Tag Archives: homemade

Thai Greens and Tofu

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I write an occasional home cooking column for my friendly neighborhood blog, and last weekend I told all my neighbors about a recipe that came from the nice folks at my favorite not-quite-a-restaurant (it’s really just a streetside stand), Little Uncle.

So I thought it was only fair to tell you, too.  Because we are going to be making this a lot at our house.  Partly because I bought a huge bottle of yellow bean paste, and this recipe requires 2 Tbs., so I have a lifetime supply (it’s like that beet powder!).  But mostly because it took 17 minutes (that was for the jasmine rice to cook), made the house smell divine, and yielded a savory-spicy-garlicky vegan bowl of goodness.

You can read my Capitol Hill Seattle post here, but just in case you don’t, here’s the important thing you’re missing: track down some mangosteens.  Yum, mangosteens.

You can also substitute chicken for the tofu, or make a greens-only version of this dish (pictured below) as one component of a bigger Thai meal.  More Thai recipes to follow, I think!  In the meanwhile, if you are in the mood for Thai flavors, you could also check out this Noodle Curry or this Green Fish Curry to hold you over.

Continue reading Thai Greens and Tofu (click for recipe)

Leek and Mushroom Pizza with Blue Cheese

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I can never resist the cheese counter at my local co-op.  It has a small selection of cheeses, but they’re meticulously curated by a cheese enthusiast whose palate seems in tune with my own, and I always love everything he recommends.  Last time I was in the store I browsed by myself, however.  I know I probably should have chosen a cheese based on the type of milk used, or the region from which it hailed, but I will admit to having used one criterion only to select this cheese: its name.

Oregonzola.  Isn’t that cute?  See how they did that?  A blue cheese, a local spin, a clever pun, and I’m sold.  And it was quite nice, I must say.

It’s the weekend, so make your pizza crust today (recipe here) to have it handy in the fridge for a speedy weeknight dinner.

Continue reading Leek and Mushroom Pizza with Blue Cheese (click for recipe)

Parsley Pesto, with or without Whole Wheat Pasta

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Last night we bundled up for our first outdoor dinner of the season. Met the neighbors on the front steps, let the kids get dirty, slurped hot noodles with a fresh spring pesto. It’s not summer yet, but it’s coming.

Parsley is always one of the early springtime arrivals in my garden, but my plants are still just unfurling and getting their footing. This pesto made use of a lonely green bunch of store parsley. I like to keep parsley around for the perky boost it gives to the flavor and color of many dishes.  But in this pesto, it’s the star of the show. And it made for a flavorful and nearly effortless dinner; I just whirled the pesto in the food processor while my pasta boiled.

I saved my parsley stems for homemade stock, of course.

Continue reading Parsley Pesto (click for recipe)

A One Year Old’s First Birthday Cake, or, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

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Our baby is one!

We’ve had her in our lives for a whole year.  And what a year the first year of life is!  A baby grows from a shapeless, snuggly bundle of tiny fingers, big eyes, and warmth into a little person who can play peekaboo and demand bananas.  It’s been a good year.

A birthday, at our house, calls for a cake.  I know there are birthday-pie people and people who think one-year-olds shouldn’t eat sugar (they probably shouldn’t), and we aren’t even really cake people so much but…. Birthday. So cake.  I have made this same cake for all three of my little ones’ first birthdays.  Here it is.

You can think of this particular cake in two ways.  If you want to feel virtuous, you can describe it as a tender, butter-free whole wheat cake, glazed with a maple-sweetened cream cheese frosting, chock full of carrots and tinted pink with beet.  If you want to feel honest, you can describe it as a total sugarbomb of a cake, well-suited to any celebratory occasion.

In the past, I’ve grated a beet and squeezed it in cheesecloth to use as pink food coloring.  This time, I came across powdered dried beet at my spice shop and gratefully took that less-messy route.  I bought about a quarter cup of the stuff.  Achieving the magnificently pink hue below required half a teaspoon.  Oops.  Does anyone need some powdered beet?  What should I do with the rest? Continue reading A First Birthday Cake, or, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting (click for recipe)

How to Steam Artichokes, or, Steamed Artichokes with Two Perfect Sauces

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As artichokes make their springtime debut, I would like to share a life-changing tip with you.  Or at least a tip that will save you half an hour every time you steam artichokes.

I don’t know that I have properly thanked the friend who serves these artichokes at his house (just casually, as if they’re not miraculous) for bringing them into my life.  I should.  Because here’s the ray-of-light epiphany he helped me to see: You don’t have to steam artichokes whole.  You can cut them first.  They cook faster.

So, ok, this may have occurred to you already.  But it had not occurred to me.  Ever.  And I am giddy with the newfound ability to serve artichokes for dinner on a whim.

You do have the cut them first, and you could trim the outer leaves or drop them into lemon water or whatever you want to make them pretty.  But all you really HAVE to do is scoop out the furry choke with a spoon, like so:And then chop each half into quarters (so each artichoke is cut into eighths in the end), steam them for 20-30 minutes, depending on their size, and serve them with my friend’s special secret sauces.  Continue reading Steamed Artichokes with Two Perfect Sauces

Queso Fundido with Mushrooms, Greens, and Chiles

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So, those chiles.

They arrived in Seattle lovingly packed and frozen, straight from the Santa Fe farmers market.  Someone who loves me seeded the roasted chiles and pulled them apart into strips, a painstaking labor.  I had to do right by them.

There’s this little taqueria in Santa Barbara called La Super-Rica that became famous as Julia Child’s favorite taco joint.  There is always a line down the block.  There are a lot of great tacos in that part of the world, and some of my personal favorites actually come from Reyes Market in Carpenteria, but La Super-Rica makes one dish that I love.  Love.  They call it “rajas,” a name referring to the roasted strips of poblano pepper, but those peppers are also smothered in salty cheese.  You scoop them up with a warm tortilla and let the grease run down your arms.  Luckily Seattle is not very close to Santa Barbara, so this is an occasional indulgence.

I’m calling my version “Queso Fundido,” which is a Mexican dish of melted cheese enhanced with bits of meat or vegetables or spicy peppers, meant to be scooped up with chips or wrapped in corn tortillas.  As I like to do, however, I’ve inverted the traditional proportions, starting with a pan chock-full of vegetables and stirring in just enough cheese to make the dish come together.  And we loved it.  Continue reading Queso Fundido with Mushrooms, Greens, and Chiles (click for recipe)

Broccoli Salad with Ravioli, Feta, and Lemony Harissa Dressing

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I have this little food-related fantasy right around lunchtime some days.  I thought for about two seconds about whether I should share it with you all, but then I realized, YOU’RE the one reading a food blog, you must be at least as obsessed with food as I am.  So I figure you must have plenty of food fantasies of your own.  Here’s mine, which may be most recognizable to stay-at-home parents of very small children who end up eating PB&Js for lunch with one hand while holding a baby in the other arm: a drive-through (or delivery!) deli counter, featuring healthy, hearty, fresh, delectable salads.  Or, since it’s make-believe anyway, let’s just go ahead and say great salads that magically appear in my refrigerator as soon as I get hungry.

There are a few places near me that feature impressive arrays of pre-made salads, but they’re not always as good as they look.  And I want good.  So when I can manage to plan in advance, I like to make a great salad for dinner and then stock my fridge with the leftovers for weekday lunches.  This is just such a salad.  Whether you eat it at your desk or during your baby’s 10-minute nap, I recommend following it with one of those pixie tangerines that are sadly about to disappear until next year.  Almost like magic.This salad is adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day.  You can play with the proportions, using more ravioli for more of a pasta salad or less for more of a broccoli salad (which I prefer).  As for the dressing, we have tried many prepared harissa pastes and currently use the Tunisian brand Les Moulins Mahjoub (it looks like this and I buy mine at The Spanish Table), but if you have another favorite I’d love to hear about it! Continue reading Broccoli Salad with Ravioli, Feta, and Lemony Harissa Dressing (click for recipe)

Southwestern Frittata with Peppers, Black Beans, and Cheddar

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Speaking of glorified scrambled eggs, a frittata is one of my favorite quick dinners.  (Although of course it would not be out of place at an elegant brunch. You know, should you have the occasion to host or attend an elegant brunch.  Around here on weekends it’s more of a race to see if I can just snag a pancake before the kids eat them all.)  A frittata has a significant advantage over scrambled eggs when it comes to dinner, in fact, because it can be made ahead and served at room temperature, or even cold.

Some of my favorite people went tootling around New Mexico recently, and knowing that they were in the land of chiles left me dreaming of the flavors of the Southwest.  They hadn’t yet come back to deliver my stash of frozen roasted Alcalde chiles, so I was stuck making this frittata with ingredients available to ordinary mortals.

But now those chiles are in my freezer.  What should I do with them?! They’re like gold. Or at least truffles.

Anyway.  Back to the I’m-not-in-Santa-Fe frittata.  I knew that I wanted to make a thick frittata, packed full of vegetables and a big scoop of drained pico de gallo salsa.  I was a little worried about getting my frittata to cook through, so I turned to the experts on nitpicky culinary concerns, Cook’s Illustrated.  And, as usual, they had good advice for me: cook the eggs as if you are scrambling them until they are nearly set, then finish them under the broiler.  Which I did. Continue Reading Southwestern Frittata with Peppers, Black Beans, and Cheddar (click for recipe)

Matzo Brei

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Lest you think that I am only posting this recipe in order to get away with eating scrambled eggs again, I would like to start by clarifying that matzo brei (rhymes with “fry” and, hey!, also means “fried”) is a traditional Passover meal.  Some people eat it because they are eating matzo (matzoh/matzah!) in place of leavened bread in observance of Passover.  The rest of us eat it because we have a box of matzo in the house and would prefer to use it up this year.  Either way, these eggy pancakes make an appealing blank slate for sweet or savory sauces, and get you out of eating boxed matzo in its dry and un-fried form.

I’d like to tell you that this was my own Bubbie’s recipe, but actually it came from Bon Appetit.  Growing up, my family’s matzo brei was more of a scramble, and if I recall correctly it involved fried salami as well (is THAT kosher?).  This recipe is more refined, more symmetrically shaped, and more vegetarian.

Matzo brei is traditionally a breakfast dish, but breakfast for dinner is never a bad idea.  You can take these in a sweet direction with jam, powdered sugar, or syrup, or you can spice things up; we liked them with a harissa spread.  But my personal favorite topping was our homemade plum-ginger jam.  You could easily replicate it by pureeing a pound of pitted plums and boiling them down with a couple of teaspoons of grated ginger and sugar to taste (I further sweetened our jam to use as a sauce here).  Isn’t that good?  You’re welcome. Continue reading Matzo Brei (click for recipe)

How to Make Homemade Organic Vegetable Broth for Free

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Well, almost free.

I like to make my own broth for many reasons.  It tastes better, I can choose how to salt it, it’s environmentally friendly, and it doesn’t sit on a shelf in plastic for an indeterminate amount of time before it arrives in my soup pot.  But, let me be honest, the biggest reason I make my own broth (or stock, maybe, if you want to get technical) is that it’s irresistibly cheap.

Buying mostly organic produce is good for the environment and, I believe, for my family’s health.  But the price tag still rankles a bit, especially here in Seattle where the only things that appear to grow effortlessly are rosemary and moss.  Making my own broth allows me to essentially use my vegetables twice: I eat the trimmed part the first time around, and save the peelings for the stock pot.  At $3.50 a quart, I’m saving over twenty dollars every time I make my own broth.  If I do it once a month, the savings really add up over the course of a year.  Of course, you might not eat as much soup as we do…but still.  It makes me feel better about how much I pay for organic produce.

[UPDATE: Many of the comments below mention composting veggie scraps or feeding them to the chickens.  This, of course, is their third and final use after you have boiled them for stock!]

The basic method is to chop your selected organic vegetable trimmings into 1-2” pieces and save them in a bag in your freezer.  (I wouldn’t do this with non-organic vegetables, because I’d be concerned about concentrating the pesticides that are in the peels.  This is my completely unscientific personal opinion.)  Add to the bag over time.  When it’s full, put everything in a pot, cover it with water, add some seasonings, and simmer for 30-45 minutes.  Add salt until it tastes like something you’d like to drink by the mug.  Strain and use your broth, or freeze it for later use.  Get a new freezer bag of trimmings started and repeat.

The only mental effort required is the contemplation of whether the trimmings you have before you will taste good in your broth.  Some are easy: Carrots? Yes.  Broccoli rabe?  Probably not.  Turnips?  Trick question!  They’re great.

You want to aim for a balance of flavors in your stock pot.  For me, the essentials are onion, celery, and carrots (or another sweet vegetable, like winter squash).  If I don’t have some of each in my frozen mix, I will sacrifice a whole onion or a few stalks of celery to balance out the flavors.  Beyond, that, though, the sky’s the limit.  I have tried to list some of my favorites (and a few un-favorites) below, but if you want an opinion from me and/or your fellow readers about whether a particular vegetable would be good in a broth, please just ask in the comments.

One more note: this process has the added benefit of giving you seasonally-flavored broths.  The vegetables I’m cooking this month are going into the freezer, and what goes into the freezer ends up in the stock, which means that my stocks reflect current seasonal flavors.  Perfect, because my soups usually do as well.  It’s a beautiful cycle.  When cooking in the summer, I usually do want a light broth with corn and tomato flavors, and in winter I am glad to have a rich one full of mushrooms, root vegetables, and winter squash.

Continue reading How to Make Homemade Organic Vegetable Broth for Free (click for recipe)