Summer minestrone

I used a combination of this recipe and this one. Sort of. Here's the actual recipe, which was light and summery and satisfying. (Although don't cook too long or the zucchini makes the whole thing bitter.)

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

5 small red potatoes, cubed

5 small carrots, chopped

1 big green zucchini, cubed

2 small yellow squash, halved and chopped

1 1/2 c frozen peas

1 big can low salt whole tomatoes with basil

big handful of beet tops, chopped

1 can cannelini beans, rinsed and drained

a bunch of basil, thyme and oregano (maybe 2 T, 1 t and 1 t)

pepper

2 c leftover zucchini stock from the squash blossom risotto the night before plus

about 2-3 c more water

In the dutch oven, heat 2-3 T olive oil on medium heat and add onions. Saute until soft. Add the garlic and potatoes. Cook 3-4 minutes. Add the carrots and cook another 4-5 minutes. (I added some stock several times in this period to deglaze the pan and keep the potatoes from sticking to the bottom.) Add the liquid (and a bay leaf if you one..we didn't, so I used a bouillion cube) and boil for 5-7 minutes. Add everything else and boil for about 15-20 minutes or until the vegetables are soft.

You might want to add salt....I didn't, and I didn't want to add cream or blend it. I like chunks in my minestrone.

Eat with toasted bread with melted cheese and an extra sprinkle of pepper. Then eat vanilla ice cream with some of Jeremy's cherry sauce for dessert and scream out in ectasy.

Three cheers for food!!!!

Plantain salad and squash blossom risotto

I love summer salads. You can throw one of these suckers together in less than five minutes, with tons of fresh veggies, some fruit and nuts. As you've guessed by now, one of my compulsions is use-up-that-thing-we-have. I bought two plantains last week at the farmer's market, and here they were, turning black and soggy. Why not throw them in the toaster oven and put them on a salad? Brilliant! (Jeremy didn't think so, but what does he know?)



Okay, he does know some things, because as he predicted, the crystalized ginger chunks were weird on my salad.
Jeremy, my creative and wonderful husband, felt inspired to try squash blossom risotto. I was thrilled after seeing them at the market for two years and being clueless as to what to do with them. A word of caution: after you buy them, they will wrinkle and close, but it's very important to wash them before cooking them. The blossoms will actually open up, so you can rinse away the dirt and bugs hiding inside. After Jeremy started cooking, we discovered we were out of arborio rice. We did have orzo. What the hell.



As it turns out, not only is the orzo a very effective substitute for short grained rice, it reheats much better than traditional risotto. The blossoms we delicious and bright orange! They taste very much like the squash that they were once attached to, but add textural fun. Go look in your gardens or farmers markets, becasue soon they will be gone.

Zucchini Strata and Potates Bravas

So we had some potatoes to use from the great new potato extravaganza at the markets two weeks ago, and after using them in any number of other dishes, we decided to try out a recipe from the beautifully illustrated Accidental Vegetarian book that we had from the library. It's essentially potatoes roasted in tomatoes and chilies. We were a bit impatient for dinner and Julie was a bit overzealous in her desire to use up all of the tomatoes from the can, so they were bit wet and a bit over done, but still quite tasty, and the concept was sound (dammit!). Maybe we'll make some more for the next picnic we choose to attend.
The potatoes sounded good and all, but not like a full meal in themselves so we decided some form of egg dish would work well with the zucchini proliferating in our fridge. We also had half of a stalish whole wheat baguette that need to be used up or fed to fish, so I decided to try making a strata for the first time.
Oh my god, how did we never try this before? I used this recipe, substituting a mix of sharp cheddar and asiago for the Swiss, added a few beet tops to the zucchini for good measure, and used a mix of fresh oregano and sage for the herbs. The bread became soft and pillowy (in a good way; not like chewing on your pillow at night), the zucchini and cheese complemented each other wonderfully. The whole thing was somewhere between a crustless quiche and a savory bread pudding -- satisfying but also light.

Finally, because what is a good Spanish and Italian(?) meal without a Belgian beer?

Sixth Glass was rich and slightly sweet. A very complex and smooth ale.

Chocolate dinner party

At Jeremy's part time job, he works with such fun, nice people, some of whom happen to also be vegetarians. We started a veggie potluck, which meets about every other month, and so far it's been a roaring success. Jeremy and I decided to invite just three of the girls, Sheena, Jessica and Katie, to our house for a smaller dinner party. Always ready for a theme, I proposed a few options, including my-favorite-recipe and chocolate. Jeremy scoffed at my chocolate idea, but it quickly became the preferred theme. Chocolate it is!

Sheena volunteered for "salad" before she realized it was a chocolate themed dinner. But, trooper that she is, she found this recipe, which uses white chocolate as the base for the salad dressing.



Like most dinner parties, I take photos of the first course and forget to photograph the rest.

Oh well.

Jeremy made chocolate bread (substituting walnuts for the chocolate chunks), a lightly sweet treat that paired perfectly with the salad.

Jessica made vegetable chili with cocoa. The chocolate flavor was subtle, but nice (especially with extra cilantro.)

We made the main course--bean enchiladas with chocolate mole sauce. The heat was freaking intense....I mean, my god, it had nearly 10 chiles in it...and the chocolate flavor was quite pronouced. Thankfully I'd made guacamole, which strangely had a cooling effect on the enchiladas (no chiles in the guac, just lots of lime). I don't know many people who could actually eat this without passing out from the spiciness, and I needed to take breaks after each bite. Yowza!

Katie made chocolate almond mousse for dessert.

It was actually difficult to find savory chocolate options--if anyone has any suggestions, please send them our way for the next chocolate dinner party.

Dinner with Monique--salad, beet soup and sangria

Back in the early days, before we lured Monique into our "So You Think You Can Dance" addiction, we had her over for dinner. On this particular evening, an otherwise bleak day for all of us, we had beautiful summer salad, with radishes and stripy beets. My god, aren't they GORGEOUS???

To cheer her up, I gave her a new bee finger puppet, shown here with the shockingly fuschia spicy coconut milk beet soup. The recipe comes from The Accidental Vegetarian, one of our new favorite cookbooks. In the future, I would strain the soup, unless you like strings, but it was light and flavorful. In fact the beets were secondary to the lemongrass and lime leaves.

Here's the recipe:

Take just over a pound of beets, trimmed and cleaned, and place them in a roasting pan. Rub some vegetable oil into their skins, spinkle them with salt and cover the pan with foil. Roast them in a preheated 400 degree oven until the beets are soft, about 40 mins, then allow them to cool. At this point it shoud be possible to skin them easily and with a minimum of finger staining. Cut them into 1-2" pieces and set aside.

Take 2 stalks lemon grass (outer layers peeled and the remaining stalks cut into managable pieces), 2 cloves garlic, 3 red chiles, a 1" piece of peeled ginger, 4 kaffir lime leaves and the juice of one lime and place them in a blender or food processor. Blend them until they form a smoothish paste, adding additional water if necessary to blend. Saute 2-3 shallots and 1 tsp cumin seeds in a little vegetable oil, until the shallots are translucent and the cumin fragrant. Then add half of the above paste and gently cook together for about 5 minutes. Add half of the beets and stir them together for a couple of minutes, then add 2.5 cups vegetable stock. Bring this mixture to a boil, then reduce to simmer for 10 minutes. Then add the remaining beets, paste and one can of coconut milk, and puree in a blender or with a hand blender. Strain the resulting soup to get rid of any remaining lemongrass chunks and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve the brightest fuschia thing you've ever put in front of someone with cilantro, mint leaves, and/or diced cucumber and enjoy.

Sangria is easy to make, and it's a lifesaver in the summer when fruit turns so quickly (at least it does in our oven-of-an-apartment). Our version here is a mixture of blueberries and strawberries, covered with a bottle of cheap white wine (reds good too), a few splashes of liquor (vodka, rum, fruit liquor, Cointreau, whatever) and topped with fizzy water.

Veggie pie and Peach tart

Crusts! Crusts!
My mother used to make homemade pie crusts all the time. I’ve used her recipe many times, but it leaves something to be desired in terms of flavor. It’s fine, but bland. We’re busy people, and our kitchen is small, so these days I get lazy and prefer to buy store-made crusts. Recently, we discovered that the pie crusts we’ve been buying for the past year contain lard. (Blech.) (Also, see here for more information on store-made crusts.)
Since then we’ve experimented with different recipes. I’d still rather run to the Wedge and buy one, but Jeremy likes to use his elbow grease and make crusts at home. While the ones with cream cheese are tasty, it’s a pain in the ass to make and adds a bunch of extra fat and calories. What works best for us is to use part butter, part shortening, both chilled. Make sure your water is ice cold, and don’t over-mix. Also, I’ve found it’s easiest to roll the dough on a piece of parchment paper/wax paper, or in a pinch, a large plastic bag. Our table is sticky and I end up using a large spatula to remove it from the table, which rips and warps the crust and makes everyone sad.
Jeremy made this version for the veggie pie (just add par boiled or sauteed veggies and about a cup of roue sauce (thinner is best…thick roue just clumps up on the top, which is tasty, but the lower vegetables get lonely.)
Before baking:

After, in all of its golden glory:

This crust (a slightly sweetened version of the above) was made weeks later for a different fruit tart, and then lived in a Ziploc in the refrigerator for far too long. I rolled it out, covered it with some homemade lemon curd (a few tablespoons), sliced fresh peaches and drops/small clumps of ginger preserves. Fold over the edges, sprinkle with some sugar and a little butter and bake for about 25-30 minutes or until the crust starts to brown and the peaches look soft.

Ooooooh, yes......

Curry beans, beet tops and blueberry tart

As part of the bean present, we finally made curry beans. Eh. It was sort of weird...beans and curry....and it felt like they really needed something to cut the flavor. Not the winning recipe, I'm afraid, but we still love our Rancho Gordo beans!

Jeremy tried yet another crust to make this blueberry tart. They were wet little bastards and ran all over the place, but paired with fresh strawberry martinis, the taste was magnificent.
For the martinis, crush a bunch of strawberries.

Mix about 1 c strawberry juice with 2 shots vodka in a shaker with ice. If you're feeling extra zesty, add a squirt of lime.

Chard, pecan quiche and strawberry/rhubarb crisp

Last year, one of Jeremy's mom's friends gave her a 50 pound bag of pecans that had lived in the back of her truck over the winter in Mississippi. They then lived in Trish's closet for a while, until we hauled them out on the porch one night and started shucking them. Miraculously most of them weren't rancid, and after an hour we had a few ziplocs of pecans (and we'd only done half the bag!)
We were having dinner that night and combined the pecans with the chard, arugula and herbs in the quiche we were making. It was damn good--the nutty crunch of the pecans was a tasty addition and one I would recommend.

I'd made the dessert ahead of time (standard crisp recipe) and the rhubarb and berries were so ripe and wet, that they made this messy pool of juice that sloshed all over the back seat of the car. Tasty, but damn sticky.

If you want specific recipes, email us and we'll send you the details.

Jeremy had found a new recipe for the quiche crust and had some left over. My mom used to roll it in a mound and sprinkle it with sugar and bake it. Because I grew up on the Betty Crocker recipe for crusts, it was usually pretty damn bland. What I like to do instead is use whatever fruit is handy (in this case some squishy cherries from the grocery store) and spread it on the rolled out bit of crust. Drop little bits of jam/jelly and a bit of butter on top (or spray the whole thing with a good burst of Pam), sprinkle with sugar and bake until the fruit is soft. My god it was good----so don't throw out that leftover chunk of crust. Make a mini-pie!