A Call to Action: Please Vote for My Italian Wedding Soup!

6 Mar

After providing you with hundreds of easy recipes over the last three or so years, i have a small favor to ask. The website Easy Italian Recipes has nominated my Best-Ever Italian Wedding Soup for Best Italian Wedding Soup. Can you go there and vote for mine? The winner just gets bragging rights and not much, but that’s good enough for me!!!

Look for #74 and click on the heart. Voting closes April 5….Thanks!!!

Click the picture to link and look for #74. xoxoxoxox

Click the picture to link and look for #74. xoxoxoxox

 

And here is the original recipe…with the cutest tiny meatballs ever!

Tiny little meatballs packed with cheesy-herby flavor....

Tiny little meatballs packed with cheesy-herby flavor….

 

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Fish on Fridays: 5 Seafood Solutions for Lent (or any time)!

6 Mar

Note to readers: The Lenten season has begun for Christians around the world and part of Lent is Fish on Fridays! So here are some super-easy, super-tasty Fish on Friday ideas from the Hot, Cheap & Easy archives.

Natalia at A New World of Writing's avatarHot, Cheap & Easy

So you forgot it was Friday and for a Catholic in Lent (lapsed or not, and you are talking to a serious case of the relapsed kind) that can present a last minute scramble. Relax. Here are five quickie solutions that you can do today!

Delicious shrimp scampi - perfect Lenten meal that everyone will love. Delicious shrimp scampi – perfect Lenten meal that everyone will love.

BRoiled Lemon Flounder (kid-friendly!) BRoiled Lemon Flounder (kid-friendly!)

Gotta love big flake fish - Cod with Capers and Onions Gotta love big flake fish – Cod with Capers and Onions

This is a Puerto Rican salt cod classic (you must factor in time for soaking/boiling off salt This is a Puerto Rican salt cod classic (you must factor in time for soaking/boiling off salt

Fish filets in Creole Tomato sauce (filete de pescado en salsa entomatada) Fish filets in Creole Tomato sauce (filete de pescado en salsa entomatada)

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Melissa Clark Answers My Smoky Kitchen Question

4 Mar

These days if you have a question for a living chef, you can just post it to Twitter and next thing you know you’ve got your answer. So after a Splayed Roast Chicken technique that I learned from Melissa Clark’s most excellent videos in The New York Times resulted in phenomenal chicken perfectly cooked, but also a pretty smoky kitchen, I wanted to know whether she had encountered the same problem. This is the conversation, which results in me being told that I should probably clean my oven (which will probably result in me never using it again and just borrowing my parents’ much better one, as per my usual MO):

Natalia de Cuba ‏@NataliadeCuba 

@goodappetite Loved Splayed Roast Chicken. Shared/linked on blog but what about smoky kitchen? see http://wp.me/p18ra3-1qo  via @NataliadeCuba

melissa clark ‏@goodappetite Mar 3

@NataliadeCuba depends on how clean your oven is. Usually the high heat will actually help clean the oven, so it will smoke less next time

So, ask and ye shall receive…Thanks Melissa!

And here is the original post from the other day.

Splayed Roast Chicken

Moist and tender all around

Moist and tender all around

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Broiled Lemon Flounder (Kid Friendly Fish!)

3 Mar

Note for readers on this reblog: Made this for dinner again last night…and it was so successful that I thought I should remind you of it!

Natalia at A New World of Writing's avatarHot, Cheap & Easy

Let’s face it, if you are eating a salad (again) and your son is across the table chowing down on spinach and cheese ravioli coated in real parmigiano and a schmutz of butter…you are secretly hoping he doesn’t finish so you can have just a little, just a taste…

Marinating in oil and lemon Marinating in oil and lemon

So I am very much looking for more dishes we can eat together and that don’t tempt me into carbohydrate sin while I am trying to work on those troglodytes, I mean, triglycerides that my doctor says I need to reduce. And really, I want to reduce the number of dishes I prepare and have to wash up after!

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Splayed Roast Chicken (adapted from Melissa Clark)

2 Mar

I had a craving for a roast chicken and Stop & Shop had a sale on whole organic birds and it was a rare lazy Saturday with almost nothing on the schedule…so the stars aligned and I got to planning a proper weekend lunch for me and my boy. I have several terrific roast chicken recipes (see links below), but wanted to try something new and I seemed to remember that the New York Times’ Melissa Clark was roasting birds in a new way.

I really enjoy Ms. Clark’s recipes and short videos. Her techniques tend to be very simple and unfussy and I have gotten many good ideas from her work. I would like to do something similar for Latin and Puerto Rican cooking…who’s in?

Cutting the skin to release the legs (photo by Leandro de Cuba)

Cutting the skin to release the legs (photo by Leandro de Cuba)

A quick Google search got me to her video on splayed chicken and I was inspired! PLEASE NOTE: I had a big issue with my oven smoking, but the end result was so amazing that me and the boy agreed it was worth doing again, even though I had to shut him in the bathroom with the fan on and the window open and my eyes streaming and opening more windows to the frigid temperatures outside.

Herbs!

Herbs!

Mind you, I rarely use my tiny apartment stove because it sucks — uneven cooking, imprecise temperature settings, no indication of when you’ve reached the temperature that you want, just awful – and I head down to use my parents’ whenever I want to roast or bake or broil anything that doesn’t fit in my fancy toaster oven.

Into the skillet. Raw whole chicken always looks vaguely sordid to me. I popped this one right into the oven before it got to me...

Into the skillet. Raw whole chicken always looks vaguely sordid to me. I popped this one right into the oven before it got to me…

So it may very well have been a function of unmentionable stuff burning toxic something that I don’t really want to think about, but I had to lower the heat a bit towards the end which helped somewhat and the child kept himself busy in the bathroom until the air had cleared out the windows. I don’t know why the smoke alarm didn’t go off, which is also worrying…I will be writing to Ms. Clark to ask her if this has ever happened to her and will keep you posted on her response. Continue reading →

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Simple Caribbean Chicken Noodle Soup (throw it all into the pot at once!)

28 Feb

Note to Readers on Re-Blog: It is COOOOOOLD in NY and it’s been a busy week…so stay warm the Caribbean way…make a no-fuss soup to warm your bones with one of this blog’s top recipes.

Natalia at A New World of Writing's avatarHot, Cheap & Easy

Yeah, yeah, your grandmother’s chicken soup. I know. It was the best. Could raise the dead, in fact.

Just five minutes of chopping, and throw it all in the pot! No browning, no saute, no mirepoix, no sofrito, no roux.

Well this chicken soup may not be your grandmother’s, or even your mother-in-law’s. It may not be complex, may not feature a rich and dense stock, may not have anything at all fancy about it. But if you want to just throw a bunch of things in a pot and end up with a soothing, yummy, cure-all of a soup in less than a half hour, I think you will like my soup a whole lot. It’s a typical Puerto Rican and, apparently Aruban, style of soup prep.

The first tender tropical culantro leaves from a container on my Long Island stoop!

Important note: in this soup, my herbs were…

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Yes! BAKED Broccoli, Spinach and Feta Empanadas (using store-bought disks)

24 Feb

Here is the second installment of 2014: The Year of the Empanada. After my first installment, in which I fried up my stuffings in Goya pre-made disks, I was showered with questions about whether they could be baked instead.

I wasn’t sure, but thanks Kathy Blenk for reporting back that she tried it and indeed they could!

How to pinch in those cute folds

How to pinch in those cute folds (photo Marianne Goralski)

So I decided to go for it as well (later in the year I hope to make my own, but one thing at a time) and was very pleased with the results. Continue reading →

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Getting Better All the Time: Black Bean Burgers with Black Quinoa…Baked!

20 Feb

I am always tinkering with my black bean burger recipes – at under a dollar per pound of dried beans that end up being at least 1.5 quarts once soaked – almost everyone can afford to play with beans in the kitchen. My six-year-old likes them most of the time (we’ve had a few failures of seasoning and of texture along the way, before developing and settling on this recipe) and they freeze well, so I can throw them from the freezer into my lunch bag and heat them up satisfactorily in the office microwave.

Getting beans ready for the mashing

Getting beans ready for the mashing

I generally start soaking my beans by rinsing and picking through. I put them overnight in a big bowl covered by at least 3″ of water. In the morning, I drain and rinse, then put them in the slow cooker (crockpot)with a teaspoon or so of salt, switch them on low, cover and go to work. By the evening they are usually done; there is a “beany” smell that tells you it’s time to check for tenderness. Good cooks engage all their senses to the task; the more you cook, the more likely you are to raise your nose from the computer suddenly, like a mystic having a vision, and say solemnly: “The beans are ready” or “The rice is done.” The less you cook, the more likely you are to look up from the computer with streaming eyes and cough “Oh s**t, dinner is burning!” Continue reading →

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Cheese: Fail. Pasta: Fail. Dishes: Broken. Thank goodness for Adriana’s Pesto

18 Feb

Adriana and I love cooking together. Our kids are very close in age and have known each other since the very beginning, so we get together for sleepovers that involve kid activities by day and then massive food in the evening. Then the kids go to bed and we stay up talking all night.

Usually I walk away with excellent bloggable dishes that I can post for days. So I went into this one thinking I had it made.

Fail.

Fail.

Then, whether it was the wobbliness of an afternoon spent trudging the Arctic tundra for a sledding excursion, or the fact that the moon was 98.4 percent full (we checked), or that we should have waited until after we’d gotten a lot more things out of the way before having that first glass of wine, or just over-the-top plans that were far too ambitious…everything seemed to go wrong.

Fail.

Fail.

We tried to make cheese from a cool kids’ kit that Adriana got (the kids were not at  all interested, funnily enough). I ate the 1/4 tablet of rennet thinking it was crumbs from my crackers, but even with a new 1/4 tablet, the milk just wouldn’t curdle. We dumped it.

Fail.

Fail.

We followed the instructions to make home-made pasta (another fun-for-the-kids activity that they completely ignored) — we really did — but ended up with a solid hard ball of dough that resisted all attacks with the rolling pin. And I had forgotten to bring my pasta cutting machine anyhow (which annoys the bejeezus out of me because it was a wedding gift for a marriage so disastrous that we were divorced before it ever got used and it still hasn’t been used because well, shit happens and pasta, apparently, doesn’t).

Continue reading →

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Quick, Before It Gets Dirty! Before It Melts! Maple Syrup Ices

15 Feb

Note to Readers on this reblog: It would seem that I was doing something very similar at this time last year to what I am doing now!

Natalia at A New World of Writing's avatarHot, Cheap & Easy

Been waiting so long to do it that I almost ran out of real New York Maple Syrup to do it with (Sugar Brook Maple Farms, Kerhonkson, NY)!

Maple Snow Maple Snow

But a few scoops of fresh snow(center cut) and some drizzles of maple syrup later, Leandro and the neighbors had real ices, Little House on the Prairie style…or in more modern parlance Maple Nemo Sno-Cones…..

Are postal workers wishing that no-delivery Saturdays had started now, rather than August? Are postal workers wishing that no-delivery Saturdays had started now, rather than August?

Stay warm and cozy folks.

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