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)
Thanks to two bloggers working together, Leandro and I were inspired to try our hand at natural Easter egg dyes and it was so, so, much fun!
Boil, boil, toil and trouble
The road to this adventure was winding
Out, out, damn spot (cutting beets)
My friend, Ashley, posted a “fun Easter craft” on the Hot, Cheap & Easy Facebook page recently. It linked to Lisa Leake’s 100 Days of Real Food a terrific blog about her adventures, discoveries and triumphs eliminating processed food from her family’s diet. The original post was Natural Easter Egg Dyes and the guest blogger was Christina Le Beau whose blog, Spoonfed, covers her quest to raise children who are literate about food. Women after my own heart.
Ready, steady, go – note the glorious colors already on the Restoration Farm Eggs
Spanish tapas: Mussels vinaigrette (make ’em the night before)
The last Friday in Lent is coming up. Why just pan-fry filets (again), when you could try some of these much more entertaining and tasty takes on seafood? This is Part Two of my Lenten seafood series. I know you’ll end up making them all year long. I certainly do!
Shrimp and Avocado Salad, Spiked with Chipotle (charming served in an avocado shell)
Pasta al Tonno: One of the fastest pasta sauces known to man. (Feel free to switch out the green olives for black and skip the capers) Deeply flavored!
Creamy, sweet, tangy, chunky, light Swedish Skagen Salad (the best shrimp salad EVER)
Cioppino Latino…A San Fran Seafood Stew Classic with a special Latina twist
For more seafood recipes, click here!
This was not at all a sneak attack. This was a straightforward “Hey little dude, do you think you would like cauliflower if I made this recipe?”
Oh, yes, yes, I would eat it up, it looks delicious, definitely make it Mommy, make it right away, blah, blah, blah.
Baking bacon!
So there is no reason why, after troubling myself to get all the ingredients and getting my unwilling, intermittently vegan dad into the process, and committing myself to joining my son in eating a stodgy, creamy, cheesy, bacon-y mess of a fantastic casserole that in no way advances my desire to look good in a bathing suit by summer…there is absolutely no reason why said five-year-old little dude should be allowed to not eat the damn cauliflower, whether he likes it or not.
Mustard seed and rosemary, crushed
But of course, you know what happened. Continue reading
Another Perfect Mom Moment gone astray. I had the blueberries. I had the jam. I had the flour, the sugar, the butter, the cinnamon, the eggs. I had the kindergartener signed on to the project. But oops (oops being a euphemism for the words I actually used when I realized), I did not have the yogurt for our favorite blueberry-lingonberry mini-muffins.
Usually we do blueberry-lingonberry muffins with yogurt – light and lifty
.
But, snow falling on the first day of Spring told me that baking had to be. So Iron Mom took over from Perfect Mom (who I don’t like very much anyway) and made from lemons lemonade. Or in this case, a different muffin. As Temple Grandin’s mom used to say, “Different, but not less.”
Sweet and petite blueberry mini-muffins
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.
BRoiled Lemon Flounder (kid-friendly!)
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
Fish filets in Creole Tomato sauce (filete de pescado en salsa entomatada)
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….
You are not alone. The cashier at our local grocery store didn’t know what it was either.
When I explained to her that it was celery root, or celeriac, I remembered the day when I first encountered celery root (beware, gentle reader, a somewhat Proustian moment is about to ensue).
I was a (not-very-enthusiastic and rather undocumented) jeune fille au pair in Paris – a nanny/housekeeper for a divorced, working mom with two kids. I understand Madame D. a lot better now that I am a single parent, but back then, all I could understand was that she was underpaying me for a lot of domestic work that didn’t let me take French lessons or frequent cafés in the manner which I thought more befitting my station. It didn’t even let me buy enough food. At the weekends, when I didn’t eat with the family, I skipped a lot of meals. In turn, Madame D. was clear that, while I had certain likeable qualities, I was pretty much an American brat who did not know much about anything at all. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.
Anyhoo, I pretended not to be able to cook in order to avoid having to cook, but when she brought home this homely, knobbly, ugly softball of a vegetable, I was not faking my ignorance. I was truly mystified. Qu’est-ce que c’est? Or, in today’s common parlance: WTF?
Madame D. explained that because Americans are wasteful, they don’t use the bulby root of celery stalks, while the French, in their infinite superiority, understood its sublime nature and made it a national dish – celeriac remoulade (which we are not doing today, so don’t get excited, but coming soon!).
I nodded and watched her make the remoulade (celeriac slaw with mayo and mustard powder, basically) and it was indeed sublime ( breath of relief, as Madame. D. French or not, was not much of a cook, but since I was pretending not to be able to cook myself, I ate what I was given. And took seconds if they were ever offered, even if I shocked the family. I was hungry!!!!!).
As it turns out, Madame D. was correct that celeriac is good stuff, but this time, it wasn’t a case of Americans chopping off the best part of a plant out of stupidity. Celeriac (Apium graveolens rapaceum) is not at all the root of the celery stalk (Apium graveolens dulce) so ubiquitous in the American supermarket. They are all celery, but distinct forms of it. And in fact, it turns out to have a lot of uses in the Puerto Rican kitchen, but I have only just begun to explore that.
Which brings me back to the local IGA (independent grocery) and the lumpy celeriac sitting in a corner, ignored. I was actually charged with taking a salad to a St. Patrick’s Day dinner party and was hoping to find something novel to add to it. And there was my answer. The Mystery Root.
When you get your celery root ready, pop it into a bowl of cold salted water until ready to cut up. It will oxidize and like Princess Fiona, return to its natural ogre-like state.
To prepare, rinse. Slice off each end and pare off the tough skin with a knife. plunge in cold salted water until ready to use. You can boil it with potatoes (1 part celeriac: 2-3 parts potato) in your favorite mashed potato recipe, or make remoulade (again, I may just make some today. I’ll keep you “posted”) or, do as I did: grate it raw into a green salad and add apples and grated carrot. Mustardy-mayonnaise-y dressings are good matches for the celeriac, which tastes a lot like…well, celery!
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
We love eggs around here and Leandro especially likes them hard-boiled. One of our favorite laid-back dinners is hard-boiled eggs with broiled asparagus. Olive oil to coat the asparagus and a bit of salt for both eggs and vegetable is all the seasoning we need.
The length of time it takes to bring the water to a boil when the water covers the eggs by an inch is the magic time period!
As you might guess, I almost invariably buy organic eggs when I buy in the supermarket and from local folks whenever possible. And yeah, they tend to cost a lot more. To me they are worth it in terms of better conditions for the hens and less chance of harmful chemicals for my son.
The taste however? Well I don’t find any appreciable difference. It is mostly when I buy local free-range eggs that I notice a difference in the vibrancy of the yolk color and the intensity of flavor. Continue reading
Great food - Simply
Click on the image to purchase at the iTunes store!
Click on the image to purchase the Kindle Edition!
It was another summer Friday in the neighborhood and that called for another festive cocktail. Riding high on the success of last session’s passionfruit mojitos, I decided to make mango mojitos. The drink itself followed much the same construction, but the mango was decidedly sweeter than the passionfruit, so I decided that it needed a […]
Summer evenings in the neighborhood can be wonderful. Occasionally on a Friday some of us neighbors bring out folding chairs and sit together in one front yard for a bit of happy hour while the kids go mental on someone else’s lawn. It’s pretty much BYO, but we do mix up a pitcher of experimental […]
We spent the better part of last summer in Puerto Rico, and among the tasty things that my little guy fell in love with was tembleque, a jiggly (temblar means to tremble) dessert that falls somewhere between pudding and flan. I promised him we’d make it back in New York, and this weekend, for a […]
When the heat gets tropical, so should the drinks. On a recent trip to the mountains of Puerto Rico, I was inspired by a wonderfully cooling and exotic sangría I had up around and about El Yumque (Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. Forest Service system) at Noelia’s, recommended to us […]
There are a number of land crab species skittering about Caribbean coastlines. Some are edible and the one we eat most here in Puerto Rico (although I am told they mostly are imported from Venezuela these days) is Cardisoma guanhumi which we call juey and — if you are English-speaking — you might call the […]
Hot, Cheap & Easy 