Another wintry birthday has come and gone. You may be sensing a theme here. Last year there was a splendiferous key lime pie. This year’s creation really takes the “cake” though. Introducing my very first birthday pot pie. Cakes are great and all but, honestly, you will win my heart ever so much more quickly with a pie of any kind instead.

This pie idea came from Paula Deen’s Hurry Up Chicken pot pie. Basically, start with some chopped cooked chicken, an assortment of vegetables, a bechamel or roux (or cream of something soup), seasonings, broth, and a gloppy biscuit batter for the top. We made this 3 times last month, throwing in any vegetables we happened to have from our treasure trove of “Bargain of the day” produce bags. Paula also added hard-boiled eggs, but I left those out since I’ve been eating so many eggs in my homemade pasta.

The result: a casserole bursting with hearty homemade goodness that brought warmth to the belly and the soul, perfect for the snowy days we’d been granted.

If I get to eat like this, I don’t mind if winter sticks around for just a little bit longer.

One year ago: No Fail Banana Muffins

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Still, there’s no need for you to suffer with take-out or instant foods for every meal just because your schedule has become too packed to keep fresh food around. These burritos are easy, flexible, and are a perfect example of a simple on-the-go meal that can run the gamut of flavors. I got the idea from The Simple Dollar’s Bulk Breakfast Burritos recipe but alternated some of my own favorite fillings to make them suitable for any time of day.

Recipe: Freezable bean burritos with a zing

Makes 8 burritos (multiply as needed)

• 8 medium or large flour tortillas
• 8 pieces of American cheese
• 2 batches of “Unfried” Black Beans mixed with a dollop of your favorite hot sauce
• 1 batch of Guacamole

1. Fill each tortilla as show above.
2. Fold the left and right sides in and then roll the bottom up until the burrito is closed. This is also explained, with photos, in the Simple Dollar recipe.
3. Wrap the burrito in plastic wrap. Freeze.
4. When you wish to eat, remove from the plastic wrap, wrap in a paper towel, and defrost in a microwave for about 2 minutes (power level – 50%), and then heat on regular power for about 1 minute.

These gooey, zesty little packets have brightened many a work day when I’ve been too rushed for breakfast or lunch. What are some other ingredients you would add to your frozen burritos? I’m about to make another batch and I want to plant some variety in my freezer this time.

One year ago: Vegan Extra Cheesy Grits

While on a recent grocery trip, I noticed that the outdoor produce section of our favorite market was currently undergoing some major reorganization. Every stand was being cleared off, and at first I was sad that we wouldn’t have an opportunity to peruse what is usually a very diverse selection — that is, until I spotted an assemblage of shopping carts labeled “Bargain of the Day : $1.50 a bag” hiding out in a quiet alcove. What I discovered were weighty bags featuring a plethora of random fruits and/or veggies, and ignoring my auto-responsive dose of New Yorker cynicism  for a moment came to discover something more than sub-perfect specimens.

These 7+ lb-bags of assorted produce from a reliable market I shop at on a regular basis proved to be a steal at less than 20 cents per lb, and not being able to resist such a deal for raw ingredients that I don’t usually buy, I went ahead and stocked up on as many as I could carry home. We rationalized that not only would they contribute to our overall healthy cooking for the next few weeks, but also double as body conditioning as we lugged them home in addition to our already stuffed backpacks and messenger bags of groceries.

After arriving home, ripping into these culinary “grab bags” proved to be half the fun. We ended up with eggplants, zucchinis, tomatoes, colorful bell peppers, apples and oranges, and even more surprising, cantaloupe and cauliflower. We realized that it was going to be a fun week in recipe-planning. I was even more excited because it would give me an opportunity to really sell Sarah on the tastiness of eggplant, a veggie that she is less than keen on.

We discovered an Oven-Roasted version of Ratatouille over at Chocolate & Zucchini that sounded perfect for tackling the veggie marathon that we knew we would have this week.

The recipe proved to be a delicious success! Before baking we threw in a huge sprig of fresh rosemary and seasoned further with salt, pepper and some Herbes de Provence (thyme being the dominant flavor). A heavenly aroma filled the apartment when it approached the end of its cooking time, and just as Clotilde described, the amount of liquid left in the baking dish after roasting was not overwhelming to the point of making the dish soggy, but more like a sauce to drizzle over our individual portions.

We paired this Ratatouille with pan-fried flounder fillets and rice pilaf that night, and it truly was a healthy but hearty meal. I can’t wait to enjoy these vegetable leftovers tomorrow!

One year ago: Avocados, Guacamole

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I know, pasta with tomato sauce doesn’t sound very exciting. And it isn’t, usually. But when you match recipes from two of the highest quality food bloggers on the internet today, how can you go wrong? Those were my thoughts exactly.

Let me tell you, this dinner was so far from going wrong, I was asking entirely the wrong question. I underestimated how good both of these recipes would be, probably because of their delightfully simple list of ingredients. The pasta? Just egg and flour, and a dash of salt for the boiling water. The sauce? Canned tomato, onions, and butter. Instead of asking what could go wrong, I should have asked what could be better.

The answer is NOTHING.I expected this dinner to be tasty but it actually blew me away. The sauce, as everyone who writes about it says (but no one seems to believe until they make it) was amazingly sophisticated. I’m not sure if it was the butter or the onion, but it took on the rich taste of a meat sauce but the texture of silk. The pasta was the perfect firmness and held up much better than I ever expected. It held the sauce like it was meant to wear it. It made me wish I never had to make pasta from a box again.

If you’ve ever had the urge to make your own pasta, do it and use the two recipes below:

The Pioneer Woman Cooks!: Homemade pasta

Smitten Kitchen: Tomato sauce with onion and butter

Some recipe notes: I needed a bit more flour for the pasta than the recipe suggested. I suspect this had to do with the fact that the flour was being measured by volume rather than weight. Just keep your flour around until you are sure you don’t need more. For the pasta sauce, I was out of cans of whole tomatoes and only had tomato sauce around. I also diced the onion since I like bits of onion in my sauce. If my sauce was outstanding with those substitutions, I’m pretty sure it can only get better with better ingredients.

One year ago: Tomato Rice Soup

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The pickles actually took on this unnatural looking tint of green

After all these pickle experiments, I’ve noticed that there’s only so many pickles I can eat. When I started this summer, I only had a few jars, so in order to try a new recipe I had to hurry up and finish one of the jars I already had. Now, after I’ve collected jars for months, I’ve found a way to get around the jars completely.

This recipe was adapted from a recipe found on a packet of Japanese cucumber pickling spice mix, to use spices for half-sour kosher dills. I’m not sure that these will ever get very sour as they are not fully “pickling”. Make a small amount at a time and eat them within a week. These will make more of a tasty treat than a long lasting preserved pickle.

A few hours after the cucumbers were bagged, they had already let off quite a bit of liquid.

While I love the aesthetics of glass jars, one frustration I’ve had is the difficulty of getting more than just a few whole pickles into a jar. All of the jar pickles I’ve made had to be cut down into spears or coins in order to fit into their jars. I’ve missed the satisfying crunch that comes from biting into a whole pickle.

Recipe: Brine-less Half-sour Cucumber pickles

• 1/5 lb small thin cucumbers (ex: Persian, Israeli, Japanese, baby seedless, etc.)
• 3 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp coriander
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tsp ground allspice
• 1 handful of fresh dill (stems set aside or frozen for later use)
• zippered storage bag

1. Clean and dry the cucumbers. Put them in a zippered storage bag that has enough room to fold over as you’ll have to press the air out.
2. Add all of the spices to the bag. Massage the rub onto the cucumbers. Some of the liquid will be pulled out of the cucumbers over time.
3. Press all of the air out of the bag and seal. Store in the refrigerator and enjoy as early as 12 hours later. Rinse before eating (unless you really like salt).

One year ago: Cheesy Macaroni with Baked Acorn Squash and Tomato Sauce

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2. Bread and Butter Pickles
3. Lemon Pickles

I love color coordinating my beans.

Weeknights have become busy around here, between new year’s resolutions, birthdays, and the usual. This is the time of year when I know I need food to function but I can’t always bring myself to whip up something new each night. The lack of fresh produce in the house doesn’t help either.

It would be really easy to succumb to take out and pre-made frozen foods, but I know my stomach, wallet, and conscience wouldn’t be happy with me if I did.  To combat winter food fatigue, I’ve been making larger batches of things to take for lunch with me throughout the week. I’ve stocked the freezer so that when I’m at wits end I don’t end up ordering pizza (at least not again anyway).

This week, the savior dish was a bean and barley soup I’ve been playing with all winter. Basically, I choose two types of dried beans, throw in a cup of barley, onions, carrots, celery, a bay leaf and bouillon and we eat like kings for a week. This kind of soup is filling, incredibly healthy, cheap, and can last for days and days. I bet you could even feed it to an avid meat-eater and they wouldn’t even realize it is vegan.

Here’s my latest recipe, but this soup is flexible enough that you could substitute just about any ingredient for another similar one (except the barley which is needed for its magical thickening powers).

Recipe: Pink and white bean barley soup

Makes 6-8 large servings

• 1 lb dried pink beans
• 1 lb dried small white beans
• 1 cup barley
• 1 cup celery, chopped
• 1 cup carrot, chopped
• 1 cup onions, chopped
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 tbs rosemary
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbs bouillon
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Soak the beans using your favorite method. Since I usually don’t have the foresight to soak beans overnight before I want to use them, I soak the beans in 6 cups of boiling water per pound of beans, for roughly one hour in a covered pot. I add smaller beans 15-30 minutes into the soaking so they don’t oversoak and disintegrate later in the process. After the hour is up, I pour out the water, rinse the beans and return to the pot.
2. Add all of the rest of the ingredients and cover with 4 quarts of water. You can also substitute some of the water for your favorite stock or broth.
3. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat and allow to simmer for an hour, covered.
4. Taste some of the soup to see if the beans and barley are cooked. Beans should be tender but not disintegrating. Barley should be puffed and soft with little to no firmness at the center. Allow to cook uncovered until the beans are finished. The soup will thicken. Taste test for seasoning and add more if necessary.
5. Enjoy piping hot, or lukewarm. The soup will continue to thicken as it cools due to evaporation and the starches released from the barley and beans.

One year ago: Beef and Lamb Chili

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This picture would have been discarded if I hadn't noticed a longing face poking in.*

Half sour pickles, sometimes called “new pickles”, weren’t my favorite growing up. They were overlooked in the quest for the most lip-puckering sour garlic pickles. As my taste buds matured, however, I came to appreciate the more delicate saltiness of a good half sour pickle. From what I’ve noticed, half sours are made from very similar recipes to full sours, but are not left to ferment for as long.

After my recurring failure to make a good sour pickle, I experimented with the less intimidating half sour. I used the same recipe I had been tooling with since the summer. The first time I made them, I found the chips to be a little too small, so instead of using Kirby cucumbers the second time, I used some large jersey cucumbers. You could even use a long seedless cucumber (the kind that come in shrink wrap) for nice large sandwich chips.

Half sour pickles in their jar

I found this recipe on the blog Fork This. The procedure is very similar to the Bread and Butter pickles, except that the cucumbers pickle in salt brine rather than vinegar.

Arthur Schwartz’s Homemade Kosher Pickles adapted by David Lebovitz and Melissa Sands, Pickled Cucumber Recipe:

• 2 quarts water
• 3 tablespoons kosher salt – do not substitute table salt or sea salt
• 12-15 Kirby or small cucumbers, cleaned & sliced as desired
• 1 bunch of fresh dill, washed
• 1 teaspoon each: coriander, allspice berries, fennel seeds
• 4 bay leaves
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly crushed

In a large pot, heat water with the salt until dissolved.

Sterilize two 1-quart jars by running them through the dishwasher or filling them with boiling water and dumping it out.

Put two or three bushy sprigs of dill into each jar. Pack in the pickles, layering in each jar: 1 1/2 teaspoons spice mix, 2 bay leaves and 2 smashed garlic cloves.

Carefully pour in the brine to cover the cucumbers completely. Cover each jar with cheesecloth and secure with a rubber band or kitchen twine. Store in a cool, dark place for 3-6 days. When they have reached the desired sourness, put on a lid and refrigerate.

Following these directions, you may end up with extra brine, which you can discard or use to pickle something else. I followed the recipe mostly as written, except that I put the jars straight into the refrigerator to keep them from souring deeply. The result was a crisp, light, salty, dilly pickle. They were great on burgers, sandwiches, and just straight from the jar.

*Incidentally, the face pining away for those Kirby cucumber pickle chips (or maybe just the burger underneath them) belongs to the sweet little dog we adopted this summer, also named Kirby.

One year ago: Being Gluten-Free and the Benefits of Whole Grains

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Hunk of a traditional raclette cheese

While grocery shopping last week, I noticed a wheel of raclette cheese at the cheese counter. The sight of that cheese brought back warm memories of the first time I tasted it, during my time in France, with my host family gathered around the table on a cold winter’s night. The memory of raclette, the meal and the cheese, struck me as a great way to spend the holiday with family.

Raclette is a type of cow’s milk cheese from France and Switzerland. The cheese has a ripe scent and a mild flavor at room temperature. When melted, the scent can be very strong. The flavor also increases, but, if you are put off by strong cheese smells, don’t be in this case: the cheese flavor is subtle and complex when melted, much like other cheeses used for fondue.

Potato and hard sausage for smothering with raclette cheese

Raclette is also the name of a traditional dish of those regions. In sum, the cheese is  melted and scraped onto a plate of cooked potatoes, with cured meats and pickles (like gherkins and capers) on the side. Melting the cheese can be done in a variety of ways – traditionally the round of cheese was placed beside a fire and scraped onto potatoes as the surface melted. A more modern technique includes the use of a raclette party set which is a kind of hotplate that diners can cook foods on top of and melt cheese underneath in an individual non-stick tray (my French host family had one of these).

Slices of raclette prepared for melting

Without a fire or a raclette grill, however, you can just put slices of the cheese on a cookie sheet and heat in a conventional oven at up to 400 degrees. Just watch the cheese and when it is all melted, remove the tray from the oven and slide it over the potatoes, and eat immediately. The cheese will firm back up pretty quickly and while it will still be delicious as it cools, the signature flavor most noticeable when it is freshly melted. After cooking for days, an easy meal of raclette was a great way to get the family around the table without much effort.

Cinnamon bread spreads to the South

Of course, with all the time we saved cooking by making raclette, we decided to whip up a batch of that Chain Letter Cinnamon bread, this time adding some nuts for decoration. We brought a starter with us down to Jen’s southern family and now, since it has split into four new starters, we can safely say that this Amish bread has invaded the South!

One year ago: Syrian Lemon and Olive Chicken

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Split-pea soup with crispy onions

Unfortunately for me, growing up I never knew a good pea soup, let alone one outside of the school cafeteria. My mom didn’t make pureed soups from scratch often, so for me the words “Split-Pea Soup” conjured up images of gelatinous vats of over-salted green-gray mush, not unlike in the Exorcist, that would send me running from the cafeteria when appearing on the menu.

So, it’s not a surprise that a couple of weeks ago when Sarah expressed an interest in making a batch after picking up some dried split-peas at the grocery, I needed a little convincing before I was ready to revisit that childhood memory. I’m sure that not all of you grew up detesting pea soup, but after one taste of Sarah’s simple and satisfyingly creamy concoction topped with crunches of bacon and sweetened slightly by carrots, I dropped all previous stereotypes of the heartily-satiating dish. Highly recommended for cold, wintry nights alongside a chewy piece of sourdough.

Recipe: Sarah’s Split-Pea Soup

Makes 4-6 hearty servings (for an entire single dish meal)

• 1 lb dried split peas
• 1 1/2 cups carrots, chopped
• 1 1/2 cups celery, chopped
• 1 cup yellow/white onion, chopped
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
• 1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 quart your broth of choice
• 1 quart water
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Saute the roughly chopped vegetables with the olive oil in your soup pot.
2. Rinse the split peas and make sure there isn’t any debris.
3. When the onions are translucent, add the peas, seasonings and liquids to the pot. Stir and cover. Let simmer for 45 minutes.
4. Taste the peas to check for firmness. When the peas are soft (they may need 15-30 more minutes at this point), turn off the heat. Remove the bay leaf. If using an immersion blender, go ahead and puree the soup right in the soup pot until everything comes through smoothly. If using an upright(?) blender, allow the soup to cool a bit to make the process a bit safer.
5. Taste and add liquid (if too thick), salt and pepper to taste. The soup should be velvety and thick enough to coat a spoon.

Serve with a side of crusty sourdough bread, or garnished with some fresh ground black pepper, crispy fried onions, croutons, or even crumbled bacon.

One year ago: Lotus Root Salad

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The bread that keeps on giving

About six weeks ago, we were gifted a so-called “Amish Cinnamon Bread” yeast starter in a zip-top bag that came along with a somewhat cryptic-sounding recipe. Due to my affinity for baking, I decided to take charge of the project. After waiting ten days and “mushing” the bag everyday, it eventually yielded what it promised – one deliciously moist cake, and four baggies of starter batter for friends.

I couldn’t help but begin to think of this adventure in baking as an edible chain letter, and low and behold, not long after that initial baking and gifting of starters on consenting friends and family, one came back to us last week. After another ten days of mushing and feeding, we had new yeasty, bready cakes to gift on unsuspecting friends. I chose to bake them into two smaller loaves this time, and they came out perfectly sized for holiday gifts.

So now we come to today, where I find myself incubating yet another four baggies of starter, and wondering whether this cake chain will ever end. This time I’ve opted to keep all four for now, and bake up a holiday extravaganza when they are ready. Who knows, I might even smuggle future starters across state lines to give out to my mother and grandmother around the new year.

It makes me wonder where the yeast starter in our original batch came from, and how many batches it had come from before that. How far will our starter’s progeny travel before someone finally gives up and bakes the whole thing? Will you, dear reader, receive one? Or have you already participated in such a “chain cake” before? Have you ever even heard of such a thing?

Edit: This recipe on Foodista is similar to the one we used, though not exactly the same.

One year ago: Spicy Peanut Butter Cookies

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