SPAGHETTI SQUASH
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Spaghetti Squash!! :)
Lorien, Mike, and I went apple picking yesterday at a farm. It was my first time picking apples and it was a lot of fun! I also picked beets and spinach. I did not, however, pick my own spaghetti squash. Rather, I picked out my own spaghetti squash from among the ones pre-cut in the barn store thing.
Out of all the new things I have tried in the last few months (drangonfruit etc) THIS IS THE BEST!!!! Seriously, I think spaghetti squash is one of my new favorite foods. K, eat it like this:
Cut your squash in half and scoop out the seeds.
Poke the skin with a fork or knife in a few places
Place face down in a baking dish and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30-40 min.
When it is done (pokeable) scoop out the flesh with a fork. It actually comes out stringy like spaghetti!! I threw it in a bowl with a little olive oil, some parmesan, a touch of garlic and salt, and about a tablespoon of tomato paste. AWESOME AND DELICIOUS! I really haven't felt this enthusiastic about a vegetable in a long time :) Enjoy!
Out of all the new things I have tried in the last few months (drangonfruit etc) THIS IS THE BEST!!!! Seriously, I think spaghetti squash is one of my new favorite foods. K, eat it like this:
Cut your squash in half and scoop out the seeds.
Poke the skin with a fork or knife in a few places
Place face down in a baking dish and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30-40 min.
When it is done (pokeable) scoop out the flesh with a fork. It actually comes out stringy like spaghetti!! I threw it in a bowl with a little olive oil, some parmesan, a touch of garlic and salt, and about a tablespoon of tomato paste. AWESOME AND DELICIOUS! I really haven't felt this enthusiastic about a vegetable in a long time :) Enjoy!
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Chanterelle bruschetta
So I tried out the chanterelle bruschetta recipe that Lemon Verbena-san pointed me to. Here's the link, in link format. I'll go ahead and run it down here, with apologies to Nami Nami from Estonia, because this place has already become my go-to recipe box.
Ingredients:
Chanterelle mushrooms, the more the better (I used golden chanterelles; I see white ones at the market, but I haven't tried them yet)
1 red onion
garlic (I used the minced garlic you get in a jar, maybe a couple of teaspoons)
butter
olive oil
fresh dill (how much? the original recipe doesn't say; I used maybe a half cup, loosely packed, and I think I'll use maybe twice that next time)
good bread (I used a potato rustica, and it was a good choice, if I do say so myself: the potato-flour was a perfect match for the chanterelles and the dill)
1. Cut up the mushrooms into bite-size pieces.
2. Chop the onion. I chopped it in the food processor, thinking the finer the better, but it came out too fine and sort of turned into a glop when I put it in to sautee it. It was still awesome, but I think I should have chopped it by hand, and just tried to get it as small as I could that way.
3. Chop the dill. I also found that the dill tended to clump together when sauteeing, and maybe dried dill wouldn't have done that, but the flavor of the fresh dill was so good that I'd hesitate to substitute. Maybe chop finer?
4. Melt a little butter in a frying pan with a little olive oil (possibly the clumping of the onion and dill came from too much butter and oil: try it with just a little).
5. Sautee the mushrooms with the garlic, then add the onion and dill in that order.
6. Toast the bread in the oven as per normal bruschetta (the original recipe asks you to pan-fry it in butter, which sounded like just too much butter for me). I.e., brush one side with olive oil, put the bread oil side down on a foil-lined baking sheet, bake at 350 until it gets nice and toasty.
7. Spoon on the mushroom mixture, grind a little salt over everything, and you're done.
As you can tell, I did a lot of things wrong when I made it, but it still came out amazingly good. This shows off the true flavor of a chanterelle.
We paired the bruschetta with steamed asparagus topped with shavings of aged gouda. Yummy.
Ingredients:
Chanterelle mushrooms, the more the better (I used golden chanterelles; I see white ones at the market, but I haven't tried them yet)
1 red onion
garlic (I used the minced garlic you get in a jar, maybe a couple of teaspoons)
butter
olive oil
fresh dill (how much? the original recipe doesn't say; I used maybe a half cup, loosely packed, and I think I'll use maybe twice that next time)
good bread (I used a potato rustica, and it was a good choice, if I do say so myself: the potato-flour was a perfect match for the chanterelles and the dill)
1. Cut up the mushrooms into bite-size pieces.
2. Chop the onion. I chopped it in the food processor, thinking the finer the better, but it came out too fine and sort of turned into a glop when I put it in to sautee it. It was still awesome, but I think I should have chopped it by hand, and just tried to get it as small as I could that way.
3. Chop the dill. I also found that the dill tended to clump together when sauteeing, and maybe dried dill wouldn't have done that, but the flavor of the fresh dill was so good that I'd hesitate to substitute. Maybe chop finer?
4. Melt a little butter in a frying pan with a little olive oil (possibly the clumping of the onion and dill came from too much butter and oil: try it with just a little).
5. Sautee the mushrooms with the garlic, then add the onion and dill in that order.
6. Toast the bread in the oven as per normal bruschetta (the original recipe asks you to pan-fry it in butter, which sounded like just too much butter for me). I.e., brush one side with olive oil, put the bread oil side down on a foil-lined baking sheet, bake at 350 until it gets nice and toasty.
7. Spoon on the mushroom mixture, grind a little salt over everything, and you're done.
As you can tell, I did a lot of things wrong when I made it, but it still came out amazingly good. This shows off the true flavor of a chanterelle.
We paired the bruschetta with steamed asparagus topped with shavings of aged gouda. Yummy.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Baking
Does anyone make pies/tarts? Apple season is coming up and my local farmer's market is going to be overflowing with apples that are tempting on, like, Old Testament levels :) Ideas? Tried and true recipes? Mind you, I don't generally bake. I don't generally do dessert so I have very little experience in this way.
Help!
Help!
Monday, September 27, 2010
yay Trader Joe's
So I got some exciting things at Trader Joe's last week and I used two of those exciting things in my dinner last night. I got a bag of tiny tiny tiny potatoes (each one is like half a ping-pong ball) with thin skins and a package of fully cooked andouille style chicken sausages. SO this is what I did
1 bag tiny potatoes
2 chicken sausages
extra virgin olive oil for drizzling
fresh rosemary leaves (off the stems)
salt
garlic powder (I used a salt/garlic/pepper seasoning thing)
throw your potatoes into a baking dish (small enough to have them all touching and layered and stuff) and slice your sausage into rounds over top. Drizzle the oil. Sprinkle the seasonings and the rosemary and stir it all a little folding the sausage in with the potatoes. Cover it with tin foil and bake at 350 degrees for about an hour or until the potatoes are the desired tenderness.
You could totally use some small-chunked larger potatoes like red skins or some other kind that you don't have to peel. The best part about this dinner is that it took about 5 minutes to throwq together and then I just did homework while I waited and then got to enjoy a nice hearty dinner :)
1 bag tiny potatoes
2 chicken sausages
extra virgin olive oil for drizzling
fresh rosemary leaves (off the stems)
salt
garlic powder (I used a salt/garlic/pepper seasoning thing)
throw your potatoes into a baking dish (small enough to have them all touching and layered and stuff) and slice your sausage into rounds over top. Drizzle the oil. Sprinkle the seasonings and the rosemary and stir it all a little folding the sausage in with the potatoes. Cover it with tin foil and bake at 350 degrees for about an hour or until the potatoes are the desired tenderness.
You could totally use some small-chunked larger potatoes like red skins or some other kind that you don't have to peel. The best part about this dinner is that it took about 5 minutes to throwq together and then I just did homework while I waited and then got to enjoy a nice hearty dinner :)
Chanterelles
Speaking of mushrooms, we've got chanterelles in season here, big golden things. I made a sort of scrambly omelet with them tonight: sauteed the chopped chanterelles in butter and pepper, then cooked them in eggs with sour cream. Real good. I can't wait to get more of these beauties, but I realized that beyond omelets I really don't know what to do with them. I seem to remember trying a couple of things last fall, but I don't remember what worked besides the eggs. With most mushrooms I tend to like just sauteeing them with salt and pepper, but people say chanterelles need a little more work to bring out their best flavor. Any suggestions?
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Waldorf salad variations?
We had some apples that were getting old, and some silverberries that we'd gotten at the farmer's market that we wanted to use, so I decided to try a Waldorf salad - sort of a commonplace, but I don't think I've ever made it before. Unfortunately we didn't have all the right ingredients, so I ended up making something that didn't much resemble a real Waldorf salad, but ended up working out pretty well anyway.
Ingredients:
3 apples (I don't remember what kind they were - red, sweet, and very ripe)
1 cup or so silverberries
a couple handfuls of raisins
mayonnaise
lime juice
1/3 cup or so of creamy/crumbly chevre (we had some fig-walnut chevre that was hitting its expiration date, so I threw it in)
1. Peel, core, and cut up the apples into bite-size chunks.
2. Mix them with the berries and raisins.
3. Mix together 6 tablespoons of mayo and 2 tablespoons of lime juice. In a real Waldorf salad this is supposed to be lemon juice, but we were out, and lime juice worked well.
4. Mix the dressing and the fruit.
5. Add the crumbled chevre, mix. (A real Waldorf salad is evidently supposed to have walnuts, and we didn't have any, but that's what gave me the idea to use the cheese.)
6. Chill for a couple of hours. We had some of this right after making it, and it wasn't as good as it was when it had chilled for a while. Warm, the mayo tasted like mayo. Chilled and given time for the flavors to mingle, the mayo taste receded and we had a nice mingling of fruit flavors.
Note: have you ever had/seen/heard of silverberries? I hadn't until we got them at the market, but they're pretty good. They evidently come from this tree, and I can't seem to find much about them on the web, which makes me wonder if they go by another name; anyway, I'd never heard of them. They're quite small, not much bigger than pomegranate seeds, and bright red with kind of a silver spot on them. They have seeds, but the ones we got were edible with the seeds - once in a while you get a berry where the seed's a little chewy, but it's still edible. The berries have a nice tartness, not as strong as huckleberries, and a nice sweet aftertaste.
Anyway: this salad was kind of an accident, but it turned out well. Does anybody else have any recommendable variations on the Waldorf-type fruit salad?
Ingredients:
3 apples (I don't remember what kind they were - red, sweet, and very ripe)
1 cup or so silverberries
a couple handfuls of raisins
mayonnaise
lime juice
1/3 cup or so of creamy/crumbly chevre (we had some fig-walnut chevre that was hitting its expiration date, so I threw it in)
1. Peel, core, and cut up the apples into bite-size chunks.
2. Mix them with the berries and raisins.
3. Mix together 6 tablespoons of mayo and 2 tablespoons of lime juice. In a real Waldorf salad this is supposed to be lemon juice, but we were out, and lime juice worked well.
4. Mix the dressing and the fruit.
5. Add the crumbled chevre, mix. (A real Waldorf salad is evidently supposed to have walnuts, and we didn't have any, but that's what gave me the idea to use the cheese.)
6. Chill for a couple of hours. We had some of this right after making it, and it wasn't as good as it was when it had chilled for a while. Warm, the mayo tasted like mayo. Chilled and given time for the flavors to mingle, the mayo taste receded and we had a nice mingling of fruit flavors.
Note: have you ever had/seen/heard of silverberries? I hadn't until we got them at the market, but they're pretty good. They evidently come from this tree, and I can't seem to find much about them on the web, which makes me wonder if they go by another name; anyway, I'd never heard of them. They're quite small, not much bigger than pomegranate seeds, and bright red with kind of a silver spot on them. They have seeds, but the ones we got were edible with the seeds - once in a while you get a berry where the seed's a little chewy, but it's still edible. The berries have a nice tartness, not as strong as huckleberries, and a nice sweet aftertaste.
Anyway: this salad was kind of an accident, but it turned out well. Does anybody else have any recommendable variations on the Waldorf-type fruit salad?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)