Category: recipes

Now that’s a salad.

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I’m not really entirely sure where the idea for this salad came from.  Saturday night, I was given the task of creating a salad for dinner.  There was iceburg lettuce, onions, broccoli, carrots, a bunch of fresh herbs.  I pulled out a few eggs and decided to hard boil them and made some croutons with some french bread.
And then I diced the onions and broccoli into tiny little bits.  I started caramelizing the onion in butter & olive oil and when it looked good, tossed in the broccoli and just cooked it.

 I chopped the lettuce, julienned the carrots, chopped fresh thyme & dill and threw it on top.  I chopped the hard boiled eggs and added them as well.   I added the croutons and the broccoli mix, a wee bit more olive oil and some vinegar – I used some tarragon as well as red wine vinegar – and tossed it all together. 

 It was a lovely salad.  The cooked broccoli & onion gave it a really good flavor and they clung to the lettuce without a whole lot of oil.  I definitely need to experiment with that some more.  Edie got me a salad cookbook for Mother’s Day last year as a hint that I needed to liven up my salads.  I do love a nice, big salad.  I definitely need to give them more thought.

For a quick little dessert, I took some strawberries, cooked them in a wee bit of butter & chambord liquor, with sugar and a touch of balsamic vinegar.  I served them between wedges of the peanut butter cups I made last week with little dollops of whipped cream.  A perfect little sweet bite.

And that’s total amount of cooking I did all weekend.  We went out of town and it was one of those completely deserved, relaxing weekends.  I got quite a few inches of Pat’s sweater knitted and I got to spend Friday night with one of my most favorite people in the universe, just the two of us, no husbands, no kiddos.  Down right glorious.

Pat’s away at a conference this week, so it’s just me & my gal.  I pulled some soup out of the freezer for tonight’s dinner (it was dated and labeled so I do know it’s some vegetable soup I recently made) and am whipping up another salad like Saturday night’s.  This one uses cauliflower and blue cheese, because that’s what I have on hand.  

Clearly, I have come back slightly refreshed  and inspired from my weekend.  Ah, I needed that.

Beans a la Highacre.

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Last weekend, we went up to Harper’s Ferry with friends.  We stayed in the lovely ‘cabin’ Highacre, owned by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club.  That right there is the view we had from the dining room window.  The house overlooks all of Harper’s Ferry and the infamous “Jefferson Rock”, where Thomas Jefferson himself stood and declared the view worth the ocean voyage.  It is where the Shenandoah and Potomic Rivers converge and become one.  And the house is this incredibly beautiful  100 year old Victorian.  It’s really one of my favorite places to go.  It’s always relaxing and just breathtaking.  I highly recommend it.
Like I said in my last post, we just brought some crockpots and winged it.  I put a wee bit of thought into it and brought the basics for baked beans.  This is what I had on hand:

That’s coarse sea salt, some Goya Adobo all purpose seasoning that was at the house, black pepper, molasses and a can of spicy hot V8 that was left in the fridge.  I bought a pack of country ham bits to throw in and I had a bag of navy beans.
Becky’s Baked Beans a la Highacre
 Chop an onion and mince a few cloves of garlic.  Add a bag of dried beans, salt and pepper and about a half jar of molasses, cover with water and stir together in a crock pot. Turn it on high.  
Add some chopped country ham bits.   
Sprinkle liberally with the Adobo seasoning.
Add about half a V8 or so.  
Let cook all day.
While the beans are quite good that day, they are even better if you pull them out the next day and heat them back up. 

Mollie’s Awesome Greens.

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My friend Mollie makes the best greens I’ve ever had.  They are always cooked just right.  It’s a  gift really.  She experiments in ways that just blow me away, because no way do I think that way.  I really want to cook like Mollie when I grow up.  Especially my greens.
We all went up to Harper’s Ferry this weekend.  No one felt like being in charge, so we didn’t really have a menu for the weekend.  We did bring crock pots and a few ideas though.  Saturday morning, we got up and went to the store.  She found some organic Chard that looked good. So, she grabbed some and brought it home.

 She sauted it up in a pan with some shallot and some apple and omigod, it was amazing.  AMAZING.

The whole dinner turned out pretty well actually.  Will made his mother’s chuck roast in one crock pot, I made a really good batch of beans in another, we baked some potatoes and Mollie made her greens.  I promised her I’d put the baked beans recipe on here (that will be another post), but she said I could share this recipe.  Which, I’d like to point out, she totally made up on the spot.

Mollie’s Swiss Chard
Shallot, chopped
Apple, chopped into bits
3 garlic cloves, minced
Stems, chopped
Cook in (oil) & butter until softened.
Add chopped greens with salt & pepper.  Cover and simmer over low heat until just wilted.

Birthday Week, Parts Three and Four.

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Friday was Pat’s actual birthday.  Usually, when I am canning peaches every summer, I whip up a few pies while I’m at it and stash them in the freezer. I found out one year that peach pie is his favorite, so to be able to just pull one out of the freezer and call it day has been glorious.  One of those things I really love about myself, you know?   This year, for reasons that I can’t remember why now, I didn’t.  I think after spending 2 weekends back to back canning peaches and tomatoes and everything else in sight, I didn’t feel like making a pie crust.  And then Pat told me it was okay, because he wasn’t sure he wanted a peach pie this year anyway.  Phew.
However, that meant that I had nothing to pull out of my sleeve on his actual birthday.  And true to form, I was getting weary of cranking up the oven and baking a treat.  I still have a good bit of canned peaches on hand, so I knew it had to be something that used them up.  Thank you internet, for inspiring this:

Peach Pound Cake.  I cut the recipe in half, and used the other half of the jar of peaches I popped open to make a glaze.  Super easy, super good.  Even better the next morning with yogurt on top for breakfast.

Saturday night was the big slumber party.  Edie had 5 friends over.  Why do I think it’s easier to host a slumber party than to just spring for a party at the bowling alley or Bounce & Play or any of the other places around town that cater to this sort of thing?  Oh that’s right, I find paying for it harder than cleaning my house and dealing with 6 little girls for a night.  I am that cheap.

We went with cheese pizza for dinner and I outsourced it to Mona Lisa Pasta.  Well, at least the dough part.  For $2.50, you can buy a dough ball, bring it home, roll it, top it and bake it yourself.  And since all the mommies but one decided to stay and have a glass of wine (or 4), Pat stepped up and took care of making dinner.  (He’s a total keeper.)

Dessert was the Ultimate Chocolate Cupcakes with Ganache Centers from Cooks Illustrated.  So, so easy and so, so good.  And they looked divine on the pink depression glass cake stand Allison found for me.  (I need a new butter dish please, a round one.  Preferably old lady looking china.  Thanks.  Your thrifting luck has been better than mine lately.)  Moms stayed for that too.  I think we may have a reputation for serving good food.

Breakfast was chocolate waffles, topped with your choice of strawberries or cherries (canned by me last summer of course), fresh whipped cream and sausage from Tom & Michele’s pigs over at Open Gate Farm.  Last summer when we went to visit,  we got to watch some piggies being born, so when I told Edie I got some sausage from them, she asked if it was made from those pigs.  No, they’re not quite old enough yet.  “Oh, then it must be from the ones I helped feed.  That’s cool too.”
That’s my girl.  On a first name basis with her food. 
So, birthday week, with all of it’s baking and celebrating is over.   We finally get to settle into the winter doldrums. I spent a week pulling out all the stops and making sure everyone got their favorite food for their birthdays.  The chocolate waffles are by far, the most requested breakfast whenever Edie has a friend sleepover.  I came up with the recipe myself after a few experiments and I’ll share it below.  The tally of baked goods for the week?  6 dozen cupcakes, 1 cheesecake, and 1 peach pound cake.  Also made were lasagna, pizza and creamy shrimp & spinach stew.  Yum.  I think we need a week of beans & rice to recover.
And I’ll admit, after all the girls left Sunday morning, I crawled back into bed with a book and stayed there until it was time to make dinner.  I’m currently reading Life by Keith Richards.  Who knew he loved being a boy scout?
Chocolate Waffles
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 tsp sugar (or more, to taste). 
Whisk dry ingredients together in a bowl.    Separate 2 eggs.  Beat  yolks and combine with:
1/2 cup butter, melted
2 cups buttermilk
a heaping spoonful of yogurt
1 tsp vanilla
Add to dry mix.  Beat remaining egg whites until fluffy and fold in.  Cook according to your waffle maker’s instructions.
They are good served with fruit and whipped cream, but syrup and butter work just fine too.

Coming around again.

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My new favorite soup is this  Northern Italian Spinach and Cornmeal Soup from an old Vegetarian Times cookbook.  This fall, I was looking for a new, quick, easy soup recipe and rediscovered the soup section in that particular cookbook.  It was a hit and quite yummy to boot, so it’s now in the repertoire.  At least until we burn out on it.

I’m not sure if it was the end of the holidays and the return to regular life, or the flat out catharticism of my last post or a combination of the two, but I had the most productive weekend I’ve had in I don’t know how long.  Christmas got taken down.  The house got clean.  I made some super yummy pizza with my own dough.  I cleaned out and purged Christmas decorations that hadn’t made it out in a few years.  The attic corner in which they live in got cleaned out and reorganized.  Edie’s birthday party got planned.  Laundry got caught up.  The “happy corner” got cleaned up and reorganized and I even purged stuff there too.  AND I fixed the torn loop on the laundry bag in our room.  I pulled out all the best stops in my procrastination bag in getting it all done – long, hot baths were had and naps were taken.  The only thing I totally slacked on was Sunday night dinner.  Which is where the spinach & cornmeal soup comes in.  I really wasn’t in the mood to cook, so I made that instead.  I love that there is NO chopping involved in that soup.  Just my handy garlic press that I swear by. 

I started making a list of projects I want to accomplish as well.  I’m slowly but surely crawling out of my head and back into real life.  It feels so good, I can’t even begin to tell you.

How to make Watermelon Rind Pickles.

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First, you consult every cookbook in the cabinet. You pull out all the ones that have a pickled watermelon rind recipe. Then you look to see what all the differences are and pick one.
Then, you take the rind of a watermelon. You peel the green outer layer off.
You chop it and soak it overnight in pickling lime. I read if you leave some of the pink on, it looks prettier. So I did.

You simmer it until translucent in a brine of sugar, vinegar and water, as well as select spices.


When it has achieved proper translucence, you pack it in jars, pouring the brine on top.

Process for 10 minutes and VOILA! Watermelon rind pickles!

I am the sort of person who hates to throw things out, I’m convinced I can get one more use out of it. I use vegetable scraps to make a broth before I put them in the compost bin. I turned a bedsheet turned shower curtain that I thrifted into matching skirts for me & Edie. If there is a way to find a new life for an object, I am all about it. So, watermelon rind pickles have appealed to me for years. I’ve never actually had one, but I love the idea. So, I finally decided to try them.

I pulled out every last cookbook I own and came up with 6 different recipes for them. Then I went on the internet and read some more about them. A friend who is a chef, who’s had them but never made them said to use pickling lime. Never used that before and only one recipe from my 6 had that. I found a recipe on a blog that used lime and it was from a New Orleans chef. The one recipe I had that used pickling lime was in one of those collections from a former college roommate’s grandmother’s church – you know the kind, the ones everyone submits a recipe for and they sell to raise money for something? I have a whole collection of them – all your best home cooking is right there in those.

Anyway, I had two seemingly credible recipes that involved the same proportions of sugar, vinegar and water, as well as similar spices. In talking to folks that have actually had these before, I made sure to ask about the spices, and the ones included in these two recipes came up time and time again.
A friend offered to come help, she’d actually eaten them before and so she had a good idea of what they needed to look like. She brought a few more recipes, one of which matched up with the two I was following, so I felt I was on the right track. Thank goodness she was here, because I probably would have jarred them up as soon as they started looking translucent. It’s a long time before they start looking that way and are totally that way.
The one deviation I made was cardamom. Betty said you needed it in there and one of the recipes called for cardamom seeds. I borrowed some ground from Betty and just threw it in, not measuring, just eyeballing. That’s the one part of the equation I’m not 100% on. Betty came by today though and looked at a jar up close and said they LOOK like the ones her grandmother made. In 6 weeks, we’ll know how close they are to TASTING like them.
The Recipe:
Take one watermelon rind. Peel the outer green layer off with a vegetable peeler. Cut into 1 inch by 1 inch pieces.
Dissolve 3 teaspoons lime in 2 quarts water. Pour over watermelon rind and soak overnight. Rinse at least 3x, or until water runs clear.
Combine:
8 cups sugar
4 cups water
4 cups white vinegar
Bring to a simmer.
Tie in spice bag and put in simmering liquid:
1 lemon, thinly sliced
1 large piece of ginger
3 sticks cinnamon
1 tablespoon whole cloves
(Generous sprinkle of cardamom)
Simmer spices in brine for 10 minutes, then add watermelon rinds. Simmer until translucent – this actually took about 2 hours. Pack in jars, cover with brine and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.
I used one decent sized watermelon and got a dozen jelly jars full.