Category: Entrees

The Moosewood’s Caribbean Vegetable Stew

Recipe here.

This was quite yummy.  I added a bit of garlic (about 2 cloves, pressed) and about 2 tsp of Jamaican Jerk seasoning.

For the chile, I used one roasted hatch green chile from Central Market (although it would have been even better with two.)  I just LOVE the Hatch Chile festival week!  If you’re in Central Texas and haven’t already checked this out, you are missing a bet.  Head over there right away – only 2 days left!  They have huge grills set up outside the store and roast hatch chiles all week long.  They sell bags of the roasted chiles (hot or mild, your choice) and feature all kinds of hatch chile products all week (tortilla chips, enchilada sauce, chile con queso.)  They are the best chiles EVER.  I always buy a bag to use right away and another to chop and freeze for future use.  YUM.

Veggie Sandwich

Vegetarian Girl LOVES the “Veggie Delite” sandwich from Thundercloud Subs (a fairly famous Austin chain,) so I thought that I would try to create an “at home” version for her.

I used:

a whole wheat hamburger bun

hummus

thinly sliced cucumber

thinly sliced tomato

caramelized onions

sauteed mushrooms

She liked the sandwich, but said that it was a little bland and that she’d like to add some lettuce, pickle slices and chopped olives next time.  So, not bad for a first stab, but we’ll know how to fix it next time.

Some other great possible additions or substitutions would be:

baby spinach leaves or your favorite kind of sprouts

avocado slices or a smear of mashed avocado (or even guacamole – yum!)

a spread of cream cheese or a slice of your favorite cheese (instead of the hummus)

grated carrot

Hoisin-Glazed Scallops with Sauteed Spinach and Peanut Butter Noodles

Peanut Butter Noodles recipe here.

The scallops recipe is from the subscription-only section of Fine Cooking’s website, but basically, you just cook the scallops in a VERY HOT lightly oiled pan (after sprinkling them with a tiny bit of cayenne and salt) until they’re browned on both sides and opaque throughout and then you lightly brush them with hoisin sauce.  Easy peasy.  The accompanying spinach recipe is slightly more difficult to sum, but I didn’t use it, anyway.  I just sauteed my spinach the same old way, with a little Baby Bam.

I’ve added the “vegetarian” tag to this post, because the peanut butter noodles would be (and were, for The Girl) an acceptable vegetarian entree, on their own.  They were delicious and were a huge hit with all four of us.  You could add any veggies that suit your taste (mushrooms, water chestnuts, baby corn, broccoli, etc.) and you could add a bit or sriracha to spice it up, if you like that sort of thing.  We added cucumber, grated carrot, red bell pepper, cilantro and finely chopped peanuts.

Wheat Berry Salad with Raisins and Pistachios

Recipe here.

This was quite tasty.  It had a nice lemony tang to it, and the chewiness of the wheat berries was very filling.

Now, that being said…if you hate raisins and goat cheese, or if you’re not crazy about cilantro or are frightened by unfamiliar novelty grains, this salad isn’t going to convert you.  It is exactly the sum of its parts, so if you like the parts, you’ll love it; if you don’t, you won’t…

Spinach and Cheddar Souffle

Recipe here.

I’ve always loved souffles and absolutely adore Ina Garten, so when I saw this recipe in House Beautiful magazine, I knew that I had to try it.  It was totally easy and really is foolproof.  I confess that I even forgot and opened the oven door once and the souffle still didn’t fall.  Yummy and cheesy, but also light and fluffy.  We served it with a fresh tomato-and-basil salad (tomato from our garden…basil from Girl’s sweet Spanish teacher’s garden) and it was beautiful.

Vegetarian Girl, clowning around with the souffle after it came out of the oven.

Beautiful Tomato-Basil salad…no recipe necessary, just sliced tomatoes, thinly sliced basil, a generous pour of olive oil and a sprinkle of kosher salt and freshly ground pepper.  This is basically just a cheeseless Caprese salad, but it was delicious.

Spinach-and-Ricotta Tortelli with Browned Butter

Recipe here.

I knew when I saw this recipe that, as appealing as it looked, it was going to be a fair amount of work.  I’ve had it sitting in the “someday when we have a lot of free time on our hands” pile for quite some time, just waiting for the perfect day.  I  knew that the kids would want to help with the stuffing and rolling, so it had to be a time when every one was home (difficult) and didn’t have other compelling things to do (near-impossible.)  It was time-consuming, but not terribly, and it took a little patience to get the hang of rolling the tortelli, but it was easiest than I thought and we were more successful than I had feared we might be.  All of the tortellis remained intact during cooking (I cannot boast this level of success with previous homemade ravioli attempts) and they were VERY tasty.  Well worth the effort and definitely something we will be doing again.  After running the pasta disks through the pasta machine, they became VERY long and unwieldy strips, so I cut them in half, but that turned out to be a mistake later, because I was not able to cut as many dough circles out of them.  We consequently had about a third of our spinach-ricotta filling left and our batch of dough made less tortellis than the recipe specified.  I’ll correct this next time by using a slightly larger circle cutter (I have another one that is 3 inches across) and using slightly more filling in each one.  We’ll be trying this again (now that the kids have mastered tortelli-shaping) and maybe experiment with different fillings and/or sauces.

Our batch only made about 52 tortelli, although the recipe states approximately 80.  I think I know what we did wrong, though, and will correct this next time.

We served the tortelli with some sauteed green beans and a grilled New York Strip steak (we just buy one steak and cut it into small strips to split three ways, amongst the carnivores in the family.)  Vegetarian Girl just had green beans and pasta.

We also sipped a lovely Syrah-Sangiovese blend that we brought back from Italy last summer.  We were saving it for a special occasion and figured that making our own stuffed pasta from scratch qualified as one.

Curried Couscous Salad and Sauteed Green Beans

Curried Couscous Salad recipe here.

Sauteed Green Beans recipe here.

Both of these recipes were vary tasty.  The green beans are very simple, just a slight variation from basic blanching or steaming, but the get just enough color in the saute pan to add some great extra flavor.  The couscous was a little more complicated, but well worth the effort.  This was a delicious salad with some really bright, bold flavors.  The recipe makes a TON of salad, so plan to invite people over, take it to a potluck or enjoy some leftovers (which are great for a day or maybe two, but not longer than that, and you can’t freeze it because of the cucumber.)  If you have a smaller family, I would recommend making half a batch.

We served this with a little bit of Baby Bam-dusted, grilled chicken for the carnivores.

Spring Salad with Grapes and Pistachio-Crusted Goat Cheese

Recipe here.

This was delicious and ridiculously quick.  The Easy Herb Vinaigrette in the recipe was indeed, easy and was quite tasty, but you could also use a balsamic vinaigrette or any other dressing that you prefer (although I would stay away from anything creamy, so that it doesn’t overpower the cheese.)  I highly recommend allowing the cheese to come to room temperature, as the cheese is much more palatable that way.  Nothing worse than a cold glob of cheese, in my opinion.  I used lowfat cream cheese for The Boy, because goat cheese is a little too gamey for him.  Boursin would also be good.

I was planning to grill some chicken to serve with this, but I forgot until I had the salads completely prepared and ready to go.  It was a very light dinner, but we didn’t miss the chicken at all, because we were having a VERY decadent dessert.  (Check out the next post for details.)

Soft-Shelled Crabs Meunière

Recipe here.  Please pardon the crummy cell-phone photo.

Making these recently at my best friend’s house in the mid-Atlantic region (during high soft-shelled season) is what gave me the courage to attempt the Sole Meunière.  Yum.  Yum.  Yum.  Soft-shelled crabs are one of my all-time favorite foods.  Paramount is getting the freshest crabs available.  Unfortunately, this is not possible in Central Texas, but my best friend has THE MAGICAL PLACE at her disposal.  A magical place where the crabs are decapitated and de-lunged when you order them.  If you cook them as soon as you get home, they might still be twitching.  Mmmm…

I followed the original recipe pretty closely, but did substitute Wegmans pan searing flour (a GREAT product) for the regular flour in the recipe.  They were, consequently, pretty peppery, but pretty fabulous.

Classic Sole Meunière

Recipe here.

This is one of my favorite “fancy restaurant” meals, but I’ve never attempted it at home before.  I’m SO glad that I did, because it was super easy and VERY delicious.  I think that the recipe’s suggestion to buy a couple of extra fillets is a good one, because it does take a tiny bit of practice to get the knack for how long it takes to cook each fillet and for how to turn it.  The sole fillets are VERY fragile and have a tendency to fall apart when you flip them, but even if they do, they’re still delicious, and it shouldn’t take you more than two or three “practice fillets” before you’re flipping like a pro.  You definitely need to have the butter, lemon juice and parsley measured out and ready to go, because when you need each addition, you need it NOW and there’s no time to chop parsley or squeeze lemons.

We served this with some sauteed spinach and basmati rice.  We added a bit of sauteed shallot, chopped parsley and toasted, chopped pecans to the rice and finished it with a tiny bit of butter after it was cooked.