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Natalia’s Refrigerator Pickles (prep in 30 minutes, eat in 24 hours)

11 Aug

 

 

Refrigerator pickles are kind of like entry-level preserving for those of us who aspire to be like Martha Stewart, but don’t have the time, patience or domestic staff.

I started making them last year with a bumper crop of CSA pickles and zucchini and had so much fun, instant gratification and praise that I have kept going. I actually entered them in the Long Island Fair last fall, but the jar cracked and put me out of the running (wardrobe malfunction of the foodista variety). I will try again next year (so don’t even think about trying to enter this recipe on your own!).

These are a really popular item at BBQs and nice hostess gifts for wherever you are going to have dinner. By all means play around with the ingredients; I think turmeric is crucial, but leave it out for a more pure dill flavor.

And really, they don’t take more than 30 minutes to get in the jars if you arrange your ingredients ahead of time. Use labels to keep track of ingredients and Best By date (they keep about 3 months in the fridge).

Natalia’s Refrigerator Pickles

2 lbs medium Kirby cucumbers, sliced (I prefer spears, but you can also do rounds. Zucchini can also be substituted. Do not eliminate turmeric if using zucchini)

1 medium onion, sliced thin

6 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed (1.5 cloves per jar)

1 tsp black peppercorns

1 tsp whole mustard seed

1 tsp turmeric (This stuff stains! Careful!)

Several sprigs fresh dill weed

4 whole dried bay leaves (1 per jar)

1 1/3 cups brown sugar

13 TBS distilled white vinegar (approx ¾ Cup)

13 TBS white wine vinegar (approx ¾ Cup)

1.5 Cups water

  1. Divide cucumber and dry ingredients (except sugar) evenly between four quart jars with lids.
  2. Stir together brown sugar, vinegars and water.
  3. Pour vinegar mixture into the jars, screw on lids and shake well to combine. (Don’t worry if there doesn’t seem to be enough liquid to cover. The contents shrink after a day)
  4. Cover and chill. You can start eating them after 24 hours and they will keep up to three months in the fridge. Eat the onions too!

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Cool Off with Cold Chicken Chinois

10 Aug

The hot weather begs for cold chicken that you can really get your hands into.

This is yet another New York Times-inspired recipe for which I happened to have some — but not all – of the ingredients on hand so I had to adapt. I very much liked the Asian inflections in the chicken, but what I noticed most was how moist and tender the chicken stayed and how well it absorbed the flavors with the long, slow simmer. I will be trying the same technique with different seasonings in the cooking liquid in the very near future. In the meantime, do try the wrap idea at the bottom; we took it to the pool for a light evening meal and it was just the thing.

I simmered this one at night when the temperature had dropped, since it was going into the fridge for the next day anyway! Link to the original NYT article at the bottom!

Chilly Chicken Chinois

(factor in overnight refrigeration)

1 lb. boneless chicken thighs

Salt and pepper

1 two-inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced thick

4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced

1 star anise

2 scallions

Season the thighs generously with salt and pepper. Place in a heavy pot and add enough cold water to cover. Add the ginger, garlic, star anise and scallions. Bring to a gentle boil, scooping out any foam. Turn heat to very low, cover and simmer ever so gently for an hour.

Transfer the thighs to a bowl to cool. Skim the fat off the surface of the remaining liquid. Reduce the liquid by half over high heat (5-10 minutes), then strain it over the thighs. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Serving suggestions: Sprinkle with cilantro, slivered scallions and sesame oil. Or….

Quick chicken wrap ideas

Spread a wrap or your choice with mayonnaise. Add cucumber, sliced lengthwise, pieces of chicken, slivered scallions and cilantro. Add a sprinkle of lime/sesame oil and a drizzling of Asian Stir Fry Sauce https://hotcheapeasy.wordpress.com/?s=asian+stir+fry+sauce roll up and serve.

You can do the same by substituting hummus and roasted vegetables for the mayo, stir-fry sauce and cucumber.

Article from nytimes.com which inspired this dish. You will note David Tanis recommends free-range birds; I used organic thighs from Costco with very good result.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/dining/chicken-simmered-and-chilled-city-kitchen.html?_r=1&ref=citykitchen

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Chickpea and Tahini Salad

8 Aug

Regular readers know my love for chickpeas. I love my Gingery Marinated Chickpeas (Greta Garbanzo https://hotcheapeasy.wordpress.com/?s=greta+garbanzo&submit=Search,) but decided it was time to freshen up my outlook.

Thus, this Chickpea and Tahini salad…perfect to accompany summer BBQ or Mediterranean buffet, an excellent side dish to just about anything, and best of all, easy! I made this a few hours ahead, and the little bit that remained made for great leftover snack lunch!

Chickpea and Tahini Salad

2 29 oz cans of garbanzos/chick peas/ceci, rinsed and drained

½ red onion, sliced thin

2 ripe tomatoes, seeds and gel removed and chopped

1 Tbs cilantro leaves (can go to two if you like) chopped fine

1 Tbs mint leaves (can add another Tbs if desired) chopped fine

4 Tbs tahini

4 cloves garlic, pressed or minced super-fine

4-6 Tbs lemon juice

2 Tbs water

Salt to taste

Place chickpeas, onion, tomato, cilantro and mint in a bowl

In a separate bowl, whisk tahini, garlic, lemon juice and water until blended

Toss dressing in salad. Salt to taste.

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Macaroni and cheese with style (yes, you can make a roux) and spinach

6 Aug

The perceptive examiner of the picture in this post will probably agree that I did not choose an auspicious time to tart-up a macaroni and cheese dinner. I should’ve reached for a box of Annie’s Organic (and believe me, as much as I believe in a home-cooked meal, I reach for the Annie’s with great frequency in stressed times) rather than set out to make a white sauce while my over-tired, over-heated, under-snacked and therefore unpredictable pre-K maniac was in the room. If you decide that I am actually the maniac for trying it, well, I won’t argue.

A proper white sauce is creamy and smooth and tonight’s, while creamy, was not quite as smooth as normal. But I decided to post anyway, because I want to convince you that making a roux isn’t so hard. If I could do it passably well under this evening’s circumstances, imagine what you can do with better timing and fewer interruptions. And to those who get too critical, I say most of the lumpiness in the picture is due to the cheese, which I do not allow to cook much at all, since I don’t want it to get hard or stringy!

A roux is a mix of fat and starch and it adds thickness to dishes. The idea is to get the fat to activate the starch in your flour without burning it. It is the binder for a rich gravy, a thick gumbo, and unctuous macaroni and cheese. This one is blonde – which means it is not colored, so it requires little precision. All you have to do to make this happen is watch your temperature and keep stirring. I mean it.

For more background on roux try Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roux

To make your own, try this!

Creamy, cheesy and easy

Macaroni and cheese with style and speed (and spinach)

½ box pasta of your choice, 6-8 oz (we prefer small shells for this)

1 Cup frozen cut or chopped spinach

2 Tbs butter (salted is fine)

4 tsp all-purpose flour

¾ Cup whole milk

½ Cup grated grana padano or parmigiano reggiano or other cheese of your preference, grated fine for even melting

Salt to taste and additional grated cheese to taste

Cook pasta according to package instructions, adding frozen spinach 4-5 minutes before pasta is ready. Drain and set aside.

In the meantime, melt 1 Tbs butter in a heavy skillet at low heat (save 2nd Tbs for later in the recipe). When any foaming subsides, stir in flour 1 teaspoon at a time, stirring frequently until each teaspoon of flour is completely blended in. Then continue stirring while mix (roux) thickens into a paste. Continue cooking at least five minutes, stirring frequently to avoid burning or coloring (you need this cook time to get the floury taste out).

Add milk and raise heat to medium and stir frequently until liquid becomes thick and creamy. Stir in cheese, stir just enough to mix and then add pasta and spinach mixture and reserved butter. Mix thoroughly and salt to taste. Serve with additional grated cheese.

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A quick link to some important New York Times magazine stories on food

5 Aug

As a foodie and food writer, Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan are among my personal heroes. The New York Times today published a short list of some important stories by them (and Gary Taubes, who I am just getting to know). They are longer articles, but well worth a look, if you are interested in the state of the American diet!

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/long-story-shortlist-growling-stomach-edition/?hp#preview

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Slow-Roasted Grape Tomatoes (For pasta, bruschetta or sandwiches)

3 Aug

Here is more to do with those gorgeous tiny tomatoes that are so abundant and sweet at this time of year!

I’ll give you the link for the original recipe which I didn’t have time to do completely. I saw it in The New York Times recently, but didn’t have time nor basil to prepare the special oil, so I modified to suit what I had at home, basically eliminating a step and that’s the recipe you’ll find below. Here’s the original  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/health/nutrition/26recipehealth.html

My version is lovely summer fare – bright and sweet and yet with depth. It also requires very little work and I did it successfully in the toaster oven, limiting the heat index in my kitchen! You can serve it on crusty bread or over pasta, but I popped a fair few into my mouth just as they were….
Slow-Roasted Tomatoes with Italian Seasoning

1 pint grape/cherry/Sun Gold tomatoes

1 pinch salt

1 pinch sugar

2 Tbs extra virgin olive oil

1-2 Tbs Italian herbs/Provencal herbs

Preheat oven to 300°F. Line an oven dish with aluminum foil and spread tomatoes in a single layer. Sprinkle with sugar and salt, then coat with olive oil. Sprinkle with herbs and roast for about 30 minutes, so that tomato skins are crinkling and splitting, but not fallen apart. Cool and serve on garlicky toast as bruschetta, as sandwich spread or mixed into hot pasta.

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Spider Dogs – a kid-cool way to grill hot dogs

1 Aug

Hot dogs are quintessential BBQ and camp favorites – easy and convenient, tasty and filling. But we stepped the fun up a notch at our latest beach camping adventure with a recipe culled from a most excellent camping prep book called Camp Out! The Ultimate Kid’s Guide by Lynn Brunelle.

Called Spider Dogs by Brunelle (and Octo-Dogs by us when we are making them at the beach)  they are skewered hot dogs skewered, sliced and cooked so that they become eight-legged spiders (or in our recent case of camping: octopii).

Your kids will really dig them, you will raise your cool quotient and they are still as easy as throwing a few dogs on the grill.

 

(Note: There is quite the fire storm about the relative healthfulness of hot dogs. Nitrates and nitrites may or may not be bad or good for you…I really don’t know. We use Applegate Organic hot dogs, which apparently have as much nitrite and nitrate as conventional brands, but are made with organic meat and “natural” curing sources. Does it make a difference? Who knows? But Leandro likes them. I find the whole thing confusing, so I can’t offer solutions, but here’s a New York Times article that can at least explain the source of the confusion: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/business/02hotdog.html?_r=2&ref=health)

Grilled Spider-Dogs

Packaged hot dogs

1 skewer for each hotdog

You’ll want a hot grill going for this.

Stick a skewer halfway through each hot dog lengthwise.

Carefully cut the free half into quarters, lengthwise.

Lay the sliced ends of the hot dogs on the grill. The slices will curl back away from each other as they cook. When the sliced end is cooked and curled, carefully remove the dogs from their skewers, skewer through the cooked end and slice uncooked half into quarters lengthwise. Lay the uncooked ends of the dogs on the grill and cook until they are also curled back and you have a spider (or octo-) dog!

You may also like:

A Camping Week Come A Cropper – And What We Cooked

Spaghetti A La Carbonara for camp stoves

Spanish-style Tortilla adapted for camp stoves

Quesadillas adapted for camp stoves

Aglio Olio et Peperoncino (simple garlic and hot pepper pasta dish) for camping

Better Scrambled Eggs for a Camping Trip

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Best Book for Maximizing the Farmer’s Market/CSA Experience!

28 Jul

 

DON’T PANIC and Always Bring a Reusable Bag

The more farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture farms that pop up all over Long Island and its environs, the better we like it. There is better, fresher produce, we can support the local economy and we can feel healthy and virtuous as we bring our boxes of glorious stuff into our kitchens to be converted into all manner of delicious dishes.

But ‘fess up…sometimes you have no idea what that lump of vegetable with the fan-like greens is, much less what to do with it. How do you store it? How do you prepare it? What is it called?

Well, DON’T PANIC. As The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is to interplanetary travelers, so is the Field Guide to Produce to intrepid locavores.

This handy guide to most any fruit or vegetable you might encounter at a greenmarket or specialty supermarket will fit in your backpack or good-size handbag (or your reusable bag). It has more than 200 color images of produce, as well as information on the history and lore of each (e.g. “The ancient Egyptians and Greeks ate wild asparagus shoots as a rare spring delicacy” and “In the Old Testament, Adam and Eve covered their bodies with fig leaves, and Cleopatra hid the poisonous asp she used to take her life in a basket of figs”).

The nitty-gritty is right there with the history lesson; Green tells you how to select the produce at its peak, how to store it (and whether it can be frozen) and basic guidelines on what to do with it when you are ready to slice, dice and create something delicious. For the independent traveler, she includes flavor affinities for each item (e.g.  parsnips: “apples, brown butter, brown sugar, cream, curry, leeks, oranges, root vegetables, stews and ragouts, truffles.”)  setting you off on your own path to culinary greatness.

Before Field Guide to Produce, I pretty much sautéed anything I didn’t recognize from my C.S.A. pick-up in garlic and oil and called it a day. If it was particularly nice-looking, I’d stick it in a vase for a centerpiece that looked great, but never got eaten. Now, emboldened by my trusty Guide, I am roasting, stir-frying, steaming and experimenting with great confidence and a certain savoir faire that I didn’t have before. And where I used to ignore the vegetables that stumped me until they got rather nasty in the fridge, now I am using every bit of my weekly take, either fresh or in frozen form. Come the long, cold winter, I will be pulling great Long Island summer flavors out of the ice box, thanks in part to Aliza Green. Share and Enjoy.

Field Guide to Produce: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Fruit and Vegetable at the Market by Aliza Green, Quirk Books 2004

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Asian Stir Fry Sauce (this time with vegetables and your choice of noodles or rice)

27 Jul

One of my favorite prepared sauces comes from Sang Lee Farms in Cutchogue, on the North Fork of Long Island http://sangleefarms.com/. Their Asian Stir-Fry Sauce is all organic and adds incredible Asian pop to stir fry dishes, without the annoying cloying sweetness and goopiness of other seasonings in a bottle.

However, I run out of it pretty fast, so I am in the process of trying to recreate it at home. I haven’t quite got it, but this version is very yummy and does the job pretty damn well. When I hit exactly the combination I want, I will make larger batches, but for now, the amount in this recipe will season a couple of pounds of vegetables – enough for two to four people, depending on what you serve it with.

We used soba noodles (Leandro’s request, cause the curly noodles and Japanese writing on the package caught his eye and he absolutely loved them). We also had enough left over to drizzle over some cold chicken wraps I made the next day (and which will be the next post, haha!).

Do you make your own stir fry sauce? Please add your ideas in comments in this post!

Soba noodles make a worthy (and fun) accompaniment to stir fry veggies

Asian Stir-Fry Sauce

¼ Cup soy sauce or tamari (preferably low-sodium)

½ tsp crushed garlic

Scant ¼ tsp sesame oil

¼ tsp grated ginger

½ tsp lemon juice

Mix ingredients together and refrigerate overnight if possible.

When you are ready to cook the dish, begin preparing a cup or two of white rice or a package of soba noodles or other pasta of your choice, following package instructions.

Vegetables

2-2.5 lbs mixed stir-fry vegetables, cut into ¾ inch pieces (we used onions, carrots, some leftover chard stems and a beautiful purple pepper, all from Restoration Farm, plus broccoli from the supermarket)

Generous ½ tsp sugar

Heat the  vegetable oil in a 12 inch skillet with a heavy bottom, until just rippling and just beginning to smoke. Add vegetables and sprinkle the sugar over, coat with the oil and cook, stirring frequently, for about eight minutes, looking for caramelization on the vegetables. Lower the temperature to medium if you get a lot of sticking.

Push vegetables to the side and add a tablespoon of the stir-fry sauce , stir to heat, then mix with the vegetables. Add two to three more tablespoons as desired, being wary of making it too salty.

Serve over rice, noodles or pasta.

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Asparagus, Tomato and Hummus Wraps

25 Jul

I love asparagus and red pepper and especially love them with hummus. The following recipe is an easy wrap that tastes delicious and feels virtuous going down. It is easy to assemble, quite portable and looks very nice when you serve it (or eat it with shameless gusto in front of your admiring colleagues at the lunch table). The slightly charred tomatoes really give it a depth of flavor you will like, especially in this season when they are abundant and ultra-sweet.

But first: a confession.

Ready to roll

It has been a very, very long time since I made my own hummus.

When I lived in Puerto Rico and there wasn’t any readily available, I made my very own, very yummy hummus using (expensive) tahini from the health food store. Today, I have to admit, I buy the Sabra stuff from Costco in big tubs; it’s my In Case of Emergency Break Glass (or plastic seal) lifesaver for surprise guests or a snack for watching the news before dinner with my folks. One day I will go back to making my own (and of course I will tell you all about it and look forward to any recipes you would like to share), but for right now, Sabra is a shortcut I feel pretty comfortable with.

In this recipe, I give the ingredients to make four or five wraps, but you may want to double the vegetables so that you can have some as an appetizer and make the wraps for next day fare.

 

Wrap and go

Asparagus Wraps

1/2 lb asparagus spears, bottoms snapped off and set aside for stock/another day

1 red pepper, top and seeds removed, sliced long

1 Tbs extra virgin olive oil, plus a smear of olive oil for the skillet (only if sauteing the peppers_

½ pint small tomatoes (grape, cherry, Sungold), halved

1-2 Tbs hummus per wrap (about 1 Cup)

4-5 wrappers of your choice (tortillas for example)

If roasting the asparagus and red pepper, preheat oven to 400°F. Coat vegetables in olive oil and roast 20 minutes, turning once or twice, until fairly tender. You may also simmer the asparagus for five minutes in water instead and follow skillet instructions for red pepper.

In a skillet, warm each wrap until soft and pliable and keep warm on a plate, covered (may also be heated in microwave, following package instructions).

In the same skillet, warm a bit of olive oil on medium to cook the red pepper (if you haven’t already roasted it) until tender. Add the roasted vegetables and the raw tomato halves to the skillet and cook on high about three minutes, until the tomatoes look slightly charred and softened, shaking the pan frequently. Go back to the wraps, smear one half of each with a tablespoon or two of hummus. On the half that has the hummus, place a few vegetables. Roll up and serve, or pack up for an excellent work lunch or beach snack.

 

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