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.  

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.

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.  

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.

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.   

Guest Post: Pineapple Salsa

So the other day, Rose had to go out to a meeting and she left me in charge of dinner. 98% of the time this means I should order us some takeout out from one of our favorite places. She leaves the bad-decision-making up to me when it comes to our food intake.

This night though, I wanted to impress her. I am Sous Chef Brian after all. All this time in the kitchen with her means I have to have learned something, right? So I formed a plan. Tacos! But I wanted something more than just tacos. I don’t mean to be insulting to anyone here, but anyone can make some decent tacos. To surprise my wife, I decided to take some of the pineapple in the fridge and make something she would never expect. A pineapple salsa.

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. 

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.  

Dal Palak (Lentils and Spinach)

Lentils don't sound very exciting.  Sous Chef Brian has an anti-lentil thing that goes back to long before he had ever had lentils, so it's not really their fault.  But if we call it dal, lentils can get a bit more exciting. You know that I don't claim to have a clue about how to make Indian food. I should really have called this, "Spiced lentils and spinach," and then I wouldn't even be pretending. This is simplified.   Whole seeds are subbed for ground.  I only used things I had in the house.  

Creamy Roasted Garlic Spinach Pasta

It's April, it's distinctly spring, and new veggies are on the horizon, but for most of the winter, there's been a lot of spinach in my life.  Year-round there's a lot of spinach in my life, but there has been less variety lately, so spinach is at the forefront.

This is one of those dishes where you can very easily swap in and out whatever appeals to you or whatever is left in your fridge and it'll still taste like you put way more time and effort into it than you did.

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.  

Strawberry Balsamic Salad Dressing

This is the only salad dressing I make (so far) that I actually cook at all, but it's totally worth it.  It's just five ingredients, and yes, I'm using frozen berries, but you can use fresh when it's fresh berry time.  I'm clearly missing the sweet goodness of summer. 

You can use raspberries too.  Of course, you can do whatever you want, it's your salad.