We're Back! (and Grilled Swordfish with Tomato-Braised Cauliflower)

Aaaaand we're back after a month-long hiatus! For most of the last month, my life has looked a little something like this:

The hubs and I moved across a state-line, into the 'burbs. And while I miss my old, walkable neighborhood dearly (Seriously, why are the suburbs so anti-walking? We tried to walk to a nearby strip mall the other day and were nearly killed by oncoming traffic), I get to live in this big beautiful house with a big beautiful kitchen and laundry room.

The interior is still a work in progress (wallpaper is dead to me), but it's mostly cosmetic issues, and the kitchen is an absolute delight. I adore my dishwasher and garbage disposal and miles of counter space. And my new stainless-steel, french-door, bottom freezer refrigerator makes me smile every time I walk into the kitchen. It's refreshing to have an appliance that doesn't have 20+ years of someone else's dirt and grime in it.

So, I unearthed my cookbooks and have been cooking up a storm these past couple of weeks. Fresh Michigan asparagus has been abundant in the local groceries (which leave something to be desired, but more on that later), so we've been eating loads of it. If you're looking for a kick-ass recipe with asparagus, look no further than this gem from Smitten Kitchen. We had it for brunch last Sunday and it was amazing.

You know how when you move, you find things you forgot you had and make resolutions to actually use them? Well, I have made a resolution to cook from more of my cookbooks and not just my usual standbys (ahem, ATK and Smitten Kitchen). When we were in Greece, I bought this lovely book called "How to Roast a Lamb" by Michael Psilakis. Some of the recipes are quite advanced, but this Grilled Swordfish with Tomato-Braised Cauliflower is so simple and full of delicious flavors. If you're near a body of water or in a big city, you can probably get amazing swordfish, and if you're in the sticks like me (and you google "Fish Markets" in your zip code and come up with Long John Silvers) you may have to go with a flash frozen variety, which was actually quite delicious. This cauliflower is so good, I ate it the next day for lunch, just by itself. Don't be alarmed by the cinnamon in a savory dish - just trust me, it is fabulous.

Grilled Swordfish with Tomato-Braised Cauliflower
from "How to Roast a Lamb" by Michael Psilakis

Ingredients
2 TBSP extra virgin olive oil
1 medium head cauliflower, broken into florets
Kosher salt and cracked black pepper
Large pinch ground cinnamon
1/2 large Spanish or sweet onion, thinly sliced
1 fresh bay leaf or 2 dried
2 cinnamon sticks
1 TBSP tomato paste
2 TBSPs red wine vinegar
1 and a half cups of water
2 whole sprigs thyme
2 tsps Dijon mustard
4 swordfish steaks, about 5 oz each

Directions:
In a large, heavy pot over medium-high heat, warm the oil until it is very hot. Add the cauliflower florets. Season with kosher salt and pepper, and dust with the cinnamon. Shake the pan for 2 to 3 minutes, until nicely golden. Add the onion, bay leaves, and cinnamon sticks. Stir in the tomato paste and cook for 1 minute. Deglaze the pan with the vinegar. (This means pour it in and stir, scraping up any brown bits on the bottom). Add the water, thyme sprigs, and mustard. Partially cover the pan and braise over low heat until the cauliflower is tender. Remove from the heat and discard the bay leaves and cinnamon sticks.

Preheat a charcoal or gas grill (or cast-iron grill pan or skillet) until very hot. Season both sides of the swordfish steaks with salt and pepper and grill for 1 and a half to 2 minutes on each side (Psilakis says that swordfish should be cooked to the same temp as you would enjoy a tuna steak, so somewhat raw on the inside - you can cook it slightly longer if you prefer it more done on the inside). Rest steaks for a few minutes before serving.

This all comes together VERY quickly, which makes it perfect for a weeknight dinner, but it's also fancy enough for company. And you probably already have most of the ingredients for it in your pantry and fridge. I'd serve it with some crusty bread and maybe a Greek salad. Enjoy!

Vegan Chili: What a Crock!

This recipe is from the Crockpot 365 website. If you haven't been there, you need to check it out. If you've never cooked in your crockpot, you are truly missing out because there is no cheaper or easier way to feed the hungry mouths in your home. Nothing beats coming home from work and having the house already smell like dinner. Anyway, the woman who runs the site decided to make every meal for a year in her crockpot, which turned into a Julie and Julia-esque book deal (if only that fate were possible for the fallible foodies...). I've made other crock meals from from this website before, but this one came recommended to me by a very awesome vegetarian.


Click here to find the recipe.


I made a few alterations, kind of one and a halving the recipe. I added some green pepper, another sweet potato, some black beans, and a little more orange juice. That's the beauty of the crock. You throw almost anything into it and what comes out will usually be edible! (Some recipes on the cRock blog are fails and it's really funny to read what she says about them).

Before, circa 7:30 am. Look at that beautiful morning sunshine gleaming off those veggies! Note: I would cut the sweet potatoes and peppers a little smaller next time.

After! It smells like magic. Just don't forget the Chipotle Chili powder!

And the end result! I served it over some brown rice made in my rice cooker (another magical machine, just like the crock pot). This meal is warm, hearty, and delicious. You won't miss the meat at all, I promise! You might miss the cheese and sour cream, though... I made this for an impromptu dinner party of 5 and it was a smash hit!


Enjoy!

Roasted Veggies

Roasted carrots, parsnips, and Brussels sprouts

Roasted veggies are a staple in our kitchen. When I'm unsure of what to make for dinner, roasted veggies are usually my default dish. Or when I've perhaps over-indulged a bit on desserts or fried foods one weekend, a couple of dinners of roasted veggies can turn it all around. Roasting in the oven at a high temperature is bound to make any veggie taste good - even ones you thought you hated. Just go to the store, pick out what looks fresh, chop it up, toss in some olive oil, sprinkle with Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper et voila! You've got a delicious meal. Adding potatoes always helps make it more hearty and feel like a main dish rather than a side.

A few tips to keep in mind when roasting veggies:

1) Roast at 400 to 425 degrees to achieve that yummy caramelization.

2) Be sure to use plenty of olive oil and toss to make sure each veggie is coated - don't want them sticking to the pan!

3) Don't chop them too small - they will shrink when roasting, so err on the larger side.

4) Root veggies will take a bit longer than, say green beans and asparagus. Start the root veggies first (including potatoes, if you desire), then after about 15 minutes or so, add the green veggies and roast for 10 minutes more (or until all is tender). For the veggies pictured below, I roasted them all together for about 20 minutes, shaking the pan a few times during roasting to make sure they didn't stick.

Before

After

I tried a new method for roasting beets last night, too. I read about this in America's Test Kitchen (where else?) and decided to try it. First you remove the stem parts, scrub the beet, and wrap it in foil. (You can do this with multiple beets as well, I just happened to be roasting one). Place the foil package on a baking sheet in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until a knife slides easily into the beet.

Unwrap (carefully, it's hot!) and let cool for 10 minutes. Using paper towels (to shield your fingers from beet stains), rub off the skin of the beet - it will come off very easily.

Once you've got all the skin off, slice the beet, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with salt and pepper! I find beets delicious all by themselves, but they are also wonderful in salads, such as with arugula and goat cheese.



If you're not a big fan of vegetables, have a go at roasting them. I honestly believe it's a good way to get even the pickiest of eaters to enjoy veggies.

Italian Couscous: An Experiment

I love couscous. LOVE it. When I was thinking of things to make for "Vegan Week," it was one of the first things to pop into my mind, because I didn't want to deal with any of the weird, hard to find, meat imitation junk that a lot of vegans and vegetarians eat. I wanted to keep it simple and easy. Couscous can be made in a ton of different ways, but I didn't find one that was necessarily "Italian" inspired. So what the heck, I figured I'd give it a whirl.

Italian Couscous (my own invention)

1 red onion, diced

1 zucchini, sliced, then quartered into small pieces

1 red pepper, diced

1 cups sun dried tomatoes, diced

2 1/4 cups couscous

3 cups vegetable stock (homemade! hopefully you already have this in your freezer)

Salt, Pepper

Olive Oil

Handful of fresh Basil, julienned

This will easily serve 6 people.

Warm 2 Tbs olive oil in a large pot. Add the onion and zucchini and saute for a few minutes before adding the red pepper. Sautee until the veggies are cooked through, but make sure to not over cook them.

Delicious and Beautiful!

Add the stock and bring to a boil. Add couscous and a teaspoon of salt, remove from heat, Cover, and let sit for 5 minutes.

Stir in the sun dried tomatoes, a little more salt, pepper, and basil. Spoon into deep dishes, and enjoy!

Note: This made a delicious light supper. My one complaint was that it could use a lot more seasoning. Maybe some red pepper flakes thrown in with the couscous? I'm open to suggestions, let me know what you think! (Also, Kaycee thought it could use more zucchini).

Cooking in Greece Part 2

Things continue to be lovely over on this side of the Atlantic. The hubs and I took a little day trip today to Epidavros, a very cool ancient ruins site with an amazingly preserved, 14,000 seat theater with perfect acoustics. It was quite awesome.



Just thought you might like a little culture with your food. Anyways, I was jonesing for some healthy eats tonight so I decided to make my go-to healthy dish, which just happens to be Greek. Honestly, I can't believe I haven't posted it here yet - I seriously cook this every week or so. It's one of the few things I can make without consulting the recipe, it's ridiculously cheap to make, and I've given out the recipe to many friends who now love it too. So here, it is: Greek Lentil Soup (called Fakes - "fah-kess" in Greek).

Fakes
(taught to me by my husband, whose mother taught him)

Ingredients:
1/4 cup olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 or 2 carrots (I like 2, but 1 will suffice)
8 oz brown lentils
1 quart water
dried oregano
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper
1 to 2 TBSP tomato paste (to taste)

Directions:
Put lentils in a large, heavy bottom pot and cover with about an inch of water. Bring to the boil and boil for 10 minutes, then strain into colander and set aside.

Dry out the pot and pour in the olive oil. Heat to medium high heat and saute the onions and carrot until soft, about 10 minutes. During the last minute of sauteing, throw in the garlic until fragrant. Add the lentils back to the pot, along with one quart of water, the oregano, bay leaves and salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, then cover and boil for 10 minutes.

Uncover the pot and stir in the tomato paste. Re-cover, turn down the heat so that it simmers, and continue cooking for 30 to 40 minutes more, until the lentils are tender.

Serve with Feta and a drizzle of red-wine vinegar over the top.

Who would've thought I'd be a Greek lady when I grew up?

It was neat to cook a meal in my husband's family's kitchen. I never got to meet my mother-in-law, sadly she passed away in 2001. Tonight, standing at her stove, cooking a dish I know she cooked a hundred times before, I felt as though I knew her a little bit. It was really special, one of the many moments in my life where I've been grateful for food and the way it has brought me closer to people I love.

Kalinichta (good night) from Greece!

Swiss Breakfast

You know, it really pays to have friends/roommates who know you and your tastes. Throughout Lent, I've been having Greek Yogurt with Homemade Granola (recipe coming soon) almost every day for breakfast. Sometimes, you need to change it up a little bit. Roommate Emily saw this quick little breakfast recipe in the Sunday Chicago Trib and said "Hey, you should make this. This looks like something you'd like." She was SPOT ON!

Swiss Breakfast (I have no idea what this means...)

Milk

Lemon

Apple

Rolled Oats (Old Fashioned Quaker works well)

Raisins

Slivered Almonds

Step 1: Curdle the Milk. Weird, right? Place 3 Tbs Milk in a bowl and squeeze 2 tablespoons of lemon juice on top (I just used half a lemon's juice). Watch it curdle! I don't know how well the picture captures it, but milk gets funny looking swirls in it when it curdles.

Step Two: Using a box grater, grate a whole apple into the bowl, peel and all. This is fun and it looks pretty. The recipe says to do it on wax paper then dump it in... I say just have good aim.

Step Three: Throw on a handful of rolled oats, raisins, silvered almonds, blueberries, whatever you want!

This is a delightful start to any day. You get creaminess from the milk, crunchiness from the oats and almonds, and a fresh pop from that lemon juice. And you probably have all the ingredients just laying around, too!

Shrimp Tourkolimano

Hooray, I did it! I made a quick week-night meal in approx. 30 minutes! I made this once before but had kind of forgotten about it until I was scouring my cookbooks for something fast and easy.

We received this lovely book Greektown Chicago: Its History and Its Recipes as a gift from my husband's brother and sister-in-law a couple of years ago. I swear by the Pastitsio recipe in it (but more on that later). Its a really fun book, loaded with old pics of Chicago's Greektown and recipes from the Greektown restaurants as well as from local Chicago Greek-Americans. I look forward to sharing this book with my children someday.

So this recipe, called Shrimp Tourkolimano (which according to the book means "Turkish harbor, named for the place where the Greeks arrived upon their exodus from that region, at the port of Piraeus) is full of traditional Greek flavors - olive oil, tomato, feta. My husband and I tasted something sort of like this while we were in Greece last time.

Shrimp Tourkolimano
from Greektown Chicago, serves 4

Ingredients
1 lb shrimp
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup Spanish onions, chopped
1/4 cup green onions, chopped
4 garlic cloves, finely minced
1/2 cup chopped tomatoes (I used diced from the can since it's the dead of winter and the tomatoes suck right now!)
1/4 cup tomato puree (I had used about a 1/2 can of tomato paste I had leftover mixed with a a little water)
6 oz crumbled Feta cheese
1 cup water
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Preheat oven to broil. Meanwhile, saute the garlic, green and Spanish onions in olive oil until lightly brown (about 10 minutes). Add the tomato puree and chopped tomatoes and continue cooking for 2-3 minutes. Add the water, salt and pepper, and boil for 10 minutes.

Add the shrimp to the pan with the tomato mixture and boil for 3 to 4 minutes (do not fully cook as they will finish cooking in the oven and you don't want them to overcook). Transfer to a small, shallow baking pan and top with the crumbled Feta. Broil for about 10 minutes, or until the Feta begins to melt and brown.





I served this with some plain Greek white rice and a green salad. It is also wonderful with crusty bread to scoop up all the yummy sauce. (However, I had a fallible moment yesterday and a complete bread making FAIL - more on that later, I'm attempting a second try either today or tomorrow).

You, too, can enjoy the flavors of Greece in your kitchen tonight!

Ground Beef Take 2

My fellow fallible foodie and I must have been on the same wavelength this week, because we both bought the exact same organic grass-fed ground beef from Gene's (or rather, my husband bought it, as I was schlepping myself from gig to gig to rehearsal on Sunday, our usual shopping day). My husband isn't into the whole "paying more for food" thing (and neither am I, really, but I'm trying to come to terms with it), so he must really love me to go out of his way to get the good stuff. As Mark said, it isn't cheap, but we compensate by cooking more vegetarian dishes and trying not to make the meat the focal point of the meal. Case in point, we stretched the 1 lb of ground beef into two meals for each of us - then the $7 spent on meat doesn't seem like as much.

The hubs took the lead on this meal - yes, I married a Greek man who can cook. It's ok to feel jealous. ;)

Greek Meatballs (keftethes)
(adapted from a Greek cookbook my mom bought him for Christmas - it's one of those old church ladies compilation type thingies)

Serves 4

1 lb ground beef
1/2 c dried bread crumbs
1 small onion, minced
1/4 tsp dried oregano
3 garlic cloves, minced


Combine all ingredients in a large bowl, using your hands to mix thoroughly. Form into balls. Saute in olive oil in a hot non-stick skillet until evenly browned, about 3-5 minutes per side.

My husband is also the homemade french fry champ. They are so easy! - and without the Guilt of the Golden Arches.

Homemade French Fries
(1 potato will serve 2 people)

1 or 2 baking potatoes
olive oil
salt and pepper

Peel and cut the potatoes into matchsticks. Let them soak in a bowl of cold water for a few minutes while your oil gets hot in the pan. Use enough oil to completely cover the potatoes, and wait until the oil is just smoking to add the potatoes to the pan. Fry until golden brown, turning several times throughout to avoid burning.

a three-burner night at chez Emily. more on that tomato sauce later...

our take on burgers and fries

And that my friends, is how you make the bad-for-you stuff seem not so bad at all! (We also had a big bowl of broccoli).

Quick Dinner

Today is Thursday, which means church choir. This leaves me one solid hour between the second I walk in the door from work until the moment I have to leave for rehearsal. I usually try to make this night a left-over meal, but figured in the spirit of the project, I would try to make a delicious meal as quickly as possible. I turned to "Healthy Recipes," one of the apps on my Droid (beloved Gizmo... you have so much to offer and I barely know how to work you!). I ended up attempting "Authentic Indian Chicken Curry," but basically only used the ingredients that I had at home, so we'll call this Bastardized Indian Chicken Curry Stir-Fry Thing. Below is a close approximation of what I made, I was kind of a mess with the spices.

1.5 Lbs of Chicken, cut into cubes about 1" thick

Half of a big yellow onion, diced into small pieces... ma non troppo! You want them to be about the same size as the tomatoes.

1 can of diced tomatoes

2 Tbs EVOO

1 Tbs Fresh grated Ginger

4 cloves of Garlic, finely diced

1 tsp Cumin

1 tsp Curry Powder

1 tsp Red Pepper Flakes

2 tsp Sea Salt

1 tsp Cinnamon (actually, I just sprinkled a bunch in the pan.. I have no clue how much it was)

Fallible Note: I'm unfortunately not too sure what my chicken was before it became my dinner... It's from Gene's Sausage Shop so I'm telling myself it lived a slightly better life than the pre-wrapped crap from Jewel, but I have no way of knowing this... much more research is needed!

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet (or a wok), over medium heat. Brown the onions, then add the garlic, cumin, curry, red pepper, and cinnamon. Then toss in your ginger, diced tomatoes, salt, and finally the chicken. (For the sake of time, I actually just kind of threw everything in...) Cook, stirring often, until the chicken is done.

The real recipe (which calls for many more ingredients....) suggests serving this over rice, and I know that would be delicious. I didn't have any rice so I just threw it in a pita and it was wonderful. Sloppy, but wonderful.

This literally took 30 minutes to make... I walked in my door at 5:58 and was eating at 6:32. Suck on that, RR!

This picture is not quite amazing... you'll have to take my word on its spicy deliciousness.