Archive for the Category ◊ Veggies ◊

30 Jan 2021 Absurdly Addictive Asparagus
Absurdly Addictive Asparagus

I belong to a cookbook club. We meet every month to feed each other some spectacular food and then to share the recipe for the food. Sometimes the meeting/recipes follow a theme like “Your Mom’s Best Recipe” or “Picnic Food”. Sometimes the meeting/recipes are from a particular cookbook, a particular chef, a particular location or focus on a particular ingredient. Usually I have it covered. This month though, I didn’t. Our meetings are on Sunday at 3, I was searching recipes at 8 PM on Saturday. Nothing was speaking to me. Desperation was setting in, but then desperation-inspiration hit and I googled Best Recipes of All Time. Five entries down I saw 10 Best Recipes of All Time at Food 52. I clicked on it. Then I clicked on the recipe in the #9 spot. Originally uploaded to Food52 by community member kaykay in 2010, this recipe has racked up an impressive amount of attention with upwards of 12,000 favorites and 300 comments. Pretty good creds, so I made it. Then I made it again. It was delicious. Don’t know why it’s only #9. Here’s the recipe; I only made a few minor changes, but if you want the original recipe, the link is above.

Absurdly Addictive Asparagus

SERVES 4

  • 4 ounces pancetta, cut into 3/8 inch to 1/4 inch dice
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 pound asparagus, woody ends trimmed and sliced into 2 inch pieces on the bias
  • 1 leek, thinly sliced crosswise (white and pale green parts only)
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • Zest of one lemon
  • 1-2 teaspoons orange zest
  • 2 tablespoons toasted pine nuts, optional
  • 1 tablespoon Italian parsley, chopped (more to taste)
  • Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
  1. In a large non-stick pan, sauté pancetta, stirring frequently, over medium heat, until crisp and lightly golden.
  2. Add 1 tablespoon of butter to pan. Add leek and sauté for a few minutes, or until halfway cooked.
  3. Add asparagus pieces and sauté until asparagus is tender crisp, about 3-4 minutes.
  4. Add garlic, lemon and orange zest, toasted pine nuts and parsley and sauté for about 1 minute, until fragrant.
  5. Season to taste with freshly ground pepper and salt and serve immediately.

I hope you enjoy it! Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
02 Oct 2019 Fresh Corn Soup
Fresh Corn Soup with Roasted Poblano Chilies, Queso Fresco, and fried corn tortilla strips.

This is such a plain and simple recipe, it’s hard to believe such a good tasting soup comes out of it!

The ingredient list for this soup is so ordinary that it’s hard to imagine how exceptional the soup tastes.  Been there, thought that. I was wrong. This soup is beyond the sum of its parts. Fresh Corn Soup is divine, and creamy and rich, but it’s not a hearty soup so it needs something else to go with it to make a full meal. Soup-and-sandwich anyone or, even better, a soup-and-enchilada combo?

I like to have this Fresh Corn Soup when the seasons are just beginning to change , just when cooler temperatures heighten the desire for soup and when the end-of-the-season corn-on-the-cob is still available. The original recipe said this soup can be made with frozen corn, so score one for simplicity! I always make things hard on myself though. I strip the corn kernels off six ears of fresh corn and then proceed with the recipe.

The toppings make this soup exceptional. Top each bowl of Fresh Corn Soup with a few corn tortillas cut into strips and fried in a little oil until crisp, a few crumbles of Queso Fresco, and a tablespoon or so of charred, peeled and diced poblano chilis.

This soup can be made vegetarian by substituting vegetable broth for the chicken broth, or by not using broth at all and using milk as the liquid ingredient.

Fresh Corn Soup

4 cups fresh corn kernels (from about 6 ears of corn) or 4 cups frozen corn kernels, defrosted.

1 cup water

4 tablespoons butter

2 cups chicken broth, vegetable broth, or milk

2 cups of milk

½ teaspoon table salt or 1 teaspoon Kosher salt

  1. Mix corn with water and place in blender, process until the water and corn combine into a smooth paste.
  2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add corn puree and sauté for 5 minutes.
  3. Pour chicken broth (or veggie broth) plus milk into pan with corn mixture and bring to a boil.
  4. Reduce heat to medium and gently simmer soup for 15 minutes.
  5. Turn off heat and cool slightly.
  6. Don’t skip this step! I did once and it was not nice. Pour the soup into a fine mesh strainer. Retain the liquid and discard the solids.
  7. When ready to serve, gently reheat and serve with all three of the toppings below.

Makes about 6 cups of soup. Leftover soup freezes well.

Garnishes

2 Poblano Chilies

3 corn tortillas

Queso Fresco

  1. Char the poblano chilies over an open burner. When completely charred and black, place in a brown paper bag to cool. When cool enough to handle, rub the burned skin off with a paper towel, cut away the stem, seeds and membrane and then finely chop the remaining flesh.
  2. Cut the three corn tortillas into thin strips. Heat a thin layer of vegetable oil in a small fraying pan. When hot add some of the strips and fry until light brown. Repeat with remaining tortilla strip.
  3. Open the package of Queso Fresco and crumble the cheese.
  4. Add ½-1 tablespoon of diced chilies into bottom of the bowl along with approx. 1 tablespoon crumbled Queso Fresco.
  5. Ladle hot soup over the chilies and cheese.
  6. Top with crispy fried corn tortillas
Fresh Corn Soup made with white corn, topped with fancy corn tortilla shapes and Queso Fresco. Made and photographed by my daughter, Abby.

Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
03 Oct 2013 Butternut Squash : Little Pieces of Heaven

squash01

No one ever makes this recipe when I suggest it to them, EVER.   The recipe is just so…, so, …odd.  Mere mortals can’t put the ingredients together in their head and have any idea about how GOOD butternut squash tastes when cooked like this.  For years I’ve been banging my head against a wall trying to promote this recipe. I have submitted this recipe to two community cookbooks, and no one ever called to say how wonderful the recipe was, so I know no one tried it. My family loves this, of course.  These little pieces of heaven never make it to the table to be served with any meal.  We just crowd around the pan and eat it hot from the oven, elbowing out anyone who gets in our way.  I guess I could promote this recipe as our “Family’s Favorite  Secret Recipe”, one that we are now sharing with the world.  That might be more of a selling point than “No one ever makes this recipe when I suggest it to them, EVER”!

Anyway, I thought I found this recipe, a long, long time ago, in Jeffrey Steingarten’s book, The Man Who Ate Everything, but looking through the index now on Amazon I don’t see any mention of it in the index, or in the index of his other book, It Must Have Been Something I Ate. Now I am stumped, but I am still going to credit him for the recipe because I am pretty sure that’s where I found it, at least I think I am sure… I would have liked to have dreamed this up myself!  I would like to think I have a palate creative enough to roast some squash pieces, then sprinkle them with a little red wine vinegar and dried mint resulting in these Little Pieces of Heaven (really, they are just that) but I am fairly certain it didn’t happen that way…

Butternut Squash : Little Pieces of Heaven

  • 1 butternut squash
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon melted butter (or an extra tablespoon olive oil)
  • a pinch of Kosher or other coarse salt (if you only have table salt, that’s fine too)
  • a pinch of black pepper
  • 2-3 teaspoons Red Wine Vinegar or Raspberry Vinegar
  • a pinch of Dried Mint
  1.  Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Put rimmed baking sheet in oven to preheat, too.
  2. Peel and seed the squash.  Cut squash into bite sized pieces. (I like to slice the squash into rounds, or half circles, and then cut those larger slices into triangular shaped wedges.)
  3. Put the squash pieces into a large Ziploc bag or a bowl.  Add olive oil and optional melted butter and toss well.
  4. Remove hot tray from oven.  Pour oil coated squash pieces onto the hot tray and immediately place in hot oven.
  5. Bake for 10 minutes.  Check.  If the undersides of most of the pieces are slightly browned, remove tray from oven and turn pieces over.  (I do this one at a time with a fork.)  If the undersides are not yet browned.  Continue to bake for another 2-5 minutes, then remove from oven and turn pieces over.
  6. Return pan to hot oven.  Bake for another 7-12 minutes.  When the second sides are slightly browned and the squash looks cooked, remove pan from oven. You need those chewy browned edges for this dish to be spectacular.  If you are not getting them, broil the squash for a bit! (But don’t overcook the squash…) With this step, remember that cooking is an art, not a science.  You might have to adjust baking times/method to fit the strengths/weaknesses of your oven, the age of your particular squash and the size of the pieces you cut.
  7. After removing the pan from the oven, immediately sprinkle hot squash with vinegar (I put my thumb over the bottle top of the vinegar, and then shake a bit of vinegar onto the squash)–not too much–then sprinkle with coarse salt, a bit of black pepper and a sprinkling of dried mint.  Eat (or remove to a serving plate and then eat)

Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today!  Oh, look what came out of my garden, ten butternut squash from 2 plants! The missing squash is in the picture above 🙂  I’m quite pleased with my bounty.  BTW, if you still have tomatoes left, be sure to make my Fresh Tomato Lasagna as a final farewell to your Summer garden.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
26 Jan 2013 Onion Rings

There are a lot of bad onion rings out there.  I know.  If onion rings are on the menu, I will find a way to order them, but I rarely order them a second time at the same restaurant.  There used to be some good Onion Rings out there (and, eternal optimist that I am,  I keep hoping I will stumble upon them once again), but not any more.  Onion Rings are pretty much universally bad now, and often the same from restaurant to restaurant.  There’s this huge ring of  “crunchy” (“stiff” would be a better word) “batter” (if that’s what you can call brown cement) engulfing a thin, watery, tasteless bit of something-that-looks-like-an-onion, which is served up hot and hard.  One bite, and that something-that-looks-like-an-onion comes slithering out leaving a hot ring of brown cement in your hand.  Sadly, these are not the worst Onion Rings.  The worst ones have the same batter, but with reconstituted onions on the inside!  Horrific.  Let me tell you a little secret though.  Onion Rings, good ones, real ones, are very easy to make.  If you promise to read my blog forever and ever, comment occasionally, and say nice things to your friends about it, then I will share my recipe with you!

Way back when, when my Dad was healthy, he would visit on a regular basis.  I would make a batch of these for him.  He’d sit on his stool, drink his Manhattan, eat onion rings  and tell me what a good cook I was while I prepared dinner.  That doesn’t happen any more.  Sometimes he forgets he’s eaten dinner, even when he’s still sitting at the table. Occasionally, he still tells me I am a good cook though.  I think I’ll make Onion Rings for him again, next time I see him.  Maybe they’ll trigger a memory, just like this recipe did for me.

There is not much batter on these Onion Rings, just a light coating of flour moistened with buttermilk…, and they are sooooooooo GOOD!

Polly’s Onion Rings

  • 2 or 3 large brown onions
  • 2 cups buttermilk (in a pinch I have successfully substituted 2% milk)
  • 4 teaspoons salt (divided use)
  • 1 teaspoon pepper (more if you are a pepper lover, you could also substitute or add in a dash of cayenne, if you’d like)
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • oil for frying (I use one 48-oz bottle of canola or vegetable oil.  I discard all the oil when cool)

1.          Cut onion into 1/2 inch thick slices and separate into rings (my rings are usually a bit less  than ½ inch)

2.        In a large bowl or  Ziploc mix buttermilk and 2 teaspoons salt.  Add in the onion rings.  Stir or shake to drench all the onions.  Let onions soak in the buttermilk, at room temperature, for least 10 minutes, and up to an hour or more.  Stir or shake occasionally.

3.        Drain rings from buttermilk. Discard the buttermilk…or save it for another use. ( I have been know to use the buttermilk and the leftover flour from the next step  in Yorkshire pudding batter.)

4.        In a large Ziploc bag combine 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1 teaspoon of pepper.  Shake to combined.

5.        Add onion rings to the flour mixture a few at a time.  Shake until covered with flour.  Remove the rings from the flour and place on a cake rack to dry for at least 15 minutes (and up to an hour).  Repeat until all onion rings are lightly coated in flour and drying on a rack.

6.        Pour oil into a heavy pan.  Heat oil to 360 degrees. (If you are an experienced and careful cook, the oil can be heating while you are completing step 5)

7.        Fry onion rings, in batches, until golden.  Turn each ring over at least once.  (A batch, determined by the size of your pan and the size of the onion ring, so a batch could be as few as 4 onion rings or as many as 10.  Try to cook large onion rings in the same batch, small onion rings in the same batch, the medium onion rings together, and so on.) Each batch should cook for approx. 3 minutes (up the time a bit for larger onions).

8.        Transfer cooked onion rings to a paper towel lined tray to drain off and absorb excess oil then place in a 200 degree oven to keep warm, while you fry another batch. (My family eats as I fry, I can’t get them in the oven.)  Bring the oil temperature back to 360 degrees before adding more onions.

9.        Serve hot with additional salt (I use Kosher salt)

Makes approx 50 onion rings.

I just made these for the “Superbowl Snack” theme meeting of my cookbook club. They are great to make as your guests walk in, as they are best right out of the oil.  Don’t cut up too many onions though, or you will never get a chance to sit down.  I find folks will eat as many onion rings as I make…, and at a faster clip than I can make them!

Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today.  It was a good day to stop by, this is one of my all time best recipes (and one of my most sinful… 🙂 )

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email