Mushroom "Risoniotto"

A few years ago, the parents of my preschool group gave me a generous gift card to Amazon and I promptly ordered three cookbooks, including River Cottage Veg  by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  I had perused the library's copy and decided it was a welcome addition to  my collection.  Fast forward five years and I hadn't made one dish from the book. Not. One.  I would read through the book and decide that I should give it away. Read through it again and decide that I must keep it. 

Thankfully, iheartcookingclubs is celebrating their tenth anniversary. Usually, they highlight one chef for six months and anyone can join in by cooking recipes by that chef. For IHCC's tenth anniversary, they are featuring all previous chefs (including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall) giving me the perfect opportunity to actually cook from Veg.  I chose the Mushroom "risoniotto" on page 258 of the book. The Washington Post printed the recipe in 2013 (hopefully with Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall's permission) so I am posting a link here.

It is easy to make and most ingredients are readily available if not already in your pantry. I found the recipe a bit bland, but to be fair, it says to add salt and pepper to taste and I didn't add a lot. I probably could have added more fresh thyme and maybe two teaspoons of balsamic vinegar instead of one. Still, this is a good dish for a simple, filling meal. 

Baby Spinach Salad with Dates and Almonds

We lived in Jerusalem for 8 1/2 wonderful years. We ate really well from a wide variety of foods. And yet, we never ate many of the foods found in Jerusalem, the cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.  When this book first came out, I was very excited. Although I've had it for three years, this is the first time I have cooked from it.  Thanks to I Heart Cooking Clubs for that.  Without the incentive of joining my fellow cooking bloggers, I would probably have enjoyed reading this book without ever actually making any of the dishes.

I chose to make a salad of baby spinach with dates and almonds. Looking through the list of ingredients, it wouldn't have occurred to me that these flavors would work together. The featured spice is sumac. Sumac? What's that? Apparently, it's a Middle Eastern spice that I never used before and is not commonly found in American grocery stores.  I did a quick internet search while standing in the spice aisle to find a suitable substitute. As sumac is often described as lemony and tart, some suggest using lemon zest, others suggest lemon zest with salt, or oregano or just using za'atar alone. I am sure these are all great suggestions, but in the end I remembered that I pass a Mediterranean deli on my way home from work. Problem solved. They had two kinds of sumac, Turkish and Lebanese. I chose the Lebanese. It has a tangy kick to it and it adds a deep red color to your food.

The recipe can be found in the book, Jerusalem, or here. You marinate dates and onions, sauté almonds and pita, and mix it all with baby spinach and other spices. I like that you use a variety of techniques and seasonings to end up with a beautiful salad layered with sweet and tart flavors.

We really enjoyed this salad. My spouse declared it tasty in a strange way, which I believe he meant as a complement. Both of us did finish the whole salad between us and it was only part of the whole dinner.

This week is potluck week at IHCC, so if you head over to here, you will find a wonderful variety of recipes by great chefs.

 

Asian Noodle Bowl with Peanut Dressing

This is "Oodles of Noodles" week at I Heart Cooking Clubs (IHCC) . This means any pasta, noodle or noodle-like dish.  As I looked through Ellie Krieger recipes both in The Food You Crave and www.elliekrieger.com  I thought the peanut noodles looked the tastiest and most likely to please. Peanut noodles are my favorite pasta dish and I've made many variations through the years, but I'm always game to try a new recipe for the dish.  Clearly, the dish appealed to some of my fellow cooks at IHCC, because there are already two postings for this same dish. 

Ellie Krieger has two recipes based on peanut noodles that are similar. I almost made the one found in The Food You Crave. It features broccoli, snow peas and sugar snaps. The problem is that February is a difficult month in which to find sugar snaps. This dish is probably wonderful, but better suited to late spring and summer cooking.

Asian Noodle Bowl with Peanut Dressing is better suited to year round cooking, at least in southern Virginia. As it turns out, I had all but three of the ingredients in my pantry already. The recipe can be found here. Although I only made two changes, it is a versatile recipe. The changes I made (regular pasta in place of whole wheat and crunchy, not creamy, peanut butter) were the result of what I already had on hand and could use up.

Basically, the recipe features many of my favorite flavors.

I added carrots, red pepper, snow peas and spring onion as written in the recipe. This recipe was a winner in my house. Usually, I don't add veggies or roasted peanuts to peanut noodles, but my  husband said they really added a nice crunch. The sauce on its own was a winner, too.

If you head over to IHCC this week, you'll find the other two variations, both of which look delicious.

Sweet and Spicy Peanut Soup

You can always count on an Ellie Krieger recipe to be healthy. In fact, her cookbooks have the nutritional breakdown of each recipe which is a bonus. This is especially helpful when I have spent the morning celebrating the Bar Mitzvah of a friend and the feast after the services was just too tempting. My husband insists that calories consumed on the Shabbat, the Sabbath, don't count. I'll hedge my bets on that one.

So, after a morning of indulging, I went easy in the evening. I made Sweet and Spicy Soup, also known as Nutty Sweet Potato Soup.  The recipe can be found in The Food You Crave (p. 77) or here.  It's a lovely, filling, but mildly flavored soup. Maybe the ginger I added was beyond it's freshest and fullest flavor. Next time, I'll use fresher ginger.

I don't always add garnishes to soups, but I would recommend adding the scallions at the end. They added a lovely crunch and piquancy that enhanced the soup. 

This week is I Heart Cooking Clubs' monthly pot luck. Which means, if you go here, you will find a treasure of different recipes and blogs.

Smoked Paprika Potato Chips

Its Nibbles and Noshes week at I Heart Cooking Clubs blog, featuring the recipes of Ellie Krieger.  For some time now, I've been interested in making potato chips at home. I love chips, but won't bring them into the house because frankly, I have no self-control. It really is a challenge to eat just one potato chip, or ten, or twenty.....

But if you make them at home, you don't have to make a whole lot of them. When you follow EK's recipe, you can bake them instead of frying them. This recipe features smoked paprika which is one of my favorite spices, so all in all, this was worth a try. 

An important part of the success of the recipe is a mandoline, so you can slice the potatoes 1/16 inch thick. It probably also helps to keep the slices fairly uniform as well. I don't own a mandoline and frankly during this, the giving season, I wasn't keen to spend any money on an implement I might use only once.  I decided to try my hand at slicing the potatoes with a knife. If I liked the recipe enough, I could always buy a mandoline later .... maybe during January sales.

Is the finished product worth buying a mandoline? I think so. Even when the potato slices were uneven and therefore some were crisp and some ... well, not so crisp, they were tasty. You can find the recipe at elliekrieger.com.  Also, for other great ideas for nibbles and noshes go to I Heart Cooking Clubs.

 

 



Two Side Dishes

Thanksgiving is approaching. I know which main dish I'm making and Thanksgiving is not Thanksgiving without my mother's dressing.  A friend is bringing the veggie main dish and homemade cranberry sauce. My husband will make pies (I hope, I hope.)  But we're still short a couple of side dishes.  Luckily,  I Heart Cooking Clubs  is featuring side dishes by our current chef, Ellie Krieger.

I have long wanted to try making oven baked onion rings. I love onion rings, but dread deep fat frying.  The recipe is from The Food You Crave or you can find it here.  It's quite easy to make. It's not the same as eating traditional onion rings, but it's a satisfying dish all the same.  I might add a little more salt and I wonder what it would be like if I used regular potato chips instead of baked potato chips.    

There is one other thing I will do differently next time.  Onion slices are dusted with flour, dipped into buttermilk and then covered with potato chip crumbs.  The crumbs got soggy after a few of the onion slices were dipped in them.  After that, it was hard to get the crumbs to adhere to the onion slices. Next time, I will divide the crumbs into smaller portions, so the crumbs stay drier.

I also made broccoli toasted with garlic, from the same book.  The recipe is available here as well.  Basically, you sauté the garlic, sauté the broccoli, pour the garlic on the broccoli and voila, a very tasty, healthy side dish. 

Visit IHCC to see what other wonderful sides people cooked up.

Savory Carrot-Cashew Soup

This week, I Heart Cooking Clubs (IHCC) is featuring recipes by Ellie Krieger that feature one or more orange hued ingredients. This shouldn't be difficult. Think butternut squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, papaya, oranges and other citrus fruit, persimmons, pumpkins, mangoes....you get the idea.

Perusing Ellie Krieger's website I came across this tasty recipe for carrot soup. Carrot soup is one of those dishes I've been meaning to make for years, but never did. Why? Who knows. Fortunately, I tried this recipe. It's tasty, filling and healthy.  Most importantly, my husband and I really liked it.  This recipe is a keeper. You can find it here: Carrot-Cashew Soup. 

 

To see what other members of IHCC came up with go here. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. 

South Indian Vegetable Curry

One reason I enjoy on-line cooking clubs is that it is an incentive to try new things, especially the ones I've been meaning to try for a while. And "by a while" I mean for a long time -- months, maybe years.

I recently discovered I Heart Cooking Clubs or IHCC. Mostly, they feature one chef for about six months. We just started cooking our way through Ellie Krieger's repertoire of healthy recipes.  Every so often IHCC tries a new theme. Maybe it's for the variety; maybe it's a chance to revisit a previously featured (and beloved) chef. This week, we are cooking recipes from Nigella Lawson. 

I bought Nigella Kitchen a few years ago. I have enjoyed reading her essays about home cooking and the kitchen. I can relate to her relaxed attitude towards cooking and I love the variety of cuisines and styles of cooking. I've thought a lot about the many mouth watering recipes in the book, but have only managed to use two of the recipes in the book. That is why I am happy that IHCC gave me the kick in the a... I mean, the opportunity to pick a new recipe from the book and actually cook it.

I chose South Indian Vegetable Curry.   You can find the recipe on page 154 of Nigella Kitchen or here.   I don't often make curries and I don't use much coconut milk or tamarind paste in my cooking, so this was my chance to try something new.  My husband and I are also trying to eat healthier, which means more vegetables. 

Basically, the recipe is really easy to make. There is a lot of chopping, but nothing complicated. I made a few modifications to the recipe. I like a little heat, but my husband likes very little to no heat, so I held back on the red pepper flakes and used only half of a jalapeno pepper. The recipe lists 5 kinds of vegetables, but you can change the combination any way you want.  I would have like to use green beans as called for in the recipe, but the green beans at the grocery looked kind of sorry, so I used mushrooms instead. My husband doesn't like cauliflower that much, so I halved the amount and threw in potatoes as well.  I served the curry over couscous.

I had "wet tamarind seedless" from the local Asian market. It had the consistency of paste, so I guess it was the right stuff. It didn't seem very seedless though, so I pulled my punch and only added a half tablespoon.  In retrospect, maybe I should have done a little more research or added more in.  At any rate, the taste of the tamarind was subtle at best.

Overall, I would say this was a success. My husband liked it and so did I. Next time, in addition to adding in the full tablespoon of tamarind paste, I'd probably add less liquid. You can't tell from the photo, but the dish was very soupy.  My photo  makes the dish look quite dull. I guess in this case,  picture is not worth a thousand words, but this dish is tasty and filling.

TWD & BWJ: Summer Vegetable Tart

I was looking forward to making this Summer Vegetable Tart, this being summer and all. It doesn't need very long in the oven at all, so baking during the very hot weather isn't too much of a problem. I would say that this tart is a snap to make, but I hadn't worked with phyllo in a very long time and as you can see in the photo the results were less than photogenic.

I would say that the tart was a semi-success. Two out of three teenagers loved it and the third won't eat a veggie that is not broccoli, green beans or corn. I found the phyllo crust difficult to cut. So while the filling was delicious, I would pick another crust for the base.  Or, if I were to use phyllo dough again (I have a whole lot left over), I might make these as little tarts or bourekas.

To see how others fared with this tart check out Tuesdays with Dorie. Better yet, join us. There's always room for more.

Wok Wednesdays: Stir-Fried Eggs with Tomatoes

Years ago, when I was just developing an interest in cooking, I bought a wok along with a beginners' Chinese cookbook.  I marveled at the recipes presented in order of difficulty. I don't know why, but I never, ever made any of the dishes from that book.  Instead, I used the wok to make vegetable tempura and omelets. What possessed me? Who knows? As I recall, the omelets came out quite well.  These days I'm happy that I now include stir-fries in my repertoire.

This week's recipe is Stir-Fried Eggs with Tomatoes. I was really pleased that I had most of the items on hand from the ingredient list.  I substituted fresh basil for the cilantro; we're not big cilantro fans and my basil plant is still producing.  I also used onions instead of shallots because I had them on hand.

I decided that in case we didn't like the recipe, I should make a second dish.  I made mu shu vegetables using tortillas as the pancakes. The recipe was adapted from Millie Chan's Kosher Chinese Cookbook.    I spent about 30 minutes, laying out all the ingredients for both recipes and then started stir-frying.  Everything went great. The only point I started to worry was when I put the eggs into the wok and they just sat there. No fabulous sizzle. No hot bubbling eggs.  I stood there for a moment and then started mixing from the bottom of the pan up. In the end, it all came together.  The garlic and onion gave the eggs a nice crunch and the basil and sesame added flavor.

This recipe is from Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge  by Grace Young, a book well worth adding to your cookbook library. To find out how others enjoyed this recipe, check out the Wok Wednesdays  site.

Wok Wednesdays: Yin Yang Beans

The temperatures have been in the high 90's, but feel like 110 and the humidity is near 90%. We're all too listless to do much and we're certainly not going to turn on the oven in this weather. It's great weather to stir-fry and grill.

Our Wok Wednesdays challenge this time: Yin Yang Beans.  This tasty dish features green beans, scallions and pork with the piquant flavors of fresh ginger, pickled ginger and garlic.  This is a perfect summer dish as fresh beans are plentiful.  I ususally like to follow the recipe as close as possible, but since we don't eat pork (we have a Kosher kitchen), I decided to make a vegetarian version.
My first thought was to go with some tofu approximation of meat.  I decided that as much as I like Morningstar Farms products, I wasn't sure how they would work in a stir-fry.  I thought black beans might work as a contrast to the green beans.   And then it occured to me; slivered almonds would work great. They're crunchy and they would make the Yin Yang Beans a stir-fry variation of green beans almondine. Perfect.

The almonds add a nice crunch and soak up the flavors of the sauce and aromatics. I also used red onions instead of scallions. This was not so much a culinary choice as a moment of forgetfulness at the grocery store.  Overall, the beans were a success. The only change I would make is that I would use one ounce of almonds. I had used two ounces of almonds to replace the pork and that was too much.  You can read other Wok Wednesday blogs here.  And to get this wonderful recipe, get the book, Stir- Frying to the Sky's Edge by Grace Young.