Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for September, 2008
September 30, 2008 at 5:03 pm · Filed under food, meals, meta, pasta
Fun fact: tomato puree and tomato paste are probably not, in fact, the same thing. Except that in England they are. Sort of. So what does this mean for this dish? I made it with tomato paste, which meant that I felt the need to add a bunch of the pasta water (thanks, food blogs, for alerting me to this facet of sauce-making!) to thin it out, and also that it had a darker, smokier flavour than I was really expecting – a nice surprise – although this may have also been due to the sausage.
Also, I had to open up my bag of frozen peas for this one. This bag was not “food.” This bag was, as everybody no doubt understands, a nice bendable icepack. I mean, sure, there is edible food inside it, that’s not what I mean by “not food.” The peas were fine. Don’t get weird. But now I have to be careful the next time I need to ice some injury, because the bag’s open now and I just know I’ll end up spilling peas all over the floor.
This dish was inspired by this post at twoyolks.org, and while it is basically the same – a tomato, sausage, and pea sauce, and I largely followed his recipe proportions- and timing-wise – I am pretty sure his sauce was made with actual tomato puree and not paste, so I bet the two tasted substantially different. Besides, from his photos, it looks like I made less, too. Sometimes I wonder why everyone makes food for 4 to 6 people when they’re not cooking for that many. Or maybe they just halve it in their minds, and post the full recipe anyway? I don’t know. You know my policy – post what I make – so this serves let’s say 2 to 3. It served the two of us and we had generous leftovers.
Spaghetti with Sausage and Peas
Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
2 hot italian sausages
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 small shallot, minced
1 12-oz can tomato paste
1 oz (I know, I know, ounces are weird, but 1/8 of a cup, ok?) heavy cream… or put more; I wouldn’t have been against a little more creaminess
1/4 cup frozen peas
spaghetti for 2 (what, half a package? More or less?)
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
Method
Heat the olive oil in a large pan.
Cook the sausage, then take it out and slice it up. It’s ok if it’s not 100% cooked through since it will be back in the pan for the duration of the sauce-cooking. The original had you squeezing it out of its casing and breaking it up; that’s not how I roll.
Throw in the shallot and garlic and cook for about 2 minutes or until softened.
Add the tomato paste and cover partially (this worked great for me, since I don’t have a lid big enough for my big skillet) and simmer for 30 minutes. If you feel the urge to add some water, because paste is paste, feel free to give in to this urge.
Stir in the peas and the cream and simmer for 10 more minutes.
While the sauce is cooking, cook the pasta according to the manufacturer’s directions and your preference, although take it out just before it’s done, because it’ll cook the last little bit in the sauce.
Add the parmesan cheese to the sauce, as well as salt to taste.
Now scoop your pasta into the sauce – it’s ok if some pasta water makes it in; in fact, you’ll probably want to add more on purpose – and cook for another minute.
Serve with more parmesan.
This picture is blurry. That is because, unlike the makers of certain otherwise-helpful food photography guides, I can’t take dozens of shots until I get the right one, and I can’t spend ages setting up a photo backdrop or devote a corner of my 2 feet of counter space to it. I’m not only cooking for myself. I can’t just keep Matt waiting while I futz around with a camera; food is to be eaten, and taking its picture is secondary. It would be rude to put eating dinner second to taking a picture of it.
September 23, 2008 at 12:19 pm · Filed under dessert, food
So yesterday Matt came home from work with his allergies really acting up. He was suffering badly enough with just the allergies themselves, and then on top of that he’d been sucking back allergy medicine at work (his boss even made a special drugstore run just to get him an array of anti-histamines), so he was exhausted and kind of in a daze. I felt awful watching him sit around and be miserable, and there was nothing I could do to help – there’s no way to make someone else’s physical symptoms go away, you know? I could be nice as pie, do tons of things for him, anything, but that wouldn’t alleviate his actual problem. So I decided that if I couldn’t reduce his suffering, I could at least make him something he might like so he would know I was trying to help. He’s a fan of Dunkin Donuts’ pumpkin muffins, so when I found this recipe in my desserts file, I figured it was probably the best option (didn’t hurt that it’s a quick one, either). I don’t know if it worked; he ate one, but he didn’t say anything about them, good or bad. Granted, he was pretty wiped out, though. This morning – he seemed better – I told him he could take the rest to work if he wanted, since I worried we wouldn’t finish them before they went stale, and it was just about the right number of people at his work to eat them (there were far too few to go around at mine, and besides, I made them for him, didn’t I?). He declined, saying he didn’t want to waste them at work – maybe that does mean he liked them? Or maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered carrying a tupperware to work and back.
Anyway, they turned out kind of small – my muffin pan is kind of big, though, so it’s possible that in a normal-sized pan they’d be regular muffin-sized – and I kind of screwed up by adding the egg to the melted butter, which might have cooked it a bit, instead of adding a bunch of other things to the butter and then the egg at the end. I also didn’t have buttermilk, and for some reason our supermarket doesn’t sell buttermilk in small cartons. This means that I always have lots left over that winds up going to waste. So I tried to substitute regular milk – I didn’t know it was vinegar you had to add, or lemon juice, to sour it; I didn’t realize that it was supposed to be sour in the first place. I thought it was just supposed to be buttery. So I guess I know for next time. I’ll put the “correct” recipe here, even though the measurements were converted from metric into ounces, of all things. The original poster of the recipe – who it was, I have no idea – suggested that some sugar would not go amiss, so I added a couple of heaping tablespoons. They taste all right the way I made them. Next time I’d consider adding more pumpkin.
Pumpkin-Almond Muffins
Ingredients
1/2 oz butter, melted
5 oz whole wheat flour
3 oz cornmeal
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 oz slivered almonds, with some more for topping the muffins
1 egg, beaten
6 oz pumpkin puree (I used the pumpkin-pie-in-a-can stuff)
6 oz buttermilk, or 6 oz regular milk with 2 tsp vinegar or lemon juice added and left to sit for 10 min.
Method
Preheat the oven to 350.
Line your muffin pan with muffin liners – this recipe makes 12 muffins.
Melt the butter and leave to cool.
Mix all the dry ingredients together, adding the nuts last (why? Who knows?). If you’re going to add some sugar, do so here. I can’t really tell you how much to add, since I just went at it with a regular spoon, and I could have added more, maybe.
Beat the egg with the pumpkin and buttermilk, then add the melted butter. Don’t be a moron like me and pour the melted butter into the bowl first, thereby necessitating adding the other stuff to it. It’s warm. It’ll cook the egg a little bit, maybe. Duh.
Pour this mixture into the dry ingredients and stir quickly with a metal spoon (why? Who knows?).
Pour the batter into the prepared muffin pan.
Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with some more slivered almonds.
Bake for 25 – 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of a muffin comes out clean.
I just had one for lunch. They’re nice warm.
September 18, 2008 at 11:53 am · Filed under food, side dishes/appetizers
So we had a bunch of tortilla chips left after making the tortilla soup, and the other day when Matt was hungry and I suggested eating them, he said “Maybe if we had salsa…” Well, I did have the tomato I had bought to cut up for garnishing the soup (and then never used because of the non-immersion-blender situation), a bunch of green onions, and plenty of other salsa-appropriate ingredients. So I decided to give salsa-making a shot. I mean, it couldn’t be easier, really, right? You just cut up everything, throw it in the food processor with seasonings, give it a zizz, and then start dipping chips in it. And it worked! Matt even told me it tasted like restaurant salsa – not like the store kind, which I chalked up to not having added sugar, something they probably do by the handful (which does give the image of a kind of festive atmosphere at the salsa factory, though). It also gives you spicy mouth, not to mention garlic mouth (I might want to roast the garlic first for next time to avoid this).
Ooh, layery!
My Empty-Out-The-Fridge Salsa
Ingredients
1 tomato
4 stalks green onions, I think
1 clove garlic
3 drops hot sauce
1 shake coriander seeds
1 shake paprika
2 shakes cayenne
2 shakes cumin
2 shakes chipotle powder, because I love it so
Method
Chop up the tomato, green onions, and garlic.
Dump everything in the food processor.
Process until desired consistency is reached.
September 17, 2008 at 2:02 pm · Filed under dessert, food
On Monday night, I baked these ginger cookies to bring in to work. They were a success, but then again, free food is always a success. I found the recipe on Edible Garden, made some changes of course, but the biggest change I made was, er, actually putting the ginger in! I’m sure she did, but her recipe doesn’t say anywhere when to actually add the ginger.
Mine came out less puffy than hers, probably having something to do with the fact that I thought I had more than one egg, but I did not, so I just made do. Either that or I thought I’d added two teaspoons of baking soda but had only added one, but I’m pretty sure I got that right… pretty sure. But they were still chewy instead of crunchy, which was a plus. Crunchy cookies are pointless, in my opinion, unless we are talking about Oreos, in which case they’re only good crunchy. Anyway, they were still good and everything, so why not save on eggs and just use the one? I used fresh ginger, grated, since I had that and not ground ginger powder, and I also doubled her recipe (hence the more than one egg – I bet you’re all looking at her one-egg recipe and thinking “so what that you only had one egg?”), because hers says it makes 24, and we have about 40 people in our office. So 48 would be a nice amount to take in, right? Hahaha. It made WAY MORE than 48. By my count, there were, ah… 72. I took in most of them – kept maybe a dozen at home for Matt and myself to snack on – and they STILL all disappeared. One guy said they were good, “but I’ve only had 3 so far.”
Ginger Cookies
Ingredients
to make 72 cookies
4 cups flour
1 1/2 cups butter, softened
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1 tbsp fresh ginger, grated
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp water
6 tbsp brown sugar
some more sugar to roll the cookies in at the end
Method
Preheat the oven to 350.
Ok. Lots of recipes call for sifting the flour and stuff together at the start. I don’t have a sieve or a sifter, so I just whisk them to combine, hoping that will aerate things enough. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference. I don’t know. So sift or whisk the flour, salt, and baking soda together, and set them aside.
In a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in the egg.
Stir in the water, brown sugar, and ginger.
Stir in the flour mixture gradually.
Make the dough into walnut-sized balls (note: I had to have Matt tell me how big he thought a walnut was; I’m hopeless at gauging size when the comparison item isn’t right there, so I wonder whether this may have contributed to how I got so many cookies) and roll them in sugar.
Arrange them on your cookie sheet, allowing for a decent amount of spreadage. The original recipe asked you to flatten them a bit; this was unnecessary in my experience.
Bake for 8 – 10 minutes.
Cool on the sheet for 5 minutes or so, and then the rest of the way on a cooling rack.
September 16, 2008 at 2:12 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Here’s the second dish I made this weekend involving tomato, corn, and Mexico. It also involves the first time I ever actually cooked with jalapeno peppers, so I used only one instead of the two requested by the recipe – I could definitely go for two next time. Also, the pepper we got made us wonder if it was actually a wee green pepper, since it looked more round than the rest, but we taste-tested it. It was the real deal.
We’re also both pronouncing them “ja-LAP-a-no” now, thanks to Trailer Park Boys. We try not to do it in public in case people think we actually believe that’s how it’s pronounced, but I don’t try very hard.
Chicken Tortilla Soup
from My Gourmet Connection (well, not my gourmet connection, I don’t have one, that’s just what it’s called, OKAY?)
Ingredients
1 smallish onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 jalapeno, seeded and minced (but totally add more if you need more fire in your life)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 cup crushed tortilla chips
1 quart chicken broth (I just found out that a quart is basically the same as a litre, go team metric conversions!)
1 14-oz can diced tomatoes
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp hot sauce
some amount of boneless chicken parts, chopped into bite-sized pieces – the original recipe called for 3/4 lb, but we just used a biggish breast piece we had in the freezer, which was doubtless less than that. We could have used more. Use as much as you want.
1 8-oz can of corn, again, or use real corn OR freezer corn, it doesn’t matter as long as it ends up cooked in the end
1/3 cup half and half
1 cup grated cheese – they called for monterey jack, of course, but we used cheddar to no discernible ill effect
zest and juice from one lime
salt and pepper
Method
Get your big pot out, this is a one-pot meal! Aw. Look at me assuming that normal people have “a” big pot. You all probably have a whole shelf full of big soup pots, from which you select based on your mood.
Put the olive oil in it and heat it up on medium.
Saute your onion, garlic, and jalapeno until softened.
Push them off to one side and add your tortilla chips, and toss them until lightly toasted.
Add the chicken broth, tomatoes, hot sauce, and spices, and simmer for 5 minutes.
Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.
Run an immersion blender through the soup. This is where I discovered that I do not actually own an immersion blender. See, I have this, and I thought that one of the attachments was an immersion blender. But it’s not. It’s a drink mixer! It doesn’t even have blades! I found this out by trying to use it and finding that the tomatoes were not being blended at all. The tortilla chips were, because they were smaller, and, by now, squishier, but the tomatoes remained as chunks. The original recipe had instructions for those of us who don’t own immersion blenders – namely, use tomato paste instead of tomatoes – but I ignored that, never realizing myself to be a member of said group. Not that it was a big deal. It was just a somewhat chunky soup instead of a smooth puree. But you might want to try it with tomato paste instead, if you’re in the same boat.
Throw your chicken chunks in and return to the heat for 5 – 7 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through.
Stir in the corn and half-and-half.
Reduce the heat a bit and add the cheese, lime juice, lime zest, salt, pepper, and more hot sauce if you find it wanting.
Give it all a good stir, then serve. You could choose to garnish it with cilantro (which I can’t stand), sour cream (which Matt can’t stand), or chopped tomato (which would have been fine except that the tomato chunks in the soup were still clearly discernible, so what would have been the point?), or lime wedges. We served it with more tortilla chips since we’re classy like that.
September 15, 2008 at 4:02 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta, side dishes/appetizers
So this weekend I wound up making two things with more or less of a Mexican slant to them, and both involved corn and tomato. I’m in love with corn this summer, apparently. Insofar as one can still say “this summer” with any degree of accuracy, anyway.
This one was also Italian, obviously, what with being a pasta salad and all, and also the use of hot Italian sausage in it. I really liked this one, and it worked as a lightish dinner, warm, and also as a lunch or regular pasta salad (you know, a side dish for a barbeque or potluck type thing), cold.
I based it, more or less, upon this pasta salad from Culinary Adventures of a New Wife. Hers was a clear-out-the-fridge affair; mine was coldly calculated. She used frozen veggies; I used a can of corn (what, I didn’t have time to cook corn and then cut it off the cob, I was busy going to a roller derby pre-tryouts open skate and acquiring this) and a tomato and some green onion. She used an actual chipotle pepper; I used chipotle powder. She used sweet Italian sausage; I used hot. So it was only the same dish in the sense that both were pasta salads with a chipotle flavour and with Italian sausage of some kind. But I still would never have had the idea to do it without reading her post, so all credit for success must still go to her.
Chipotle Pasta Salad with Sausage
Ingredients
An appropriate amount of rotini or other pasta that does well in pasta salad (rotini’s nice because it has lots of nooks and crannies for sauce or seasoning to get stuck in)
1 large clove garlic, minced
2 hot Italian sausages
1 tsp or so chipotle powder
1 8-oz can corn (or be cool and use corn off a cob, see if I care)
1 smallish tomato
3 stalks of green onion, more or less
1/2 cup mayonnaise
juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 tsp adobo sauce
1/4 tsp brown sugar
salt
pepper
olive oil
Method
Cook the pasta according to package directions; drain and set aside when done.
While the pasta is going, heat a glug or two of olive oil in a pan and saute the garlic for one minute. I actually took it out after this point, and just threw it back in again at the end with the sausage, but it would be just as good to leave it in at this point and cook it with the veggies. Then they’d be all garlicky and yum.
Add the corn, tomato, green onion, and chipotle powder, and saute until heated through; remove from the pan and set aside.
Now add the sausages to the same pan and cook them in the same oil from the vegetables. The tomatoes got a bit juicy in the pan when I was making this, so the sausages absorbed tomato juices as well, which certainly didn’t hurt. If necessary, and it always is for me, slice the sausages once they appear to be cooked, and then cook the slices until the middle is no longer pink. You’ll be using them sliced anyway, so either slice them before they’re done cooking or after. As long as you wind up with fully cooked slices of sausage, it’s all good.
In a bowl big enough to contain all the ingredients, combine the mayo, lemon juice, adobo sauce, brown sugar, and salt and pepper to taste.
Add the pasta, sausage, and vegetables, and toss to coat.
Serve warm or cold.
September 11, 2008 at 3:00 pm · Filed under food, meals, meta
So while in Vancouver, we went up to our place at Whistler, and that was the one day I had a chance to make dinner, what with all the going out, the making of food for us that my parents knew we were pining away for, the party, and the occasional day when it was just too late and we were too tired to bother cooking and we just got Chinese.
I made chilaquiles, which are apparently a Mexican hangover food and generally eaten at breakfast, but I wouldn’t know since I’ve never had a Mexican hangover. I actually was completely unaware of this dish until seeing it on Dine and Dish, home of the fabulous Adopt-a-Blogger event, in which I have just been adopted by Kitchenparade. More on that, no doubt, later, as it develops.
Anyway, the chilaquiles looked appetizing to me for two reasons: one, it is essentially Mexican lasagna, and lasagna is awesome; and two, I cooked with tomatillos for the first time a couple of months ago and was a fan, so another recipe using them was welcome. This one called for canned ones, and in my snobbery I thought, well, I’ll just use fresh ones, of course – canned vegetables, pshaw, pshaw. With my nose pointed directly at the sky, I headed off to the grocery store and the produce stores that dot the Vancouver landscape (note: why can’t we get these in Boston? They kick the ass of supermarket veggie departments, and it’s more convenient than the only farmers’ market I know about around here that isn’t during work hours – the one at Haymarket on weekends – which is the other alternative to supermarkets), but I couldn’t find any tomatillos. Not a one. Oh Vancouver, you are only just beginning your love affair with Mexican food – burrito places popping up all over the place all of a sudden – but you have a long way to go. But! My brother’s friend from California had been staying at my family’s place for a bit, and apparently she had left some food, because what was in the pantry but a can of tomatillos! And also a can of chopped green chilies, another of the ingredients. So was this fate or what? I was compelled to make this dish!
Of course I made some changes based on what was on hand/available, and as has been my practice, I’ll write the recipe of what I did. Wow, Adopt-a-Blogger has made me highly explanatory, apparently. The biggest change was that we didn’t have cooked chicken hanging around, and while at the supermarket in Vancouver there was rotisserie chicken in a little plastic box, we held out for non-”barbeque” (I didn’t think that meant it would be flavoured with barbeque sauce, but Matt disagreed), and decided to postpone the chicken purchase until we got to the supermarket at Whistler. But when we got there, there was no cooked chicken. At all. Barbeque or anything else. Even in the frozen food section it was all uncooked, except for some slightly alarming chicken… sticks. They were breaded little tubes of chicken. Terrible for you, no doubt, but at least COOKED, and since it was getting late and everyone – including, by the way, my mother-in-law, who had flown in that afternoon – was starving to death, it was that or me not cooking at all. So we got them. Don’t hit me. I also forgot the parmesan cheese I had picked up earlier in the day. Throw some in if you have some. I’m sure it’s good. And I omitted the cilantro because the smell of that stuff makes my whole face hurt. And I messed up the layering – I forgot that I had to have some tomatillo mixture left at the end to go on top, so my top layer was tortillas instead. Which was maybe for the best – it got all nice and crispy and did a good job of holding the thing together instead of just being a heap of food.
Chilaquiles
Ingredients
2 cups shredded cooked chicken… of whatever kind you can find
generous 1/2 cup chopped green onions – what, like 3 stalks?
1/2 cup grated pepper Jack cheese – again, feel free to be generous, because cheese is the bomb
1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper, which I forgot until the thing was all assembled and just sprinkled it on top
3/4 cup milk
1 11-oz can tomatillos, drained
1 4.5-oz can chopped green chilies
1 tomato, diced
12 6″ tortillas (I believe this is called “fajita size”)
perhaps also some grated cheddar cheese for on top (or inside too), however much you feel is appropriate
cooking spray
Method
Preheat oven to 375.
Mix together chicken, green onions, Jack cheese (and maybe a bit of the cheddar too if you want), salt, pepper, and chili powder in a bowl. Contemplate just forgetting about the rest and eating it straight like that. This is where the parmesan goes as well, if you’re using it.
Blenderize the tomatillos, milk, green chilies, tomato, and cilantro (if using) until smooth.
Spray an 11×7 baking dish with cooking spray.
Ladle a third of your tomatillo mixture into the pan.
If your tortillas are cold and un-bendy, warm them up, but mine were all set so I didn’t heat them. Layer them over the tomatillo mixture – should be 4 to a layer to cover the whole dish.
Cover them with half the chicken mixture.
Repeat the layering until you finish with tortillas.
Sprinkle your extra cheese over the top.
Put it in the oven for 20 minutes or until bubbly; this does not become moot if you, like me, don’t have a tomatillo layer on top. You can totally see the bubbliness of the lower layers around the sides.
It says it serves 4, but there were 4 of us and there was a quarter of the dish left. Then again, none of us are teenaged boys or anything, so who knows. The inner tortilla layers got a bit soggy, though, so I wonder how best to alter this for next time.
September 10, 2008 at 10:40 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I was away this past week visiting family in Vancouver, and I only got one worthwhile post out of it, which I will publish later, once I’ve uploaded the photos. I thought I’d get at least one more, since there was a big family party (sort of like a second wedding reception for all my relatives who couldn’t make it to the real wedding), and I made a couple of things. But one of them was a potato salad that I’ve already made, and the other was this little rolly appetizer I make all the time, but this time I decided to bring them, unbaked, to my grandma’s (site of the party), and just use her oven to bake them, so they’d be hot and fresh. But a few minutes into baking them, smoke started coming out of the oven. It was nothing, just a lot of crud built up on the floor of the oven burning off (not with actual fire… well, except for that one time… just lots of smoke), so we all decided that the goodies would be fine, and maybe they’d have a smokey flavour to them, yum yum yum. And they were fine. Just… grey. Yep. The smoke discoloured them, so instead of a nice golden brown, they were more of a golden grey, which is not photo-worthy. Everyone still gobbled them right up, though.
Anyway, I’m back now, swamped with catching up (mostly at the gym), but I’m going to try to make a couple things this weekend, and as soon as I get those photos uploaded, I’ll have the post from while I was away.
