I thought I’d share this recipe for stuffed poblano peppers as a follow-up to my post on what to do with all the extra cilantro I had on hand from making Southwestern-inspired dinners. Although it was an absurd idea to roast stuffed peppers in the oven in the middle of July, that’s exactly what I did. This recipe just highlights some of the flavor combinations I’ve really been enjoying lately: black beans, corn, onions sauteed in cumin, and fresh diced tomatoes are stirred in with chorizo sausage and topped with chopped avocado and cilantro.
I’ve been on a bit of a Southwestern kick lately. Over the last year, I’ve made more and more dishes that involve the classic combination of cilantro, lime, corn, tomatoes, and beans. Part of it has to do with the fact that so many of the things you can make with a Southwestern bent are actually super healthy. Whole wheat quesadillas filled with cumin-scented black beans, onions, and cheese; stuffed peppers with corn and avocado, cheesy enchiladas with beans and tomatoes. These are all things that I’ve been making over and over again throughout the spring and into the summer. Even though it’s been crazy hot out lately, I managed to crank up my oven to 400-degrees for the sake of those enchiladas.
Part of the equation is that all of these dishes can be made with a few staple ingredients, cycling through the different recipes so you’re eating a different meal with slightly different flavors every night, yet nothing goes to waste because it’s languishing, unused, in your fridge.
This August, I’ll be coming up on the 1-year benchmark for posting regularly on this blog. I actually started the blog a year earlier, in 2010, but it took awhile to find my rhythm and figure out what I actually wanted this space to be. It took another three months or so to figure out what good photos and lighting could do for food shots. Remember the tomato cobbler? It’s probably one of the best dishes I’ve made in the past year, but back in September, I was still surmounting the steep learning curve of DSLR and coming to grips with the fact that Photoshop can’t transform harsh 70-watt overhead lighting into soft natural light. Now, all of my shots are done in natural day light with some thought to food styling and composition. I still have a lot to learn, but I’ve made some good progress.
And then something like this red lentil dal comes along which absolutely resists having a good photograph taken. From any angle, it still looks like what it is: Red lentils cooked to bursting with some wiggly red onions and asparagus. The photos don’t help brag about the flavor, how the red lentils cook down to what turns out to be an excellent sauce for the asparagus and onions and how the Indian spice blend infuses the onions to perfection.
So without the help of photos, how can I convince you that you absolutely must make this recipe? That in the course of a few weeks, this dish has made many appearances on our dinner table, and it’s been a delight each time?
How about this: Once you buy the few spices needed which may not already be in your spice rack, this is one the absolute cheapest dinners you can cobble together, and you can do it again and again without needing to hit the grocery store each time.
Today marks Recipe Redux’s first birthday, and to celebrate, we’re all making small bite desserts. Recipe Redux was started by a group of dietitians, and each month a group of healthy food bloggers post the recipes they’ve created, all stemming from a single monthly challenge.
Those of you who know me in real life likely know that dessert isn’t my favorite course, and I’m much more likely to spend my time in the kitchen on something savory and satisfying instead of sweet and luxurious. So coming up with a tasty dessert bite was a bit of a challenge. Given my culinary proclivities, it’s no surprise that what I ended up with is a small bite leaning heavily on cheese and fruit. The idea here is pretty simple, and it’s a good party appetizer because so many of the elements can be made individually and made ahead of time. A classic shortbread dough is shaped into a tiny tart shell, then filled with ricotta cheese and macerated strawberries (though practically any fruit would do just as well).
But the absolute genius part of this recipe is what I came up with for the ricotta cheese: it’s homemade and infused with mint. It’s delicious, and I’m so excited to share it here! I’ve been making homemade ricotta for a few years, and it isn’t all that challenging. The only special equipment you need is cheesecloth, which can be bought at a grocery store or hardware store for around $2-3. One purchase will get you through several rounds of cheese making. After that, it’s as easy as boiling water (or milk, in this case), and draining. The brilliance of this particular recipe is that I added a good handful of mint leaves to the milk before I brought it to a boil, and the flavors and scent of the mint leaves perfume the final product. Strawberries and mint go so well together; this one simple addition helps elevate the entire dessert.
It’s almost summer in Boston, but sometimes it doesn’t quite feel like it. Luckily, we’re seeing the seasons change with fresh summer produce turning up in the grocery stores, and the farmer’s markets have opened across the city. Sometimes it’s warm enough to grab a drink outside after work. But as I’m sitting here writing, it’s barely over 60 degrees outside, and I need to wear long sleeves to stay warm with the windows open.
About a week or so ago, it was a chilly, rainy day with the temperature down into the 50s. I’ve started a more ambitious running routine since my semester ended in May, and my good friend Jodi introduced me to running on the Esplanade along the Charles River. I do either a 4 or 5 mile loop most days of the week, and I’d been doing such a good job sticking to my routine that I didn’t want to let the rain and the chill be what broke my good streak. So I wore a fleece pullover and hit the road, got wet, but wound up back home after an otherwise normal run. I spent the rest of the day feeling like the damp had seeped into my bones and couldn’t get quite warm enough no matter what I did.
And so this sandwich was born: Standing by the stove slow-cooking some onions for about an hour and roasting tomatoes for soup would be the only thing to break the chill.
This is a twist on a dish I’ve been making for years, and it’s a perfect accompaniment to a Memorial Day party. Here, strawberries are paired with the classic combination of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and basil, resulting in a fresh and summery dish. A smear of goat cheese lends the bruschetta a hearty, tangy flavor to contrast with the strawberries’ and tomatoes’ sweetness.
I’ve been making the sans-strawberry version of bruschetta for years (since college, at least), and it’s a reliable appetizer to serve when I have friends over for dinner. For this version, the strawberries are a unique addition to my reliable original recipe. About a week ago, I picked up Ted Allen’s new cookbook, In My Kitchen. He’s the host of Chopped, one of my favorite shows on TV right now, and the recent recipient of a James Beard award. As David says, “the James Beard Awards are like the Oscars for you,” so the fact that he recently won one is very exciting (for me, at least, and I’m sure for him, too). The idea for adding strawberries came from one of his recipes, and it’s a fabulous idea.
It’s a crowd-pleaser: I’ve had the opportunity to serve these to three different groups of friends, most recently some of David’s relatives and a friend & former coworker from Pearson just yesterday.
The recipe can also be adapted in a few ways for Memorial Day celebrations. The tomato-strawberry blend can be made awhile ahead, as the flavors will blend together and meld over time. The preparation outline below is what I do in my apartment, but if you’re bringing a dish to share to a Memorial Day party or grilling, this can easily be converted to an outdoor dish. If that’s the case, brush the baguette slices with olive oil and place on the grill. Once it’s toasted and somewhat crispy, take a clove of raw garlic and rub it on the flat surface of the bread. Then top with a thin layer of goat cheese and the raw tomato-strawberry combo and garnish with basil.
The goat cheese can also be omitted entirely to keep make it a vegan recipe.
Strawberry & Tomato Bruschetta with Goat Cheese
Adapted from Ted Allen’s “In My Kitchen”
Ingredients
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
1/2 pint strawberries
3 garlic cloves, chopped
3 Tablespoons olive oil
salt & pepper
3 oz. soft goat cheese
1 baguette, cut into 1/2-inch thick slices
4 large basil leaves, sliced
1) Slice the grape tomatoes down the center length-wise, then chop into thirds. Chop the stems off the strawberries and slice into smaller pieces. Combine the olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, and strawberries in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.
2) Preheat the oven to 400-degrees. Smear an even layer of goat cheese across each slice of baguette and arrange on a rimmed baking sheet. Spoon the strawberry-tomato mixture over each slice. Bake for 15 minutes, or until the edge of the baguette get toasty and brown and the strawberries and tomatoes are warmed through. Garnish with sliced basil leaves and serve immediately.
Over the weekend, one of my favorite websites, Food52.com, won the James Beard Award for Publication of the year for their cookbook, a compilation of winners from their community cooking contests. I’ve used their contest themes for inspiration before, one of which was selected as a Community Pick on their site (pretty exciting, I thought). This time around, the idea is to showcase “Your Best Mango” in a new recipe, and this was what I came up with. Mangoes aren’t an ingredient I frequently cook with, but with Cinco de Mayo on the horizon, I went in a Southwestern direction, adding lime juice, cilantro, and onions to top off a shrimp taco. The shrimps are infused with a complimentary flavor profile, getting grilled with a dash of cumin. And before everything comes together, a small smear of adobo pepper sauce is spread across a lightly toasted tortilla, adding a smoky flavor and a kick of heat.
The combination of mango, cilantro, and lime brings an intense freshness to this recipe, and grilling both the shrimp and the mango adds complexity and layers of flavor. The recipe makes four individual tacos, which serves two people. It can easily be doubled or more.
About two weeks ago, I gave a talk to a group of medical students at Boston University. The idea behind the presentation is that there’s a pretty significant dearth of nutrition education in our medical school curricula, so I tried to highlight some key points that they would find most helpful – for both their patients and themselves. Sometimes it’s hard to talk generally about eating healthier: everyone knows they should probably eat more vegetables, but so often people just don’t know how. I dislike coming back to that piece of advice again and again unless it is paired with concrete ideas for reaching that goal, which again, can be challenging in a group setting. One of the practical tips I included was to modify recipes by adding vegetables or increasing the quantities already called for in the recipe.
So I took my own advice when making Heidi Swanson‘s wild rice casserole, from her book Super Natural Everyday . While the original dish is healthy all by itself (whole grains, lean dairy, mushrooms), it’s almost begging to be doctored up with some vegetables, too. I opted for a head of cauliflower (a good choice for these early weeks of spring when the temperature hovers around 50 degrees), which blended in seamlessly with the creamy texture. Other ideas include broccoli or peas, which would add some nice color.
We’ve been basking in gorgeous 70-degree weather for the past couple of days in Boston, and I’ve been enjoying everything that comes with it: drinks outside on a sunny patio, the return of Boston’s bike share program, and commuting to school along the Charles river. But the weather’s dipped back down to the mid-40s and I’m back to wearing scarves and my winter coat. Yesterday was overcast, gloomy, and grey. So while it’s still appropriate to put together a wintry, comforting risotto, I wanted to share this with you.
A few weeks ago, my sister sent me a (late-night) text message asking me to come up with a recipe for crispy honey or teriyaki Brussels sprouts. Happily, about a week before that, I’d had dinner with a friend at a restaurant downtown which had crispy sprouts on its menu. They paired theirs with a savory, bleu-cheesy sauce that was actually quite good, but what I really learned from them was how to make Brussels sprouts crispy. When my order arrived, the Brussels sprouts were tiny, tender, and perfectly cooked, but these little cores came surrounding in a bowl of their own leaves, oven-roasted and crisped to a deep, delicate brown. Peeling the individual leaves off the Brussels sprouts and roasting them with their inner cores seems to be the trick to adding a little bit of crunchiness. I think this is the thing my sister’s hankering for, so I hope it works.
