Cooking On Sundays

I made a tomato-based spaghetti sauce?  I didn’t mean to.  Really.  I was following on of my uncle’s recipes for a  spicy spaghetti–first add a ton of thai chilies (except I had arbol, as that giant jar of them I have is never ending where as I always run out of every pepper I ever buy) and a huge amount of garlic with too much olive oil, and you take cooked spaghetti and stir it into that…

…except before I stirred in the spaghetti, I noted my giant yellow zuchinni I paid 50 cents for was starting to get a little aged, so I chopped it up and threw it in to stir fry a little….

…and while I couldn’t resist tomatoes from the farmers market at $1/lb, I did buy a few too many, so while I can still call them tomatoes and not mush, I should put those in too…

…and hey, it resembles spaghetti sauce now!  Tomato based and and everything!  I sliced up a green bell pepper really fine and tossed it at about the same time I turned off the heat, and the remains of some cilantro that was threatening to go icky, and put the spaghetti sauce on top of the pasta, instead of the other way around, and covered it with hard grated cheese just like my uncle’s recipe.

And it was fabulous!  I’m not sure where I went wrong, but I am generally am not a fan of the “pasta and sauce” type cooking, but perhaps that is because I don’t encounter home made pasta sauce all that often.

I didn’t actually make this; I’ve gotten so lazy that all I ever make is salads.  And when I say lazy, last time I just bought a bag of premixed salad and put olive oil and vinegar on it.  However, my industrious eaters came over early to make margaritas to reward the cook (geez thanks guys but if I’m not cooking, do I really deserve quite such a reward?) one of them raided my cucumber stash and made a cucumber soup that looked like this:

• Some butter
• A red onion
• A little garlic
• Two huge cucumbers
• A quart of milk
• Enough salt to call it soup
• A large green bell pepper

The butter went into a soup pan, and at the bottom of the soup pan the garlic and onions were sauteed.  Then the garlic and onions went into a blender with the cucumbers, all blended up.  Then in the soup pan went a quart of milk, which was scalded.  After scalding, the blenderized contents went into the pan, salted to taste, and — almost instant cream of cucumber soup!  Hack up the bell pepper into tiny little chunks, and add more to give it some crunchiness and break up the flavor a little bit.  Served with salt and pepper; well, actually in my crowd we also had hot sauce on the side, but I just put ground black pepper on top, I say nothing about the taste buds of the rest of those freaks.

Tasty!  Extra thanks to my soup maker.  And thanks to my margarita maker too, though now the cap to my blender is broken.  But the margaritas are good!

I was asking someone when they would update their blog, and the response was, “when do I get a new recipe?”  I argued I haven’t been cooking lately (it’s too hot!) but then I noted I had a few recipes in the queue.

Well, actually this story is pretty old, but I thought trying to convince others to write is a good motivating force, so I offer you this story.  It’s about a month old, maybe not quite two months old.

I was at the farmer’s market and the most appealing thing there were carrots, “spring garlic”,  and basil.  I had no idea what I could do with such a thing.

My friend who was helping me contemplate my decision, proposed the following idea– cream sauce, with potatoes (which I conveniently had lots of leftover potatoes).

So when I made it, it contained:

• All my milk (there wasn’t much)
• My roommate’s milk
• I sent him out to get me a thing of cream, too
• The carrots at the farmer’s market
• Leftover potatoes–one was purple
• Spring garlic–it was soft (didn’t have to peel it, and used most of the green part like it was scallions)
• Scallions
• Basil
• Salt
• Olive oil
• Flour
• Grated cheddar cheese

First, I put the carrots and potatoes to boil, to cook.  Meanwhile, I put all the green things (this includes the garlic) in with the milk, olive oil, and flour, and stir.   The reason the ingredients are listed as such is because I put all my milk in the pan, add some water and flour, realized there wasn’t enough, stole some of my roommate’s milk, realized there still wasn’t enough, and to add insult to injury, I told him it wasn’t going to be tasty unless he retrieved me cream.

This was actually a lot easier than I had imagined making–after cooking the cream and milk, and the potatoes and carrots went into an baking tray, and I put it all in the oven for a while to cook down and made a layer of cheese on top (some went into the cream for extra gooeyness), and the only real hard part was determining the appropriate amount of salt.

But we are not done yet!  In fact, we are barely at the interesting point.  Carrots at the farmers market come with a top full of leaves.  They offered to cut them off for me, and I asked if they were edible or had other uses.   They suggested that they make a good salad, except that you should boil them first, to leach out any bitterness.  I also had kolrabi, which is an alien looking plant that I had not experimented with.  I added to this red lettuce (to make it slightly more normal), tomatoes, cucumbers, and walnuts.

This was tasty except for the fact that by boiling the carrot tops, they were soggy and would stick together.  They gave the salad a very tasty almost carrot flavor–in fact, I think my exact words were “why didn’t anyone tell me that carrot tops were so tasty!”

However, one thing I found on my internet travels afterwards is that carrot tops are considered “mildly poisonous”, although I suspect boiling them may have leeched out the “mild poison”.  In any event, no eaters reported ill effects, and one went so far as to comment I “made the least poisonous food she ever encountered, so if no one was at all sick (or even mildly discomforted) I think all is well.

A few weeks ago, my friend invited me over for movies.  Over movies, there is wine, chips, and mango salsa.  Of course my taste buds get all snooty, declare the salsa foul, and suddenly I am determined to make my own.

I managed not to declare the salsa foul in the middle of the movie, attempting to save some grace.

But that didn’t stop me from trying to make mango salsa.  I note that mexican tomatoes are on sale, and chilean mangoes are on sale.  Still not cheap but after months of no good tomatoes I like this idea.

I started with this:

• One mango, two weeks old now because I’ve had this plan for a while
• Three tomatoes, only one week old
• A bunch of cilantro
• Dried arbol chilies.  Apparently I used all my fresh chilies in a curry or something.  I know I bought fresh chilies for this purpose.
• Some garlic
• A lime
• Half an onion

I threw two tomatoes, some of the cilantro, and some water in the blender (it gets unhappy if there is no water with the food).  Meanwhile, I put the chilies (I used about 10-15?) and the garlic (four cloves) in a pot with some water (very little, just enough to cover) and started boiling it.  The other tomato I diced and tossed into a large bowl.  Some of the cilantro leaves I saved, also chopped, and put into a bowl.  The blended goop also went into this bowl.  After the dried chilies couldn’t be called dried any more, they went into the blender, with the water (which there wasn’t much left at this point).  I learned from previous experience that boiling liquids in a blender will blow up in your face so I added a little water, the lime, about half the half-onion and blended that up too. The rest of the onion was chopped fine, and went into the bowl.  The mango I also chopped up–I read somewhere you should use a less ripe mango, but now I think that is because if it’s perfectly ripe you’ll munch the mango rather than make salsa.  The parts that couldn’t get chopped either went into the blender or into my mouth.  I threw a bunch of mango chunks into the bowl (while saying “one chunk for them; one chunk for me”) and at the very end I was squeezing the mango pit over the blender.

All this went into a bowl and stirred up to make it look like salsa.  One taste and I quickly realized it wasn’t working.  So I added:

• Salt
• Vinegar
• A can of tomato paste
• More onion
• Cumin
• A little chili powder
• More salt

All this made it taste much much better.

A few things learned:

• I know blenders like watery things, but salsas shouldn’t be quite so watery.  While I think I’ve got a good consistency, it was a battle, and I really should get a food processor.
• Salt.  I know you are planning on putting salty chips in this, but you still need salt in the salsa itself.  More than I might initially suspect.
• More tomatoes.  Three just isn’t enough.  Also, chop more, blend less.  The cilantro I think I got the right chopping/blending ratio (most stems blended, most leaves chopped).  I can’t wait for tomato season to come in full swing.
• More mangoes.  I can’t call this mango salsa, which was the original intention.

I’m going to try this again at some point, though I’m not sure if I’ll make it a front page post or just edit this one or pretend I never did.

Raven back again, for more cake - and yes, this is old.  After the success of the chocolate cake the week before, I wanted to make more cake, but not chocolate.  I thought a lemon cake might be nice, both because the weather was grand and springy and because I was thinking of the lemon cakes at Seven Stars.
Finding a lemon cake recipe that didn’t need advanced cooking equipment that I didn’t have was a little challenging, though.  Although I was really tempted by the prospect of one lemon-yogurt recipe that gave all the non-yogurt measurements in terms of the emptied yogurt cups, I ended up picking this one from Smitten Kitchen and tweaking it.
I’m the kind of person inclined to follow recipes, though, so there’s not much more to say about it…. okay, maybe there is.
I doubled the recipe, for starters, because I wanted to make enough cake for sixteen people.  This was a huge amount of cake batter. It took:

• 3 cups flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 cups plain whole-milk yogurt
• 2 cups plus 1 tablespoon sugar
• 6 extra-large eggs
• 4 teaspoons grated lemon zest (3 lemons, which is a little short)
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• A bottle of lemon juice

I was not in the mood for squeezing lemons, and they were wanted for the curry Stanza was making anyway, so I bought a bottle of real lemon juice instead.  It worked out.  I did use the zest, though.  The original recipe also suggested using blueberries in this, but that made it look breakfasty, and besides, I wanted chocolate. So no blueberries.
Once I mixed all the ingredients but the lemon juice, into last week’s leaky pan it - half of it, really - went.  Much less leaky this time.  While that was baking (350F for about 50 minutes) I poured some lemon juice in with the extra tablespoon of sugar and heated that until the sugar dissolved.  I wanted the cake really damp, so I used about a cup.  Baking this takes a while, so I also melted some semi-sweet dark chocolate for the planned topping, so I’d have that ready.  Having only one pan, I did only one part at a time, but that ended up being for the best, as it gave the bottom layer enough time to rest that it was nice and stable.
When the cake had finished baking and set properly, I soaked it in lemon juice.  Yep, soaked.  This is a pretty porous cake, so it’s possible to pour the juice in pretty quickly, but it’s a good idea to let it sit a while afterward so it doesn’t drip or ooze when you move it to a serving plate.
The expected sixteen people had by now been whittled down dramatically, so rather than make two separate cakes, I opted to make a two-layer cake.  I soaked the second layer separately before putting it on top, and for once, thankfully, I even managed to get the layers on straight.  This is not a cake you can adjust without tearing the heck out of both top and bottom, so if you try it, be careful.
Basic structural success achieved, I pulled out my secret weapon, the chocolate.  I drizzled melted chocolate all over the top and sides, but it still seemed to be missing something…. something decorative and lemony….
What I was looking for were the New England-style gummy lemon slices like the ones in the picture, but, as it turns out, you really can only get those in New England.  (Hunh!)  Instead, I used more traditional gummy lemons, cut in half.
It came out rather nicely, although there wasn’t nearly as much chocolate taste as I’d hoped.  When I do it again, I’d put chocolate between the layers, as one of the eaters suggested.  It was reviewed as “AWESOMZORS!!!eleventy-one!!etc…” though, so I’m pleased.

Since the post about indian food is still in the “technical difficulties” stage, and beet soup post has disappeared into the ether (where did it go?), I will write up the first day of the farmers market season.  Farmers market!  Best produce in town!  Cheaper too!  I bought 10lbs of apples for $4, some rabe, some turnips w/greens attached, some oyster mushrooms (in hopes they were as good as the ones bought for a couple dinners ago–which also got lost in the technical difficulties, but you don’t want to read about that dinner anyway).  Oh and two humongous leeks for $1.50 (why are leeks always cheap at the farmers market but frighteningly expensive in stores?  I almost refused to buy them until the vendor listed various ways leeks could be used which did not involve soup).

So this week I did not actually make dinner.  It was a friend’s birthday, so I went to his house instead.  Others had made burgers, sausages, falafels, chips and dip, so I made the salad.  I looked at my ingredients, debated what I could do with them, and decided “anything goes in a salad!”

• A huge head of cauliflower (actually bought at a supermarket rather bargainously, there were none at the farmers market)
• The rabe
• The pink eggs
• Walnuts, dried currants, and dried cranberries
• And a salad dressing of lemon, tahini, olive oil, salt, cribbed from a few weeks ago

I steamed the rabe and cauliflower–the rabe doesn’t take much at all! and the cauliflower was barely cooked.  Chopped and into the salad bowl followed by “what do I have in my closet that might work with this”, hence the walnuts and dried berries.  Then I got the idea for the eggs!  If I don’t use the pink eggs now, who will I show them off to (besides my awesome blog readers)?  And deciding I wanted more complicated than just oil and vinegar, I went and made that dressing, which was good because my lemon had been sitting for a while and it would be sad if I didn’t use it.

I have to say I felt awkward bringing an unusual salad to a party.  The people who like salads loved it–I didn’t expect it would be that well loved!  The rabe was somewhat bitter, but I put in enough dried berries and cauliflower that it was balanced out.  The dressing also added a good flavor.

However, I’d say more people skipped it and went straight to the burgers, than actually ate it.

I love soup.

I get these days of “well, what do I have?” and then it goes from there to the soup pot. One of the most awesomest things about soup is that anything can go in it.

Several weeks ago someone gave me some meat that was never clearly identified. It’s clearly a chunk of beef, but from what part of the cow, I’m not certain. Knowing the people involved, I suspect it came from the shoulder.

I threw it in my freezing promising to use it someday. That was many weeks ago. Finally, I got sick of stumbling over that chunk while reaching for ice cream, and pulled it out.

I’m not that good at cooking with meat so I asked everyone I could think of about it. The suggestion I followed was a “cook it on low all day long”. The only problem with this is that we are approaching spring and really what I want to do is go outside and play all day long, and having a boiling pot making it hotter inside only amplifies this effect.

So I did that. After about an hour (much faster than I predicted!) it was soft enough to cut, so I pulled it out and chopped it into bite sized chunks (because I have this weird american habit of all food must be small enough to eat).

Back in the pot, threw in salt, cayenne, onions, scallions. I also threw in two huge sprigs of rosemary.  In a blender I pureed bell peppers, jalapeños, left over cabbage, and lemons. I didn’t tell anyone about these secret ingredients, and I wanted them out of the fridge before they tried to make friends with me. Tossed this “broth” into the soup, keep cooking.

I wanted this to be more like “stew” than “meat with water” so I looked for things that would thicken the broth. Since I always seem to have a large supply of lentils on hand, I dumped a bunch in. I also have barley! So this became lentil, barely, and beef stew.

I still have veggies left, noticeably, I saved a bell pepper, I have some celery, so I chopped these up, and in they went.

After last week I promised myself I wouldn’t put any cumin in it.

This was tasty! Actually, I would recommend something spicy added to it, and of course, I didn’t add enough salt. On the day I made it, I put out my collection of hot sauces, however most people didn’t use them. They did use the salt though. Since then, when I throw a bowl of it in the microwave, I usually put in sriracha, that garlic helps it a lot, and a lot of salt.

In the end, I suppose calling it “rosemary beef stew” would be a better name, but “mystery meat” is far more fun to have as a title.

Oh–and before I forget–on the side, we served a fabulous salami, cheese, and cracker plate on the side.

Also, despite the lack of pics today, I actually have been making pics. Pics will soon appear!

We’ve got a a triple hitter here, especially with the salad being bigger than the entree, and the cake being fancy enough to impress everyone….

We started with salami and mushrooms.  Really, my friend made these, and it literally was just fancy salami and some portobello and criminy mushrooms.  The ingredient list is already done!  It was just stirred fried in olive oil, and that was that.  We kind of didn’t make enough, despite usual cooking style, although I suggested we throw everything else in there too, we didn’t.  Also, I almost forgot to mention, we boiled some pasta to go with this.

I made a salad where I did live up to my reputation of “everything goes in it”.  I planned on following this butternut squash salad recipe, but in the end, I only used the salad dressing.  In this salad I put:

• Garbanzo beans
• String beans
• Green cauliflower (I think it’s advertised as “broccoflower” or something)
• Half a red onion
• A bunch of cilantro
• Green bell peppers
• The remains of a small red cabbage

I steamed the cauliflower just a little, boiled the garbanzos enough that they were cooked, but I just did this so that they were soft enough to eat, and I did this ahead of time so that it was a cold salad.

And I made a tahini dressing out of:

• Tahini (in a jar) (I didn’t make it)
• Finely chopped garlic (one of these days I’ll get a press)
• Some of the onions above got into the garlic, so they were finely chopped as well
• The juice of three lemons
• Olive oil
• Salt

I mixed with the quantities in the dressing until I feared that I wouldn’t have enough lemon juice to balance it if I added any more tahini, and while straight the salad dressing was not the best.

Then the cake.  I didn’t really make the cake, I just helped pour and such, so I might suddenly hand the keyboard to raven, but the cake, if I remember, started something like this:

• Half a block (not stick, like two sticks) of butter
• A block of fancy dark (60%) chocolate (9.7 oz, I think)

I’m stealing this.  So the recipe came off the inside of the chocolate wrapper, because I had planned to make this cake and been thwarted by Stanza’s kitchen.  (You might have noticed that he doesn’t seem to go in for precisely measuring things; he doesn’t have a measuring cup, and there’s no way I’m making imprecise buttercream by hand.)  I needed an emergency easy recipe.  Fortunately for all of you, Scharffen Berger (the Co-op had fancy chocolate, what can I say) puts the recipe online.  You need:

• One brick of chocolate, 9.7 oz, give or take a smidge
• 7 oz of butter. (Half a brick, equivalent to 7 tablespoons.)
• Five eggs
• A cup of white sugar

I whacked the chocolate into little pieces with a knife that was probably bigger than was wholly safe (I’d recommend a hammer instead; this was one thick brick of chocolate.) Then I melted the butter and the chocolate together - they recommended a double boiler, but I was feeling lazy and this chocolate has enough cocoa butter that it was okay in the microwave.  The eggs and sugar went into another bowl until the liquid chocolate was done, at which point they all got mixed together.

The recipe is one of those chocolate cake recipes that tells you to bake it in another pan full of water.  We tried this and found - panic panic! - that our newly acquired springform pan leaked, so I dried the batter out as best I could while Stanza tried to see if the pan could be made non-leaky.  Finally we gave up and cooked the thing without the second pan of water, but with a piece of tinfoil underneath just in case.  Three-fifty for an hour and a half.

The finished product was not the best looking cake ever, since it was kinda flat, so I thought I’d make it prettier by covering the whole thing in homemade whipped cream.  I halved the amount of sugar I normally put in whipped cream and added a little vanilla, because the cake was really sweet.  There was some old nutella in the cabinet, so I mixed a little milk into it and spread that on top.  (The cooking style around here is perilous and catching, let me warn you.)  Then I covered it in whipped cream and chopped some hazlenuts up for the top.  Done, and it even looked fairly impressive.  Everyone certainly said it was tasty enough - but how can you go far wrong with that much  chocolate involved?

Following the ideas of this post, I have come to realize that no matter how much of a stretch something is, you can call it a taco if you put in quotes.  Rather than justifying my reasoning for calling it chili, I decided it was easier to put into quotes.

I started with this recipe for vegan white bean chili, and realized I had no white beans, so I used black beans and pinto beans instead.  I had some garbanzos I wanted used up, so I threw them as well.  And halfway done, deciding I wanted it thicker, I threw in some lentils, figuring they would be tasty and dissolve into something thicker.

Without further ado, here is the ingredient list:

• Black beans
• Pinto beans
• Green lentils
• Garbanzo beans
• Two serrano peppers
• Two anaheim peppers
• One yellow onion
• Garlic
• Celery
• Carrots
• White onions
• Frozen okra
• Frozen corn
• Frozen snozzberries (just kidding)
• Three bell peppers
• Five scary dried red peppers
• Oregano
• Paprika
• Chili powder
• Sliced peppered salami that a friend gave me
• Some corn flour
• Some other spices to taste

I soaked the garbanzo, black and pinto beans from the night before - well, actually, I soaked the garbanzo beans about a month ago and didn’t use them and they’ve been living in my freezer ever since.  That’s why I was using them.  I drained the beans, then I blended one and a half bell peppers, the spicy peppers, half the onion, and half the garlic, and put that green soup in the pot with the beans.  I set that to boil for an hour or two, added the spices, and worried that I’d added too much.

I drank a lot of wine and chopped the other vegetables into little pieces.  The wine is why I can’t remember exactly what spices I put in.  At some point I was figuring the chili wouldn’t thicken appropriately, so I added lentils (there was still enough cooking time that they would dissolve into tastiness) and corn flour (I read that on the chili recipe linked above).  This did thicken it enough that it was appropriate.  I added some carrots at this point too.

Further towards the end I added all the vegetables.  I kept finding random things to add; it kind of got out of hand.  I had a bag of frozen okra in the freezer, frozen corn, at some point it felt like I kept digging further back and I kept finding odder things (though I did use up all the turnip greens on a non-Sunday cooking day; those would have been in here too but I found an empty bag instead).

At the very end I added the salami which I carefully cut into quarter-circles.

While it was very spicy, and I did kind of go wrong with “too much spices such that it didn’t taste like anything”, I think if I hadn’t said “I’m afraid it’s too spicy”, I think people wouldn’t have thought it quite too spicy.  The spicy-eaters are fond of everything spicy and gobbled it up without yogurt and sour cream; the non-spicy-eaters feasted on the spinach salad instead.

I was inspired by this entry at bread-and-honey, and I had a surplus of broccoli to use, which I though would go great in it.  But of course, I can’t really follow directions, so if you go read that post and then compare my recipe, you’ll find that they don’t match up very well.

But I made a good effort!  In fact, I acquired tarragon and fennel explicitly for this soup.

The fennel came out so strong that it quickly became fennel soup.  However, it was not overpowering, and in fact was very tasty.

Anyway, the ingredient list looks something like this:

• Half a yellow onion
• One large leek
• Half a bulb of garlic
• About six small zucchinis
• Two broccoli crowns (they were cheaper than the rest of the broccoli)
• A box of Trader Joe’s “Creamy Corn and Roasted Pepper Soup”.  It has been sitting in my closet for about half a month, and I was looking to add creaminess, and maybe that would do it.
• Dried fennel, tarragon, arbol peppers, salt, and black pepper, all ground together
• Olive oil and butter
• A small amount of corn starch

I carefully followed the directions of sauteing the onion, leek, and garlic in the pot before making the soup.  Of course, I use so many ingredients, that this filled the pot up about two inches!  Giving them a little time to cook (almost ten minutes, which Alicia thought would be too long), I added the zucchini, which filled the pot to about half!  Well, those zuchinni are never going to saute like that, but I like my veggies crunchy, so that’s fine by me.  I added some water and took some of the zucchinis (and some of the broccoli stems too) to the blender, and pureed enough to make the broth green.

At this point I realized I forgot to acquire cream.  I debated using milk, when I found the box of soup in the closet.  I know it is the highest form of cheating, but I really don’t care, and dumped the entire contents of the box in the pot.  I’m not sure if the box of soup has cream in it, but it is a perfect smooth creamy consistency which went far in the soup.

I also found I had no flour, according to the recipe.  I put a little corn starch in it–I wanted the thickening effect, but I really don’t like corn starch, it has a flavor that makes me think of hot and sour soups.  I basically put in so little it did nothing, and gave up looking for thickeners.

I realized at this point there isn’t much in there that really needs to cook, so I waited for it to warm and put all the spices in a grinder and hit the grindy button.  Here the fennel really came out–the tarragon I could have left out, but the fennel gave it a really nice smell.

This was a really tasty soup.  However, there was an interesting effect between when it was hot, and how it was the next day–fresh from the pot, it was almost too spicy, and seemed to need salt, which I alleviated by putting lots of saltine crackers in it.  The next day, the salt ratio seemed perfect, but I added tabasco to get the heat back.  I’m not sure what caused this effect.