Cranberry Kale Salad

If you're reading this, and you're like, "Really, just another kale salad?" then feel free to go on with your day.  You know kale salad.  I don't need to tell you.  Otherwise, this is for you.   I realize I've written about kale salad plenty of times before, and I also realize that if I posted a spring mix salad with tomatoes, and then another spring mix salad with cucumbers, you'd think I didn't think much of you and your creativity.  That's not the case.  But kale salad needs a voice.  

I made this salad last week for a friend's family's holiday dinner.  I had made something similar the year before and resisted writing about it, but this year when I made it again for many of the same people I realized there was a serious need out there to continue discussing kale salad publicly.  People wanted the recipe because using kale instead of spring mix or romaine or whatever still isn't the norm for a lot of folks.  So I continue in my kale salad advocacy campaign.

This is my go-to winter kale salad.  I know it's April, and we're all excited about the brand new veg that are on their way.  Go ahead and make a kale salad and add those veg.  But even without the bright green goodness that spring and summer bring, this is a pretty mean salad.  To read about my conversion to kale, please click here.  To read about an awesome kale salad for summer, please click here.  Otherwise, let's add some tangy dried cranberries and some onion and make this salad happen. 

Creamy Roasted Garlic Hummus

Hummus is one of those foods that I had never thought of making on my own, until one day I did, I was shocked at how quickly it came together.  Other than causing me to purchase tahini, which I really had no other use for, hummus is simple.

Average hummus is simple.  Ok hummus is simple.  But you can do better too.

Chickpeas, tahini, lemon, oil, water, garlic, salt, processor.  That's all you need.  

Carrot Ginger Miso Soup

I have a list of secrets to tell you about carrot soup.  I don't like carrots much. I'm not wholeheartedly opposed, like I am to say, beets or okra, but I'm not a fan.  I keep carrots around, I eat them raw with hummus, I add them to things, but when I'm served up a pile of cooked carrots, I'm not thrilled about it. They're so sweet and orange.  But, as a colleague of mine would say, I don't want to yuck your yum.  Maybe you love carrots.  It's really none of my business. 

So I bought far too many carrots for a stew that never happened, and they were just sitting there, staring at me.  I considered making seven or eight carrot cakes to freeze.  And I had this sinking feeling that I knew what I had to do.  Carrot soup has been all around lately.  Not so much around me, but you know, you see a friend post on Facebook that she's eating carrot soup and a colleague is microwaving something in the break room that looks like it's guaranteed to stain their tupperware and it's just everywhere.  So much so that when I asked my Facebook friends what to make with all these carrots, I was like, "Yeah, I know, soup.  What else?" And they were all creative and sweet and thought about pickling carrots and carrot salads and deep in my heart I knew the whole time I was going to have to make soup.

Cranberry English Muffins

Lately, I've just been sticking cranberries into everything I cook.  I really miss fruit this winter, and I got tired of apples pretty early on.

You could make this without the cranberries, but then I'd have nothing to contribute to the literature, because there already is a perfect recipe for English muffins.  I've been trying to do this for a while.  I hinted at it 14 months ago (!)  It turns out that everyone uses the same recipe anyway, and it's Alton Brown's.   "My" recipe is *so* Alton Brown's that I'm not going to post it at the end, really, this is someone else's work.  

The only changes I made were:

1. Cranberries!
2. Earth Balance instead of shortening
3. Mix of whole wheat and AP flour

When I say everyone uses Alton Brown's recipe, I mean that most of the first page of Google hits on "English Muffin Recipe" is either that version or something based on that version.  I mean that when I searched for video guidance on making English muffins, the most useful video is based on Alton Brown's recipe.  Also, I've made English muffins not using Alton Brown's recipe and they were less than awesome.  These, however, are awesome, so let's do it this way.

Vegan Minestrone

Minestrone can be anything you want it to be.  It's super flexible, adapting to what's in season.  In the summer, your minestrone can be full of zucchini and fresh tomato and herbs, and in colder months minestrone can be a refuge from thick, pureed vegetable soups while still providing an outlet for the squash, potatoes and hearty greens of winter. 

Minestrone can easily be made vegetarian or vegan.  Many recipes call for pancetta or beef both, but a dab of extra oil and a bit of sundried tomato can fill in for the rich flavor and texture provided by the meat.  If you don't use butter and don't sprinkle the top with parmesan, it's a vegan soup.  If you leave out the pasta, it's gluten-free.  Minestrone is what you need it to be.

The recipe below is an amalgam of all the recipes out there, skewed towards what was in my fridge on Sunday.  Yes, this was superbowl minestrone.  It's vegan, and while I threw some pasta into mine at the last minute, it's portioned to result in a rich soup with plenty of chunky vegetables and beans and no need for pasta.  (Though, if you'd like to add pasta, just add more stock). 

Spiced Applesauce Breakfast Cake

I'm just starting out honestly, with "breakfast cake."  I know there's a fine line between bread and cake - (banana bread and carrot cake?) and this is a non-dessert cake.  It's not a bread.  It's also not super sweet.  It's breakfast cake, but you can have it for dessert if you want.

I was looking to make applesauce cake for two reasons:
1. I had too many apples, and am not interested in things like crisps, crumbles, pies, tarts; and
2. When I was a teenager, there was this orchard/farm market by the mall and they made amazing applesauce cake.

So working off the idea that cake can be made of applesauce - and not just in the swap-the-oil-for-applesauce-in-the-Duncan-Hines-mix-way - and that I needed to use some apples, I went to work.

Except, it's hard for me with desserts.  I don't like really sweet things.  Also, I have no idea how that applesauce cake I grew up with was made.

But it worked.  A very lightly sweet cake (dust it with powdered sugar and you get a bit more sweet in every bite) that's not really CAKE in the plan-your-other-meals-to-account-for-it way.

Cranberry Rice Pudding

Sure, I try to write about using the fresh, seasonal, local produce bounty to create dinner.  But sometimes, it's about upcycling.

I don't make white rice, but I do sometimes acquire white rice.  Sometimes it comes along with General Tso's Tofu.  And it sits in the fridge.  Sometimes I have the common sense to freeze it and make fried rice with it later, other times it sits until we have to give it the old sniff-n-toss.

Let's face it, not every meal is a home-cooked treasure.  But just like I add spinach or chard to my leftover Chicken Tikka Masala to stretch my takeout into a three day experience, cooked takeout white rice can be turned into a creamy dessert that pretty much comes free with your delivery meal.  Recycled rice = instant dessert. 

Dining Out: Yes, I had Christmas Dinner at Ikea

In my teens and twenties, I lived at Ikea.  Ok, in my teens I begged my mom to stop there whenever we were anywhere near Elizabeth, New Jersey, but in my twenties I lived close enough to a different Ikea to get there fairly regularly and I did just that.  I loved Ikea. I can walk into your house and name your Ikea pieces.  Who doesn't have a Poang chair or a Billy bookcase floating around?

A few years ago, I moved and now there is an Ikea at the end of my street.  Seriously, right there.

Cranberry Orange Bread

I make a lot of "quick breads."  I try to always have banana bread or blueberry bread in the freezer for a quick breakfast.   Blueberry bread is just blueberry muffins without the worry about whether they'll come out of the tins properly.  I buy extra berries in the summer and keep them in the freezer for as long as I can stand it.  I keep whole bananas with their skin on in the freezer (stash them just when they're too brown to eat raw).  But sometimes, the season catches up with you and you're out of nanners and blueberries and you're *so over* things like pumpkin and apple.  What then?

Cranberry bread.  Cranberry orange bread.  Seasonal but not squash.  

Hot Tip: Save your spoon with a clip

So I make these Norwegian cookies.  I told you all about them last year. Krumkake.  They take over my kitchen for two weekends each December.  There's smoke and fire and grease and burned fingers and spilled batter and in the end, lacy, crisp, amazing sugar cookies. Still, a huge mess. 

Well, this year I figured it out.  No, this doesn't prevent small kitchen fires and burned fingertips, those are going to happen either way, but oh does it  save on cleanup.

Sure, you don't make krumkake.  I understand.  Maybe you make pancakes, or pizzelles or something else with a drippy batter?  

This is a bag clip, but a standard binder clip would work too.  Clip it on the edge of your bowl and your spoon won't sink down into the batter.  Everything is right with the world. 

Fried Tofu Stir Fry

It's not like we don't eat, but I realize it's been a good while since I've posted a recipe.  When something awesome strikes, I'll write it up for you, but we've been eating stuff you'll find in past posts, mostly.

This is a recent stir fry with an illicit fall red pepper.  It was awesome, but not super-different.  I usually just stir-fry the tofu, but this time after I drained it, marinated it (mirin, soy, fish sauce, sriracha, onion, garlic, toasted sesame oil, rice vinegar) and drained it again, I tossed it in corn starch and shallow fried it (like the banh mi recipe).  I stir fried some chopped up veg - broccoli, onion, carrot and the aforementioned pepper - and added some of the marinade.  That's really it.  Dinner. 

I took the head off a chicken

No pictures, but this is not a post for the super-squeamish.  Just a warning.

Like everyone in the mid-90s, I was a vegetarian teenager, which meant that I ate a lot of grilled cheese and zero beans or nuts.  I didn't eat tofu and had never heard of seitan or tempeh or any other vegan protein.  I was also once so anemic that I had to routinely drink the water spinach was boiled in for the iron (not recommended).  So when vegetarianism wasn't working for me, I went back to meat.  Sort of.

I'm the kind of meat eater who isn't looking to expand my horizons.  I have a friend who loves rabbit and duck, but the cuteness factor gets to me (my mom grew up with a pet duck).  I've never been able to eat anything on a bone, and this means Sous Chef Brian has used a fork to take meat off a chicken wing for me.  

So I don't eat a ton of meat, in overall quantity or in range. 

I'm also pretty upset about factory farming, so I try to buy meat from local farmers and feel like I have a sense of where it came from.  This is easy, with beef, we have great farms we can buy it from.  With chicken, the real limit is that at the farm stands and similar locales, most of the time you're getting a whole chicken.

So in reality, while I say I "make food out of food," what I actually do is make food out of vegetables.  I don't take meat from a non-food state and bring it to the table.  The meat I'm working with has generally been all fooded up before I see it. 

Potato Cauliflower Soup

I've been traveling for work, which means I have once again taken many pictures of hotel carpeting.  I don't do a ton of traveling but this past month or so has been exhausting.  I spent more time elsewhere than I did here.   So I've seen an array of conference center rugs. 

Coffee Rings

It also means I haven't been cooking, because you know, I've been elsewhere, and that I came home and had no idea what was in the fridge or freezer.  So I had to do a serious overhaul/cleanout/accounting for what's what like I did a while back.

Thanksgiving Centerpiece

The magical part of doing that was finding soup in my freezer.  Chicken soup and butternut squash soup and potato cauliflower soup.  Finding soup in the freezer isn't like finding frozen tofu or leftover pasta sauce.  With soup, you're already there.  It's dinner.

Piercing Array

Before I left, I had made up a lot of potato cauliflower soup.  I don't find a lot of use for potatoes, and potato soup has a guilt-laden heaviness to it that stems from the clear association between potatoes and saddlebags--an association often forgiven in the face of french fries.

Still, somehow soup sounds like I'm pretending.  "Oh, it's healthy, it's soup."  "No, it's potatoes." But when I found myself with these potatoes, I also found myself with a head of cauliflower.  And if there's one thing cauliflower does well*, it's pretending to be a potato.

Curried Acorn Squash Soup

Oh, right, dinner.  I've been in that space for too long where I forget what that task I'm supposed to accomplish around 7pm is.  Dinner. 

This is dinner.  It took about 15 minutes of actual-paying-attention-time and it was ridiculous good.  Like, tell your friends and family good. 

I had this little acorn squash - and I don't have prep photos because I didn't think it was going to turn into anything special.  This little acorn squash came home with me on CSA day a couple of weeks ago, and my friend Kim said, "What are you going to do with it?  It's so small!" and I shrugged and said, "Soup? Just two servings but still, soup." So look at my math and imagine multiplying it to get the number of bowls of soup you want to get.  

The Egg Test

I'm not a perfect locavore in any way.  I try to buy local, in-season produce, but then sometimes I find myself with a pineapple, or a banana, or a mid-winter red pepper.  But I try pretty hard. In the warmer part of the year, I get the majority of my food from a CSA and a farm market, and in the cooler part of the year, I rely on a buying club and can get almost everything I need from local folks.  Don't look too hard in my fridge at the pickles or the worcestershire. 

There are huge advantages to eating this way.  You can get to know the producers.  You understand what you're eating. You help the local economy.  Your food is fresher.  You get more variety, year round.  

One of the tiny drawbacks, however, faces me every time I go to use an egg.  I get my eggs from my CSA right now, and when that's over I'll get them from another fairly local farm.  That means that my eggs aren't always sold in new cartons that are clearly labeled with the date.  So sometimes, eggs are a gamble.  Did we get those eggs two weeks ago, or was it the week before that?  Which of the two cartons in the fridge is newer?

Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Salad

It's pasta salad, without the pasta.  You could call it Low Carb Pasta Salad, if  you were a carb-driven sort of person or you could call it All Vegetable Pasta Salad, if you were a vegetable-driven person, or you could stop lying to yourself about the pasta and just call it salad.  You're in charge here.

Tofu Banh Mi Salad

I've had this salad stuck in my head for a while.  It's sweet and spicy and crisp and fresh and it mimics my all-time favorite sandwich.  I've proclaimed my love for the tofu banh mi pretty loudly on this blog. Nearly a year and a half ago, I wrote up the recipe for the sandwich.  One of my first posts was just about how much I like these sandwiches, without a recipe or anything, just "Hey, you know what's a good sandwich? Tofu banh mi."  

A banh mi is pickled carrots and daikon, cucumber, jalepeno, cilantro, a wee bit of mayo or vegenaise, maybe some sriracha and some kind of protein* which in my case is always tofu.  Sweet fried tofu.  

The good rolls from the real Vietnamese bakeries are made with rice flour and are crisp on the outside and soft inside and perfect for balancing the complex flavors of this salad.  

But something about it was calling for salad-ization.  Rolls are great, but lettuce works. And a soft, crisp-edged roll might interfere with the magic act that is sweet tofu with pickled veg and spicy peppers and cilantro.  That's a lot to work with and you want to taste it all. So it was time to make it into a salad. 

Let's call this Same Dinner, Different Day, even though the other day was in April of 2011.  Please don't hold on to leftover tofu that long. 

Baba Ghanouj

Baba Ghanoush?

Baba Ganouj?

Eggplant dip.

Smoky, creamy eggplant dip. Thick and smooth, I don't want to knock hummus, but when I'm served hummus and baba ghanouj on the same plate, it's the eggplant dip that goes first.  And, much like hummus, baba ghanouj is really easy to make.  Even better than hummus, baba ghanouj is really easy to freeze, so you can have the goodness of eggplant season whenever you need it.

But I'm not being fair to hummus, and that's not why we're here.

Like riding a bicycle, or a horse.

I'm mixing analogies, or idioms or something. Something about not forgetting how to ride a bike and then something else about getting right back on the horse. 

I blog pretty much in "real time," meaning that I don't have a backlog of foods waiting to be posted at any given moment.  Generally speaking, I'm writing about foods I've cooked recently.  I have one older post that'll go up soonishly from before we took our little hiatus, but usually, if I'm writing about it, it's from this week or so.  Usually there are still leftovers in the fridge.

So that means that when stuff comes up, there isn't content I can just push out automatically.  I don't have stock posts.  

Back soon

Have you ever been on your way to meet someone, and you're running a little bit late but you don't want to call because by the time you call you'll actually be there and it'd defeat the purpose?

I should have mentioned earlier that it'd be a lil bit before I got back.  I imagine I'll be back real soon. 

Here's the text version of The Goods, Week 14.  
Please pretend you're playing a role playing game on your Commodore in the 80s. 

Today we got spaghetti squash and tomatoes and little tiny pears and nectarines and sweet peppers and onions and lettuce and local (Trenton) pasta and some faux-romano cheese and my all-time favorite yogurt.  

Anyhow, back soon. In the meantime, hug your friends. Maybe even cook them a meal.