Black beans, roasted sweet potato, and just the right amount of cheese come together for these crispy, filling quesadillas
Even though I’d like to think that working & studying at home leaves plenty of time to cook creative, hot lunches, I usually fall back on a reliable favorite: a lightly-toasted quesadilla. This version is an incredibly satisfying vegetarian substitute for the classic chicken and cheese combination. Don’t be too skeptical about the sweet potato + black bean combination, it actually works quite well. Sauteing the beans with some chopped onion and ground cumin lend the quesadillas a characteristic southwestern flavor, and pairing beans, sweet potatoes, and whole wheat tortillas results in a super-filling (fiber-rich) lunch.
Back when I was interning at Cook’s Illustrated last summer, this was one of my favorite dishes to test out in the kitchens. The test cooks would make batch after batch, making revisions and listening to our feedback as the process went along. The romaine and cabbage make this a colorful winter salad, but the secret really is their dressing. A a base blend of soy sauce, orange juice, vinegar, ginger, and chili-garlic sauce is whisked together and used to poach the chicken. The base is then used to make the dressing for the salad. Since the recipe was published earlier this year, I’ve made this salad many, many times, eating it for dinner, packaging it up for lunches with a small tupperware . I’ve made a few adjustments to the original recipe, though not many. The original recipe can be found here, at the Cook’s Country website, the sister publication to Cook’s Illustrated.First, I omitted the oranges; even while sampling this in the test kitchen, I always preferred the salads without the orange segments. I find the chopped salad and pepper combination comes together more evenly without them. Instead, using 1/4 cup of orange juice in the dressing/marinade base works just perfectly. I also prefer chicken thighs to breasts. They have a bit more fat, but they’re incredibly flavorful and moist. Instead of shredding the chicken, I used a butcher’s knife to carve the thighs into slices, and then chop the slices into evenly-sized chunks.
Some advice on making this salad: Using low sodium soy sauce is a must. With the regular versions, the saltiness can be overwhelming. Just a Tablespoon is a sodium bomb. Also, cutting all the ingredients into evenly-sized pieces will help ensure each bite of the salad has the perfect array of veggies and fixins. The first time I made this, both the bell peppers and the peanuts were too roughly chopped. Spending the extra time on finely chopping, especially with the peanuts, makes scooping these ingredients onto your fork a less unwieldy task.
So often, when I think about what I want to make for dinner, I crave creamy pasta. Obviously, loading up a plate of pasta with heavy cream and cheese isn’t going to work out in the long term, so a lot of my experiments over the fall and winter months have been playing around with different ways to turn vegetables into a healthy pasta dish that’s still creamy and cheesy. And, after watching a few episodes of Chopped, you start to realize you can puree just about anything into a sauce. I made this dish a couple of times, and I’ve found that the key to this combination is the Parmesan. It’s saltiness is the perfect bridge between the sweetness of the roasted peppers and the tang of the goat cheese. Without the Parm, the goat cheese + red pepper combination falls a bit flat, and the end result is a lackluster, too-sweet red mess.
I developed these chewy oatmeal cookies for February’s Recipe Redux, the monthly cooking challenge I joined last year. The challenge this month was to develop a recipe that highlights chocolate, and sweets, I have to say, aren’t my strong suit. When it comes to sweet versus salty, I’d pick salty every day. Baking is typically less forgiving than cooking, so it was a bit challenging to come up with a chocolate-focused dessert. Instead, I thought about what kinds of sweets I actually like to eat, which lead me to oatmeal cookies. Rather than experiment with the chemistry behind cakes and batters, I went with adapting a plain and simple oatmeal cookie recipe and spicing it up.
I incorporated chocolate chips into the recipe, which was a pretty obvious adaptation, and I’m certainly not the first to pair chocolate and oatmeal in a cookie. So, to take the whole thing a step up from obvious, I wanted to incorporate something more complex in place of cinnamon. I went for a Chinese 5 spice, a blend of cinnamon, star anise, fennel, cloves, ginger, and peppercorn. It works because the cinnamon element hints at the traditional flavor profile of an oatmeal cookie, but the peppercorn and ginger lend a subtle, almost smoky spiciness. Chocolate and spices go very well together, so if you don’t have a super sweet tooth, this is a fantastic cookie. It’s chewy and tender and incredibly flavorful.
Eggs and toast are David and my usual weekend breakfast fare. Every Saturday and Sunday morning we choose between scrambled versus over-easy, toast a couple slices of bread, and put on a pot of coffee. The Recipe Redux challenge for this month is breakfast, so I’ve been experimenting with egg-based dishes on weekend mornings instead. I wanted to include both eggs and potatoes — two of my favorite foods that usually get a bad rap. Neither is actually a deal-breaker for people looking to eat healthy, and this recipe showcases both ingredients’ flavors without adding a ton of fat and salt. Instead of frying the potato pancakes, I baked them with a minimal amount of oil at a fairly high temperature to ensure they’d get a nice brown, crisp exterior. The pairing of runny egg yolk with a starchy base is a classic combination, and swapping these potato pancakes in place of toast or English muffins worked well.
I created this recipe based on the recent Food52 challenge to combine the flavors of sage and walnuts. Toasting the walnuts and gently crisping the sage in the rendered pancetta fat transforms the ingredients and intensifies their flavors.
After traveling for the holidays last month, I came home to a DVR loaded with episodes of Chopped and spent last week catching up. In one episode a contestant was eliminated because she cooked a risotto using only simmering water, not stock. I’ve written before about how the clerks in my neighborhood shops prefer skipping the broth in favor of water. When I make my own stock, I do tend to use it when I make risotto, but if you’re making a dish with more subtle flavors or without a central protein, the saltiness can overwhelm other ingredients. With this recipe, I dilute a few cups of stock with water, which lets the flavors of the toasted walnuts and crisped sage come through. Then I stir in a small amount of Parmesan cheese to add a little depth.
I made this pickled shrimp recipe from Saveur magazine at least four times over the past few weeks, and I’m sure they’ll keep finding their way into my menu planning throughout the spring and summer months, too. My family always serves shrimp on Christmas Eve, and this works well as an elegant holiday appetizer. I could also see it being a convenient and portable snack for Super Bowl parties. I’ve been lucky enough to stumble upon a few new recipes this fall that will make their way into my repertoire, but I’m kind of surprised that this is one of them. For one, the shrimps are marinated overnight, so it’s not the kind of dish that can be a last-minute menu idea. But each time I’ve made it and brought it to parties or dinners, it’s gotten rave reviews.
I returned Saturday from a great 2-week vacation to the Midwest, visiting both David’s and my family for Christmas. It was a great holiday, in part because I found this waiting for me under the tree on Christmas morning (thank you David!).
I am actually an owner (shareholder) of the Green Bay Packers. Of course there’s thousands of us, but it’s still fun. The Packers have had a great season, and since I’m no longer working Sundays at the restaurant, I’ve been able to catch every single game. And every Sunday I wake up thinking it’s a great idea to make cheddar biscuits, cheddar scones, or beer bread. But as lazy Sundays go, I never quite managed to get a batch together before the game started.
Last week was extremely busy at school, with little time to cook, even less time to take pictures, and next to no daylight in which to take good pictures. Now, with a little less on my plate, I got to spend the weekend testing out new recipes that I’m considering making for my family’s Christmas dinner and the meals leading up to it. (It also doesn’t help that the first time I wrote this post I closed out of the browser without saving). I tried this chorizo cornbread stuffing back in November, but I think it would work just as well for December holidays. The sweetness of the cornbread and the spiciness of the chorizo are a good combination on their own, regardless of whatever they accompany.
A tale of two pastas: one decadent and delicious, the other a healthier bake that still tastes impossibly fresh and cheesy. After David and I planned our Thanksgiving menu, we bent our heads together over the grocery lists and divvied up the ingredients we needed to buy by store: Whole Foods will have happy turkeys and chorizo sausage, let’s get them there and Trader Joe’s has the cheaper frozen corn and potatoes, it makes sense to get those there. But when we came home on Wednesday night with our bags of goodies, we found that we hadn’t exactly sorted out who should buy the staples and ended up with three pints of heavy cream. Whoops. Some got used up in a rather lackluster cauliflower gratin, more of it in a pre-Thanksgiving clam chowder David made, and a little topped off the pumpkin pie. But as the weekend drew to a close, we still had 2 almost-full pints sitting in the fridge.
