Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for July, 2009
July 31, 2009 at 1:31 pm · Filed under side dishes/appetizers, soup/stew
This is a recipe from Bitchincamero that I didn’t intend to alter (well, beyond using one onion instead of 2, and using up whatever I had left in my jar of roasted red peppers instead of getting 2 whole new peppers), but I’m a dummy who can’t read a recipe. See, hers has you layering half the chicken mixture, then beans, then – this is the crucial missed step – the other half of the chicken mixture. I basically put as much chicken as could fit and threw the rest in the fridge (where it waited to be made into really delicious burritos a few days later, incidentally). So mine doesn’t look like hers, because there isn’t a chicken layer on top for the cheese to sit on and get all melty. The cheese went amongst and in between the beans on mine, so while it was there, you couldn’t see it as well, and it wasn’t as concentrated a cheesy taste. But I am still going to say this was a success, not least because Matt was worried about whether the plantains were too fruity to eat with meat (he has a thing about meat with fruit or sweetness in general), but he totally ate them. I cited their use as basically fries, and argued that this made them count as basically potatoes (leaving out the part that this recipe called for ripe ones, which are more sweet and less starch, but shhh), but he wasn’t buying it. But it doesn’t matter what he bought or what he didn’t buy, because he ate it!
Plantain Casserole
Ingredients
depending on the size of your casserole dish, 3 or 4 ripe plantains (yellow and black, not green) – the original recipe called for 4, but I wound up having too many
1 tbsp olive oil (I just didn’t drain the oil off my roasted red pepper from the jar)
1 yellow onion, diced
1 roasted red pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 rotisserie chicken, meat shredded off the bones
1 8-oz can tomato sauce (from the canned tomatoes aisle, not the pasta sauce aisle)
1 15-oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
enough grated cheddar cheese to cover the top of your casserole dish
Method
Preheat oven to 425.
Peel the plantains and slice them in half lengthwise.
Bake them on a greased cookie sheet for 10 minutes (although apparently if you forget and leave them in an extra 5 or 6 minutes like I did, no harm will be done)
When you take them out, turn the oven down to 375.
Saute the onion and red pepper in the olive oil over medium heat until the onions are soft (the peppers, being the roasted kind, will have started out soft), about 10 minutes.
Add the garlic and continue sauteeing for another minute.
Dump in the chicken (did I mention you should use a pan that’s big enough to hold what is essentially a whole chicken? Well you should) and the tomato sauce and cook for another 5 minutes. If things are looking too dry – not a problem for me – add some water or chicken stock.
Grease a casserole dish and commence the layerin’.
First go your plantains.
Spread half of the chicken mixture over it.
Pour the beans over that.
If you want, cover the beans with the other half of the chicken mixture; otherwise, do like I did and save that for another day.
Cover the whole shootin’ match with cheese.
Bake for 30 minutes at… well, your oven is at 375, she says bake at 365, but I don’t know how many ovens are that detailed, so… maybe turn it down a fraction and bake it? Or don’t turn it down. Whatever. It’ll be good no matter what.
July 30, 2009 at 10:48 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
When I found this recipe, it was 44-clove garlic soup. But, as they said, it was more than enough for 3 people. So I halved it. 22-clove garlic soup… does it have the same ring to it? It certainly has the same garlic fabulosity to it, and since most of the cloves are roasted, it’s not all AHH OH MY GOD THE GARLIC in your mouth. I wonder if it might still be as good without making it creamy – maybe even without chucking it in the blender (or using the immersion blender, if you’ve got one). That would mean you’d have whole cloves floating around in your bowl, though, and those would be the non-roasted ones. So maybe bashing them with the back of a spoon or something first. I don’t know. I mean, it was good and the consistency was fine when we were eating it, but the leftovers got all congealed in the fridge, and the photo isn’t completely lying when it makes it look more grey than brown. So it’s not beautiful. If you can get past that, you’re fine; we got past it both in its original incarnation and as leftovers.
Garlic Soup
Ingredients
13 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
7 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 small onion or half a medium-sized one, diced
1/4 cup white wine
1/4 cup greek yogurt
1 tsp oregano
2 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup milk
1 oz parmesan
salt and pepper
if you have chives to garnish it with, do so… if you’re me, don’t
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Lay out your 13 unpeeled cloves of garlic on a baking sheet and douse them with olive oil, salt, and pepper.
Bake for 30 minutes or until the skins are getting brown – it may take longer; the original, with twice as many cloves, took 45 minutes, but I don’t want to lead you astray into burnt garlic land.
Set them aside to cool while you do the other stuff.
Melt the butter in a soup pot.
Saute your onion and oregano in it until the onions are soft and translucent.
Add your non-roasted garlic, and also squeeze/scrape the roasted ones out of their husks into the pot.
Cook for another 3 minutes.
Add the stock and the wine and simmer for half an hour or until you can smash the whole cloves with a spoon… which maybe you should do, like I was discussing earlier.
Now, you can choose to make it a pureed soup or not, but if you do, now’s the time. Chuck it in the blender until it’s smooth (or use an immersion blender).
If you want to make it creamy as well, put it back in the pot and stir in the milk and yogurt until combined.
Either way, you’re done now. Salt and pepper to taste, garnish with the cheese, and you’re all set. Well, unless you have attractive chives to scatter on top of it.
See what I mean, though?
July 28, 2009 at 11:30 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I’m not ashamed to say this is a space-filler post. I have a few recipes in the pipe, but I haven’t gotten the photos off my camera yet.
So let’s talk about the fact that I just finished the Roasted Red Pepper Humbles, which had a subtle red pepper flavour – enough for Matt not to be interested, but that’s his loss – and that I’ve just started the bag of Chilean Lime Avocado Oil Chips. The lime flavour is light and not overpowering, and it’s interesting to have a potato chip with a lime flavour. I’ve had the tortilla chips with a “hint of lime,” as their packages say, and it’s the same sort of idea, but with the texture and taste of a kettle chip instead. Of course, much like the Barcelona Barbecue flavour, I don’t understand what’s so Chilean about these, unless lime-flavoured potato chips are huge over there.
Like the flu, but more delicious, Amish Friendship Bread was going around my workplace a month or so ago. It’s more of a coffee cake than a bread, I’d say, and it’s particularly good when you substitute applesauce for half of the oil (I didn’t try substituting it for all the oil, but I wonder…). It’s moist and cinnamony – if someone offers you a bag of the starter for it, do not decline! And that brings me to the point that I can’t post the recipe, because it is one of the great mysteries of life (well, unless you’re Amish, in which case what are you doing reading this online?). Someone gives you a bag of “starter” and a sheet of instructions. You keep the bag out on the counter, squishing it every day, and adding some ingredients every few days. Finally, you separate it into 6 portions – 2 for you (it fills 2 loaf pans), and 4 to give away. At no point in the process may you use metal implements – no metal spoons or bowls allowed! The loaf pan can be metal, though. I took note of the fact that my friend who gave it to me had already almost saturated our workplace’s bakers, and knew that I wouldn’t be able to find enough people to give it to, and I only have one loaf pan, so I thirded the recipe in order to end up with only 2 portions – one to make, and one to give away. It worked perfectly. Mmm, delicious math!
July 26, 2009 at 11:32 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
I know I already have a beef barley soup on here, but this is a beef barley stew! Except not really. It’s still essentially a soup. It’s just a different recipe. Is it more substantial? Maybe. I can’t remember how substantial the first one was. This one isn’t all that thick, though. It was inspired by a recipe from Cookbook Catchall, but diverges from that in a few ways – the pearl onions, which I would have had if I’d gotten a bag of frozen ones for that other recipe but figured I’d never use, were omitted (Matt would have avoided them if I’d used them anyway), as was the parsnip. The thing about the parsnip is that I was ready to use one, but you can only buy them in a bag of 3 or 4, and I thought they might be a hard sell already without having to deal with more of them down the road. And the recipe starts out making vegetable stock, essentially, so instead of doing that on the spot, I used some of mine that I’d frozen, but I kept the extra flavouring agents.
Beef Barley Stew
Ingredients
1/2 – 3/4 lb chuck roast, cut into bite-sized pieces
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
a bit of flat-leaf parsley
a sprig of thyme
2 carrots, sliced
1/2 a small onion, diced
1 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 tsp red wine vinegar
2 small yellow waxy potatoes, cubed
1/8 cup pearled barley
oil for cooking
salt and pepper
Method
Salt and pepper the beef on all sides.
Heat some oil in a pan and brown the beef. Don’t clean this pan out, it’s going to come in handy later.
When it’s browned on all sides, transfer it to a soup pot.
Add in veggie stock, thyme, and Worcestershire sauce, and bring to a boil.
Turn down to a simmer and leave it for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, brown the potatoes, carrots, and onion in the pan you used for the beef.
After your 30 minutes of simmering are up and all the vegetables are browned, add them into the soup pot along with the barley.
Simmer, partially covered (if you remember – I didn’t, at least not for the whole time), for another 30 minutes or until beef is fork-tender.
Garnish with parsley to serve.
July 26, 2009 at 12:11 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I actually know the exact date I made this, because it was me taking advantage of having July 3rd off (because the 4th was a Saturday). Except I didn’t start making it until the time I’d have gotten home from work anyway, since I’d been out with friends. But I suppose I did get to buy the ingredients earlier, so it wasn’t a total non-entity of a day off. I mean, in terms of cooking. In terms of everything else, it was pretty great.
The recipe was taken from here, and that made a zillion, so I cut it in half. I was really good at sneaking things into this, too. There are roasted red peppers in here, and cream cheese, and Matt doesn’t like either, but he enjoyed this and didn’t notice the incorporation of the offending foods. Or noticed and didn’t care. Either way, high fives to me. But subtract one high-five for not having crushed tortilla chips – I didn’t want to buy a big bag, and I couldn’t find a small bag for the life of me. Maybe they don’t exist. Anyway, once we had leftover salsa, we wound up buying a big bag anyway…
Taco Stuffed Shells
Ingredients
1/2 a box jumbo shells
1/2 lb ground beef
1/2 tsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 roasted red pepper, diced
2 oz (1/2 a can) diced green chilies – I know that’s a drag, but you can save the rest or use them as a garnish, or you can even go with the whole can for a little more bang for your taste buds’ buck.
1/2 a package taco seasoning (I know, again with the half package, but this is way easier to keep, and I’m sure you’ll find a use for it)
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp chili powder
a shake of cayenne
2 oz cream cheese
1/2 cup salsa (if I had really been on the ball, I’d have made my own and used that, but I didn’t have the foresight or time, plus I have no idea how much I end up with when I make it. So I used pre-made salsa in a jar.)
1/2 cup grated cheese – I used cheddar, and that’s what the original recipe specified, but Monterey Jack would be good too, and I bet if you have a different cheese in mind, it would work
1/2 cup enchilada sauce
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Cook shells according to package directions.
Meanwhile, heat olive oil over medium heat in a pan big enough to hold all the meat and sauce.
Saute the onions in it for about 5 minutes or until translucent.
Add the meat and cook until browned throughout.
Stir in red pepper and green chilies.
Drain fat – this may be a 2-person job if you have a big heavy skillet.
Add all your seasoning powders.
Stir in the cream cheese until it is fully melted and incorporated.
Once your filling is done and your shells are cooked and drained, you can start the assembly. Pour salsa into your baking dish.
Divide up your filling amongst your shells – there may be some extra shells – and arrange the filled ones in the baking dish.
Pour the enchilada sauce over them.
Top with cheese.
Bake for 30 minutes, at which point it should be bubbly and approximately the temperature of the inside of the earth. Therefore, it might be wise to let them cool a bit first before eating.
I really liked these, not least because regular stuffed shells involve ricotta cheese, which makes my stomach churn. I think Matt wishes he could have that kind, but he liked these too.
P.S., like my chipped plate? Yeah. I forgot to turn it so the chip was out of frame.
July 23, 2009 at 12:06 am · Filed under Uncategorized
And these I made for another birthday! It was a week or two after the first one, and I couldn’t not make something for her when I’d just done it for my other friend, after all. So I did the same thing – gave her the tupperwareful and let her decide how she wanted to distribute them (or not distribute them).
The recipe is from the adorably-named Flour on Her Nose, and it is truly a recipe worthy of the title of this blog. I mean, there is very little you can make yourself that is easier than this. Granted, there are ways to make it harder. You could be some kind of overachiever who makes his or her own puff pastry. You could… actually, that’s the only way. When there are this few ingredients, it limits your options for overachieving. I suppose you could pick the apples off a tree in your back yard, if you are fortunate enough to have a back yard, let alone one that contains an apple tree, instead of buying them at the store. If we have to start talking about refining your own sugar, I’m leaving.
Apple Pastries
Ingredients
for the pastries
1 sheet puff pastry, thawed – in the original recipe, she specifies that it should still be cold. Yeah. Well, I got distracted talking on the phone to my mom, and then had to do delicate (and, let it be said, not entirely successful) surgery to separate the increasingly sticky folded sheet from itself. Not recommended.
2 regular-sized apples – if you’re using monster apples, I suppose you could get by with 1, peeled and sliced thinly
a bunch of cinnamon sugar (look. I don’t know how much I used. I had a little ziploc baggie of cinnamon sugar left over from something else I had made, which I can’t remember now – unless that was this, and I used the leftovers in a subsequent thing? unclear – and I just took a bit, then took a bit more as necessary. Having leftover cinnamon sugar around the house is never going to be problematic.)
a wee bit of butter (you’ll be using one or two teensy cubes per square, and you get 9 squares, so work it out for yourself)
for the glaze
icing sugar
milk
vanilla
Method
Preheat the oven to 400.
Cut your sheet of puff pastry into 9 equal pieces – I mean I suppose you could do more or fewer but this is just the right size for the apple slices, plus you’ve already got cutting guides for the horizontal cuts based on the fold marks.
Layer a few apple slices on each square of pastry.
Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar over the apples.
Put one or two tiny cubes of butter on each square.
Bake for 20 minutes.
While it’s baking, whisk together the glaze ingredients in such proportions as to give you the desired consistency of glaze. I couldn’t tell you what it is, but you do have to put more sugar in than you think you will.
Drizzle the pastries with the glaze while they’re still hot out of the oven.
Cool the rest of the way, or whatever, on a rack.
Yeah. My glaze didn’t really come out. More sugar was needed, or less milk. It tasted fine, but you can’t really see it at all.
July 21, 2009 at 2:51 pm · Filed under meta
Who knew I’d make it this long? Granted, not all of the 100 posts are recipes, a handful are other stuff, but it’s still pretty good, I think. I was trying to think of something to post to mark the occasion, such as it is, but the best thing I can come up with is the top 5 most popular posts I’ve got. And providing these links will only make them more popular, thus widening the gap, so maybe I will also post my top 5 not-in-the-top-10-but-should-be posts.
Top 5
#5, with 127 views, is Beef Barley Soup. A standby soup that I guess a lot of people agree needs to be in their recipe collection.
#4, with 207 views, is Hamburger “Helper” Casserole. I think part of the reason for this post’s success is that people can search “hamburger helper” and find it, or “hamburger casserole,” or any other thing, and it’s got 3 different kinds of Campbell’s Cream of Something soups in it. Holler!
#3, with 342 views, is Garlic-Shrimp Pasta. I feel like this is another go-to recipe for most people – you know, people who can make something with shrimp in it without it having to be a big foofaraw. P.S.: I just used “foofaraw” in a sentence.
#2, with 556 views, is Ginger Cookies. This one and number one switch places a lot, but I’m prouder of this one because it got this many hits all on its own. Cookies with fresh ginger! Soft and sweet and delicious! Utterly devoured at work!
#1, with 577 views, is Coffee-Chocolate Chip Shortbread. I’m not going to lie, most of this is because this was my one submission that ever made it on Tastespotting (which I have even stopped reading now, because of the shady redirects to advertising pages when you click on an image – that’s unfair both to the reader and the submitter, because they won’t get the click-throughs they would otherwise have gotten!). But it is a recipe with a really strong pedigree, so to speak, and it was really good even though it didn’t really meet with the response I had hoped for.
Not in the top 5, but worthy
This was tough to narrow down to just 5. I decided to leave off things I’ve made really recently, since who knows, they might make it up there in time, but that still left a lot to decide from. After that challenge, I don’t know if I’m up to ranking them. I may faint.
Chicken and Sausage Stew: it’s really good, thicker than you might expect, less butter-laden too, and it smells fantastic. I brought a little tupperware of it in to work for lunch one day, and a co-worker was astounded how much aroma came out of that little container.
Beans and Rice with Chorizo: smoky, delicious, and filling.
Chipotle Pasta Salad with Sausage: to be fair, this one is in the top 10, but it’s that good. I mean, chipotle-flavoured anything is basically already my favourite, but with spicy sausage as well? Make this immediately, is what I’m saying.
Chicken and Lentil Soup just misses the top 10. It’s richly flavoured, with more than a hint of India, and the colour is just amazing.
Last but not least, a tie between two glazed nuts I made around Christmastime: Sesame Almonds and Sweet Ginger Pecans. They’re both impossible to stop eating, and they’re both completely easy.
Whee, 100 posts!
July 20, 2009 at 3:10 pm · Filed under dessert, food, meta
I made these for a birthday. I wasn’t about to let it go unnoticed – the birthday girl in question had sent out an Outlook reminder to all her friends so we wouldn’t forget – and I hadn’t made it to her party. So I brought her these 7-layer bars and told her they were hers to do with as she wished. She could eat them all herself, set them out publicly, or just share them with people she liked and nobody she didn’t like.
The original recipe, and an enlightening explanation of what each of the 7 layers is, can be found here, although I did change a little bit – I don’t like white chocolate, but I do love peanut butter chips, so I made the substitution there. That’s it, though. Oh wait, no, I was short on butter so I used less and it was fine. I can’t remember exactly how much I used, so I’ll write down what I think I did. I considered substituting something for the butterscotch chips because I don’t really care about them, but Matt convinced me they should stay.
7-Layer Bars
Ingredients
1 cup sweetened shredded coconut
4 or 5 tbsp melted butter
5 graham crackers (the attached pairs, not 5 actual crackers, apparently those don’t count as a whole cracker…), crushed
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup butterscotch chips
1/2 cup peanut butter chips
1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Spray a 9×13 pan with cooking spray, then line it with tinfoil, leaving some overhang to grab later when removing the bars from the pan, and spray that with cooking spray. You are taking no chances here! Except we already use the kind of tinfoil that has a non-stick side, so I just lined it with the non-stick side facing up and didn’t bother spraying the second time. It worked fine.
Toast your coconut shreds on a baking sheet for about 4 minutes or until they just start to go brown. I did this in the toaster oven since my regular oven doesn’t have a window, and you kind of need to keep an eye on these bad boys.
Combine the melted butter and the crushed graham crackers (I used my food processor to savage the graham crackers, by the way) until the butter is evenly distributed.
Press the crumb mixture evenly into the bottom of the foil-lined pan.
Now it’s time to do the layers. They’re not going to wind up super layery because you won’t have enough to completely cover the surface with any one thing, so just distribute the toppings as evenly as you can.
First, the walnuts.
Next, the chocolate chips.
Then, the peanut butter chips.
Now, the butterscotch chips.
Finally, the coconut.
Now douse the entire thing in sweetened condensed milk.
Bake for about 25 minutes or until the top is golden brown.
Cool in the pan on a rack for about 2 hours. I know that seems like a hundred years but trust me. It’s way too melty to cut earlier.
When it’s time to cut them, you can hoist them out of the pan using the edges of the tinfoil.
And on a side note, this is post #100 in this blog! Maybe I’ll do something cool for it in the next post.
July 16, 2009 at 11:51 am · Filed under dessert, food
I made these a few weeks ago because a friend was coming back to work. She’s an actress and she’d been on a leave of absence to rehearse for and perform in a play. Someone else had been covering for her during this time, and her department threw him a thank-you party for that the day before she returned. But was there a welcome-back party in the works for my friend? There was not. I was appalled at this shocking lapse in manners and decided that the least I could do was to bake her something.
The recipe for these comes from the fabulous Latest Addictions, and in going for the link I remembered that they are, in fact, good for you. Whole wheat flour, applesauce replacing fat… not that I was trying to drop hints toward my friend, who is healthy as a horse (but much smaller). They’re not the sweetest muffins in the world, although I, like finsmom, used unsweetened applesauce. Presumably you could use the sweetened kind if you wanted this to be more desserty and less breakfasty. Or if you want to have dessert for breakfast! I DON’T JUDGE.
Apple-Cinnamon Muffins
Ingredients
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp cinnamon
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup plain yogurt
2 apples, peeled and diced
Method
Preheat the oven to 450.
Mix applesauce and yogurt. Taste this and consider just eating the whole bowl and giving up on muffins. Think better of it and proceed with the recipe.
Add egg.
Stir in sugar, but finsmom exhorts us to do this gently – we’re not making scrambled eggs, here.
In a separate bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together.
Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ones; I know this is a bit of a reversal, but let’s live on the edge, shall we?
Fold the apple bits into the batter.
Pour batter into lined muffin pan.
Bake for 10 minutes.
Turn the heat down to 400 and bake another 5 – 10 minutes.
I just realized that I can’t remember whether I halved this or not. I know I didn’t bring a lot in to work, but I did keep a couple at home… I think I must not have halved it. It’s been a while.
July 10, 2009 at 4:06 pm · Filed under things other people made
I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of a sample pack of flavours from Good Health Natural Products. This pack contained 3 flavours of Humbles, which are their chips made from hummus – specifically the lemon-olive oil-feta, roasted red pepper, and sesame garlic – and 3 flavours of avocado oil potato chips (note: I am not an old fuddy-duddy who says “potato chips,” I’m just clarifying that the chips aren’t made of avocado or something. They’re regular chips, they’re just [i]cooked[/i] in avocado oil, which is apparently better for you than the kind most chips are cooked in. In which they are cooked).
We aren’t the world’s most fervent consumers of chips, so we’ve only finished one bag and started another at this point, but I’ll update as I have more info. As is my way with most things, I started with the ones I felt least likely to be my favourites, and proceeded down the line. However, I was pleasantly surprised! The first bag we opened was the Olive Oil, Lemon, and Feta Humbles (hummus chips). I wasn’t expecting to like them because I am not a fan of feta. But either I couldn’t taste the feta in these, or the reason I dislike the cheese is texture-based, because these were delicious. They’ve got more than a little bit of garlic in there, which is always a recipe for success.
I just opened the Barcelona Barbeque Avocado Oil Chips the other night, and while I don’t know what makes them Barcelona Barbeque, I think they’re pretty good. Matt has two strikes against these from the start: he doesn’t care for barbeque chips, and he doesn’t care for kettle-style chips either, which these are. His problem with kettle chips is that they’re “too crunchy.” I don’t find these as thick as the typical kettle chip, so I don’t know if they bother him on that count. But the barbeque flavour is enough for him to know he’s not interested. I think they’re pretty good. I can’t really discern any avocado flavour from the oil – maybe you’re not supposed to be able to, or maybe I’ll be able to once I try the just sea salt variety.
I didn’t see them in our local grocery store, in either the regular chip aisle or the natural-foods section, but I bet I could find them in a Whole Foods or such. The next time I find myself in one, I’ll be sure to check.
