Frittata with roasted peppers, potatoes and zucchini

Making this up on Sunday proved to be very handy — it’s a very busy work week for me with the end of the quarter and school year happening, so I wanted to make sure whatever the main dish was was something I could make and store for a bit in the fridge or freezer. This turned out to be perfect for that, using potatoes, zucchini and parsley from my basket along with some other items. There are a slew of such recipes out there — I ended up using this one, only substituting roasted red peppers for the poblano chiles. Worked my way through a good amount of it already and should polish off the rest tonight or tomorrow.

Honey roasted potatoes

Roasting potatoes is an easy and common enough thing but the honey glaze suggested in the recipe following, which I received from my latest CSA mailout from who knows what source, was a very nice variant. Officially for red potatoes but hey, I just used what I had to hand. So:

• 1 pound red potatoes, quartered
• 2 tablespoons diced onion
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 pinch ground black pepper

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly coat an 11×7 inch baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.

2. Place potatoes in a single layer in prepared dish, and top with onion. In a small bowl, combine melted butter, honey, mustard, salt and pepper; drizzle over potatoes and onion.

3. Bake in the preheated 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) oven for 35 minutes or until tender, stirring halfway through the cooking time.

Potato carrot soup

I’ve done this kind of soup plenty of times before but it’s always good to revisit — in this case, I wanted to use up the rest of the potatoes I had around but I didn’t want to just do another creamy style soup like I’d done last week. The advantage of this soup — the recipe can be found here — is that it’s really quite simple and relies on two things: a little preparation in advance and time to let it really cook through. In this case I went for a full two hours and the result’s excellent — there’s no noodles or rice or the like in this soup but it wasn’t missed, all one needs is a bit of bread to help fill in the corners.

Broccoli-potato soup with greens

And time to get back into the cooking swing of things for a new year. I’ve done broccoli-potato soups before but this one turned out really well —

Some food updates…

…as it were. I should say also by means of introduction it’s just been a terribly busy time for me lately, with the upcoming school year and our concurrent adjustment with the general UC budget situation, so the sporadic nature of my posting here lately has a big reason behind it! But since today is a day off and I have nothing planned, I figured time for some blog work while enjoying a cool morning and Les Rallizes Denudes on the stereo.

In terms of cooking, a combination of dinners out and the very hot weather has meant that I’ve been concentrating on things like basic salads and a bit of bread in the evening, so for the most part there’s been nothing new to share. But over the past couple of weeks I’ve done a few experiments, so sharing a couple of here:

This was described in a cookbook I have as a gift from my aunt and uncle as Thai basil fried rice, and whatever the exact origin of the recipe it turned out nicely, though I was using a European basil instead. The key trick lies in including basil as both ingredient cooked with the rest and with garnish — while strong, it’s not overpowering, and is a nice twist on the more straightforward fried rices out there.

This baked zucchini spears recipe was found here, though as you can see my version turned out less heavily dredged in comparison. But no matter, even though it wasn’t thickly coated, it was still tasty with the right amount of spice and crunch, and was a good way to make use of a huge zucchini from the garden.

Finally from last night and taken from the Farmer John’s Cookbook, a potato and broccoli frittata, done quite honestly as a way to use up a variety of ingredients (potato and broccoli but also eggs and onions) as the next basket approaches on Thursday. A little effort but turned out nicely, I think I would add more spice to it while also trying to figure out how to get the potatoes brown more thoroughly while sauteeing them (my range is good but not always the most precise when it comes to ideal temperatures).

Potatoes gorgonzola au gratin

Damn, this was pretty good. Heavy of course but using soy milk probably helped (I hope!). One of those things to try every so often…but not regularly! Recipe here.

Ragout of potatoes

So I had a small batch of potatoes from the most recent basket that I had to do something which — for whatever reason the eyes always sprout quickly — and I found this recipe from Anna Thomas’ The Vegetarian Epicure. As her site shows this book has spawned a couple of sequels but this is from the original, published in 1972 and very much a product of its time in many ways (not all bad — far from it! — but the color scheme and artwork on the cover are very much a time-and-place affair).

Thomas herself has lived the kind of ‘why pigeonhole yourself?’ life more should in this world — with her husband Gregory Nava she’s done quite a bit of work in film, perhaps most famously the still-excellent El Norte — but The Vegetarian Epicure, written while she was in grad school for film (and I’m impressed for that reason alone! wish I had had that kind of energy when I was pursuing my master’s) was her first success and deservedly so, helping to advance an idea of vegetarian cooking in America as something more than simply searching for analogues to meat dishes.

The introduction to the book is worth a read alone, a statement of purpose delighting in the possibilities of good food and good living as working in tandem, dealing with the kind of questions that still recur today about food supply health, appropriate amounts of protein and simply the idea of not regularly eating meat — and as I keep saying, I’m omnivorous, I just want that kind of good food myself! (And if you’ve read my blog enough by now you should know that’s part of the goal anyway.)

To quote a nice bit from Thomas’s introduction:

Vegetarian cooking is not a substitute for anything. It is a rich and various cuisine, full of many marvelous dishes with definite characteristics not in imitation of anything else…It is not the slave of the ‘main course,’ even as it does not avoid that arrangement when it seems fitting and useful.

Thus, I think, this recipe — in the hopes that this can serve as a sampler for interested parties, I’ll quote it here, while urging you consider her books for further ideas. She hasn’t updated her site in a bit but had included new recipes and further reflections, and there are links from her site to purchase her three books. Give ‘em a try!

(As a side note — the seeded sourdough bread you see there also provided the croutons for the salad. Taking a tip from Mark Bittman I went ahead, diced up some bread and crisped it in the oven, drying out the portions nicely without having to fry them. Good idea, that.)

—

6 very large russet potatoes
2 large onions
1/4 cup butter (I substituted margarine)
1 tsp. Bakon yeast (I substituted a bacio tuscano spice blend from Avanti)
2 to 3 cloves garlic, minced or pressed)
1 cup strong vegetable broth
1 Tbs. fresh tarragon or 1/2 tsp. dried tarragon
salt and pepper
olive oil
wine vinegar
chopped parsley (used as a garnish; as I had none to hand you won’t see any in the photo)

Peel the potatoes and dice them. Peel and coarsely chop the onions. Heat the butter in a large skillet and stir in the Bakon yeast. Sauté the onion and garlic in it until the onion is transparent. Add in the potato cubes and stir around for a few minutes.

When the potatoes are all evenly coated and warmed, add the vegetable broth, the tarragon, some salt and pepper and just enough water to barely reach the top of the potatoes; it should not be more than a cup. Let this mixture simmer gently for about 45 minutes, stirring often. The potatoes should be tender and most of the liquid gone. A thick sauce will form from the pieces of potato which fall apart.

Pour about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and a little wine vinegar over the potatoes and mix well. Sprinkle with some fresh chopped parsley and serve steaming hot.

Serves 6 to 8.

Potato and onion soup

This recipe comes courtesy of Marcella Hazan, one of those cooks and writers of an earlier generation pre-Food Channel overload. Friend Stripey turned me on to her work and generously gave me a copy of The Classic Italian Cookbook, where I found this one (that book and a later one were combined into

Caldo verde, redux

So when I did my first attempt at caldo verde I was pleased enough with the results. Turns out, though, that somebody who really knew her caldo verde noticed my post, as well as noticed that what I had made wasn’t really caldo verde.

Isabel, who is herself Portuguese, clearly knows her food in general and her spirit of cooking for herself when she likes fits in perfectly with my own way of things, so I was very interested to read her post and follow-up emails. I’ll quote her comment here:

Caldo Verde is extremely simple (and delicious), the only problem is that you need one specific type of cabbage. There:

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagem:Couve-galega.JPG

So, you peel some potatoes and boil them with a little salt, moosh them thoroughly (it should not be be thick, but not too watery), bring to boil again and then add the cabbage cut in veeeeeery thin slices or strips. Bring to boil again and leave it boiling maybe no more than 5 minutes, add a good spoonful of olive oil and stop the heat. Add the sausage if you want and eat it as soon as possible. It should look like this:
http://aeiou.escape.expresso.pt/fotos/gourmet/68_fu_1.jpeg

The kale that I used in this preparation isn’t necessarily the cabbage Isabel notes, I think, but it’s a good big leafy one, and I think I definitely got closer! I should have mixed in the olive oil more, though. Turned out very nicely in any event — thanks Isabel!

Caldo verde

A Portuguese soup, I gather — found the recipe here. Added some vegetable broth concentrate for color and flavor, and turned out very nicely, a clear soup that was still somehow rich.