The Week of Magical Eating days 3 and 4: Soup and Salad

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Chelsea

Since sharing lunch with my friend S. a few weeks ago, I have developed a minor obsession with Caesar Salad. The crispest romaine, whether to add the Parmesan by shreds, crumbles, grates or curls, the perfectly textured crouton: crisp and golden on the outside, with the barest hint of residual chewiness deep within. But mostly, the object of mystery and allure is the dressing. It’s tangy but creamy and rich but still light, and pulls the flavors of the salad together to make it a phenomenon. I decided to make it. In the gloom of winter, I don’t have the opportunities I’d like to find farm-fresh eggs, and locally grown egg yolk is all I would feel comfortable using without cooking it. Besides, N. gets worried about raw foods sometimes, and he doesn’t care for the idea of fish in dressing, so egg and anchovy were out. I poked around online and found some vegan Caesar salad dressings with interesting suggestions, including the addition of brewer’s yeast and tamari to add the salty richness of anchovy. I collected ideas and then, as usually happens, ended up making my own.

Mayonnaise, lemon juice, brown mustard, tamari, pepper, and garlic went into the mixing vessel that came with my immersion blender. I pulsed these ingredients together a few times until the garlic was chopped and things were looking paste-like, and then streamed in some olive oil with the blender running until it reached a more dressing-y consistency. It’s a work in progress, and I didn’t take note of amounts, but it began to capture that lofty Caesar flavor as I added additional spoonfuls of mayo here and lemon there… a bit too much mustard in the first squeeze. Over-enthusiasm, you know. Tossed with fresh greens, lemon wedges, and sourdough croutons from half a baguette, it was almost right. Almost there, but close enough for a weeknight.

The next night, inspired by a recipe request I couldn’t fulfill from D., I scoured the ‘nets for a suitable looking black bean soup. Our salad accompanied a slow cooked chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, and I saved the garlic-infused broth our chicken expelled in the crock pot, so I had a wonderful flavorful stock to use for soup.

After sliding a pan of batter in and a loaf of cornbread out of the oven half an hour later, I commenced to create Dave Lieberman’s black bean soup, found here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/dave-lieberman/black-bean-soup-recipe/index.html

I made a few changes to his recipe, for one reason or another, which I’ll share because I thought the result turned out well.

I cooked my bacon until crispy before draining out some of the fat (which ended up mixed with dogfood; Lucy was ecstatic!) and adding only 1 ½ onions. Instead of Dave’s can of chicken broth, I used the leftovers from our chicken, which were about 1 ½ cups, and about a third of a bottle of New Belgium 1554 for a little extra flavor and fizz (then I handed the remainder of the bottle to N. Beer and bacon = happy little family!). I eliminated the ketchup and forgot the lime juice, and added my cilantro right at the end rather than letting it cook. I decided I wanted a fresher green flavor, so it would serve as a garnish.

Then we went a little crazy with toppings. I crumbled up some queso fresco, which I am having a deep affair of intrigue with, and used up my single-serving ramekins providing serving dishes for cheese, sour cream, green onion tops, more cilantro, and lime wedges. The photo below isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing composition, but it was belly-warming and hearty, and tasted marvelous. We usually have trouble finishing up leftovers from soup, but it has been only four or five days since I made this, and the remains are already gone. That should tell you something.

Elana’s Pantry cookbook giveaway!

Posted on January 10, 2010 by Chelsea

It’s not Thursday, and there are no pictures, but there is a link. A delicious, delicious, gluten-free link.

I’ve been following Elana’s Pantry for a few months now, partly because one of my close friends can’t eat gluten and sometimes I need inspiration, and partly because it’s just delicious looking food! Unfortunately, said friend can’t eat nuts either, but I have great plans for Elana’s recipes and the unopened bag of rice flour in my pantry.

Here, Elana is featuring her Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook, and has a marvelous sounding little giveaway going on. If I am lucky, you may be seeing a lot more gluten-free food featured here.

Yum.

Dinner for one

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Chelsea

At the beginning of October, N. went to a literary conference in Spearfish, South Dakota. That’s right, Spearfish. For almost a week. Now, I don’t even like eating dinner alone, much less rattling around the empty (all-but-dog) house in the evening and settling into bed by myself (again, aside from the dog who spent each night usurping more of my blankets). You hear the creaking and settling of an old house much more clearly when something is out of the ordinary.

To assuage my loneliness, of course, I turned to food. There are several items in this wonderful culinary world that N. doesn’t like. One of them is shrimp. I know, I must be crazy for having married him with such a deficiency (another of his dislikes is coconut. Crazy!), but otherwise he’s pretty perfect. So in his absence, I ate shrimp. A recent issue of Cooking Light had a wonderful looking shrimp pasta recipe that I wanted to try out, and with the crustacean hater a full time zone away, this was my opportunity.

Shrimp, pine nuts, a little white wine, basil, and some nutmeg and pepper spiced cream made the sauce, and I tossed spaghetti into it and folded the creamy sauce around the long strands of pasta before adding a generous grating of Parmesan cheese. Though this sounded like an excellent meal all on its own, I have been making an effort lately to be sure I include some kind of vegetable (or fruit) material in my meals, and a few julienned leaves of basil wasn’t going to cut it on this one.

I turned to tomatoes. Our sungold cherry tomato plant, with which I’ve been having a serious love affair all summer, provided me with several generous handfuls of tiny, deep orangey-gold spheres of sweet juicy flavor explosions. I drizzled a little olive oil over them in a small skillet and agitated them in the pan until they started to burst their skins. Then I added salt, pepper, and two big glugs of balsamic vinegar and let it heat through until barely simmering. Then I couldn’t stand it anymore, and ate a huge helping of tomatoes and pasta.

It was delicious. The sauce for the pasta was creamy and luscious, punctuated by bursts of freshness from the basil, and deep, complex buttery nuttiness from the pine nuts and nutmeg. The tomatoes, meanwhile, were tart and sweet – almost sweet enough to be dessert. When I went back for a second helping (what can I say, I was all by myself with no one to help me enjoy the feast!), an amazing thing had happened. Though I had turned off the stove (safety first!), I had left the pan containing the tomatoes on the cooling burner, and there was enough residual heat to begin to reduce the balsamic vinegar. What remained was a slowly thickening syrup of balsamic and sweet cherry tomato juice, sticky and oozing among the deflating tomatoes. I couldn’t stand it, I gobbled up the remaining spoonfuls and left the rest of the pasta for another day.

At my house, dinner for one looked like this:

Roast Chicken, part III

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Chelsea

With one delicious dinner out of the way and several quarts of stock safely frozen, I used the remaining chicken (the bits I could save; N. kept snacking on succulent pieces straight from the refrigerator!) to make one of my all time favorite summer dinners. With two more big heirlooms ready on the vine, I made a simple chicken salad from the roasted leftovers. I shredded up the chicken into bite-sized chunks with my fingers, then added just the necessities. Well, mostly just the necessities. A creamy spoonful of mayonnaise. Finely chopped dill. Julienned yellow pole beans from our garden that I’d lightly steamed. A handful of mixed chives and green onions, diced up. Salt and pepper to taste.

Cut the tomatoes ¾ of the way through so that eight thick, juicy slices hang together by half an inch or so at the bottom, but begin to pull apart, leaving a perfectly ripe, red vessel for the chicken salad.

Pile it up good and high.

Sometimes for presentation’s sake, I place the tomato atop a ruffled piece of butter lettuce. Sometimes I don’t.

Then I eat it.

First Bounty

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Chelsea

Though we have been harvesting sugar snap peas by the bowlful for the past few weeks, and though we probably still have enough preparing for maturity on the vine for me to freeze a bagful, it didn’t feel like we really had a harvest on our hands until a few days ago, when I picked these:

I know it seems crazy, and I know I’ll be sick of it before August is over, but despite the heat and despite the impending pounds of zucchini and despite my encouragement to myself to eat better at breakfast time, I couldn’t resist. Despite all that, I made zucchini bread.

As you can see, whether it was the monster zucchini I grated up that exceeded the recipe’s requirement a little bit, or whether it was because my thrift store loaf pan was on the small side, I had extra batter. Fortunately, my sweet little too-seldom-used ramekins called to me from the cupboard, and I heeded their siren song. In addition to the loaf, we also had four big muffin-sized servings. The advantage of this was that they were ready for consumption much sooner, and consume we did. Here’s my serving suggestion:

The recipe I use for zucchini bread right now is from Bon Appetit’s latest cookbook. This isn’t the magazine, it’s the full book, and this particular version is called Zucchini Spice Bread. It has a hefty teaspoon of cinnamon added to the standard mix, and with 2 cups of zucchini as well as a cup of toasted nuts (I used pecans because I was out of walnuts, and may have liked it better with the substitution), it seems like one of the healthier quickbreads out there, as well as using up a decent amount of zucchini. And the flavor. The flavor is stupendous. Since the nuts are toasted, they donate more of a crunch and a warm richness to the bread. Because there is so much zucchini, they don’t dry out the bread too much, which is sometimes a complaint I have about nuts. The zucchini itself is mild but still present, and the bread is not too sweet. It has a nice moist crumb to it but the top gets crusty, so the whole thing is just a medley of textures that I really enjoy. Here’s to the joy of baked goods, the joy of home grown vegetables, and the very special joy of being able to eat them both at the same time!