Tag Archives: homemade

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)

How to Cook White Beans

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Having already discussed the many reasons to cook your own dried beans (they’re tasty, healthy, and inexpensive) and how easy it is, I won’t go into that again here.  What I will say is this: although you can further embellish these beans or use them in other recipes, these basic white beans are so good that I also like to just serve them with a spoon.  They are gently aromatic, tender, wholesome, and delicious.

You can cook any white beans following this recipe. Cannellini beans, flageolets, Great Northerns, navy beans, even chickpeas.  Larger beans will take longer to cook, that’s all. Continue reading How to Cook White Beans (click for recipe)

Brown Rice Pudding with Golden Raisins

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The other day I came across this list of common cooking mistakes, several of which apply specifically to healthy cooking techniques.  Guess which ones I make?  I’ll give you a clue: most of them have to do with trying to speed through the cooking process when a bit of patience is warranted.  Like here.  See tip No. 7: overheating milk can cause it to curdle.  So take it slow when you make this rice pudding.  Or use cream.

And in another classic do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do move, I’m going to advise you to reheat any leftovers of this dish gently for breakfast, thinning with a little milk if necessary. But then I will admit to you that I couldn’t wait and just scooped a bowl cold from the fridge, and that wasn’t half bad either. Continue reading Brown Rice Pudding with Golden Raisins (click for recipe)

Roasted Broccoli Pizza with Feta

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I know we all made no-knead bread for a while there, and I saw the no-knead pizza dough recipe in Bon Appetit last month.  But it wasn’t until today that the recipe began to really intrigue me.  Because today, the “Genius Recipes” feature that I love on Food 52 proclaimed that “not-kneading pizza is even simpler than not-kneading bread.”  What the…?

If anyone has made both the no-knead bread and the no-knead pizza dough, can you please explain to us how not kneading one is easier than not kneading the other?  Thank you.  And, hey, if you’ve made the pizza dough, how was it?

I did not, obviously, make the no-knead pizza dough.  I made my same old pizza dough, with a bit of whole wheat flour, and topped it with crispy broccoli, creamy feta, garlic and spice, and the zest of a lemon.  And about that crispy broccoli?  It’s not like fresh-crispy.  It’s like roasted-to-a-crisp-crispy.  Continue reading Roasted Broccoli Pizza with Feta (click for recipe)

Dal with Curried Red Onion Jam

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Like many enthusiastic cooks, I have a bit of a cookbook collection. Some books I use mostly for reference, some I keep only out of nostalgia (or, more embarrassingly, because hey-I-might-need-THAT-Sri-Lankan-recipe-someday!), and others are in heavy rotation.  Also, I just love books in general.  I always have a cookbook or two on my bedside table, which I occasionally read as bedtime stories.  But the cookbooks I like most are the ones that inspire me to branch out in my preparations of the humble vegetable.

I think I have mentioned before that Seattle is graced with five months of springtime, which means greens galore in the garden.  Arugula, chard, kale.  Radishes, turnips, peas.  Repeat.  Springtime all the way through until August, when we may (or may not) see a little flourish of zucchini and cherry tomatoes to end the growing season.  We belong to a couple of CSAs to fill in the gaps.  So I’m always looking for ideas to churn through the produce while keeping both the cooking and the eating enjoyable around here.

This year I am going to be brandishing a new cookbook in the kitchen.  I just got my copy of Ripe today and I’m smitten.  It’s an homage to fruits and vegetables as much as a cookbook, really.  It’s written by Cheryl Sternman Rule, the witty and eloquent voice behind the 5 second rule blog (she’s the one who brought that Quick Whole Wheat Spice Bread with Brown Sugar, Orange Zest, and Walnuts into our lives, bless her heart).  It’s gorgeously photographed (click here to see some of the pretty pictures).  Each fruit and vegetable gets a few pages: a glam shot, a few irresistible descriptive paragraphs, a featured recipe and a few “un-recipes”–my favorite part, of course–such as this one for carrot salad: “wide carrot ribbons + harissa + yogurt + green olives + parsley.”  Yes!

And if the first recipe I tried is any indication, the flavors pop as brightly as the colors in this book.  A simple gingery dal, a plain pot of brown rice, diced red onion jewels glinting at first in the wide pan, then melting into a sweet and tangy and black-pepper-spiced chutney that transported us to some mad place where we wished winter weren’t so close to over.  Oh, well, I’m looking forward to trying the radish recipes. Continue reading Dal with Curried Red Onion Jam (click for recipe)

Green Salad with Smoked Salmon, Tomatoes, and Crème Fraiche-Dill Dressing

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J and I meet up with a lovely group of friends every few months for dinner and an evening of playing cards.  I wish I could say that we play an intellectual game, like bridge.  Or a hip game, like poker.  But we don’t.  It’s euchre.  It’s so much fun.

Last night, I lost spectacularly.  But it was still a gold-medal evening, thanks in large part to the excellent company and thanks in small part to the fact that it brought a great new salad into my life.

Our hosts made a delicious potato soup for dinner in observance of St. Patrick’s day, and I came up with this salad to go along it.  It turned out very well, if I do say so myself.  I hardly ever make a creamy salad dressing, but it was a winning combination with the smoked salmon and potato soup.  A little lemon, a little dill, a lot of tiny sweet tomatoes.  Crunch, zing, sweet, salt, smoke.  Are those the food groups or what? Continue reading Green Salad with Smoked Salmon, Tomatoes, and Crème Fraiche-Dill Dressing (click for recipe)