Simply Recipes: Recipes Only

Brussels Sprouts with Black Bean Garlic Sauce

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:22:05 -0800

Please welcome guest author Garrett McCord of Vanilla Garlic as he shares one of his favorite quick and easy brussels sprouts recipes. ~Elise

"It's funky. Abrasive. It's not afraid to get in your face and call your mama ugly."

That's how black bean garlic sauce was first described to me. I was one of the RA's in the dorms way-back-when in college and some of my freshmen residents were teaching me how to use a wok. One of them tossed the sauce in with some cooked chicken and greens and as the steam and smoke rose the air became salty and pungent. The aroma was so thick you could suck it in and roll it around on your tongue. A flip of the wok and suddenly lunch was served. A quick taste and I could see that the sauce was an ingredient that demanded your attention and could only be tamed by other brassy ingredients.

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Pasta with Cauliflower

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:11:05 -0800

Okay, so I'm weird. I'm one of those people to whom you can say "cauliflower" and "anchovies" and I'll start salivating. I'll take cauliflower any which way (though IMHO roasted is best) and anchovies? Well anchovies are one childhood prejudice ("hold the anchovies!") I've happily outgrown. (Thankfully, along with my childhood anti-opera and country music sentiments, too. What is it with kids not liking things before they've ever tried them?) No, the anchovies will not make this dish taste like fish, they will however give it an indescribable savoriness (umami) that will make you want to eat the whole bowl. This pasta with cauliflower recipe I've adapted from a recipe from my dear friend Pam in Napa who adapted it from a Sicilian recipe by Vincent Schiavelli that appeared in Saveur. It's outrageously good; I've been eating the leftovers for days, which just seem to get better as the flavors have more time to meld.

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Scrambled Eggs with Tomatillos

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:38:22 -0800

Every few days, for the last month, I've gone out to my garden in the morning and gathered enough tomatillos to cook up with some eggs for breakfast. Here it is November, and the leaves are all turning, but we're in Northern California and we still have yet to get a frost, so the tomatillos are still growing, albeit more slowly. We grew up with my mother making huevos a la Mexicana, or scrambled eggs cooked in a tomato and jalapeno salsa. This recipe is a salsa verde version of my mom's huevos. Add some chorizo and you'll have a Mexican version of Green Eggs and Ham! Yes, the eggs are green, but if you, like me, love salsa verde, this is a good thing.

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Cranberry Applesauce

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:52:09 -0800

Every fall we await the arrival of fresh cranberries in the grocery aisles. "Have you seen them yet?" "Are they in?" We compare notes for cranberry sightings at the local stores. When the cranberries do finally come in, we load up, so we have plenty of frozen cranberries to last us the year. Then we start cooking with them. Cranberry relish, cranberry sorbet, even cranberry salsa. We even have three different recipes for apple cranberry pie. One of my father's favorite things to make is applesauce with cranberries added in for tartness, flavor, and color. We'll eat it for breakfast, as a side for pork, or with ice cream for dessert.

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Marc's Cashew Chicken

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:46:19 -0800

Updated. Originally posted in 2006.

This cashew chicken recipe is one of my favorites on the site, and not just because it hails from my friend Marc Canter who I don't see nearly enough. I first posted it several years ago after a raucous and memorable dinner that Marc prepared, accompanied by his wife Lisa and their kids Mimi and Lucy (any dinner with little kids tends to be raucous and memorable, don't you agree?) Marc had been serenading me with stories of his famous cashew chicken, his trademark dish, tested and perfected over decades of crashing at the homes of old and new friends in exchange for his cooking. One of the things I like so much about Marc's cashew chicken is that it is a good base recipe from which one can easily expand. Several people suggested the addition of some ginger and onion greens, which I agree works well and I've added in this updated version as an option. I've also enjoyed it with some fresh chopped pineapple thrown in, giving it some sweetness. Others have added vegetables such as broccoli or snow peas. Note that the amounts are all approximate. Marc doesn't really measure; like most natural cooks I know, he "eyeballs" it. But with these ingredients, in approximately the right proportions, it's hard to go wrong.

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Asian Coleslaw

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:54:58 -0800

We eat a lot of cabbage around here. Could be my father's Minnesota German roots, but for whatever reason, coleslaw is on the menu several times a week. I recently had a lovely Asian coleslaw at a local grill, that was served with an ahi tuna burger. This is my attempt to recreate that coleslaw, and I think I've come pretty close (may try my hand at the burger sometime too). It's super easy to put together; the defining ingredients are cabbage, rice vinegar, and toasted sesame oil. This version also has some peanut butter in the dressing and some twice toasted peanuts. So good! We had to stop eating it after our "test kitchen" tasting, just to save enough for dinner.

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Apple Walnut Gorgonzola Rustic Tart

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:33:25 -0800

Every fall we are blessed with a bounty of apples and walnuts. I grew up in what used to be a walnut orchard. At one time our home had 5 huge trees, covering both front and back yards, and yielding 500 pounds of walnuts a year (which sounds great unless you are the teenager chain-ganged into spending your afternoons and weekends raking mountains of dank leaves and stooping to pick those hundreds of pounds of nuts.) The trees are old now. We've lost 2 of the 5 trees (commercial orchard trees don't last forever and these were planted at least 50 years ago), and the remaining trees are just sputtering. It's only a matter of time before they're gone too. So we enjoy the bounty while we have it (and leave a bunch for the crows and squirrels.) This tart is a riff on an apple walnut turnover I made this summer. Same idea, an outstanding combination by the way, just this time with maple syrup instead of honey, and in a dead-easy-to-assemble rustic tart form. It's savory, and a little sweet. I ate a big slice for lunch; my father had his for dessert. Would be great for a brunch too.

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Spicy Vegetarian Chili

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:24:36 -0800

Updated, from the recipe archive. ~Elise

Those of you who have been reading Simply Recipes for a while probably sense (rightly) that my father is a committed carnivore. Thus you may appreciate that dad, spending an afternoon making this vegetarian chili with vegetables that he had bought at the farmers market that morning, would only put so much care into a meat-free chili, his dinner, if that chili were darn good. This vegetable chili is that good. It's excellent. Spicy, flavorful, delicious. Of course my mother did have to convince dad that no, we didn't need steak in addition to the chili, the beans were full of protein. And no, neither did we need potatoes. We served the chili with French bread.

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Pear Butter

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:16:45 -0800

Every year during apple season I spend days hovering over a large copper pot, slowly stirring a thick, bubbling mixture that will become our year's supply of apple butter. And every fall for the last several seasons I've wondered how I would work the same magic on pears. I've seen plenty of recipes for pear butter, but most of them look like apple butter to me, heavily spiced with cinnamon and cloves. Pears are more floral than apples. I wanted to see them with ginger, and nutmeg, and maybe some cardamom. So when my pal Hank offered me a a bagful of Bartletts freshly picked from his backyard tree, I was all over it. This pear butter is similar to apple butter in that it is a spicy, sweet, tangy spread, great over buttered toast (there is no "butter" in apple butter or pear butter), but with a distinctly different taste coming from the pears (obviously) and the seasonings of star anise, ginger, lemon, cardamom, and nutmeg.

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French Toast

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:18:06 -0800

Is there nothing better than French toast for Sunday breakfast? Thick slices of bread, soaked in a mixture of beaten eggs with milk and cinnamon, toasted in a frying pan, and served with butter and maple syrup, this has to be one of our favorite breakfast dishes. It works best with several day old French or Italian loaf bread, thickly sliced. Fresh bread, or bread that has been sliced too thin tends to get mushy and fall apart when soaked in the egg milk mixture. Many people serve with powdered sugar; I believe there is enough sugar in the maple syrup, so I don't add more. One of my favorite variations, the idea for which I picked up from The Silver Palate Cookbook 20 some odd years ago, is to add some orange zest, and a bit of Triple Sec orange liqueur to the batter for extra zing.

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Baby Bok Choy with Yellow Bell Peppers

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:16:11 -0800

There are certain routines in our family for which I am unendingly grateful. One is that at the dinner table there is always a green vegetable of some sort. I may not have loved some veggies as a child, but as an adult, I crave them. If not for the fact that the other members of my family love their greens too, I could easily eat an entire serving bowl of pretty much any of the veggies that regularly grace our table. This baby bok choy dish by my mother, case in point. I think I ate most of the bowl, and then begged her to make it again the next day so I could get some good photos. (Baby bok choy, baby bok choy, try saying that 3 times fast!) Wonderfully simple, with bok choy, peppers, and green onions fresh from the farmers market, this stir-fry doesn't even need added salt, there is enough naturally in the bok choy itself.

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New England Fish Chowder

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:38:28 -0800

My first job out of college was in Boston, in the financial district downtown. My local friends did their best to inculcate this wide-eyed Californian to New England traditions of every sort, especially food. We feasted on indian pudding at Durgin Park, as many menu items as we could afford at the Union Oyster House and the No Name Restaurant, and $5/lb lobsters I would buy from the Italian fish monger across the street from where I lived in the North End. One dish I could never get enough of was "chowdah". Clam chowder, fish chowder, seafood chowder, whatever, I loved it. New England style chowder is white, with cream and potatoes. No tomatoes. It's thick, rich, and creamy. You can bury it in little oyster crackers.

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Hamburger Stroganoff

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:58:02 -0800

One of my favorite recipes on this site is our beef stroganoff made with strips of top sirloin that have been fried in butter. In the recipe several commenters offered their takes on the dish, including making it with ground beef instead of top sirloin strips. The main advantage of ground beef is clearly budget, and if worked properly you can also have wonderful flavor. First, get ground chuck. Chuck is the shoulder cut of beef, the shoulder muscles being well worked from the grazing action of the steer. More muscle action equals more flavor, and a tougher cut of meat. Chuck is notoriously tough as a steak (ask my father who used to try to cook chuck steaks in his poor bachelor days), but one of the most flavorful parts of the animal. Grinding the meat tenderizes it, but the flavor is still there. Second, take the time to properly brown the meat. In other words, don't stir it! Just let it cook, on relatively high heat, until well browned, before giving it a stir. The browning is what gives you the flavor. Use the cooking of the onions and mushrooms to scrape up any of the browned bits, and deglaze the pan to get the rest. It's also important to salt while you cook. If you get to the end of this recipe and it's dull, it's because you haven't salted it enough. Experiment with the spices if you want. A little ground nutmeg can give it a lift, as well as tarragon.

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Glazed Lemon Bread

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:56:37 -0800

There is a reason comfort food is called "comfort" food. It's for those days when you hit every red light, when you're on the phone all day trying to fix a situation that should never have become broken in the first place, when every attempt at anything gets thwarted somehow, and all you want to do is crawl back into bed, pull the covers over your head, and go back to dreamland with the ponies, kittens, and rainbows (where hopefully they won't be chasing you in some twisted, scary movie, kitten-turned psycho-kitty, kind of way). This glazed lemon bread, a tea cake really, is perfect for chasing off the grouchy-grumblies. It's light, moist, lemony, with just a touch of honey and cardamom. If the magic that is baking can produce this cake, then anything is possible and tomorrow is a new day.

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Tomatillo Chicken Stew

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:33:19 -0800

September is tomatillo season around here. Little green lanterns hang from our tomatillo plants like ornaments on a well decorated Xmas tree. Do you ever cook with tomatillos? They look like smallish green tomatoes, and are even called "tomate verde" in Mexico, and are used for making salsa verde and chile verde. Tomatillos are typically boiled with some chiles to make the green salsa, but roasting them, as I've done in this recipe, will bring out more flavor. If you don't have access to fresh tomatillos, you can use canned salsa verde for the sauce (sort of like using canned tomatoes versus fresh).

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