Green Curry Broth

While scrolling through my Pinterest app, I saw that Heidi from 101 Cookbooks had posted an older recipe from her site - Green Curry Broth.  I can't explain why, but it really appealed to me at that moment and I made it for dinner not too long after that.

First, you chop and chop and slice and dice and chop some more to create the foundation for the delicious green curry broth.  This is the longest part of the recipe.  After all of this cooks down to impart its flavor, you strain it out and throw it away.  At first I was sad about this, but then I tasted the broth - it was amazing.  Next time, I would not bother with all the fine dicing and such - you can get this done much faster with bigger chunks and since you're straining it, you probably won't even notice a difference.  I also wouldn't hesitate to make this broth with the intention of freezing it, without any add-ins, to enjoy on a rainy day.

Once the broth has been made, you can put pretty much whatever you want in it.  We opted for rice noodles, shredded cabbage, broccoli, frozen corn and green beans, and I saved the tops of the scallions (used in the broth) and added those in too.  I chopped handfuls of mint, basil, and cilantro from my balcony and mixed those in at the very end.  I topped off my own bowl with a little swirl of coconut milk.  This was a good combination of things, but I would break the noodles in half next time, and I had also intended to add cubes of tofu, but things got away from me.

Black Pepper Tofu

This Black Pepper Tofu recipe was the last I made from the Ottolenghi books for the Jan/Feb featured cookbook "season."  I didn't post about everything I made, but I also didn't make as much as I would have liked, because being sick for 3 weeks can really ruin things for a person.  Next up is Melissa Clark - I already own In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite but I bought her new book, Cook This Now, last night.  I have slowed down my cookbook buying, but Melissa Clark's books are full of appealing recipes and I actually want to "cook this now" so I think it'll certainly be worth it.

Back to Ottolenghi, though - this Black Pepper Tofu was a spicy and delicious Asian meal.  We've all made stir fry, and it can be boooring.  This is the remedy to all that, and on top of being great, I learned a new technique - coating tofu cubes in cornstarch and frying them makes at-home tofu so much more delicious!  I find that tofu is not something I eat often at home, because honestly, it's not very good.  But this is a great treatment for it and I certainly will try it in other recipes in the future.

The recipe itself is fairly complicated, but can easily be simplified.  As an example, the recipe calls for three different types of soy sauce.  I used one kind of soy sauce (tamari), and at the suggestion of another poster on the 101 Cookbooks library, some molasses to replicate the taste of the "sweet" soy sauce that was called for, and I never would have known the difference.  If you slice and dice the shallots, ginger, garlic, and scallions in advance (and you could even fry the tofu in advance too), this dish will come together in minutes.

I ended up scaling the recipe down by half to account for the amount of tofu I had and the fact that only I was going to eat it.  I also omitted the chiles and reduced the black pepper, which I could have even scaled back a little further, and I ground it more finely than instructed.  I substantially reduced the butter (2Tbsp for half the recipe) and used a little additional oil which turned out to be unnecessary.  I'm not entirely sure but I think when measuring the soy sauces, I forgot that I was halving the recipe and I may have used the original amounts.  Either way, it definitely turned out delicious and I definitely intend to make it again.  With a little prep ahead of time, it's a doable weeknight meal, but it is also pretty impressive if you want to do an Asian-themed dinner party.

Thai Soba Noodle Bowl

This delicious Thai-inspired noodle bowl came to my attention through this list of "favorites." I had most of the ingredients on hand, needing to pick up only tofu and ginger (and a new bottle of soy sauce/tamari, because we had gotten regular-sodium last time and it was terribly overpowering).  A base of garlic, ginger, lemongrass, shallot, and chile is sauteed, then simmered with coconut milk and water.  To this broth, add mushrooms and cooked soba noodles.  Bake the tofu while this cooks, and top the bowl with the tofu cubes, cilantro, and (my delicious addition) chopped peanuts.  One note of caution: you will splash this on yourself while you eat.  Leftovers are great too.

Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts

Not too long ago, I got bok choy from the choice group at our CSA.  I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it, so since it's Deborah Madison month, I flipped through her books for some ideas.  I decided on this recipe for Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.  It made a nice, simple, surprisingly filling weeknight dinner.

The recipe is simple: bok choy, peanuts, a little garlic and ginger, soy sauce and some cornstarch to thicken it up.  Of course, as I was already stir-frying I reached for my soy sauce only to find that I had a bit less than half the amount called for, so I used teriyaki sauce for the rest. I thought it came out delicious anyway, maybe even better.  The peanuts gave it a nice crunch and red pepper flakes make everything better.

Spiced Eggplant Stew

If you came into my living room right now, the first thing you would notice is the stack of books on my living room table.  From the bottom up: Heirloom Beans, Cooking from the Farmers' Market, Edible, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Super Natural Cooking, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and on top of the pile is Tender, open to this Spiced Eggplant Stew.  I've been turning to this book fairly often lately after neglecting it when it was the featured cookbook last month.

This recipe contains the flavors of cardamom, coriander, black pepper, garlic, ginger, turmeric, mint, and cilantro - quite a few flavors, and they all combine with the heat from the chile and the creaminess of the coconut milk to make a really delicious meal.  The tomatoes and eggplant go well together, and the eggplant is smooth and soft.  I served this over brown basmati rice.  The leftovers were delicious as well, and I put some in the freezer to enjoy when the weather cools down.  I'm not certain it will defrost well, but here's hoping.

Green-Packed Stir-Fry

This tasty Green-Packed Stir-Fry from Super Natural Cooking uses asparagus and spinach, two things I have had a lot of lately, and so I picked it out of a bunch of recipes that I was considering.  I also added snow peas, since I had them - they only added to the green.  I can see this being easily adaptable to whatever veggies are around.  I left out the tofu and used red pepper flakes in place of the red chiles - just sprinkled them in, no measurement.  Otherwise I mostly followed the recipe.  I loved the taste of the sauce.  I have never used hoisin sauce before but I really like it!  It's easy enough to change the vegetable ingredients - I'm sure I can find something to use this tasty sauce in every season.  The beige in the picture is cashews - they added an almost meaty texture to the stir fry.  We ate it with a small portion of short grain brown rice.

Lentil Stew with Winter Squash

When I am miserably bored I like to search for recipes.  So most of the time, I have a ton of tabs open on my browser, and usually they stay there for weeks and I end up making none of them.  Recently a friend was here for dinner and she can't eat any fat, which you would think is impossible in my house, but as I was flipping through my open recipe tabs, I noticed that one of the NY Times Recipes for Health that I had open, Lentil Stew with Pumpkin, had the nutrition information, and zero grams of fat.  I had pretty much all the ingredients, so I made it for dinner and sent her home with the leftovers.  (I also made her some very low-fat brownies.  Delicious.)

The soup was pretty tasty.  I personally do not prefer the texture of lentils and split peas, but they happened to taste good, which made up for it.  I didn't eat a lot, though.  The spices and aromatics added some good flavors to the soup.  I used what I think is ambercup squash - that was pretty good too.  According to Ken, this is a regular lentil soup.  But I thought it was pretty good, and I hope my friend enjoys the leftovers!

Swiss Chard and Pork Dumplings

Since I struggled all year to use the chard that we get from our CSA almost every week, I was happy when I saw this recipe for dumplings made with chard and ground pork.  Making the dumplings was very easy.  You just mix together the filling, scoop a bit onto the wrapper, wet the edges, and seal it up.  I enjoyed doing it.  I made them in mid-September and froze them for later.  Now that I'm working on eating my way through the freezer, I wanted to try them.

They turned out to be very tasty.  The filling could have used a bit more salt.  We steamed them and ate them with a dipping sauce made of 1 clove pressed garlic, 2 Tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp sesame oil, 2 Tbsp vegetable oil, and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes.  I whisked it together so it became somewhat emulsified.  Now we have one quart bag left, a different shape dumpling, so I look forward to having them again.  Maybe we'll try a different dipping sauce.  Also somewhere in my freezer I know I have several wonton wrappers, so maybe I will make the shrimp and chive variation suggested at the end of the recipe.

Winter Squash Soup with Gruyere Toasts

My friend Hilary came over last Saturday afternoon to make Winter Squash Soup with Gruyere Toasts.  We love winter squash and a discussion with her is what somehow made me start making soup all of a sudden.  The Gruyere "croutons" (we decided that they are really toasts) made this soup extra special.

This soup stood out to me a bit over some of the others I've been making.  One reason was the use of both butternut AND acorn squash - the acorn seemed to mute the excessive sweetness that butternut can have.  I thought the combination created an outstanding flavor.  This soup was also a bit thinner than the other soups I've made with squash - just a tiny bit thinner, but noticeably so, and somehow this made a big textural difference to me.  I finished the bowl pretty easily (with thicker soups I sometimes have to force myself through the texture, even if I'm still hungry).  The sage and thyme were perfect flavors for the soup and for the season, and carrying them over into the amazing little toasts tied it all together.  I LOVE Gruyere, so this might have been my favorite part, even more than the soup, but just a little.

This is a soup that I hope to come back to again!  Luckily I was able to stash a bit in the freezer, labeled with specific instructions to serve with Gruyere toasts.

Nigella's Granola

I like to make granola bars to take as snacks when I'm out, but I don't have a perfect recipe yet.  In the meantime I got distracted by a recipe for loose granola.

You can substitute some things here to suit your tastes.  I personally LOVE the pecans, while Ken prefers the almonds - you could use different nuts instead.  Use more or less sunflower seeds or sesame seeds.  You can use another liquid sweetener other than maple syrup - the original recipe uses brown rice syrup, which I didn't have.  I thought about trying agave nectar, but I thought maple syrup would contribute more to the flavor.  And next time I might substitute some rolled grains for a bit of the oats.

Granola
Adapted from Orangette's adaptation of a recipe from Nigella Lawson.

Dry ingredients:
5 cups rolled oats
1 cup raw almonds
2 cups raw pecan halves
1 cup hulled raw sunflower seeds
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup light brown sugar
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. salt

Wet ingredients:
1 cup unsweetened apple sauce
1/3 cup maple syrup
¼ cup honey

Rack in the upper and lower thirds of the oven and preheat it to 300 degrees.  Mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl, and the wet ingredients together in another.  Then, mix the two together very thoroughly and spread it evenly on two rimmed baking sheets.  Bake it for 35-40 minutes or until golden brown (I went for about 45 minutes).  When you take it out, if you DON'T want clumps, go ahead and mix it right away.  If you DO want clumps, just let it sit.  It should crisp up as it cools, but a lot of mine remained soft.

If you want to add dried fruit, you can mix some in after it cools.  This can be stored at room temperature if you're going to eat it soon.  Otherwise, to preserve the nuts, you can keep it in the refrigerator.

It was very, very delicious!  In the future, I might like it to be crunchier or clumpier.  I might try to spread it out more on three baking sheets instead of two next time.  I ate it with yogurt, as a cereal with milk, combined with Total with almonds cereal, and plain.  I thought it would make a great apple crisp topping, too.

Ginger Peach Muffins

I've been waiting to make the Ginger Peach Muffins from Good to the Grain since I first got the book back in March.  When delicious, ripe, juicy peaches started showing up at the markets, I broke out the recipe.

There was some hesitation from my primary taste tester, who doesn't like ginger (but will eat anything I make with it despite that preference).  The recipe includes both fresh ginger, used to saute the peaches, and crystallized ginger, which melts on the inside of the muffin.  The final product, perfectly moist when warm, tasted more like gingerbread than actual ginger - the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

The peaches were delicious, of course - sliced, sauteed in honey, butter, and ginger, and stuck on top of the batter in the muffin cups.  After the first batch, though, we decided it would be an improvement to also dice some peaches up and mix them into the batter.  This was definitely an improvement upon an otherwise perfect recipe.  I thought it made a difference.

Another note - all of Kim's muffin recipes make weird numbers of muffins, usually 8-10 instead of the standard 12.  After the first batch, I decided I could easily stretch the batter to make 12 muffins, which is good for a number of reasons: 1, it makes more muffins; 2, each muffin is less calories; and 3, they are not ginormous and spilling all over the pan (like the first batch).  I found this to improve the quality of the final product as well and I will do it again next time.

Like every other recipe in Good to the Grain, I will be making this again.  YUM.

 

Chilled Watermelon Soup

Haley came over to cook with me today. We had planned this a while ago and she had picked out some recipes from my bookmarks that she wanted to make. For our appetizer/first course, she chose Chilled Watermelon Soup.

The recipe called for 6 pounds of watermelon, or 9 cups diced. I obviously have no idea how much anything weighs, because I ended up at the register with a 20 lb watermelon. Now I have a ton of watermelon. It was pretty difficult to cut up, and then it barely fit in the blender - it was kind of oozing out of the top. I also had to strain the soup, which was then a big squishy mess. It was a pretty color, though.

The soup was okay, but tasted more like a drink than a soup. I couldn't really drink too much of it. Then again, I am not a fan of soup. The general consensus seemed to be that the spoonful of added watermelon chunks, mint and feta was not enough and that these things should be prevalent in the soup. They also floated in the picture, but not in real life. Although I probably will not make it ever again, if I did I would reserve more of the watermelon chunks - maybe three cups instead of one, and mix the feta in with them instead of adding a bit by itself.

Honey Soy Dipping Sauce

I found veggie dumplings in the freezer section of the grocery store and I wanted to try to make a dipping sauce for them. I googled and found several recipes, but settled on Emeril's Honey Soy Dipping Sauce. It is one of the easier recipes I found and used mainly ingredients that I already had on hand.

All that really needs to be done is grating ginger and toasting sesame seeds, then measuring a few things and mixing it all up. I cooked the dumplings by steaming them, which I did per package directions for just under 15 minutes. You can make the sauce in this time and still have time to clean up, too.

This sauce was delicious. I may have slightly over toasted the sesame seeds, but they looked good! The sauce was just a little thick because of the ginger, and the sesame seeds added another dimension of texture. I dipped the dumplings in the sauce using chopsticks and everything was great. I almost doubled the recipe thinking I would run out of sauce, but this was plenty for 6 dumplings and I am positive will be enough for the other 6 in the package as well.

One day I will try making my own dumplings, but for now I find these frozen ones (Stop & Shop's Nature's Promise line) to be absolutely delicious. (I also love the Stop & Shop vegetarian spring rolls - just don't use the microwave instructions or they will be soggy and gross. Dip those in Thai sweet chili sauce, which you can find in the Asian section.)

Now that I am done with my internship, I will have a lot more time to cook and hopefully will be posting more! I am looking forward to making falafel, hummus and baking my own bread (maybe even pitas!).