Salads and stir-fry

Farmshare season is in full swing, which means we've got veggies out the wazoo! And with the recent heat wave, I've been loathe to use the stove any more than necessary. Thus: salads.

Fresh pea/tomato salad
1 medium tomato, cubed
~1 cup fresh peas (1 pint unshelled)
1-2 Tbsp sour cream
fresh mint, chopped (2-3 leaves)
fresh dill weed, chopped (to taste)
lemon pepper/salt

Beet-feta salad
4 small beets, cut into bite-size slices
a handful of mustard greens, finely chopped
~1/4 cup sour cream
~1/4 cup feta cheese
honey to taste (I used 1-2 tsp)
a dash of vinegar

As always, you can adjust the amounts to suit your taste or your actual veggie supply. I thought both salads ended up tasting pretty good for my basically having made them up on the spot, but I'm sure they could be tweaked to become even better.

Now we come to one of my classic standbys for dealing with vegetables: veggie stir-fry! I like stir-fry because it's easy and works with just about any veggies you have around. The featured ingredient for this week: snow peas!

1 pint snow peas
2 carrots, julienned
1/3 of a medium white onion, cut into petal shapes
1/2 jalapeno pepper, finely chopped
~6 inches of garlic scape, finely chopped (or a clove or two of garlic)

Pour a little olive oil and a dab of sesame oil into a frying pan and heat until medium-hot. Add veggies and seasonings and cook just until the onions lose their sharpness, stirring frequently. About halfway through cooking, add about a tablespoon of brown bean sauce (or soy sauce) and a couple dashes of mirin. (Mirin is a somewhat sweet sauce made from sake; a pinch of brown sugar or a dime-sized dot of honey should be fine as a substitute).

Vegetable Polenta

Hello everyone. I know it's been awhile, but I'm still here and still cooking! Last night I made a tasty vegetable polenta that I thought I'd share with you.

Polenta:
2 Cup Corn Meal
8 Cup Water
A Dash of Salt

Vegetable Topping:
2 Purple Scallions
1 Garlic Scape
2/3 Tsp. Crushed Garlic
1 Head of Broccoli
1 Zucchini
1 Summer Squash
1 Handful of Frozen Bell Pepper strips
The juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup White Wine
A splash of balsamic vinegar
Breaded eggplant cutlets
Basil
Oregano
Salt and Pepper
Aged Asigao Cheese

Polenta:
Beat 2 cups of water into the corn meal. Slowly add the mixture to 6 cups of salted boiling water while stirring. Cook, with stirring, until the mixture thickens. Then reduce the heat, cover and cook for 5 more minutes.

Vegetable Topping:
1) Mince the bulbs of the scallions and the garlic scape. Slice up the zucchini and squash and break down the broccoli.
2) In a sauce pan, saute the garlic, basil, oregano, salt, pepper, minced scallion and garlic scape.
3) Add the zucchini, squash, peppers, and broccoli and continue to saute.
4) After a few minutes, add the lemon juice, wine, and balsamic.
5) Add a sprinkling of the cheese and toss the mixture to fully coat the vegetables. Allow the sauce to cook down.

In a seperate pan, fry up the eggplant cutlets.

Serve the vegetable mixture on top of an eggplant cutlet on a bed of polenta. Sprinkle more cheese on top and enjoy! You won't need to use all of the polenta in this recipe, so you can save the rest to use later.

Scallion Waffles and Kohlrabi Fries

OK, as promised, a new update from one of the main authors here at Entropic Kitchen. Dinner tonight was scallion waffles, kohlrabi fries, and (leftover) greensy salad with strawberry vinaigrette. Now, I have to admit that I got the waffle recipe online and actually followed it; it's easy to mess up on anything remotely bread-like, so I tend not to be too experimental when it comes to baking, etc. But in my defense, I came up with the concept of scallion waffles on my own before looking up a recipe, and had I not found one, I would have gone ahead with a regular waffle recipe with added scallions. But without further ado:

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp yellow cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
2 cups buttermilk
2 eggs
1 cup finely chopped scallion
coarsely ground black pepper (optional, Derek's addendum)

Mix all the dry ingredients except scallions. Seperately, whisk all the wet ingredients until uniform. Then stir wet and dry mixes together just until blended (clumps are OK) and finally stir in the scallions. Waffleize as you would any other waffle.

They were very good plain, but I topped a couple of them with a bit of freshly made strawberry jam for variety. (Sidenote: Chris and his girlfriend were over yesterday and we made jam and it is fabulous!)
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The kohlrabi fries were born out of a comment my wife's coworker made, suggesting that kohlrabi might make a good french-fry vegetable. So on a whim I decided to see if this was true. I peeled and sliced a kohlrabi into fry-sized rectangular prisms and let them cook on medium high in about 1/4 inch of canola oil. After 10 or 15 minutes, they were quite brown, but soft, not crispy. At this point I began to suspect there was more to french fries that just a simple deep fry -- after all, the stuff you get at Mickey D's has been cooked already, then fried again in the restaurant. Taking a quick peek on the internet, it seems like double-frying is the way to go, so perhaps that will be a project later on. I also suspect I may have had the temperature too high, as a couple of pieces were still slightly uncooked in the middle, despite the dark brown on the outside.

Anyway, a quick salting and pat-down to remove excess oil and there they were. Kohlrabi, dark-brown and shrively, but similar enough to potato fries that I was encouraged. The flavor was a little strong, slightly turnipy, and not unpleasant, but in combination with the squishy texture just didn't seem worth the work when fresh, raw kohlrabi is so tasty and potato fries can be had at nearly any restaurant.
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Finally, this was a leftover from yesterday's dinner with Chris and his +1, but we had a salad consisting of greens, chopped veggies (broccoli, cucumbers, turnips and scallions), craisins and feta cheese. For the dressing I mixed together

(approximately)
4 Tbsp salad oil (something nutty is good; I used walnut and grapeseed oils)
6-8 Tbsp vinegar (I used honey-champagne vinegar)
strawberry jam to taste (I used probably 2 Tbsp or so)
dash of salt and pepper

The jam was still in the process of being made (I yoinked a couple of spoonfuls from the big pot on the stove) so it was nice and fresh! Obviously, the more of it you add, the sweeter and more strongly flavored your dressing will be.

Well that's it for tonight. What about you? Do you find yourself cooking more now that fresh summer produce is readily available?

Guest Post: Prenatal Chicken Parm

Note: today's post was written by Steve, whose other excellent musings may be found here. Look for more regular updates from your usual suspects soon, now that summer produce season is in full swing.

As far as cooking goes, I’ve never been huge on experimenting. I always find myself following recipes rigidly, panicking if I’m even five seconds late to pull something from the oven. I haven’t the know-how to throw in a mixture of spices to create a new flavor. Probably one of the most dangerous experiments I’ve tried in the kitchen so far was leaving a cup of mushrooms out of a recipe (solely for the fact that I don’t like mushrooms). I love cooking, but I’ve never been comfortable deviating from written recipes.

This morning, I woke up and went to the kitchen to find that it had been quite some time before someone had restocked it. No cereals, an excessive amount of oatmeal, and just one egg (two if you count the one that was cracked inside the carton). Deciding I wasn’t in the mood for oatmeal, I thought I’d give the egg a shot. But I had eggs yesterday and the day before that, why should I do simple eggs again?

While searching through the nearly-empty fridge for something to do with this egg, I came across a nearly-empty bag of mozzarella cheese. I’ve thrown cheese on eggs before, usually cheddar or American, but mozzarella doesn’t taste good on an egg by itself. Then, my eyes came across a nearly-empty jar of spaghetti sauce.

Prenatal chicken parm, I thought to myself. Or would it be pre-natal? Let me tell you, it’s weird to find yourself going to Wikipedia to look up what a common egg is.

So, I threw some bread in the toaster and started to fry my egg as I usually do (over-hard). After I flipped the egg, I threw a small handful of mozzarella cheese on top and tried to spread it around as much as I could without burning myself. Then, I spooned some of the spaghetti sauce on top of that. I’m wondering if I should have done the cheese and the sauce in reverse order, since I had no way of telling when the cheese was melted underneath the sauce.

After a minute or two, I took the egg out of the pan and sandwiched it between two slices of toast (nice and brown for that crisp breading taste). I would have loved to have paired this meal with a glass of grape juice (because hey, it’s Italian), but all I had in the fridge was a nearly-empty carton of orange juice, so that had to do.

I took a bite into the sandwich, and immediately realized I had put too much sauce on the egg. Excessive sauce aside, it tasted quite good. I couldn’t taste the egg as much as the sauce and cheese (in retrospect, I essentially made a small pizza with a fried egg in it), but the overall flavor was still pretty good. Just as I expected, the cheese in the middle of the egg wasn’t quite melted, but that cold portion only lasted one bite. Maybe this dish deserves a little less disgusting name than “prenatal”, I thought.

Granted, I know this isn’t exactly Entropic Kitchen material. I’m nowhere near as dangerous with my food experimentations as Andrew, Chris, and Derek are. I guess if there’s one thing I learned from my experience, it’s that you don’t have to be Emeril Lagasse to have fun with your food. Experimenting is good every once in a while, no matter what degree you go to.

Side note from Derek: I was quite relieved to find that Prenatal Chicken Parm was not in this family of recipes.

Food Pilgrimage

I love a good food party. There are a number of approaches: the first is the carefully planned, elegant dinner party. The second is the social/finger-food party. This second type is really good if you pick your food right. Crepes are good for this, as you can just have a bunch of fillings, like cheese, caramelized onions, veggies, chocolate, etc, and everyone can just go crazy. Taco parties can be similarly fun.

The final type of food party is the one I like most, but requires some like minded friends to be the most enjoyable. This is the food-pilgrimage. You go on a quest to find divine inspiration in the holy grounds of the farmers market, or the health foods store, the local cheese shop, or anywhere where people care passionately about the food they are selling. You go without premonition or preconception about what you are going to cook, the journey will tell you.

Today I went on a pilgramage with my flatmate Gabe, and we headed to the Ferney-Voltaire farmers market, and the local cheese shop. We bought the following: blood oranges, avocadoes, herloom tomatos, pasta with black truffle, local asparagus, chicken, and fresh bread. Some nice looking pears for a tart too. Oh and the cheese... We got some gruyer that I think we will use for a black trumpet mushroom cream sauce to serve with the chicken, asperegus and pasta. But then just as a treat, we also got a raw milk brie ripened with truffles inside! And a delicious blue cheese blue de le something or rather (Bleu d'Auvergne). It was creamy smooth and the right amount spicy/pungent, like a good stilton.

So we had a wonderful lunch of the fruit, bread and cheese, and coffee. Tonight we will feast! The last step of the food pilgrimage often involves figuring out how to cook everything, but I feel up to the challenge. I'm going to go for a run now, just to prepare my appetite, but I will let you all know how it goes!

Smoked ginger-wasabi pork and stuffed yellow peppers

Ah, the weather is warm and that means it's grilling season! Tonight's meal: smoked pork cutlets and stuffed pepper (also smoked).

I started with three smallish, thin pork cutlets. First, I rubbed some ginger-wasabi spice mix/meat rub onto the cutlets. If you don't happen to have access to a World Market, a mix of the following will probably cut it pretty close:

-mustard powder
-brown sugar
-salt
-garlic powder
-ginger
-pepper
-wasabi powder

After the rub had been applied, I stuck the cutlets in a plastic bag and drizzled a teaspoon or two each of white wine vinegar, olive oil, and maple syrup and mooshed the bag around a little before sealing and setting aside.

For the pepper stuffing, I started with about 2 inches of old baguette, sliced into 1-cm cubes (yeah, yeah, mixed units, I know). Then, I added some dried herbs (sage, savory, and rosemary) and onion powder plus salt, black pepper, and some red pepper flakes. As a binder, I used a a mixture of melted butter, melted cream cheese, and milk. After stirring it up, it didn't seem quite wet enough, so I added a splash of vinegar and white wine, which I think made the whole thing come together nicely (some egg probably would have been suitable here as well, but I didn't have one on hand). After soaking for a half-hour or so, into the hollowed-out yellow pepper it went!

I fired up the grill using some hardwood charcoal and a packet of smoke pellets. Both the pepper and the porks went onto the upper rack so as not to get too much direct cooking, as I was going for the slower smoke treatment. I let it cook for about half an hour with the top vent on the grill closed so as to trap the smoke in the cooking chamber. The end result was smoke-darkened but still juicy pork, and a deliciously browned stuffed pepper!

Sauerkraut Hotdish

Hey folks, it's been a while since anyone updated, so I thought I'd share a quick and easy recipe that's been a staple of my family for years: sauerkraut hotdish. Now, anyone who's not from the North Star State may not be familiar with the term hotdish. No, it doesn't have anything to do with a sizzling platter, it's just our way of saying casserole.

I'm not sure how popular casseroles are outside of the upper midwest, but back at the homestead, they're everywhere! So much so that my home ec class in high school had an entire unit on making them, where I learned the four parts of a casser- erm, hotdish. Of course, that was 12 or so years ago, so I forget exactly what the parts are, but I do know beyond a doubt that there's four of them! Probably something like:

-starch (rice, pasta, potatoes, etc.)
-binder (cheese, cream of X soup, sauce, etc.)
-meat
-vegetable

The typical way to make a hotdish is to blend the four parts together, add an optional topping (bread crumbs, cheese, etc.) and bake for about an hour. As you can see, the possibilities are pretty much limitless as far as experimentation goes.

Anyway, sauerkraut hotdish is wonderfully simple, consisting of:

-1 package wide egg (or eggless) noodles (10-16 oz, I think)
-1 lb sausage of your choice
-1 8 oz can sauerkraut
-black pepper to taste

Boil the pasta, cook the sausage (if necessary), then combine it all together! If the pasta has gotten cold you can reheat it on the stove or in the oven.

Now, I realize that this may not academically qualify as a hotdish (no binder, no baking, and sauerkraut kind of stretches the limit of the term vegetable), but I don't care. That's just what it's called, and anyone who disagrees with me can go make me a ham sandwich! If you're really hankering for a saucy hotdish, I suppose a light cream or cheese sauce can't do any harm.

Traditionally, the sausage used was homemade by my dad and his brothers -- it was a loose (no casing) ground-pork-based sausage with some mild seasonings and plenty of liquid smoke. In lieu of the good stuff, you can use I think pretty much any sausage you want. Most recently I used kielbasa, and it turned out great. Oh, and don't let the sauerkraut scare you off -- the rest of the dish dilutes the strong flavors that turn most people off of it. If you're still worried, try starting with 4 oz and adding more if necessary.