Tag Archives: DIY

Tempeh Tacos

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“Meatless Mondays” come and go around here without much notice, since we eat meatless meals most of the time.  But I occasionally get comments about dedicated carnivores trying to add (or grudgingly accepting) more vegetarian meals into their diets.

I acknowledge that I am supremely unqualified to comment on this topic, having eaten very little meat in the past two decades, but I imagine that it is hardy, “meaty,” vegetarian (vegan, even!) meals like this one that will appease even the most apprehensive carnivore.  Try it.  Let me know.  And then once you have eased into occasional meatless eating, you can move on to advanced vegetarian fare, like those herbed Quinoa Cakes.

Continue reading Tempeh Tacos (click for recipe)

My Favorite Recipes: March 2012

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I spent all day today wondering what on earth I could have done with my slippers.  I looked everywhere.  I kept asking if anyone had seen them.  (Nobody answered, but I assumed they thought I was just muttering to myself, which, ok, I was.)  I had to make do with a ratty old pair that I was apparently keeping just in case of an emergency like today.  Finally, late at night, J admitted to me that my 5 year old squirreled my slippers away early this morning as step one in an April Fools joke she had planned.  What?

First, should they really be teaching kids about April Fools Day in schools?  What about the unintended adverse consequences, like me having to wear different slippers today?  And second, since when can my 5 year old plan and execute devious schemes over the course of multiple days?  I clearly am going to need to up my parenting game.

I leave you with my favorite recipes from the past month and a warning to be on the watch for April foolishness.  I’m off to fill the kids’ breakfast bowls with fish sticks and broccoli.  And if you have any great ideas for April Fools tricks to play on my children, please share, as I believe I will have to be planning more elaborate ruses in future years.

How to Cook Black Beans
The Best Red Lentil Soup of 2012 (and a close runner-up for my favorite soup this month: Cauliflower and Cheddar Soup)
Challah French Toast with Vanilla and Orange Zest (perhaps made with your homemade challah?)
Quinoa Cakes with Cheese, Garlic, and Herbs
Roasted Broccoli Pizza with Feta
And last but not least, a readers’ favorite: Sweet Potato Chips

Thank you for reading and cooking along with me, and for sharing your own great tips, recipes, and humorous anecdotes.  To receive daily recipe updates, you can subscribe to this blog via RSS or email, or follow @emmycooks on Twitter (links on the sidebar).

Kale Chips

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Are kale chips so 2009?  I used to be in the kale chip vanguard, an evangelist for their crispy crunch and umami allure.  I sang their praises, shared the recipe (such as it is) with anyone who’d listen, made batch after batch.  But suddenly I keep hearing that kale chips have become as passé as the combination of sun-dried tomatoes and asparagus.  It is with great regret that I will have to give them up to keep abreast of current food trends….

Not really.  I don’t even really know what the current food trends are.  So, friends, two questions.  One, what are the current food trends?   And two, what do you put on your kale chips?

I have heard of all kinds of fabulous-sounding additions that could take your kale chip experience in many possible directions: sesame seeds, Parmesan, smoked paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, you get the idea.  But I usually just go with olive oil and salt.  I hesitate to call this a recipe because you can really do anything you want here as long as you dry out some kale in the oven until it’s crisp without burning it.  Any kind of kale.  I’ve made these chips with lacinato kale (pictured), green and purple curly kale, Red Russian–all great.  Wash and dry a bunch of kale and tear it into small or large pieces.  Rub with a little olive oil and salt and additional seasonings if desired.  Spread leaves in a single layer on two cookie sheets.  A relatively foolproof method is to bake the chips at 250 for 30-35 minutes, switching the top and bottom pans halfway through and watching closely near the end of the cooking time.  (Thanks, Bon Appetit in 2009!) Remove chips as they crisp and return the rest to the oven to finish cooking.

But IF you can’t wait half an hour for this magic, and IF you’re feeling daring and eagle-eyed, you can roast these chips at a much higher temperature (say, 450).  It goes without saying that they will cook, and burn, more quickly at a higher temperature.  On the other hand, they’ll be ready more quickly for you to gobble up like they’re going out of style.

Breakfast Tacos with Eggs, Potatoes, and Greens

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Everyone pretends it’s only the first few months of parenthood that leave you bleary-eyed and dazed from lack of sleep.  Wrong.  Most babies I know regularly wake up during the night for a long, long time.  I don’t know if it’s collective amnesia or willful deception, but nobody ever explained this to me in advance.

Last night my almost-one-year-old slept all night long for the first time in her life.  I was overjoyed, because my older girls didn’t do that until they turned two.  So it was probably a freak occurance that won’t be repeated for a year.  But still–still!–multiple consecutive hours of sleep are always a welcome gift after five years of sleep deprivation.  (I am like to think of this period of my life as the decade of babies, to be immediately followed by the decade of sleep.  Does it work that way?)

Sleep or no sleep, these tacos–just eggs atop a tangle of sauteed onions, potatoes, and greens–are a nice way to start the day. Continue reading Breakfast Tacos with Eggs, Potatoes, and Greens (click for recipe)

Sweet Potato Chips

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I occasionally see sensational headlines about how you can make potato chips in your microwave.  That is bunkum, I say.  I tried it out, just to be sure, and the results were as ridiculous as I expected.  I got cardboardy, chewy potato slices with some occasional hard spots.  My kids did eat them (I mean, I called them “chips,” so what’s not to like?), but they weren’t good.  And they took a while to make, what with having to check and remove “crisp” specimens then re-microwave the rest.  Luckily you can only make a plate at a time, so the damage was limited to half a potato.

You want chips without a deep fryer?  THIS is the recipe for you.  We do this with regular potato slices as well (I keep promising that potato chip pizza recipe), but for eating on their own these sweet potato chips are the best.  They crisp up right through, you can make two big trays at a time in the oven, and they are a sweet and salty side or snack.  Crunch, crunch, crunch. Continue reading Sweet Potato Chips (click for recipe)

Chickpea and Avocado Smash

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Do you find that sandwiches always taste better when someone else makes them for you?  I do.  If you make your own sandwiches and enjoy them, can you tell me your secrets?

Sure, I like a luscious grilled cheese sandwich made with leftover curried onion jam.  And I can always snuggle a cold slice of any of these frittatas between two pieces of whole wheat toast swiped with mayonnaise and harissa.  But a real, well-composed, flavorful vegetarian sandwich takes some work.  I usually leave it to the professionals.  Or, you know, anyone else who’s offering to make me a sandwich.

But a spread?  A spread I can do.  In fact, I learned, I can make this one with one hand while holding a clingy baby in the other arm.  (When I was preparing to welcome my first baby, why didn’t anyone tell me to practice feeding myself with one hand?  I’ve got some experience by now, but even if you’re a novice, you too can make this spread with one hand.)  It was inspired by this good-looking sandwich from the makes-me-want-to-eat-cookies blog Two Peas and Their Pod.  But you know how I feel about making my own sandwiches.

You also know how I feel about making my own beans, but on this occasion I used canned chickpeas.  No biggie.  They get a bit lost in the smash anyway, adding more texture and protein than flavor to the creamy, salty, mustardy spread.  And although this would be a perfectly acceptable dip for veggie spears (or chips, for that matter), I heaped it onto rounds of a seedy baguette.  Almost like a sandwich.

Continue reading Chickpea and Avocado Smash (click for recipe)

Rhubarb and Brown Sugar Jam

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There are harbingers of spring in the garden.  Eggs and herbs.  Flowers and spots of sunshine.  I’d like to say that this rhubarb jam is a celebration of my first harvest of the year, but it’s not.The rhubarb still has a ways to grow.  Instead, this jam celebrates a more mundane annual ritual: cleaning out the freezer.  While fruit picked at the peak of ripeness and made instantly into jam preserves some of the flavor of summer, frozen fruits (or vegetables, in rhubarb’s case) are a perfectly acceptable alternative.  And when it all gets to be too much for us in the summertime–all the plums ripen at the same instant I find myself unable to resist a box of peaches at the market and my brother offers to bring a haul of rhubarb to town–well, into the freezer it goes.  And at this time of year, when our kids have eaten through our obviously-inadequate annual supply of jam, we’re glad to have summer’s bounty patiently waiting for us to deal with it.

In the past few days, we’ve made peach, yellow plum, Italian plum, plum-ginger, and this rhubarb jam.  We canned most of it, froze some, and experimented with making a sticky jam tart.  And hopefully these 35 jars will hold us over until summer comes again.

The Rhubarb Brown Sugar Jam is simple but seductive.  Sweet, bracing, tonic.  And maybe, where you are, you can already pick a few stalks of rhubarb or find it at your local market.  The recipe is infinitely scalable.  You can make one jar to spoon over toast (think of it with this bread!) or a big batch to freeze or can.  Or do as my 5 year old did and just enjoy a bowl of it with a spoon.  (I probably would have added some yogurt to the bowl myself, but hey.)

Continue reading Rhubarb and Brown Sugar Jam (click for recipe)

Smoked Salmon Pizza with Red Peppers, Green Onions, and Feta

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Sometimes making a great pizza requires the preparation of many sub-recipes: a sauce, cooked vegetables, a drizzle of reduced vinegar.  This one, though, is fresh and light, a springtime pizza.  And it can be in the oven in minutes.  Start preheating now.

We had some whole wheat pizza dough left over from making this Roasted Broccoli pizza last week.  J and I took a little break from canning jam (more about that tomorrow, but here’s the takeaway: jam-making always takes longer than we think it will, and once we start the kitchen is going to be a hot mess all day, so we might as well add to the chaos by making a good lunch in the middle of it).  It was a teamwork day, so I piled ingredients on the counter and rolled out dough; J curated and composed this lovely pizza.  Voila, lunch. Continue reading Smoked Salmon Pizza with Red Peppers, Green Onions, and Feta (click for recipe)

Hazelnut Tea Cookies

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Sometimes you just need a little something sweet.  Friends or neighbors stopping by?  Late night and no dessert in the house?  Feels like a milk-and-cookies afternoon?  These cookies have you covered.  They’re quick to make, but try to let them cool for a few minutes after they come out of the oven.  You’ll be rewarded with a crispy edge to contrast with the rich, chewy, nut-studded center.

You can choose to add a bit of chopped bittersweet chocolate to this dough, of course.  And chocolate is always good in chocolate’s own way, but omitting the chocolate really lets the hazelnut flavor shine.  Or–go crazy–make them with another nut, your favorite.  (What IS your favorite?  I have a hard time deciding.)  Whatever you choose, you’ll want to use good nuts here, so taste them before you buy them if possible.  Here in Seattle, I buy Holmquist Orchards Dry Roasted Hazelnuts at my farmers’ market.  They’re also available at the Pike Place Market (every day except Tuesdays) and by mail.

Continue reading Hazelnut Tea Cookies (click for recipe)

Savory Bread Pudding with Peppers, Mushrooms, Chard, and Feta

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I love savory bread puddings for so many reasons.  This one is packed full of vegetables and has all four food groups in one baking dish (you know how I love a casserole).  You can make it ahead of time and have it cooling on your stovetop when your brunch guests arrive.  The texture contrast between the crisp browned top and the savory custard within is lovely.  And it’s a thrifty way to use up bread that’s past its prime.  Actually, let’s just call that bread that’s in its bread pudding prime.

This is not a terribly pudding-y bread pudding.  It’s hearty fare, not a delicately quivering cream custard (those make good bread puddings too, but you’ll need a different recipe for that).  As always, you can vary the ingredients here, but I think the essential thing is to make sure that the eggs and vegetables are well-seasoned with salt and pepper and/or herbs, since a plain bread adds more texture than flavor to the finished dish.  (Or you can use your leftover beer bread, as I did, or another strongly-flavored bread, in which case it adds a flavor of its own.) Continue reading Savory Bread Pudding (click for recipe)