You're Making a Mess!

Now is by far the best time of the season (at least in Illinois) for the farmers’ markets. Among the fresh berries, tomatoes (that’s another post!) and apples are some really amazing sweet peppers. Red, green and yellow bell peppers are actually the same plant (a cultivar of Capsicum annuum),  chosen at different stages of ripening for different colors and flavors.

Bell peppers go well with a variety of foods, like sausage, tomato sauce and ground beef, but my favorite is pairing them with fresh goat cheese. The earthy sweetness of the pepper (particularly red) complements the tanginess of the goat cheese perfectly, and gives a great depth to pastas, sandwiches and pizzas. Last weekend, I returned from our local farmers’ market with about a half dozen peppers in several colors, and got to work. I roasted them over a charcoal grill until the skins were blackened, and then set them in a bowl covered with shrink wrap for about 5 minutes to loosen the skin. If you don’t have access to a grill, try roasting them in an oven or broiler, turning the peppers every few minutes so the skin is evenly charred.After peeling them, I sliced the flesh into strips, saving most of it for later.

The remaining parts I layered on top of toast spread with a thin layer of goat cheese and a twist of freshly ground pepper. I then piled on some carmelized onions and grilled chicken, popped in between the plates of my panini press, and out came a delicious, summery sandwich.

The rest of the peppers were used over the next few days on a pizza and another sandwich. There are a thousand uses for roasted sweet peppers, and they keep in the fridge for about 5 days.

If you’ve been cooking and sprinkling regular grocery store-bought cinnamon on your oatmeal since you were a kid, do yourself a favor and find some “True” Ceylon cinnamon. It’s lighter in color than what most Americans are used to (which is actually Cassia, a separate bark) and has a much more subtle, mellow flavor with less “spice”. It adds a subtle, but definitely noticeable and new complexity when sprinkled on breakfasts or added to desserts without overpowering the dish itself.

Clockwise from top: tomato cucumber salad, hummus, curried grains, and chicken shawarma

I first started cooking Middle Eastern food a few years ago during a few weeks when I decided to see what it would be like to go completely vegan. I ended up doing a lot of falafel sandwiches with tahini sauce and tomato cucumber salad, since they were about the most delicious non-animal food I could find. The veganism didn’t stick (it wasn’t meant to — just an experiment), but some of the recipes I made during the time got incorporated into the regular rotation. Baba ghanouj (eggplant dip), hummus and falafel were relatively easy (although I’m still perfecting the recipes), but I never could figure out a good way to recreate the crispiness and flavor of shawarma in my small apartment, devoid of any huge vertical rotisseries.
read more »

In Illinois, asparagus is in season, so every farmer’s market is overflowing with fresh, purplish green stalks. I love it grilled in the summer, but was looking to mix it up tonight and use some other ingredients I had on hand. I ended up making rotini with chicken and a grilled asparagus tomato sauce finished with goat cheese. Browned butter and garlic added a nice complexity that was really well balanced out by the tanginess of the tomatoes and goat cheese. It was definitely a keeper.

I wanted to keep the sauce simple, and let the fresh ingredients stand out. I started by sauteeing two cloves of garlic in just under a tablespoon of butter. Once it browned, I added in a can of diced tomatoes (use fresh if they’re in season, but use canned if the only tomatoes you can get at the store are a dull orange color — canned tomatoes are ripened on the vined and then canned, so they paradoxically have a much fresher flavor than greenhouse tomatoes). I let a bit of the liquid cook out for a minute or two, then added some fresh basil and turned the heat off. Fresh basil makes a huge difference — you could use dried, but you won’t get the same flavor.
read more »

Ratatouille is French for “stew made of all the vegetables that you have in your refrigerator” (I think, but don’t quote me). Traditionally, it’s made with eggplants, onions, tomatoes, garlic, zucchini, bell peppers, carrots and spices like bay, basil, oregano and marjoram. With that many ingredients, its more than open to improvising, especially when you have a refrigerator full of veggies that you’d like to use up.

I found myself last week staring at a few eggplants, onions and zucchini threatening to go bad in my crisper drawer. I also had a bunch of pre-cooked whole grains (barley, wheat berries and rice) that were looking for an interesting complement. Bam! Ratatouille seemed like the perfect solution to my dinner quandry.
read more »

As summer rolls around, I’ll be on the lookout for particularly interesting cold drinks to make and keep in my fridge. I stumbled on Rick Bayless’ recipe (via the Homesick Texan blog) for horchata recently, and since I’m a sucker for the vanilla-almond-rice creaminess of the drink, I gave it a try. What really sets this recipe apart from other horchata I’ve had is the refreshing kick that the lime adds. It’s not at all overpowering, but adds an unexpected and interesting citrus note to the aftertaste.

Left to right: powdered rice, almond skins, blanched almonds

read more »

I saved some salmon we pan-seared last night for breakfast this morning to make salmon and eggs. I love salmon for breakfast (particularly the smoked kind), and it goes very well with eggs. I started by putting a bit of white truffle oil in a non-stick pan and then cracking eggs directly into the hot pan, which I prefer to mixing the eggs beforehand in the traditional scrambled-egg way. After the eggs were mostly cooked, I added some grated swiss cheese and finally, the salmon.

Since the salmon was already mostly cooked and I didn’t want to cook it more, I purposely left it until last. Finally, I sprinkled a bit of dill on top and breakfast was ready. Total time: 10 minutes.

Next time, it would be pretty good to add asparagus and serve on brioche. You could also do Hollandaise and have an awesome salmon Benedict.

I’ll admit — this one was kind of a fun experiment for me. My friend Brian was talking about some healthy cookies he made the other day that involved banana, and I figured since I’ve had a banana in the freezer for the past 2 months, I’d give the cookies a shot. I looked a few places for recipes, but they all seemed dubiously “healthy”, and I wanted something lightly sweet that went well as a breakfast or with some tea.

So I took a stab at throwing together some ingredients in my own recipe. I started by softening all the butter I had in the fridge, which was about 3 tablespoons, and creaming it with some rock-hard brown sugar from the pantry. I had to use a food processor since the beater didn’t play well with the hardened brown rocks, but then beat it as usual with the butter. To this I added the now-thawed, previously frozen banana (which has a vastly different texture than a never-frozen banana). The water in the banana didn’t mix with the fat in the butter, so I added an egg to act as an emulsifier and continued mixing.
read more »

There are some things that you buy and immediately find a thousand uses for. I first picked up a few white cotton flour sacks when I was making Mark Bittman’s [now famous] No-Knead bread. The recipe called for a “lint-free towel”, and my first attempts with a dishcloth left me with a thoroughly unusable piece of fabric covered with sticky dough. Not even a wash could take out the remnants of my foray into breadmaking, since all the fibers grabbed onto the sticky flour and didn’t let go.

The flour sack worked much better. With a tight weave and no lint (and a healthy coating of cornmeal), my dough didn’t stand a chance. But I soon found myself reaching for the flour sacks for more than just breadmaking — they were remarkably good strainers, dish towels, cast-iron cleaners, vegetable wringers and more. I made Greek yogurt by rigging up a towel rubber-banded over a plastic container and draining off the whey, dried spinach by squeezing the water out, and cleaned my frying pan without leaving bits of lint all over the place. They’re soft and durable, and take many washes (and bleaches if you like) without coming apart.

A lot of kitchen equipment is single, infrequent use, and expensive. At $1 or less apiece, I buy them a dozen at a time from Amazon, and always have clean ones at hand.

Today’s concoction was tabouli. I didn’t set out to make it — while it’s good, it isn’t necessarily a dish that stands on it’s own or something I want to eat all week. However, it happened to fit the bill since I had on hand a bunch of parsley from my ceviche. I picked up some tomatoes and wheat bulgur, and was on my way. Wheat bulgur is ground whole wheat that has been parboiled to make it fast-cooking, and it’s used in many Mediterranean dishes like this one.

I started with this recipe from Epicurious , since it seemed pretty straight forward and called for stuff I already had. I had to add a bit more than the called-for amount of lemon juice, since my bulgur wasn’t getting soft enough, but other than that, it worked well. The olive oil doesn’t overpower the dish, which is a problem I’ve had in other versions. Overall it came out really well, and I’ll eat it for lunch a few days this week, topped with some feta and maybe some black olives.

Next time, this recipe looks pretty interesting — uses more herbs, including dill and basil, which probably add some other interesting flavor components.

Edit: I had the tabouli today for lunch, on top of some cooked grains (barley and wheat berries) with some feta on top. It made a great salad and I’ll definitely make it again.

Side note: I’m also learning as I go how to take good pictures of food. This picture clearly has way too shallow of a depth-of-field, so next time I’ll go with a narrower aperture to bring more of the dish into focus.