Purple Broccoli

My broccoli turned purple. I googled this surprising discovery and was surprised to discover that some broccoli is purple. Mine is a bit old, so I don't think it's supposed to be purple. If anyone knows a good private detective to investigate this, please let me know.

Update: I cooked it. I'm now not sure if it's purple or brown. Either way, it was fine.

Red Bean Love

This why you should always have canned red beans, cooked brown rice, and frozen onion and bell pepper on hand. And half a tablespoon of honey, for the very end.

Cheap, healthy, and out-of-this-world-delicious. All hail broccoli Gavroche!

Recipe for red beans, Cuban style: saute garlic and onion and green pepper for a few minutes.

Typical sensationalist story-telling Cubans masquerading as Italians! The nerve!

Then add tomato sauce and oregano; after a few minutes add beans and a bay leaf or too. Cook for 45-450 minutes, adding more water if things dry out. Add a little bit (about 1/2-1 tbsp) of honey after you turn the heat off and stir well. Serve hot (or cold to college students) over brown rice. Make lots and lots and lots or they will disappear insantly.

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.

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.

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.

Holiday Pasta Estate

It's all about being colorful. (Studies have shown that food that is colorful and messy tastes better.)

Pasta Estate

Saute garlic in olive oil until fragarant; don't let it brown. Add chopped zucchini (half half-moons), yellow and red bell peppers (you could use green, but that wouldn't be adding new colors now, would it?!), and broccoli. The veggies should be cut up pretty small and should all be roughly the same size. It's a good idea to add the zucchini first and the others 3-5 minutes later since the zucchini might take longer to cook. Add water to keep things from burning, and whatever spices you like (we used basil, oregano, and black pepper). After the veggies are deemed to be done, toss them with your freshly cooked pasta, a chopped tomato, a splash of olive oil, and a very generous drizzle of red wine. Sprinkle with Romano cheese.

P.S. Tonight I cooked some dried black beans, this time not soaking them for 30 hours in a hot apartment.... Stay tuned for what they become!

the cuties after being soaked, before being cooked

Friday Night Experiments

What are weekends for? Extra time for kitchen experiments! I'm still in search of the perfect pasta sauce. Tonight it might have happened if someone had reminded me to buy dry basil. The other reason I have to go shopping again is that somehow I bought CRAP olive oil - I tasted a small spoon of it and then a bit of another bottle's oil and the one I bought today (because it was cheaper...) tasted relatively tasteless. Very sad. Horray for more shopping! If only I were in Italy and could buy olive oil at the farmers' market tomorrow!!!

In happier news, the tomatoes were the best store-bought tomatoes I've ever had. I was skeptical at first because the package said they'd been packaged more than a week ago, and they came from Arizona. Tomatoes from Arizona? I stand corrected. They tasted like I had actually picked them off the vine in my backyard!

Experiments today involved sherry for the first time. I took a tiny spoonful of it too and found it surprisingly strong and sweet; moreover I wished I had white wine because my extreme lack of knowledge about wine says white wine would be better.

The tomato sauce ended up being very light - good for summer but disappointing (everyone else who tasted it was impressed) because of the lack of spices. There was a blending basil win, however. And I am getting better at mincing garlic :). I had to suck it up and buy a $4 pound of peeled garlic because peeling garlic requires turning off the fan (or the paper blows everywhere) and turning off the fan isn't really an option.

Recipes:

Nice light summery tomato sauce: Saute minced garlic (I think I used seven cloves) in extra virgin olive oil for a few minutes, then add half a medium-sized onion. Cook for a few minutes and then add the tomatoes. Cook for 5-10 minutes then turn off the heat, put about half the tomatoes in the blender, and add the tomato puree back to the pan. Turn the heat back on and add 1/4 tsp oregano, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, and a few turns of the black pepper grinder. I made the mistake of dumping in a bit of cooking sherry which made the sauce too sweet in my opinion (a friend said she one of the the things she liked about it was that it wasn't too sweet, so just adjust to you taste). After a few minutes of heavy boiling to reduce the sauce, I put a bunch back in the blender on a higher speed because the sauce was still too thin. (In the end it was always too thin; I think tomato paste intervention might be necessary.) During the second blending, I added five large (as in 4"!) fresh basil leaves to the tomato sauce in the blender. Next time: No onion, more garlic, loooooots more basil, no sherry, and back to the tried and true 3 tbsp. dried basil and 1 tbsp. dried oregano.

QuinoaSherryBroccoli Experiment: Saute minced garlic in extra virgin olive oil, then add small pieces of cooked (or almost cooked) broccoli florets (you get to eat the stems while you cook - don't throw them out!) and a generous unmeasured amount of cooking sherry. Watch sadly as it immediately evaporates. Add more sherry, turn off the heat, and continue talking with hungry friend while sherry soaks in. Turn heat back on, on LOW, and stir while everything gently cooks. When the voices in your head say so, add cooked quinoa. I probably used about 1.5 cups, but I didn't measure. Use however much is appropriate for the amount of broccoli you used slash however much is appropriate for the number of people you are trying to feed slash however much is appropriate for how hungry people are. Stir and cook for a few minutes to let the flavors marry and get nice and warm and happy. Feed to your hungry friend. Hungry friend will be impressed. :) Kudos to my sleepy brain for this fantastic idea. Next time: use another kind of wine. Donors, anyone?

P.S. While you cook: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ige8G7qpEF8