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Archive for the ‘Yum’ Category

Summer!!

I have been wildly delinquent in posting because we have been enjoying lots of sunshine and just generally staying pretty busy.  I have a few really yummy recipes to post.  Today, just a couple quickies.  For 4th of July lunch, we grilled up some bbq chicken on our stovetop grill pan and got some wonderful char marks!

We had this with thin-sliced grilled potatoes and grilled corn succotash.  The succotash was really simple and delicious with our chicken and potatoes.  I wasn’t a huge fan of the leftovers, but I made a ton of it, so I ate it a couple more times for lunch and snack.

Grilled Corn and Edamame Succotash

• 4 ears shucked corn
• 1 cup frozen edamame
• 2 cups green beans, washed and trimmed
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 1 clove minced garlic
• 1.5 Tb butter
• 1 cup cherry tomatoes
• 1.5 Tb lemon juice
• 1 Tb balsamic vinegar
• Salt & Vinegar

1. Grill corn for about 10 minutes, turning often to get lots of grill marks all the way around.
2. Boil 4 cups water and cook edamame and beans for about 3 minutes to par cook.
3. Drain and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking process.
4. Melt butter in a pan and sauté onion and garlic until lightly brown.
5. Add the corn and cook for a couple minutes.  Add bean/edamame mixture and cook for another couple minutes.
6. Remove from the pan to a large bowl and add tomatoes, lemon juice, balsamic, salt and pepper.  

Super easy and really fresh!

 

Matt and I don’t eat a lot of fresh fruit as snacks, so when our CSA box comes with new fruits that we’re not used to eating out of hand, I try to come up with somewhat healthy ways to use them and get as much fruit into our diet as possible. 

This past week I made another pie.  The last pie I made was a bit fancier, much prettier, and probably quite a bit healthier.  This pie, however, was amazingly wonderful and we finished it by Thursday night.  I didn’t get many pictures of the actual pie-making process, and the slice of pie that I have a picture of is a mushy mess, but this is what made it so delicious. 

Cherry Pluot Custard Pie Heaven

• 1 pie crust (Pillsbury for this one)
• 1 box Jell-O Pudding custard mix (I should have used two…it was a pretty thin layer of custard.  And the next time I make a pie like this, my plan is to actually make the custard.)
• ~1 cup fresh cherries, pitted and cut in quarters (I never liked fresh cherries when I was growing up, but now that I’m in Seattle, I’m finding that fresh cherries in Washington—which they offer up as samples while you walk around farmer’s markets—are a really wonderful summer snack)
• 4 pluots, peeled, pitted and chopped
• Cool whip galore

1. Prepare custard according to directions for thick pie filling.
2. Cook fruit over medium heat until it gets nice and juicy and wonderful.  I added a tiny bit of sugar to the mix.
3. Line pie plate with pie and blind bake until it is nice and brown.  You’ll notice in one of my pictures there is a big glob of white chocolate in one slice of pie…this is where I poked a hole in the baked crust.  I mended it with white chocolate chips melted into the space to prevent the custard filling from oozing out.  Matt did not object to a giant piece of white chocolate with his pie.
4. After the fruit has cooked down quite a bit, strain mostly solid parts from the liquid sweetness.  Save this! (I drizzled a bit over our first piece of pie, and the rest I shook up with some limeade for a sweet summer drink)
5. Mix the strained solids with the prepared custard (after it has rested like the package says).
6. Spread the custard mix evenly in the pie crust and top with cool whip.

Is there any question that this was delicious??? The tangy tart bite of the fruit mixed spectacularly with the thick rich custard, and a giant serving of whipped cream never made anything worse.  So satisfying!

 

Spectacular Speedy Simple Burritos

So I had a bit of success with our rice maker last week.  We made a brown basmati rice that turned out a bit too mushy, but cooked through and not burnt–a definite improvement!  The problem: I made WAY too much rice for what we needed (peanuty fried rice).  Leftover cooked rice is difficult to use up…most recipes call for dry rice, and my fail-safe go-to method of using rice up is to make fried rice.  This is not the best choice if the rice you have leftover is from the production of a GIGANTIC pan of fried rice. 

We grabbed spinach tortillas and three canned goods.  This was such a satisfying, easy and yummy dinner.  So wonderful that we had it twice for dinner (and one other time with eggs for breakfast!).

Specatcular Speedy Simple Burritos

• 2 cups leftover cooked rice
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• Cumin, salt, pepper, red pepper to taste
• 1 can black beans, mostly drained
• 1 can diced tomatoes with green chiles, half drained
• 1 can sweet corn, drained
• Spinach wraps
• shredded mexican cheese (we always have this on hand for some reason)

1. Sauté onion in a tiny bit of olive oil until soft.
2. Add rice and stir fry until heated through, adding seasoning to taste.
3. Heat beans, tomatoes and corn in a small saucepan until bubbly.
4. Add cheese, bean mixture and rice/onions to a tortilla.
5. Roll and eat!

After we ate this the first time, I added the rice and the bean mixes together in one tupperware container.  This made 6 different (very full) burritos, and there was at least 1 (maybe 2) more servings of the rice and beans left.  Matt loved it!  And looking at the pictures now makes me wish we had some more for tonight!

Fruit Jumble Pie

Ok, I’m still way behind…this weekend was not so much about catching up as I thought.  Oh well.  I have been telling Dori I would post pictures of this pie I made for over a week now, so here it is!

I started with a recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, which I love because it has just about anything you can think of with lots of basic info to help you get started.  I usually use it to get a sense for how long something should be cooked or what kinds of flavors go into some type of traditional sauce or something along those lines and then go from there.  For this pie, I was looking for a way to use up a giant pile of fresh fruit that was too ripe for us to eat straight up and that I didn’t want to go bad.  BH&G had a recipe for a Harvest Fruit Tart that used apples and a bunch of dried fruits that you reconstituted in some apple juice before mixing with nuts and baking in a tart with a lattice top. 

I used my fresh fruit, used the apple juice to make a gooey gooey sauce, and was too lazy to even attempt lattice-work. 

Fruit Jumble Pie

• 4 apples, peeled, cored and chopped
• 3 peaches, peeled and chopped
• 4 plums, peeled and chopped
• About 1 cup strawberries, chopped
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup apple juice
• 1 cup rough chopped walnuts
• 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 2 pie crusts (I used whole foods frozen crusts already in tins.  To make the top, I let one defrost and took it out of the tin)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Combine chopped fruit and apple juice in saucepan over medium-high heat and cook until it gets thick and syrupy.
3. While it cooks, mix nuts, brown sugar, flour and nutmeg in a large bowl.
4. Add the fruit mixture to the bowl and mix until everything is combined.  This will look really beautifully gooey and sticky and amazing.
5. Fill the pie shell.  I had WAY too much filling and fit in as much of the fruit as I could.  You’ll see below this was a tiny bit disastrous.
6. Top with top crust in a fancy lattice or whatever way you see fit.  I used one of my valentine’s cookie cutters to make crimp-edged hearts (8 of them! one for each slice of pie!) that went around the edge.  This was mostly successful. 
7. Brush top pie crust with a bit of milk and sprinkle with granulated sugar.
8. Bake for about 45 minutes.  You want the crust to be brown and the filling inside to be nice and bubbly.  If the middle of the filling isn’t bubbling, your pie will probably not thicken up nicely as it cools, so make sure you get to the bubbly filling stage!
9. Remove from the oven….mine had a little bit of an overflow and one of the hearts slide off the pie and onto the baking sheet (always bake your pies on a baking sheet!) so I had to rearrange that after cooking.
10. Cool on a wire rack.  My book says fruit pies can stay out overnight or for up to 24 hours.  I left it on the counter overnight and then covered it and tossed it in the fridge the next morning.

I ate a slice one day after work, straight from the fridge by itself.  It was alright…a bit too tart for me.  From that point on we heated up slices and served with vanilla ice cream…HEAVEN!  I love warm pie crust and fruit filling with cool vanilla ice cream.  Really really satisfying.  I’m not sure I liked the walnuts in the pie….sometimes I liked them better than others, but Matt really enjoyed them every time we ate the pie.  It only took us a week to get through the whole thing and now I’m sad that it’s gone 🙁

    

Comfort Food Guest Post from Mom

 

I have more recipes and things to post, but haven’t gotten myself organized enough to find time for them.  I am expecting a pile of editing work this weekend, so hopefully next week I’ll get back on track.  Until then, here’s another one from my mom!! This is pretty much top secret information I’m about to share, so be grateful.  My grandma makes something we have always called Easter Bread…it has very little to do with Easter for me, since I remember eating it all the time.  She used to send it to me in college and one of my roommates and I would devour an entire loaf…it’s amazing. Super simple, but somehow you have to get it just right otherwise it won’t be the same.  My mom has been working hard trying to get it to be as good as grandma’s, and she is pretty close…there’s just something about grandma food, right?? 

Anyway, here it is.  Can you really go wrong with bread, cheese, pepperoni and ham?? Nope! I actually like it better when it is leftover in the fridge after a day or two (if it lasts that long).  The bread is nice and chewy and soft and because it’s all rolled up, you get a bit of cheese, pepperoni and ham in each bite and it’s one of the most comforting snacks for me 🙂 Take it away mom!

Easter Bread à la Grandma, via Mom

Or as mom calls it: “For the girls that need to add a couple inches to the waistline.” Of course that’s not me and I really don’t know any.  Never as good as  hers but we keep trying cause it is so yummy.

• Bread dough rolled thin (Mallory note: mom has a bread maker, which makes this part wonderfully easy…I have no bread maker and have not yet attempted to make this for that exact reason.)
• Ham, Pepperoni and cheese  -  sharp please
• Dad and I started adding some pizza seasoning too

1. roll…seal with cold water
2. 350 for 30 minutes…

MISTAKES	HINTS
I love my cheese but too much will make it burst…	When some bursts out of the badly sealed edges  -  YOU get to eat it….
forgetting the seasoning on the 2nd loaf	Great for me to take to work for breakfast
I can get flour all over the kitchen in 2 seconds..	Wonderful heated slightly with some tomato or marinara sauce for dipping (Mallory note: AGREED!)

 

Hybrid Falafel

How have I had no time to blog?? Things have not been particularly busy, but we’ve been doing a lot of running around and planning and even some relaxing! Plus, Santana has been a fussy fussy pup…not always wanting to eat her breakfast/dinner, sometimes giving us the pleasure of waking up to some hidden spots of vomit in the dining room and all around being a bit fussier than normal.  We have a vet appointment in a couple weeks and hopefully things get all fixed up (if there’s anything wrong to fix).  A quick recipe until I can catch up with some of my other back-logged meals!

Hybrid Falafel: the falafel of the future (said in a deep booming voice, of course)

I have made falafel at home a few different ways.  The first few times, we used a mix (on the left in the first picture below).  All you do is add a bit of water to the dry mix, let it sit for ten minutes, form into balls and fry.  It’s pretty tasty. The texture is not nearly as wonderful as freshly made falafel at some great Greek restaurant, but it was easy, fairly cheap, and the perfect amount for the two of us.  A success.

The second attempt was a baked falafel from scratch, using bulgur and chickpeas and lots of yummy spices that made a really tasty (and much healthier/fresher) version of falafel.  We used these for leftovers and even froze some for later.  I thought they were a tiny dry and wanted to work on the texture. 

This brought us to the hybrid falafel I concocted last week.  They turned out really well, and I’ll probably stick with this method from here on out, with a few adjustments in spices and mix-ins.

• 1 package dry falafel mix
• 3/4 can chickpeas, drained
• 4 small carrots (ours were super small, 1 large would do the trick), shredded
• spices and seasoning to taste (I used a little cumin, garlic powder and onion powder in my mix, but could have used some fresh chopped or grated onion instead to bump up the moisture)

1. Prepare falafel mix according to directions and let sit.
2. While it is soaking, mash chickpeas and add other ingredients.
3. Combine the two mixes into a really pretty, mushy mixture.
4. Bake!!! I think we went with 425 degrees, 10 minutes per side.

We turned these falafel into a salad with some really wonderful tomatoes, some fresh croutons made from a french baguette that was getting stale, some chopped spring onion and some toasty crisped chickpeas (tossed with some spice and baked in the toaster oven for a while).