This is a continuation of the Sunday cooking extravaganza I did for Zack. The salad portion of the meal was this amazingly flavorful and pretty simple to throw together. Which I needed after preparing the main course, but I'll get to that in another post.
Now, quinoa has been a part of American cuisine for a while, but we had yet to work it into our rotation. Well, as it turns out, it's so simple to prepare, is extremely good for you, and tastes good. Why weren't we using this before?!?
Here's what you need:
1 cup quinoa
2 cups low sodium chicken stock (or vegetable stock if you're vegetarian)
1/2 package of mixed greens
1 red pepper
1 scallion
1 handful of Italian parsley
1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese
Homemade Balsamic Vinaigrette
Here's what you do:
Combine the quinoa and chicken (vegetable) stock in a medium sauce pot and bring to a boil.
Once that comes to a boil, cover and reduce to a simmer. (Sounds kind of like making rice, doesn't it).
Let cook for 20-30 minutes, or until the grain absorbs the liquid. You can lift the lid and check it if you don't have a glass lid like this.
While the quinoa is cooking, get started on the other pieces of your salad.
Chop your red pepper.
Then slice your scallion.
And, finally coarsely chop the parsley. You can skip this step if you want. I was just in a chopping mood.
Combine all of that into your bowl, cover and put in the fridge until you're ready to eat.
Transfer the quinoa into a bowl and let cool in the fridge until you're ready to build your salad and take it to the table.
Right before you're ready to serve, add the feta cheese and a couple of scoops of the quinoa to the salad and toss.
Top with our seriously tasty homemade balsamic vinaigrette.
Enjoy!
Continuing on with the documentation of my day of cooking while Zack was at work, I bring you the salad dressing next. We use a lot balsamic in our house. It's probably one of Zack's favorite things, so it was only natural that I would make a homemade balsamic vinaigrette for the salad.
It's very easy. If you stock the essentials, you will never have to buy sodium packed salad dressing again.
Here's what you need:
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp Kosher salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
3/4 cup olive oil
Here's what you do:
Combine brown sugar, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a bowl.
Add balsamic vinegar to the mix and whisk to combine.
Drizzle in the olive oil, whisking to emulsify.
Transfer to a carafe or squeeze bottle and keep in the fridge until ready to use.
Stick around for the amazingly tasty and simple Quinoa Mixed Greens salad I topped with this!
Enjoy!
The fresh green beans looked gorgeous at the grocery store the other day, so we created this recipe on the fly. Zack correctly decided that they should be roasted with chopped garlic, to which Michelle added the balsamic reduction to finish it off. These green beans were de-li-cious.
Here's what you need:
2-3 lbs fresh green beans
3-4 large cloves of garlic
Kosher salt & freshly ground pepper
Oil oil to coat
4 Tbsp-ish balsamic vinegar
Here's what you do:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Trim the ends of your green beans and toss in a large bowl. Chop the garlic, but not too small. It will roast and be super tasty with the green beans. Add that to the bowl. Season with kosher salt and black pepper. Drizzle enough olive oil to coat.
Toss in a 9 x 13 Pyrex baking dish. Bake for 30 minutes or so. When the beans are ready, they will wilt and the garlic will turn a light brown color.
While the beans are roasting, put the balsamic vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-high heat.
Allow that to reduce by half. We did this once before for our Tomatoes with Balsamic Reduction and we forgot to mention that you shouldn't breath the scent of balsamic while it's reducing. It's quite strong and will definitely clear your sinuses. If it reduces down before your beans are ready, just reduce the heat to low to keep it warm.
Drizzle reduced balsamic over the beans.
Enjoy!
If you've ever been to college, chances are, you've had Ramen noodles. You get a whole meal for just $.33. How can you beat that?
Well, we've progressed since our poor college days, and we wanted to find a way to elevate the Ramen noodle. Mostly because the salt content in those little packets of seasoning are through the roof! You can buy just the noodles in the International aisle of your grocery store, or you can buy the individual "soup" packages.
This preparation will be cold. If you want to try it warm, just prepare your onion and dressing before you cook your noodles.
Here's what you need: *Note - the quantities on the dressing are approximate. Use your taste buds. They'll tell you when you have the right mix.
1 package Ramen noodle soup
1 scallion
2 Tbsp low sodium soy sauce
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 - 1 Tbsp rice vinegar
1/2 - 1 Tbsp honey
5-6 drops of Sriracha (more if you like it spicy!)
Freshly ground black pepper
Kosher salt if you need it, but you should get enough salt from the soy
Here's what you do:
First things first, open up the package of Ramen and throw the seasoning packet in the trash. You don't want to be tempted to use it.
Now that that's taken care of, put a sauce pan of water over high heat and bring to a boil. Add your noodles and let cook for 3-4 minutes. They cook fast, so don't let them go too long. No one likes mushy noodles.
Pour all of your dressing ingredients in a medium bowl and whisk to combine.
Your noodles should be done by now, so drain and rinse with cold water to stop them from cooking and cool them down. If you are serving this as a warm noodle dish, just drain and add to your dressing.
Slice up a scallion. We like to cut them diagonally when we're putting this in a salad like this. It's just prettier. You can slice them any way you want, we won't judge you.
Add your noodles and scallions to the bowl with the dressing and toss to coat everything.
That's it! You're ready to eat.
Enjoy!
Recently, we've discovered David Rocco's Dolce Vita. It's a great show on the Cooking Channel. We always thought polenta was some difficult side to make and you were better off buying the pre-made polenta and just slicing it to use when you needed. Boy, were we wrong. Polenta is actually pretty simple, just a little tiring. You have to stir the entire time. Slight forearm discomfort is worth it for this yummy dish.
Here's what you need:
4 1/4 cups of lukewarm water
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 lb yellow corn meal
Here's what you do:
The first and most important step is to start with lukewarm water - not hot, not cold. Cold water will make your polenta lumpy. We don't really know why you shouldn't use hot water, but David Rocco said use lukewarm, so we did, and the polenta turned out amazing.
Add the salt to the water. Pour in a high-walled skillet or low-walled dutch oven. Your pot needs walls, but you don't want them too high because you're going to be stirring a lot.
Turn the heat on medium and add the corn meal. Start stirring in a clockwise direction.
Continue stirring, always in a clockwise direction. Apparently if you don't stir in the same direction, Italian women all over the world will roll over in their graves and your polenta won't turn out properly. We didn't want to risk that, so we stirred in one direction the entire time.
Eventually, your polenta will thicken and look like this:
At this point, there were a few bubbles coming through and the polenta was the consistency of porridge. The entire process takes 20-30 minutes.
You can serve your polenta two ways - warm, with a bit of olive oil and grated Parmesan, or cooled. We did both, but forgot to snap a picture of the cooled polenta.
To cool it, spread the polenta in a baking dish (we used a 9 x 13 Pyrex) and let cool on the counter. Slice into squares and serve.
Enjoy!
We got a fancy new pizza pan for the grill. Now that we have a gas grill to go along with our charcoal grill, we finally have an area big enough to cook a pizza on. We have done this a couple times, but this last one was actually worthy of a blog.
We decided on Pizza Margherita, because the basil in our garden does not seem to be effected by the excessive heat. We also had some fresh tomatoes from Zack's parent's garden. We didn't make our own crust or sauce for this one, because it was a weeknight meal. Someday we'll figure out the perfect recipes for those, but for now, we're using store bought.
Here's what you need:
3-4 tomatoes, sliced
15-20 leaves of fresh basil
1 ball of fresh mozzarella - trust us, get fresh mozzarella and not shredded.
Drizzle of Extra Virgin olive oil
1/2 jar of pizza sauce
1 pre-made pizza crust
Here's what you do:
Start by heating your grill. We have a 4 burner grill, so we heated the outside burners to medium, and the inside 2 burners we kept on low.
The pizza crust we purchased was made for a rectangular pizza. We, however, have a round pizza grill pan. If this happens to you, you'll simply need to clean the counter and sprinkle the counter with flour to prevent sticking. Roll the crust out and the knead into a ball. Make sure you add flour as necessary. You don't want it to be sticky!
Now, roll the dough out with a rolling pin to the desired round shape. Pizza dough is fairly elastic, so you may have to pick it up and toss it around a little bit too. Once you have the crust in a round, place on the pan and build up the edges so that you have a place to pool your sauce.
Spoon your sauce over the dough so that it's coated, but you can still see the dough through it. It will make things much less messy in the long run if you don't over sauce.
Add the tomatoes first, then mozzarella, then basil. Finally, drizzle the entire pizza with a bit of extra virgin olive oil.
After a couple of not so exciting grilled pizzas, we knew at this point that this one was going to rock, so we snapped a picture.
Place on the grill and close the lid for 10 minutes or so, or until the cheese is melted and the crust is golden.
Enjoy!
Alright, soup is probably not the first thing that crosses your mind when the temperature is nearing 100 degrees outside. That being said, we wanted to do something different with the beautiful sweet corn we picked up at the store, so we crafted a delicious corn chowder.
We based this off of Ina Garten's recipe. Ina's never led us down the wrong path in the past, and she didn't this time either. We halved the recipe, though, because it makes a TON!
You could easily make this a vegetarian chowder by taking the bacon out altogether and swapping the chicken stock for vegetable stock.
Here's what you need:
3 strips of bacon (omit this step if making vegetarian)
2 large onions
1/8 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp tumeric
1 tsp Kosher salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
6 cups low-sodium chicken stock (vegetable stock if making vegetarian)
1 lb boiling potatoes, skin on
5 ears of fresh corn (or 1 1/2 lb frozen corn)
1 cup half and half
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (we used medium cheddar, but you can use what you want)
Here's what you do:
Start by dicing your onion.
We also cleaned and diced our potatoes at the beginning, so we had less to do later.
Heat the olive oil in a large dutch oven over medium high heat.
Cook the bacon until crispy, then set aside. If you're making the vegetarian version of this dish, just start by cooking the onions with the butter in the olive oil.
Reduce the heat to medium, then add the onions and butter.
Let the onions cook for about 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, boil water for your corn and salt well.
Slice the corn off the cob.
Blanche the corn in the boiling water for about three minutes. If you're using frozen corn, you don't need to boil it.
Drain the corn and set aside.
When your onions have become translucent, like this:
Add the flour, tumeric, salt and pepper to the pot.
Give it a good stir and let the mixture cook for about 3 minutes. This will take the raw flour taste out of your chowder.
Once your roux is cooked, add the chicken stock. (Vegetable stock for vegetarian).
And, add the potatoes.
Return the heat to medium high or high and bring to a boil. Let boil for 15 minutes, or until your potatoes are tender.
Once your potatoes are tender, reduce the heat back to medium and add the corn.
Add the cream.
And finally, add the cheese.
Stir everything to combine it and cook for another 5 minutes or so. Stir occasionally to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pot.
While the cheese was melting and the chowder is coming together, we whipped up a garnish by crumbling the bacon, adding diced avocado, and some cilantro.
Serve hot.
Enjoy!
