but my kid's won't eat it...

Dinner with Jay

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:31:26 -0500

I've been in a bit of a cooking funk lately, so I decided a new project might help perk me up. Jay, my eight year old, has become a bit more culinarily adventurous lately as well so I thought the time had come for a joint dinner project. The idea is that Jay will pick out one recipe a week, help me make a grocery list, and then help make the dinner. I gave Jay a Rachel Ray cookbook to look through, and he quickly picked out this butternot squash mac and cheese. The recipe is very similar to recipes in the Sneaky Chef and Deceptively Delicious --> cook and puree a mild tasting vegetable and stir it into the pasta with a bunch of cheese and cream. The little differences that I liked in this recipe were the step of grating the onion directly into the butter, which made for no onion chunks to scare off the kids, and the addition of fresh thyme. I actually left the thyme out of the recipe in the (fruitless) hope that the five year old would eat it, but sprinkled the herbs liberally over my portion, and they were very tasty. This makes a ton of pasta, so we've got some tucked away in the freezer for a lazy day. Jay ate up all of his and gave it a solid 4 out of 5 stars. For a first try on our new culinary project, I think it went really well.

Review: Honga's Lotus Petal

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:15:48 -0600

I love Asian food, especially Southeast Asian and Asian fusion dishes. But I own very few Asian cookbooks, really just a smattering of Thai, and I rarely pick one up from the library just to flip through. I don't know if it's the lists of ingredients that would necessitate a trip to a special store to procure, or the way the recipes all seem the same after a while (at least to my Western palate), but it's rare for me to find an Asian cookbook that I want to stay up late reading. Honga's Lotus Petal: Pan Asian Cuisine, by Honga Im Hopgood is one of those rare finds. The photographs are beautiful, the narrative is entertaining & informative, and the recipes are inventive & diverse. It probably also helps that the recipes incorporate influences from multiple countries (including the US) rather than focusing on the cuisine of one valley in Southern Laos. Plus the author has a kickass name. Honga's Lotus Petal is apparently a restaurant in Telluride. I've never heard of it, but I would definitely look it up were I ever to find myself skiing in Colorado. I see the location's influence in the book's focus on healthy, seasonal, organic ingredients. I don't think I got more than a few pages in before finding the first recipe I wanted to try, a version of cream of tomato soup that substitutes coconut milk for the cream and adds a Thai flair with lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves. The local grocery that usually stocks lemongrass was mysteriously out, but I had some lime leaves in the freezer. I just bumped up the amount of lime leaves and never really missed the lemongrass. I think you could successfully make this recipe as long as you have at least one of those two ingredients (and some fish sauce of course, you can't do anything without fish sauce!). I ate my soup for dinner with these Cilantro Noodles from Donna Hay, and enjoyed some even more the next day for lunch. The soup has a subtle, creamy, savory taste. I'll make it again and I look forward to trying many more recipes from Honga's Lotus Petal.

Oat Knots

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:56:50 -0600

These rolls are a category winner in the most recent Cooking Light reader recipe contest. These contests are such pieces of Americana - you must incorporate a sponsor ingredient into your recipe. Ten ways to cook with Kr@ft Mir@cle Whip! But the sponsors for the Cooking Light contest are fairly innocuous (soy sauce, rolled oats, and canned tomatoes are a few examples) and the resulting recipes look pretty good. And these Oatmeal Knots also taste pretty good! Actually they taste really good. They are made with whole grains and very little butter, but they don't taste heavy or spongy. The seeds on the outside provide a nice nutty crunch, and the insides are light, fluffy, and slightly sweet. The recipe is a standard yeast bread recipe, with one step that I haven't seen before. To melt the honey and butter together with the oats you heat the water for the recipe to boiling and pour it over them. The dough was really wet and sticky for me, I had to add more than the additional 1/2 cup of flour mentioned to get it to stop sticking to my hands (and the counter, and the bowl, and anything else that wandered by). But it didn't seem to adversely affect the resulting texture. Fashioning the knots was pretty easy, a lot like playing with Play-do, but mine spread out and didn't look a whole lot like knots after baking. It might work just as well to roll them into balls and bake together in a pan like rolls. I love the soft places where rolls merge together during baking and you have to pull them apart before eating. Yumm...

Winter Tomato Soup with Goat Cheese Crostini

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:55:10 -0600

This delicious recipe comes from The Flexitarian Table, by Peter Berley. The cookbook is based on a fabulous premise ~ convertible recipes that can be prepared easily for either a vegetarian, meat-eating, or mixed group of diners. Unfortunately, for the most part the recipes aren't that appealing to me. Don't get me wrong, it's a great cookbook, I think I just have a different palate than the author. But if you're looking for good mostly-vegetarian recipes or have to cook for both meat-eaters and vegetarians do check this book out. If your palate matches up with Berley's I think you're in for a treat. One of the recipes that did leap off the page for me was this Winter Tomato Soup with Goat Cheese Crostini, and considering I had to dash through falling snow in my backyard to grab the required sage and thyme I think that a winter soup was definitely called for. The recipe is easy to prepare and just the thing for a cold winter evening in front of the fire. Also, unless you're cooking for a large group you'll more than likely have some of the goat cheese spread leftover for sandwiches and snacks. Unfortunately I ate mine up before having a chance to try it, but panini/toasted sandwiches spread thinly with the herbed goat cheese and layered with grilled mushrooms and fresh tomato seem like an awfully nice idea.

Cooking with Pumpkins

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:42:34 -0600

Following up on my last post on single ingredient cookbooks, I raided another book in my collection for Thanksgiving dinner - this one on pumpkins. (And yes I realize I'm posting this over a month late, insert the latest "I've been busy" excuse here). Putting together a Thanksgiving menu for my family is increasingly difficult as the diets and food intolerances pile up (currently we've got low-carb, no beef, lactose intolerant, and a tomato aversion ~ oh and two picky kids who pretty much exist on carbs and lactose), and this baked pumpkin recipe was technically off-limits as it includes mascarpone cheese. But as soon as I saw it I knew I had to make it. How can you resist a recipe that is baked in a whole pumpkin and includes pancetta and cheese? I don't know about you but I simply can't (resist that is). My lactose-intolerant brother will just have to drool and eat the mashed potatoes that the carb-a-phobes can't eat. You'll need four 1-lb sugar pumpkins or two 2-lb'ers for this recipe. A one pound pumpkin is very small and can be served as an individual portion. It can be hard to find them that small except around Halloween though, so larger pumpkins can be shared between diners. If you can find the little ones though, how cute is that to serve individual tiny baked pumpkins oozing with cheese and herbs? (Cute is the answer by the way, super cute).

Cooking with Apples

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:58:38 -0600

I have several single ingredient cookbooks - one on pumpkins, one just about cooking with garlic, and this Apple Cookbook by Olwen Woodier. These books tend to be small and slim, and I rarely think of them when I'm flipping through sources for inspiration. But last week I looked at the bag of delicious Oregon-grown apples in the corner and knew just what cookbook to go to. Every year around this time my parents take an apple foraging trip to the Hood River area of Oregon. They'll bring back all sorts of kinds of apples you'll never see in the grocery store and I usually score a sampler bag. And because my parents are nothing if not generous, the sampler bag this year actually filled two big paper grocery bags. Despite our best apple-gobbling efforts there were still quite a few left in the bag when they started to get mushy so this last week has been an all apple bonanza. I made apple cake, applesauce, cider braised chicken, and this recipe for Pork Tenderloin Stuffed with Apples. The chicken and cake recipes also came out of the Apple Cookbook and were equally as good but I decided to feature the pork both because it has been ages since I included a meat recipe on this blog and because it seemed extremely seasonal and appropriate for this almost Thanksgiving season. You take a tenderloin, split it open like a book and pound it flat. Then it gets rolled up with a stuffing comprised of apples and onions that have been sauteed with bread crumbs, butter, and marjoram. You tie up the pork roll, glaze it with a sweet and sour mustard glaze and chuck it in the oven to roast. Served with a side of baked or sweet potatoe, it's a really great combination of sweet and tart, chewy and smooth.

Green Herb Tart

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:59:02 -0500

See this recipe calls itself a tart, and even calls for a tart pan. Scary! And yet it got itself made by virtue of having alternate instructions for baking in a pie dish. And look how pretty! Although my crappy picture might not show it, this was probably the prettiest thing that has come out of my kitchen in a long while. It was also the answer to the age-old question: what to do with a fridge full of far too many bags of random greens that keep arriving in my vegetable box and refuse to clean or cook themselves. I used the dough recipe from Deborah Madison's book, but it's just your basic olive oil pizza dough recipe. The recipe calls for a specific combination of greens and herbs, but just use whatever you have or looks good in the store that day. I think I ended up using beet greens, kale, spinach, basil, and some random herbs from my garden. And I chopped that kale to bits and cooked it to death because I hate big stringy pieces of tough greens. No worry here though, as all my violent hacking and boiling took care of that nasty kale. The taste of the filling is very mild - you could substitute feta for the Gruyere for a sharper taste, but if going with the original be sure to put in enough salt as the final baking seemed to mellow the salt a bit and I wished I'd put in just a tiny bit more. This isn't a quick recipe by any means (ugghh is there anything more time consuming and thankless than cleaning multiple heads of straight-from-the-mud greens?) but really worth the effort. The leftovers keep really well and make for great lunches - either rewarmed in the oven or microwave, or served at room temperature.

For Want of a Tart Pan

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:28:06 -0500

Come August and September of each year our neighbors become very generous with the produce. Apart from the expected deliveries of bulbous zucchini, we can usually count on receiving some tomatoes, Asian pears, figs, and plums. This year the figs didn't materialize, as despite our neighbor's best efforts (which included blowing a whistle every half hour all day long, wild clapping, and tying pieces of paper to his fig tree) a herd of small birds decimated the fig crop within a several block radius of our house. But the plums, the plums came in abundance. Apparently the birds are finicky, who knew? So last week found me rifling through my cookbook collection for good plum recipes, and declaiming loudly to all who could hear me (my husband) about my lack of a tart pan. "Why this looks good," I'd say, "if only I had a tart pan." "Oohh, what about this one. Nope. Don't have a tart pan." "Oh look, I could make this one... if I had a TART PAN!!!" Eventually my declaiming and thumping of heavy cookbooks got so bad that Jim patiently suggested we go down the hill and make a trip to a local shopping pavillion as he needed some batteries and maybe while we were there I could look for a damn TART PAN and perhaps QUIT WHINING ABOUT IT! Of course there was nary a tart pan to be found within a twenty minute radius of our house, but by the time I got home I had calmed down and remembered that I did in fact have a Bundt Pan (!) and perhaps there existed somewhere in the vast reach of the internet a recipe for plum something or other that did not involve a tart pan. And that is how I came to make this cake. And it was good. Ian in particular liked the frosting. Who needs a tart pan anyway?

The Best Salad

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 13:07:58 -0500

Cooking Light's September issue celebrates their 20th anniversary, and they editors have compiled a list of their favorite recipes over the past twenty years in various categories. This is their favorite salad recipe, green and yellow beans topped with vinegary tomatoes, basil, and feta. I think calling it a salad is kind of arbitrary - I'm not exactly sure what separates a vegetable side from a vegetable salad - but regardless it's easy, makes good use of end of the summer ingredients, and had me tilting my bowl to slurp up the last of the vinegary dressing. The only changes I made from the recipe as given below were to snap the beans into bite sized pieces rather than serving them whole, and substituting lemon basil for the Italian kind, just because that's what I had on hand. It's a great substitution though, providing both spicy basil and tangy lemon notes to the dish. The salad goes well as a side for fish or roast chicken, and the leftovers are good for lunch with some brown rice or barley.

Carrot Bread

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:43:06 -0500

As you may have noticed I like to read cookbooks. I buy them new and used, check them out of the library, and make long lists of books that I absolutely need to read. There are a lot of good cookbooks out there, but it's inevitable that after a while a lot of recipes start to seem repetitive. After all there are only so many ways to prepare a rustic fruit tart or seared flank steak. So I'm always excited when I come across a recipe that is entirely new to me or incorporates familiar ingredients in an unexpected way. This recipe for a quick savory carrot bread includes pecans, whole wheat flour, dried dill, and Chinese five spice - certainly not a combination I had seen before - so of course I had to give it a try. The preparation is also a bit different. It's a quick bread leavened with baking soda rather than yeast, but you knead it like a yeast bread and bake it in a freeform loaf. The recipe comes together quickly and the results are really quite good. The carrots make the bread much moister than your typical whole wheat loaf. In fact it kept for almost a week without going stale and dry, quite a feat for homemade bread. The dill and five spice don't come through too much in the loaf once it is baked, just enough to give a bit of complexity to the taste. I might add just a bit more five spice next time to see what that's like. Try this bread warm with lots of butter, or spread with a savory cream cheese and smoked salmon.