Roasted Cauliflower with Lemon and Pepper

 

Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, you name it – just about any vegetable is great roasted.  In The Art of Simple Food, Alice Waters sings the praises of roasted vegetables when she explains her guests’ astonishment that all she did was “toss them with a bit of oil and salt and throw them in the oven.”

 

A couple years ago, Husband and I ate dinner at some friends’ house we had just met (shout out to JW!).  I was pregnant with my son, and they made Indian food – a reliable indicator that we would get along well.  Roasted cauliflower was one of the side dishes, and it made such an impression that now my preferred method of preparing cauliflower is roasting.  I wish I could remember how theirs was seasoned, but (unfortunately) the pregnancy fog takes over from there.  Some kind of curry?  I wonder if she remembers. J

 

I usually go Alice Waters’ route when roasting vegetables – tossing them in olive oil and seasoning with sea salt.  Really, it’s a foolproof method for veggie success.  Tonight I mixed things up a bit with fresh lemon and pepper, but this is still so simple that I shouldn’t even be calling it a recipe.  If you try it, though, you will enjoy it.  Because roasting is the formula for gustatory awesomeness.

 

Roasted Cauliflower with Lemon and Pepper

 

1 head of cauliflower, washed

Olive oil to coat

Lemon wedges

Freshly ground pepper

Sea salt

 

1.  Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Chop the cauliflower into equal bite-sized pieces and place in a bowl.  Toss in enough olive oil to coat, but not so much that it pools up at the bottom.  Squeeze a couple of lemon wedges on the cauliflower, add in some freshly ground pepper and sea salt to taste, and toss again.

 

2. Spread the cauliflower out on a baking sheet and roast until the edges start browning (20 minutes? I’m terrible about timing).

 

3.  Serve as a side dish with salmon and millet pilaf if your toddler doesn’t eat it all first!

 

 

Part of Fight Back Fridays and the Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap.

Sausage, Potato and Apple Skillet Dinner

This is such an easy, flavorful meal, but it’s a bit of a splurge (on account of the sausage), so we only have it occasionally.  It’s also best eaten right away – not as leftovers – but you probably won’t have anything left anyway.

 

The original recipe came from one of my husband’s students.  Husband is a high school English teacher and apparently talks about food quite a bit in class.  A few years ago, one of his students brought in a recipe for Sausage Skillet Dinner – reportedly, her dinnertime favorite at home.  Beyond that, I’m not sure of the recipe’s origins, but we’ve doctored it a bit and made it even better.

 

This recipe makes four servings, but it’s easy to adjust – sometimes I just add more potatoes to stretch it.  It’s also not entirely a skillet meal, so I hope that part isn’t deceiving.  It looks like a lot of steps, but it comes together quickly, especially after you’ve made it a time or two.

 

Sausage, Potato, and Apple Skillet Dinner

 

2-3 russet potatoes (or more if using smaller potatoes)

Olive oil (enough to coat potatoes)

Seasoned salt (I will have a recipe for this next week)

1 kielbasa sausage

1 small onion

1-2 small red apples

2 tbsp butter

¼ cup raw apple cider vinegar

2 tbsp sucanat

½ tsp caraway seed

Parsley to garnish

 

1.  Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Cut two large potatoes into wedges and toss in enough olive oil to coat.  Whether you leave the skin on is your preference – I peeled mine because I wasn’t using organic potatoes.  Throw in enough seasoned salt to your taste, and toss to coat.  Bake on cookie sheets, evenly spread out and not overlapping, until desired crispiness is reached.  Don’t let them go too long, though, or they will be hard – remember that they will still continue to cook once you take them out of the oven.

 

2.  About 15 minutes into the potatoes’ baking, chop the kielbasa into diagonal, bite-sized pieces.  We use sausage with no nitrates, preservatives, etc. – Wellshire and Applegate Farms are the brands we usually go with. 

 

 

Brown the sausage in a cast-iron skillet for about ten minutes on medium heat; since this sausage is already cooked, we’re really just heating it through and giving it enough of a browning to make it look mouthwatering.  Yeah!?  Meanwhile, cut onion and apple into wedges.  I left the skin on the apples because these are organic.  Then combine vinegar, sucanat, and caraway seed in a measuring cup and set aside.

 

3.  When sausage is done, remove to a warm platter.  Melt butter in skillet, then sauté onion and apple until apples are just tender.   If potatoes aren’t done yet – which they might not be – just turn off the heat on the skillet until they are.

 

4.  When potatoes are done, add them, along with the sausage, into the skillet.  Give the vinegar mixture a stir and pour over the skillet mixture, tossing it to coat.  Garnish with some parsley (fresh or dried) and serve!

 

 

I will try to get my seasoned salt recipe up sometime this week, but as usual, I make no promises.  So often, life gets in the way — but thankfully so.  After all, I would have no reason to write if it weren’t for the sweet, quotidienne toils of earthly existence.  Every day is a blessing, and I’m blessed with the everyday.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

I’d never heard of these cookies until I moved to the South three years ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since the first one.  They’re typically very sweet and cakey, but I’ve been trying to cut back on the sugar consumption, so I made this version using natural sweeteners and less sugar overall.  The dough itself is not as sweet as other pumpkin chocolate chip cookie recipes, but it works well in satisfying my omnipresent chocolate cravings.  I still have lots of pumpkin on hand, so I’ve been looking for creative ways to use it!

 

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

1 cup pureed pumpkin

½ cup sucanat

3 tbsp. maple syrup

½ cup butter, softened

1 tbsp. vanilla extract

1 egg, whisked

2 cups whole wheat flour (I used home-milled flour)

1 tbsp. ground flax meal (for added nutrition; can be omitted)

2 tsp baking powder

1 ¼ tsp. baking soda

1 tbsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp. salt

Chocolate chips (I use a lot in this recipe, since the dough isn’t as sweet)

 

1.  Combine pumpkin, sucanat, maple syrup, butter, vanilla, and egg in a bowl.  In a separate bowl, combine remaining ingredients (except for chocolate chips).  Combine wet and dry ingredients, then mix in desired amount of chocolate chips.

 

2.  Bake in an oven preheated to 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.  You want them to be firm to the touch but with some springiness, like a quick bread.  Since these have the texture of a biscuit or muffin, they won’t be as crisp as a traditional chocolate chip cookie.

 

Enjoy!

Black Bean Soup with Chard and Sweet Potatoes

 

We postponed date night until Friday, so my menu will be a bit off this week.  But it always is. J

 

I went ahead and made the black bean soup, since I knew the chard and sweet potatoes would get eaten for lunch if I waited too long.  I love the combination of the black beans, chard, and sweet potatoes – something I discovered by accident while combining leftovers – so I continue to plan my menus with this in mind.

 

These instructions are for a slow cooker, but this could be done on the stove with a dutch oven, as well.

 

Black Bean Soup with Chard and Sweet Potatoes

 

1 pound of dried black beans, rinsed and soaked 24 hours

2 quarts chicken bone broth (or enough to come 2 inches above beans)

3 pinches of asafoetida (scroll down through this post to see why)

Salt and pepper to taste

1-2 cups sautéed chard (leftovers – I made extra last night just for this)

1-2 cups roasted sweet potatoes (also leftover from last night)

 

1.     Place beans, broth, and asafoetida in slow cooker, cooking on high for three hours – or low for 7-8 hours – or until tender. 

2.     When beans are done, add salt and pepper to taste and the leftover chard and sweet potatoes.  Don’t worry about preheating the vegetables before adding to the pot – just stir them in and let them sit with the beans for a few minutes (with slow cooker still on) and they will warm up.

 

We ate the soup with gluten-free banana muffins. The muffins are based on this recipe, since it was the best one I could find using the Bob’s Red Mill GF All-Purpose Baking Mix and not calling for xanthan gum.  They were light and banana-y.  Much better than I expected, since I’m very new to baking — especially gluten-free baking!  I really wanted to make them with coconut flour, but I only had about a teaspoon of coconut oil and no other suitable substitute (we can’t use butter because of dairy allergies).  Maybe next week!

 

For more nourishing soups and stews, visit the Nourishing Gourmet.  For more gluten-free ideas, visit the Gluten-Free Real Food carnival at Cheeseslave.

Curried Chicken and Quinoa with Chard and Sweet Potatoes

 

This is easy week.  So if you’re looking for something elaborate, this is not it.  Very tasty, though, which is all that counts.  The prep was all done ahead whenever I found time, and putting it together was easy.  This is the basic timeline:

 

In the morning:

 

Soak three cups quinoa in almost twice as much water, plus add a swig of raw apple cider vinegar to help break down the saponins.  You could soak it overnight, but I wanted a sturdier grain with more of a couscous texture – unfortunately, I cooked it a little too long and it turned to mush anyway.  On the plus side, quinoa is a quick sprouter, so at least the nutrition is enhanced.

 

Slice chicken (I used boneless, skinless breasts, but any part would work well) and marinate in raw apple cider vinegar (still on the counter from earlier!), toasted sesame oil, and curry masala powder.  Store in the refrigerator until later.

 

About an hour before dinner:

 

Drain and rinse quinoa and put into a dutch oven with fresh water.  Bring to a boil, then let simmer until the water is absorbed, stirring periodically.  If you add too much water or cook it too long, it turns into mush (like mine did tonight!), but the leftovers can be eaten for breakfast.

 

Chop sweet potatoes into cubes and coat in olive oil.  Place in an even layer on cookie sheets.  Roast at 375 degrees until pleasantly browned.  I also cut a butternut squash in half and roasted it along with the sweet potatoes – this will probably end up being for my 1-year old.

 

Rinse chard well.  Because I want to puke anytime I taste a rogue grain of dirt, I like to give leafy things a quick rinse under the water in the sink, then submerse them in a bowl of water for ten minutes, then thoroughly rinse each leaf under the sink water again.  This is not as labor-intensive as it sounds, and it’s MUCH better than biting into dirt.

 

Cut chard into bite-sized pieces and spin in a salad spinner.  Sauté in a tablespoon of olive oil – I used this citrusy olive oil from my hometown –

 

 

with a clove or two of minced garlic and some sea salt.  This cooks quickly, so I just pulled it out after it wilted enough and cooked the chicken in the same pan.  The chicken also cooks quickly because I cut it into small pieces.

This might seem like a lot of steps, but I cooked large batches of everything but the chicken.  I will use the extra sweet potatoes and chard in some black bean soup, and the quinoa will be tomorrow’s porridge.  If it had turned out better, it would’ve shown up at dinner again later in the week.  Oh well – it’s not a complete disaster!

Sweet Potatoes Fried in Coconut Oil

I wish I had more in the way of fun recipes I tried this week, but I’ve been steeped in laziness.  I’m still sick, but that’s no excuse!  I’ve avoided going out to eat, though, so that’s good.  So far we’ve had tacos and the buckwheat pancake dinner, and I ate at a friend’s house on Wednesday.  So it’s been very low key.

 

For lunch today, in an effort to curb my sugar cravings, I fried up some sweet potatoes in coconut oil.  This was also to ingest some lauric acid, which is antimicrobial and is the main fatty acid in coconut oil.  Anyway, this was a shallow fry, as I’m not fond of many things being deep-fried – unless you’re making fish tacos, of course.  Then I want the cod beer-battered and deep-fried.  Speaking of which, I could totally go for three of those right now.  But back to the sweet potato fries…

 

There’s not much of a recipe here, but let me tell you how I did it.  I made enough to feed myself a large helping and to give a baby and two toddlers a small side helping, so this is about two small sweet potatoes’ worth.  Cut the potato into pieces of equal size (this helps them all cook at the same rate), and put into a medium-sized sauté pan with 3 (or more if you need it) tablespoons of melted coconut oil.  Fry until the pieces become pleasantly brown – not quite to the crispy point, because they crisp up more after you take them out and they cool – then transfer the pieces to a plate with a paper towel on top.  (If you’re more eco-friendly than I am, use a kitchen hand towel!  My main use for paper towels, though, is blotting items that have been fried.)  Blot out as much oil as you can, since an oily mouth feel is NEVER what you’re going for, and they’re ready to eat!

 

 

I think the coconut oil is a great complement to the flavor of the sweet potato, but you could add cinnamon and a little of your favorite natural sweetener if you wanted to.  If the sweetness is too much, a little sea salt tastes great, too.  I didn’t add anything extra, and the kids were delighted by the sweetness. 

 

If you prefer sweet potato fries from the oven, I talk about how I make them in this post.

Mmm…Brussels Sprouts!

You know, Brussels sprouts really have a poor reputation.  This isn’t surprising, considering most people I know grew up eating them in their freezer-packaged, then steamed incarnation.  But I knew there had to be a better way.

 

I’ve been scouring my cookbooks and the web for different things to do with these tiny cabbage-looking things in preparation for my monthly food article (one of my two jobs).  For the December issue, I want to talk about choosing seasonal, local foods for Christmas dinner.  Asparagus, for example, shows up on many Christmas dinner menus, but it is way out of season for most of us at that time. 

 

I have found some great recipes for Brussels sprouts, though, including one where they are baked with bacon and apples.  For tonight’s dinner, I opted for a simpler dressing, since I wanted to taste the actual sprouts and not just some yummy toppings.  On a friend’s advice, I prepared them like this:

 

1) Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Wash and dry the heads, then chop off the woody stem end.  Then cut them in half — this way, they cook a little better and are more bite-sized.

 

2) Toss the heads with some olive oil and sea salt (and pepper if you like, but I didn’t add any to mine tonight), then spread them out on a cookie sheet.  Bake until they start to brown.  (A picture should be inserted here, but I think it’s time to get a new camera.)

 

We served them with organic top sirloin steaks and rice for a simple and hearty meal.  Maybe next week I’ll try the recipe with bacon and apples!

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Tuesdays are always pretty crazy around here, with Husband being gone at work all day and grad school at night (his classes are on Mondays and Tuesdays this semester) and two additional children in my house (that I babysit).  I usually have some friends over from across town for an early dinner, then we take the kids to a local inflatable gym.  The inflatable gym has a deal where you can buy one of their t-shirts for $10, then get in free any Tuesday wearing the shirt.  Since it would normally cost $4 for my 3 year-old to get in, this works out very much in our favor — especially considering we’ve gone about ten times already!

 

To account for the varying tastes of my guests and allow flexibility for my friends to bring something of their own to contribute, most Tuesday dinners are a small plates affair.  We’re all a bit sniffly today, though, so we stayed home and didn’t have anyone over.  That’s probably for the best, since my kids were taking turns with my time all day.

 

I started the day already playing catch-up — I had to make two loaves of Banana Bread with Cauliflower (a recipe featured in Jessica Seinfeld’s book, Deceptively Delicious) because I bought a bunch of bananas and cauliflower last week and the bananas weren’t going to hang on much longer.  So I steamed the cauliflower before lunch, set aside some of it to eat with lunch, and pureed the rest of it.  One cup of the puree went into the banana bread, and the rest got frozen with some pureed lentils for baby food.  Lots of fiber and vitamin C!

 

In an effort to get all my dinner prep done in the morning, I started the lentils for the salad.  I wasn’t following a specific recipe for the salad, rather, I had what I thought was a great idea to merge two recipes that I really like.  The first recipe — Lentil Snacks, from Grocery Cart Challenge — is a super nutritious, frugal, crunchy snack that I’ve been tossing around in my head for weeks as the protein for an actual meal.  I wanted to add a sweet and creamy component, hence the second recipe — Apples and Celery with Gruyere from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone– a salad that features celery as the green portion, apples for sweetness, and nuts for additional crunch.  The creaminess doesn’t come from the gruyere, which is in chunks, but from a dressing of tarragon vinegar, walnut oil, and mayonnaise or yogurt. 

 

For my Toasted Lentil Salad, I envisioned the diced celery from Deborah Madison’s salad, dried cherries for sweetness, the lentils for protein and crunch, and a mixture of red wine vinegar, mayo or soy yogurt, and celery leaves for dressing. The Lentil Snacks have oil and spices in them already, so thew wouldn’t need to be added. 

 

Well, I’m not sure why this sounded good originally, because it just didn’t work!  It’s so obvious now, but it’s hard to get food ideas out of my head unless I experiment.  Failure is essential to learning, I guess!  The mixture isn’t too bad as a crunchy topping for an actual lettuce salad, so it wasn’t a complete loss.  Check out the Lentil Snacks recipe at Grocery Cart Challenge, though, because it is AWESOME.  And if you think of a way to make this into a meal, let me know.

 

I didn’t get around to making the green beans (the easiest part!), but I can eat them later this week.  They’re probably the last green beans we’ll have this year anyway, so I should hang on to them a little longer.  I made the sweet potatoes, though, and we had a very simple meal with the lentils and banana bread.  Here is how we made oven-baked sweet potato fries:

 

1) Preheat oven to 450 degrees, then scrub and peel the sweet potatoes.  Count on one potato per person, that way you have a little more than what you need.  Also, some people don’t peel them, but I think sweet potato peels are a bit too earthy.  I don’t mind leaving peels on regular potatoes, though.

 

2) Chop into fries, being careful not to leave sharp or really thin edges (these will burn easily).

 

3) Blanch the fries and dry well.  (Blanching = drop them into a pot of rapidly boiling water for a minute or two, then empty the water and quickly add very cold water to stop the cooking.)  Don’t leave them in for so long that they get mushy.

 

4) Once you’ve dried them well, put them in a bowl and add some olive oil (I just drizzle it on — I probably used a tablespoon or so for two large sweet potatoes), sea salt, and freshly ground pepper.  Mix until coated well.  Spread onto a cookie sheet, spreading them about evenly.

 

5) Cook until edges brown, maybe 20-25 minutes? (I’m terrible at paying attention to time.)  Turn them over about ten minutes in to brown both sides and achieve maximum crispness.  They should look like this:

 

 

My camera must be on it’s last leg, because I only got one other clear picture — this one of the Banana (and cauliflower) Bread, with the Lentil Snacks in the background:

 

 

Husband is grilling steak tomorrow, so that should be pretty straight-forward. 

More Fall Food: Turkey and Pumpkin Chili

 

Who doesn’t love fall?  And what a better food to celebrate the season and warm up with than a chili made with pumpkin and ground turkey?!  My good friend Cherie in the Bay area turned me on to this, so here’s a big thank you for the tip!  Enough with the exclamation points now.

 

She warned me that it needed lots of seasoning (because hers came out kind of bland), but I made sure to add all the spices when I sauteed the onions, etc., since that’s when I usually add spices to other dishes.  I didn’t add as much jalapeno as it called for, either, because I wanted my kids to eat it, but the little bit I tasted in the chili indicated that two whole jalapenos would have really complemented the sweetness.  My husband added some pepperjack cheese to his, which he said rounded it out very nicely.  The only other substitution was coconut oil in place of olive oil, which worked well and didn’t add any distinctly coconuty flavor.

 

The recipe says it makes six servings, but my husband and I finished most of it off. My daughter only ate a little bit, and I had enough left over for a lunch-sized portion tomorrow.  We did eat two bowls each, though, so I guess that comes out to the full six servings.   I also ate two pieces of my bread with it, but that was all part of a strategy to eat a smaller amount of chocolate cake at my friend’s birthday party later in the evening.

 

Next week, I’m going to try a recipe another friend sent me for Vegetarian Chili with Chocolate.  Did I mention that I love chocolate?

The Raw and the Cooked

Something I’ve been thinking about for awhile is the crudités course — which, simply put, is a serving of raw foods before the official meal begins.  When I was reading through Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious a few weeks ago, she mentions that she uses a crudités course at the beginning of dinner so the kids eat their veggies when they’re most hungry (instead, as most kids are apt, to fill up on carbs).  My daughter actually prefers raw vegetables over carbs, so this approach was actually more for myself, since lately I haven’t thought as much about eating vegetables as I used to. 

 

I actually bought a six-pack of orange, yellow, and red bell peppers at Costco last weekend expressly for this purpose, since everyone loves them in my house.  You can see this worked out pretty well with Sunday night’s dinner:

 

 

 

 

 

I’m not sure where I stand in the raw vs. cooked foods debate…I guess I think they’re both important (i.e. a diet of strictly one or the other isn’t good).  A macrobiotic diet sounds totally boring to me, but eating lots of raw fruits and veggies in conjunction with warm proteins and grains (since the body digests warm/room temperature foods better than very hot or cold foods) is what I go for.