11 posts tagged “recipe”

Note: for those vegetarians or those Catholics who'd like to eat this on a Friday, I imagine that vegetable broth could easily be substituted for the chicken broth.

You'll need:

Olive oil

4 TB butter

Balsamic vinager

2 onions

4 stalks celery

1 bunch green onions

6 carrots

1 green bell pepper

2 small cans of tomatoes

4 cans of chicken broth (or the homemade equivalent, or vegetable broth, or...)

1/2 pound black beans

1/2 pound black-eyed peas

Two generous pinches of tarragon and sage

Three generous pinches of thyme

Dash of salt

Black pepper to taste

Dash of cayenne pepper

 

Slice the fresh vegetables.  Put them into a pan with a drizzle of olive oil and the butter. Simmer until the onions have been translucent for a few minutes.  Splash in a little balsamic vinegar, the half the juice from one of the cans of tomatoes, the herbs and the spices.  Simmer on medium-high heat until the vegetables are slightly past "browned" but not quite "scorched."  Dump in the remaining tomatoes and juice, the broth, the (rinsed) beans.  Simmer until the beans are tender.  Best served with fresh bread and perhaps a salad.

This is one of those soups that gets better with time.  It's quite good immediately, but the flavors meld together better after two days or so. 

This is both tasty and cheap; I got all the ingredients for less than $20.  Of course, I already had the stock items (vinegar, spices and herbs, onions), but even if you had to buy some of those this soup would still be quite reasonably priced.

 Enjoy!

Whilst waiting to head out to HBP, I came up with this yummyness:

Take one burrito-sized tortilla.  Spread it thinly with mayo, pile on salad greens.  Slice some roasted red peppers and gherkin pickles and throw them on the tortilla.  Spoon on some tuna salad, roll up the totilla into a wrap, and munch.

This would be even better with the addition of artichoke hearts, but I didn't have any in the cupboard.  They've gone onto my grocery list, though, as I'll be making this again and soon.

I finished dinner with a large mug of cafe au lait.  Usually I don't drink coffee at night (or if I do, it's decaf) but since I've been going to bed so early lately and I'll be up until at least 3 'cause of the movie, coffee sounded like a wise decision.

Must go make up and head out!  Have a good evening!

I bring to you a recipe.

I've started four blog posts in the last couple of days.  Each was more sickeningly navel-gazing/meandering/boooooring than the last. 

So I'll post about food.  Food is always good, yes?  Yes.

This weekend being my first weekend off in Cthulu-knows-how-long, I've made some comfort food.  Really easy recipe, and my gosh but it's the BEST pepper-onion-sausage sub EVER.

You'll need two bell peppers (I suggest red and green, but orange or yellow also work), one yellow onion, five spicy italian sausages, a little cooking oil, and four hoagie rolls.  One of these will be plenty for a person and the sub mix sits well in the fridge, so only pull out as many rolls as there will be people eating.

Slice the onion in half.  Slice each half into strips.  Ditto the peppers.  (If you're like a Certain Diva--starts with U, ends with s, you may need to get another pepper as you may find yourself eating a good bit more than a bite or two of the crunchy fresh pepper.  Just warning you!)

Toss them into a large frying pan with the Italian sausage (spicy) and enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan plus a little more.  Cover and cook on medium heat, stirring periodically.  Once the smell is mouth-wateringly tempting and the sausages are a nice brown all over, slice the sausages into bite-sized pieces.  Let sizzle for another five minutes or so, and then turn off the heat.

Slice a hoagie roll down the middle without cutting all the way through.  Prop this over the toaster with the cut edge down.  Turn on the toaster, and toast until the roll is crispy-brown but not burnt.  IMMEDIATELY spoon some of the sausage-pepper-onions over the roll and serve with lots of napkins.  Side salad strictly optional.  I'd also suggest serving with a fork for the bits that get away.

The SOP mix only gets better with fridge time.  Reheat and serve over a fresh-toasted hoagie roll for the next day's lunch/dinner.  Mmmmm!

A tad over a year ago, some friends bought me a Magic Bullet blender.  This was a very sweet and awesome gift; I just never had a reason to yank it out.  I do cook a fair amount, but smoothies and their like aren't really my thing.

However, I now live in a house with a front porch.  Said porch is shaded all day, and there's usually a breeze.  It has a lounge chair.  Therefore, it cries out to be sat upon while reading books and sipping icy drinks in hot summer weather.

On a whim, I threw some grapefruit juice and ice into the Magic Bullet this afternoon.

Thirty seconds later, I had a slushy grapefruit-y drink.

Mmmm.

This has been repeated several times since, and I can tell it will be done thousands of times this summer.

More mmmmm.

One of the perks of a) living on the East Coast and b) having a father whose legal specialty was "whatever you need" is that you run into lots of fascinating people from all sorts of backgrounds.  (You also run into a fair number of out-and-out insane individuals, but I digress.)

Many of the less insane clients ended up as friends of the family.  Miss Jo was one of them.  (Jo is her real name, but I think I'm not going to put her last name out on the Internet.)

Miss Jo was, when I met her, an Italian lady of about 70 years.  She cooked the best Italian food I have ever tasted in my entire life--and I exaggerate not.  Of course, having ten kids, she had a lot of practice.  She also was convinced that unless you had to be rolled out the door post-meal, you were "too skinny."  This is a very pleasant attitude in a person who loves to cook Sicilian cuisine, let me tell you.

I fell in love with her biscotti.  (And her lasagna.  And pretty much everything she cooked.  And, naturally, her, because she was about the sweetest person I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.  I mean, how can you argue with someone who's life's ambition seemed to be "cook yummy food and lots of it for everybody?")

She was also that delightful sort of cook who likes to share recipes.  Therefore, I give you Miss Jo's Biscotti.  Bear in mind that she had ten kids and, if I recall correctly, several siblings who had about as many kids.  Therefore, I STRONGLY recommend that you halve or (even more likely) quarter the following recipe.  I made it in its entirety precisely once, and that was at Christmastime.  I swear we were still eating biscotti at Easter.

Without further ado, then, Miss Jo's Sicilian Biscotti:

1 pound of butter

12 large eggs

1 1/4 TB vanilla extract OR lemon extract OR almond extract (almond is my favorite, but all are good)

16 C flour

4 C sugar

1/2 pint whipping cream

6 TB baking powder

 

Cream the butter and sugar.  Add one egg at a time, mixing thoroughly after eac.  Mix in cream and whichever extract you chose.  In a separate bowl, sift together the baking powder and 14 cups of the flour, reserving the other 2 cups of flour.  Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, and add remaining flour until quite stiff.  Roll out the dough half an inch thick, cut the dough with the cutters of your choice, and bake in a 350 degree oven for 10-15 minutes.  The cookies should not brown.  You can roll them in powdered sugar afterwards or ice with a simple icing when cooled.

A few notes:

-Any recipe in which butter is measured by the pound and flour is put in 16 cups at a time will make a LOT of cookies.  If you have ten kids who love biscotti, the original amounts are perfect.  If not, you will never want to see biscotti again by the time you finish that batch.  Last warning, I promise.

-1/2 a pint, for those of you (me) who can't remember pint-cup conversion, comes out to 1 cup.  This make halving and quartering quite easy.

-There are three teaspoons for every tablespoon.  Therefore, 6 TB of baking powder comes to 18 ts of baking powder.  If you halve it, obviously, you can just use 3 TB, but a quarter of 6 TB comes to 4 1/2 ts.  The 1 1/4 TB of flavoring is a bit more difficult to get perfect.  Fortunately, you don't have to.  I've eyeballed it with success many times.  For the perfectionists among you, 1 1/4 TB comes to 3 3/4 ts.  Half of that is 5/8 TB or juuuust under 2 ts.  A quarter is just under 1 ts.  I'd say round it up to 1 or 2 ts and be done with it.

-You can, of course, just slice the dough into strips for the more familiar biscotti shape.  The cookie cutters are more fun. :P

-If you have a kid to whom you're trying to teach fractions and who enjoys cooking, this is a perfect recipe for him/her to work on reducing.  I think this recipe is how I got really comfortable with fractions.

-The absolute yumminess of a biscotti dipped into a cup of coffee cannot possibly be overestimated.

 

Recently, I decided to try making my own bread.  I tried one recipe with decidedly mixed results: the bread looked gorgeous, but it was extremely bland and had a tendency to crumble.  Worked well for toast, but that's about it.

Meh.  I like toast--particularly with raspberry fruit butter from Central Market, mmmm--but I wanted a bread from which I could make sandwiches and the like.  Besides, the recipe was for white bread, and while I love a good white bread, it isn't so healthy as whole wheat.

A bit of searching later, I came across this gem of a recipe.  It looked simple enough for a relative newbie to the world of bread-baking, it used ingredients I already had, and the reviews all said that it was tasty.

I spent last Sunday afternoon creating a batch.  Instead of three loaves--I don't own loaf pans yet, and my oven isn't big enough for more than two baking sheets to cook evenly--I made two big loaves and baked them for a bit longer.  The spreading of a little butter (juuuuust enough so that the tops of the loaves had butter on them, no more) post-baking made the bread chewy but not tough or crumbly throughout.  It makes excellent sandwiches, and freezes perfectly well.  I ended up cutting both loaves in half and freezing all but one half in individual bags.  Bakers with more than one person or who themselves eat bread every day would probably leave one or even both of the loaves unfrozen, but I'll go through just about a half or a bit more each week, so it would be wasted if not frozen.

Kneading is also extremely therapeutic--meditational, really.

I'm vaguely wondering if this would make a good bread pudding, and am considering turning one of the halves into a bread pudding at some point in the future.

The one thing I notice is that it is a little sweet.  Not obnoxiously so, mind you, and the recipe uses honey rather than white sugar to sweeten, which is good.  I think I may cut the honey down by a tablespoon or two the next time I make it, but the bread is good as it is.

For the record: a slice or two of homemade toast with raspberry topping, a sliver of really good swiss cheese, and a pot of tea make a marvelous afternoon tea sort of meal.

(Of course, it would be even better shared with people--Carapiccoladiva, you bring the cookies, FlamingoDancer, you're in charge of cake, preferably chocolate, and PatrickXFCE, you can provide the background music.  All other bloggers welcome, too! )

That being said, afternoon tea is extremely pleasant when taken with a book in hand, a cat at your feet politely requesting cheese and toast bits, and something early (Corelli, Scarlatti, et all) on Pandora.

I really should be studying.  I have a test either tomorrow or next week (don't give me that look, all you teachers; the teacher wasn't sure when she'd give it!), and I have a sizeable math assignment due on Friday, which means that it must be completed this evening since I do not have time on Thursdays to do anything except attend class and work.

But...I'm a college student and a singer.  Therefore, my thoughts turn not to music lit or algebra.  (Actually, my thoughts never turn to algebra if I can avoid it.)  Rather, I am thinking about food.

Ooooooh!  I know!  I was going to post my breakfast oatmeal recipe!

You'll need:

1/2C oatmeal

Handful of dried peaches

Half handful of golden raisins

Half handful of nuts (I had walnuts, but I should think pecans or hazelnuts would be yummy, too)

1C water

Pinch of salt

Two (ish) spoonfuls of brown sugar

 

Mix the oatmeal, salt and water in a bowl.  Microwave on "high" for three minutes.  Stir in everything else, microwave on "high" for another three minutes.  Enjoy with coffee and perhaps some toast.  I find that just adding those nuts means that I don't get hungry nearly as quickly.  This is particularly handy on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I tend (I know, bad habit) to have breakfast and then not eat until 7 or 8 PM while on break at work.

 

But dinner is coming, and I missed lunch.

I could grab some sushi.  Sushi is yummy, it's been a while since last I had some, I know a great sushi place that features a $2-$3-a-roll menu after 7 PM....mmmm, fish and veggies.

On the other hand, spicy sounds good, too.  There's that curry I made a few weeks ago...wouldn't mind having some again, and I could study while it cooks.  Can't study in this sushi restaurant; waaaaay too loud.

Getting out might be good for me, though.

On yet another hand (I am now a genetic mutant), I supposed that I could order Chinese takeout.  Savory or hot sounds...mmmm.  Pepper steak, anyone?

Have I made you all hungry yet?

Chicken Soup for the Starving Student (or anyone else with taste buds)

Ingredients:

1 whole chicken

2 pounds of carrots

Two baking potatos

Two yellow onions

1 cup lentils

3 cups frozen green beans

2 cups frozen peas

1 red bell pepper

1 green bell pepper

Olive oil

2 TB dried rosemary

Salt and pepper to taste

2 lemons

 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Place the chicken in a roasting pan.  Drizzle the chicken with olive oil.  Slice one of the lemons in half, and squeeze the juice over the chicken.  Put the lemon halves in the chicken cavity.  Grind pepper and salt over the chicken.  Place it in the oven, and bake for thirty minutes per pound.

After the chicken is cooked, pull it out of the oven and let it cool.  While it's cooling, chop the carrots, onions, potatoes and peppers.  Keep them in separate bowls or containers, and put them in the fridge.

Slice the chicken meat off of the body.  Separate the meat into two containers, and refrigerate.  Put the bones (it's fine if they still have some meat on them) in a large pot and cover with water.  Slice the other lemon into four pieces, and drop into the pot.  Bring to a boil, and then cover the pot and set the heat to "low."  Continue cooking the chicken for an hour and a half.  Strain out the bones by pouring the broth through a sieve and into another pot.  Put the pot of broth into the refrigerator and leave it there for several hours.  (Throw away the bones and lemon pieces.)  The fat from the broth will solidify on top of the broth, and all you'll have to do is spoon it off and throw it away.

Once the broth has had the fat removed, put it back on the stove on medium heat.  While it's heating, cook the onions on low heat in a little olive oil in a small frying pan.  When the onions become slightly golden (stir them often), pour them into the broth.  Add the carrots, potatoes and lentils (be certain to rinse the lentils first) to the broth and continue cooking.  Crush the rosemary in your hand, add it to the broth, grind in some salt and pepper, and stir every 15 minutes until the potatoes are no longer crunchy.  When the potatoes are a good texture, add the bell peppers, frozen vegetables, and half of the chicken meat.  In ten minutes, everything will be heated.  Serve with a nice slice of bread and a bit of good cheese.

The remainder of the chicken can be used for sandwiches, wraps and salads through the week.

This shouldn't cost more than $10-15 at the most, and the soup and meat will last for at least a week.  Add a few other essentials (coffee, yogurt or eggs for breakfast, fruit, salad) and the grocery bill for the week will still be under $30.

 

FYI:

-Most chickens have various organs (such as the liver and heart) inside the chicken (ie, in the cavity).  You REALLY want to pull those out before putting the chicken in the pan.  They may or may not be in a bag.  Just feel around in there and pull anything out that will come out.

Don't really have any stories from work at the moment (at least, nothing amusing) and school is fantastic but as of yet unremarkable, so what to write about?  Well, if singing and work are out, that leaves...books and food, natch!

Okay, recipe for a lovely dinner, which will either serve 3-4 or leave lots of leftovers.  In particular, the salmon is incredible as leftovers, possibly even better than it was right out of the oven.  I think the flavors mingle a little better after 24 hours or so. 

Take a salmon fillet and a bottle of ginger-wasabi marinade (I never said that this was original!).  Pour some of the marinade into the pan, and slap the salmon into it.  Turn the salmon over a few times in order to be sure that it is covered in marinade.  Refrigerate for a day or so.

The next day, snap the ends off of two pounds of asparagus.  Place the ends on the bottom of a fairly deep frying pan.  Add just enough water to almost (but not quite) cover the asparagus ends.  Add a TB of butter, cut into slivers.  (I know, I know, butter = great evil presence that will kill you in your sleep.  One TB will add a whopping hundred calories to the entire two pounds of asparagus, and will improve the flavor immeasurably.  Put the butter in, darn it!)  Then put the rest of the asparagus on top of the ends.  The ends will keep the asparagus from scorching on the bottom of the pan.  Cover the pan, and set it on a burner.  Simmer until tender, about 8-10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the stalks.

While the asparagus is cooking, put the salmon under a broiler until crispy on the edges; time will vary depending on the size of the fillet.  Cut a few slices from a loaf of really good bread and some more slices of a similarly good cheese (I recommend Brie).  If you're a wine person, pour a glass at this point.  Put on some sort of pleasant but unobtrusive music.  Pull out the salmon, and cut yourself a piece.  Dish out some asparagus, put some bread and cheese on the plate, and voila!  Dinner is served.

I had fresh raspberries and a peach for dessert; to make it fancy, you could add cream whipped with just a hint of nutmeg, with a light dust of nutmeg overall just before serving.  I think that the fruit was good as it was, though, as it's hard to beat perfectly in-season raspberries and peach!

Now for some books...

 

 

I've finished Waiter Rant, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I even decided to purchase it, on the theory that I've read The Waiter's blog for years for free, and that I should at least say "thanks" by buying the book.

It's a rather out-of-the-way book, admittedly.  The best way to describe it is as a collection of blog posts.  Over two-thirds of the book has never been online, but I still sort of perceived it as a set of posts (admittedly longer than most of his posts) that I hadn't read before.  You know how, when you read a really neat blog you finish up reading the latest post by thinking "Man, that was COOL, but I wish it kept going?"  This book is like that for Waiter Rant fans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a rule, I don't usually read best-sellers.  Far too frequently, they're trash, garbage (yes, there's a difference), or just plain badly written.  I not only read this NYT Bestseller, but I purchased it before it hit used-book sites at a considerably cheaper rate.  Readers (all six of them) of this blog know how unusual that is.

It's written as a series of letters between several characters and set shortly after WWII.  I was initially uncertain about it, but after reading about 20 pages I was hooked and didn't put it down that night until I'd finished it.

If I had to describe it, I'd say that it's a historical novel/love story/mystery based around some relatively unknown wartime incidents.  It will particularly appeal to the lover of good books.

 

 

 

 

Resistance is written by a woman who was arrested in France shortly after Paris was invaded.  She had been distributing pamphlets and putting impertinent de Gaulle bumper stickers on Nazi vehicles.  For this, she spent the remainder of the war in prison and labor camps.

I would have expected this to be a really interesting book, and it was.  But it was just depressing.  That sounds so self-centered, because this woman went through more horror than I can imagine.  But, well, it's true.  I didn't see much love or affection in this book.  Sure, I wouldn't exactly expect that from the Nazis, but the author spent most of the book being sarcastic and unpleasant.  When speaking, for example, of being told that she was a grandmother, she didn't discuss her feelings of not meeting this child or even initially knowing his sex or name.  Instead, she was sarcastic: of course the camp's wardress didn't let her know; she supposed that good German women didn't need to know the sex of their grandchildren.  If any of you have read The Chronicles of Narnia, the author's style reminds me of that of Eustace (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) when he wrote in his notebook: in a word, snotty.  Just snotty. 

Maybe it's partly the translation, since the book was translated from the French.  But the unpleasantness, bitterness and--I'll use this word once more and then stop--snottiness of the book kept me from particularly appreciating it.  At the end of the war, some of the local peasants refused to identify those who had mistreated them.  Why?  Because they were religious, and forgave their opppressors.  Quite frankly, I couldn't do that, but I could respect it.  After all, those who had been in charge of the camps weren't going to be in such a position again, so not identifying them wouldn't cause others to suffer in the future.  Instead of being at least understanding about this position, she mocks them and makes unnecessarily rude remarks about the religious statues in their cottages. 

All in all, this isn't a book I'll be recommending anytime soon.

 

Now for an entirely different sort of book.  While I'm a bit of a Dean Koontz fan, I had never read his Frankenstein books.  I read both over the last month or two.  I must say, I'm impressed.  While I wouldn't say that they are great literature, I will say that they are, as his books generally tend to be, extremely well-written.  Exquisite attention to detail mingles with brilliant imagination, and they form another series that has me begging, "Mr. Koontz, WHERE is the third book of the series?" (His Christopher Snow books, my favorite of all his series, have been waiting for their third book for over ten years, I believe, though a very distance reference was made to them in his latest Odd Thomas installment.)

Koontz makes the reader present in his story; one cringes at Carson's madcap driving, and chuckles at Maddison's side comments.  At the same time, the reader ponders the unanswerable: how and what is ensoulment?  Can a creature created specifically for evil still render good?  The importance of the responsible practice of science and, of course, the "everyday hero" are prominently featured.

There are, as always, many good laughs and much reference to mouth-watering food.  As has been indicated in his other books, Koontz (not incorrectly, I think) seems to argue that when the world is being destroyed, sometimes all that one can do is cling to that which one holds dear: family, friends, and chocolate-mint ice cream.

Heaven alone knows when he'll release Book Three.  It was supposed to be published in 2006.  The date was then pushed to 2007, and on to 2008.  Now the tentative release date is in 2009. 

I do know that I'll be first in line when that book is finally released.

But please, Mr. Koontz.  Couldn't you finish the Christopher Snow series soon?  This reader would be most grateful.

This will make one sixteen-ounce travel mug of deliciousness.

You'll need:

14 oz water

4 heaping TB of ground coffee (I make VERY strong coffee; use less if you prefer)

1 oz milk (anything from skim to whole)

1/4-1/2 ts cinnamon

Two spoons of sugar or honey

Place the coffee in the basket of the coffee maker, and add the cinnamon on top.  Brew as usual.  While brewing, put the milk in the bottom of the cup, and add the sugar.  Pour the coffee into the milk/sugar mix, stir, and enjoy!

Oh, and I do realize that 14+1= 15, and not 16.  Even my math isn't that bad.  However, if you fill the cup to the brim you will not be able to put the lid on most travel mugs without splashing coffee about, as most travel mugs have lids that fit on the inside of the mug.

I am told that this also works well with soy milk and Splenda.  I don't mind soy milk in anything except coffee; in coffee, the flavor strikes me as grotesque.  Splenda I detest as well, but, of course, your mileage may vary.