Crockpot Black Beans

I loves a good bean recipe.  I served this the first night as our main dish with salad and bread (cornbread would have been an excellent accompaniment, but alas was not meant to be that night).  I served the leftovers (and there will be a lot unless you're feeding a small army or a couple of teenage boys) as taco filling the next night.

Even though these beans cook all day in a crockpot, you still need to presoak them.  Depending on what kind of schedule you have, that might mean soaking overnight (to put in the crockpot in the morning), through a whole day (to prep in the evening for the next day's crockpotting) or doing the boil-two-minutes-then-cover-and-soak-one-hour thing.

Crockpots keep food very moist, so be sure not to add too much stock, otherwise you'll have bean soup instead of beans.  Add stock until just before the beans would be totally covered; you should still see little lumpy-bumps of beanage peeking through the surface of the liquid.

Crockpot Black Beans
Makes 8-10 servings

1 lb. black beans, soaked several hours or quick-soaked and drained
2 tbsp oil
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 mild pepper such as anaheim or poblano, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 tsp seasoning salt
1 bay leaf
1 14 oz can crushed tomatoes
2 tbsp lime juice
4-5 cups vegetable or chicken broth

Prepare beans.  Heat oil in a skillet and saute onions, garlic, peppers and seasonings 5-10 minutes until soft.  Stir in remaining ingredients, except for broth.  Fridge or freeze, if desired (as a scheduling note, you could do the sauteing the night before Crockpot Day and start soaking the beans at the same time; the next morning mix it all together in the crockpot).

On Crockpot Day, put the onion-bean-tomato mix in the crockpot (still frozen is OK).  Add stock to barely cover the beans.  Cook on low 8-10 hours.


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Zucchini "pizza" slices

Oh my goodness, these were tasty!  They were the "light entree" at our meal with hearty grain and veggie side dishes, or I could see making these as snacks for the kids too (and yes, the kids ate them up!).  I can also imagine using other pizza toppings like mini pepperoni, sliced olives and other veggies as well as the tomatoes.

You could preroast the veggies and prep the "pizza" in advance and only have to do the final stage of baking at dinnertime.  You might need to bake a few minutes longer if you have a straight-from-the-fridge, cold, prepped baking sheet to get the cheese good and melty.

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Fettucine with (vegan) White Pesto

Oh my, this is my 300th post!

One of my pet peeves about special diet (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, sugar-free, whatever) cooking is the convention of naming a recipe after a foodstuff that it kinda sorta resembles if you pinch your nose and squint real hard while you eat (e.g. Mock Sausage, Sugar-Free Caramel, Scrambled You-Won't-Believe-They-Aren't-Eggs, and all those plant-based "cheeze" sauces out there).

C'mon (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, sugar-free, whatever) folks...you know these are tasty recipes that stand on their own without trying to stand on the shoulders of a "missing" ingredient.  The practice reeks of an inferiority complex and besides, you're inevitably setting your dining companions up for failed expectations if you tell them you will be serving something like is *almost* like sausage/cheese/eggs/etc. but isn't.

This is one such recipe.  It's from Christian Pirello of Christina Cooks and she calls it Vegan Fettucine Alfredo.  Actual alfredo sauce is buttered heavy cream, cooked down until it's super-thick and finished with fistfuls of parmesan cheese.  It's a heart attack in a pot.

This heart-healthier, plant-based "fettucine alfredo" is really NOTHING like real fettucine alfredo.  My husband made the snooty-face when he first tasted it because he was expecting something alfredo-y.

What it IS is awfully darn good once you get around that misnomer.  Once he got over his "this isn't alfredo" reaction, my husband loved it (ofc he did sprinkle some parmesan cheese on top of his, because pasta just isn't pasta until there's a flurry of parmesan on top in his world).

What the recipe IS is a white pesto...the only difference between this dish and a "true" white pesto is the relatively small amount of parmesan cheese which is understudied in the vegan production by miso paste.  No need to pretend like it's alfredo...it's pesto!

My one serious deviation from her recipe (aside from changing the name) is to omit sweetener.  I'm not quite sure why, but she feels the need to put brown rice syrup in everything.  This dish doesn't need it.

Lastly, the pesto (as with all pestos) can be made in advance and frozen. Just thaw it and add it to cooked pasta.

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Shakshuka

I've seen and made multiple versions of the eggs-poached-in-chunky-sauce meal...one with a bed of sauteed spinach and mushrooms, another with caramelized shallots and a marsala-beef consomme reduction, among others.  This one is a recipe from the cookbook Jerusalem by Ottolenghi that uses a stovetop-simmered pepper-tomato sauce as the poaching bed.  A similar sauce that would probably also work well for cooking eggs this way is this roasted red pepper sauce.

The original recipe calls for harissa, a super-spicy pepper paste, that I don't have on hand.  I used some minced jalapeno and ginger from my freezer stash to bring a little heat and depth of flavor to the sauce.  If you like things hotter, use more or hunt down some harissa.

To chop your pepper finely enough for this dish, I highly recommend using the food processor.  Pulse quickly and stop short of pureeing them.  If you use canned tomatoes instead of fresh, drain them very well to shorten the cooking time needed to thicken the sauce.

I like how quickly the sauce went together and how well this recipe lends itself well to prepping ahead and freezing ahead.  You can chop all the ingredients for the sauce ahead of time and fridge them, or make the sauce completely in advance.  If you're going to freeze the sauce, you can even freeze it in individual portions for a quick meal-for-one.  Just bring the sauce back up to a simmer (from its frozen state even!), crack an egg into the sauce, cover and simmer 8-10 minutes.  Probably this thaw-and-poach process could even be managed in microwave...I don't know offhand how long to zap an egg to poach it, but if you do, let me know!

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Creole Risotto and How Your Christmas Lights Help You Prep Ahead

Finished dish with chicken and peas

I have a new cookbook (my Mother's Day gift to myself)!  It's a vintage cookbook called Scientific Cooking with Scientific Methods by Sarah E. Woodworth Craig, published in 1911 by Ellis Publishing Co (Battle Creek, MI).

It's chock-full of adverts for Vonnegut Hardware in Indianapolis (yes, *that* Vonnegut, though Vonnegut grandpère rather than Vonnegut grand-fils) and "scientific" culinary gems like, "Brain workers want to take easily digested foods, such as eggs, fish, etc. The laborer needs quantity, and can eat of corned beef, cabbage, corn bread and brown bread, and not overtax his digestion..."

As always, I wonder what of our current "known scientific truths" will seem quaint and outmoded in a few decades.

Outmoded though their musings on digestion are, I LOVE recipes from the pre-processed foods era.  In this instance, I'm combining one of the recipes with a previous Mother's Day gift (my rice cooker) and streamlining the recipe.

Rice cooker in foreground,
Christmas lights timer in background

I've been really into using my rice cooker lately as a prep-ahead tool in combination with...wait for it...my Christmas light timer.  Most rice recipes (the vegetarian ones) can sit out at room temp for a few hours before cooking without ill effects, but really can't sit around on "warm" all day without getting burned.  Enter the timer...  Rice cookers will generally cook white rice in 15-20 minutes, plus a few minutes cool-down time or brown rice in about 45 minutes with the same cool-down period.  Count backwards from your preferred meal time, and set your timer to start at the appropriate time.  Don't forget to set the rice cooker itself to "cook" even though it won't be kicking on for awhile.

Now the recipe...the original recipe calls for making a sauce of onions, pepper, mushrooms, sherry and tomatoes separate from the rice.  I sauteed the veg, added a splash of wine and added all this to the rice cooking liquid.  I used all mushrooms rather than a mixture of onion/pepper/mushroom because that's what I had on hand.  Use more veggies, less veggies, whatever works for you.

Also, be sure to use all the liquid called for even if it doesn't seem to jive with the rice cooker's notion of appropriate rice-to-liquid ratio...the volume of the sauteed veggies throws things off.

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Pepperoni-spiced seitan & veg packets

This is one post that can be read for 2 distinct recipes...the first is a dinner-in-a-packet recipe that works for both vegetarian and carnivorous proteins, and the second is for a pretty darn tasty (and new to us) vegetarian protein called seitan.

Say what??  Seitan (it's pronounced say-tahn).  It's made from wheat gluten (which is wheat flour with most of the starch removed...I don't know how they do this, but you buy it in "specialty flours" part of your baking aisle) which is the proteiny part of the grain.  You combine it with some flavoring ingredients and liquid, then shape it and simmer it in broth or bake it to make a product that can be used as a vegetarian protein substitute in any number of ways.

I really like it for two reasons...1) the wheat gluten is a little pricey (about $7/lb.) but one bag makes several batches and it winds up being a very inexpensive vegetarian protein (only beans are cheaper), and 2) you can throw it together out of pantry and refrigerator staples (beans are also a good pantry staple, but I know a lot of folks don't care for beans...seitan is a toothy vegetarian protein in the vein of frozen tofu or tempeh).  It is also a soy-free vegetarian protein, if one wants to avoid soy.

Seitan takes some time to make in the first place...you either have to simmer it for an hour or so or bake it (my preferred method) for 60-90 minutes, depending on the exact recipe.  But you can make several batches at once and freeze them for future use.  A good basic (i.e. seitan with a pretty plain, versatile flavor profile) recipe can be found here (there's also a recipe for using vital wheat gluten as an egg-replacement binder in bean burgers on this site...that recipe is good too!)

I've used seitan in stirfries, either just plain cut-up or "velveted".  I've grilled slices of it after basting with barbecue sauce.  And I've made these packets with it.  I've also made the packets with actual sausage and they're good both ways. For the purposes of these packets, I like the following seitan recipe which mashes up this seitan recipe with the seasonings called for in the pepperoni recipe in Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie.

Something that is obvious in hindsight is that wheat gluten is what gives bread its structure as it rises.  I prefer baking seitan to simmering it and you need to make sure to keep the seitan dough compressed by wrapping it very well in foil to keep it dense and chewy.  At least two full wraps around with the ends twisted or folded off.  If you wrap it so the ends of the foil overlap by just a little bit, the seitan will rise (like bread), bust out of the foil, make a mess and lose the dense, toothy texture you're after.  I screw up so you don't have to.

Last note...seitan is often a vegan recipe.  The recipes above call for something called nutritional yeast to provide a salty umami depth of flavor and a hit of vitamin B12 in the absence of all animal-derived products.  I'm not particularly invested in keeping my seitan 100% vegan, so I use parmesan cheese (the kind out of a can) instead of nutritional yeast.  It's been working for me.  Also note, if you are cooking for a vegan, the velveting process uses egg whites and will be not be suitable.

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Green Tomato and Corn Soup

I had a boatload of green tomatoes at the end of the garden season this past fall. In the past I've done a variety of things with green tomatoes...pickles (meh), relish (meh), cake (yum but...) ...these just aren't dishes that move real well at my house.

The house favorite remains fried green tomatoes. You can slice, dredge and freeze green tomatoes for quick cooking later.  But at the time of our last garden harvest, I was 38 weeks pregnant and had ankles with the same diameter as my neck so I just didn't feel like doing it. I now have gallons of naked frozen green tomatoes that I still don't feel like dredging!

Some interwebs surfing turned up a suggestion to use green tomatoes in soup. This is my all-green-tomato version of what I found.  It is going on our menu until our green tomatoes are used up, and into next year once our garden starts producing tomatoes.

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Easy-easier-easiest: Cauliflower

Cauliflower can be a messy vegetable to prep.  I find the least untidy way to deal with it is to break the green leaves off by hand, then cut the whole head in half down the center, then cut the core and stem out in a U-shape.  Break large florets into bite-size pieces. 

I'm not crazy about raw cauli, but my son adores it.  To each their own.  Here are my favorite ways to prepare it.  As always, roasting tops the list because the cauli simply turns into a different creature under the influence of the Maillard reaction.  You really do need fresh cauliflower for this one.

Pureed cauli is very hip among the low-carb crowd, but the addition of horseradish gives it an unexpected depth without wicked heat...my younger veggie-avoidant son loves this dish.  This one can be made with frozen or fresh cauliflower.

The cauli curry is a more complicated recipe with flavors that can become too competitive as a side dish, but is absolutely worth being on the radar.  Serve the curry with plain baked chicken or a simple roast, or throw in some cooked lentils for a complete vegetarian dish.  Make this with fresh or frozen cauli, or leftover roasted cauliflower (plan ahead and roast 2 heads of cauli).

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The BEST vegetarian chili

Pictured with biscuits

I'm no stranger to vegetarian cooking.  I routinely incorporate vegetarian and vegan meals into our dinner rotations...in fact, one of my kids will only reliably eat vegetables when accompanied by tofu (or hidden in a smoothie, in which I have also used tofu).  I have a long-standing history of sneaking vegetarian proteins into meals without telling my soy-phobic audience (bad Daughter-In-Law, bad!)  I have happily tried cooking with nearly every meat substitute and vegetarian protein readily available at my grocery store, everything from tofu and tempeh to Fakin' and Garden Burgers and (oddest of all IMHO) Texturized Vegetable Protein.

But I do not like vegetarian chili.

I have tried many a recipe...the ones that use frozen-then-thawed shredded tofu as a meat substitute, the ones that use TVP, the ones that refuse to even try to sub anything in for the meat and go all-out with beans and vegetables.  They all lack something, well, *meaty*.  The texture, the depth of flavor, the way the tomatoes and spices of the chili play together...it just doesn't quite work as well without meat.

And then I saw the recent Cook's Illustrated issue (December 2012).  I adore Cook's Illustrated.  Geeky and science-y and culinarily outstanding all at once.  They have dedicated most of a 2-page spread to explaining why their newly developed Best Vegetarian Chili Recipe Ever works, but the important part is...it does work.  It makes the thing that meat does to chili happen but without the meat.  It also makes a vat of chili, which naturally makes it an ideal make-ahead sort of affair.

It's a good thing it makes so much (and that you can freeze some for another day) because, like everything Cook's Illustrated does, there are a lot of little steps that lead you to the perfection they offer.  Aggravating, but absolutely necessary.  The one step you could probably skip is toasted and grinding your own dry chile pods.  In fact, they suggest substituting 1/4 cup ancho chile powder for the at-home roasted-ground chiles if you don't want to do that step.  But everything else...grinding dry shiitake mushrooms, toasting and grinding walnuts, cooking a blend of dried beans from scratch...necessary.

They recommend a mixture of earthy beans (pintos, kidney, black beans) and creamy beans (navy, great northern).  I used navy and pintos in equal parts.  I also used 2 pasilla peppers and 2 sandia peppers (instead of ancho and New Mexico) because those are the dry peppers I have in my pantry, but next time I'll just use chile powder.

CI recommends cooking the chili in the oven to avoid having to stir the beans.  I think it just makes it take longer and produces a thinner chili than I like, so I'll be doing it on the stovetop from now on.

The recipe below is rewritten to streamline the steps and make the ingredient list make more sense to me LOL  I *hate* it when the ingredients are listed in a different order than you use them, so I've regrouped them into clusters that get added/handled all at once.  I also think this makes a LOT more than the 6-8 servings CI suggests, hence the range of servings.

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Tofu Burgers

This recipe was among my first tries at cooking with tofu.  I think the original recipe came from one of Molly Katzen's Moosewood cookbooks, but I'm not entirely sure now.  I did find the combination of flavors in the OR both a little weird (tahini, miso and basil???) and underwhelming, and have over time found my own happy flavor mix.  But the basic technique for creating a burger patty out of tofu remains the same.  A delicious twist on this flavor mixture is using a curry paste instead of tomato paste with mint for the fresh herbs. 

The one thing you can do "wrong" here is to make the mixture too wet by not pressing enough moisture out of the thawed tofu or by adding too much stock.  The result will be a mushy patty rather than a toothsome burger at the end of cooking.

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Make ahead Wheat Berry Salad

This salad is one of my top 10 favorite recipes.  The whole wheat kernel base is layered with artichokes, bitter greens, peppers and olives and finished with the classically Greek lemon-olive oil-feta flavor party.  Once you've got the wheat berries prepared, it goes together quickly and only gets better over the course of a couple days in the fridge...read: it *likes* to be made ahead and the leftovers are delicious!  It can stand to be out of the fridge for awhile (and tastes better served at room temp anyway) so it's suitable for picnics or dinner at your kids' Little League games. 

It's also a recipe that I never quite make the same way twice...it depends on what I have on hand and how willing I am to have 1/2 a can of something hanging around after I finish the recipe.  It's not so much a recipe anymore as guidelines :D  Originally, it was a recipe from the Washington Post food section.  They recommended serving this as a side dish with grilled fish or chicken, but I serve it most often as a vegetarian main dish.

Wheat berries

Wheat berries are the whole kernel of wheat, what comes off the plant before it gets flattened into cereal or ground into flour.  When cooked, the  individual kernels are chewy and toothsome.  They pop between your teeth like caviar or grapes.  They have a nutty, grainy flavor and make a much more flavorful salad base than rice (the usual grain-and-vegetable salad suspect) in my opinion.

Top Row: Red bell pepper, black olives, radicchio
Middle Row: Feta, chickpeas, lemon
Bottom Row: Radicchio, cherry tomatoes, artichokes

Cooking the wheat berries is a lot like cooking dry beans.  Some folks say they can be cooked without soaking first, but I prefer the results from soaking then cooking.  You can do either the overnight soak, then cook them, or do a "quick soak"...just like for beans!  Here is how I put together this salad last night for dinner tonight...I put the wheat berries in a saucepan covered with 1" of water and brought it to a boil.  I boiled for 2 minutes, then turned off the heat and covered the pan.  I let them stand for 1 hour (this is the "quick soak" method) while we put the kids to bed.  Then I drained them, rinsed them, covered them again with water, brought to a boil, reduced the heat, covered and simmered for 50 minutes while I zoned out and watched TV.  Drain.  Ta-dah!  Cooked wheat berries!  I measured and chopped the remaining ingredients this morning, but I could have done that while the wheat berries were cooking for 100% Dinner Done Yesterday ;)

This recipe lends itself to tweaking...use regular black olives or the fancy marinated olive bar ones, use fresh red bell pepper or roasted red pepper, use radicchio or arugula or a handful of salad from a bag of spring mix, whatever you have on hand!

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Roasted spicy chickpeas

A tasty, low-fat snack to start your New Year's healthy eating resolutions off right!  I've made roasted chickpeas before following the South Beach Diet's recipe, but they're pretty darn bland and I can't get my husband or kids to eat them (for whose benefit they are made, after all!)

Beans are a pretty healthy snack that most people don't think of.  If you roast them, they'll hit the same crunchy texture points that chips and nuts do but with less fat...see below:

Per 1/4 cup        Roasted Chickpeas             Raw Almonds
Calories             75                                        135
Fat (g)               4.5                                        11
Carb (g)            10                                          5
Protein (g)         3                                           5
(calculated by myfitnesspal.com)

So I decided to try making roasted chickpeas like I do roasted nuts...tossed with a bit of oil and some kind of seasoning...and it turns out that they're pretty darn good this way!  I used homemade taco seasoning so they're salt-free, but you could use packaged seasoning mixes like ranch dressing, mixed minced fresh herbs or sweet spice mixes like pumpkin pie spice.

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Tempeh Salad

Packed for eating on the run tonight.

After the richness of Thanksgiving, I need some vegetables that aren't covered in cheese sauce or deep-fried onions.  This recipe is just the ticket, plus it goes together fast and can be made entirely in advance for a chilled salad. 

Tempeh is a soy-and-grain based food product that has a sturdy texture (unlike tofu) and a robust flavor (also unlike tofu). I'm not going to say that when you eat it, you'll think you're eating a steak but it hits the same textural and flavor points that a lot of meat products do. In fact, as I was cooking this one day, I had a delivery person at the door who commented that dinner smelled really good and he thought he might make some sausage for dinner, too LOL

I like wilted salads, so I top the greens with the hot tempeh mixture.  I get a little crunch by leaving the bell pepper and celery in this recipe raw.  You could saute the pepper and celery as well, though and wait for the whole mixture to cool before adding to the salad for a different effect.

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Garlic Artichoke Pasta

I <heart> artichokes.  They're supposedly cancer-fighting and they're exotic and they're amazing with butter.  That's the first thing that made me want to try this recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens Better Than Mom's Slow Cooker Recipes book.  The second thing was that this is a recipe that is made practically entirely from pantry goods without being one of those can-of-cream-of-death-soup type of recipes.  You can buy all the ingredients you need for this ahead and keep them on-hand as a pantry meal kit.  You can also prep the crockpot mixture ahead to fridge or freeze.

Until I had a toddler, we never had dairy beverages in the fridge routinely.  I had to buy milk or cream or half-and-half specifically for a recipe that called for it.  These days, I use whole milk for all recipes calling for cream or half-and-half because it is what we have in the fridge.  So use whatever you happen to  have here (or use canned evaporated milk, if you are like pre-toddler, dairy-drink-less me) if you throw this recipe together out of "ingredients on hand".  If you're planning to make a meal kit for this recipe, you can freeze an appropriate amount of milk or cream, rely on having some in the fridge on Dinner Day or buy canned evap milk for the "pantry kit". 

Comparatively, cream and half and half will be the highest in calories and fat, then evaporated milk and regular milk.  If you get non-fat evap milk, you'll get the best of both worlds...the lighter caloric/fat profile of milk with the rich mouthfeel of cream.

So a meal kit for this recipe will look like this: canned tomatoes, canned artichokes, box of pasta and can of evap milk (if using) labelled and stored in the pantry with garlic+dry herbs and milk/cream (if using) on hand or frozen in ziptop bags.  OR everything except milk mixed together and frozen with pasta/evap milk in the pantry.

The one gripe I have about this recipe is that it's a crockpot recipe that still requires significant cooking right before dinner.  The joy of the crockpot is that you don't have to cook at dinnertime, right?  Boiling pasta isn't hard, but getting the water up to a boil takes time...more time than I'm willing to spend to "finish" a crockpot meal. 

The solution is to cook the pasta almost fully in advance, toss it with a bit of oil or butter to keep it from sticking, fridge it and stir it into the crockpot at the end to warm up and finish cooking through.  Or you can boil the pasta at the last minute, whatever works with your schedule.  Just please don't rinse the pasta...rinsing washes away starch which will prevent the pasta from sticking to itself but then it also won't stick to the sauce.  Besides, the starch is where the flavor lives (yes, pasta does have a flavor of its own) so rinsing washes away flavor, too.

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Tomato Soup

I am not a Campbell's tomato soup fan, but I do like homemade tomato soup, especially with summer-ripe garden tomatoes.  If you can or freeze, a pint of homemade soup boiled to half its volume will replace a can of store-bought concentrated soup for recipes that call for it.  Just leave out the milk for all make-ahead preparations, and add 1 tbsp per cup of soup when you reheat it.

I have a couple of favorite recipes, but here's the most versatile of the bunch.  You can peel and seed the tomatoes before proceeding with the recipe which saves a good bit of straining at the end, or skip this step (especially if you're only doing a small batch of soup) and sieve out seeds and skin at the end.  You can also choose to roast or not to, depends on your time frame and preference.  For putting up, you can freeze or can...if you can a soup made with a stock (be it beef, chicken or vegetable), you really should pressure-can...although before I knew what I know now, I canned tomato soup containing chicken broth in a boiling water bath and have lived to tell the tale.  So do as you will.

Cored and "X"d tomatoes

Peeling tomatoes is not hard (especially compared to sieving 3 gallons of soup a ladleful at a time).  To peel tomatoes, take a small paring knife and cut the stem out in a cone-shaped cut.  Cut a shallow "X" on the bottom of the tomato and slice lightly across any cracked bits of skin (important if you're using heirloom or homegrown tomatoes which tend to be tastier but also less "perfect" than store-bought). 

Parboiled, in the cold water bath

Bring a gigantic pot of water to the boil (or a smaller one, but give yourself time to let the water reheat between batches), and drop the prepped tomatoes in.  Have another large pot filled with ice and water at the ready.  Boil the tomatoes 1-2 minutes.  Keep an eye on them, and pull the ones whose skins peel back first.  Different varieties, different stages of ripeness affect how long the tomatoes need to boil before they start peeling.  Pull tomatoes as they begin to peel, and leave the tougher ones a minute or two more.  Drop them right into the cold water, partly to keep from cooking the bejeepers out of them and partly to make them easy to handle quickly. 

Peeled "zombie" tomatoes

Once all your tomatoes are chilly, start pulling the skins off.  It's kinda like peeling a sunburn ::blark::  Don't worry if you don't get every bit of skin.  To seed them, just squish the tomatoes like they're stress balls.  Cut big ones in half before squashing them silly.  Don't worry if you don't get every last seed out.  Now you'll have a pile of really horrifying-looking but delicious seeded, skinned tomatoes.  Proceed with your recipe.


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Caribbean Ratatouille

The South Beach cookbooks (whence the original recipe here comes) just say summer...lots of veggies, in all flavors and colors.  The OR for this dish calls for a variety of veggies that were pretty easy to locate in my grocery stores when I lived an hour away from South Beach...calabaza squash, chayote, green plantains...but which are hit-or-miss finds now that I live in the Corn Belt.  What follows is my Midwestern Caribbean Ratatouille which takes advantage of the current agricultural overlap in late summer and early fall produce.  It's full of color which means it's full of nutrients and vitamins...talk about cooking the rainbow!

This is a fast and light stew...goes together in less than 20 minutes once all the veg is chopped and the seasonings measured and sorted.  It *can* be frozen once it's cooked, but I think it loses a bit of its bright, fresh flavor.  It is perfect though for prepping ahead for same day or next day cooking.  Just chop all the veg, sort into containers, and combine the cooking liquid and seasonings for fast-fast dinner execution.

When you "peel" an acorn squash, don't sweat getting every last bit of peel off.  Once the squash is cooked, the peel will come away very easily from the squash meat.  Note: If you do use a green plantain instead of a green banana, start it with the squash and onion...they're more like potatoes than bananas when they're green and unripe.

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Easiest-Easier-Easy: Tomatoes

I am not a tomato fan.  Really.  But I adore the smell of a tomato plant and a fresh tomato tastes NOTHING like a grocery store tomato, so we grow them with abandon come summer.  I'll wind up canning quite a few just as is or in tomato soup or pickled (talk to me in October about pickled green cherry tomatoes).

Other ways to use an abundance of fresh tomatoes include: canning, green beans with tomatoes, grilled marinated okra, oven-baked zucchini, frittata, tomato sauce (enchilada and pizza), tomato soup, Bloody Mary mix or any place else you'd used canned tomatoes or prepared tomato juice (just blitz the tomatoes in a processor or blender, then strain through a fine-mesh strainer for juice).

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Greens au gratin

I had scads of end-of-season chard in my garden, and this is what I did with it.  It's similar to the holiday favorite broccoli-n-cheese casserole.  You can use any combination of greens you want, just be sure to cook them and drain them very well.  You'll need about 5 cups cooked for this recipe. 

Before cooking

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Easiest-Easier-Easy: Zucchini

Who doesn't have an excess of zucchini at this time of year?  You, over there?  Well, I'm leaving some on your doorstep next.  The following shouldn't be a surprise by now...I love me some roasted veggies, but given the time of year, grilling is the way to go.  The fanciest recipe I provide here is poached from my in-laws...as my father-in-law says often and with gusto, "I could make a meal of this".

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Broccoli packets for roasting or grilling

Blackberries, lemon-thyme salmon
and broccoli packet

This doesn't have to be done with broccoli or Boursin.  It's just a framework for an easy make-ahead/freezable side dish.  You could do carrot slices, cauliflower, asparagus, squash or zucchini and any kind of soft, flavored cheese.  To make it freezer-friendly, use pre-frozen vegetables and omit the extra liquid. 

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