Ok, this may be old news in the foodblogging world (but I wouldn’t know, because I was just sent the link today, and there’s no date on the thing), but this is a really cool photo essay of families’ food purchases for a week, all over the world. It makes you wonder what yours would look like. Mine would probably be embarrassing.
So I made this soup on Friday. I halved the recipe, and I decided that, instead of using 1 1/2 cans of great northern beans, because half a can of something is going to get wasted, I’d use one can and the leftover baby lima beans (dry, in a bag) that I had. It sounded like it would have been about the same amount. Except that when you soak the beans, you wind up with way more than you had when they were dry. So this wound up as more like a big pot of beans with some kielbasa in it. It’s tasty and everything, don’t get me wrong, the beans soak up heaps of flavour from the kielbasa and the veggies, but next time I would be a little more parsimonious with them. It really makes it not a soup.
Kielbasa and Bean “Soup”
Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 rib celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 jalapeno, seeded and minced
1 clove garlic (or two smallish cloves… my clove was big), minced
1 tbsp cornmeal
1 can chicken stock – the original recipe instructs you to spare no expense here, because it is whence cometh the flavour, although I feel that flavour is acheived from all the other ingredients, too, so in these trying economic times, etc.
EITHER a can of great northern beans, drained and rinsed, OR half a bag (ish) of baby lima beans, soaked, drained, and rinsed; not both like I used
1 1/2 cups kielbasa, sliced – this came out to about one sausage, because the one I bought wasn’t one big U-shaped sausage, but two curved half-Us end-to-end. So one of those, or half a U.
Salt
Pepper
Method
In your big soup pot, heat the olive oil and melt the butter.
Throw in the onion, celery, and carrots, and saute until the onions are translucent, about 3 to 5 minutes.
Add the jalapeno, garlic, and cornmeal, and give it another minute or two.
Add the kielbasa; the original recipe had it going in at the same time as the chicken stock and beans, but if you add it a minute or so early, you can fry it up a little and maybe buy yourself a little crispiness, which is the best, as you know.
So now add the stock and the beans and let it simmer at medium-low for 30 – 35 minutes. Mine went for 40 and thickened up a bit, although to be honest that could have been because of bean overload. Like with any soup, the longer you can let it simmer, the better.
Matt felt that the next time, the kielbasa slices should be cut into halves or quarters. Maybe. It would make for less delicious sausage at a time, but it would increase the chances that any given spoonful would have sausage in it. Smart man.
So this weekend we went to Ikea, because Matt wanted to get the duvet cover with bodies on it (they’re supposed to be dancing, and that’s supposed to be a beat above them, but doesn’t it look like chalk outlines and a heart-rate monitor?), and I wound up getting 3 separate things for the kitchen: a roasting pan (yesss!), oil for our bamboo cutting board that we haven’t even been able to use yet, and… a carton of bread. Seriously.
What this is, and maybe this is totally common in Sweden and I’m being a huge dork, is a 2-litre milk carton filled with the dry ingredients for a loaf of Swedish rye bread, all mixed together. The instructions are to shake it a bit to make sure the flour isn’t caked to the bottom, and then pour some hot water into the carton, hold the top shut, and shake vigorously for 45 seconds, which is harder than you might think. Then you pour it into a loaf pan, leave it to rise for 45 minutes, and then bake at 400 F for an hour.
Either I didn’t shake it vigorously enough, or I didn’t shake it long enough, but when I poured it into the pan, there was quite a bit of uncombined dry stuff that fell out of the carton. No big deal; I just mixed it in in the pan with a spoon. Turned out fine.
Ok, so I realize that Mexican lasagna hovers dangerously close to chilaquiles, which I made sort of recently, but this was actually a substantially different dish, and in my opinion, it was a bigger success. I got the recipe from another blog whose name is so awful that I really don’t want to link back there, and anyway I suspect this recipe comes originally from one of those Kraft Food and Family magazines (which I am not trying to disparage – I’ve gotten some awesome recipes from those) just because it had a corny name and required that you use their products, like their brand of bagged Mexican cheese blend. I also made some changes, not least of which was of which meat to use (the original used chicken; I used beef), and the original had you using uncooked noodles and refrigerating the thing overnight before cooking, which I did not do. Plus I added tortilla chips on top. So I don’t feel bad in the least about not linking. It’s not the same recipe anymore.
Mexican Lasagna
Ingredients
2 14-oz cans diced tomatoes with green chilis/jalapenos
3/4 cup salsa, divided
1 1/4 – 1 1/2 lbs ground beef (I mean, I had 1 1/4 lb and it wasn’t inadequate, but it would’ve probably been better to have a little more)
1 can refried beans
however many lasagna noodles it takes to cover your baking dish of choice 3 times – for me, that’s 9, but I know it’s 12 for some people
3 cups grated cheese – I supplemented one of those lame “Mexican blend” bags with some sharp cheddar, but whatever you like, really
1/2 cup chopped green onions, plus a bit more for garnishing – I don’t remember how many actual green onions this came out to, sorry
a generous handful of tortilla chips, broken up
Method
Preheat the oven to 350.
Brown the ground beef, adding any seasonings you feel appropriate to the situation (I went with cumin and chipotle seasoning, because I’m in love with both, and cayenne and a bit of paprika, but do what you want) and drain excess fat.
Mix the cooked beef, tomatoes, and 1/2 cup of the salsa together in a bowl.
Meanwhile, cook the lasagna noodles.
Spray your baking dish with cooking spray.
Now it’s happy layer fun time! First do a layer of the tomato/beef mixture.
Next, do a layer of noodles.
Spread the noodles with half the refried beans. The original recipe had the refried beans being mixed with 1/2 cup of sour cream, which would have made it go farther and probably made it easier to spread, but Matt doesn’t like sour cream, so I omitted it. If I had been making this for just me, I’d have left it in. So if you’re omitting it, you may need to be a bit conservative with your beans.
Spread half the remaining beef/tomato mixture on top.
Cover it in a layer of cheese (about a third of your cheese) and half your green onions.
Repeat this set of layers – noodles, beans, beef, cheese and onions.
Now lay down your last noodles.
Cover them with the remaining salsa and cheese and green onions.
Cover the whole dish with tinfoil (the original recipe asked that I spray this with cooking spray, too, but I just used a nonstick foil, so no worries) and sling it into the oven for 40 minutes.
After 40 minutes, take the foil off and sprinkle the broken chips all over the top so that they’ll get nice and toasted.
Bake uncovered for 10 minutes or until it looks, you know, good.
Take it out and let it sit for 5 minutes before slicing into it. I’m not sure what difference this makes, honestly, and the original recipe had it resting 10 minutes, but we just couldn’t handle waiting.
The leftovers are pretty great, too, although if you heat it up in the microwave you’re necessarily going to sacrifice the crispiness of the chips on top.
Oh! Oh! Also! I won free pasta at “Mommy? I’m Hungry!” (I always think the blog is called “Lady Loveburger” because of the url, hahaha). I am not too proud to take a chance on Pizza Hut pasta. Besides, it’s got bacon in it. What is not to love?
So I made potstickers on Sunday night. I think I may have used the wrong wrappers; this was the best option I could find at Super 88, since nothing specifically said “potsticker wrappers.” I got “dumpling wrappers.” Potstickers fall within the category of dumplings! I just expect them to be whiter, and these are more yellow. But no big deal, they still work, and I even got the pleats to work, although I guess I had perogies on the brain and made them so that they lay on one side instead of standing with the seam pointing up. But how fun are they to make? Super fun.
When I was shopping for ingredients, Matt objected to the use of Napa cabbage on the grounds that it is cabbage, and cabbage is nasty. While I agree with him on cabbage generally, I got the impression that this wouldn’t be all cabbagey-tasting. So I decided to substitute some celery that I had lying around instead. Turns out that this is a known and acceptable substitution , which makes me feel like a total culinary genius.
Also, this recipe (which I found at For the Love of Cooking) included a recipe for the dipping sauce, which I think is awesome (Matt prefers them without), but it makes enough to drown a small army in. Consider halving.
Potstickers
Ingredients
for the dipping sauce
1 cup soy sauce
2 tbsp seasoned rice vinegar
2 tsp sesame oil
2 tsp sugar
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tbsp water
for the potstickers
1 1/2 cups celery, diced (although you don’t need to be too particular about dicing any of the ingredients; they’re all going to get food-processorized anyway)
about 1 chicken breast’s worth of cooked chicken (I think we had 2 boneless cutlets, they’re kind of small, and we cut them into bite-sized pieces and cooked them up in a pan with some garam masala and garlic, but use leftovers or whatever you want)
2 green onions, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp corn starch
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
salt and pepper
potsticker wrappers
a little olive oil for cooking
Method
Put all the filling ingredients into a food processor and process them all until they form a dodgy-looking grey-and-green mush. Mmmm! Except it actually is mmm. Taste it. See?
Put a little spoonful of filling in the centre of each wrapper – don’t be like me and try to put too much, it’ll just ooze out and make a mess.
Brush some water around the top edge of a wrapper and fold the bottom edge up to stick the two together, making sure to seal it all the way around. Make folds in the edge if you so desire.
Heat a little bit of olive oil in a pan – not too much, they’re pot stickers, after all, the whole idea is that they stick – and put your potstickers in.
The original idea here is that they will cook and start sticking to the pan and you DON’T MOVE THEM, and then when the bottoms are golden-brown, you dump some water in and cover it so they steam free. But the oil and a non-stick pan might put some holes in that plan. Besides, how are you supposed to know what colour the bottoms are if you don’t move them? So try and keep the moving to a minimum, and maybe check one gingerly after about 5 minutes, and go from there.
Once the bottoms are browned, splash a little water into the pan and cover it, and steam for about 4 more minutes. The original recipe called for 1/2 a cup for a dozen dumplings, but that seemed like too much the first time I made them; they turned out kind of wet, and there was still plenty of water boiling away in the pan. The second time, I used just a splash of water, and they turned out much better.
While they’re cooking, mix together all the dipping sauce ingredients. Voila, sauce.
If you’re going to freeze the extra, don’t be an idiot like me and just put everything in a freezer bag and throw it in the freezer. Lay out the dumplings on a platter or a baking sheet or something and put that in the freezer, so that they all freeze separately and not together in a big lump. Then throw them in the bag. And that is why the only photo I have of them is them steaming merrily away in the pan – even though the second round of potstickers were better looking in terms of being a better colour and texture, they were all mangled and missing parts from the adventure I had trying to get them disengaged from each other in the big frozen heap they had become.
This is sort of just filling space; I made potstickers the other night, but they didn’t look good enough to take pictures of, so maybe when I make some of my leftover frozen ones tonight, it’ll work out. We’ll see.
This is actually about ways in which I’m a snob. I’ve considered the foodie snob label, and while seeing that in action irks me, I am, of course, a snob about other things. I get all my recipes from websites, pretty much, and sometimes I’ll read the page and be conflicted over whether to use the recipe or not, because it would imply approval of everything else on the page, not just the recipe. There are three main things that get me:
1. Certain celebrity chefs/lifestyle magnates. I can’t endorse these people. Rachael Ray is one of the most obnoxious people on this earth, and Martha is evil, and people who buy into their schticks in any way get painted with the same brush. How can an adult take seriously someone who can’t say “olive oil” but has to make an acronym out of it and then sound out the acronym?
If I know it’s one of their recipes, I don’t use it.
2. Sneering at perfectly good food or ingredients. Just because it didn’t cost a lot of money or because it can be found in a supermarket doesn’t mean it’s not real food. This is the same boat as the people who put on a great show of horror at the idea that some people eat fast food. Guess what, one cheeseburger won’t give you an instant heart attack, and people who eat them – or, horrors, let their kids eat them – aren’t war criminals or idiots. Just today I found a recipe for a tasty-looking bread, and in the post, the author said they decided to make the bread – it’s a beer bread – because someone gave them a Sam Adams variety pack and it included, as well as the fancy varieties, some of the regular beer. Which they then make puking noises about and swore up and down they’d never drink, as it would erode their beer snob credentials. They may not have said that last part out loud. But Sam Adams isn’t Coors Light; it’s a decent, reasonable beer. I had to decide whether to use their recipe or not, because I didn’t want to look like I endorsed that kind of behaviour. Ultimately, I decided that I can make it, but I can’t link back to them.
3. Awful writing. Grown adults who don’t know how to use an apostrophe, or don’t know the difference between your and you’re, or who spell like a third-grader… no. I don’t mean people for whom English isn’t a first language, although honestly most bloggers from non-English-speaking countries are LESS likely to mangle the language. A food blog has two major components, right? The posts and the photos. And people are totally willing to overlook, reject, or correct a blog with lousy photos. So why can’t the same standard be upheld with the writing? If your blog is well-written but you don’t have a natural ability with photography, people expect you to spend more time working at that part. So if you know you’re a terrible speller or don’t know the basic rules of grammar, spend more time checking your stuff! Have someone who DOES know what they’re doing take a look at it for you. Learn.
With this in mind, I have a really hard time using the recipes of someone who won’t even take the time to look over their writing for errors, or who doesn’t know enough to notice an error. Particularly when these people are parents. What on earth are they going to teach their kids? That it’s ok to be wrong? That it’s ok to be spectacularly wrong in public? That “they’re” can be used for a possessive? My head hurts just thinking about it.
So I’m not innocent of being a snob. But if I can get it out of my system every now and then, I hope I can keep it from interfering with the way I operate this blog and not let it come out too much in my posts.
So ok. The sad shortbread incident, you may recall, took place because Matt had to work late. This meant that I got to make something off my “only me” recipe list (seriously, that’s what it’s called). I just pick from the top of the list, ok, unless there’s some ingredient in the house I really need to get rid of, and the next thing on the list involved cream of mushroom soup – hence its inclusion on the “only me” list. But honestly, you can barely taste the mushroominess, and I think Matt would be able to enjoy this dish. Part of that is because it’s about the least fancy thing ever. I kind of love the site I got the recipe from – they say they’re “hard-core foodies,” and then throw recipes at you with 3 different cans of Campbell’s condensed soup in them. So “foodie” does not equal “food snob,” evidently. I still kind of hate the term, because usually it DOES mean “food snob,” but whatever. More self-proclaimed foodies need to use pre-made, blue-collar, supermarket brand foods. You won’t die if you eat something out of a can, and nobody’s going to shun you for it. And if they do, they’re kind of a douchebag, and maybe you shouldn’t be friends with that sort of person in the first place. So there you go: make this dish as a test of your “foodie” friends’ true nature. And also because it’s delicious in a your-mom-made-it-for-you kind of way. I mean, my mom didn’t make us things with heirloom tomatoes – she used regular ones, just to name one example.
In the original post, she says not to use too much pasta, since it soaks up all the liquid. However, I have no idea how much pasta I used in ounces. It was about, what, a cup and a half? I could have used more, too. There was plenty of liquid left to soak up. Unless you have a scale, you’re kind of on your own for this part.
Hamburger Casserole
Ingredients
4 – 6 oz egg noodles
1 1/2 lbs ground beef
1 cup celery, diced (about 3 stalks)
1 small onion, diced
1 can condensed tomato soup
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
Method
Preheat the oven to 350.
Brown the ground beef in a big pan with the onions and celery.
Drain the fat – and do a better job than I did, because I wound up with excess oil oozing out of my finished product. Although this might have been because draining fat from my big cast-iron skilled is a 2-person job – two hands to hold the skillet leaves no hands to hold back the meat and scrape out the fat – so I just scooped up the meat and veggies with a slotted spoon, gave it a few shakes, and dumped it into the casserole dish.
Meanwhile, cook the egg noodles according to the package instructions.
Drain the noodles and add to the hamburger mixture in the casserole dish.
Add the soups and mix everything together thoroughly.
Bake it in the oven for 30 minutes, at which point it should be all golden and bubbly.
I feel kind of bad having altered this one in any way. Actually, I feel kind of bad about the whole endeavour, but I’ll explain that part later. The reason I don’t feel like I had any right to mess with it is that I got it from Use Real Butter, who, in turn, got it from Smitten Kitchen, who got it from Dorie Greenspan. Is a nobody allowed to even make these, let alone post about it on the internet? And sure, food-blogging royalty are allowed to play fast and loose with each other’s recipes, make changes, substitutions, whatever, but isn’t that the height of pretension for a dork like me to come in, take lousy photos, and substitute (gasp) instant coffee instead of instant espresso because I just couldn’t find instant espresso, only the normal kind? Shouldn’t I have said, well, then this is something I cannot make right now, and gone on to the next recipe? But I didn’t. I made it anyway, and then in the middle of making it, I realized that I didn’t have as much icing sugar as I’d thought I’d had, so I had to go halfsies with regular sugar. I mean, they turned out fine, as far as I know. I don’t know the true extent of their amazingness since I didn’t make them right, but if this is what a sub-par version of these cookies tastes like, the real deal must be pretty mind-blowing, because they’re good. And so is the batter. Which, you may note, does not have any eggs in it (just a whole lot of butter… mmm, my arteries are hardening in delight), so you can, and rightly SHOULD, gobble up at least a couple more cookies worth of it raw. I did. But out of respect, awe, and fear, I’m going to use a different approach to writing the recipe than usual: instead of writing what I did, I’m going to write the correct way, but note my digressions.
So why did I make these? Matt had to work late for one big push – busy season approacheth – so everyone in the warehouse had to stay until 9 or 10. So I thought it would be nice to send him with something to reward them all for having to do something crappy, and the fact that these babies are caffeinated wouldn’t hurt either. So I made them, but then when I had gotten them all to fit in one tupperware, Matt told me that it wouldn’t do: the tupperware was opaque, and this meant that no one would eat them, because he couldn’t leave the lid off – it being a warehouse, this is inadvisable – so he put them into two smaller containers instead. He came back with one full container and one nearly empty. I was crushed. I thought people would like them – I liked them, and the aforementioned famous food bloggers rave about them – so either these guys have vastly different taste (one, apparently, said they gave him flashbacks – THAT’S encouraging – to smoking pot in his friend’s basement, because the friend’s mom made cookies like these and they’d gobble them up), or the two tupperwares thing made them think there weren’t as many as there were, and they held off where they would have gorged. Matt also informed me that they weren’t shortbread, they were cookies – even though they do actually meet the wikipedia definition of shortbread. So as you can imagine, I feel like a jerk for even trying in the first place.
Maybe you’ll have better luck with these puppies than I did. I hope you do.
Ingredients
1 tbsp instant espresso powder (or instant regular coffee)
1 tbsp boiling water
8 oz unsalted butter, room temperature
2/3 cup icing sugar (or 1/3 cup icing sugar and 1/3 cup regular white sugar)
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
3/4 cup chocolate chips
more icing sugar for dusting, if you have it (I did not)
Method
Dissolve the instant espresso or coffee in the hot water and set it aside to cool.
Cream the butter and sugar.
Beat in the vanilla and the coffee.
Turn the mixer down to low and add the flour, mixing only until just incorporated.
Fold in the chocolate chips with a spatula.
Transfer the dough into a gallon-size ziploc bag and don’t seal it (yet).
Lay the bag flat and roll the dough out to 1/4″ thickness, which should just about take up the entire bag.
Now press out all the air and do your best to get out any creases from bag wrinkles, and seal the thing.
Put your bag o’ dough in the fridge for at least 2 hours and up to 2 days; mine was in for about a day. Bonus points if your fridge is a little overzealous and your dough winds up as a rock-hard slab:
Now that it’s later, preheat your oven to 325.
Take your bag out of the fridge and slice the bag open around its seams, and pull it off your dough.
Get out a ruler and cut your dough into 1 1/2″ squares. Yes, it must be precise. There will be a test, and misshapen or wrong-sized squares will result in beatings and shunnings.
Put your squares on a baking sheet. Some people prick them with a fork here, some don’t, and they turn out fine either way.
Bake them for 18 – 20 minutes. If you are baking more than one sheet at once (my wee oven is laughing hysterically at the very idea), you’re supposed to switch the sheets around from top to bottom and front to back at the halfway point. I wouldn’t know. Anyway, they won’t look much darker than they did when you put them in, so just take them out when you think it’s appropriate.
Cool them on a rack, and if you want to dust them with more icing sugar, now would be a good time. I bet that would have been delicious.
I seriously debated calling this recipe “Jew Stew,” because I adapted it from a recipe for Cholent, and also because it rhymes. I like rhymes. I couldn’t just go ahead and call this cholent, though, because cholent isn’t a type of stew (containing ingredients x and y, prepared according to z method), it is, according to wikipedia, a stew simmered overnight or in a crock-pot so that you can have a hot meal on the sabbath without having to kindle fire. And this was not done that way. This was thrown on the stove on Sunday afternoon and left to simmer and become delicious until we were hungry, at which point it was eaten. Also, I’m not Jewish. Well, I mean, I am Jewish, technically – it passes through the the maternal line, and my mom’s family is, but I’ve never observed anything or really done anything about it. I’ve got enough Judaism in me to be allowed to say “Jew” and not be being offensive, but that’s about it.
So anyway, this stew. The original was a vegan version involving TVP, and mine has meat – hunks and chunks of delicious meat – and I omitted the bulghur in favour of just more beans, partly because I couldn’t find bulghur at the store, and partly because I didn’t want to have to use half a can of beans. I think this omission also makes it not be cholent – it apparently has to contain rice or bulghur or some other thing like that. Oh well. It was nummy, to paraphrase my grandmother (not the Jewish one, the one whose dad was a Methodist minister). And it was all rainy and grim this weekend – thanks, Tropical Storm Kyle! – so something all fall-y and hearty was called for, and the colours are very autumnal as well. I halved it, and it still made enough for a small army. By which I mean we’ve each had at least two helpings at this point, and there’s at least enough for both of us to have one more. At LEAST.
Beef and Bean Stew
Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp tarragon
1/2 tsp caraway seeds
1/2 tsp salt
however many cranks of pepper you feel are appropriate – I’m not here to judge
1 12-oz can chicken broth
1 bay leaf
1 carrot, peeled and sliced
1 potato, peeled and cut into bite-size chunks
1 sweet potato, likewise
1 8-oz can tomato sauce
1 cup water
1 lb stewing beef, cut up into bite-size chunks (or not, if, like me, you forget that the pre-packaged chunks are a bit huge, and just dump them in straight from the package)
1/2 cup lima beans, either rinsed and drained canned ones, or dry ones like I had, soaked and then drained
1 15-oz can kidney beans
Method
In a large pot, heat the olive oil and put the beef in to brown. You can add the onions and garlic right away or once the meat is already partly done, up to you. Give it about 5 minutes; everything’s going to stay in and cook for the duration, so don’t worry if the meat’s not cooked all the way through yet.
Add the tarragon, caraway seeds, salt, and pepper, and saute for another minute.
Pour in the broth and deglaze the pot.
Dump in everything else but the beans, and simmer, covered, for about 30 minutes.
Now add the beans, take the lid off, and let it simmer low and slow until you feel like eating. Ours went for another couple of hours. It can get pretty thick, which is fantastic if you ask me, but you can always add more water if it’s too thick for your liking.
It smells up the house something amazing, too.