Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for March, 2009
March 31, 2009 at 4:17 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
Last week, our friend – I was going to say “Matt’s friend,” but it’s not like I don’t like the guy, we just haven’t known each other since we were 5 – stayed with us, but I didn’t know until Thursday night that he would be leaving Friday morning. So I was all set to make this for all 3 of us to eat. Oh well. There’s no shame in leftovers.
I know it’s not exactly news that I made a creamy pasta dish with bacon, but I found this to be particularly well-balanced. And that seems like the kind of terminology I don’t really go in for, but this really was a melding of different flavours and textures and everything worked well together. The tenderness of the pasta contrasted with the crunchiness of the bacon, and the bacon’s salty smokiness contrasted nicely with the sweetness of the peas and onions, while the cream wasn’t overpoweringly creamy, just enough to lighten up the flavour. (And if you thought I meant balanced in the “4 food groups” sense, well, pasta, cream, peas, bacon – all 4!)
The recipe is from Imagelicious, but I can’t link to the actual post – I get an error every time! I can link to the page it’s on, though – it’s about a third of the way down this page.
Pasta with Bacon and Peas
Ingredients
pasta, however much is appropriate – I used way more than the original recipe called for, but kept the amounts of everything else the same, and it was fine
6 strips bacon
1 small onion, diced
1/2 cup light cream
1/2 cup pasta water
1/2 cup (roughly) frozen peas – mine were in a big lump, and after a certain amount of bashing it against the edge of the counter, I just gave up and used the likeliest-sized chunk
pepper (and salt if you need it, but the bacon is already salty, so you might not)
Method
Set the pasta on to cook according to package directions.
Meanwhile, fry up your bacon in a big pan.
When it’s crispy, take it out to drain on paper towels, and dispose of all but a tablespoon or two of the grease in the pan.
Saute the onion in the grease until caramelized.
The pasta will probably be done while you’re cooking the onion. Whenever this occurs, drain it, but reserve the 1/2 cup of pasta water.
Once the onions are caramelized, stir in said pasta water, as well as the cream, and cook for about a minute.
Add the peas and let them cook for however long it takes them to thaw and heat through. A couple minutes. Not long.
While that’s cooking, break up the bacon into bite-sized pieces.
Stir them back into the sauce.
Crank some pepper in, and some salt if you think it needs it.
Toss the pasta with the sauce.
March 29, 2009 at 8:25 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
I used up the rest of my vegetable stock making this. I’m in love with my veggie stock, in case you didn’t know, but Matt didn’t think it was so great in this. I wonder if it was maybe the combination of vegetable flavours in it not matching well with the cumin, for him, but for me it was still fine. When I ate the leftovers a couple days later, I felt that it was even better – spicier and more flavourful. And it’s got loads of carrots and celery in it, it’s chunky and hearty, especially for an all-vegetable soup – no noodles, no beans, just carrots, celery, potatoes, onion and garlic.
This is halved from a recipe found here. She added some cream to hers; I didn’t, since she said hers was good before the cream as well, and Matt is not into creamy soups. Her photo looked like it was thicker than mine, although my leftovers thickened up a bit in the fridge. I’d have liked to garnish mine with green onions as well – love green onions – but I didn’t have any on hand.
Vegetable Soup with Cumin
Ingredients
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
4 ribs celery, sliced
4 carrots, sliced
2 small potatoes, chopped into bite-sized pieces
1 tsp cumin
1 1/2 cups vegetable stock
cayenne pepper
Method
Heat the olive oil in your soup pot.
Saute the onion, garlic, and celery in it until softened.
Add carrots and potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes.
Add the cumin and vegetable stock and bring to the boil.
Turn it down and let it simmer for 30 minutes.
Just before serving, stir in a shake of cayenne.
Garnish each bowl with a crank or two of black pepper.
Bonus fun fact: the blog where I got this recipe is by a Scottish woman. I am going to be in Scotland in 2 weeks! Well, actually, no, in 2 weeks from right now, we’ll be back in Ireland, but in 2 weeks from earlier today, we’ll be in Scotland! We’re going on a belated honeymoon to Ireland, but we’re going to make a quick detour to Scotland right at the start to see some friends of ours. So not that a week’s hiatus in posting would really be all that unusual for me, but if you comment and it doesn’t get approved for a week, that’s why!
March 28, 2009 at 9:44 pm · Filed under food, meals
Making jerk chicken means an endless supply of remarks about how this chicken is for jerks, is a jerk, or that the jerk store called, and they’re running out of this chicken. I am a master of hilarity. Mistress. Whatever.
This was a backup recipe for a Monday when Matt wasn’t sure if his union thing was happening or not. The thing I was going to make for myself required me to buy the meat and a lime. This required me to buy more chicken… and a lime. So it was really easy. When it turned out that Matt wasn’t having his union thing, I chucked my salmon in the freezer and made this instead. Easy pease.
I wonder whether this recipe, which I got from Comfy Belly, is as spicy as they say jerk chicken is. True confession: I’d never had jerk chicken before this! I don’t know why; it isn’t because I can’t handle spice. I didn’t used to be into it, but my palate has evolved. Anyway, this isn’t mind-blowingly spicy, although no doubt you could ramp that up if it suited you to do so. Since I halved the recipe, the cayenne pepper went down to 1/8 tsp, which I have to guess at, and which probably amounted to a couple of healthy shakes. So I probably lowballed it. Anyway, this version of jerk chicken is a really yummy combination of sweet, savoury, and spicy.
Jerk Chicken
Ingredients
2 medium-sized chicken breasts, sliced into 1/2-inch-thick strips, about 1/2 lb
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cayenne
1/8 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp honey
the juice of 1/2 a lime
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 cardamom pod, broken open and crumbled in
1/8 tsp powdered ginger
1/8 tsp garlic powder
Method
Toss the chicken in a bowl with the oil.
Squeeze in the lime juice and toss the chicken to distribute the juice evenly.
Add all the rest of the ingredients and stir to coat the chicken thoroughly.
Now cook them – I did it in a skillet, but you could do it on a grill. We just have a George Foreman grill, though, and all the coating would have made it a real pain to clean, so… skillet! Anyway, just cook them until browned on the outside and cooked through but still tender.
See, Melissa, I finally put it up!
March 25, 2009 at 4:02 pm · Filed under dessert, food
Someone at work has been having a tough life lately. It’s a small office, so even though she’s in another department, I’m aware of this. However, since I’m not in her department, I don’t know things like whether she likes brownies with a peanut butter layer on top and chocolate ganache on top of that. I decided to guess that she might. After all, if it didn’t go over with her, I could make something else, and everyone else would eat this more or less happily. And did they ever. I was asked for the recipe, I was told that they were the best brownies someone had ever had, another co-worker waxed, well, not poetic exactly, but… well, fervent, anyway. They went over well, let’s call it that.
But the best part is that I thought they’d be a huge failure. For starters, I worry when a ganache is involved, because they never work out as well for me as they’re supposed to. Second, I had to spread not one but two layers of something over something else, which is a prescription for ripping things up and making a general mess. Then there was the fact that I thought I had two eggs, but I only had one. And finally, when I was putting it in the pan, there didn’t seem to be quite enough of anything. I was using a 9×9 pan, not making individual mini-brownies like the original recipe suggested, which appears to be responsible for the “not enough of anything” problem. But somehow the oven gods smiled upon me. I didn’t make a shocking hash of it all, and people loved them. Including, I hear, the woman whose day they were intended to brighten. So here’s the recipe as I made them, failures and all.
Peanut Butter and Chocolate Layered Brownies
Ingredients
for the brownies
6 tbsp unsalted butter
3.5 oz semisweet chocolate (a little under 1/2 a cup) – it’s easiest to use chocolate chips here
1.5 oz unsweetened chocolate – and it’s easiest here to buy a bar and hack it up
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt
1 egg
1/2 cup flour
for the peanut butter layer
1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter – apparently, old-fashioned and natural peanut butter doesn’t work, so use the regular kind
2 tbsp butter
a heaping 1/4 cup icing sugar
a pinch of salt
a pinch of nutmeg
1 1/2 tsp milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
for the ganache
2 tbsp butter
3.5 oz semisweet chocolate (chips again)
Method
Preheat oven to 325.
Grease a brownie pan.
Melt both chocolates and butter together in a pot over low heat, stirring until smooth.
Remove from heat.
Whisk in sugar, vanilla, salt, and egg, adding the egg last (why? I don’t know. Maybe in order to give the mixture a little time to cool first so you don’t end up with scrambled egg brownies).
Fold in flour.
Spread into pan.
Bake for 20 min or until a toothpick comes out with moist crumbs attached.
Cool on rack.
Meanwhile, blend together peanut butter and butter with an electric mixer (I don’t know how helpful a handheld one would be with something as sticky as peanut butter, though… stand mixers FTW!).
Beat in icing sugar, salt, and nutmeg. Attempt not to give up and just eat this mixture with a spoon.
Beat in milk and vanilla.
Spread this mixture over the mostly-cooled brownies. If you don’t have enough and need to fill in the corners with straight regular peanut butter, I won’t tell anyone.
Melt the remaining chocolate and butter in a pot over low heat, again stirring until smooth.
Drop spoonfuls on the top of the peanut butter layer and spread around. We are striving for smoothness here, but I realize that this is not always possible.
Chill until set, which is apparently 1 1/2 hours. But considering that you’re supposed to keep it chilled until it’s time to eat, at which point you let it come back to room temperature, just make it the night before and throw it in the fridge.
We use Skype at work as an instant messenger. After putting this pan of brownies out on the kitchen counter, I had 11 Skype messages about it!
In other stuff I have cooked news, I made a loaf of soda bread for St. Patrick’s Day (which is abbreviated St. Paddy’s, by the way, not St. Patty’s – Patty is short for Patricia), but I didn’t take its picture. You’ll live.
March 16, 2009 at 3:26 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
In case anybody wasn’t aware, I grew up in Canada. And so even though my mom is American, a lot of quintessentially “American” things were simply not a part of my childhood, much to Matt’s shock, dismay, and/or amusement, depending on the thing. For instance, the dish known as “American chop suey.” I had never heard of it. I’d heard of chop suey, but as far as I knew that was an American dish. But evidently no, the “American” form of the thing bears little, if any, resemblance to the original, which may indeed have roots in actual China. American chop suey is macaroni and ground beef and cheese, baked in a casserole, right? It is not a stir-fry of any kind and it never gets within a hundred feet of a wok. Not that this is a problem. Pasta, meat, and cheese baked in a casserole sounds fantastic to me. I’m just baffled by the impulse to drag China into it.
But guess what? This isn’t even that! This is almost, but not quite, American chop suey. It’s not baked, and the only cheese involved is parmesan garnished on top. Plus this has top secret vegetables in it. Is it bad that I saw what Katie of Chaos in the Kitchen suggested for sneaking vegetables past picky kids and used it to get away with having green peppers in the sauce without Matt objecting to the whole dish? I mean, he’s not a child, and it’s probably wrong to trick him into eating something he hates, but if he didn’t notice or hate it, does it count? I am thinking it does not. Anyway, the top secret secret is to put all the veggies in the food processor first, so they’re ground up into a paste or a mush, and no longer identifiable as their individual selves. We could go down a very nerdy philosophical road here, but then even the last few people who read this would fall asleep. So no. Let’s move on.
Macaroni and Beef
Ingredients
1/2 lb ground beef
1/2 an onion, quartered or something
1/2 a bell pepper – I used a green one, but it would have been even sneakier to use a red or an orange one, come to think of it – cut into strips
1 carrot, sliced
1/2 tbsp butter (or 1 1/2 tsp, but it’s easier to just cut one of those tbsp markings on a stick of butter in half)
1 1/2 tsp oil
1 tbsp tomato paste – did I tell you? I finally found tomato paste in tubes! No more wasting parts of cans or overdoing it just to use it up! And there is nothing wrong with being as excited as I am over it, or with paying a little extra for it. Anybody who tells you otherwise is mean and you shouldn’t listen to them.
1 14-oz can diced tomatoes
1 1/2 tsp dried oregano
1 1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp sugar
1 cup uncooked macaroni noodles
salt and pepper
Method
Put the ground beef in a pan, season it with salt and pepper, and brown it.
Meanwhile, take your roughly-chopped vegetables and throw them all in the food processor. Blitz them until they are unrecognizable as being whatever they originally were. Or, if you’re not working with people who care whether or not they eat a green pepper, just chop the things to your desired level of chunkiness.
Once the ground beef is browned, drain it and set it aside.
Here, the original recipe asks you to add oil and butter to the pan you just drained. Why waste fat? Just use the grease in the pan instead, who cares. Anyway, saute the vegetables and garlic in it until softened.
Now add the tomato paste and continue to cook, stirring, for 1 minute.
Dump in the can of tomatoes (don’t drain it), the beef, and the spices, and reduce heat to simmering.
Cover the pan and cook for 30 minutes.
Cook the pasta according to package directions.
When you drain the pasta, you may want to reserve 1/2 a cup of the pasta water in case your sauce starts to be too dry, but this was not a problem that I had.
Once the pasta is cooked and the half hour is up, toss the noodles in the sauce, and serve with parmesan cheese.
You have no idea how long I’ve been trying to post this. I kept opening it and not having a chance to write in it, or getting a sentence or two off and then having to stop… what a hassle. The meal, however, was not a hassle. Don’t get confused.
March 1, 2009 at 8:57 pm · Filed under food, meals
Last Monday, Matt had a union meeting, and he was dreading having to go; it’s far, and it takes him a million years to get there and back, and it’s just generally a huge pain. So I told him I’d save him from having to go by cooking something from the only-me list. Historically, this has guaranteed that he would come home right as I started cooking. It worked, too! He walked in even before I’d started cooking – only a few minutes after I got home! I have magical powers!
You know what’s even more magical? He ate it, and enjoyed it, even though it contains both mushrooms and green peppers. He didn’t eat those, of course, but he didn’t feel that they flavoured the whole dish or ruined it or anything.
I wonder, usually, about dishes like this. I can never be sure, especially when the name is in the popular American lexicon, if it’s a real dish that actual Chinese people in actual China might eat, or if it’s made up for the western palate. This is not made up. Well, it sort of is. There’s a standard American version and a standard Sichuan version, and this is the American one. The Sichuan version is a bit different, but they have similar ideas. I under-spiced this, because I was nervous. It tasted fine, but I know it’s supposed to be on the spicy side, and it wasn’t really. Oh well. It’s easy to remedy next time. And also the recipe that I used doesn’t use the little dried red peppers, and I don’t think I’d have wanted to either. I did some math for this, since theirs was for 3, and there are 2 of us. I two-thirded it, if you can imagine such a thing, which amounted mostly to ballparking the measurements, and boringly substituted back in the green peppers and peanuts instead of yellow and almonds. Because I am a snore fest.
Kung Pao Chicken
Ingredients
2 pieces of chicken – I used breast, they used thigh, Matt doesn’t like dark meat, so there you go – cut into bite-sized chunks
half a bell pepper, colour of your choosing, cut into strips
a handful of peanuts
1/4 tsp chili powder
1/3 cup water chestnuts
1/3 cup sliced mushrooms (or… well, I sliced 4 mushrooms, do what you like)
2 cloves garlic, minced
a couple of splashes cooking oil
1/3 tsp cornstarch (I guessed; it worked out)
2 tsp rice wine
1 tbsp soy sauce
a splash sesame oil
Method
Preheat wok to high heat, or, if it has a set stir-frying temperature like mine does (which I believe is 375), turn it to that point.
Pour in the oil and add the garlic right away.
Stir-fry for 30 seconds.
Add all vegetables and chili and stir-fry for 2 minutes, then remove from wok.
Dump in the chicken (and a bit more oil if needed) and stir-fry for 3 – 5 minutes, or until cooked.
Mix cornstarch, rice wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil in a small bowl, then stir it into the chicken.
Keep stir-frying until the sauce has thickened and is bubbling furiously, which in my case was almost instant.
Throw the veggies back in, as well as the peanuts, and stir to coat everything with sauce.
Cook covered for 1 minute.
Serve hot over steamed rice.
The reason this photo is so pepper-heavy is because, of course, all of the pepper slices were to be eaten by me, so my helping was skewed towards the peppers-and-mushrooms end of the stir-fry spectrum. And my sauce got spilled, or rather I knocked over the bowl, right before I was supposed to add it in, so I tried to make up the spilt amounts by just pouring splashes of the liquid into the wok. I don’t know if it worked correctly, in terms of tasting the way it was supposed to, but it clearly didn’t hurt anything.
Also, can I point out that my rice was perfect? It was. It was fluffy and the perfect degree of moisture, and nothing stuck to the pot. So the next time someone asks me what I’m good at, I finally have an answer: cooking rice.
