WIshing you a happy 2008 through rustic italian pasta

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So folks, it's been a while. A long while. Come to think of it, it's kinda been three months since my last real post.

Isn't that something, eh?

Funny how time flies.

Well, the good news is that I don't have to diet this year. In fact, I've got carte blanche to gain about 25-35 pounds over the next six and a bit months. Neat, eh?

Of course I can't drink any vino, and I'm supposed to avoid sushi and most other yummy indulgent things....but hey - there's a MINI FOODIE on the way! :) Coming late July/early August 2008. Let's all hope my picky kid posts don't come back to bite me in the arse or you al l will have great old belly laugh at my expense. :)

Anyway, I haven't posted much lately because, to be honest, I've barely been able to eat. I've felt kinda icky and not at all hungry....but the good news is that as the first tri is coming to an end, I'm actually back to looking at recipes and other food sites without turning green. So I can post again! And lucky for hubs, he actually gets to eat homemade food again.

First though, I have some confessions to make.....

In the last few weeks, I have:
- eaten boxed mac and cheese no fewer than three times
- sent my husband out at 1 am for Chicken McNuggets with bbq sauce because I HAD to have them
- insisted on eating a big mac (um.....EWWWWWWWWWWWWW)
- subsisted nearly entirely on simple carbohydrates
- generally grumped, whined and moaned my way through the first trimester.

On the up side Christmas brought a new attachment for the kitchen aid (a meat grinder - prepare for LOTS of new uses for ground meat).

Anyway, you don't come here for my random rambles, you come here for the food. So let's get to dinner. I wanted to come up with a kind of rustic italian stew - the kind a nice old italian nonna would have made for her hungry family (or at least something similar....y'all know that authenticity and I are rarely intimate bedfellows). But in the interest of not becomind a whale in the next bit, I wanted a way for it to be hearty, rustic but not to butt-enrounding.

This is what I came up with - I loved it. It had just the right amount of bite, acidity, texture, and is a good way to incorporate marginally sketchy fridge veggies that may be slightly past their prime (hey, is it really my fault that anything green or crunchy was out?????).

Rigatoni with Rustic Sausage Stew
1 lb rigatoni (or other chunky pasta)

2 T olive oil
(most people would put garlic here, but I still can't eat it....neither can hubs...because I can SMELL IT FOR DAYS....poor guy - use 2-3 cloves if you can stand it. Just don't talk to me after)
1 onion, diced (not too fine)
1 green pepper, diced (again, not too fine - we want chunky!)
1 head broccoli, coarsely chopped (you could use any veggie here - zucchini, mushrooms, etc.)
1 cup red wine (it's the only way I get to have any! and it really enhances the flavour)
1 can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 t oregano
1 t italian seasoning
1 T balsamic vinegar
1-1.5 cups low fat cottage cheese (sneaky way to up calcium)

6 lean italian turkey sausages (best way to lower the fat and uck content of this recipe)

parmesan cheese for grating

1. Set a big pot of salted water to boil.

2. Cook your sausages - I prefer doing them on my indoor grill. It's quick, easy, and if you slice the little suckers diagonally, it lets all the extra fat drain out.



3. In a large, deep skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the (garlic if you MUST...but again, do NOT come near me) onion and green pepper. Sauté until the veggies brown just a little bit (like nonna went outside to yell at the family to come in and got distracted a moment).



4. Add the wine. Let it boil until it's about half evaporated.



5. Add the can of tomatoes, the oregano and the italian seasoning. Add the broccoli at this point too.

6. Meanwhile, your sausages should be just about done. Using a sharp knife, slice them up and toss them in with the sauce. Add the cottage cheese.



7. Now your water should be boiling. Cook the pasta about 12 minutes, until done to your liking. This will give your stew time to blend and develop a little more flavour. If it's losing too much liquid, turn the heat down.

8. Drain the pasta, return to the pot and dump your stew in on top. Serve topped with parmesan cheese. It would be fabulous with a nice italian red...but you'll have to raise a glass for me, as I am reduced to toasting with grape juice. :)



Thanks for reading! Now that I seem to be able to eat again, I will be back!

grocery-free ingenuity

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Every once in a while, hubs and I go through a little phase where I don't really have any motivation to plan or cook anything at all. This is really a terrible thing for both our waistlines and pocketbooks and it's something I really have to stop doing. I'm not sure why I do it....I don't really like fast food all that much, and I know that it's basically just a slow way of killing yourself.....

I occasionally crave fast food like there is no tomorrow, and then eventually find myself lost in the land of factory-farmed rot and wobbly wobbly people. Uck. And, I realized, but due to my newfound zeal for not eating factory-farmed meat, there's actually very little I can eat from a fast food place. Take today, hubs and I stopped into a Tim Horton's/Wendy's shop.

Do you know what a non-meat-eater can eat at Wendy's? A plain baked potato or a garden salad. So lame. They don't have a veggie burger, and no veggie chili or anything. SO I went to Timmy's, where I had a grand total of ONE choice - a veggie sandwich with cream of mushroom soup (all the non-cream soups had meat in them). Blah.

This reminds me why I need to cook at home....I can buy yummy non-factory farmed meat, and there is SO much choice out there.

On Friday though (and still today) I didn't really have all that much in the way of groceries, so I decided to make something based on what I had in the fridge.....and after a little googling and recipe-tweaking, I am across something that used a record amount of random ingredients - chicken, tomatoes, chickpeas, zucchini, couscous.....so I was a happy camper. I had to make a few alterations to the recipe, and I can't for the life of me remember where I stole it from (apologies to the original author), but it brought a little touch of exoticism into the kitchen.

And a touch that was VERY badly needed after my forays into nutritional purgatory. This had vitamins, vegetables and other things that are SO much better for me than the nastry crap I have a bad habit of hoarding and hoovering....blah.

Hubs and I both enjoyed this recipe, though I think it would have a little more spice, and my bad habit of adding cinnamon to all things to all things pseudo-north-african wouldn't have been amiss here. Overall, I liked it. Not too shabby when you haven't bothered to brave the grocery store for a few days. As usual, there's little authenticity to this dish....rather than recreating the perfect dish, I'm generally more concerned with whether or not a particular dish will be enjoyable. There are many authentic things out there that I'd rather not touch with a ten-foot pole, such as hàkarl, which is an Icelandic dish of fermented shark flesh. So um yeah....I don't necessarily bow down to the gods of authenticity, as necessity is often the mother of invention....not necessarily taste or yumminess.....


North-African-Inspired Chicken and Chickpea Stew
1 T olive oil
4 chicken breasts, chopped
1 t salt (I used fleur de sel)
1 large onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 T grated fresh ginger
**I measured all of my spices quite generously!
1/2 t smoked paprika
3/4 t ground cumin
1/2 t oregano
1/4 t curry powder
1/4 t cayenne pepper (I rounded it and this added a touch of heat....I could have doubled this and still enjoyed it)
1.5 cups low sodium chicken broth
1 cup crushed tomatoes (I just took diced and blasted them with my immersion blender)
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 zucchinis, halved and sliced
3 T fresh parsley, chopped
1 T lemon juice
hot cooked coucous

1. In a large pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Toss in the chicken (mine was still mostly frozen at this point) and cook until browned. Remove chicken from pan and set aside.


2. Reduce the heat to medium-low. Add the onion and cook until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic, ginger and spices and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds.


3. Add the broth, tomatoes and about 1 t salt, scraping the bottom of the pot to get any browned bits that have accumulated. Add the zucchini and cook for about 5 minutes, until it begins to soften.


4. Add the chicken and cook until the chicken is cooked through and zucchini is cooked to your liking. Add the parsley and lemon juice. Serve over couscous and garnish with lemon.



Voila - it's as easy as that! This is a pretty quick dinner that would work for a weeknight....I wouldn't personally serve it to company, because I think it needs a little more tweaking to be awesome, but it's tasty and nutritious, so I won't whine too much. ;) Tonight, I'm about to attempt something a little creative with seafood and pastry....stay tuned for the results and thanks for reading!

spice rack roll call...fenugreek?

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Hubs LOVES bugging me about my spice rack. From his perspective, he has little use for my hordes of little bottles, bags, tins and containers...in our kitchen's distinct lack of cupboard space, the spices take up an entire shelf in the pantry. As much as I would love to have some sort of funky rack, I actually have never been able to find a spice rack that holds a reasonable amount of spices....they all seem to hold something like 12 or maybe 16, max.

What I also love is that somehow, most of these spice racks come with spices ALREADY in them....so....how exactly is a newfound plethora of stale spices supposed to solve my spice storage issues????? Meh. At least after living together for over three years, I've now got hubs mostly-convinced of the validity of having a well-stocked spice rack (before I moved in, he had garlic powder, italian seasoning, salt and pepper...ah, the glamour).

And tonight's dinner definitely made use of it. Sadly though, as complete as my spice rack is....there was one thing missing. Fenugreek. I'd vaguely heard of this spice before...but never used it or knowingly tasted it. And do you think I could find it? Nope. I checked the discount grocery store, the big crazy grocery store and even the bulk food store (which surprisingly has more spices than I could ever dream of). But no fenugreek to be found....so I had to make the recipe without it.....though I'm still very curious as to what it tastes like and what it would do to my recipe.....

This is pretty closely based on a something I found online a while back. It's an ethiopian-inspired lentil tomato stew....quite tasty. It's not the best thing I've ever made, but hubs and I both enjoyed it and would likely make it again.

Added benefits of this recipe:
- using up spices you forgot you had
- cheap, super healthy and full of "super" foods
- exotic flavours for pennies a plate :)



Ethiopian Spicy Lentil-Tomato Stew
1 c brown lentils
1 large onion, chopped
2 carrots, sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 T fresh ginger, grated
2 T olive oil
1 can diced tomatoes, drained
1 small can tomato paste
1 c vegetable stock
2 T sugar
1 cup peas
fresh coriander

Spice Mix:
2 t cumin
2 t smoked paprika
1 t fenugreek (didnt' have it, subbed 1/2 t celery seed and 1/2 t turmeric)
1/2 t thyme
3/4 t cardamom
1/4 t coriander
1/8 t allspice
1/8 t cloves
1/8 t cinnamon
1/2 t cayenne

1. In a medium pot, boil the lentils for about 40 minutes (or until tender). Once they are tender, drain them and set aside. [if you're making rice, start now!]
2. Meanwhile, measure out all your spices. I LOVE these colours. Gorgeous.



3. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add onion, garlic and ginger. Once the onion starts to soften, add the carrots.
4. After 3-4 minutes (and before the garlic starts to burn), add the spice mix and combine well, stirring for 1 more minute.
5. Add the broth, tomatoes and tomato paste. Simmer for about 10 minutes (until carrots start to soften).
6. Add the lentils and peas. And, if you're smarter than I am, you won't let a massive frozen block of peas double your dosage.....oops



7. One the peas are cooked (about 3-4 minutes), sprinkle in some fresh coriander. Yum. I served this over brown rice, but to be more authentic, you could make injera, a wonderful ethiopian flat bread. I had no such time or patience tonight. ;) But it is good stuff.



Thanks for reading! :) This is a great hearty dish for a cold night. Already looking forward to my leftovers tomorrow!

Beet-atitude

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Yum, yum and more yum. Dinner last night turned out really well, with plenty of food and fun to go around. The now-infamous beet soup was even better than I could have imagined. I followed the recipe pretty much exactly as written, though I did add about a teaspoon of vegetable bouillon, because soup without salt is not really a soup worth enjoying. I doubled the recipe, and had more than a little “fun” in trying to peel the roasted beets – my fingers are still a bit purple, but last night, I actually looked like an accident victim….yikes. Apparently, roasting and peeling veggies is miserable regardless of what veggie you’re roasting.

I thought I would also share a few tips on cleaning leeks – these guys are a little bit pesky when it comes to cleaning. If you just wash the outside, you’re likely to end up with a gritty soup (and who know what that grit really is…..) because leeks are literally full of crap. A few years ago, I read this method of cleaning leeks and wanted to share….

1) Cut off the root, and cut off the dark green parts, so you’re left with just the white and pale green portion.
2) Cut this lengthwise, so you know have two long half-leeks.
3) Chop into ¼” wide pieces (give or take – most recipes call for chopped leeks like this).
4) Put the chopped leek in a strainer and give it a really, really good rinse.



This method gets rid of all the grit and crap and leaves you with tasty leeks, ready for consumption.

Another aspect of this recipe that I loved was the slightly unusual seasoning – rather than more typical Italian herbs, this recipe incoporated a little bit of exoticism by adding some allspice and ginger (I subbed fresh because I was out of dried, and I just prefer fresh for most applications – baking excluded). I also used marjoram instead of time (because I had it). And because I was just having way too much fun in the kitchen, I arranged it all and snapped a pic for y’all.



And last, I have to say that the colour and flavour and presentation of this recipe more than surpassed my expectations. It was a brilliant fuschia (you absolutely have to use whipping cream in this recipe – skim or other lower fat product wouldn’t have the whitening (pinkening?) power. It was so gorgeous in the bowl, I almost didn’t want to eat it. I used low-fat sour cream to drizzle over the top. I just put it in the corner of a plastic baggie and snipped a tiny little hole – the smallness of the hole, partnered with the velocity of the sour cream made a kinda fun squiggly effect. I garnished with a sprig of flat-leaf Italian parsley. The flavour was milder than I would have thought, given the rich colour. There was a definite beet flavour, but the creaminess and the celery balanced it nicely. I liked the hint of allspice, and might even consider adding a touch of cinnamon and cumin in the future. Very tasty. Hubs didn’t mind so much – he ate most of his little bowl. I wrote his name with the cream, and this had the desired effect of guilting him into at least trying the dreaded beets….



The main course was Hungarian beef goulash…..planning-wise, I’m sure I could have done a little better – this was more of a stew than I had anticipated, so the beet soup and goulash is not a combination I would serve to guests, though each dish on its own is pretty good. I loved the loads of paprika in this recipe, and thought it added a touch of fun to it. In retrospect, I would add some garlic, and also perhaps some parsnips to deepen and vary the flavour of the finished recipe. Perhaps using hot or smoked paprika would also change the depth of this.

Not so great, however, is the condition of my poor pot at the end of all this – not sure what I did wrong, but I ended up with a thick layer of burnt crustiness at the bottom of the pan. Going to have a TON of fun getting that crap off. Meh. My other issue with the recipe is the fact that it calls for 1 T of tomato paste….I know that technically this stuff is now available in tubes, but I’ve yet to find it. I really want it, because it felt so wasteful and ridiculous to throw out the remainder of the tin this morning (yeah, I know, Martha would have frozen the remainder in ice cube trays or some other nonsense, but keep in mind who’s writing this….hahahaha).

Anyway, here is the recipe for the Hungarian beef goulash, with my substitutions and suggestions in parentheses. Recipe modified from one-pot cooking, which is a british book, with wacky british names and measurements….tons of fun for the Canadian cook!

Hungarian beef (pork) goulash



100 g butter (I used 1 T olive oil….like I’m going to use a quarter pound of butter????!)
900 g beef topside, cut into cubes (not sure what top side is, but I used 2 pork tenderloins)
450 g onions, chopped (I used 2 large onions)
50 g paprika (I guess-timated 3 T)
50 g flour (again, guess-timation of ¼ c)
1 T tomato puree (which I’m assuming is the tomato paste that I ranted about in the previous paragraph)
2 L beef stock (I didn’t use quite 2 litres)
225 g carrots, peeled and cut into chunks (used half a package of baby carrots and halved them)
450 g potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks (didn’t peel – fibre is good for you!)
Chopped parsley for garnish

Preheat the oven to 400F. Heat the butter in a large heavy pot, season the meat and add to the dish. Add the onions and cook for 2 minutes, stirring. Add the paprika and flour, mix well and place in the preheated oven, uncovered, for 10 minutes.

Remove from the oven and mix in the tomato purée. Reduce the oven temperature to 350F. Add enough of the stock to cover the meat. Bring to a boil on top of the stove and season.

Cover with a lid and return to the oven for 2 hours. After 1.5 hours, mix in the chopped carrots and potatoes and cook for another 30 minutes, or until the meat and vegetables are tender. Sprinkle with chopped parsley to serve.

Last, I just want to say that my photos will soon be getting much better – my lovely hubby has agreed to build me a light box, so I’ll soon be able to take much prettier pictures.

Now, I better get cleaning because my in-laws are coming for dinner on Tuesday, and I have a first-class messy disaster to be rid of…….I’ve even noticed my rabbits start to write “dust me” with their little paws on the floor of their pen…….yikes.

Thanks for reading!