Pan-fried Polenta with Sauteed Mushrooms and Garlicky Spinach

I have been wanting to try to make polenta for a while but I was hesitant because I didn't really know what to serve it with. I consulted The Book (we all know which this is by now) and found that sauteed mushrooms were suggested with polenta. How convenient that I had some mushrooms that weren't used for Thanksgiving. I wanted some green on the plate so I decided on spinach, and I used the Garlicky Greens recipe on 101 Cookbooks as a rough guide.

The polenta was easy to make, but a little difficult to work with when cutting it and frying it. First you cook it in a pot, then pour it into a pan (I used a loaf pan) to cool. You can let it sit there all day if you want. Then you just slice it and do whatever you are going to do with it. I wanted to pan-fry it. I tried my stainless skillet at first but this is not a good idea. You need nonstick for this. The stainless saute pan worked great for the mushrooms though, since you deglaze with a little wine (yum).

This turned out to be a nice, delicious meal. I think it was pretty balanced too - protein from the spinach and carbs from the polenta. I would like to try some lemon with the greens too - maybe zest instead of juice to give it a little something refreshing.

I thought I had pictures of this, but I can't find them. Sorry!

Barley and Roasted Pepper Salad

My mom's neighbor gave us 5 peppers (red, orange, yellow) and I decided I wanted to roast them, but had no idea what to do after that. Later that day I opened How To Cook Everything Vegetarian (surprise) to look up something totally unrelated, and when I opened the book it happened to land on page 87. I happened to notice a recipe on this page called "Wheat Berry or Other Whole Grain Salad with Roasted Peppers." The first sentence of the recipe says "This mild, rich salad is not only delicious but also gorgeous, especially if you use red and yellow peppers you've roasted yourself." Not surprisingly, I made it the next day.

This recipe takes a bit of advance preparation. I roasted the peppers and cut them into long thin strips the day before. I also should have cooked the barley at this time. I wanted to use wheat berries as the recipe mentions, but I couldn't find them in my freezer or refrigerator. I know they are buried somewhere in there. One of these days I will come up with some kind of organizational system.


I didn't have fresh basil, so I added some dried basil to the dressing of olive oil and red wine vinegar. I mixed it up before pouring it over and mixing it in. I got a little too crazy with the dressing so I will have to have some self control next time so I'm not eating spoonfuls of oil with each bite.

This kept for several days in the refrigerator, although I made sure to eat it at room temperature. I like grain salads best at that temperature. It was definitely easy to make with all the prep work done.

Apple Walnut Muffins

All day today, I had this terrible urge to bake. I think it had something to do with the fact that my stockpile of frozen muffins is long gone. I had a few things in mind that I wanted to make. Some took too long, others I was missing just one or two ingredients for. Still others were just not what I was looking for (even though I didn't know what I was looking for). I got more and more antsy when I had a sudden breakthrough.

I wanted something that wasn't already spelled out for me on paper. I wanted to make a muffin, and I wanted some ideas of what should go in it. I turned to How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and I found exactly what I needed - an adaptable muffin recipe. Mark Bittman is my hero, for real. I am no scientist, so I can't just go throwing things together in the kitchen and expect them to turn into a muffin. I used his basic muffin recipe and changed it around to satisfy my desires.


Ingredients:
2 cups white whole wheat flour
1/4 cup turbinado sugar
1/2 tsp fine grain sea salt
3 tsp baking powder
3 Tbsp melted butter
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and grated
1/2 cup walnuts, roughly chopped

Directions: Bake in muffin cups at 400* until you stick in a toothpick and it comes out clean.

The resulting muffin was like a light, delicate cake. If you are looking for a cupcake, look elsewhere. It was almost like a biscuit or a slightly sweet bread. The apple strands were visible, but underrepresented flavor-wise. What a fascinating recipe this was... I can't stop thinking of variations. Different types of flour, different spices, different nuts and maybe fruits. Here, I will stick to some of the variations I would like to make using the apple/walnut flavor profile.
- Mini-muffins = tea cakes!
- Add spices (Pampered Chef Cinnamon Plus spice blend?)
- More/different types of apple
- Grating with the skins on (particularly some deep red ones)
- Brown sugar... muscovado in particular
- Natural sweeteners (honey, agave nectar)
- Rolled oats

Hummus

I am constantly reading my cookbooks, so when I found the hummus recipe in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian I was basically ready to try it immediately. Lucky for me, it couldn't be easier. With minimal ingredients and a ton of possible variations, this is something everyone should be making at home. I have been carefully checking ingredients lists lately, and preservatives and chemicals are NOT things that I want to eat. Unfortunately, my (former) favorite hummus brand (Sabra) is not present at Whole Foods*, which is a kind of lazy trick I use to decide whether I want to eat something. The reason it is my favorite is because of the big pile of seasonings and whole chickpeas and other random good tasting stuff in the middle. But if I make my own... I can just add that in myself.

For this particular batch of hummus I used organic canned chickpeas, and chose paprika as my spice (Mark Bittman offers cumin as the other option in the basic recipe). I also used extra garlic and extra lemon. One caution is that it comes out very very thick - that is why he has you add water, to thin it out. However, keep in mind that it will thicken up in the fridge, so you should make it thinner than you want to initially.

This hummus is something that I will definitely be making again and would be a great option to bring to a party or picnic. The picture may not be that easy to identify, but it is me holding a pita chip with some hummus on it.

*I don't buy everything at Whole Foods... I don't even make it there very often. But when I do go, I spend a LOT of time there and I really pay attention to what is around me. I can trust them to have "foods that are free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, sweeteners, and hydrogenated fats"(according to their website). So I pay attention to things I see there and if I see them at a conventional grocery store, I feel much better about picking them up without thoroughly examining the ingredient list.

Goat Cheese Raviolis

So I have a few things bookmarked in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and one of them is ravioli. Yes, I am crazy enough to make my own ravioli. I wanted to do it, but at the same time was dreading it - I just had this bad feeling that it was going to be a huge disaster. When I finally got started, I started to feel a little better about it.

I replaced half of the all-purpose flour with white whole wheat flour. I was too nervous to replace it all on the first try, but I knew I could safely replace half. I used the food processor to make the dough. It was dry, so I added a little water as the directions called for. The whole wheat flour definitely made a firmer dough, I think.

Since I don't have a pasta machine, I had to roll the dough by hand with a rolling pin. At this point I kept asking myself what was I thinking making my own damn pasta! It is ridiculously difficult to roll the dough thin enough. You have to roll it over and over. Towards the end, I started rolling it, cutting it in half, rolling out the half, cutting that in half, and rolling another half... you get the idea. It worked, because my first few raviolis were a little on the thick side and they got thinner as I went along. But towards the end, I gave up entirely. The dough became too elastic to work with. Luckily I had plenty of raviolis by this point so I just threw the rest away.


I put them all on a baking sheet, separated, and kept them in the fridge for a few hours until I was ready to cook them. They cooked very quickly, about 3 minutes or so, but we also had to cook them in batches of about 8 at a time.


As it turns out, we only ate about 6 raviolis each, and I made around 30. If I had known that they would be so filling, I probably would have frozen the rest instead of cooking them, but hopefully the raviolis reheat well. The cooked raviolis stuck together and a few ripped when I tried to put them in a tupperware.

Reminder for next time: buy pre-made ravioli. Or at least a pasta rolling machine.

Basil Pesto (Pesto Genovese)

I went to visit my Nonna today and she has basil growing rampant all around her backyard. I asked her if I could take a big bunch to make pesto and she gave me a LOT. Using the recipe from my favorite big green book (How to Cook Everything Vegetarian) I made a triple batch.

First, I made a double batch. It was so easy - just throw everything in the food processor and go, adding a little more oil when you take off the top to scrape down the sides. I used this double batch to freeze in an ice cube tray. I have read this trick somewhere to make individual servings of pasta with pesto. I think one or two cubes would do the trick. When they are fully frozen, I will pop them out of the tray and just toss them in a plastic bag. I might wrap them individually but if they are already frozen they probably won't stick together anyway.

One thing to remember is that you need to add Parmesan when using the pesto. I have heard that it doesn't freeze well, so I guess the best thing to do would just be to stir it in when you defrost it. I stirred it in to the batch I made for the pasta but didn't realize I would have a little left over. The recipe says to only stir it in when you are about to use it, but I will have to see how it keeps in the fridge. Another thing I might try doing differently next time I make pesto is to toast the pine nuts. The recipe didn't call for it and I wanted to just stick to it this time, but I think toasting them might bring out the flavor more and add more dimension to the pesto.

When I was done with this I still had more basil left, and it was about enough for another single batch. Ken suggested we have it with the whole wheat pasta we picked up this weekend. I don't remember if I've ever had true whole wheat pasta, but I have heard that it is substantially different from traditional pasta.

The whole wheat pasta with pesto turned out pretty yummy. Whole wheat pasta is definitely a different texture and feel from traditional pasta, so get some olive oil or something in there ASAP after straining. It was a little thicker and denser, but was very good with the pesto. I definitely want to try the whole wheat pasta with the Rustic Pine Nut Sauce - but back to the pesto... I would definitely have it again as a quick, easy, last-minute kind of meal. There is a good amount of olive oil in there though, plus the Parmesan, so don't go overboard with it. I would also like to try it for other uses than just pasta, but not much comes to mind right now. If you have any suggestions please let me know!

Rustic Pine Nut Sauce

The recipe for Rustic Pine Nut Sauce can be found on page 796 of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. Since it's a copyrighted recipe from a book I can't copy it in here, and obviously I can't link to it either. Some of the pages of the book are available on Google books, but unfortunately page 796 is not one of them. So you will have to follow along as best you can knowing only the ingredients and what I did with them!

This sauce was on a list somewhere else in the book of sauces that would go nicely with whole wheat pasta. We used Barilla Plus, which I was expecting to be a little whole wheat-ier than it actually was, which is probably because it isn't whole wheat pasta. Anyway, that was my motivation for making this sauce. Another plus is that the ingredients don't go bad that quickly. The sauce includes chopped pine nuts, chopped basil or parsley, bread crumbs, red onion, garlic, salt and pepper, olive oil, and wine (red or white). Optionally, you can add capers, but I don't like them that much, so I left them out. One of the cool things about this book is all the variations offered on each recipe. One of the variations I wanted to try was the lemony version, which calls for replacing the wine with lemon juice, and the capers with lemon zest. I wanted to use wine, though, so I decided to add only the lemon zest, since it is one of my new favorite flavors. Ken helped a little by slicing up the onion for me. My poor little basil plant is dying, I think, because he is very droopy lately, even though I set him up outside where he might actually get some sun. I took several leaves from the plant for the sauce, so at least I will get some good use out of him. I never had a green thumb; all plants in my care die shortly after I get them. :(

I cooked the ingredients, following the recipe as closely as possible. The cooking times in the recipe seemed a little too long, so I moved things along a little more quickly. I also halved the recipe because I only had 1/2 the amount of pine nuts, and we are only two people (most recipes feed 4). Towards the end of cooking, I added the halved amount of wine. It disappeared almost instantly! At this point I became very concerned. How could this be a sauce? It had no liquid! I added more wine, and more olive oil. It just fizzled right out. I was getting nervous, so I picked up a bit and tasted it. It was a little strongly wine flavored, but good. After a few minutes I turned off the heat and stirred in the basil. We decided to just use it as is and hope it was good.

I mixed the "sauce" in with my pasta as well as I could and made sure to get some in every bite. Lucky for us, it turned out delicious. This is when we realized what "rustic" means. It doesn't have to be liquidy to be a sauce! Plus, pine nuts are a little creamy as is, which gives a very nice texture to the sauce. It was some wonderful chunky goodness. I think the lemon zest was a nice little touch and I didn't feel that I was really missing anything by leaving out the (optional) capers. I might try this with lemon juice, but the wine turned out quite good. (I used some Fish Eye Pinot Grigio left over from a while ago. This is a cheap brand and has a screw top, so if you keep it in the fridge it should be fine for cooking, or even drinking, up to a few weeks. That way you can use a little at a time, as needed, and you don't have to open a new bottle for each recipe.)

I wish I could post the recipe for you... but I don't think it would be copyright violation for me to share it with you privately - so if you would like the recipe, I would be happy to share my cookbook. However, it is a fantastic reference book, so I highly recommend looking into obtaining your very own copy.