Untitled Improvisations

Here are two delicious fast things to do with a saute pan. They're somewhere between risotto and stir-fry, and have infinite flexibility. The 28th and 29th saw improvisational cooking at its best.

Day 1:

Saute some of the minced garlic in olive oil until fragrant, then add chicken. Cook until just brown on the outside and set aside. Saute more minced garlic, then chopped onion, carrot, and celery (about a cup each?) and saute some moe. Without adding water, add about 1 c chopped tomatoes and boil with 1 tsp oregano, dried basil, rosemary, thyme, and a bit of black pepper.

Add chicken and rice (how much depends on how many veggies you use). Cook, stirring often, until the chicken is cooked through and everything is nice and hot and well blended. Serve with heavy whole wheat bread. :)

(Sorry it's a crappy picture; the flash was misbehaving and I was hungry!)

Day 2:

Brown the chicken in sauted minced garlic like day 1, but with the addition of Famous Dave's Country Roast Chicken Seasoning. Remove, add more olive oil and minced garlic to the pan, and saute the already cooked broccoli for a minute, then add cooked brown rice and browned chicken to the pan. In lieu of canned cream of whatever soup, I added a 1/4 c (skim) milk and about 3/4 c grated cheese (mostly cheddar, but also some romano to use it up), and lots more of the chicken seasoning.

(Easy, efficient way to grate cheese. These guys are infinity times better than the box kind.)

(This guy reminds me of  Gavroche singing "Little People" from Les Mis)

Cook, stirring often, until the chicken is cooked through and everything is nice and hot and well blended to creamy deliciousness.

Because It Wasn't Hot Enough

The plan was to make bread on the weekends. Oops.

This time, having conferred with a professional bread baking person, things worked much better. I used less water, and therefore less flour, slightly less yeast, and baked the bread at 400 instead of 350. I also kneaded it less, because 20 minutes, besides being REALLY hard sweaty work, might have been overdoing it. Most exciting, I finally got loaf pans! The loaf wasn't as *big* as I wanted, but I can attribute this to the size of the recipe since it was the perfect consistency.

And because of the loaf pans (I think having direct metal contact makes a difference) and the increased temperature, it was darker than before. So pretty!

And then, since the apartment wasn't hot enough, I decided the time had come to make granola! (Since I sillyily mistook granola for granola bars, that'll be happening soon too. Stay tuned!) Here's the mountain of granola; it reminds me of Vesuvius, in, maybe, 78 A.D.

Here's the recipe. As with most things, it's my rendition of a recipe I found somewhere among teh interwebs.

in bowl:
2 c rolled oats
1/2 c wheat bran (actually a bit more)
1/2 c wheat germ (actually a bit less)
1/3 c sunflower seeds (this was too much!)
1/3 c sliced almonds
3/4 tsp cinnamon (could be more)
1/2 tsp salt (probably unnecessary)

in pan:
3 tsp brown sugar
3 tsp water
2 tbsp butter
1/4 c honey

boil syrup, pour over dry stuff
spread in greased jelly roll pan and bake at 350 for 25? minutes

In the future, I'm going to try using a combination of applesauce and/or mashed banana instead of the oil.

I eat it as cereal, but you can also mix it with cottage cheese, yogurt, or make parfait!

Also pretty!

Bruschetta & Roasted Zucchini (& Heavy Pasta Estate)

Lesson learned: bell pepper has a nasty way of taking over everything. And unless you're prepared to use too much oil and salt, let the zucchini stay out of pasta. Actually, I think tonight taught me that I should stop trying to put things in pasta besides spices. (I was pretty disappointed with the pasta, so someone please come eat the leftovers for me! If you want to know what I did, leave a comment.) At least I can make food look dang good!

The proper way to prepare zucchini (imho) is as follows: wash zucchini, slice 1/4 slices, place in bowl big enough you can comfortably stir them, with olive oil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Put on greased cookie sheet and roast at 450-475 for 10-15 minutes (but watch them in case your oven is different). Devour.

The tomatoes in the photo are the only decent store-bought tomatoes around. They come from Arizona but somehow taste exactly like they're freshly picked from the backyard. They're absolutely mind-blowing. So was the bruschetta I made with them, superfruity olive oil, fresh garlic, and the basil my plant donated:

(I dried out my leftover Italian bread with the zucchini I roasted, it got reaaally dry. The tomatoes softened it up perfectly however, and it was interesting rubbing the garlic cloves (I cut them in half first to use the inside of the cloves) on the very dry bread because the bread was so hard it was like rubbing garlic on a cheese grater. Now I know the best way to make really legit garlic bread!

Bruschetta recipe:
Slice bread, put plain bread on ungreased cookie sheet and bake/roast at 450ish for 10-15ish minutes. When cool enough to touch, paint with superfruity olive oil with a pastry brush (or your fingers). I put the olive oil in a small dish to make it more accessible and to avoid having to pour it (because I would accidentally pour too much). Then scrap bread to taste with the cut side of a (crushed) garlic clove, and top with tomato basil mixture. (Tomato basil mixture = roughly chopped tomatoes, torn fresh basil leaves, s&p&olive oil to taste, refridgerated for a while to marry flavors (I actually used the the freezer to cool it faster). Keep away from you roommates unless you want it all gone very quickly!

Hummus & Veggie Sandwhich

It was the perfect Sunday lunch. It was also the messiest sandwich I have eaten in my entire life. (Not that I let that keep me from reading while I ate it!) It also reaffirmed my belief that the key to the perfect hummus & veggie sandwich is hot hummus on crusty bread. If your bread isn't crusty and your hummus isn't hot, just put the whole thing in a panini press, which will make it also compressed enough to not break your jaw eating it.

I used the Italian bread because I was out of wheat (I'm supposed to make more this afternoon but am getting tired of being sweaty...) and stuck it in a 500 degree oven for 5-7 minutes to try to toast a bit. Next time I'm toasting it with olive oil in a frying pan (like how you make grilled cheese) and hopefully that'll work better. In assembly, you use the hummus to hold down the garlic sprouts and shredded (I gleefully recently discovered how well the big round holes on the cheese grater work for shredding baby carrots!) carrots. Then you sandwich the tomato slices in the lettuce to keep them from soggifying the bread. I recommend making this kind over overstuffed un-panini-pressed sandwich with fresh, strong bread that won't fall apart.

Just like I wanted to say last week that there's nothing like cleaning up the homemade sauce on your plate with homemade bread, there's REALLY nothing like a hummus and veggie sandwich on homemade bread, with homemade hummus, and homegrown veggies. Someone please make my tomato plants hurry up!

Ice Cream Cake Roll!

So many adventures! This weekend we politely declined the forest preserves' invitations to bike in them because they refused to air condition themselves, so since we didn't get to get soaked biking, I decided we should have an adventure of a different sort.

Making a cake roll was something I'd been wanting to try for a while, and it was easier than I expected. Also messy. But messy food is always more delicious.

You start by making the recipe for the Hershey's Holiday Chocolate Cake (do not use another recipe; we have already verified this is by far the best!): 1.75 c flour, 0.75 c cocoa, 2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt, 0.25 c vegetable oil, 0.2 c unsweetened applesauce, 2 c sugar (sorry), 2 egg whites, 2 tsp real vanilla, 1 c buttermilk or sour milk (1 tbsp vinegar than milk to 1 cup), and 1 cup black coffee (we use Cuban espresso :)). Bake it for 15-20 minutes at 350 in a jelly roll pan. Don't forget to line the pan in greased wax paper so you don't have to do major archeology to get it out like I did....

When it's done, turn it out on an old but clean kitchen towel. Roll it up.

Dye your ice cream crazy colors, stirring well to make sure it's soft enough to spread. (I know a guy who loves stirring, if you need help.) Unroll the cake, spread the ice cream, and take pictures if you want bragging rights of the messiest cake. Sadly, things were very, very melty and we only had time for three colors. Who knew that ice cream takes so much food coloring!?

Then the hard part: roll it up. (Well it's only hard if you care about it looking nice, which we didn't, because, again, the messier, the more delicious!) We had to chill it in the freezer for 20-30 minutes so the ice cream didn't try to escape when we began rolling. Eventually, we sort of conquered it.

Chill (if you can wait), slice, and serve! Hopefully your cake came out of the pan in one piece, wasn't as broken as ours, and was therefore an actual spiral.

Be forewarned that this is an extremely rich dessert, so don't feel bad about giving up eating it and having to send it all to me! :)

P.S. Here's why you should use an old towel. It's easy to eat the cake off it, but the food coloring is another story. Sorry, Mom!

Taco Salad

In some ways, taco salad is even more fabulous than stir fry. Unless you make your own refried beans, which is easy and fast, it involves only a bit of knife work and some washing of vegetables. Tonight's included red leaf lettuce, tomatoes, scallions, corn off the cob, onion sprouts, cheddar cheese, refried beans, and a small handful of tortilla chips. It was definitely fit for a payday celebration!

Chicken Debut

Stir fry is fantastic for lots of reasons, all of which I'm too hot to write about right now. Tonight's was an epic success, taste-wise and protein-wise. It went like this.

1. Saute trimmed chicken in 1.5 tbsp olive oil until it's done on the outside. Remove to plate that can't absorb chicken germs.
2. Saute minced garlic until fragrant. (You can can turn up the heat after adding the veggies because you no longer have to worry about smoking the olive oil.) Then add chopped broccoil, onion sprouts, scallions, and carrots until half done. (The broccoil should be half cooked. The easiest way to do this is to cut and wash it, and put it in a ceramic bowl with a cup or two of water and microwave on high for ~2-3 mins. It doesn't need a cover. Take it out with a hot pad, pour off most of the water, and add to sizzling veggies in more olive oil.) Add a tablespoon or three of water.

3. To veggies, add 0.5 tbsp peanut butter and 0.5 tsp salt.
4. When veggies are half done, add back chicken and stir lots more.
5. When cutting through the thickest piece of chicken reveals it to be done, add cooked bulgar and mix well. Serve piping hot.

Lessons:
1. Scallions and sprouts cook down a TON. Add extra.
2. Next time exchange carrots for onions. The Pteph, you knew you don't like cooked carrots, so why did you put them in?
3. The bulgar should be added before serving, to warm it up, break up the chunks, and integrate everything better.

Roast Pepper Adventure

Well all adventures can't be delicious. It was interesting though!

It started well enough. Put oil on pepper, put pepper in 500-degree oven. (Break rule about not using olive oil because its smoke point is too low, ignore advice. Also try to ignore the absence of a normal broiler flame and hope that it won't matter.)

Sit forward and enjoy the show. Listen to the pepper pop and sing and dance around the cookie sheet. Giggle amusedly when it slides around in its oil and ends up in the far corner of the cookie sheet. Sweat too much to worry. Turn off the oven when the pepper begins to blacken, and forget about it. Cook dinner, complain about the heat, sweat some more. Prepare for bed.

Right before turning off the lights, remember there's a roasted pepper in the oven. Well, there's supposed to be one in the oven. Feel silly for ignoring the many recent lessons to follow recipes and instructions when doing something for the first time.

Take pictures to send to the insurance company. Document the innards as well, just in case.

At least I only collapsed a pepper, not an economy!

Hummus

I finally made hummus! Here's to many yummy hummus & veggie sandwiches, oh and, following recipes when you're making something for the first time.

I used the recipe that had 835 reviews, and 25.3k saves on allrecipes.com. It called for 2 c drained garbanzos, 0.33 c tahini, 0.25 c lemon juice, 1 tsp salt, 2 cloves of garlic, and 1 tbsp olive oil. For the tanini, lemon juice, and garlic, use less to start; it's always easier to add than to subtract. I learned the hard way that tahini is bitter, and added up adding a pinch of sugar to fix things.

One Hot Night (Part 2 - Pasta & Successful Sauce)

 (Isn't it cute! And the knife is my one and only - it can do anything!)

I caught another culprit. (The onion has been behind bars in the sauce-making sense, so we needed some excitement.) The culprit this time is the tomatoes. I am sadly resolving to stop making pasta with fresh tomatoes, because the tomatoes aren't near flavorfull enough. This time I just sauted a bunch of minced garlic in olive oil and dumped in a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes (I was expecting crushed tomatoes to be analogous to crushed garlic, and was wrong. Now what I need is someone to explain the difference between crushed and purred tomatoes). I added about 2 tbsp of dried basil and 1/2 tbsp dried oregano. Finally my faith in my ability to make Italian food was restored.

And the leftover bread I made last week? Perfetto per facendo la scarpetta!

Fatto!

One Hot Night (Part 1 - Bread)

They say it tastes better if you have to fight for it. Let's add, or sweat your brains out for it. I was perfectly justified in skipping the gym the next day (especially after biking 40 miles over the course of the weekend, getting happily soaked)!

Even though the temperature outside was having a race with the temperature in the oven (thankfully it never quite caught up!), not having sandwich bread is not really acceptable. While I was at it, I decided to make a loaf of white Italian bread to eat with pasta. It took a lot of self-restraint to not put in all sorts of extra healthy stuff like I do for the "normal" bread. I found a very simple recipe (2.33 c flour, 1 c water, 1 tsp yeast, 1 tsp salt, 0.25 tsp sugar) online and added a few tablespoons of dried basil to the dough. Here it is being slathered with olive oil before the first rise:

It rose like crazy. Here's before and after being punched down:

It went crazy again during the second rise:

(It rises under a wet towel so the outside doesn't dry out. The oil on the pan is to keep it from sticking and to give it a golden bottom.)

(It also sprouted dried basil on top! How did that happen!?)

One of the great things about finding recipes online is you get the added wisdom of the commenters. I learned this way to take the bread out of the oven (no happy feat, considering it was 450!) every two minutes for the first 10 minutes of cooking to add water. This colors the crust and also keeps it from forming too soon, and reducing oven spring. At first I didn't think it was working and almost gave up, but the crust came out beautifully rustic.

I was even more speechless tasting it than looking at it!

P.S. I also made a loaf of my hearty whole wheat bread for sandwiches. After kneading it, the Italian bread was practically zero effort to knead; I had never kneaded bread so white so I didn't know what a big difference all the whole wheat flour, bran, flaxseed, etc. has on the toughness of the dough. I love the smell, color, and texture of the dough ball.

(In the lower left corner, you can see the strands of gluten. The finished bread was full of them. Anyone know what that means? I'm wondering if it could have risen more - it was extremely dense, but yummy and filling!

Bulgar Half-Stir-Fry

When the clock struck 10 on a Friday night, what more natural thing is there to do than dig some veggies out of the fridge, and make bulgar half-stir-fry? It's super simple, delicious, and nutritious. And provided you already have the bulgar cooked, and the broccoli at least half cooked, it only takes about ten minutes.

First saute minced garlic in a tablespoon of not-too-hot olive oil. When it's about to start browning, dump in a cup or so of chopped scallions and roughly the same amount of broccoli, cut pretty small. Add your leftover bulgar, a sprinkle of salt, a tsp of peanut butter, and about a third cup of water. Stir it up until it's the desired dryness and temperature.

Triple-Type Pizza

It looked better than it tasted. It was a lesson in why not to put raw tomatoes directly on the crust: sog city (the drizzled olive oil didn't help either). The olive oil I used to grease the pan, since I didn't have cornmeal, did however make the crust nicely crispy. It was still too thick, despite the absence of leavening.

The crust was simply 1.5 c whole wheat flour, maybe 1/2 (unmeasured) salt, a generous (maybe 1 tbsp) honey, and about 0.75 c water. I kneaded it just to mix it more easily and to work in a bit more flour.

Then I slathered the cookie sheet with olive oil, spread the crust, and slathered it with oil. Then on went a layer of tomatoes (part of the problem with this pizza was also that the tomatoes hardly tasted like anything; thank goodness my flight for Italy leaves tomorrow!), three columns of toppings: basil, broccoli, and diced yellow pepper (see top picture), and about seven cloves of garlic, minced (I really prefer garlic powder but I refuse to use the garlic salt thingy in the cabinet). Then knife-shredded Cheddar and Romano cheeses, a hearty dose of freshly ground black pepper, oregano, and dried basil, and finally another (bad idea) drizzle of olive oil. I baked it at maybe 450 for about 15 minutes.

At least it was pretty.