A+ Dinner: Italian Sausage and Rapini

I prepared an awesome dinner tonight: I cooked Italian sausage in diced tomatoes with crushed garlic. I made a salad of mixed, spicy greens, which I dressed in a balsamic vinaigrette. I made the crispiest, chewiest garlic bread from a sourdough boule. And I sautéed a bunch of rapini.

Rapini, I discovered through Google this weekend, is the same thing as broccoli raab.  When I found out that I unknowingly picked up in my CSA this past weekend a bunch of broccoli raab (which Clear Brook Farm had marketed as rapini) I was disappointed.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not too fond of broccoli raab’s bitter flavor.  But in the interest of incorporating more veggies into my diet and eating all the vegetables I get in my CSA before they go bad, I prepared it to go with this geshmak meal of Italian sausage and buttery garlic bread.  

I found a Rachel Ray recipe that sounded like it would make the rapini palatable.  It called for first sautéing the rapini in olive oil with sliced garlic, then simmering it in some chicken stock to mellow the bitterness of the greens. The technique worked, and the chicken stock gave the rapini a pleasant flavor.  Had I not bought the rapini myself, I never would have known what I had cooked was brocoli raab.  

Eric wasn’t in the mood for the cooked greens, so I wound up eating all the broccoli raab. 

Speaking of Eric, he just came into the living room with a big mug of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream for me, so my top priority now is downing this hot chocolate before it gets cold.

Better Roasted Vegetables

I’ve been roasting a lot of vegetables this fall because I’m getting so many in my CSA each week, but I haven’t been entirely happy with the way they’ve been coming out. 

When I cook them, I roast a variety of vegetables on the same rimmed baking sheet, usually some combination of beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, brussell sprouts and cauliflower.  I try to cut all the veggies so that they’re approximately the same size.  I drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, give them a good toss, and roast them in a 425 degree oven for 40 to 60 minutes.  Every 20 minutes, I toss them on the baking sheet. 

They always taste delicious, but they get a little too brown–the beets in particular. (I guess that’s because they have such a high sugar content). In fact, my roasted vegetables always come out slightly burned.

Saturday night I roasted beets, rainbow carrots, garlic and brussell sprouts.  I cooked them at 425 degrees for only 40 minutes, I think, and they were still kind of burned. 

The next night, I roasted exactly 10 brussell sprouts exclusively.  Instead of cooking them on a rimmed baking sheet, I put them in small ceramic baking dish with low sides.  Instead of roasting them at 425, I cooked them at 350.  I tossed them at 20 minutes, and after 40 minutes, I thought they were done. The brussell sprouts weren’t burned, but they weren’t tender enough for my taste, either.  They could have incubated longer.

I’m not sure why my roasted vegetables aren’t coming out better.  They taste delicious, but they’re just too browned. I’m wondering if I’m not using enough olive oil.  I’m going to continue to roast them at a lower temperature (35o degrees) and just cook them longer.  I hope that helps.

If you have any tips or techniques for cooking roasted vegetables, I’d be much obliged if you’d share them here!

Spigarello

This week’s CSA featured a green I’d never previously eaten, even though it had been in two previous farm shares (one a few weeks ago and one last year): Spigarello.

When it debuted in last year’s share, it sadly went to waste. I didn’t know what this fancy green was, how to cook it, or how to pronounce its name.  The spigarello that came in my CSA a few weeks ago sadly met the same fate: I never wrapped it in damp paper towels before I put it in my fridge and it went limp a few hours later.  I tried to revive it, but to no avail.  

When I saw that spigarello was in my share this week, I was excited and dubious. As much as I like my nachos and potato skins, I love my greens, and I was eager to try something new. Yet I worried the spigarello would taste bitter, like broccoli raab. (Or is it broccolini that I’m thinking of?) 

I wound up cooking some of the spigarello for lunch on Sunday. Clear Brook Farm recommended cooking it with some garlic and crushed red pepper flakes in olive oil, which I did. It was delicious!  I tried some of the spigarello raw before I cooked it, and it just tasted green.  Honestly, the flavor was rather nondescript, but not at all unpleasant.  I made it again to go with my lunch today, carrot ginger soup.

I like the spigarello so much that I don’t want to share it with Eric.

Lemon Chicken with Rice and Broccoli

Tonight I made one of my mom’s recipes, “Chicken Francais,” for dinner.  Eric loves this meal.  So much that he ate three and a half pieces of chicken. It’s fairly simple to make and oh-so-tasty, thanks to all the lemon and butter in the sauce. 

I served the chicken with brown basmati rice and broccoli, which I first sautéed in a little bit of olive oil with some sliced garlic, then steamed. It was a really nice dinner for a Monday night.

Nacho Nights

Last night, in honor of NFL sunday, I made nachos for dinner.  I got the idea to make nachos specifically for dinner from a co-worker, Tom Wailgum, who once told me that he and his wife Karin were splurging on home-made nachos for dinner one Friday night.  (I get the sense that Tom and Karin generally eat pretty healthy.)

Oddly, I never considered making my own nachos–let alone for dinner–before Tom mentioned it.  It’s odd because I love football food, and come Sunday, when I have time, I like to put out a spread for Eric and I (and any random person who happens to stop by) to graze on while our beloved New England Patriots kick butt.  Past spreads have featured steak and blue cheese paninis with caramelized onions, venison Philly cheese steaks, hot clam dip and crackers, potato skins, and porcini mushroom and bacon dip.  

I wound up making the nachos for dinner Saturday night, too.  I had been planning to serve for dinner the carrot ginger soup I had made Saturday afternoon, but my craving for nachos was too big to put off for another day.  After eating nachos two nights in a row, my carving has been sufficiently sated. 

Here’s how I made my nachos:

1. Brown one pound of ground beef in a skillet.  When just cooked, add an envelope of taco seasoning mix and two-thirds of a cup of water and simmer until water mixture has evaporated.

2. Meanwhile, spread a bunch of tortilla chips evenly out on a round pizza pan.  Sprinkled with cooked meat, shredded cheddar cheese and anything else you wish to add, such as chopped jalapeno peppers or sliced olives.  

3. Adjust oven rack to middle of oven and heat broiler.  Broil nachos on middle rack for two minutes.  Serve with sour cream, salsa and guacamole.

I have a little bit of ground been leftover from the nachos.  I’m going to use it in a “nacho” baked potato later this week: I’ll bake the potato and top it with the leftover ground beef, cheddar cheese (or better yet, salsa con queso!), salsa and sour cream.  Damn.  I can’t wait for later this week!

I Like Tofu

Whenever I cook tofu, I can’t help but think of a song by the Krishna punk band Baby Gopal. I don’t know the name of the song, but the chorus goes something like, “I like tofu, I like tofu…” and on and on.  I heard it for the first (and last time) when I saw Baby Gopal perform at the Rat in Boston one straightedge Sunday afternoon when I was in high school and flirting with Krishna consciousness. (The flirtation, which was short-lived, alas, consisted of me meeting a cute Hare Krishna in Harvard Square one Saturday, accepting an invitation from him to go to a vegetarian dinner, and giving him a $5 donation for a Bhagavad Gita.)

And so when I was frying slices of tofu tonight for dinner, I thought of Baby Gopal, sang “I like tofu” over and over in my head, and wondered whatever happened to that Bhagavad Gita.

I served the tofu with brown basmati rice and braised baby bok choy (leftover from week 3 of my CSA).

Pantry Cooking: Spaghetti with Clams and Garlic

Even when money was tight, my parents’ pantry was always well-stocked when I was a kid—with Campbell’s and Progresso soups, Near East Rice Pilaf, cans of Bumble Bee tuna, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Prince pasta, and jars of Prego spaghetti sauce, Hellman’s mayonnaise, JIF, Welch’s grape jelly, and my childhood favorite, marshmallow fluff.

Since the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, it should come as no surprise that my pantry is always teeming with food.  My cupboard contains many of the same pantry staples as my parents’—the JIF, the jelly, the fluff, the mayo, the pasta, the tuna and the cream of mushroom soup—in addition to some foods that my parents never had on hand, such as quinoa, dried porcini mushrooms and wasabi powder. Like my mother, I like to have back-ups in case we ever run out of anything that’s in the fridge during the week.  And when we finally crack that sealed bottle of ketchup from the pantry, I promptly note on my grocery list that I have to purchase a new back-up ketchup for the pantry. What psychological make-up causes this compulsion, I don’t know.

Anyway, the inventory in our pantry has dwindled quite dramatically this week for the first time in—dare I say—years (there’s actually space for new SKUs!) because, as you may have read in previous posts, I was out of town last weekend and therefore couldn’t do the grocery shopping. So Eric and I have been cobbling together dinners based on what random ingredients we have left in our house. Monday night we had butternut squash and steamed spinach. Last night we had tortilla pizzas. And tonight I cooked with some of my pantry staples that I keep on hand for just such circumstances: spaghetti and canned clams.

While I boiled the spaghetti, I sautéed some sliced garlic in about a tablespoon of olive oil over medium-low heat for four minutes. I reserved the olive oil and garlic in a small pyrex ramekin to pour over the pasta when it was done.

In the same pan that I used to sauté the garlic, I added another tablespoon of olive oil, and when it was warm I tossed in some pieces of brocoli. I poured some water into the pan, which I covered, and I steamed the brocoli with some more sliced garlic for a few minutes.

When the spaghetti was done, I tossed it with the garlic olive oil and some additional olive oil. (I read recently that olive oil loses its salubrious properties when heated to high temperatures, which is why I reserved some unheated olive oil for drizzling over the cooked pasta.) I then seasoned the spaghetti with salt and pepper and poured it into a serving dish.  I added the canned clams and sprinkled some grated parmesan and romano cheese over the top.

YUM! It was quite satisfying.

What are your pantry staples?

Wilted Arugula

I decided to go out on a limb last night and cook arugula to go with the meatballs Eric and I had for dinner, and I’m glad I did. The wilted arugula was a nice change of pace from a salad.  It was pretty good <<channelling Larry David>>, pret-tay, pret-tay, prettay good.  The only problem was that the greens cooked down to nothing.  I could have used a side salad after all because I didn’t feel like I got my fill of green veggies with dinner.  If you’ve never eaten cooked arugula before, I recommend trying it.

Lentil Soup and Meatballs

I’m amazed at how much more I can get done with an extra hour in the day thanks to Daylight Savings Time.  After a solid night’s sleep, I tumbled out of bed at 10 minutes to 8  this morning, walked Toby and ate breakfast. Eric made scrambled eggs with Saga blue cheese, bacon, toast and capuccino.

After breakfast, I got to work on my lentil soup. The recipe I use, which comes from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, makes enough for eight to 10 servings. I usually halve the recipe, but this time I made the whole thing so that I could freeze some of the soup. 

When I got to the point where I needed to add the stock to the vegetables (onions, leeks, carrots, celery), I paniced: I didn’t have enough stock.  The recipe called for three quarts and I only had two, 32-ounce containers of store-bought chicken stock.  Then I remembered that I had two containers of stock in the freezer that I had made (eep!) two summers ago when Eric and I were buying organic chickens from Two Spoon Farm.  I dumped the frozen stock into the soup and was saved by my own industriousness.  Eric and I are going to have the soup for dinner tonight with a salad and some bialys our industrious friend Erica whipped up this morning. 

Next on my to-do list (after walking Toby a second time) was mixing up the ingredients for Italian-style meatballs (recipe from the February 2006 issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine), which I cooked in a couple of cans of diced tomatoes with some olive oil, garlic and crushed red pepper flakes.  Eric and I will have the meatballs for dinner tomorrow night.  I can’t decide whether to serve a salad with the meatballs, or try a recipe for wilted arugula that I found in another past issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine.  I’ve never eaten arugula cooked, and I can’t imagine what it’s like. Honestly, the idea of cooked arugula doesn’t send me, but I might make it anyway just to try something different.  On the other hand, I hate to waste the perfectly good arugula that I got in my CSA two weeks ago by cooking it.  Maybe I should just make an arugula pesto? 

What do you think? Should I make a salad to go with the meatballs, or try the wilted arugula?

Anaheim and Jalapeno Poppers, Friday Night’s Dinner

Eric and I got a variety of peppers in our CSA two weeks ago–a combination of sweet peppers along with a jalapeno and an anaheim.  Tonight I’m going to turn the jalapeno and the anaheim into poppers. 

I’ve never made jalapeno poppers before so hopefully mine will come out alright. This recipe for jalapeno poppers from AllRecipes.com sounds great!  Unfortunately, it calls for cream cheese, and I don’t have any cream cheese in the fridge.  I have sour cream, which won’t provide the right consistency, but it will have to do.  Rather than halving the peppers, which is what the recipe calls for, I think I’ll leave mine whole (minus the ribs and seeds) so that the sour cream and cheese mixture doesn’t melt out when I fry them.   

I’m also going to make more roasted veggies and a salad to go with the poppers since we still have so much lettuce, cauliflower, potatoes and beets left.

Update 7:14 PM

The poppers came out awesome!  Eric bought cream cheese at the general store so that I didn’t have to use sour cream, and it made all the difference.  The sour cream just wouldn’t have withstood the heat of frying.  I left the peppers whole and stuffed them with the cream- and cheddar cheese mixture. (I left out the bacon bits because I didn’t feel like cooking bacon and having yet another pan to clean up.)  I fried the peppers in a saute pan because I don’t have a deep fryer. (If Eric and I owned a deep-fryer, we’d be in deep trouble, as we’d be cooking donuts and churros and friend chicken ALL. THE. TIME.) If I ever make the poppers again, I’ll fry them in a Dutch oven or a large pot to prevent the oil from spattering all over my cook top.