Smashed Potatoes with Bacon, Greens and Cheese

December 30 was National Bacon Day. Luckily we had some bacon and I found this simple "no recipe" for Smashed Potatoes with Bacon, Greens, and Cheese recipe using some of the other ingredients we had on hand. We used bacon, cheddar /gruyere, kale, and avocados to make this colorful, flavorful, and easy lunch. 

Chicken Florentine

 

Often when I post about a recipe from the New York Times Cooking Pages the name of the dish gives all (or most) of the ingredient list, not so with Chicken Florentine which goes even further in its "not like the others-ness" in that the ingredient list provided does not provide any measures. This list simply reads:

Chicken breasts

Extra-virgin olive oil

Butter

Flour

Spinach

White wine

Heavy cream, sour cream or yogurt

There are instructions, however about what to do with the ingredients. I followed the steps provided using the two chicken breasts we got from our weekly delivery. As I've discovered on previous attempts to cook these in a skillet the breasts are very thick and any indication that they can be cooked through with 5-6 minutes per side is pure fantasy. I doubled the time and still had to give it a final blast in the microwave to cook it to a safe doneness. 

As for the portions of the rest of the ingredients the instructions do call for two tablespoons each of butter and olive oil, as well as 1/2 cup white wine.  Otherwise I went with a dollop of sour cream, and four large handfuls of spinach leaves.

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. 

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. 

Crunchy Yummy Spinach Rice

The first thing I need to point out is that the timing estimate at the top of this Moosewood Cookbook recipe is correct, and that it needs to be read carefully 40 minutes PLUS 40 minutes. Brown rice takes the better part of 40 minutes to cook, and the chef needs to spend most of that time preparing the dish. So this is a good weeknight dish if started early in the evening. I ended up rushing it just a bit.

That said, I will jump right to the punchline and say that this is a great meal. It scores very high on the delicious-nutritious-easy-cheap trade-off matrix, scoring high on all four measures. Some time is involved, and a lot of bowls are used, but this still qualifies as easy.

I decided to scan the full recipe, since it has a lot of details but conveniently fits on one page. My variations were two: one intentional and one otherwise. First, the otherwise: I somehow mis-read the rice proportions and only used one cup of dry rice with 2 cups of water. I should have used 2 cups of rice and 4 cups of water. I also did the trick we usually use in our kitchen now -- sauteeing the rice in a bit of oil for about a minute before adding the water and bringing to a boil. Incidentally, I used 2, 10-ounce bags of spinach instead of 2 full pounds. This filled our dutch oven at one point, but of course reduced to a manageable amount before I needed to mix everything together.

Second, the intentional: rather than topping this with just sunflower seeds and paprika, I mixed those with about a cup each of shredded cheddar and panko crumbs. This made the best casserole topping I have ever encountered.

The entire recipe -- click to enlarge.

Maryland Day 2015

We have a special affinity for the state of Maryland as it is the place where we met and married. We have celebrated the anniversary of day that Maryland became a state for many years, and it was one of the highlights of the year we celebrated all the states' anniversaries. Nowadays, most state anniversaries come and go with nary a mention at our house, but Maryland always gets its due.

This year we made Chèvre Croquettes on Spring Field Greens, a recipe from FireFly Farms found in our Dishing Up Maryland cookbook (which we bought on Nantucket - go figure), and for dessert a Lady Baltimore Cake.

The salad was easy to prepare, especially since we skipped what would have been the most time-consuming part - cooking the beets. Neither one of us is crazy about beets, so we just decided not to include them at all. The Croquettes were prepared using soft goat cheese mixed with a bit of chopped thyme, some garlic salt, and pepper. I formed the mixture into four small medallions and dipped each in a beaten egg, and then corn meal. They were fried in olive oil for 3 minutes and then placed on a bed of greens with chopped red, yellow, and orange peppers and a minced shallot. The vegetables were dressed with a light vinaigrette made from red wine vinegar, olive oil, and Dijon mustard. The salad was quite tasty and was a meal unto itself.

The Lady Baltimore Cake was a much bigger project than the Croquettes. Neither one of us even knew such thing as a Lady Baltimore Cake existed until Pam saw mention of one in Beverly Cleary's book Emily's Runaway Imagination (which takes place in Oregon) earlier this year.

We baked the cake the night before the celebration as we realized that we would need a bit of time for this project. We used recipes we found on the allrecipes.com site for the cake and the frosting. This is a triple layer cake, and while we do have three round cake pans, one of them is 9 inches, while the other two are eight. I used all three and then cut off the excess from the larger cake. This gave us a fun taste test. We felt like kids dipping the cut off pieces of cake into the leftover frosting - there was way more frosting than we needed for the cake. One thing about this cake is that it uses A LOT of egg whites (six for the cake itself, and four for the frosting), so if you make it you may want to have some plan for all the yolks. I attempted to make an omelet the next day with all of them, but it was awful - extremely dry, even though I added two whole eggs to the saved yolks before cooking them. The cake though was yummy, and turned out not to be as sweet one might expect when the frosting recipe calls for 1/4 c of corn syrup and 2 cups of sugar.

The dinner -- and especially the dessert -- was perfectly paired with a non-Maryland wine: a Blanc de Blancs from our favorite local vineyard.

Our celebration was muted, sadly, by the unraveling of our beloved Baltimore in the wake of the murder of Freddie Gray, whose memory we toasted at the outset of the dinner.

Two Simple Dishes

Huffington Post shared a link recently of the "Easiest, Fastest, Tastiest Meals You Never Make" from which I tried two last week. The first "Chicken with Apples and Carrots" I was able to prepare all in one skillet. And, with the exception of sour cream, I was able to prepare it with ingredients I had on hand. I did also substitute dried thyme leaves for the fresh thyme sprig. A winning fall recipe.

The other recipe Tomato and Chard Bake (the doughless pizza) should have been prepared all in one indispensable-cast-iron skillet but I forgot to bring such a skillet with me with we drove to our weekend "autumn house", so I had to use one skillet for the stove top, and then place everything into a cake pan when it was time to bake it. I used the remains two-day old baguette which I sliced and placed in the bottom of the pan with some olive oil and minced garlic. I did not have enough bread to place another layer on top of the tomatoes, mozzarella and chard, but it turned out fine anyway. I think I should have let it sit out a bit longer before serving, as I found the second helping to be better than the first. I think if I make it again I will also use a bit more olive oil and let the bread soak in it a bit longer.

Imifino

This recipe made from mixed greens and cornmeal came from out Extending the Table cookbook. James was wary of it from the get go, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Big mistake.

I started with the greens from our CSA farm box that I'd frozen over the summer. I put them in boiling water along with some garlic scrape (also frozen over the summer), and a chopped onion. Then I added 1.5 c. of cornmeal and let it cook for 10 minutes. At this point I had a big wad of green and yellow mush. I added a some more water, and some garlic salt, and left the pan on low heat to cook for 15 minutes. During the last 5 minutes I added two eggs to the top of the mush, hoping to add some protein, and some flavor. I failed at the latter. When I served this it was still just a big green and yellow wad, but now each of us had an cooked egg on top of our servings. Although I added more garlic salt, and some pepper this was simply bland. The texture was also too much for James, who did not even finish his serving. Unfortunately, there are plenty of leftovers. Looks like it is up to me to eat them over the next two days. Perhaps I will try some cheese on top.

Sweet Potato Black Bean Chili

We are experiencing some bitter cold temperatures here in New England, and we are gravitating toward nice, hot soups to warm up. Since even a trip to the grocery store, in the car, requires some minimal exposure to the elements, we looked for something we could make with ingredients we already had in the house. Since we had both sweet potatoes and black beans on hand, I went searching allrecipes.com for a sweet potato and black bean soup. This video from Chef John was easy to adapt to ingredients we had and easy to follow. I began by peeling and dicing two sweet potatoes. The cubes were tossed in with some chipotle olive oil from Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium along with some chili powder and a dash of salt. The potatoes were roasted for about 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Meanwhile, I took my cast iron pot and sauteed some chopped onions. To these I added some tri-colored frozen pepper slices, and a few pinches of garlic salt, along with some cilantro and other spices. Then a can of diced tomatoes was added, along with some water, a T of corn meal and a T of unsweetened cocoa powder. Once everything was cooked and blended for about 20 minutes I added one can of black beans, and the sweet potatoes. I also added some frozen mixed greens I had from last year's CSA deliveries. We get so many greens during the year that I end up freezing most of them, and then I can easily add them anytime I make a savory soup. Everything was simmered together for about 12 more minutes, and then served. This was filling, hearty, and full of texture, color and flavor. It was spicy without being overly so, and was the perfect meal for dark winter night. It paired well with the bottle of "Hot cocoa" ale we found in the back of our refrigerator. I am really not sure where it came from originally. I think it has been there for over a year.

Green Potato Soup

As described on my
Geography of Food
page, 2008 was YOP.
It is over, but we still
celebrate.

The soup is green, not the potatoes!

(If Dan Quayle could have done what I just did -- spelling the spud as singular and plural -- he might have been an ex-president by now.)

This evening we have a gratuitously non-vegetarian dinner because we are being thrifty with our Thanksgiving turkey. After the main meal, the sandwiches, the hash, the stuffing-egg cups, and the amazing turkey-rice soup, we still had broth. I am sure this evening's recipe could be made with a vegetable-based broth just as successfully. We we would never have found this recipe without broth, however, because it was broth that led us finally to open Jean Childress' little Soup Cookbook from the Country Kitchen Collection.

This booklet combines the author's interest in simple dishes, drawing, and calligraphy -- each of its 32 recipes is hand-lettered. She published a few dozen thematic booklets, mainly in the 1980s, and they seem to be out of print these days, though circulating among used-book shops. We have no idea where or when or how we received our copy.

I began the green potato by peeling and cubing six medium potatoes (the recipe calls for four large) in four cups of broth. After 15 minutes, I added one medium onion, finely chopped, and two bags of greens frozen from our summer farm share. The recipe calls for one pound of kale, and this seems to be roughly equivalent. Throughout the summer, Pam would blanch and freeze any greens we did not use, so that we could do exactly this with them in the winter. I added another four cups of broth and salt and pepper to the soup, though not the 2 teaspoons of salt called for!

After cooking another 20 minutes (extended by 5 because the greens were frozen), I ran all of contents in a blender and returned it to the cooking pot, where I added one half cup of light cream and blended through. In retrospect, I should have baked some bread to go with this. In the event, we had it with "liquid bread" in the form of our home-brewed English Ale.

Verdict: YUM! The broth actually makes a difference. Thanksgiving Day, we slowly roasted our free-range, Vermont turkey from Misty Knoll, between two small piles of briquettes in an old-school Weber grill. Near the end, we put in hardwood to make this a smoker, and the flavor combined well with the garlic-paprika-olive oil rub I had applied hours earlier. Now weeks later, we got a creamy, delicious, and smokey potato soup with plenty of nutrients.

Apple Sa-Té

In the spirit of Pam's recent post about timely use of our farm-box bounty, this evening's dinner was a use of our latest Colchester Farm harvest that was simple, nutritious, easy, and delicious. Read on -- I think this was quite successful and readily adapted to other available ingredients.

Pam started by preparing a salad with mixed leafy greens, sliced radish, and bean sprouts. She mixed up one of our favorite dressings -- one cup olive oil and a 1/4 cup each of mustard, honey, and balsamic vinegar. These stayed in the fridge -- alongside a Sauvignon Blanc -- while I prepared a stir-fry.

I did so with some trepidation, as my "stir fry" often seems to be more a stew than anything else. In this case, I made a couple of adjustments that resulted in a lighter, more flavorful meal. First, I melted butter in a small pan, stirred in one cup of basmati rice, and then added 2-1/4 cups of water. I brought that quickly to a boil (thanks to our super-duper burner, for which I am very grateful).

I moved the rice to a simmer burner and then heated a generous splash of olive oil on that same high burner. When it was hot but not smoking, I tossed in a package of firm tofu. This I had cut into four large blocks to drain in a sieve, and then cut into cubes the size of Vegas dice. I then added two large pieces of garlic rabe (not the head, just the stalk, which was thick enough to require snipping rather than slicing) in 1/4-inch pieces and about five large, hastily-sliced scallions. I added about a half cup of peas that I had just liberated from their pods and one small, finely-chopped apple. Yes, an apple for a bit of sweetness and texture.

All of this was cooking at high heat as the basmati (which cooks more quickly than most other rices) neared completion. Here is where I think I got smart; rather than adding a heavy sauce as I have often done, I added two or three squirts of soy sauce so that the tofu would brown a bit and then stirred in about a teaspoon of Asian chili Sa-Té paste. I stirred over high heat for only another minute before declaring dinner served. The result: a fresh, tasty and easy meal with a lot of local ingredients picked just a few days ago from nearby soil.