Thursday, November 21, 2013

Sort Of Cassoulet

If you know what cassoulet is "supposed" to be and/or are authentically French, you may want to turn away to protect your delicate sensibilities. This is not your mama's cassoulet.

What it is, is a richly flavorful, economical casserole that can be prepared in about an hour, plus half an hour of cooking time. Compare this to the several days and expensive exotic game meats it takes to make authentic cassoulet :P

You will note that the ingredients are sometimes vague. This is an EXTREMELY FORGIVING recipe. You can, and should, alter it and serve it differently every time you make it. That way you can make it often without getting tired of it!

Ingredients:
5 carrots, finely chopped
5 celery stalks, finely chopped
2-4 onions, finely chopped, about  2 cups total
5 slices bacon
1 package spicy Italian chicken sausage, about 8 ounces, sliced
Dark meat off a rotisserie chicken (I like to use the breast for other things)
2 cans small white beans, rinsed and drained
1 16oz can crushed tomatoes or petite-diced tomatoes or fire-roasted tomatoes, your choice
1/4 cup minced garlic
1/4 cup cooking wine or sherry
Broth (or water + bouillon)
Spices

Cook the bacon in a large dutch oven until crisp. Remove and drain on paper towels. Pour the fat out of the dutch oven, only leaving enough to prevent the sausage from sticking.

Add the sausage and cook over medium heat until golden brown. Remove.

Add the veggies (including the garlic IF you are using fresh garlic) and saute until tender.

Return the sausage and bacon to the pot. Add the beans, tomatoes, garlic (if using prepared or dried garlic) wine, broth, and spices. Cook, stirring often, over medium-low heat until veggies are very tender and sauce is gravy-like in thickness.

Stir in the chicken and bring to a boil.

Remove from heat and serve, or save for later. It just gets better as you store it!

This makes a lot of servings and, though time-consuming with all the chopping, is an efficient use of your time and money per serving.

Serve with cheese on top if you wanna get fancy. Smoked cheese is especially yummy.

Here's why I don't list a volume for broth: 
The amount you will need depends on the moisture of the veggies, your personal preference, the humidity, etc. Just add broth when it looks too dry. If you accidentally make it too wet, turn up the heat and boil the excess liquid off. Cassoulet is best when very thick, but you don't want it to burn, either. 1 cup is probably the right amount most of the time.

Spice suggestions:
The seasoning on this recipe is forgiving. You should adjust to your preferences. Here is what I use:
1 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp dried thyme
2 tbsp dried parsley (add this at the end, right before serving, so it stays fresh-tasting)
2 bay leaves
Ground pepper to taste

Ariel likes to shake crushed red pepper on his, like you do on pizza.

Salt:
This recipe gets most of the salt from the bacon, sausage, and cooking wine. You may not find you need any extra salt. If you do want salt, I suggest using chicken bouillon instead of plain salt. It's more flavorful! Taste the cassoulet at the end, just before serving, and add salt then. If you add salt early, it might end up too salty as additional salt leaches out of the meats.

Sausage:
You can use lots of different sausages. Anduoille is good. Regular Italian pork sausage is probably good, I've never tried it. Turkey sausage is good. Other flavors of chicken sausage, like garlic and roasted pepper, are good. Go nuts!

Monday, October 14, 2013

Scottish Oatcakes

This is straight-up the recipe off the back of a bag of Bob's Red Mill scottish style oatmeal. You need that stuff to make these.

Scottish Oatcakes are biscuits for people who are too busy repelling the Roman Empire to eff around with fluffy baked goods.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups Bob's Red Mill Scottish oatmeal
1/2 cup wheat flour
3/4 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup melted butter
1/4 - 1/2 cup hot water

Oven to 325.

Place all but 2 tbsp of the oatmeal in a bowl with the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Stir.

Add butter and stir until evenly distributed. With a fork, mix in water just until moistened. Don't make it too wet. Press dough into a ball, like you would pie crust.

Sprinkle the counter top with the reserved oatmeal and roll the dough out on top to about 1/3" thickness - a little thicker than a pie crust. Cut into squares and place on a greased cookie sheet.

Bake until oatcakes are golden around the edges, about 20 minutes. Do not overbake or they will be crumbly.

Allow to cool thoroughly before storing in an airtight container. These keep a long time.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Hella Good Omelette

I am the biggest egg snob you have ever met. To be honest, I don't actually like eggs. Growing up, my dad would get me to eat eggs by topping them with so many things, the actual egg underneath was but a distant memory.

Even then, it had to be the right topping. Heaven help the man if he served me GREEN PEPPERS. Ugh.

Anyway, this hasn't changed. But I don't have my daddy to top my eggs for me anymore (*sadface*) so the result is very creative egg recipes. When visiting my sister last year to help her through chemo - she's in full remission now, hooray! - this came in handy, since chemo messes up your taste buds and it was hard for her to eat.

Today's omelette doesn't have nearly as noble an origin, however. Basically I had woken up with my heart set on huevos rancheros (Rancher Eggs, kind of like nachos but with scrambled eggs) but discovered I was out of salsa. After I'd finished HULK SMASH-ing the kitchen, I made this omelette as  a consolation prize, pulled out all the stops because I was hungry and mad, and made something GOOOOOD.

I'm almost certain there's still an omelette in there somewhere.

Ingredients PER OMELETTE: - see below for explanations of ingredient varieties and substitutions
2 eggs
1 tbsp water
Pinch salt
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp cumin
5 cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes, quartered
1/4 cup cottage cheese
1 oz shredded chipotle-flavored cheddar, or to taste
1/2 avocado, diced

Preheat a small skillet over medium heat.

Combine eggs, water, salt, cumin and garlic in a bowl and gently beat with a fork. You need to make sure the cumin doesn't make a glob but instead gets beaten into the eggs, so keep beating until it is more or less mixed in.

Grease the skillet by half-unwrapping a stick of butter and rubbing it around the bottom. If the butter sizzles and begins to brown, the skillet is ready. If the butter IMMEDIATELY BURNS, it's too hot! Wash it out and start over. Temperature is important.

When the skillet is ready, pour the eggs in all at once. Watch it attentively; when the edges are opaque, gently pull them back from the pan with a spatula to let the uncooked egg flow under neath. This makes it cook faster so it doesn't burn. But always be gentle so it doesn't stick to the pan. If you moosh it around, it will stick.

After completing this step, add the tomatoes. They are more flavorful if they are warm :)

When the omelette is almost cooked, add the cottage cheese and fold it over with a large, flexible spatula. Then flip the skillet over on top of a plate so the omelette falls out on the plate. I am way too lazy to try to actually use a spatula for this flipping process, ha!

Top with shredded cheddar and avocado.

NOTES:

Eggs: For the love of God and your own conscience, spend a little extra money to buy cage free eggs. Battery cages are a blight on our species. Do not get me started, just buy the good eggs. (And if you love yourSELF, also buy antibiotic-free eggs. Chicken farms are spawning antibiotic-resistant UTIs.) The advantage of this is, most good, humane farms test for salmonella, meaning a healthy adult does not have to worry about salmonella at all and can safely eat soft-cooked or even raw eggs. ALSO, they are tastier and make firmer omelettes.

Cottage Cheese: Fiber One makes a delicious cottage cheese with a ton of fiber. Using it in this omelette will keep you full longer and help you keep a healthy weight! Woo Fiber!

Cheddar Cheese: I live in New England and buy Cabot brand cheese because my research indicates that dairy cattle raised in this area are kept in a more humane way than Midwest dairy cattle. Having said that, I now fully expect to be mailbombed by a Midwest dairy farmer... Sorry, guys! You know I love farmers :) Anyway, Chipotle cheddar is amazing, but regular cheddar is fine too.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Awesome Pancakes - gluten-free, lower-carb, high-fiber, DELICIOUS

I have been seriously remiss in not posting my recent grain-hipster experiments on this blog.

In case you're wondering, NO, I did NOT name these "awesome pancakes" myself. This is, however, what Ariel calls them. Like so:
Me: "What do you want for breakfast?"
Ariel: "I want those awesome pancakes again."

This recipe makes one serving. Just multiply it out to make enough for more people.

Ingredients:

2 tbsp Almond flour
2 tbsp ground flaxseed (I like Bob's Red Mill golden flaxseed)
3 tbsp oat flour (be sure to buy Gluten Free oat flour if you need gluten free)
1 packet of Stevia or equivalent sweetener
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 egg (optional)
Milk or milk substitute
Pinch of salt
1/4 tsp vanilla

Whisk the dry ingredients together.

Add wet ingredients. Note that, if you do not use an egg, you will need more milk. Basically, just add liquid until it is a slightly runny pancake batter. It is important to make the batter a tad thinner than you usually do! The flaxseed will make it thicken up.

Let the batter sit on the countertop and thicken while the griddle heats. You don't need it to be quite as hot as usual for pancakes.

Grease the griddle and pour out into four little pancakes. Cook until the edges loosen from the pan and look a bit golden. You want the edges to be a little crispy. Yummmm....

These are delicious with the usual butter and syrup, but they are very flavorful on their own, so you can also top them with peanut butter (or other almond butter) for a more savory breakfast, or even eat them plain! They're moist and tender and make a good snack, too.

MATH:
Here, I will do some math for you to make larger volumes of batter.

FOR 2 PEOPLE:
1/4 cup almond flour
1/4 cup ground flaxseed
6 tbsp oat flour (that's 1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp)
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 packets Stevia or equivalent
1 or 2 eggs, or none if you're leaving them out (you might have guessed that the egg quotient is flexible)
Milk or whatever
1/2 tsp vanilla

FOR 4 PEOPLE:
1/2 cup almond flour
1/2 cup ground flaxseed
3/4 cup oat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp salt
4 packets Stevia or equivalent
2 or 3 eggs, or none if you're leaving them out (you might have guessed that the egg quotient is flexible)
Milk or whatever
1 tsp vanilla

Grain Hipster Muffins - high protein, gluten-free

This is mostly lifted off the back of the Bob's Red Mill soy flour bag, where it is called "Outrageous Muffins", for very good reason. I made some changes:
1. Left out the wheat flour (entirely by accident)
2. Substituted half the sugar with stevia
3. Used diced prunes instead of raisins, since I hate raisins, and used less of them
4. Reduced the salt
5. Used orange oil instead of orange zest, because I didn't have any oranges and anyway zesting is annoying.

They are amazing. I'm eating one THIS VERY MINUTE.

Ingredients:

1/3 cup soy flour
1/3 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup wheat germ (leave this out, or substitute oat flour, if you need gluten-free)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup brown sugar OR 1/4 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup Splenda OR equivalent sweeteners
1 cup almond flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 cup plain yogurt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla
Zest of 1 orange OR equivalent orange flavoring OR orange oil
3/4 cup diced prunes OR your favorite dried fruit OR blueberries

Oven 350

Combine dry ingredients and whisk. Add wet ingredients and mix with a big spoon; the batter will be thick. Stir in the fruit.

Spoon into 12 muffin cups. I firmly advocate aluminum muffin cup liners, instead of paper, because they never stick. I hate peeling soggy paper off of my muffin or cupcake!

Bake for 22 - 25 minutes, or until the tops are golden.

Notes:

- These are far lower in carbs than regular muffins, but much higher in fat, due to the almond flour. Therefore they are higher in calories. While the fiber and nutrients make these muffins still a MUCH healthier choice than conventional muffins, don't go crazy and eat ten of them.

- The recipe also called for baking soda; I used baking powder by accident. I just realized that. Oops? Apparently I still have my brain wrapped up in my book. However, I recommend the baking powder. It came out great and baking soda is very salty.

- You could probably substitute all the sugar for non-nutritive sweetener with no ill effect, since the almond flour will keep it moist. But you might want to add a spoonful of molasses for flavor.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

White Bean and Sausage Soup with Chard

Ingredients:
1 large bunch Swiss chard, chopped
2 yellow onions, chopped
1 package prepared spicy Italian chicken sausage (or other Italian sausage)
1 tsp garlic powder or equivalent
1 tsp chicken bouillon
~2 cups milk or water (not any milk substitute)
Dash ground rosemary
Pinch dried thyme
Big pinch dried parsley
2 cans cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
Grated parmesan
Black or white pepper

Slice and fry the sausage in olive oil until golden. Remove to a plate.

Saute the onions until tender. Add the spices, milk, and 1 can of beans.

Puree with an immersion blender. (This step is optional).

Add remaining beans and chard. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring constantly, until chard is tender.

Put the sausage back in and serve with parmesan and pepper.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Balsamic Bourbon Pan Sauce for Steak

We rarely eat steak, but Ariel's boss bought him some filet mignon recently. I didn't want to mess it up so I did some research and ended up just pan-searing the steaks and then offering this sauce on the side, along with bacon crumbles. Ariel liked it that way because then he could eat part of the steak plain (purist style) and the rest with sauce on it. This is a luxury sauce for sure, but it would be just as good brushed onto grill meats or served on hamburgers.

Ingredients:
3/4 cup bourbon
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/2 tbsp Tamari or soy sauce
2 tbsp high quality barbecue sauce, ideally Jack Daniels brands, or extra thick Worcestershire sauce if you don't have any good barbecue sauce
2 tbsp cold butter (not margarine) cut into 4 pieces

First, cook the steaks in a heat-safe skillet. While they're cooking, whisk the sauce ingredients together.

When the steaks are done, remove to a plate and pour the sauce into the skillet. Stir to loosen any tasty brown bits stuck to the pan.

Bring to a boil and cook until thickened and all the alcohol is boiled off. Reduce heat to low and drop the butter in one piece at a time. Whisk each piece thoroughly into the sauce to form a suspension. This adds body and richness.

Serve in a small gravy boat or other serving thing with a pour spout.

Note: You can leave out the butter if you are serving a well-marbled steak. Just cook the sauce down a little longer so it's thick enough. The filet mignon is (according to the Internet) so lean that it is best to serve it with a sauce that has fat in it, ideally butter, to bring out the flavor. London broil would probably be the same, but you wouldn't need butter for, say, Delmonico.