Brussel sprout broccoli dish

I wanted to make this:

http://www.katiekdid.com/2012/03/05/pistachio-cranberry-and-bacon-brussel-sprout-salad/

But ran out of Brussel sprouts, didn't have tarragon or pistachios and doubled the bacon.

I used 3 tablespoons of coconut oil since broccoli loves to suck up cooking fats...

But here we go:

In my cast iron skillet, sauté 12 ounces broccoli and about six ounces Brussel sprouts in 2 tablespoons coconut oil.

Sprinkle with generous garlic pepper, fresh ground black pepper and parsley. Add bacon broken into bits and another tablespoon coconut oil. Toss to coat.

Bake about 30 minutes at 375 adding cranberries in the last five or so minutes.

Mighty Green Pork Soup

It's raining and I wanted to make this:
http://angelfoodcooking.blogspot.com/2011/01/pork-soup-part-one.html?m=1
But as usual I don't have the ingredients. So I made a similar soup.

INGREDIENTS (in crock pot)
- about two cups chopped and browned pork

(I browned mine in my Le Creuset cast iron skillet with two parts canola oil to one part walnut oil, adding fresh ground pepper and minced garlic while it fried)
- 32 ounces Kitchen Basics unsalted vegetable stock
- 16 ounces Pacific foods Organic butternut squash soup
- 36 ounces water
- 2 tablespoons parsley
- 1 tablespoon cumin
- 1 1/2 cups frozen greenbeans

- 1 can Great Northern Beans
- 1 crown fresh broccoli
- 1/4 cup frozen peas
- 1 cup frozen corn

Leftover Skillet

Every family has its way of treating/recycling leftovers.

Today we took some leftover meats, some leftover greenbeans from the garden, leftover fresh vegetables, and leftover Kraft macaroni and cheese and cooked it in the skillet in a sauce of leftover white wine, butter, extra virgin olive oil, four color peppercorn and a touch of garlic salt.

Pasta days

Last night, my husband made spaghetti with herbs from the garden (basil and oregano) and morningstar vegetarian sausage. It was incredible.

During half time of the French/South Aftica game, I whipped up savory baked mac and cheese. Since it's going to be another hot day, I thought I'd turn the oven on for lunch.

I used my basic Betty Crocker recipe, but altered it to use as the cheese about 3 ounces sage derby, about 2 ounces monterey jack, and about four ounces Velveeta. And I used chives from the garden, fresh ground garlic salt and fresh ground four color peppercorn instead of onion for the base.

I'm baking it in the Le Creuset skillet with a heap of broccoli.

broccoli cheese quesadillas

For a quick easy dinner last night that included a green veggie, my husband (at my suggestion) made cheddar-broccoli quesadillas in the skillet and served with mango salsa. Not high cuisine, but tasty and kid friendly. Included a green veggie, an orange fruit, calcium and protein. All good in my book. And literally, he chopped the broccoli and cooked it in the microwave, slapped it inside flour tortilla shells with lots of cheese and cooked with cooking spray in the pan. That's all. Nothing fancy.

Turkey Spinach Omelettes

So, for the last 24 hours I have thought about the omelette I wanted to make with the leftover white meat of turkey. I made it for dinner tonight and served with Nana's homemade applesauce.

Angel's Turkey Spinach Omelette with a hint of curry

• 6 eggs, beaten
• about 1.5 cups turkey, white meat, shredded
• about 1.5 cups cheese, cheddar, shredded
• about 1 cup frozen chopped spinach, thawed
• 1 teaspoon garlic pepper
• 1 teaspoon ground four color peppercorns
• 1 teaspoon curry
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil

In a skillet, not a huge one, melt the butter, add the olive oil and the two peppers. Add the spinach, sauté about one minute, add about half of the curry. Add the turkey. Add the other half of the curry to the turkey. Stir. Let sauté, stirring ocassionally, until the liquid begins to disappear.

Pour the hot turkey/spinach filling into a bowl and set aside. Pour eggs into the hot skillet. Let cook on medium or medium high depending on your cookware about one to two minutes. Add the turkey spinach filling. Let cook until the eggs are almost "solid." Add the cheese. Let sit another minute, probably would work best if you covered it to help melt the cheese. Then fold the omelet in half and press down to make sure nothing runny comes out. If it does, let the omelette continue cooking until the runny stuff hardens, as long as your frying pan is not hot enough to burn the eggs.

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Mini broccoli pot pies

The last item for pre-prep is broccoli pot pies... I put little aluminum foil discs in the bottom of cupcake tins to keep them from sticking and rip ready-made pie crusts into pieces about the size of my hand.

We made WAY more filling than we needed. So we made a broccoli cheese calzone kind of thing for another day. And froze it. We started out with 24 cupcake tins with the crust in them.

In a bowl, we mixed:

• Three crowns fresh broccoli cut into bite size pieces
• 2 cans broccoli cheese soup
• about two teaspoons garlic pepper

We scooped a large heaping tablespoon into each tin, pinched the crust closed and then baked at 375 until brown (about 20 minutes.)

Steak sandwiches

So I sliced the leftover steak au poivre into slivers and layed it into my skillet. I cooked it on low to warm it and get the pink out, and sprinkled it with garlic pepper. I added the leftover brandy cream sauce and cooked the meat slowly in the sauce with the last of the frozen parsley from my garden (about 2 tablespoons 'fresh' parsley).

I thawed the last (and very nice looking) loaf of homemade bread. Added a nice helping of leftover gratin, the spinach-cauliflower gratin I adapted from a Wegmans recipe.

Heated the gratin.

Added some slices of meat to each little piece of bread with some 'gravy.'

Fantastic. (Better than the first time around.)

My husband agreed.

Steak au poivre with cauliflower-spinach gratin

For dinner tonight, I wanted to make another meal in my Le Creuset skillet. I opted for steak au poivre, but I'll tell you, the cut of steak I picked (a huge sirloin of 2 pounds I bought for $10) had way too much fat for my liking and I ended up cooking it medium-rare when I really don't like my meat with 'red.'

The menu:
Appetizer: dates
The meal: Steak au poivre with cauliflower-spinach gratin, with bread leftover from last night's Italian dinner with family
The wine: a French Cabernet Sauvignon, selected by a French friend

First, for an appetizer, I sliced some whole dates to get the pits out and arranged two dates on each bread plate like a flower.

Steak au poivre (Steak with pepper)
from the Internet (I no longer have the source)

• 4 (3/4 to 1 inch thick) boneless top-loin (strip) steaks 8-10 ounces each
• 1 tablespoon kosher salt (I use iodized sea salt)
• 2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns (I use organic four color peppercorns)
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil (I use canola)
• 1/3 cup finely cut shallots (I substitute fresh chives and tonight I omitted them completely, but I thought it was detrimental to the gravy.)
• 1/2 stick butter, cut into four pieces of one tablespoon each
• 1/2 cup cognac or other brandy
• 3/4 cup heavy cream

Preheat oven to 200 degrees.

Pat steaks dry and season both sides with salt. Gently crush peppercorns using the bottom of a heavy skillet and press pepper evenly into both sides of meat.

Heat a 12-inch cast iron skillet over moderately high heat until hot (about three minutes). Add oil. Swirl evenly. Sauté steaks in two batches, turning over once. About six minutes for medium-rare.

Transfer steaks to heatproof platter. Place in oven to keep warm.

Drain fat from skillet. Add shallots and half the butter to the skillet and cook the shallots over moderately high heat, scraping, until shallots are well-browned all over.

Add cognac. (It may ignite!) Boil, stirring, until liquid is reduced to a glaze, 2 to 3 minutes. Add cream and any meat juices from the platter. Boil, stirring occasionally, until liquid is reduced by half. Add remaining butter and cook over low heat until incorporated. Serve sauce with steaks.

The gratin is an adaption from a recipe that appeared in Wegmans magazine.

Cauliflower and Spinach gratin:

• 1 head cauliflower, stemmed and cut into nice serving pieces
• 10 ounces spinach (I used 1 package frozen chopped spinach, heated and drained)
• salt and pepper
• 1 cup breadcrumbs
  
• Italian seasoning
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup soy milk
• 1 cup shredded mozzerella
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Combine the cauliflower, the spinach, the milk, the cream, the seasonings, and the mozzerella and half the breadcrumbs. Grease 13 x 9 pan. Add mixture to pan. Cook for 20 minutes at 350. Stir. Cook another 20 minutes. Combine remaining bread crumbs with olive oil. Sprinkle on gratin and return to oven for a final 15 minutes.

Odds and ends

Last night for dinner, I served spinach nuggets and leftover spaghetti which my daughter got to enjoy with a caramel apple from her trip to the corn maze for girl scouts.

Breakfast for her today was Greek yogurt and Booberry.

For lunch, my husband made tuna sandwiches on homemade bread with carrots and "dippins" (ranch dressing). With some chocolate chip cookies I brought home from my business trip.

Hopefully, it will rain and my dad will have us over for dinner. If not, I took chili out of the freezer.

Interestingly, we haven't had any juice or milk since I returned home (and it's been almost a week, am I lazy or just busy?)

Spinach Rigatoni with Garden Vegetable Sauce & Gruyère

I made spinach rigatoni from Aldi tonight. I like the spinach rigatoni from Aldi. It's $3.99 for the bag, and the bag feeds the family with some leftovers, especially when I doctor it.

The bag supposedly feeds three. Because of all the cheese, they are high in saturated fat, but they are also high in protein and nutrients. I don't use the seasoning packet so that may reduce the sodium significantly. I don't know.

But one serving of just the pasta has 19 g protein, 5% RDA Vitamin A, 35% RDA calcium, and 15% RDA Iron.

And tonight I made this funky sauce:

• 1/4 cup leftover crôque monsieur sauce
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1/4 cup shredded gruyère
  
• 2 teaspoons butter
• one teaspoon cornstarch
• 1/4 cup diced tomato from the garden
• 4 basil leaves from the garden
• One handful parsley from the garden
• 1 tablespoon chopped chives (from the garden)

I melted the butter, added the cornstarch and whisked until combined. I added the crôque monsieur sauce, the cheese and the heavy cream. Once combined, I added the herbs and the tomato. I cooked until bubbly.

When the noodles were done, I poured the sauce over the noodles in a big pot. Then I added:

• 3/4 cup finely chopped fresh broccoli, cooked
• 1 cup peas, cooked
• 1 shredded morningstar vegetarian chicken finger

And that was dinner.

Daddy Pasta

While cleaning Tuesday a.m. I did something to my back. I've spent much of the last few days with ice packs and Aleve. I thought I was better today but an unexpected day on my feet at my desk job destroyed any progress I had made.

This directly relates to my post. I made chicken diable to use the chicken I had planned to prepare as a fancy French style meal on Tuesday. The effort killed me. So, for yesterday and today we lived on leftovers.

Last night my husband made this pasta. He loves to experiment with noodles. Nothing drastic, always lots of cheese.

He made spaghetti. For the sauce he used two tiny cans of the plain tomato sauce, seasoned them with Italian seasoning, and added the tail end of a big old block of cheddar we'd been cooking with for the last week or so. I don't buy sliced cheese. I either get cheddar in blocks from Aldi, $1.20 for 8 oz., or the warehouse club, about $5 for 32 oz. Orange American freaks my daughter out because in our house cheese is white. And since the big blocks dry out if you don't store them perfectly, my husband thought it'd be a good idea to finish this one off.

Then, he added frozen vegetables. Peas, carrots, cauliflower and broccoli to be exact. I would have left out the carrots, but it was a bag of 'California blend' and unlike me, he wasn't about to pick them out.

Funky Mexican Style Meal

We made that hot bean dip on Sunday and today I plan on using it for some sort of cheddar cheese burritos for lunch. I'm currently boiling water for brown rice. 1 cup instant brown rice. I put in the pan 2 cups water, about a teaspoon commercial chili powder (the kind that has all the chili seasonings not just chili powder), about a teaspoon garlic powder and a few twists of my pepper grinder with the four color peppercorns.

After the rice cooked for about six minutes I threw in some tiny pieces of fresh broccoli, about 1/4 cup frozen corn, about a 1/4 cup frozen peas, and about a 1/4 cup fresh matchstick carrots that are no longer that fresh.

I sprayed my skillet with some no-stick spray, tossed in flour tortilla, some shredded cheddar and a few spoonfuls of the bean dip. With the heat on around medium, I slapped a lid on the skillet and cooked it until the cheese melted, careful not to let the bottom of the tortilla burn. I pulled it off the heat, topped with mango salsa and rolled.

Those who have followed my blog for a while know that I serve mango salsa with my Mexican dinners because it has a nice vitamin C and vitamin A content, so it's not nutritionally void like a lot of salsas. I use Wegmans. They have a generic version that's organic.

Greenbean Caesar

I harvested about a pound of greenbeans from my garden. I started making greenbean caesar, but then we also had nachos. (Odd combo, I know, but we just got home from the park and we need to get food in someone's belly so we can get her in the tub.)

We used a special hot bean dip, mango salsa and cheddar cheese for the nachos. They were so good no one wanted any greenbeans so I think I'll wrap them up and serve with dinner tomorrow. I have jury duty so who knows if I'll be home in time to cook.

The original recipe came from the recipe software Darrell bought me for my old Mac Performa... ten years ago.

Greenbean Ceasar:
1.5 pounds fresh greenbeans or two 9-ounce packages frozen
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (I used EV olive)
1 tablespoon wine vinegar (red works, so does balsamic, so does apple cider in a pinch, and today I tried champagne. Fabulous, especially since my family detests a strong vinegar flavor)
1 tablespoon minced onion (I skip, though I may try fresh chives instead)
1/4 teaspoon salt (I skip)
1/8 teaspoon pepper (I use my grinder with my four-color peppercorns and I don't measure)
1 clove garlic, pressed

Topping
2 tablespoons breadcrumbs
2 tablespoons grated parmesan*
1 tablespoon butter or margarine*

Paprika

* To make this recipe vegan, I skip the cheese and the butter.

Cook beans to desired crispness. Then toss with all the other ingredients, except the topping. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put beans in oven safe dish. Combine topping ingredients and mix with fingers to form "crumbs." (I often skip this and just sprinkle whatever I want on top, including other seasonings.) Sprinkle over beans. Add paprika to top if desired. Bake, uncovered, for 15 minutes.

Leftover Chicken and Spinach Salad

As I suspected, last night's chicken reheated wonderfully and the basil and ginger flavor really came through after sitting. We served it for dinner with a small side salad of spinach that our daughter picked from the garden. My husband and daughter ate theirs with organic ranch, I used a Wish Bone red wine spritzer. And we still had some vouvray left to wash it down...

Terri Rigatoni

It's a positively frigid June day, and it's raining, and I have company coming tonight after dinner... On top of all that, my contractor called at 1:30 and said he had the windows I ordered in April and he wanted to know if he could come install them.

Today.

I said sure. I guess I need more chaos in my life. He wanted to make a rainy day productive.

They arrived around 3 and had the windows installed before 5. My guests might arrive around 7:30, but I told one she could come early. Between trying to keep the cats from jumping out the windowless windows and my almost-five-year-old from getting under foot, dinner was not a concern.

I went so far as to request cheesesteaks. But, I opted to cook, because my friends are bringing goodies and I don't want to be too full to eat them.

So, as my husband chopped fresh broccoli into his trademark teeny-tiny pieces and cooked the remaining portion of Aldi spinach rigatoni, I got my skillet and about four tablespoons of olive oil. I sprinkled about two tablespoons of garlic powder in. My husband chopped and grated the last hunk of ricotta salata. I tossed the chunks into the skillet, then the broccoli. I sprinkled some of the rigatoni seasoning on it.

Then, I warmed the leftover elbow macaroni in the microwave. I put the cooked rigatoni in the skillet and added more mystery seasoning. I combibed the elbows and the skillet mixture and sprinkled in the last of the grated asiago. When I dished it onto plates, I added grated ricotta salata on top.

Mystery Quiche

My daughter and I just whipped up a quiche that may turn out odd. We started with a store-bought crust, added two strips Morningstar vegetarian bacon in crumbles in the bottom, about a half cup frozen peas, and about a half cup each frozen broccoli and frozen cauliflower. (It was California Medley but we picked out the carrots.) Then we added about 2.5 ounces of cheddar and about 3 ounces gruyere.

In a separate dish, I poured almost two cups of soymilk, a big tablespoon of sour cream, four eggs and a container of Papa John's garlic butter sauce. My daughter whisked it until smooth and we poured it into the pie crust with the other goodies. It's baking now, so we'll see...

Pasta with vegetables and artichoke hearts

I intended to make Dominique Malet's "Orecchiette Aux Brocolis" for lunch, but the laissez-faire state of our groceries contradicted that.
So I based a dish on hers.

Ingredients for Pasta with Vegetables and Artichokes
Pasta of your choice
About 3 cups frozen cauliflower, carrots and broccoli, cooked
About 2 cups frozen artichoke hearts, cooked
About four tablespoons garlic powder
one teaspoon garlic pepper
two teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons slivered almonds
About 1/2 cup milk
grated cheeses
pepper

I cooked about 400 grams of elbow pasta.

While that cooked, I heated the olive oil in a skillet with the milk and garlic powder, garlic pepper and fresh ground pepper. Once it became bubbly I added the almond, the artichokes and the vegetables. I cooked them until good and hot.

I put the cooked noodles in a big serving dish. I poured the sauce over the noodles, holding the vegetables, artichokes and nuts back in the pan and returning them to the burner on high to try and brown them.

While they cooked, I stirred the noodles and noticed I didn't make much sauce.

I added the vegetable mixture to the noodles. As I served, I generously added grated parmesan, romano and asiago. The sauce was just enough to make the cheese stick to the noodles, but the vegetables soaked up most of the moisture.

The family devoured it, which surprised me because last time we had artichokes my daughter hated them.

For dessert, we had a small dish of vanilla ice cream.

Un-Chicken Parm

My husband once again saves the day. This whole week is a blur for me and eating has not entered my mind as a priority. I thawed out a loaf of homemade French bread. That was my contribution. My husband made tuna with soy mayonnaise and crackers (the funky gluten free multi-grain or ritz I wonder) for lunch. And carrot sticks. For dinner, he made "chicken" parm with Morningstar Chik'n Patties, cheese, Wegmans pizza sauce and the homemade bread. He cooked some mixed veggies in seasoning (probably garlic pepper and a touch of butter) and voilà.

Good news is that the budget post-home disaster (we had a minor flood a month ago) has recuperated and I might be able to go to the grocery store soon! And I expect this week to be nutty, and full of bad food, but next week (fingers crossed) we'll get back on track.

Curried fried veggies

I'm probably going to make Morningstar chk'n patties or nuggets to accompany this... but I have broccoli, carrots and cauliflower cooking now. I mixed some curry powder (amount based on the smell) with breadcrumbs and plan to roll the veggies in the mix and fry them. We'll see how it turns out...

Wow... another culinary coup. ;-)

To try this at home:

Angel's curried fried vegs

1. Cook your vegetables, but not too soft. I used about 2-3 cups of frozen cauliflower, carrots, and broccoli.

2. Mix about 3/4 cup Italian breadcrumbs, two tablespoons curry powder, and two tablespoons garlic powder.

3. Roll veggies in the crumbs, the moisture from cooking should help them stick.

4. Heat canola oil in skillet. I used about a 12 inch skillet and used a layer of oil about 1/2 inch thick. That's pretty generous for me.

5. Drop coated veggies in hot oil and fry until crispy and darker. I drained mine on paper towels before serving.

photo caption: Morningstar buffalo chicken wings, commercial spinach dip (for the nuggets) and Angel's curried-fried veggies.