chorizo, egg & raisin tacos

A while back this Serious Eats "dinner tonight" post caught my eye...chorizo, egg and raisin tacos. Sounded interesting, flavor-wise, and simple...perfect for a weeknight.


It IS easy. The only thing I really did different than the Serious Eats' method was I soaked my raisins in tequila instead of boring old water. I also made pico de gallo to top them. No need for a recipe, because it's pretty much cook some onions, chorizo and raisins, check for seasoning, add eggs, put on tortilla. eat. If you'd like more egg, use more egg. More sausage? you get it.

These were good! I had some for breakfast the next morning, too. Fun!

Ellie Krieger's Penne with Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic and White Beans

Spring is coming, followed by summer. Which means that this tummy I've developed in the cold months has to go. Things like chicken & waffles and pancetta egg cups and hollandaise sauce don't help, so I'm gonna try and cut back on meals like that, and cook more healthy meals.

Back in January, I got the opportunity to meet Ellie Krieger and have her sign a copy of her book The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life at the St. Louis Food & Wine Experience. She was very nice! The book is great. There are so many recipes I want to try. I like her stuff because she uses real ingredients to make healthy meals....butter, cheese, olive oil...she just uses it in moderation.

Last night I tried her Penne with Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic, and White Beans. The recipe called to me because it had lots of summer flavors...lemon, basil and tomatoes. Of course tomatoes are horrible right now, but I got some cherry tomatoes, which tend to be less-mealy than the regular ones. Also, this recipes calls for roasting the tomatoes, which really helps them get sweet and yummy.

Penne with Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic, and White Beans

3 large tomatoes, (about 2 lbs. I used 2 12 oz. bags of cherry tomatoes and one can of whole tomatoes)
6 cloves garlic, unpeeled
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
Freshly ground black pepper
1(15 ounce) can cannellini beans (I used 2 cans)
1/2 pound penne pasta
2 Tbsp. fresh squeezed lemon juice
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, cut into ribbons
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Slice each tomato into 8 wedges and discard the seeds. Put the tomato wedges and garlic into a 9 by 13-inch roasting pan. Drizzle with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and sprinkle with salt and a few turns of pepper. Roast in the oven, uncovered, for 40 minutes.

Drain the beans into a large colander in the sink. Cook the pasta according to the directions on the package. Drain the pasta into the colander containing the beans, so the hot pasta water will warm the beans. Return drained pasta and beans to the pasta pot.

When the tomatoes are done, pick out the garlic cloves, squeeze the garlic out of the skin into a small bowl and mash with a fork. Add lemon juice, the remaining oil and salt and pepper, stir to combine. Pour the roasted tomatoes into the pasta pot, add the garlic mixture, the basil and additional salt and pepper, to taste. Toss to combine. Serve topped with the Parmesan.

It was easy, and the flavors were refreshing...sweet roasted tomatoes and garlic, tart lemon and creamy beans. Again, Ellie's recipe works for me! Here are some other times when I've made her recipes: Oven fried chicken thighs and Short-cut greens ; Oven fried chicken strips.

Chicken Strips and 5 Dips!

Friday Night was chicken strip night! I made a bunch of Ellie Krieger's chicken strips again, and Jack made a variety of sauces for dipping them in. He also made some awesome Bloody Marys, and we watched movies. It was a nice night!


The dips, from top to bottom:
Sweet Baby Rays Barbecue Sauce, Horseradish Honey Mustard Sauce, Sweet & Sour Sauce, Chipotle Yogurt Sauce, Cocktail Sauce.

Here are the dip recipes, via Jack, minus the chipotle yogurt sauce, which was just Greek yogurt with finely chopped chipotles in adobo sauce mixed in to taste, and the Sweet Baby Rays, which is from a bottle:

Horseradish Honey Mustard Sauce
Ingredients
¼ cup Greek yogurt (or drained yogurt)
¼ cup yellow, Dijon , or stone-ground mustard (or mixture)
¼ cup honey
1 tbsp. prepared horseradish
¼ tsp. white pepper

Mix all ingredients. Adjust for heat and/or sweetness as desired. Cool and serve.


Sweet and Sour Sauce
Ingredients
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
¼ cup brown sugar
½ cup pineapple juice
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and sliced
2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 tbsp corn starch
Cayenne or ground red pepper (optional)

In a small container, mix the corn starch with enough pineapple juice to dissolve. In a saucepan, heat the vinegar, brown sugar, and the rest of the pineapple juice. Add the ginger, garlic and cayenne (optional) and boil for up to 2-3 minutes. While boiling, add the corn starch/juice mixture and stir until thickened. Cool and serve.


Cocktail Sauce
Ingredients
½ cup catsup (ketchup works just as well)
1 tbsp prepared horseradish
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp hot pepper sauce

Mix all ingredients. Adjust flavor as desired. Cool and serve.

As for the Bloody Marys...


Jack garnished them with a rim of celery salt and green olives skewered won a thin spear of celery. Yum! If only we had known about Brownie Points' bacon vodka (thanks Alanna!). That would have made a great addition to this cocktail. Oh well. Here is the Bloody Mary recipe:

Jack's Bloody Mary Mix
Ingredients
4 cups vegetable juice (V-8 or equivalent)
2 tbsp prepared horseradish
4 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
hot pepper sauce to taste
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp celery salt

Mix all ingredients. Adjust flavor as desired. (and add vodka to your taste, of course. We added 2 oz. of vodka to drinking glasses filled a little more than halfway with ice, then filled the rest with the Bloody Mary mix and stirred. You could also shake it and strain out the ice.)

Now THAT's a good Friday night, people!

chicken fingers and peanut sauce

Last night for dinner I made Ellie Kreiger's Crispy Chicken fingers from her book The Food You Crave, as featured on Serious Eats. I had made a couple recipes before of Ellie's...The fried chicken and collard greens...after seeing one of her shows on the Food Network. We like the fried chicken, and these strips looked pretty similar. It seemed it would make a nice, comforting, quick and healthy meal. Once at the grocery store, however, I decided to nix her honey mustard sauce and whip up some spicy peanut dipping sauce instead. And for a veg I decided on broccoli stir-fried with ginger, garlic and sesame.

Recipes for the Chicken fingers (direct from the book via Serious Eats), peanut sauce and broccoli follow. Keep in mind that this is the kind of cooking you do to taste, so use my recipes as a guide, but feel free to add, subtract, veer off...

Chicken Fingers
1 1/4 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, cut across into 1/2-inch-thick slices

1/2 cup lowfat buttermilk 
(I added some soy sauce to my buttermilk...don't know if that made a ton of difference or not)
Cooking spray (I just used vegetable oil wiped on the pan with a paper towel...)

4 cups whole-grain corn cereal such as Corn Chex or corn flakes 
(I added sesame seeds as well...)
1/4 teaspoon salt 
Pinch of freshly ground black pepper (I put in about 1 tsp. of white pepper instead of black)

Procedure
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. Combine the chicken and buttermilk in a shallow dish. turning the chicken to coat it with the buttermilk. Cover and chill for 15 minutes. Coat two baking sheets with cooking spray.
3. Put the cereal in a sealable plastic bag and crush with a rolling pin.
4. Transfer the crumbs to a shallow dish and season them with the salt and pepper. Dip each piece of chicken in the cereal to fully coat and arrange on the prepared baking sheets. Bake until cooked through, about 8 minutes. Leave the chicken on the baking sheets to cool slightly. It will become crispier.

Peanut Dipping Sauce
1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
3 Tbsp. honey
1 tsp. fresh grated ginger
1/2 tsp. fresh grated garlic
1 tsp. chili hot oil
1/2 tsp. sesame oil
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. rice wine vinegar
1/2 tsp. fish sauce
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes
water to thin out...approx. 4 Tbsp.

Mix everything but the water together. add water a little at a time, stirring until sauce reaches your desired consistency.

Sesame Ginger Broccoli
3 cups broccoli florets, blanched
about 3 tbsp. vegetable oil
1 tbsp chili hot oil with some of the flakes
1 tbsp. fresh grated ginger
2 tsp. fresh grated garlic
1 shallot, sliced thin
4 tbsp. sesame seeds
4 tbsp. soy sauce
dash of fish sauce

cook shallots and garlic in oil until translucent, add ginger, hot chili oil and sesame oil and sesame seeds, cook for a couple minutes, then add broccoli and stir-fry for about a minute before adding soy and fish sauces and cooking for another couple of minutes.

sausage+arugula+gnocci

I don't know what all to write about this dish. It's so easy and fast...Cook some sort of Italian flavored sausage (this was a pesto flavored chicken sausage), cut up, take out of pan, cook chopped garlic and some ol' frozen pesto you have hanging around in the sausage drippings, add the chopped sausage back plus some cooked gnocchi (not home made...the shelf-stable stuff...it was a weeknight, afterall) then put a bag of arugala in until it wilts. Voila! Oh, I also tossed some toasted pine nuts in at some point, and topped it all with Pecorino Romano cheese...of course. Too bad the sausage was too salty. Otherwise a great weeknight dish. So simple, there's nothing left to do but show photos of it...




I must've had this gnocchi dish in my memory as inspiration...

tarts gone wild

While I was making potato salad and zucchini muffins on the 4th, a friend of mine was hunting for wild Chaterelle mushrooms. They just came into season in Missouri, and that season lasts only a few weeks, probably. Anyway, he gave me a baggie-full of his finds! Wasn't that nice? It was my first time trying/cooking with Chanterelles. I was gonna do a simple pasta and saute the shrooms with garlic, oil and butter, but Jack (smarty pants that he is) suggested I make a tart, like I did with asparagus. Brilliant! This worked really well. I got to taste the mushrooms without any other strong flavor interfering, it was pretty, and it was simple! You can follow the links to the recipe, originally from fer food, but basically, you roll out a sheet of puff pastry, score around the edges to creat a crust, dock the inside of the score with a fork, pre-cook it for 15 minutes or so, put down shredded gruyere (about 3/4 cup), top it with the mushrooms, some pepper and drizzle it with olive oil and bake the whole thing for another 25 or so minutes.






I ate the tart with a simple salad of romaine, tomatoes and red onion dressed with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Simple but quite lovely with my rich tart.

Apparently, the shroomin' pal is having a lot of luck with his hunting...so I may be getting some more of these earthy, buttery, delicious morsels of fungus soon. So I'll continue doing some recipe research. I am open to suggestions, of course.

Grillin' up a Saturday

Yesterday was kind of a lazy Saturday. The weather was awesome...ripe for some hot grill action. For lunch we had some grilled all-beef uncured hotdogs. Yum! We topped them with this relish we made up a couple of years ago, kind of a chicago-style dog in a jar.It's simple, just cut up a couple of pickles, a couple roma tomatoes and a small red onion, season with salt and pepper and pickle juice to taste and mix together. Use it to top your dog along with your favorite mustard! Some crunchy reduced-fat plain potato chips on the side? Mmmmm MMMMM!


Then, last night, Jack started up the grill again. He grilled some sun-dried tomato chicken sausages and portabello mushrooms. When they were good and grilled, he chopped them up and we added them to some whole wheat penne pasta, a jar of good marinara sauce and some toasted pine nuts. Top with Pecorino Romano cheese, and that's a simple but really yummy dinner. In fact, it's the second time this week we've made it.

friday frozen food fun

Two posts in one evening! Crazy. It's been a long week. I came home from work, too lazy to cook something, too lazy to go to the store, and too poor to go out for sushi for a second Friday in a row. So I took a look in the freezer, where I had collected some fun stuff. So I present, my "there's more to frozen foods than lean cuisine" crazy dinner:

So the round bread thingy is called gobi paratha. I picked it up from a small Indian store by my home.The package says it's "Indian bread stuffed with cauliflower and spices." All you do is heat it up in a skillet for a few minutes. Yum! Quite spicy, which is fine by me. Luckily I had some plain yogurt in the fridge, which served as a dip and added another dimension (and cooled the hot hot spice a bit). When I googled gobi paratha, the first entry was from fellow St. Louis food blogger One Hot Stove (she's on my list of local links on the right over there! small blogosphere!). She has a recipe for making homemade gobi paratha (scroll down, it's there). It doesn't look too too hard, but kind of a delicate process. I usually shy away from baking too...to science-y. Maybe I'll try it, though (I'll just make sure to have these frozen ones (SWAD foods is the brand, by the way) on hand in case I screw up royally.

I also noticed I had stashed some edamame in there, so I heated that up as a side dish of sorts. I love edamame. It might just be my favorite veggie. It's up in the top ten of my favorite foods, even! I just like it with salt. But I might try it with lemon juice, as suggested here, sometime. That would make it more summery!

So, that was my dinner! it took all of 7 minutes, and was way better than any frozen dinner I've ever had.

random foodness

-Tiny tiny sculptures of people interacting with food as the landscape. Fantastical!

-Today Slashfood had a post about the ”popener”, a name and product that made me giggle. I sent it to a couple of friends, and Kelly went the extra mile and clicked on the Spartacus link on the site where the popener is sold. The only Roman Gladiator to cook! Apparently it’s a show/going to be a show? What the?!

-Last night I made a simple, cheap, healthy-like dinner (those are my specialty). I cooked some cous-sous, added a can of butter beans, a can of diced tomatoes (drained) and a can of Glory mixed greens along with some garlic and onion powder, cumin, salt, pepper and crushed red pepper. Mixed it all up, put a blob of it on my plate, sprinkled low-fat Mexican cheeses on top and nuked it to melt the cheese. I served it with salsa. It was yummy. The greens really add a nice smoky-sweet flavor. I know it sounds strange. A “fusion” of Moroccan, Southern US, and Mexican. Hey, my kitchen is a melting pot, what can I say?

-I am currently drinking Old Speckled Hen Ale. It’s quite delish. Rich, but not in that dark-beer way. Kind of nutty, but still refreshing. I think it’s a bit on the expensive side, but heck, Jack bought it, and it’s really yummy. If you’re up for a beer splurge, I’d recommend it.

more time for food

So I am just starting to settle in after moving. We are way way way closer to work, now, saving around and hour and a half a day of our lives that used to be spent in the car. Woo.

Tonight I'm flying solo. I decided against working out, because I have worked out 3 days in a row, and don't feel bad taking a break. So after work I went to the library. Having so much time, I perused the "New Books" shelf. I came across Read it and Eat, by Sarah Gardener. It basically lists 4 books for every month, each month within a theme (i.e. September is "Celebrate Banned Book month" and October is "Fright Night," so all the books have a common theme). It has discussion questions for each book, then, and this is the neat part, recipes inspired by the book to serve at the book club gathering! What a great idea! There's a catfish recipe for Huckleberry Finn, "Inconcievable! Fritattas" for Princess Bride,and Irish Farm Bread for Angela's Ashes. I really like this idea. Check out the excerpt from Amazon.

After the library I made myself a healthy dinner. I cooked a sweet potato in the microwave, then cut it in half and dumped some curried chickpeas on it. It was a simple meal...I added my curry powder and a few other spices and seasonings to the canned chickpeas, and a bit of water, and nuked them for a couple minutes. It's a very filling and comforting meal. Healthy, too, it would seem.

While I was eating, I flipped to Isaac Mizrahi's show on the Style Network. He's so fun. He had a guy on named Josh Perilo who had the 10 best wines for under $10. Being a big fan of wines under $10, I enjoyed the segment. Unfortunately, the link to Perilo's site doesn't work, and I couldn't find anything much on him with a web search. For now, there are tons of "Under $10" lists out there for us to check out.

Okay, back to my book, now.

Ruby Reuben

Last night I got a little creative with dinner. I had some German dark wheat bread...that's what the package said...it's pumpernickle, basically. I got some turkey pastrami from the deli as well as some Lorraine swiss. So I have to make a Reuben, right? Only I don't really like Thousand Island dressing...so I used spicy mustard intead. The "creative" part was, I also didn't feel like sauerkraut.I remembered Aunt Nellies sweet & sour cabbage. It's milder than sauerkraut, and prettier, and really really cheap.

I put my pastrami on one slice of bread, my swiss on the other, stuck them under the broiler for a few minutes, added the cabbabge and voila! A yummy modified Reuben! I'll call it a Runy Reuben, because Aunt Nellie's is red, and with the pink pastrami and dark brown pumpernickle the colors of tha sammich were lovely. It was quite healthy too.

making it up as i go along

Exibit A:

Last week I had the following: can of garbonzo beans, small leftover nub of feta cheese, Ajvar and some past-thier-prime pitas.

So I mixed up the beans, cheese and some avjar with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and garlic powder. I cut the pitas into 4 wedges and toasted them in the oven. And had me a delish dinner of garbonzo gunk on crunchy warm pitas!

Exibit B

Over the weekend I had low-fat cinnamon ghraham crackers, honey spread* and some plums. I merely spread honey on a cracker and topped with a plum wedge. It was suprisingly wonderful.

*Honey spread is new to me. There are no ingredients listed, so I guess it's just kind of honey that's been put through some kind of crystallizing process.