May 27, 2012

Strawberry & Tomato Bruschetta with Goat Cheese

This is a twist on a dish I’ve been making for years, and it’s a perfect accompaniment to a Memorial Day party. Here, strawberries are paired with the classic combination of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and basil, resulting in a fresh and summery dish. A smear of goat cheese lends the bruschetta a hearty,  tangy flavor to contrast with the strawberries’ and tomatoes’ sweetness.

I’ve been making the sans-strawberry version of bruschetta for years (since college, at least), and it’s a reliable appetizer to serve when I have friends over for dinner. For this version, the strawberries are a unique addition to my reliable original recipe. About a week ago, I picked up Ted Allen’s new cookbook, In My Kitchen. He’s the host of Chopped, one of my favorite shows on TV right now, and the recent recipient of a James Beard award. As David says, “the James Beard Awards are like the Oscars for you,” so the fact that he recently won one is very exciting (for me, at least, and I’m sure for him, too). The idea for adding strawberries came from one of his recipes, and it’s a fabulous idea.

It’s a crowd-pleaser: I’ve had the opportunity to serve these to three different groups of friends, most recently some of David’s relatives and a friend & former coworker from Pearson just yesterday.

The recipe can also be adapted in a few ways for Memorial Day celebrations. The tomato-strawberry blend can be made awhile ahead, as the flavors will blend together and meld over time. The preparation outline below is what I do in my apartment, but if you’re bringing a dish to share to a Memorial Day party or grilling, this can easily be converted to an outdoor dish. If that’s the case, brush the baguette slices with olive oil and place on the grill. Once it’s toasted and somewhat crispy, take a clove of raw garlic and rub it on the flat surface of the bread. Then top with a thin layer of goat cheese and the raw tomato-strawberry combo and garnish with basil.

The goat cheese can also be omitted entirely to keep make it a vegan recipe.

Strawberry & Tomato Bruschetta with Goat Cheese
Adapted from Ted Allen’s “In My Kitchen”

Ingredients
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
1/2 pint strawberries
3 garlic cloves, chopped
3 Tablespoons olive oil
salt & pepper
3 oz. soft goat cheese
1 baguette, cut into 1/2-inch thick slices
4 large basil leaves, sliced

1) Slice the grape tomatoes down the center length-wise, then chop into thirds. Chop the stems off the strawberries and slice into smaller pieces. Combine the olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, and strawberries in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.

2) Preheat the oven to 400-degrees. Smear an even layer of goat cheese across each slice of baguette and arrange on a rimmed baking sheet. Spoon the strawberry-tomato mixture over each slice. Bake for 15 minutes, or until the edge of the baguette get toasty and brown and the strawberries and tomatoes are warmed through. Garnish with sliced basil leaves and serve immediately.

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May 21, 2012

Simple Fried Rice with Anchovies and Asparagus

This month’s Recipe Redux theme features recipes of sea vegetables and small fish. I usually have a small jar of anchovies in the fridge, so I felt pretty comfortable with the challenge, and I wanted the recipe I created to really demonstrate how anchovies can be used as an everyday ingredient. I’ve talked about using anchovies before as an easy way to add depth and a salty flavor to dishes and as a healthy inexpensive option for eating more seafood.

One of my favorite dinners is a simple preparation of brown rice stir fried in oil, topped with a fried egg and crisped garlic, and seasoned with Asian flavors like toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, or ginger. It’s quick and easy, and I usually always have the ingredients on hand, so it’s a good fallback option for when there isn’t time to grocery shop or meal plan. And it lends itself so well to this challenge. Because anchovies dissolve when you cook them in hot oil, they can be blended seamlessly into just about any dish that starts of sautéing something, anything, in olive oil. And I liked that the strong flavors of the egg and toasted sesame oil would complement the saltiness of the anchovies without overwhelming them (or letting the anchovies overpower everything else). And, in the true spirit of the RecipeRedux, I included some chopped steamed asparagus to make it even healthier.

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May 17, 2012

Fiddlehead Fern Shrimp Scampi

I was ready to post this recipe at 12:30 last night, but as I hit “Publish,” an error message popped up and erased the whole post. At midnight, I was too spent to cobble together what I could remember of my original writing, but I thought it was a fitting end (hopefully) to a week that’s had some pretty messy flops in the kitchen. I guess it happens to everyone; sometimes things just don’t work out. Ideas that you think might turn into fantastic recipes fall flat. A few days ago, for example, instead of sweet potato and chickpea fritters, I had a disintegrated, oily mess. What that means is that the next few posts I’ve developed include some of the quick and easy meals I’ve made for dinner as a Plan B, when my bigger ideas didn’t pan out.

This fiddlehead pasta dish is a good start to my series of flops. My sister came to visit me earlier this month and brought a small paper bag full of these fiddlehead ferns. The first time we made fiddleheads, it turned out disastrously. It was a few years ago, and we were up in the Green Mountains of Vermont, celebrating my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. We hiked along the trails and saw these ferns growing in the wild, and we were intrigued when we saw them for sale at the local market. My family and I bought a bundle, cooked them up, and ate them. And they were so bitter. As I’ve since learned, fiddlehead ferns need to be steamed for a few minutes before adding them to a dish, like this pasta. Here, I sauté the fiddlehead ferns for four minutes and then plunge them into an ice bath to halt the cooking process. Then, after cooking the shrimp and pasta, I add the ferns to the olive oil sauce. It turned out beautifully.

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May 9, 2012

Shrimp & Mango Tacos

Over the weekend, one of my favorite websites, Food52.com, won the James Beard Award for Publication of the year for their cookbook, a compilation of winners from their community cooking contests. I’ve used their contest themes for inspiration before, one of which was selected as a Community Pick on their site (pretty exciting, I thought). This time around, the idea is to showcase “Your Best Mango” in a new recipe, and this was what I came up with. Mangoes aren’t an ingredient I frequently cook with, but with Cinco de Mayo on the horizon, I went in a Southwestern direction, adding lime juice, cilantro, and onions to top off a shrimp taco. The shrimps are infused with a complimentary flavor profile, getting grilled with a dash of cumin. And before everything comes together, a small smear of adobo pepper sauce is spread across a lightly toasted tortilla, adding a smoky flavor and a kick of heat.

The combination of mango, cilantro, and lime brings an intense freshness to this recipe, and grilling both the shrimp and the mango adds complexity and layers of flavor. The recipe makes four individual tacos, which serves two people. It can easily be doubled or more.

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April 28, 2012

Wild Rice & Cauliflower Casserole

About two weeks ago, I gave a talk to a group of medical students at Boston University. The idea behind the presentation is that there’s a pretty significant dearth of nutrition education in our medical school curricula, so I tried to highlight some key points that they would find most helpful – for both their patients and themselves. Sometimes it’s hard to talk generally about eating healthier: everyone knows they should probably eat more vegetables, but so often people just don’t know how. I dislike coming back to that piece of advice again and again unless it is paired with concrete ideas for reaching that goal, which again, can be challenging in a group setting. One of the practical tips I included was to modify recipes by adding vegetables or increasing the quantities already called for in the recipe.

So I took my own advice when making Heidi Swanson‘s wild rice casserole, from her book Super Natural Everyday . While the original dish is healthy all by itself (whole grains, lean dairy, mushrooms), it’s almost begging to be doctored up with some vegetables, too. I opted for a head of cauliflower (a good choice for these early weeks of spring when the temperature hovers around 50 degrees), which blended in seamlessly with the creamy texture. Other ideas include broccoli or peas, which would add some nice color.

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April 21, 2012

Spring Garlic Carbonara

This dish has been a winter-long workhorse for me. I must have made it at least a half dozen times over our cold, though snow-less Boston winter. I even made it for my parents when I went home for Christmas. It’s the kind of dish that always sounds like a good idea: pasta studded with just the right amount of crispy, salty pancetta, coated with a rich, creamy (yet cream-less) sauce, and still loaded with a ton of vegetables. I knew I’d post it here in the next few months, but hadn’t found the right excuse. It’s the meal you make late at night, exhausted, after work, and you don’t bother to take photos of the food on the plate because it doesn’t stay there long anyway.

And then this month’s Recipe Redux topic was announced: the first shoots of spring. The theme highlights the first fresh produce of the season, and the recipes (check out more contributions to the Redux below) incorporate a wide range of veggies including ramps, Carolina sweet onions, and asparagus. And I though: what a perfect opportunity to introduce this fabulous carbonara.

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April 12, 2012

Spaghetti with a Puttanesca Puree

I’ve never been a big fan of puttanesca pasta, but it’s one my good friend Kerri’s favorites, and I think of her every time I see it on a menu. I’ve always wanted to like it, and on paper, it makes sense that I should. It’s got garlic, onions, tomatoes, and anchovies: so why didn’t I like it when they all came together in a sauce?

With this recipe, I seem to have fixed the issue. Most importantly, I got rid of the capers, a traditional, briny ingredient that I think was causing most of my problems. The other quick fix that I found immensely helpful was pureeing the sauce into a marinara-like consistency. A traditional puttanesca sauce is kind of like a stew: there a bunch of discrete bits and pieces that blend together over time and the flavors meld, but each bite doesn’t necessarily capture the whole dish at once. Making a sauce with a uniform texture is the perfect solution and will also help others who might be hesitant about adding anchovies or olives to their pasta.

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March 27, 2012

Bacon & Eggs Risotto

We’ve been basking in gorgeous 70-degree weather for the past couple of days in Boston, and I’ve been enjoying everything that comes with it: drinks outside on a sunny patio, the return of Boston’s bike share program, and commuting to school along the Charles river. But the weather’s dipped back down to the mid-40s and I’m back to wearing scarves and my winter coat. Yesterday was overcast, gloomy, and grey. So while it’s still appropriate to put together a wintry, comforting risotto, I wanted to share this with you.

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March 21, 2012

Crispy honey & wine roasted Brussels sprouts

A few weeks ago, my sister sent me a (late-night) text message asking me to come up with a recipe for crispy honey or teriyaki Brussels sprouts. Happily, about a week before that, I’d had dinner with a friend at a restaurant downtown which had crispy sprouts on its menu. They paired theirs with a savory, bleu-cheesy sauce that was actually quite good, but what I really learned from them was how to make Brussels sprouts crispy. When my order arrived, the Brussels sprouts were tiny, tender, and perfectly cooked, but these little cores came surrounding in a bowl of their own leaves, oven-roasted and crisped to a deep, delicate brown. Peeling the individual leaves off the Brussels sprouts and roasting them with their inner cores seems to be the trick to adding a little bit of crunchiness. I think this is the thing my sister’s hankering for, so I hope it works.

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March 13, 2012

Black Bean, Sweet Potato, and Chipotle Quesadilla

Even though I’d like to think that working & studying at home leaves plenty of time to cook creative, hot lunches, I usually fall back on a reliable favorite, a lightly-toasted quesadilla. This version is an incredibly healthy, vegetarian substitute for the classic chicken and cheese combination. Don’t be too skeptical about the sweet potato + black bean combination, it actually works quite well. Sauteing the beans with some chopped onion and ground cumin lend the quesadillas a characteristic southwestern flavor, and pairing beans, sweet potatoes, and whole wheat tortillas results in a super-filling lunch. Seriously, just three wedges will tide you over for a long time.

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Filed under Healthy, Quick & Easy, Sandwiches, Vegetarian