Weekly Dish

Sometimes I simply crave salad. I’m sure it’s my body’s way of telling me I’m not eating enough vegetables, or I’m eating too much other non-vegetable fare. Or maybe I hunger for something bright and crisp and raw in place of the usual warm cooked meal. Whatever the reason, ever since Alanna, who writes A Veggie Venture, posted a lovely watercress salad last week, it has been on my mind.

I had seen watercress, both at the farmer’s market and at my local grocery the week before, so I was excited to have a recipe to try with the peppery little green. Unfortunately, this week, the watercress at the market was missing (or gone by the time I got there) and the two sad little bunches at the grocery were brown and wilted. Alas.

I couldn’t get the combination of sweet, tangy citrus and rich, salty blue cheese out of my head, so I made the salad with spinach instead. Arugula would have been a better substitute for watercress, but we used the last of it from our garden a few weeks ago. And Alanna’s recipe called for clementines, but satsumas were the best I could do (they are both sweet, diminuitive relatives of the orange).

As I was already tinkering with the recipe–albeit reluctantly–I decided while I was at it to add a few chunks of avocado and a slightly different dressing. I’ve never been one to mix up dressings anyway–I usually just drizzle the ingredients right onto the salad. If you want proportions and an exact recipe, you should head over and check out Alanna’s version. What I have to offer is really more of a suggested toss, which turned out to be delicious, although more free form.

To accompany the salad, I topped some French bread with feta cheese, thin slices of tart green apple, and a drizzle of honey, and popped the toasts under the broiler. Minus the honey, this concoction is frequently what I have for lunch, and when Rorie at Milk & Honey posted about a similar snack last week,–plus honey–I decided to sweeten up my recipe with her addition. Yum! The salad was refreshing and healthy, the feta toast a little more decadent, and together, they made for a filling supper. If you need more protein to make a complete meal, I imagine that citrusy grilled chicken would make a great addition to the salad. As vague as it is, here’s my very approximate salad recipe:

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Since I began blogging about food, several people have asked me how I find time to do it, why I do it, where I find the energy to cook a different meal every night and then write about it, etc. There’s a meme going around, where different food bloggers list seven things about themselves in various categories. Rorie over at Milk & Honey tagged me to do it a few days ago, and while the seven things I say most often might or might not be interesting to you, I thought it would be useful for me to articulate exactly what it is I enjoy about this blogging business. And since I’m somewhat of a nonconformist, I’d like to offer it in narrative, rather than list, form (if that’s okay with you. Please don’t call the meme police .

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This soup is so simple, but really satisfying too. The sweetness of the squash, enhanced by the cane syrup and basalmic vinegar in the roasting process, provides the main flavor for the soup, but the subtle savory depth of the carrot and onion mellows the sweetness a good bit. I use a sweet onion so that the contrast is not too stark, add a dollop of mascarpone cheese for texture and creaminess, and sprinkle the bowl liberally with fresh nutmeg. Homemade chicken stock provides a richer flavor, but canned broth works too.

This recipe is designed to use up leftover squash, but other roast vegetables would work too, especially in combination. The wonderful thing about soup is that it’s a pretty forgiving medium. You’d rather use celery than carrot? Fine. Don’t have mascarpone cheese? No big deal. Want to add sweet potatoes? Go right ahead! My favorite thing about this soup recipe is that it makes use of what I have and allows me to play with the flavor combinations already at work with a minimum amount of time and effort. To have dinner on the table, the only thing I had to do was chop and saute the carrot and onion, add the rest of the ingredients and let them simmer, and throw together a salad. What’s even better is that the soup could be made early in the day, or even the day before, and then just warmed up later.

You’ll probably be seeing more meals like this one from me in the coming months–starting Tuesday, I have class three nights a week. If dinner’s going to be made, it will have to be done in the daylight hours. Yikes!

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Cake and fry, that’s what. One of the ways that I manage to get dinner on the table in the midst of, well, life, is through recipes that use up leftovers, like this one. Leftover paneed fish all by itslef is no treat, but if you shred it, add a couple of eggs, a handful of bread crumbs, a bit of mustard, and a smattering of fresh vegetables, it morphs into a whole new dish. I serve these cakes over a bed of lettuce with a simple lemon juice and olive oil dressing and a sprinkle of cracked black pepper. Because I had it, I also topped these with the cilantro pesto from the night before. How I do love using things up in my fridge! The fish cakes are basically crab cakes made with fish instead–crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. While it’s hard to beat fresh crab cakes, these are a pretty good substitute for a weeknight dinner. And I imagine they would work with any kind of fish.

Leftover Fish Cakes

About a pound of cooked fish
2 eggs
1 cup green onions, minced
Half a red bell pepper, minced (or a whole one–half is all I had)
Zest and juice of a lemon
1/3 cup bread crumbs, plus more for coating
2 tablespoons Creole mustard (or mayonnaise)
1/8 t. cayenne pepper

Beat the eggs in a large bowl. Shred the fish with a fork, and add it, along with everything else to the bowl. Mix thoroughly. Form into small balls, and then flatten (you’ll flatten them further with your spatula during the cooking, so leave them a bit round for now). Spread more bread crumbs on a plate, and coat both sides of the cakes. At this point, they can be refrigerated until ready to cook. When you’re all ready, heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a very large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook the cakes until very brown and crunchy on the outsides, turning once, about 4-5 minutes per side. Serve on salad greens and drizzle with equal parts lemon juice and olive oil.

So it’s no secret in my family that I am not a veggie-lover. I was a pretty picky eater as a child, turning my nose up at all sorts of good-for-you vegetables. I am doing better in my grown-up days, but my ventures into cooking veggies have been rather limited. I know what I like, so I stick with that (sweet potatoes, anyone?). But those crazy food bloggers out there have been raving about vegetables in such poetic ways that I think I’ve been entranced.

Whether convinced by Alanna, who cooks a vegetable EVERY DAY, or Stephen, who waxed eloquent about them for nearly the whole month of November, I bought some brussels sprouts at the grocery store on Monday. I already planned to serve roasted squash with the steaks we were having last night, so I thought the addition of some green could hardly hurt. If I ate them, anyway. David was skeptical. Although I don’t have any bad memories of brussels sprouts, he doesn’t like them. Or so he said. So I only bought a few, about a dozen, and decided we’d at least give them a try.

Learning to roast vegetables is one of the things that began to turn around my veggie-hating ways. Ina Garten’s simple, simple method did wonders for my veggie-cooking habits. She says: buy the freshest vegetables, toss them with olive oil and a good bit of Kosher salt and cracked pepper, and roast them at a high heat (400-450) until the outsides are crisp and browned and the insides tender. Most vegetables I enjoy eating these days come in this roasted packaging.

So I found Stephen’s recipe for Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Apples and Onions, modified it a bit based on what I had in the kitchen, and decided the little sprouts could just go into the oven after the squash had been cooking for an hour or so.

To prepare the squash, I roast two at a time, so I can serve some for dinner as a side dish and have enough leftover for soup later on. I also like to pair butternut and acorn squash, instead of using only one. Acorn squash can tend towards the watery side, and butternut squash is usually fleshier, so for a puree, they complement one another nicely. For flavoring, I like to enhance the squash’s sweetness with dark cane syrup. Cane syrup is a little like unsulphured molasses–dark and thick but without the bitter bite to it (and it’s made right here in Louisiana!). Since basalmic vinegar would go in the glaze for the brussels sprouts, I added a drizzle of it to the squash too, and used the syrup in the sprouts’ glaze in place of the brown sugar. These tricks ensure that if my squash accidentally bumps into the brussels sprouts on my plate, all will end well in my mouth. No cacophonous collisions of flavors that don’t play well together.

The steak recipe is one of my Aunt Cindi’s, from the famed Aunt’s Recipe Book. She uses flank steak, but I couldn’t find any at my grocery, so I used what my butcher labels “finger steaks” instead. I think it’s a sirloin cut, sliced into thick, finger-like portions. The cilantro pesto is quick and light and adds a nice bright flavor to the meat without adding significant fat and calories (like a cream sauce does).

See, I’m trying to be healthier? And guess what? We ate it all. And it even tasted good. The brussles sprouts needed the glaze to go down without a fight, but even David said they tasted good. Who knew?

I’ve written up the recipes in order that you have to cook them–the squash needs about an hour and a half in the oven, brussels sprouts about half an hour, and the steak cooks in under 15 minutes.

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This week’s menu:

• Monday: Paneed tilapia with spicy lemon spaghetti
• Tuesday: Flank steak with cilantro pesto and roasted acorn squash
• Wednesday: Fish cakes with red and green tomato tart
• Thursday: Butternut squash soup with spinach salad

This week marks my post-holiday return to regular meal-planning and dinner-cooking. In thinking about the new year and our diets, I like to think of things I can include in the menu, not things I should take away. For instance, I tried to do the low-carb thing a couple of years ago, but I found myself imagining pasta dishes and big loaves of homemade bread all day, and I went through a phase where I really didn’t want to see meat at all. It’s purely psychological, I’m sure–I was probably one of those kids who never wanted to touch the stove until my mom told me not to. (Over at Sweetnicks, she’s encouraging food bloggers to participate in the same kind of logic by including more Antioxidant-Rich Foods in our diets on Tuesdays. I don’t think this recipe qualifies; maybe next week!)

The two things I have decided we need to eat more of (which automatically means we will eat less of other things, right?) are fish and vegetables. Last night’s menu was a stab at the former; the rest of the week, I’ll concentrate more on the latter.

In the past, I have had a difficult time with fish in my kitchen. I’ve tried different kinds and different preparations, but rarely liked the fish that I cook. For this dish, (armed with inspiration from Beyond Salmon, a delightful blog about fish) I followed all the rules: I bought very fresh fish, cooked it the same day I bought it, seasoned it well but simply, and didn’t overcook it. I’m happy to report that it was a success! Paneeing the fish gives it a nice, brown crust, and leaves bits of the crust stuck in the pan perfect for a deglazed wine sauce. I paired it with a simple lemony garlic pasta topped with toasted Parmesan and finished the whole plate with the wine sauce.

By using the same skillet to cook everything, the vegetables that you cook to flavor the pasta will also flavor the oil for the fish, giving everything a nice consistency. The toasted Parmesan is optional; it’s a trick I’ve been wanting to try and thought the cruch might be a nice complement for the pasta (I’ll use the leftovers to garnish the soup later this week). It was…but definitely not necessary.

The trick to paneeing is to get the pan really hot–the fish will cook quickly, especially if you have thin fillets, so make sure your pan is hot enough to brown the crust before adding the fish. I also use mostly olive oil with a tiny bit of butter for color and flavor, but any combination of fat will do the trick. You have to be careful if you use all butter because it will burn easily if you get the pan too hot.

If you are trying to watch your carbs, this fish would also sit nicely on a bed of spinach, which I imagine you could wilt and flavor with the garlic, jalapeno, and lemon zest in the same manner as the pasta. Maybe I’ll try that next time and hit both the fish and vegetable in the same night!

My favorite part about the dish is that once you get the prep-work done, it cooks very quickly. I’ve written the recipe for the fish and pasta out in steps because that’s how I had to think it through in order to have everything ready at the same time.

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The theme for this month’s Paper Chef, as decreed by the grand master of cermonies, Owen, is the spirit of renewal that a new year brings: health, peace, simplicity. The ingredients, presented Friday by that ever-hilarious duo over at Belly-Timber, are healthful indeed: cashews, quinoa, yog(h)urt, and something baby, in honor of the infant year. (We’ll get to that mysterious q-word in just a moment).

But, well, see, here’s the thing. I live in southern Louisiana. Here, the New Year (January 6 to be exact) kicks off the beginning of Mardi Gras (or the anticipation of Mardi Gras, often called Carnival). A spirit of. . . celebration, revelry, getting all the fun out of your system before Lent begins marks the atmosphere ’round these parts. Parades and masks and balls and feasts. . .and health and simplicity? Hmmmm.

Alright, so maybe we interpret renewal a bit differently down here. BUT, in light of the ways in which the state suffered in 2005, I certainly think renewal is in order. And what better way to inaugurate such renewal than with a celebration of one of New Orleans’ oldest and most famous traditions? (more…)

Over the holidays, David and I spent about 2 weeks travelling in Mississippi to see family. Part of the fun, for me at least, is to have lots of people in the kitchen. I hope to recount some of those family kitchen adventures for you in the coming weeks, while sharing the family recipes I’ve gathered or shared along the way. One of the favorite snack items among David’s family is salsa I’ve been bringing to Christmas for the past few years. This year, since our travels were so prolonged and our packing space limited, I decided to wait until we got there to make the salsa. To my delight, my niece and nephew, Abigail and Jacob, were excited to help with the process.

At home, I use a food processor, but in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, we improvised with a blender, and it worked just fine. This recipe is one I make over and over and over again, but I don’t measure the spices (usually), so it always comes out a little different. I quantified the spices once, for friends who wanted the recipe, but these amounts are really just guesses. I add and taste and add and taste until it tastes right to me. I had salsa like this one once in Peru, and this recipe here represents my attempt to replicate it. Fresh cilantro, lemon, and garlic are the non-negotiables; I like to serve the salsa with lime-flavored tortilla chips.

Peruvian Salsa

4 cloves garlic
1 bunch fresh cilantro, stems removed
Juice of 1 lemon
1 jalapeno pepper
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
Kosher salt, start with a teaspoon (I probably end up adding 2 more, but I like things salty)
Ground cumin, about 2 teaspoons

In a food processor, mince the garlic cloves and jalapeno pepper together by pulsing several times. If you like your salsa spicy, add the pepper whole (minus the stem of course), but if you are sensitive to heat, you can remove the seeds for a milder flavor. Then, add the cilantro through the feed tube with the motor running, and process all of the vegetables are very finely minced. Add the lemon juice, salt and cumin, and tomatoes, and pulse a few times to combine. Be careful not to overprocess here, though, or the salsa will be too runny and not chunky enough. Unless, of course, you prefer your salsa juicy; then, process away.

Note: If you don’t have a food processor, you can process everything in the blender with about a tablespoon of the crushed tomatoes. Then, pour the blender-mixture into a bowl with the remaining tomatoes and stir to combine.

When I started this venture, this food blog, I planned on using the web space to finally write down my methods for dinner preparation and to share recipes with friends and family. As with most things, I had the idea one week, at possibly one of the busiest junctures in my life, and jumped right in head first the next week, designing headers and buying a domain name. Conventional wisdom indicates that you should do your research first, learning what you need to know before you begin a project. For some reason, I never quite learned that lesson.

And so, for the last several months, I have been composing a food blog the hard way, doing almost everything manually, from typing in the links to my Archives each week, to creating a not-so-efficient comments page. And, technologically speaking, not doing a very good job of it, (as I’m sure you’ve noticed if you use Firefox; sorry for all those crazy lines!) As the holidays neared, I decided it was time for a change. So, dear reader, I am happy to report that my blog comes to you now in its new, fully automated clothing.

One of the things I teach my writing students is that one of the most important pieces of information they need to gather is who, exactly, their audience (or audiences) is. One of the things I’ve realized, as I’ve engaged in this writing process, is that my audience is very diverse. Other fellow food bloggers, intimately familiar with the cooking and technological processes I utilize, sometimes visit. On the other end of the spectrum are friends and family, intimately familiar with me, but sometimes not with blog technology or even with the food. And then there’s a third even more ambiguous and hodgepodge group: acquaintances of people who know me, readers of other food blogs, people who just happen to be looking for a recipe for sweet potato grits. Whoever you may be, I’m happy you’ve stopped by, and I hope you’ll come again.

For those of you familiar with food blogs, you don’t need a tour of the new features on my site. I know this. But for those of you who come just because you love me or because you love food, I thought I might take a minute to tell you what you’ll find here. Just in case you care.

First, on the right side of the screen is information to help you sort through the information on the site. I’m in the process of updating all of the material I wrote last year so that it will be searchable and will appear in the Categories, but in the meantime, you can find a list of recipes and links to those posts in the page “2005 Archives.” The other pages are self-explanatory, random information about me and about the way the site began. You’ll also find a list of food blogs I like to read, one I’m hoping to continue updating. If you like to read about food or search for recipes, I recommend any of these folks’ sites.

At the bottom of each post is a place for you to leave comments, to say, “Hey you forgot the baking temperature for the cake,” or “I made that grilled chicken and it was delicious,” or just hello. You can see what other people are saying too, like a little virtual discussion. In the Categories list (also on the right), you can click one (there aren’t many up yet since I only have two posts in this new software) and see all of the posts I’ve tagged as main dish or snack food or family. Or, if you’re looking for something particular, you can use the search box at the top.

Or, you can ignore all of that over there and just come occasionally to read what I write here in the middle. However you choose to peruse the site, I do hope you enjoy yourself and find something delicious to cook. Both worthy goals in my estimation.

One of my goals for the beginning of this year was to begin afresh with this endeavor called Weekly Dish. The site began really as a way to post recipes for friends and family and to learn about technology. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realized I have been doing this the hard way!

So, I’m taking this week to learn about the new software I’m using and to convert my Archives. I have much holiday cooking to report, but until I have time to concentrate on new material, I thought it might be fun to look back and see what I’ve been cooking since I’ve been in school. From left to right, my first week’s worth of meals included a Grilled Margarita Chicken with Grilled Corn and Apple-Avocado Salad, Corn and Tomato Risotto, Taboulleh Chicken Salad, and Asparagus Soup. Ahhh, summer. Oh, and I also made a vegetable platter with stuffed tomatoes and corn pudding, but none of the photos turned out. Clicking on any of the photos below will take you to that week’s worth of recipes. Wow, my photos need some improvement!

The site will inevitably change over the course of the next few weeks; I hope you’ll bear with me while I’m in transition. In the meantime, I wish you all a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2006.