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.  

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. 

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.  

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.

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?

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.

How to measure and convert

The thing that stresses me out in the kitchen is measuring, so I try to avoid it.  Over the winter I made my version of the conversion chart/art "(ch)art?" I saw on The Kitchn, and that helps with some of it.

But there are other measurements that I keep having to Google*.  As I mentioned when I first posted that (ch)art - and I'm going to have to trademark that word and make it my own - I often have to Google the conversion from packet of yeast to jar of yeast (it's 2.25 teaspoons).  

Here are links to some nifty online conversion tools and printables that you can tack up on the inside of your cabinet door. 

(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. 

Creamy Dill Salad Dressing

It's zesty. It's perky. It's dill and it's creamy.  I got dill in my farmshare haul the other week and it really wanted to be salad dressing. 

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. 

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.   

Sundried Tomato and Basil Crackers

My basil plant is thriving, which is a shock, because last year I killed a handful of them.  Looking for new uses for the abundance of sweet leaves, I thought back to crackers.  There's a cracker we've liked that's crispy and wheaty with sundried tomato and basil.  I can do that. 

I started with the flavor.  Dried tomato from Margerum's, via Winter Harvest and still fresh in my fridge, basil from the backyard and a bit of parmesan.   You can totally leave out the parmesan, just add a bit more olive oil and salt.  The crackers don't taste cheesy.  For cheese crackers, try something like the Mac and Cheesy Crackers I made last year.  These crackers are based on the recipe for the Thyme and Onion Crackers I wrote about more than a year ago (!) but they're tangier and almost spicy. 

Garlic Ginger Seitan Lettuce Wraps

There are a lot of ways to get food into your face.  A fork, for example, is pretty classic.  But forks don’t taste particularly good, and they can hurt your teeth.  So we move on to things like fingers, which can be a mess, and again, painful.  But bread and tortillas are pretty handy.  So is lettuce.  I forget about lettuce wraps sometimes.  Lettuce wraps are ideal for spring, I think, because they give you a vehicle for moving food from plate to face without overwhelming whatever bright fresh flavors are in your dinner.  Plus, the lettuce is pretty good right now.  

Also, everyone I know is getting married right now.  Friends were married this past weekend and more friends will be married this coming weekend. This happened a hundred years ago too, but I was part of everyone then.  Now, it seems like every other week someone is announcing an engagement or having a wedding. The first time I had lettuce wraps was on my honeymoon, a hundred years ago, in some fake-fancy themed restaurant in Las Vegas.   So maybe that’s why we went for it tonight.  I think it was Sous Chef Brian’s idea.

These are seitan lettuce wraps, and they’re vegan and delicious, but you could do the exact same thing with chicken and please the meat people.  It’s also – like an egg roll, or a lasagna – a great way to use up whatever’s hanging around the fridge. 

Mustard Glazed Mustard Greens

This is a quick one.  Barely a recipe, and more like what happened to my mustard greens.  

I have a confession to make... I cook all my greens the same way. I use greens in lots of dishes, anywhere they'll fit, but if I'm just making up a bunch of greens, it's garlic, a bit of vinegar, and if we're feeling luxurious, some bacon.  But that's the routine, always.

And it's mustard green time.  Yay for new veg.  I got some mustard greens (this one is Mizuna, from the unGoogleable Silver Mine Farm) and I had already made salad of another variety and thought it was time to get cooking.  But as much as I love garlic and vinegar on greens, it was time for a change. 

You know what mustard greens go well with?  It's so obvious.  Mustard.  These aren't as tough as collards or kale but they're not nearly as wimpy as spinach and they can take a little texture.  Plus, they already have that lightly peppery thing going for them.  Let's play that up.   Four ingredients, happy side dish. 

Ginger Peanut Tofu Stir Fry

 

It's spring, and there's no denying it.  It's been spring pretty much since autumn, but now, for sure, it's spring.  It's not just the short sleeves and outdoor dining that tells me, either, it's the new veggies and the flowering trees.  So it celebrate this unexpected yet totally happening seasonal shift, I bought pea shoots. 

Pea shoots are like sprouts, plus greens.  Here's a bit more information on them, if you're up for that sort of thing. 

I didn't go out looking for pea shoots, I actually went looking for flowers to plant. Because, you know, it's spring.  We took our first trip out to this year's CSA, Greensgrow (three CSAs in three years!), and they had some veg for sale.  They had some of the wintry veg I've become accustomed to in the past few months, but they also had scallions and pea shoots.  I should have bought the scallions, they'd have gone great in this recipe, but at least I grabbed the pea shoots.

At lunch they were used in a salad and for the next night's dinner, they were the star of this stir fry.  Also, yesterday's salad dressing became today's marinade.  You know what we call that?

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.