As confirmed chocoholic, I just had to pass this on by reblogging it. Love goat cheese, love chocolate….must try.
Take two thick slices of ciabatta, slather with goat cheese, top with chopped dark chocolate (an ounce of each per slice) pop in the oven at 350 until they get all gooey, about 10 minutes and viola. If you’d like, sprinkle on some sea salt or sliced strawberries to end.
Great articles here!
One of my favourite seasonal treats from the forest garden is the hostas. No, no spelling mistake: hostas are really edible. In fact, they are a near perfect forest garden crop. Woodland is the natural habitat of many hosta species, so they like moist soil with plenty of organic matter and tolerate a considerable amount of shade. A friend tells me that they have a positive allelopathic relationship (i.e. they secrete chemicals that help each other) with apples, and since the research on it is published in Russian I’ll have to take her word for it. Hostas are no novelty nibble: they have the potential to be a major productive vegetable.
The best part of the hosta is the ‘hoston’, the rolled up leaf as it emerges in the spring, although many varieties are still pretty good even once they have unfurled. The best way of cooking them depends on the…
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Luscious!
We’ve had a weird spring, which makes us even more giddy to see strawberries at the farmers market. It’s hard to feel springy when you’re using your fireplace to stay warm on May 4. The temperature dropped from the 80s to the mid 40s that week. But berries always let us know summer is just around the corner.
We’ll be featuring strawberry recipes all week — salads, booze, desserts! — and highlighting a few of our old favorites. Here’s a look back at some of our favorites:
Quick and easy!
This very easy, very quick and very delicious mushroom sauce changed my life, completely.
Okay that’s a total exaggeration, but well, at least I no longer have to go and buy those pre-made sauces for steaks (God knows what’s in there). I can make this sauce myself, at the comfort of my own home, with pantry ingredients (okay you probably need to grab the mushrooms and milk/cream from the market, but yea you get the idea, right?) And the sauce tastes so good, so spoon-licking good that I can’t stop eating it right out from the pot (even before I started cooking my steaks).
So yea, in a way you can say that this sauce is revolutionary. 😉
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I started with the recipe from The New York Times that I had mentioned in an earlier post–and adapted it for single-serving cooking.
just a few ingredients
My first “adaptation” was NOT to buy a whole head of cauliflower–I like it but I usually waste some of it, so I purchased 250 grams from the salad bar at my local Harris Teeter store already cut. This was about 1/4 of what the original recipe called for (900 to 1000 grams).
My second adaptation was to use the rice cooker to blanch the cauliflower! Put water in, add salt, close the lid and set the “rice cooker” mode. In just a few minutes when I opened the lid I had boiling water. I added the cauliflower, close the lid and blanched for about 5 minutes, then proceeded with the recipe–faster than a pan of water on the stove top!
My third adaptation is one I use often in cooking for one–I used shallot instead of onion since I don’t like bits and pieces of cut onion loitering in the fridge–so one medium to large shallot, prepped as for the onion in the above recipe.
oven ready
That recipe called for 16 olives–well four olives just didn’t look like enough, so I used six. Garlic–well, I used two very small cloves. The rest of the ingredients were “measured” by eye: parsley, the Parmigiano-Reggiano were whatever looked like enough for the amount of cauliflower–maybe my adaptation is a bit cheesier than the original, but that’s okay with me!
The results were fantastic, maybe even awesome! (Please note past tense–well, there was a tiny bit left, but that’s probably because of the rather large cod fillet–a leftover as I define leftovers–re-warmed in sugo alla puttanesca.) This was one of the best things that I’ve ever done with cauliflower. It’s a keeper with lots of room to improvise: some red pepper flakes added to the shallot-olive mixture, or maybe some roasted red peppers.
ready to eat
I think that I might step down to 150 grams of cauliflower next time, and bake it in a slightly deeper dish–but it will definitely be made again. I do need to add more garlic, though. I can’t believe how easy it was. This is my kind of recipe–not at all fussy and open to modification to fit my mood, the weather, and what else is served.
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The cod fillet was a “leftover”–meaning planned. The method of the “rerun” was unplanned. After several days of intensive course preparation for online courses, I suffered a serious case of cabin fever. On impulse, I called a friend, and we went out to dinner at one of my favorite causal places, Meelo’s Ristorante, here in Durham, since I had a serious craving for Andre Chabaneix’s spagetti alla puttanesca. There was a bit of the puttanesca sauce left in the bottom of my plate, so I brought it home with me. I used it to gently re-warm the cod fillet for supper this evening–now I’m going to have to see if I can match his sauce so that I don’t have to go out every time I want puttanesca sauce.
cod with puttanesca sauce
I have to try this–I’ve had dark chocolate with nutmeg and love it…and dark chocolate and chili and love that (but then I’m a serious chocoholic anyway).
When one really takes time to delve into all things festive it quickly becomes clear that it is unlikely that there will ever be an end to Christmastime culinary possibility. In fact, it turns out that it’s dreadfully difficult to keep one’s blog up-to-date with all that is being produced. The weather is the entity most at fault here, but what can one do? It’s difficult to castigate the weather – it makes a mockery of us all.
Following on from my recent monologue regarding presents and the meaning of Christmas, a little gifting advice may be necessary. For those of you that weren’t aware, chocolate is always a safe bet – is there anyone who doesn’t covet one form of chocolate or another? It is in this spirit that I bring you my recipe for chilli and nutmeg dark chocolate bark; it is both frugal and spectacularly delicious. Perhaps…
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I’ve just discovered milk punch–made my first last night and really enjoyed it, so I thought I share some of the recipes that I’ve found.
We clipped this recipe from a magazine years ago, I wish I could remember which one. (Update: Thanks to Andrea for telling us it was Budget Living!) It’s called “Godfather Jimmy’s Milk Punch” in the green journal we reserve for our favorite recipes. It’s a wonderful alternative to eggnog and has become a staple on Thanksgiving. But first things first, you need to freeze this in a milk jug, so don’t just toss the next one you empty into the recycling bin. I’ve been known to cut the frozen milk jug in half and only defrost half of it at a time since we don’t often have guests on the holiday and the dogs aren’t partial to brandy. (Attention PETA that was a joke, our dogs love brandy).
Brandy milk punch
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Sounds like real holiday treat. Good discussion on biscuits (English and American), and scones, too.
If there’s one time of the year at which biscuits should be made and eaten in prodigious quantity, it is at Christmas. There’s something clean and joyful about a proper English biscuit that makes them a smidge more festive than, to give one example, a cookie. It’s far easier to pick out individual flavours in biscuits than in food that is excessively sugary – a cookie, for instance, is something of a devilish experience.
Not only are biscuits rather light on one’s stomach, they are also one of the more frugal bakes one can embark upon. Of course, this is largely due to the dearth of expensive superlatives, such as chocolate, that are often added to cookies or cake. Instead, biscuits are often left plain or flavoured with spices or citrus fruits – as is the case in this recipe. Indeed, if the spiciness of these biscuits doesn’t appeal…
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mangoes
Yesterday I had a minor food crisis–fruit overload. I went to Costco (for cat food and laundry detergent) but while walking past the huge stacks of produce I smelled first peaches, and then pears–and then there were the mangoes. The difficult decision was pears or peaches, and/or mangoes. The pears won over peaches though the peaches smelled as good as the pears, but the price was such that I brought both mangoes and pears home with me. Both were much more reasonably priced than in the supermarket. So it was a no-brainer–I eat all the pears and mangoes that I want and share some with friends and I’m still ahead on the cost. (The pears were absolutely luscious–every bit as good as they actually smelled!)
Bartlett pears
That quantity of fruit does have you looking for some things to do other than just eat it out-of-hand. I had some mangoes that needed to be used; I had eaten lots and shared some, but I needed to eat some more! (Not that eating big, juicy, ripe mangoes is really any hardship.) Saved by inspiration that struck when I started smelling my supper cooking.
I was roasting some pork (on which I’d used a dry adobo seasoning rub given to me by a friend as a birthday present)–just a single big meaty spare rib for supper. This was one that was extra from making the chili con carne--simply would not fit in the pot so it became a small pork roast for one with just a tad left over.
I couldn’t think what to have with it until I smelled the roasting pork with the spicy adobo seasoning, something said “sweet and cool”–I thought of mangoes and cucumbers (which were sitting right there in the refrigerator just waiting to be used).
Not being particularly inspired about what to do with these two things, I headed for my laptop and Google! As I was entering the “cucumber and ma….” the instant search which I’ve enabled popped up “cucumber and mango salad”. That sounded just right with spicy roast pork.
I perused a number of recipe sites and blogs and found several interesting ones for cucumber and mango salads (and somehow I thought I was being very original when I visualized that combination):
Those certainly gave a place to start for concocting for what I needed that night’s supper. Then I found recipes with suggestions for adding grilled shrimp…seems like these need to be explored much more carefully next time I’m that flush with mangoes.
pear and mango
Since my adobo rub had given me quite a spicy seasoning for the pork, I decided that I did not want to add chile powder, or even ginger–anything at all spicy to the salad–I wanted something cool and contrasting with the spicy meat.
I opted for the bare basics: cucumbers (the little baby ones), mango, shallot (no red onion in the house), and since I didn’t have fresh mint (I’ve now killed my second plant), I used frozen cilantro (from Dorot) in the dressing which was just a simple vinaigrette made with olive oil and sherry vinegar (drat–no lime or champagne vinegar) and I didn’t think that rice wine vinegar would stand up to the adobo seasoning of the pork).
Even one mango and cucumber gave me some extra, so I dressed only what I was going to eat right then. (What was left became another salad, with very thinly sliced pork right in with the fruit, and I added some of those luscious Bartlett pears to it as well–threw that over some mixed greens and it made an awesome lunch. I dressed with a fig-infused white balsamic vinaigrette since I added the pear.
The combination of mango, or other sweet fruit, and cucumber is definitely one that I’ll be playing with in the future–probably with chicken, shrimp or maybe even crab, or scallops to “bulk it up” a bit for a complete meal.
(I know, it’s not a beautiful plate, but I was too hungry to go outside in the dark to find garnish–I almost didn’t even take a picture.)
A son goût!
supper
A great article for some ideas on how to deal with “leftovers” and efficient cooking for one or two.
One of the main obstacles that I’ve heard about for why people don’t cook very often is that it’s hard to buy groceries without wasting a lot of food. If you are only cooking for one or two people, I can understand how this is challenging. What works for me is to plan a few meals before I go shopping, and to try to overlap some of the main ingredients. I’ve outlined a few examples below.
When you are shopping for the week, be realistic about how often you cook. If you know that you will probably go out to eat one or two nights of the week, don’t buy enough groceries to make five dinners. If possible, shop somewhere where you can buy custom-sized portions (i.e., somewhere with a butcher’s counter and that allows you to buy produce by weight).
Sample week 1:
Grilled Chicken with Caprese Topping
Clams…
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a-single-serving.com 