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.

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.

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.

(Refrigerator) Pickled Jalapeños

There are a handful of store bought condiments that are always in my pantry.  No matter how easy it sounded when I read Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, I'm not making my own worcestershire sauce.  I'm probably not even making my own mustard.  There are always pickles, and sometimes they're things that I've just doused in vinegar and sugar and salt and other times they're store bought.  And there are always jalapeños, which are very easy to make yourself.  

We make a lot of tacos and burritos and nachos and such.  It's pretty easy to throw together whatever veg and protein you have on hand, cover it in cheese and call it dinner.  We typically add jalapeños to those meals.  We make banh mi.*  Jalapeños are important. 

Pickle Salad

Remember when I made the cucumber salad and there were a lot of variations on the interwebs?  Like with anything.   A couple of recipes called for tomato and onion, which definitely was not anything like the original, but sounded fantastic to me.  July has been about barely being able to drizzle vinegar over veg without breaking a sweat.  So I went for it. 

Kohlrabi Potato Pancakes

Kohlrabi is one of those veggies that makes people anxious. It's weird looking.  It's not one of the ten vegetables* I grew up with. 

It's actually pretty easy to just peel it and throw it in a salad.  It's sort of like a mild radish, or a bland, crisp apple.   So when we got the kohlrabi in our CSA haul, the first bulb was eaten raw, off the cutting board, while we prepped other veg.  It didn't even make it into a salad. 

You can use the greens, just pretend they're collards and you're all set.  

But one quick answer for dealing with unusual veg is to shred and crisp.  We've done this with parsnips, we can do it with kohlrabi. Enter the potato pancake. 

Sunday Dinner and Using up the Veg

This is pretty and delicious, but it's all supermarket foods, no CSA foods. 

Whenever we've been in the market for a CSA, and that's been a few times now, we have The Conversation.  The Does-It-Really-Make-Sense-To-Get-A-Full-Share conversation.  And when people ask me about my CSA, they're often surprised that we get a full share.  Most of my friends in two-person households get a half.  A half share means, depending on your CSA, either that you pick up a full haul every two weeks, or that you get a lesser haul weekly.  The every two weeks thing wouldn't work for us; I like having lettuce, always, and lettuce doesn't keep like that.  Neither does the rest of it.  

Cucumber Salad

My friend MSNDG's* grandmother makes this cucumber salad.  I should be clear, she makes a cucumber salad, or even the cucumber salad, but not really this cucumber salad, and it's truly spectacular.  It's sweet and tangy and so cool and crisp.  I was thrilled to take home the leftovers from one of their family events a few months back.  Also, we had a variant of this over a year ago as part of the falafel dinner. 

I'm very good at asking your mother, your grandmother, whoever, for a recipe, but I'm not good at pulling out a notepad and writing it down.  We covered this in the episode on brisket.   But I asked her, I think twice, and she kindly told me what she does, but I'm under the impression that either she cooks like me, and doesn't measure everything, or that she intentionally gave me vague directions so I couldn't follow her recipe exactly.  Either way, it worked like that, because I have no idea exactly how she makes it and this was close, and fantastic, and I'll make it again and again, but it's not MSNDG's grandmother's recipe.  Close. 

When I asked MSNDG for a refresher, just before making this, she gave me about as much information as I had remembered... vinegar, sugar, salt, white pepper, and cucumbers.  Ratios, procedures, no.   

Hot and Sweet Cocktail Meatballs

It's spring!  My local farm just sent me an email to say that they have strawberries and asparagus. Every blog and food person around is going on about ramps and fiddlehead ferns, and the magic that is the fleeting presence of weird early spring veg. 


This isn't that.  This is cocktail meatballs.  You could make them any time of year.  You could probably buy them in the frozen section of your local megamart.  My recipe probably isn't all that different from your mom's.  


I have always done this with pre-packaged veggie "meatballs" but they're made out of meat* this time.  So don't despair, vegetarians, you too can have this sweet and spicy deliciousness that should probably be reserved for parties, but can still be dinner, because hell, you work hard, and you deserve a cocktail meatball now and again.  

Parsnip Fritters with Indian Spices

The parsnip is underrated.  I don't give it much attention, and then we're in mid-winter and I'm tired of squash and there's not a lot else going on, and then, there it is, the parsnip.  It's a stand-in for potatoes.  It's perfect roasted.  It's fragrant and slightly peppery but still mild and almost creamy.  

Checking in

Hey there.  How are you?  You're awesome, aren't you?  Thought so.

No exciting recipes right now, but here's what I've been up to.  (Food-wise, that is... I do other things too.)

Parmesan Garlic Popcorn

A couple of months ago, I posted that I had no idea how to make popcorn.  It was true.  I grew up with an electric popper, something like this, and then we graduated to microwave popcorn sometime in my teens.  However, microwave popcorn isn't exactly food, and while there are home-made microwavy alternatives, I wanted to do it right, on the stovetop.


I was worried that my pots wouldn't work for it, but that's what The Google* is for.   I actually searched out my particular brand and style of pot, with the word "popcorn," and found enough reviews with folks raving about how awesome these pots were for making popcorn to make me feel comfortable. 

Kale Salad with Strawberries and Candied Walnuts

I'm not over kale salad yet.   

I'm worried that kale season might be over, as it wasn't offered in my buying club this go-round and typically there are two producers offering kale.  


What will I do this winter?

French Onion Soup

I love this soup.   Who can beat cheese and onion in rich broth?


But like so many restaurant foods, when we started cooking at home a lot, the restaurant versions all seemed too salty.  I don't order it anymore because there is just too much risk of it tasting like a salt lick.  Soup's tricky that way.  But if I make it, I'm in control. 


There are a lot of onion soup recipes out there, with some variation.  Some folks insist you need to use yellow onions, or white, or Vidalia or red.  There's the white wine camp and the red wine camp and the cognac camp.  There's apple cider in some, and balsamic vinegar in others.  Some recipes include three hours of baking onions.   Some use chicken stock, some use beef stock and some use a mix. 


This is a fairly quick*, delicious soup.  It's hearty and cheesy and warm and rich and a bit sweet.  You could even make a vegetarian version with mushroom stock. 


Let's do this, shall we?

Butternut Squash and Goat Cheese Dip

I had this butternut squash, and I didn't want to make soup, or lasagna, and it was sitting on the counter for a little while, in fact, it was from the CSA, so it was getting on in weeks.   It was time to roast it up.  I also needed to make some appetizery-things for an event.


Butternut squash is sweet, but it goes very well with savory things.  It likes to be with cheese.  It likes to be a little bit spicy.  I'm not one to make up sweet potatoes and top them with marshmallows, so while other people swear by adding brown sugar to winter squashes, I like to add onion-y flavors and saltiness and heat.  This is that, on a cracker.

Same Dinner Different Day: Ricotta Quiche Muffins

Ricotta quiche muffins?  Seriously, I had a hard time figuring out a name for this that made even that much sense.  It's muffin shaped, and has a lot of ricotta, and it's sort of the texture of quiche.   You're welcome to call it whatever you want. 


A few days ago I made the eggplant rollatini for an event.  Only I misjudged in the doubling/tripling, and ended up with way more ricotta and swiss chard than I needed.  Nearly two cups more.   It's about a cup of ricotta, a quarter cup of mozzarella, a half cup of swiss chard and a bit of black pepper. 

Bok Choy and Tofu Dumplings

I just signed up for Winter Harvest, because I want the stress of CSA veg year-round.  It's a buying club, it's not like I'll end up with veg I didn't choose.  I like that it starts right when this farmshare ends, and goes through most of the boring frozen vegetable season.  Last year, because I had so much extra farmshare veg, I had a freezer full of fresh-frozen veg to get me through winter, and it lasted until about March.  This year, not so much.  So I'll have Winter Harvest, and then I'll probably end up farm-marketing for a few weeks until my next CSA starts.   Looking forward to not having much of a gap.  I'd like to go to the grocery store just once every month or two for olive oil and quinoa and junk food. 

On my list of things to do with farmshare veg at the end of the week:

Pizza

Quesadillas

Pasta

Salad

Frittata

Egg Rolls

Dumplings

Dumplings, wontons, pot stickers, whatever, this isn't an authentic version of any one of them, it's just that I had too much baby bok choy and it was losing it's crispness, and then these carrots weren't all that firm, and it was time to stuff it inside of something.

I had frozen some tofu a while back, because that helps the texture get more "meaty."  If you've been served tofu in a restaurant and asked yourself why your at-home tofu doesn't have the same firmness and substance, it's likely that the restaurant froze it.   Tofu masquerading as chicken tends to be frozen.  So, a while back (months), I threw half a block in the freezer.

When I unwrapped it, it looked like this: