Some of you have reported hunting down my bean recipes. Well here are some of my faves, all gathered in one place! Just click on the image to get to the recipe.
Home-made refried beans! (Vegan, but you’d never know)
Five Minute Black beans – I KID YOU NOT – FIVE MINUTE PREP
Garbanzos con chorizo (chick peas and hot dry Spanish sausage)
Give celeriac an inch and it will take over your kitchen. Well, not quite, but I grated a bit into a salad for the first time in ages a couple of days ago, was reminded of my first celeriac remoulade in an even more distant past, and next thing you know, I was making a remoulade.
Looks a bit like an ugly planet, dunnit?
Mind you, no one else in my house eats mayonnaise – my mom is watching her cholesterol, my dad is still nominally on his crazy-ass diet which is vegan (except when he is “tasting” everyone else’s food), and my five-year-old is valiantly resisting the charms of potato salad, tuna salad, and anything else that tastes so nice with some mayo and would be so much easier to send him to school with.
So rather than make a batch of real mayonnaise that I couldn’t possibly finish eating before it went off, I resorted to scraping the last two tablespoons of Hellman’s whose Never-Say-Die longevity in the fridge is a wonder of the modern age (this jar dates back to the summer).
Celeriac cleans up real nice….
We’ve been doing Taco Tuesdays for the last month or so. Our neighbors across the street do it, so Leandro decided we should too. I actually like it, because it gives me a solid plan and lets me tinker. I don’t actually do the taco thing – by the time all the accoutrements get to the table I have eaten more than my share of shredded cheese and settle for rolling a veggie wrap for myself (ripe avocado slices are my solution when I crave creaminess and am trying — quite unsuccessfully — to battle my cheese dependence).
Olive oil, onion and peppers add to my sorta Mexican veggie wraps on Taco Tuesdays
One of the things I have been tweaking has been refried beans (which are not really refried at all). You can buy them out of a can, and I won’t deny that they taste good, but do I really need that much lard in my life? Actually, I do wish I had more lard in my life, but I would like to know where it came from before I serve it up. Continue reading
Chorizo on toast
If you are getting ready for a Super Bowl party, I’ve got some styling, kickin’ tapas ideas for you! Just click on the picture for the recipe…they are all pretty easy (with the exception of the tortillas, which require a bit of derring-do, but are well worth it). They are also portable! Have a great Game Day…I’ll be back with more ideas soon!
¡Ole! ¡Fantástico!
Mussels vinaigrette (make em the night before)
Tortilla Torcal
If I had known how good these mushrooms in garlic were going to turn out, I would have been more careful about the pictures!
Mushy focus!
This is a wonderful variation on the classic stove-top champiñones al ajillo or mushrooms in garlic sauce, that is a staple of Spanish tapas places and that I have posted before (with butter or with olive oil)My friend, Marianne and I made them as sort of an afterthought as we were packing the oven with roasted vegetables for our New Year of Eating Right. Why not throw these in too, since we have some space?
Genius.
Get the crusty bread ready, because you are going to want to mop up every bit of sauce.
Blurry photo, clearly delicious
Oven-roasted mushrooms in garlic (Champiñones al ajillo, al horno)
10 oz. button or baby bella mushrooms
2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbs chopped parsley, optional
Salt to taste
Preheat oven to 400°F. Wipe mushrooms clean. Trim off woody stem bits and cut into ¼” slices. Mix mushrooms, garlic , and oil in an ovenproof dish and roast, turning once, for about 30 minutes or until mushrooms are shiny, opaque and dark brown. Sprinkle parsley over, salt to taste and serve with toothpicks as a tapas dish or mix with warm pasta for a light primo piatto (first dish/appetizer).
So Marianne and I continue preparing food that encourages healthy eating and healthy weight for the new year. I like to make one meal a day a salad; as crunchy and varied as possible. Unless my mom is home making the powdered Italian stuff in the cruet (which I freely admit I love), I generally make my own, simple vinaigrettes or tahini-based dressings, but clearly it is time to branch out.
Do pack the tablespoon with the herbs; it is very hard to get an accurate measure of this, isn’t it?
Marianne’s brother, Peter, is famous for his Green Goddess dressing (and his pecan pie, but that’s for another day when I get his recipe!) and although I’d never had it before (see dressing history, below) , I happened upon a Green Goddess recipe in Food to Live By: The Earthbound Farm Organic Cookbook (a personal favorite that Marianne’s boys gave me a few years ago, as it happens) and well…game on! Continue reading
The last time I posted Sauteed mushrooms and onions, it was a rich and unctuous burger-topper sauteed in butter that I learned from my friend Marianne – the wife of one male and mother of two more, and so an expert in crowd-pleasing, no-holds-barred burger toppers and other such make-happy-the-hungry-horde type stuff.
Into the frying pan
But now it’s January, the birth month of good intentions (and the trail head of the road to hell, but never mind) and Marianne and I are looking at ourselves and deciding it is time to try slimmer versions of our favorite meals. We’ve been getting together on Sundays and making good, healthy,veggie, low-whatever refrigerator items for the week.
Thus, this new take on sauteed onions and mushrooms. No dairy (Susu, are you listening?) and yet still unctuous and savory (mushrooms tend to do that). Try it on black bean burgers with quinoa or without and feel truly virtuous!
Golden is good, but wait for it…darker is better
Sauteed Onions and Mushrooms
2 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
1.5 Cups sliced onion (slice against the stripes)
10 oz. sliced mushrooms (button or baby bella), woody stems trimmed or removed
2 shakes adobo seasoning (or one pinch each of: garlic powder, onion powder, salt. Oregano is optional, and you can add more of any of them to taste)
Heat the olive oil at medium high in a large skillet until loose and fragrant. Add onions and stir to coat. Add mushrooms and stir to coat. Sprinkle with adobo seasoning, lower heat to medium low and cook, stirring occasionally, for about ten minutes, until onions are quite wilted and mushrooms are darkened and soft.
“I was looking for a yellow rice recipe on your blog and I couldn’t find one,” says my dear friend Deborah the other day. “What kind of a Puerto Rican are you?”
Since Deborah’s people also hail from the Island of Enchantment, I cannot share my answer on a family blog.
And in fact, my answer — however clever — did not reflect the exact truth. I am the kind of Puerto Rican who adds a packet of Sazón to the rice and leaves it at that. But I wasn’t telling her that! After all, she is a chef, owner of Cuvée Seafood & Grill at The Greenporter in Long Island’s North Fork, a proponent of real food — not little packages of MSG –, and was asking for a recipe to try out.
Today we have a guest post – my friend Ashley who is my accomplice in many of the recipes you see on this blog (most of the beverage recipes, funnily enough).
Served separately from the eggs
Ashley is from Maryland, which from my perspective is the South, although I suppose you can argue Middle Atlantic (for those of you who are curious where Long Island falls in the regionality game, we are kinda Middle Atlantic and kinda New England, which makes it very challenging to decide which Growing Zone to follow when planting in my garden! I welcome input on that. But let me meander back to Ashley and the South).
Prosecco mimosas are the appropriate accompaniment
Ashley, like so many good Southerners has a terrific fondness for ramps (wild leeks) and anything that resembles them. So when making a breakfast recently, she decided to use the leeks in my fridge to accessorize the scrambled eggs I had on tap. Ashley has an aversion to butter (yeah, crazy, right?) so she used about a tablespoon of olive oil. You could certainly substitute, but I liked them just like this.
Mixed up with the eggs
From Ashley:
Here is a very rough write-up of the leek eggs that we ate (and we used to call wild leeks ramps, so there might be other recipes out there that call for ramps instead of leeks…):
Take 1/2 pound leeks (approx. 2 medium) and scrub them to death. Remove the end green parts. Because they are so incredibly difficult to clean, you may have to clean them, start to cut them, stop and clean them again. But in the end the effort is well worth it.
Trim the ends and cut into small pieces. Saute until leeks are tender. While it apparently tastes better with butter, you know my aversion to butter, so this is where I use olive oil.
Open your friend’s refrigerator and pilfer her leftover roasted asparagus. How can you let perfectly good asparagus go to waste!? Cut the asparagus into 1/2 inch pieces. As the leeks are almost finished cooking, add the asparagus until it heats up.
Scramble 2 eggs (per person). Add the warmed leeks and asparagus.
We didn’t do this, but when I’ve made it before, I’ve added a little parmesan/grana padano cheese and that makes it irresistible! Thyme is also a nice spice to add to this. And of course, there’s always sriracha for the bonus kick.
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Sometimes perfect isn’t good enough. Sometimes, perfect is boring. Sometimes you think you’ve got something down perfectly pat, only to discover that someone else can actually do it better.
Allow to boil, uncovered, until water goes below the surface
Such is the story of this recipe. I have posted my Perfect White Rice in accompaniment with a variety of bean recipes a number of times on this blog. It comes out perfect every time: grains moist but separate, texture cooked through but not mealy.
Light and fluffy white rice
But my dad’s rice (which uses exactly the same ingredients, as it happens) is just better. Mine is a great accompaniment. But his? You can eat it right out of the pot with nothing else and find bliss. It’s just white rice, but it has the slightest sheen of oil, a satisfying plumpness, just the right saltiness.
And now, here it is. ¡Buen provecho!
Perfection!
Pedro’s Better-Than-Perfect White Latin Rice
2 Cups water
1 generous Tbs extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp coarse salt
1 Cup medium grain rice (not parboiled), rinsed in a strainer
Bring water, oil, and salt to a boil at high. Add rice. Stir. Return to boil, lower heat to medium high and allow water to boil away until the top is no longer under water and the bubbles come up through holes in the surface. Turn rice over with a spoon bringing the bottom to the top. Cover and cook on low heat for 20 minutes. Serve. Or stand next to the stove and just eat it out of the pot. I’m telling you.
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Authentic Puerto Rican Rice and Beans (and shortcuts for effective faking)
Great food - Simply
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