Scrambled Eggs with Mushrooms in Miso Butter

When our adult child was visiting recently he made us a meal featuring noodles and miso sauce. We still had some of the miso paste so when this recipe from the New York Times Cooking pages showed up on my Facebook feed I put it on the schedule for this week's dinners.

 I halved the recipe for the mushrooms and scrambled only four eggs as only two of us were eating. This was quick and easy. I tried the method described for giving the eggs a "custardy finish" which worked well. James and I both liked the eggs prepared this way. We will never go back.

Pretty Easy Pasta

Sometimes the most important thing I'm looking for in a meal is what I can prepare without buying any additional ingredients. Yesterday was snowy and I had no desire to go out for any reason, but especially not shopping. 365 Ways to Cook Pasta to the rescue! We had a partial box of spaghetti so I flipped through some recipes and found Spaghetti with Walnuts and Parmesan which I was able to prepare in less than 15 minutes.

While the pasta cooked I coated the bottom of my indispensable cast-iron skillet with olive oil and minced and sautéed a garlic clove. After about a minute I added 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts and sautéed a few more minutes. Once the pasta was cooked and drained I mixed the contents of the skillet into the pasta and added shredded Parmesan cheese and some dried parsley. Simple, fast, and delicious. James and I were both impressed with the especially nutty flavor.

Pasta and Poppies

We had bought a large bag of spinach leaves at Costco last week in order to make a family favorite: Mashed Potato Casserole (which is detailed on this post) while our adult child was visiting. There was still an awful lot of spinach so we had been looking for ways to use it before it spoiled. I found this super simple recipe in our good ol' 365 Ways to Cook Pasta. 

There are only six ingredients in this one: butter, garlic, spinach, poppy seeds, fettuccini, and shredded Parmesan cheese. 

While the pasta cooked, I crushed a garlic clove and added it to 4 T of melted butter in the indispensable cast-iron skillet and sautéed. The spinach was went in next and cooked until wilted, then 1 T of poppy seeds was added. Once the pasta was cooked it was tossed in a bowl with the spinach mixture, topped with the Parmesan and served with some crusty bread. I imagine this would pair well with a buttery Chardonnay, but we had it with Malbec because...Malbec.

Photo added by James, who did nothing for this meal except shopping
and eating, but who wanted to give this post a bit of color.
Lacking a photo of the meal,   I found this other
poppy reference, with Miss Judy Garland.

Roasted Salmon with Miso Cream

While our adult child was visiting last month he wanted to have a lot of seafood. He currently lives in Illinois, not especially well known for it's fruits de mer. He specifically asked for salmon (among other things) so we chose the Salmon with Miso Cream from the New York Times Cooking page for our final family meal before he left.

Wow! Was this good! Lots of texture and flavor, and roasted to perfection. I used the advice offered on the recipe to test for done-ness by putting a knife into the thickest portion of the fish and to see if it comes out warm. I had not seen this suggestion before, but it turned out to be sound advice. Everyone liked this and we will for sure make it again. As a side dish we adapted another recipe from the New York Times Cooking - Spinach Salad with Persimmon. Astute readers will notice that the recipe is actually for Spinach Salad with Prosciutto and Persimmon but I don't especially like Prosciutto, and we otherwise chose the recipe because we already had spinach and persimmon on hand. I also noticed that the first part of the recipe was for making croutons, another thing I don't like, so that whole piece was left out. James does like croutons so he simply used the store-bought ones we already had on hand. After thinly slicing the persimmon and tossing it with the spinach leaves I added some shredded parmesan, salt, pepper, lemon olive oil, and pomegranate vinegar. Pleasing to the eye as well as the palate. 

Cilantro-Forward Chicken

As we contemplated upcoming meals over yesterday morning's Nicaraguan coffee, I mentioned that we had received some local chicken in our dairy delivery and that I would find a way to prepare it using some ginger that remained from a soup our son had prepared during a recent visit. Before I could say "una nueva receta cada semana," Pamela had found several options on her now-favorite cookbook: NY Times Cooking on her iPad.

I chose the first one she mentioned: ginger-scallion chicken sounded both simple and tasty and (spoiler alert) indeed it was. I started to thaw the chicken, which had arrived frozen just a couple hours earlier, in the usual Hayes-Boh way (note below).  

The recipe was, in fact, similar to what I was thinking of doing without any recipe, but I am glad we had Melissa Clark's adaptation of a recipe by Lan Hing Riggin. The ingredients were something I might have come up with on my own, but the technique was a delicious improvement on my usual approach to stir-fry, which is to brown the meat and then add vegetables, sauces and seasonings. 

They suggest a more nuanced approach, which I followed almost to the letter. One exception: we usually keep only one kind of oil in the house (proving we are not really foodies), so I used EVOO instead of the lighter oils suggested. First, though, I started cooking some brown rice, because I knew that this recipe would be ready pretty quickly. If I am going to serve something with rice, I usually start it early and I use a technique that has worked well for me recently: I heat some oil (or butter) in a small saucepan while rinsing 1 cup of rice in a sieve. I then put the rice into the medium-hot pan, stirring vigorously with a fork and perhaps adding some seasonings (in this case black pepper and oregano). After just about 2 minutes, I add 2-1/4 cups of water and bring to a boil. I then cover and lower to a simmer, where I can forget about the rice while making the rest of the meal.

I prepared all of the ingredients before I started any cooking, because this does indeed go quickly. I trimmed two large scallions and then separated the white from the green. I cut each lengthwise into quarters and then into one-inch little sticks. This was a little tedious but the texture at the end did seem to benefit. I tossed the green pieces together with one full cup of chopped cilantro (leaves and fine stems) and set aside. I put the white pieces on a plate with some finely chopped ginger and a finely chopped hot red pepper.

I cut the chicken into one-inch pieces and heated the oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet.  I stirred frequently and followed the recipe's guidance to remove the chicken to serving plates as soon as it was cooked through, not browning it as I usually might. I put the mixed cilantro and green scallion on top of the chicken and the rice alongside it on each plate. I then lowered the heat in the pan and added the ginger and pepper, which I stirred for just about a minute. I added the scallions for a half minute more and then stirred in a tablespoon of sugar and a glug of soy sauce. I stirred this just long enough to reduce it slightly and then poured it over both the greens and the rice.

Voilà! This was an easy, delicious, healthful meal. And the red peppers helped make it look as festive as it tasted.

Thawing note: I put the frozen package in a bowl full of water. This is both faster and safer than simply leaving the package out on the counter. If the kitchen is warm enough that thawing is achieved early in the day, we will return it to the fridge; if we start the process a day early, we can just thaw things like this in the fridge itself. In any case, we avoid microwave thawing, which always seems to result in some uneven pre-cooking.

Spinach Lasagna

Our only child came to visit for Christmas. Although he is not a vegetarian, he said he hadn't been feeling it for beef or poultry recently, so for our (otherwise landlocked) Chicagoan we planned a variety of seafood and vegetarian dishes for his visit (more recipes to follow).

Lasagna is a dish we've traditionally enjoyed for the holidays. I used to make the very time-consuming "Everyone's Favorite Lasagne" from 365 Ways to Cook Pasta on Christmas day before we started having Christmas dinner with friends, who also always made (vegetarian) lasagna. We had no idea at our Christmas dinner of 2019 what was to come in 2020. There were of course no get togethers the following Christmas, and the next year our hosts moved out of state. If we had known that there would be no more holiday gatherings at their home we might have done something special in 2019, but alas, here we are. In honor of Christmases past I made a spinach lasagna adapted from another recipe in the the 365 Ways Cookbook.

The recipe calls for spinach lasagna noodles, which I have never been able to find in my local stores, so I used regular egg lasagna noodles, and used actual spinach leaves between the layers. 

Additional ingredients include:

Olive oil

1 garlic clove

28 oz. can plum tomatoes (pureéd)

15 oz. ricotta cheese

1/4 c. grated Parmesan cheese

a bit o' nutmeg

1 egg 

fresh basil 

1 lb. mozzarella (shredded)

While the noodles cooked I sliced and sautéed the garlic in the olive oil. When the garlic was browned it was discarded and the puréed tomatoes were added to the skillet and cooked down for about 20 minutes. Salt and pepper we added to taste.

The egg, nutmeg, Parmesan and ricotta were whisked together in a separate bowl.

The lasagna was assembled thus:

A small amount of the sauce was spread on the bottom of the lasagna pan and four noodles were placed on top. A quarter of the remaining sauce was spread over the noodles and they were sprinkled with basil leaves and a handful the fresh spinach leaves. Another layer of four noodles was placed on top and then layered with the ricotta mixture, some more basil, and another handful of spinach. Another layer of four noodles was topped with the mozzarella, more basil, and more spinach. A final layer of noodles was topped with the rest of the sauce. 

The lasagna baked in a 350 pre-heated oven for 45 minutes, then rested for 15 minutes before serving.

We all enjoyed this, especially our adult child who ate 2/3 of the leftovers for a midnight snack! The taste of the fresh basil came through along with the cheeses. The texture was perfect. Although a bit complicated it was less work than the "Favorite Lasagne" recipe which calls for a long-cook meat sauce. We will add this one to our family "comfort meal" repertoire.