Chilly weather foods

Last week's rainy weather made me whip out my fleeces and fuzzy socks... and whip up an easy ramen bowl, some homemade calzones and a non-dairy tilapia corn chowder.My favorite instant noodles, as I've mentioned in a previous post, are the "Hoo Roo Rook" Korean brand of low-fat ramen. They come with a broth packet, a sauce packet and a seasoning packet filled with freeze-dried green onion, egg strips, sesame seeds and sea weed. I love eating the noodles without the soup, topped with crunchy veggies, an egg or tofu, some boiled leafy greens, several shakes toasted sesame and tossed in some teriyaki sauce and a little canola oil.
I haven't mastered calzone dough. But the fillings: salami, spinach, mushroom, mozzarella and tomato sauce were spot on. The Parrino boys wolfed down my batch of eight calzones in two days.
Finally, though I'll admit it looks rather unappetizing, I made a really tasty tilapia corn chowder with chicken stock, 5 or 6 yellow potatoes, sweet onion, a little garlic, dried and fresh dill, a small squeeze of lemon juice, canned sweet corn and three frozen tilapia fillets. Sorry, I didn't measure anything, as usual. But I started by sauteeing the onion and garlic in some oil (butter would've been better). Then I added the diced, peeled potatoes and covered it with the chicken stock, some of the corn "juice" and water to cover everything. Once everything was well cooked, I added half of the corn and my tilapia. Once the fish was flaky, I removed it and used an immersion blender to blend the rest of the soup. After that, I added the fish back in, the rest of the corn and just a little lemon juice and seasoned thoroughly with dill and salt.

Another cyberfridge cleanout...

Baozi. I promised I'd write the recipe last time I posted about these, but I never did. I'm gonna have to make another empty promise...
EDIT 5/7/10: OK,I actually found my chicken-scratch recipe for the baozi dough:

3 cups flour
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp yeast (or one packet)
1 cup warm water, give or take a teaspoon
1 Tbs vegetable oil
1 large egg

To make dough:
Combine flour, pinch of salt in a bowl. Make a well in the flour and pour in oil and beaten egg. Proof yeast with sugar in water. Once it's foamy, pour into the well and stir, gradually incorporating flour into liquid in the well.

Knead into a soft, but not terribly sticky, dough. If it's stiff, add a few drops of water at a time until it's soft. If it's sticky, add a tsp flour at a time until it's not.

Let it rise in a bowl, covered with platic wrap and placed in a warm, dry, draft-free spot. (I put mine on top of the stove.)

After an hour, punch down the dough. Let it rise again until it's double the original size.

Divide the dough in half, then each half into half... etc. until you've got 16 balls of dough.

Starting with one dough ball, press or roll the ball into a flattened circle, about 1/4-inch thick. Scoop one tablespoon of filling into the center and then pinch the edges together to close, giving it a little twist to seal. Place bun seam-side down in a steamer basket and steam for 10 to 15 minutes.

As for the filling, I'm afraid I usually just wing it.
So, try using the following ingredients to taste:
1 lb ground turkey, crumbled and cooked with
chopped sauteed cabbage
shredded sauteed carrot
chopped sauteed onion
a few splashe soy sauce
a few drops vinegar
generous amount of garlic/garlic powder
pinch cinnamon or five spice
a couple spoonfuls sugar
a few shakes salt
pepper
a dusting of cayenne or chili powder

You'll probably have filling left over. So, you'll just have to make some more buns!

Veggie Quiche Muffins. It's pastry made from scratch, filled with veggies, cheese and eggs. I made these for Joe to take to work, as I've been on a campaign to actually feed him.
On the opening day of the downtown farmers market, I bought some beautiful barrel-shaped radishes... from which I made baked radish chips that got eaten so fast that I don't have any photos. :-(
Morroccan Carrot soup... so delicious I was calling it a carroty butter cookie in a bowl. I ate it for breakfast it was so good. From Bon Apetit, which is just barely growing on me. I'm going to post the recipe as soon as I post the baozi recipe, if you know what I mean.
Finally, something I didn't cook: Tried some new specials at Da Vinci's while my mom was visiting. The foreground has lobster ravioli with sage and butter sauce. I love sage with pasta.

Korean ramen and fishcake soup

Summer doesn't seem like the best time for a steaming bowl of fishball goodness, but it's been cool here this week. So why not?

I'm hooked on "healthy" ramen noodles. You probably didn't know that they made those curly instant noodle bricks without all the msg, fat and sodium that have endeared them to budget conscious college students. I had been buying "Smart Choice" ramen at Kroger, but they stopped carrying them a couple months after I discovered them. They're great because they cook in boiling water in 60 seconds and have 3 grams of fat per brick as opposed to the 20 grams in the real stuff. They also taste good. Granted, you can tell they don't have all the hydrogenated oil of the original, but it's nothing a dash of sesame oil or canola oil can't cure.

I was moping about my discovery and subsequent deprivation when my mom came to the rescue, in usual fashion, by finding them in the Chicago suburbs and buying all 50 packages on the shelf. I'd been living off those noodles for a better portion of the year, but finally finished them last month. This last visit, she brought a new kind of "healthy" ramen... called HooRooRook. I don't know if that's some kind of Korean onomatopoeia or what, but these noodles are even better than the Smart Choice. They've only got a gram of fat and they come with a packet of seaweed and other tasty seasoning bits, a better flavored soup base and a tiny packet of (sodium rich, I'm sure) brown pasty stuff to stir in at the last minute. Smart Choice came in beef and chicken noodle flavor and I usually threw out the packet and just dressed the noodles in teriyaki or soy sauce and a little bit of vegetable oil or toasted sesame seeds.

If you get your hands on some HooRooRook, or any instant noodles, I recommend boiling them with some chopped cabbage and frozen assorted fish cakes for a quick and satisfying meal. Mmmm. I kinda want some right now.

Anyone still out there?

I don't really deserve to have any followers at this point since I've not been posting for the last few weeks. We have been eating... and I have been cooking. Just not a lot of things that I've been proud of lately. Tonight we had a clean out the kitchen soup and some yogurt bread along with some perfumey-sweet cantaloupe.
The soup:
1 lb chicken thighs, baked and cubed
1 can Italian style tomatoes
1 can sweet corn, juice included
1 can garbanzos, drained
1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1/2 cup mixed veggies from previous meal
water, garlic powder, oregano, canola oil to taste

The bread:
1 cup yogurt mixed with 1/4 cup oil
2 1/2 cups flour
1 cup oats
2 tsp sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 beaten egg for brushing top

Mix dry, then form a well for wet ingredients and blend until evenly moistened. Knead for 8 minutes on a floured work surface.

Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes in a nonstick or greased loaf pan.

Starry night drank my soup

Two bowls

Pineapple stir-fry rice bowl
This didn't turn out as I had hoped, but it was edible. Last week I had a hankering for pineapple fried rice, but I didn't have day-old rice on hand, so this doesn't have the right texture. But the ingredients go nicely together: Zucchini, carrots, onion, green beans, shrimp, pineapple and peanuts sauteed in oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt and a little vinegar and sugar.
Chicken vegetable soup with dumplings
I felt like the universe was telling me to buy a whole intact chicken rather than the sum of its parts... Gourmet magazine's February issue had a really yummy looking recipe, then March's issue had a whole how-to section on cutting up a whole chicken. A friend recently mentioned how much money it saved and I kept coming across them at the grocery store. But there's few sensations I hate more than having raw chicken fat under my fingernails, a near requisite for preparing a whole chicken into multiple dishes. I set out the store planning to buy a pre-made rotisserie chicken to use for soup. But when I saw that the scrawny birds getting shriveled in the chicken warmer at Kroger were almost $8, I pushed the stroller onward and picked up a raw chicken for about $3.50.

I roasted the chicken whole, effectively avoiding any more contact with raw chicken gunk than necessary, the removed as much meat as convenient before dropping the bones into my soup pot. After making the stock, I added chopped cabbage, sweet potato and a can of Italian-style diced tomatoes. I had planned to add corn, cannelini beans and onions to the mix, but I lost interest in the soup by that point and was running out of room in the pot. After everything was tender, I added the chicken meat back to the soup. We just finished off the leftovers tonight and to make it "new" again, I made some quick dumplings with flour, baking powder, milk, herbs, salt and garlic powder.

Spinach miso soup

Normally this soup would have seaweed, but I ran out ;-) I'm actually not joking. I do usually keep dried seaweed for soups in my cupboard but I haven't been to the Asian grocery in a while.

Joe and I enjoyed two soups during our last week of the fast. We supplemented a hearty vegetable stew and this soup with baked potatoes, whole wheat pasta, quinoa and a veggie stir-fry. Oh, and I big tub of chickpea/great northern bean hummus.

Sorry I didn't detail each day's meal. Long days, frigid temps, ice everywhere. It all seemed to run together after a while!

Canelini Bean Soup

Got this out of my 3 and 4 ingredient cookbook that I bought to read while I was in labor (and didn't read while I was in labor)

Simmer:
4 cans diced tomatoes with herbs
4 can canelini beans
small head savoy cabbage
olive oil for drizzling
salt and pepper to taste.

Add the beans last so they don't fall apart too much.
It was pretty tasty and very healthful. I ate it for breakfast before toting it in a crockpot to church.

This week's cooking

Lentil Veggie Soup

1 cup red lentils, soaked and cooked until mushy
1 cup chopped canned green beans
1 plum tomato, chopped
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp tandoori masala
garlic salt to taste

Zucchini Bake from East West Mennonite cookbook

3 big zucchini, grated
1 cup mozzarella
2 eggs
2 Tbs flour
1 tsp baking powder
salt and pepper
Baked at 350 til browned and firm

Couscous with pinenuts from a box!


Spicy Spinach Chicken - another Mennonite recipe

It's really great to have a cookbook with Indian and Bangladeshi recipes along side things like pumpkin cream cheese rolls. The book this recipe came from was written by well-traveled Mennonites who live in Bangladesh.

2 onions, finely chopped
2 Tbs garlic-ginger paste (made by mashing up fresh garlic and ginger)
4 Tbs oil
2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp cayenne pepper
chili peppers to taste (I skipped em)
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 lb spinach, thawed and drained
1 chicken, cut into pieces

Cook the onions in oil until fragrant, then add garlic, ginger and cook a minute. Then add spices and yogurt, cook until oil separates. Add spinach and stir for a few minutes. Then add chicken and stir until chicken is browned. Turn heat to low and cover. Cook until chicken is tender.

I served it with couscous and a side of plain yogurt, remembering how our friends Alina and Satnam always had "Dey" with their spicy meals.

Oden and daikon salad

Joe and I have been getting spoiled lately by our fun Japanese neighbors Saya and Taizo. It's been a great pick-me-up in the midst of steely gray skies and drizzly weather. Tonight, we had our first experience of Oden, a hearty soup with root veggies and fish cakes in a seaweed flavored broth. I'm a huge fan of fish cakes... even though I guess they're a little like the hotdogs of the seafood world. (But I've been known to eat quite a few of those too since Livingston's Deli opened.) Saya carefully dished out one of each kind of fish cake or fish ball or hardboiled egg or konjac jelly cake or diakon or potato chunk--to make sure we got to try everything in the soup.
I know you must be curious, as Joe and I were, to peek over the edge of the stock pot! Mmm. Look at all that tasty stuff!
In addition to oden, the Yasudas prepared fresh diakon salads with a mound of dashi-based dressing, green tea and korean seafood pancake with shoyu sauce.

When others are craving chicken noodle

I get a hankering for fishball soup.
I was running a low fever this week, I think it was a sinus infection. Wednesday was the worst... achey, chills and hot sweats, sneezing etc. It was also a very busy day for Joe so I was left to make my own dinner (yeah, there was leftover pizza, stromboli, lentil soup, and homemade coleslaw in the frige, but I felt I deserved some soup.) So I dug into the depths of a freezer that's booby trapped with about 20 ice packs and maybe 100 frozen dumplings to find the last pack of fish cakes from my birthday shopping trip in Nashville. The contents, I found, were entirely new to me!

2 cotton-candy pink fishballs with a thin fried coating, which I found rather rubbery
1 giant square of very fluffy, spongey fish cake (bream?)It was like fish souffle. And it grew on me after I'd soaked it in my homemade dipping sauce.
2 tenpura patties-- a more meaty fish cake with little crunchy bits of veggie inside
2 tofu pouches, tied with some pale, crunchy vegetable. Cute, aren't they? The first one I ate was filled with mung bean noodles and veggies. The second surprised me with some very doughy gummy filling, probably a mix of tapioca and rice flour.

I cooked all of it in my fondue pot along with a heart of romaine, a handful of baby portabellas, a wedge of tomato, a few cauliflower florets and some frozen taro chunks.
To make dipping sauce:
2 T lite soy
2 T rice vinegar
1 T sugar
1-2 chopped green onions
1 clove chopped garlic

I've been wondering what it takes to make a fish ball. Anyone tried it?

Turkey soup for the soul

One of the "interesting" things about living in the South is the amazing agitation that occurs with even the most gentle dusting of snow. If there's white stuff on the ground schools close. Cars spin out everywhere. And I have to get to work by 6:30 a.m. so the paper can go to press an hour early. Even imagined imminent snow sends all of Hoptown to the grocery store to stock up on bread and milk. (And as my co-worker says, when they realize it hasn't snowed yet, they all head out to the Chinese buffets)

SO all that griping really was a prelude to a new recipe: Turkey Matzo Mood-boosting Soup. Joe and I really needed to go to the grocery store to buy bread and milk... but seeing the parking lot brimming, we decided to head straight home and forage for our dinner. Here's what I came up with:

Turkey Matzo Mood-booster
1 turkey carcass, frozen since Thanksgiving
1 carton chicken broth
1 cup baby carrots - halved
1 red bell pepper - large pieces
1 sweet potato - large cubes
1/2 a large sweet onion - chopped coarse
1 package Matzo ball mix (thanks, Mom)
1 tsp Montreal Chicken Seasoning
1 tsp Lemon Pepper

I filled a large pot with enough water to submerge the turkey bones. Let it boil until the broth smelled nice. I removed the bones and scavenged for any remaining meat, which went into a bowl. Then I added the chicken broth and seasoning. Next I thawed 2 turkey drumsticks and 2 turkey wings in the broth until they were warmed through. I removed them and tore off the meat. Next carrots and sweet potato chunks went into the pot. When they were nearly tender, I added the pepper and onion. Meanwhile, make the Matzo batter and refrigerate 15 minutes. My veggies were tender before the Matzo was ready, so I scooped them out with a slotted spoon to stop the cooking and set them in a bowl. Next I balled up the Matzo and tossed it into the boiling broth. Lid on for a 20-minute simmer. When it was ready I added turkey, veggies, broth and 1 Matzo ball to two bowls. Good stuff.

Emily's test kitchen strikes again

A little strange?
It's sort of like if Picasso put his version of a gingerbread man's face on a pie that wasn't a pie but a big stack of crepes alternating with layers of pumpkin pie filling. I'm going to call it Pumpkin Crepe Pie. To make this weird dairy-free, no-bake dessert, (or is it breakfast?)make one batch of crepes. You could follow this recipe for Emily's Being Lazy Lowfat Crepes, or you could follow this recipe, which is more like the way my dad makes them.
1 cup flour
1 Tbs oil
1/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cups milk (I use Vanilla Silk)
a dash of lemon juice for zip.

Use an electric mixer to blend all that stuff together and get rid of lumps. (Adding a little liquid at a time helps).

To spread between the layers: 1 1/3 cups pumpkin pie filling (from a can), reduced on the stovetop, set at medium low heat as you make your crepes. Let everything cool before assembling, starting with a crepe and ending with a layer of pumpkin. Add funky decorations by using a cookie cutter on the messed up crepe that is too ugly to use in its entirety.

Salt & Vinegar Chip Soup

It started out as a lentil soup... somewhere along the way I got distracted and it became this.

1/4 cup lentils, soaked
2 smallish potatoes, peeled and cubed
1/2 medium sweet onion, chopped
1/4 cup chopped green onion
several cups of water, I'm sorry, I forgot to measure.
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp turmeric
1 tsp lemon pepper
2 Tbs white vinegar... or to taste.
1 tsp sugar
Dillweed to taste

Boil lentils until tender, then add everything else. Boil until mushy, but still intact. Dump everything into the blender and blend until smooth. Add water if it seems more like baby food than soup.

Swishin' by myself

Shabu Shabu
Tonight I made myself a little hot pot... one of my top 5 foods I think everyone should try in their lifetime. With a fondue pot, or just a pot on the stovetop, it's a very simple dish to make. Start with boiling water or chicken broth. Add a dash of teriaki or soy sauce. Drop in cabbage leaves, lettuce leaves, onion, garlic, green onion, tomato, mushrooms, tofu, corn on the cob, taro (or potato if you, like me, cannot get taro).


I used chunks of catfish tonight. But true Shabu would use thin slices of beef. One you've got your pot full of goodies, go fishing. Then dunk your catch in an addictive sauce of rice vinegar, soy sauce, 1 clove garlic, sliced green onion and a tsp of sugar. At the end add noodles and drink a soothing soup. Good stuff.

A little lovin in a bowl

I've been slacking on my blog because I've been a little under the weather since Sunday evening.

Sadly, it looks like I've got pleurisy. Which at first I confused with pleurosis, that crippling disease that isolates the poor protagonist in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie... But it's not that. Yay. (Though it might have been fun to say I've got 'blue roses.') Really it's just a viral infection of the lining of my lungs. And it hurts. Boo.

Joe was brave and made me a chicken noodle soup per my instructions from the couch where I rested when we got home from work today. This one's really simple: Just chicken broth, chopped zucchini (cooked til translucent) and some cavatappi (big fat corkscrew shaped pasta.) It turned out wonderfully.

Random Cooking Adventures

Ricotta Pancakes

I was off Friday-day because I had the night shift. I woke up and felt like making pancakes. Joe's mom makes ricotta pancakes-- and he loves them. Unfortunately, he hasn't had them in a long time because of my issues with dairy. Hers are thin like Swedish pancakes, but more tender and less greasy. The ricotta makes them tangy. Mine came out totally different... but aren't they cute?

Carrot Soup

Those carrots Joe plucked from the red earth many days ago were starting to look forlorn. Neither of us particularly likes carrots. After my pancake semi-success, I got inspired to try to make the ginger carrot soup from Evins Mill. I don't really want to talk about how it turned out. Let's just say I ate some of it and the garbage disposal ate the rest. I'm gonna blame it on the carrots.

Corn Salsa

On Saturday we went to our neighbor Blane's place for a cookout. I brought this uber yummy salsa, which I like so much that I made it twice in the last 7 days.

Messipe:
1 can corn, drained
1/4 vidalia onion
5 cloves garlic (don't expect your breath to be pretty afterward)
1 small bell pepper
1/2 medium tomato
1 small avocado
1 large lime (juice)
salt and pepper

Fried Green Tomatoes

Sunday lunch... I had to cook the green tomatoes I bought several days ago because they were starting to blush. (Again, I was inspired by Evins Mill eats) For a first attempt, I think they came out well. But today when I reheated the leftovers in the toaster oven it was more like "fried green goo."

Currrrry

Sunday dinner. Joe and I like curry because it reminds us of a good friend we had in Taiwan. We called him Bro. Seong. He loved curry. And we loved the way he'd roll his r's whenever he'd talk about curry. This dish turned out pretty spicy.