Category Archives: Vegetarian

December 11, 2012 · 7:36 pm

Drunken Fig and Pear Pockets

Is this not the perfect name for a holiday appetizer?

In addition to the parties lined up over the coming weeks, I’m happily anticipating the conclusion of my final semester of graduate school. In the middle of all the chaos of finals, prepping for the clinical rotations, and holiday travel, I also just ran my first 5k race. There’s plenty to celebrate.

Screen shot 2012-12-11 at 6.08.27 PMMy first 5K was the Winter Classic in Cambridge, MA, and it was a blast. Although I run consistently for fun, I’d never tackled a road race, so I was a little nervous going in to it. At a little over 3.1 miles, I was confident I’d be able to handle the distance, but it was the mass start and the drive to constantly push myself. I finished in just over 23 minutes, which I was excited about. I’m already looking forward to signing up for more. You definitely get bitten by the bug after your first one.

So, back to the drunken pears. As someone whose name starts at the beginning of the alphabet, I always get assigned to the appetizer group for potlucks, and I sometimes struggle figuring out what to bring. I came up with this recipe a few weeks ago when I thought the November Recipe Redux challenge was for holiday appetizers. It ended up that the real challenge was for vintage appetizers (or remakes of childhood favorites), but oh well. I’m glad I made this, and I’m looking forward to the next chance to make this again.

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Filed under Appetizer, Baking, Fall, Healthy, Holiday, Quick & Easy, Snacks & Party Food, Vegetarian, Winter

December 8, 2012 · 9:38 pm

Crisp Vegetables & Pasta Smothered with Satay Sauce

Would it surprise anyone to know that my fall has been filled with quick, simple dinners that translate well into leftovers that I can tote to work or school the next day?  Life has been intensely busy with school, work at the clinic, and wedding planning. Most of it has been challenging and fun, but it hasn’t left a lot of time for the cooking projects I’d like to do. The transition from fall to winter is one of my favorite seasons in part because of all the produce and comfort foods that are great this time of year. It isn’t quite winter here yet in Boston, so hopefully I’ll get to showcase a few more of my ideas. And I only have two more weeks left in my Master’s program before my internship starts, so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel work-wise. 

But for now, I’m really focusing on simple, cheap, and delicious. Which, luckily, this satay pasta is. It’s got the crunch and brightness of fresh vegetables cooked to just tender, with a luscious peanut sauce on top. I’ve made the pasta + tofu + peanut sauce combination before, and I think it’s a great introduction to new flavors and ingredients (like tofu or bok choy). Continue reading →

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October 21, 2012 · 7:37 pm

Spaghetti Squash with Roasted Garlic and Parmesan

Spaghetti squash is something I’ve known about for awhile, have always wanted to try, but I never got around to making it. I think it had something to do with the fact that squashes are heavy, and I carry all my groceries home on foot. It’s always easier to opt to buy the bag of potatoes right in the neighborhood than it is to lug a winter squash home from the Trader Joe’s next to work. But this month’s Recipe Redux challenge (cooking with the orange colors of fall) provided me with the perfect opportunity to try to cook an ingredient I’d always been curious about.

After a leisurely hour and 15 minutes in the oven, my experiment was ready. I’d roasted whole garlic cloves right alongside the squash, and complement the dish with some Parmesan cheese. I know a lot of recipes out there use spaghetti squash as a substitute for pasta, but I really wanted the flavor of the squash to come through. That way, it’s easier to know what you’re working with, and if you go on to make dishes in which it substitutes for pasta, you know what it tastes like and can expect something ever so slightly different than real spaghetti.

Overall, the dish came out great. I liked the combination of squash, roasted garlic, and Parmesan lightly seasoned with salt and pepper. The process of pulling out the strands of spaghetti was also easy. What surprised me, though, was how difficult the seeds were to get out (pulling a large amount of spaghetti-shaped strands with each seed… oh well) and how squarely this recipe fits into the autumnal side dish category. I’d originally made it as a Saturday afternoon snack, but I feel it really needs a dish of substance alongside it to really satisfy.

Spaghetti Squash with Roasted Garlic and Parmesan Cheese

Ingredients
1 medium spaghetti squash
5 cloves garlic, unpeeled with the papery skin still on
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
salt & pepper, to taste

Steps

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with tin foil and roast the spaghetti squash for 1 hour and 15 minutes. With 20 minutes left in the cooking time, rub a generous amount of olive oil into the garlic cloves and place them on the same baking sheet as the squash and roast for 20 minutes.

2. Remove the squash and garlic from the oven. Peel the garlic and squeeze the soft, roasted garlic insides into a small bowl. When the squash is cool enough to handle, slice it in half and use a large spoon to remove the seeds. Then use the spoon to pull the squash flesh off the sides. It should come off in ribbons resembling spaghetti.

3. Mix the squash, garlic, Parmesan, salt & pepper together in a bowl. Serve as a side to any fall main course.



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September 30, 2012 · 10:26 pm

Sliced Tomato Salad

September and August have been enveloped by two of the most expensive and time-consuming tasks I’ve ever taken on: wedding planning and graduate school. It’s been fun and challenging, and it’s so exciting to think about how different my life might be in a year from now, but it doesn’t leave a lot of time for cooking,  no matter how well-intentioned my weekends are.

Luckily, the fall lends itself to easily prepared lunches, snacks, and dinners. I’ve relied heavily on afternoon noshes of this simple tomato salad and multiple batches of homemade guacamole on the weekend. I’ve bought a bundle of tomatoes from the grocery store, slice them, de-seed them (if necessary), and drizzle them with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil, and salt. It’s so easy, there really isn’t an accompanying recipe. It’s just the clean, fresh flavors of the season, simply prepared, and eaten in the middle of a Saturday study session or in between researching vendors.

Happily, I’ve got the first exam of the semester under my belt, and we’ve squared away contracts with most of the key vendors involved in our wedding. It feels great to get so much accomplished, but at the same time, I can’t wait to get back into more cooking. Hearty, flavorful pasta dishes, warming soups, and roasted vegetables will all hopefully be on the table (and on this blog) in the progressively cooler months to come. Undoubtedly, I’ll focus on some make-ahead meals that I’ve been taking to lunch and some weeknight favorites that have been quick and inexpensive to make (as we’re now solidly in saving mode). But for now, I’ll leave you with the best of summer’s last produce, to enjoy while it lasts.

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Filed under Appetizer, Fall, Healthy, Quick & Easy, Salads, Seasonal, Summer, Vegetarian

August 21, 2012 · 10:45 pm

Creamy Lemon Pasta

As I mentioned last time, I spent a wonderful weekend in New York City with my sister, and one of the highlights of that trip was a meal we had at a restaurant in TriBeCa called Pepolino’s. I ordered cinghiale, a dish I’d tried before, and my sister ordered a simple but delicious creamy lemony pasta. It was the kind of night where we closed the place down. So when the Recipe Redux group announced that our challenge this month was to describe your favorite summer vacation meal (and pair it with a recipe for a slightly healthier version of the dish), I thought back to that celebratory weekend in NYC. This was a bit of a challenge because 1) creamy pasta can be the be-all and end-all of luxurious meals (at least I think so), and sometimes trying to make it healthy just changes it into a different beast altogether, and 2) cream + lemon often just equals a curdled mess. So how did this restaurant get such luscious creamy pasta that was so absolutely infused with the flavor of lemon without breaking the rules of cooking?

The answer, most likely, is fat and lots of it. In the past, I’ve made soups and pastas with “lighter” ingredients that can’t stand up to the heat of cooking let alone the acidity of lemons. And using high-fat ingredients, like heavy cream instead of milk or low-fat yogurt, provides enough of a buffer to prevent the protein from curdling. So, knowing that the challenge to making a healthy version of this creamy pasta would focus on cutting out the cream, I turned to eggs. Adding eggs to cooked pasta (a la carbonara) can result in a surprisingly creamy and rich dish without adding cream (you’re still adding calories, cholesterol, and some saturated fat, but it’s a win overall).

Then the challenge was the lemon flavor. The first time around, I added 4 Tablespoons of lemon juice and the zest of 1 1/2 lemons, which really delivered on the lemon flavor, but I thought it was way too tart, verging on bitter. David loved it, so if you’re someone who can’t get enough lemon, add some lemon zest even though the recipe below leaves it out. In the final rendition that I made just this last weekend, I added a bit of white wine to complement the flavors and cut the over-zealous flavor of the lemon and added a bit of half and half to make sure the dish really did deliver with the promise of a creamy texture.

The results? This is close: it absolutely has a fantastic lemon flavor, it’s creamy, and it’s satisfying. But I think nothing can quite capture the magic of dinner out in New York City with family or friends. But for an at-home recreation, I think this is quite a success.

Creamy Lemon Pasta
Inspired by Pepolino’s in NYC

Ingredients
3/4 lb. spaghetti
2 whole eggs + 1 egg yolk
4 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 cup half and half
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese

Steps
1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until done (according to package directions or to taste). Reserve 1 cup of the pasta water. Drain and return the pasta to the pot immediately.
2. While pasta cooks, separate one egg yolk and whisk it together with the two remaining eggs. As soon as the cooked pasta is returned to the pot, pour in the eggs and stir vigorously. The goal is to coat the strands of spaghetti evenly without letting clumps of eggs cook into chunks of scrambled egg in the middle of your pasta.
3. Once the eggs have been thoroughly incorporated and coat the pasta evenly, add the peas, then add the lemon juice and stir again. Finally, had the wine, then the half and half, stirring after each addition. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and serve.



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August 13, 2012 · 2:28 pm

Simple Chopped Summer Salad

On a Saturday morning back in July, my Recipe Redux post was supposed to go up along with other dietitians’ and healthy cooking bloggers’ recipes. Instead, I spent my weekend in New York City celebrating with my sister. We spent our afternoons noshing on sushi and Italian food (not at the same time), exploring her new neighborhood, and sipping red wine while watching Say Yes to the Dress and scoping out dresses online. And that was all just icing on the cake; the exciting news is that David and I got engaged! The past few weeks have been a fabulous whirlwind of excitement, so I’m confident the Reduxers will forgive my absence.

If I hadn’t been wrapped up in the all the excitement, and if I’d posted what I was supposed to be posting, it would have been this simple summer salad. The theme this time around was no-cook summer meals. I find it amusing that all through July I posted recipes that required cranking the oven in the middle of a summer heat wave, and when the Recipe Redux challenge rolled around I didn’t put together a no-cook meal for all of you. But this is actually a recipe that’s been popping up frequently in my summer rotation, especially for lunches and dinners when we get a late start or have nothing else immediately on hand. The last two weeks have been a constant string of meeting friends for after-work drinks and dining out, so I’ve been grateful for this dish as a healthy fall-back recipe to eat at work or later in the evening.

This recipe, which isn’t so much a recipe as it is a combination of my favorite simple ingredients at the moment, is very much in keeping with my Southwestern-flavored summer. I’ve been on a huge avocado kick lately, and topping this salad off with chunks of ripe avocado is what makes it one of my favorites. A blend of cherry tomatoes, red bell pepper, and avocado is mixed with chopped romaine hearts and arugula.  I finished it all finished off with a drizzle of a tangy, punchy, mustard vinaigrette. I sometimes think salads are hard to eat if all the individual ingredients are clumped in isolated piles rather than mixed in, so I think it’s a must that all the ingredients get chopped and thoroughly tossed together. It makes it so much more accessible. It is simple and satisfying. But I hesitated a bit before posting a salad as a no-cook meal. After all, the combination of ingredients isn’t exactly a new idea. But in the course of my day working at at diabetes clinic and speaking with a wide variety of people, I’ve found that it isn’t always an easy thing to just combine a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and have it turn out well. A lot of people need direction in taking salads from being mere “rabbit food” to a meal that’s worth making and worth eating. So I put this dish forward as a recipe I love and make over and over again. To keep it simple, I buy a bag of three romaine hearts and some arugula, a pint of cherry tomatoes, two red bell peppers, and two avocados, I use it all to make two salads, and it gets me through a whole week’s worth of lunches (with a tuna sandwich on the side). I make a big batch in our huge yellow bowl, toss everything together so all the ingredients are evenly incorporated throughout, and then parse the whole salad into four different plastic containers.
Simple Chopped Summer Salad

Salad Ingredients
2 romaine lettuce hearts
3 oz. arugula
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 red bell pepper
1 avocado

Steps
1) Wash and dry both the romaine hearts and the arugula. Chop off the end of the romaine heart and cut the leaves into thin slices. Roughly chop the arugula, then combine the lettuce in a large bowl.
2) Wash the cherry tomatoes and the bell pepper. Halve or quarter the cherry tomatoes and toss into the large bowl along with the lettuce. Cut the red pepper open, remove the ribs and seeds, then chop into thin, short strips. Add to the salad and toss to combine.
3) Using a sharp knife, slice the avocado in half, working around the pit. Twist the two halves apart and remove the pit by firmly lodging the knife in the center and lifting out. Peel the rough outer skin off the avocado, then slice the flesh into chunks. Add to the salad bowl.

Vinaigrette
1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard
2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar
4 Tablespoons olive oil
salt & pepper, to taste

Combine all the ingredients in a small high-walled bowl. Whisk quickly to thoroughly combine. Drizzle over the salad and serve.

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July 18, 2012 · 4:19 pm

Spaghetti with Cilantro-Peanut Pesto

I’ve been on a bit of a Southwestern kick lately. Over the last year, I’ve made more and more dishes that involve the classic combination of cilantro, lime, corn, tomatoes, and beans. Part of it has to do with the fact that so many of the things you can make with a Southwestern bent are actually super healthy. Whole wheat quesadillas filled with cumin-scented black beans, onions, and cheese; stuffed peppers with corn and avocado, cheesy enchiladas with beans and tomatoes. These are all things that I’ve been making over and over again throughout the spring and into the summer. Even though it’s been crazy hot out lately, I managed to crank up my oven to 400-degrees for the sake of those enchiladas.

Part of the equation is that all of these dishes can be made with a few staple ingredients, cycling through the different recipes so you’re eating a different meal with slightly different flavors every night, yet nothing goes to waste because it’s languishing, unused, in your fridge.

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June 27, 2012 · 8:14 am

Red Lentil Dal with Asparagus with Perfect Roasted Potatoes

This August, I’ll be coming up on the 1-year benchmark for posting regularly on this blog. I actually started the blog a year earlier, in 2010, but it took awhile to find my rhythm and figure out what I actually wanted this space to be. It took another three months or so to figure out what good photos and lighting could do for food shots. Remember the tomato cobbler? It’s probably one of the best dishes I’ve made in the past year, but back in September, I was still surmounting the steep learning curve of DSLR and coming to grips with the fact that Photoshop can’t transform harsh 70-watt overhead lighting into soft natural light. Now, all of my shots are done in natural day light with some thought to food styling and composition. I still have a lot to learn, but I’ve made some good progress.

And then something like this red lentil dal comes along which absolutely resists having a good photograph taken. From any angle, it still looks like what it is: Red lentils cooked to bursting with some wiggly red onions and asparagus. The photos don’t help brag about the flavor, how the red lentils cook down to what turns out to be an excellent sauce for the asparagus and onions and how the Indian spice blend infuses the onions to perfection.

Not everything can be as beautiful as strawberries or melted, oozy cheese.

So without the help of photos, how can I convince you that you absolutely must make this recipe? That in the course of a few weeks, this dish has made many appearances on our dinner table, and it’s been a delight each time?

How about this: Once you buy the few spices needed which may not already be in your spice rack, this is one the absolute cheapest dinners you can cobble together, and you can do it again and again without needing to hit the grocery store each time. Continue reading →

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June 21, 2012 · 8:56 am

Mint-infused Ricotta Cheesecake Bites with Macerated Strawberries

Today marks Recipe Redux’s first birthday, and to celebrate, we’re all making small bite desserts. Recipe Redux was started by a group of dietitians, and each month a group of healthy food bloggers post the recipes they’ve created, all stemming from a single monthly challenge.

Those of you who know me in real life likely know that dessert isn’t my favorite course, and I’m much more likely to spend my time in the kitchen on something savory and satisfying instead of sweet and luxurious. So coming up with a tasty dessert bite was a bit of a challenge. Given my culinary proclivities, it’s no surprise that what I ended up with is a small bite leaning heavily on cheese and fruit. The idea here is pretty simple, and it’s a good party appetizer because so many of the elements can be made individually and made ahead of time. A classic shortbread dough is shaped into a tiny tart shell, then filled with ricotta cheese and macerated strawberries (though practically any fruit would do just as well).

But the absolute genius part of this recipe is what I came up with for the ricotta cheese: it’s homemade and infused with mint. It’s delicious, and I’m so excited to share it here! I’ve been making homemade ricotta for a few years, and it isn’t all that challenging. The only special equipment you need is cheesecloth, which can be bought at a grocery store or hardware store for around $2-3. One purchase will get you through several rounds of cheese making. After that, it’s as easy as boiling water (or milk, in this case), and draining. The brilliance of this particular recipe is that I added a good handful of mint leaves to the milk before I brought it to a boil, and the flavors and scent of the mint leaves perfume the final product. Strawberries and mint go so well together; this one simple addition helps elevate the entire dessert.

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June 16, 2012 · 10:00 am

Open-faced Caramelized Onion and Fontina Grilled Cheese Sandwich

It’s almost summer in Boston, but sometimes it doesn’t quite feel like it. Luckily, we’re seeing the seasons change with fresh summer produce turning up in the grocery stores, and the farmer’s markets have opened across the city. Sometimes it’s warm enough to grab a drink outside after work. But as I’m sitting here writing, it’s barely over 60 degrees outside, and I need to wear long sleeves to stay warm with the windows open.

About a week or so ago, it was a chilly, rainy day with the temperature down into the 50s. I’ve started a more ambitious running routine since my semester ended in May, and my good friend Jodi introduced me to running on the Esplanade along the Charles River. I do either a 4 or 5 mile loop most days of the week, and I’d been doing such a good job sticking to my routine that I didn’t want to let the rain and the chill be what broke my good streak. So I wore a fleece pullover and hit the road, got wet, but wound up back home after an otherwise normal run. I spent the rest of the day feeling like the damp had seeped into my bones and couldn’t get quite warm enough no matter what I did.

And so this sandwich was born: Standing by the stove slow-cooking some onions for about an hour and roasting tomatoes for soup would be the only thing to break the chill.

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