parsnips aplenty

Entries categorized as ‘mains’

Snow Day Stir-Fried Greens

December 19, 2008 · 4 Comments

When I arrived here in Portland at the end of the summer, the long-time transplants warned me about winter.  Not so much the weather, but the reaction to it.

“This city shuts down under an inch of snow,” warned native midwesterners, suppressing groans.

I understood - both the fact of the matter, and the annoyance with it.  Asheville does the same thing, since it’s full of tiny mountain roads that turn to ice faster than a moonshine hangover, but as soon as a flake of snow hits the air, everyone runs over to the supermarket to stock up on milk, water, and toilet paper, since they’re expecting a return of the Blizzard of ‘93.  (You still see t-shirts at the Goodwill announcing “I survived the Blizzard of ‘93!”)  I had a handful of days off from school when my northeastern-born parents looked out the window, said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and took me out for breakfast.

Portland got a couple of inches of snow on Sunday, which all melted on Tuesday, and I’ve barely been able to get anything done.  Except go to work, that is - no snow days for me, since I live 20 blocks away.  Heaven forbid I try to make any doctor or massage appointments, though - I’ve been getting answering machines all week.

Today, though, is the start of a 3-day weekend for me, and I was excited to wake up to giant snowflakes falling outside my window.  This, I thought, is a day for tea and some good greens.

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Deborah Madison taught me about bok choy.  Her recipe for stir-fried bok choy with peanuts, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, is the one that I apply to just about everything I feel like coating in soy sauce.  Having grown up in the south, I can’t help but feel that every green thicker than spinach should be cooked to within an inch of its life, and I think that this new business of stir-frying collard greens is just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  Bok choy, however, does really well in this application, and is very well-rounded by peanuts, cooked in a rich-tasting roasted peanut oil, with a bit of heat at the end from ginger and red pepper flakes.  This time, I used some baked tofu instead of peanuts, but I’ll post the original recipe and let you find your own variations.  It’s an excellent introduction to throwing some veggies in a pan.

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Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts
serves 2-4
recipe by Deborah Madison

3 tablespooons raw peanuts
2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
salt
1 1/2 pounds bok choy
2 tablespoons peanut oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
4 teaspoons minced ginger
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch stirred with 3 tablespoons water or vegetable stock

Fry peanuts in 2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil until they’re golden. Chop with red pepper flakes and a few pinches salt and set aside.

Slice off bok choy stems and cut them into 1″ pieces. Leave the leaves whole. Set a wok over high heat. Add 2 tablespoons peanut oil and roll it around the wok. When hot, add garlic and ginger and stir-fry for 1 minute. Add bok choy and a few pinches salt and stir-fry until wilted and glossy. Add soy sauce and cornstarch mixture and stir-fry 1-2 minutes more until leaves are shiny and glazed. Add crushed peanuts, toss, and serve.

Categories: mains · stir fry · vegan · wintery

Sweet Potato and Corn Chowder

November 1, 2008 · 4 Comments

Today is a monumental day in the Lauren Mitchell History of October: it’s the second day in a row that I have off from work.  My days have been going thus: wake up. Go to work. Come home. Don’t go out for fear that I’ll get back too late to get enough sleep. Shower. Sleep. Repeat.

Don’t get me wrong - I love the work.  I doubt I could ever get tired of chopping up vegetables.  I love being around other people who spend their waking hours thinking about food; I love to know that I’m in a place where I can learn about the ideals of taste.  I knew I’d be saying goodbye to a social life when I started doing this work, though, and boy have I ever.  I’ve been starting to make myself go out, though - there’s so much great stuff going on in this town, and I’m realizing, if only by the fantastic percentage of cookbooks taking up my shelves, that I risk losing balance.  Today when I went to Powell’s I bought four books that have nothing to do with food.  I didn’t even go near the cookbook room.  (But then, of course, I went to Whole Foods, and I came home and put a crazy brown sugar glaze on some cranberry-orange cornbread.  More on that next week.)

So this is the kind of food that comes from me when I don’t necessarily want to think about cooking in the sense that I’ll be chopping vegetables all day - but that doesn’t mean it’s not delicious, because it is.  This the result of some leftovers from a farmers’ market trip a couple of weeks ago, and a smile at the bunch of sage I just took down from drying.

It’s also a real effort made to use fake meat.  I have many hesitations when it comes to soysage, but the patties that Morningstar makes are actually quite good, and they go terrifically with that dry, earthy punch of sage.  If you’re an omnivore and want to use real sausage, ease up on the butter.  I also added a couple of tablespoons of goat cheese when I made it, but it was really just to use up the end of the log.  I won’t note it in the recipe, but throwing it in certainly doesn’t hurt.  Apologies for the mediocre photo.

Sweet Potato and Corn Chowder
serves 4-6

2 tablespoons butter
2 soysage patties (Morningstar highly recommended), diced
1 fist-sized white onion, thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon dried sage
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
kernels from 2 ears corn
1 medium-sized sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1″ pieces
2 cups vegetable broth
2 cups milk

In a soup pot over medium heat, melt butter. Add soysage, onion, garlic, sage, salt, and pepper. Cook until onions soften, 5-7 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then drop to a simmer and cook until sweet potatoes and corn are cooked through and flavors are combined, about 20-25 minutes.

Categories: autumn · mains · one-dish meals · soup

Spanikopita

August 18, 2008 · 3 Comments

In Bulgaria I made my share of banitsa, putting leeks or spinach in it whenever I had them. One day I put in a ton of spinach and an extra helping of yogurt, and when I took a bite, I said, “Oh! This is spanikopita!”

Spanikopita was always something that my mom made on special occasions or that I got to eat at the Greek Orthodox church’s annual festival, and really never more often than that. It seemed labor- and time-intensive, and I never had enough of a mania over it to want to spend the effort making it. Coming back to giant American refrigerators from my just-big-enough Euro chill chest is almost exhausting, but it does mean that I get excited about tossing in ingredients from major fridge rummages. This spanikopita got extra love from cream cheese, lemon zest, and a squeeze of orange.

The thing about spinach: it’s watery. When I’m baking with it, I prefer to get frozen spinach, because then it’s easier to control the amount of liquid in it. After you let it sit out in a collander for an hour or so to thaw, you’ve got to squeeze the ever-lovin daylights out of it, because if it lets out any of that water during baking, you’ll get a soggy mess and end up ordering pizza for dinner. So squeeze, and squeeze hard.

How unintimidating is spanikopita? So unintimidating I didn’t even look up a recipe. This is spinach and feta and phyllo dough. Nothing to freak out about. If I had covered this up while it was baking, the top leaves wouldn’t have fanned up this way, but I like that they did, so I skipped the foil. If you want a nice well-mannered spanikopita, though, cover this for 50 minutes and uncover for the last 10.

Spanikopita

1/2 pound feta cheese, crumbled
1 shallot, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 packages frozen spinach, thawed and strangled
1 cup whole milk yogurt (don’t use low-fat - that’s just watery)
2 eggs
a few gratings of nutmeg
6 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
a squeeze of orange juice
zest of half a lemon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
a few heavy grinds of black pepper
phyllo dough
olive oil
toasted walnuts, roughly chopped

Preheat to 350F. In a bowl combine all ingredients except phyllo, olive oil, and walnuts. Drizzle olive oil over the bottom of a 9″x13″ baking dish and place 2-3 layers of phyllo in the bottom. Spread with 1/3 of the spinach mixture. Put 2-3 more layers of phyllo down, drizzle it with olive oil (you don’t even have to pull out the pastry brush! How easy is this?), and spread another third of the mixture. Repeat once more, then top off with another couple of layers of phyllo, topping off with another drizzle of oil - but this time, make sure you get the oil out on the edges too, since you don’t want them to get too dry in the oven. Pop it in for an hour. When it’s golden brown and bubbling, you’re good to go. Let it cool for about 10 minutes, then cut it up and serve garnished with walnuts.

Categories: baked · mains · one-dish meals

Quinoa-Potato Cakes with Tuna and a Lemon-Parsley Sauce

April 23, 2008 · 9 Comments

                                        

It is an understatement to say that I am not a morning person.  I set two alarms every morning, for an hour before I have to leave the house, and I hit snooze for the next forty minutes.  I became a functioning adult on the day that I refused to sleep past 10:30 on the weekends, because I knew it would make weekdays that much harder.  I like the concept of waking up early… it just rarely happens unless brute force is applied.

This means that I never get breakfast.  I roll out of bed, wash my face, throw clothes on, and hope that there are no pillowcase marks on my forehead when I show up at school, ready to infuse young minds with knowledge.  The idea of eating something when I’m still half-asleep is really rather nauseating to me, and so if I eat hash browns, it’s in the evening, on a breakfast-for-dinner kinda night.

Of course, not eating breakfast means that I am ravenous by the time I finish teaching at 12:30, and on unrestrained days I have been known to have Doritos and a chocolate bar for lunch.  (What?  Dairy, carbs, chocolate… it’s totally well-rounded.)  Today, though, while teaching question tags -

Let me just stop here and talk about how ridiculous English is.  Here are three sentences with question tags:

You’re doing your homework, aren’t you?
He walks the dog, doesn’t he?
We ate dinner together yesterday, didn’t we?

In Bulgarian, those three question tags - “aren’t you,” “doesn’t he,” and “didn’t we” - can ALL be said using the same phrase. And which one of us has the universal language? How silly.

OK. Sorry. So, today, while teaching question tags during my last class, I was about ready to gnaw my arm off, and I was determined not to grab any junk food. I thought about some quinoa I had left over in the fridge, and that onion that desperately needed to be cut open (see previous post), and a real craving I’ve been having lately for tuna. (Yeah, I eat fish sometimes.) In Venice I learned how to make risotto cakes out of leftover risotto (throw an egg in there, make into patties, fry, top with parmesan. You’re welcome), and I thought about doing something similar with the quinoa. Deborah Madison has a great recipe for Quinoa Potato Cakes, which I always made with sweet potatoes and some chipotle, but since neither one of those was around, I figured a different variation was in order. (I have yet to cook that dish straight from the recipe.) So at this point, I’m babbling - the main idea is that I’m giving you an example of what can happen when you take a bunch of cravings and leftovers and use them to adapt a recipe that will give you a darned tasty lunch.

Yes, there’s ranch dressing mix in here.  Also, I used frozen peas, and to get the cold out of them, I just put them in a bowl, and when I drained the potatoes, I poured a little of that simmering water onto them and let them sit for a couple of minutes.

Quinoa-Potato Cakes with Tuna
makes about 12

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for frying cakes
1/2 cup finely diced onion
2 cloves garlic
1 cup cooked quinoa
3 small potatoes, peeled, cubed (about a cup), and boiled until soft
1 tablespoon ranch dressing mix
1/2 cup cooked peas
1/2 tin (or a whole one, if you’re feling bold) oil-packed tuna, drained
1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs (I used panko)
1/4 cup shredded monterey jack
1/4 cup chopped parsley
ground black pepper

Heat olive oil in a pan over medium high heat. Add onion and garlic and cook until softened. Put in a large bowl (put the pan back on the heat and throw some more olive oil in there, enough to coat the bottom) with quinoa, potatoes, and ranch dresssing mix and mash until potato pieces are broken down and mixture is well-combined. Add remaining ingredients and mix well to combine. It’s going to look like the picture just above - not resembling something that will hold together easily. Grab some mixture by the palmful and press into patties. (See? It holds together fine.) Put 3-4 cakes at a time into the hot oil, careful not to crowd the pan, and let cook for at least 3 minutes before turning and cooking the other side. Serve with…

Lemon-Parsley Sauce

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon all purpose flour
juice and zest of 1 lemon
1 cup water or mild broth
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Heat olive oil in a small pan over medium high (almost high) heat. Add flour and start whisking. When flour turns a few shades darker add lemon juice and water. Let this reduce by half, remove from heat, and add lemon zest and parsley.

Categories: appetizers · mains · pantry-dependent · spring · with fish

Spicy Peanut Soup

April 1, 2008 · 9 Comments

I grew up in North Carolina, where you can go to a supermarket and buy a gallon-sized can of boiled peanuts.  If you, too, were raised below the Mason-Dixon line, you know that the proper pronunciation sounds more like “bold peanuts,” even though their constitution is rather less than daring.  This southern staple has become a quirky delicacy outside the red-clay states, not unlike ramps, which have been renamed “wild leeks,” as if such suave titling would keep the resulting halitosis at bay.  I don’t like boiled peanuts, never have liked boiled peanuts and venture that I never will like boiled peanuts.  I put my peanuts in desserts, occasionally crush them to scatter on a plate of Thai noodles, and eat them in my PBJs and smoothies and for a long time I was perfectly content with that, thank you very much.  The very idea that these salty, crunchy little legumes would be floating in any kind of broth that had been at any point bold - er, boiled - was enough to keep me away from peanut soup for 25 years.

Well!  I was an idiot.

Look: peanuts, peppers, and tomatoes go great together, and don’t skimp on the garlic.  This soup relies on peanut butter for a midground flavor, with a bright kick of heat from jalapenos, the comfort factor from potatoes and/or rice, and a nice crunch of roasted peanuts used, heavily, to garnish.  This is almost totally pantry-based, save the essential fresh jalapeno.  (I’ve tried making it with just dried red pepper flakes and it’s not the same.)  My recipe is pretty basic - I have seen it with chicken (not happening here), coconut milk (I’ve garnished with shredded coconut - yum!), and tons of cilantro.  (I wish I could put into words how much I miss cilantro.)  Serve this with a nice hunk of fresh bread and your (vegan!) dinner is served.

Spicy Peanut Soup
makes a potful

2 tablespoons neutral oil, such as canola, sunflower, or peanut
1 large onion, chopped
2 bell peppers, seeded and diced, or about 1/2 cup chopped canned bell peppers
1 jalapeno, seeded and diced
5-6 cloves garlic, minced
3-4 potatoes, scrubbed or peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
1/2 cup of your favorite grain (brown rice, bulgur, quinoa?)*
a handful of frozen green beans (optional)
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 28-oz can crushed tomatoes
4 cups water or mild vegetable broth
3/4 cup natural peanut butter
chopped roasted peanuts, to garnish
unsweetened shredded coconut, to garnish
chopped cilantro, to garnish

Heat oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add onion, bell peppers, jalapeno, and garlic and cook until softened and fragrant, about 4-5 minutes. Add remaining potatoes, grain, beans, salt, pepper, tomatoes, and broth and bring it to a boil, then drop the heat down to low and simmer for about half an hour, adding water if necessary to keep it from getting too thick. This will depend on what kind of grain you used - some are total sponges. Towards the end of cooking time add the peanut butter, stirring to incorporate completely. Ladle it up and garnish with any or all of the three choices - peanuts, coconut, and cilantro. As soup-lovers know, this will be even better tomorrow.

*White rice won’t work so well - it will blow up to 5 times its original size and make the soup a mushy mess.  If that’s all you have, though, I’d recommend cooking it separately and then putting a few spoonfuls in the serving bowl before you ladle the soup over.

Categories: african · mains · pantry-dependent · soup · vegan

lentil gyuveche

February 28, 2008 · 1 Comment

When I found out I would be coming to Bulgaria, my friend Nancy had me over for dinner to meet her husband Ron, who had been here a few years before.  Ron waxed rhapsodic about Bulgarian food, about street markets shining with fresh local produce, restaurants that always spilled out onto sidewalks and gardens in summer, and about one of his favorite dishes, gyuveche.  He and Nancy made it for me and the dinner and conversation did much to grow my excitement about my upcoming travels.

 Gyuveche (pronounced “GYOO-vech-ay”) is the name of both the dish and the pot it bakes in.  It’s essentially a casserole, but what makes it unique is its being built around a big block of sirene, the feta-like Bulgarian cheese that I will miss dearly after I leave this country.  It can be made any number of ways - most often involving salami, which is why I end up giving it a pass at restaurants - but in this version I added lentils, since I wanted something a little more substantial than just cheese and vegetables.  I’ve never heard of it being done this way, but it worked out really well.  I just made sure to put them on the bottom of the pot, and the liquid that the sirene and vegetables gave as they baked was enough to give them something to simmer in.  This is great comfort food - warm and mushy, but with a little chew from the lentils and just enough brightness from the veggies to make you feel healthy.  Most Bulgarians would insist on adding savory, which here is called chubritsa, but I’m not such a fan, so I left it out.  You can, of course, correct this grievous cultural error - a quarter teaspoon should cover it.

 I often put potatoes in my gyuveche, but I ran out of room this time!  The variations are endless as long as you put the cheese in there - beets and potatoes?  Broccoli and cauliflower?  Sun-dried tomatoes and oxtail?  Go for it.  I would recommend, however, to pre-cook anything that would let off a lot of water, like cabbage.  Then you just get soup with cheese in it.  (I still regret that lunch.)  If you are using feta crumbles and tomatoes that are a little on the dry side, I’d recommend putting a quarter cup of water or broth in the bottom of the baking dish before adding the ingredients in - otherwise, the lentils won’t get enough liquid to cook in.

 One note on the pictures: last time, on the falafels, I got all kinds of great natural light.  Not so much the case with this one, and all the steam coming out of that straight-from-the-oven gyuveche kept fogging my lens.  I did get a fun shot with a flash, though, something I usually sneer at, but this time I’d like to think it looks Hip and Postmodern.  Please tell me if I’m being delusional.

Lentil Gyuveche
serves 1

1/4 cup brown lentils, rinsed and picked over
100g (about 2 ounces) sirene or feta
1/2 a small onion, chopped
a small handful chopped green beans (I used frozen)
2 mushrooms, sliced
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 small tomato, cut into big chunks
1 small bell pepper, seeded and cut into bite-sized pieces
salt and pepper
a drizzle of sunflower or olive oil
1/4 teaspoon dried savory (optional)

Preheat to 350F.  Spread lentils in the bottom of an individual gyuveche or 1-quart covered baking dish.  Top with cheese, vegetables, salt and pepper, oil, and savory.  If you’re using a gyuveche dish, cover as normal; otherwise, leave the lid tilted open just a bit.  Bake 30-45 minutes or until lentils are cooked.

Categories: baked · mains · neo-bulgo · one-dish meals

falafel

February 17, 2008 · 4 Comments

 

In the U.S., it’s hot dogs.  In India, it’s samosas.  In Europe, it’s doners.

 Wait, what?  Europe, doners?  Doners are middle-eastern!  Europe has waffles, fish-and-chips, gelato, why should doners have leapt their way up to be the ubiquitous continental street food?

Surely there are several geopolitical threads coming together to form one very long-winded answer, but I just say: because they taste good.  Spiced meat on a spit with tangy, garlicky yogurt sauce, bright cucumbers or salty pickles, sunny tomatoes, sometimes a few french fries too, all tucked into a soft warm pita, and the best part is, you don’t need a fork. I ask you, is anything closer to heaven?

Well, yeah.  Use falafel instead!  Chickpeas and bulgur buzzed up, loaded with garlic and spices, and pan-fried to golden bliss.  This is one of those things that my parents weren’t much for, so I grew up hearing that they were greasy little wheat bombs. When they were served to me for the first time in high school, I was surprised that they weren’t awful, but was not yet won over.   In college, though, I got a good one, and then, only then, did I understand.  They’ve got to be delicate on the inside, crisp on the outside.  Can’t just dump in a bunch of grains and deep-fry it: you gotta have something green in there, gotta have good spices.  (And don’t forget the garlic.)  Only then can you achieve falafel happiness.

 

For years I’ve been using Crescent Dragonwagon’s recipe for Neo-Traditional Falafel from her book Passionate Vegetarian, a 1000+ page cookbook that I plan on hauling around with me until it falls apart.  (I did draw the line at lugging it across the ocean, however, and have been scraping by on the few recipes from it that I copied before I left.  This is not to say that I did not bring her Dairy Hollow Soup and Bread along for the ride.  Because I did.)  I made a couple of amendments.  I used spinach instead of the parsley she calls for, because that’s what I had; I had run out of the 1/2 cup breadcrumbs she uses and so threw in half that amount of wheat germ; and although she bakes hers, I cannot betray having grown up in the South: why bake when you can fry?

I also didn’t have any pita bread around, so I prettied them up instead by putting them on a little bed of cabbage and arranging the appropriate accessories.  My new favorite thing is a yogurt sauce from my friend Kate, who keeps trying to proclaim herself a disaster in the kitchen but who so far has not proven herself to be one.  You can make it even better by using homemade mayonnaise, which is the easiest thing ever.  (But that’s another entry.)  Here I also topped it off with a dollop of lutenitsa, a Balkan red bell pepper ketchup, but you could use some chopped up roasted red peppers instead.  This summer I’d really like to make some of my own lutenitsa, and rest assured I’ll be posting the recipe.

 

Falafel
makes about 12

1/4 cup bulgur
1/2 cup boiling water
2 cups presoaked chickpeas
3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
pinch of chili flakes
1/2 cup roughly chopped fresh spinach
1/4 cup wheat germ
3-4 tablespoons sunflower or olive oil, plus more for frying

to serve
Kate’s super secret sauce (recipe follows)
finely sliced cabbage
pickles
lutenitsa or roasted red pepper

Put bulgur in a bowl, add boiling water, cover, and let sit for about 20 minutes, at which time the bulgur should be soft. Drain any excess water.

In the food processor combine chickpeas, garlic, egg, salt, cumin, black pepper, turmeric, coriander, chili flakes, spinach, and wheat germ. Buzz it all together while adding oil through the tube. Pause as necessary to scrape down sides, and stop when you’ve got everything well pureed together. Add this mixture to the bulgur and mix well. You can refrigerate this if you like - and it’s not a bad idea, if you want to give the flavors time to meld, or if you want to make this ahead of time to fry up later - or you can cook ‘em now: heat 2-3 tablespoons oil in a pan over medium-high heat. Form mixture into 1/4-cup patties. (I used a 1/4 cup measure as a mold.) Fry on both sides until golden brown, about 3 minutes each side. Serve with sides.

Kate’s Super Secret Sauce
makes about 3/4 cup

2/3 cup plain yogurt
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon paprika
pinch chili flakes
1/2 teaspoon dried savory
salt and grond black pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and serve. Good with doners, falafels, and as a dip for hunks of bread.

Leftovers Serve ‘em with just a drizzle of pomegranate molasses and more pickles.  I know, it sounds like a pregnancy craving from Berkeley, but you’ll thank me soon enough.

Categories: mains · middle eastern · pantry-dependent