Summer Tagliatelle

Ingredients:

• 5 tomatoes, diced
• 2 zucchini, sliced
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 2 large handfuls mushrooms, your choice, sliced
• 1 handful of marinated artichoke hearts, chopped
• some dried oregano
• some fresh basil
• two handfuls of Parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper
• olive oil and butter

Method:

1. Drop a knob of butter and some olive oil in a frying pan, which should be heating up at a medium high temperature. When the butter and oil are a bit foamy, saute onion, garlic, zucchini, mushrooms, artichokes, etc., one at a time, building the flavors of each as they meld together to form the sauce.
2. Season the vegetables with salt, pepper, and oregano. Add the tomatoes last and simmer the sauce until the pasta is done.  Add basil and cheese last minute.
3. Boil pasta in salted water until al dente. 
4. Mix the pasta and sauce.
5. Try not to be discouraged because you are still without a camera and cannot provide any pictures.
6. Eat away your sorrows.

Interesting Food Links, News, and Recipes

• The Best Mushroom Recipes These look so delicious!
• Mexican Potluck Party Recipes  Cinco de Mayo is right around the corner!
• More Cinco de Mayo recipes…
• My favorite time of year: Asparagus Season
• I love recipes that recreate convenience items–especially ones that are kid friendly.  The homemade versions are definitely healthier.  This recipe for hot pockets looks awesome. 
• Check out these homemade pop tarts…
• Nom nom bacteria…it’s good for your brain!
• I am so thrilled that Florida’s agricultural practices have finally departed from the Dark Ages…

Roasted Chicken and Wild Rice and Mushroom Salad

Ingredients

1. 1 4lb chicken
2. olive oil
3. salt and pepper
4. 1 lemon, quartered
5. 1 onion, peeled and quartered
6. sage

Rub the bird with salt, pepper, oil, and sage.  Stuff the other stuff into the body cavity.

Roast at 450 degrees for 15 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350 and cook 20 minutes per pound.

Perfection.

I also made a wild rice salad, adapted from this recipe.   Amazing as well, although, you’ll see it didn’t make the dinner plate (we forgot about it).  Instead, you’ll see roasted beets and broccoli, and mashed potatoes and gravy.

Sunday Menu Planning

 The husband and I just got back from grocery shopping.  I’m not an Easter or Jesus-y person so I really didn’t plan on making an Easter dinner, per se, or doing anything special, but old habits die hard and I remember my mom always making an Easter dinner for us, so I caved and bought a whole chicken.

So, along with a roasted chicken, I will also make:

Swiss Chard and Caramelized Onion Tacos

Red Lentil Hummus

Farro Salad with Roasted Mushrooms and Parmesan

I’m thinking I will make the taco filling and stick it in the fridge for later in the week.  It looks like a super easy and delicious vegetarian recipe–and I’m sure it will reheat nicely.  We bought beets from the Saturday Market, and Jeff’s friend gave us some red chard, so I will mix the beet greens and chard for this dish.

The red lentil hummus will be good for an easy and light weeknight meal.  We picked up some pita and fresh vegetables to go along with it.

Lastly, the farro salad sounds like it will accompany my chicken well.  Except, I couldn’t find farro at the MoC, so I bought some wild rice instead.  I bought some mushrooms (shiitake, maitake, and lion’s mane) at the market yesterday, too, so I will use those and make the salad with rice.

Let’s see…anything else?  I also have some leeks and the beet root in the fridge that I will need to use as well.  The leeks would go good with the chicken and the beets can be roasted in the oven, too.

Stay tuned for pictures and the process later today.

Sunday Morning Menu Planning

At 10:15 this morning, I have my second Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga class.  I took my first class on Thursday–a beginner’s class, the website explained.  Beginners?  By the end of the class, everyone was busting out their head stand moves–practically levitating, others were.  Head stands, levitation, chanting in Sanskrit…needless to say (the most useless phrase, isn’t it? If I don’t need to say it, why am I?), the class was a tad advanced.  Needless to say (there I go again), I woke up the next morning, with grumbling muscles I didn’t even know I had.  Back of neck muscles?  Above my elbow muscles?  Pinky toe muscles?

I have class again this morning. I’m trying to mentally prepare myself, by preparing some recipes to cook for when I get back.

Four recipes I’ve come across this week have sounded really good.  Two curries and two noodle dishes.  I couldn’t decide which two I wanted to make, so I decided to combine the two curries into one curry and the two noodle dishes into one as well.

Spicy Soba with Shiitakes +  Curry Spiced Noodles

Red Kidney Bean Curry +  Spicy Vegan Potato Curry

I also plan on making bell peppers stuffed with tempeh and some sort of grain (quinoa, bulgar, rice, etc.).

Mushroom Ragout with Feta and Thyme Polenta

Soup.  Didn’t happen.

Instead, I made a mushroom ragout from a recipe that I first tried about a month ago.  I think I even blogged about it.  Here’s the link.  Last time I made it, I substituted the polenta, which I can barely stand, with pasta.

Today, I thought that maybe the phrase “can barely stand,” is a little harsh.  Maybe I could grow to like polenta.

Love, even?

I pretty much followed the ragout recipe exactly. It’s excellent the way it is.  But I knew that the polenta recipe would need a little work if I was going to stomach it.

But what to do?  The original recipe calls for spinach and Parmesan cheese.  I had neither.

Instead–I added some Israeli feta and some fresh thyme.  And it absolutely blew me away.  So, for the record:  I love polenta.

Cream of Pissed Off Mushroom Soup

I feel like a bowl of cream of mushroom soup right now. Particularly the condensed kind with the red and white label.  A little lumpy.  Salty. Gray.

(Pardon me while I wallow in my gray soupy-ness.)

If I make my own, instead of relying on Campbell’s, the soup could be earthy, silky, creamy, floral from fresh thyme–

I just bought some cremini and oyster mushrooms from the Market of Choice. Fresh thyme.  A shallot. I could roast the mushrooms before making them into soup.  Roast the shallot and some garlic, too.  Hmm.  Would make for a darker soup.

Hmm.  I should stop feeding my sorrow and making weak metaphors.

I’ve always been a better soup-maker than metaphor-maker, anyway.

Too Busy to Blog (Sunday Menu/Interesting Food Links, News, and Recipes)

I haven’t had a weekend cooking marathon in about a month.  Instead, we have been eating lots of sandwiches.  And burgers from Wendy’s (still need to explain about my lapse in vegetarianism).

Tonight, I will cook, I think.  I found a recipe from one of my favorite food blogs: Closet Cooking.  Every recipe this blogger makes speaks to me.  One of my favorite features of this blog is the blogger’s tendency to use one special ingredient in several different ways throughout the week.  Kimchi, for example, was one of his recipes and then many of the following recipes were fusion-type recipes that used kimchi in super creative ways.

• Kimchi…quesadillas?
• Kimchi…bacon, and shitake mushroom pizza?
• Kimchi…egg salad sandwich?

There are many more and it’s fun to watch the wheels turn in this blogger’s mind as he tries to repurpose bold ingredients.

When he was on a peanut sauce kick, we saw gems such as:

• Thai peanut turkey burger
• Thai Spicy Peanut Chicken Enchiladas
• Thai Chicken Mole

His fusion recipes are fun, but he also makes a wide range of authentic dishes from different countries as well.  So for every riff on a quesadilla he creates, he also has a recipe someone’s grandma would cook in that given country.

So, tonight I will make his latest recipe:  Tuna and Caper Tomato Pasta.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

In other news, here are the best food links of the week:

• Scrambled Eggs, I like your legs… for all of you Paul McCartney/Beatle lovers out there…
• 100 Ways to Cook Sweet Potatoes…I love lists like this.  I tend to get hung up on one certain ingredient and I love to find new ways to fix it (I fondly recall the Summer of Hummus).
• Seven Worst Stocking Stuff ideas…fetus shaped cookie cutter?
• Garlic Butter Roasted Mushrooms…I can’t stop drooling.

Pesto and Ricotta Stuffed Shells

Last weekend, I made this mushroom ragout (with crimini and oyster mushrooms).  I intended to make the polenta, but I didn’t get around to it.  Instead, I made a double batch of the sauce and tossed half of it with penne.  So, this weekend, I have a batch of ragout that I either need to freeze or use.

With this in mind, I picked up some large pasta shells at the MoC, along with some cottage cheese (I sometimes like to use cottage cheese or a combination of ricotta and cottage cheese in stuffed pasta).  I had some leftover ricotta from last weekend’s  stuffed tomatoes recipe, too.  Oh, and the rest of the pesto from that particular recipe.

This dish comes together so easily: mix your cheese (ricotta, cottage, what have you),  an egg, pesto, and some Parmesan cheese (or some Italian blend).   Salt and pepper to taste. Minced garlic if you like.

Cook and drain your shells.  Don’t cook the shells all the way–you will be baking them after all, and if they are cooked completely in the boiling water, they will turn to mush in the oven.

Stuff your shells.  Top with the mushroom ragout and more Parmesan cheese.  Layer in some sautéed spinach if you feel so inclined (Remember the spinach I was going to use in my curry?  Here is where it ended up.).

Bake, in the oven, at 400 degrees until your spider senses tell you to take it out.  You should cover it for part of the cooking, and in the last several minutes (or so–nothing is exact when I cook), take the aluminum foil off and let the cheese brown and crisp.

Sunday Menu: For reals, this time.

• Mexican Red Lentil Stew
• Ricotta Stuffed Tomatoes
• Mushroom Ragu with Spinach and Parm Polenta