Category Archives: Quick

Soft Eggs and Avocado on Toast with Cauliflower Soup

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Like most people, soups are on heavy rotation at our house in the winter.Soft Eggs and Avocado on Toast with Cauliflower Soup ourwaytoeat.com I made this Cauliflower Soup with Toasted Garlic from a recipe in a recent Real Simple Magazine and a loaf of Jim Lahey’s wonderful No Knead Bread last Sunday.  We had a few people over on Sunday night, so most of the bread was eaten up.  I needed some inspiration for a quick side dish to make the leftovers into a square meal for supper on Monday night.  P1070723Fortunately, the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living just arrived.  I paged through it, and landed on a quick, simple and still luscious side dish, that  made our cauliflower soup a satisfying meal–Sesame Toasts with Poached Egg and Avocado.Egg and Avocado on Toast up Close

To the extent possible, I followed Martha Stewart’s recipe for Sesame Toasts with Poached Egg and Avocado, but for the arugula I subbed spinach, very lightly dressed with tarragon vinegar and olive oil and I subbed crunchy, toasted slices of No Knead Bread instead for Sesame Toast.  I was able to duplicate the rest of the preparation using ingredients we had on hand.  Yes, I treat our household to the purchase of fresh avocados almost every week.  Tasty Supper of Cauliflower Soup and Toast with Poached Egg and Spinach SaladThis is more of a reminder than a recipe, really.  I occasionally need a reminder that eggs and avocado in their natural form are only a few minutes preparation away from becoming a sublimely luxurious, simple supper.Cauliflower Soup - Toast with Avocado and Poached EggsThis meal was on the table in minutes, was tasty and brought a little light into a dark winter evening.  It works well with soup,  or on its own, and it would also be wonderful for breakfast or lunch.

 

Tostadas – A Satisfying Meal in 5 Minutes

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Pop quiz, hotshot.  You are starving.  Your interest in cooking is nil, but you want something tasty, now.  You, or someone who is depending on you to cook for them, are well on their way to a hunger-induced meltdown.  What do you do? What do you do?  In my imagination, when you are in culinary school there is a day that the teacher singles out a student and poses this question in a maniacal tone reminiscent of the lunatic bus-bomber in the movie Speed.  Like Keanu Reeves in the third-best film in his acting career,* I have a cool head under pressure, and the perfect response that you aren’t expecting:  Tostadas!**

I think every home cook needs to have a few quick, tasty ideas up her sleeve for hunger that’s gone too far.  There are many correct answers, but the key is to have the idea and the ingredients at the ready when there is either a hostage situation and your response will save the city, or for when you and yours just need to eat now. 

There are a few fairly obvious guidelines to succeeding at the preparation of a good meal in 5 minutes.  The first key is simplicity.  Tostadas are extremely simple.

My favorite Tostadas in the world come from Red Pepper in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and they are nothing more than a tostada with melted cheese and hot sauce.  In fact, Tostadas began appearing at our house as an homage to Red Pepper Tostadas, and are frequently eaten on evenings when we’re tuned in to University of North Dakota Hockey on T.V.

We have Tostadas with just cheese and hot sauce as a snack or side dish, but when Tostadas are the meal, I rifle through the pantry and the fridge for a few extra ingredients to round them out.  This is the second key to 5 minute dinner prep:  it must be flexible.

I’ve made tostadas with sliced black olives, canned black beans that have been rinsed, jalapenos or with vegetarian refried beans, which is one of my favorites.  You could use chopped tomatoes, frozen corn, onions, or leftover taco-seasoned beef or chicken.  The assembly simply involves topping a Tostada shell with your Mexican-inspired ingredient of choice, and melting the cheese.  Often, I just zap the tostada in the microwave until the cheese melts.  Occasionally I have used the grill, or placed the tostadas in the oven at 350 degrees.  It only takes a few minutes for the cheese to melt, and the beans to be warmed through. 

An added bonus of using the grill or the oven is it lets the cheese get a bit brown, and the Tostada shell toasty.  If you are truly can’t wait for the oven to heat, by all means, microwave the Tostada.  It will be great.

The third key to 5 minute dinner prep is that it must be something you can make easily for one person, or for a crowd.  If you heat your Tostadas in the oven or on the grill, you can make anywhere from 1 to 10 at a time.  The microwave cooking method would get a little bit tedious if you were making more than 4 Tostadas at a time.  We’ve made cheese Tostadas as a side dish for the meal we prepare and deliver every other week to an Emergency Safe House for homeless youth in our neighborhood.  We wrapped the Tostadas individually on a paper plate, which is the same way they are served at the Red Pepper.

While the Tostadas are heating in the oven or in the microwave, there is just enough time to throw together a quick salad to make Tostadas into a proper meal.  Shredded or torn leaves of lettuce, slices of tomato or olive, jalapenos, onions, and slices of avocado with a squeeze of lime juice, a little sour cream, and of course hot sauce are all perfect for a salad, and are tasty when piled on top of the Tostada.

Now, all that is left is to dig in.  Give me 5 minutes and a few pantry staples and I can take you from a little too hungry to human again.

*In my opinion, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey are the best flicks starring Keanu Reeves in a leading role.  In order to make a fair comparison, I should probably have seen that movie that forever changed effects in movie fight scenes to include slow motion flight through the air with flailing legs…what was it called?  The Matrix?  But, I give myself enough credit to review the key performances in  the height of Keanu Reeves’ acting career because I saw him live as Hamlet in grade 8.  I have now said everything I will ever say about Keanu Reeves on this blog.  I am somewhat in disbelief that I managed to say even this much about him.

**I know you were expecting a slick, action-movie –like response to the question “What do you do? What do you DO?” line of questioning, but I can’t think of any way to make a parallel between Keanu’s response that he’d “shoot the hostage” and solving a garden variety household hunger emergency.  Ok, now I’m really done discussing Keanu Reeves, forvermore.

Principles of a Satisfying Snack

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I’ve been thinking about snacks.  If you say the word “snack” I associate it with the small plate containing Triscuit crackers with peanut butter and jam or slices of cheddar cheese that greeted me after school when I was a child.  I recall the semester that I studied abroad in England the break between morning lectures was an occasion for friends meeting in a  dorm room for cups of instant coffee and McVitie’s Biscuits.  It also calls to mind taking part in the ritual of afternoon noshes — a tiny bowl of salty-crunchy bits and nuts served with a cocktail and a crossword at my great Aunt Margaret’s home Victoria, British Columbia — très sophistiqué.  In these moments, snacking served a dual purpose — it was a time to pause and enjoy a simple and comforting luxury, and to stave off hunger for a few hours more until mealtime arrived.

If you don’t happen to be in the midst of childhood or your college years, or making precious memories with elderly relatives, snacking can have a dark side.  This would be most snacks that come in 100 calorie servings sealed in shiny wrapping, or anything mindlessly inhaled while standing fridge-side.  I don’t find those snacks to be satisfying.  For me, a snack composed according to a few simple principles fits into the romantic episodes in my life as well as the real world.  Take this tasty morsel — a tiny slice of rye bread topped with a little leftover egg salad and a sprig of fresh dill from my garden.  It is well worth  saving a few leftover spoonfuls of egg salad so I can have a snack like this one in the middle of a summer afternoon.

The first principle of a good snack is that it should be quick.  It should take less than 5 minutes, or preferably less than 3 minutes to prepare.  I start each day with only so much energy to devote to food preparation, and I don’t want to devote very much of that to snacks.  I like to keep a small bowl of hard-boiled eggs in the fridge so we can grab one for a snack at work.  It only takes a moment to crack the shell and eat it with a little salt and pepper.  The protein and small amount of fat that an egg contains can sustain me through the afternoon.

The second principle of a good snack is that it should either be light, or very very small.  I usually opt for light.  For this snack that I prepared for myself and for Bjorn, I spread a wedge of light Laughing Cow cheese on two Wasa Crispbread Crackers.  I sliced a radish and some cucumber very thin.  I sprinkled a little smoked paprika on the cucumber and a dash of salt and pepper on the radish.  The whole snack contains less than 150 calories, and also healthy things like fiber.  You can enjoy the crunch of the crackers and veggie slices, the creaminess of the cheese, and take in the brightly colored veggies with a punch of paprika with your nose and your eyes.

The final principle of good snacking is to pause.  While eating, it is so important to take a moment to pay attention, so you know you’ve eaten something, and to appreciate the nourishment.  I also try to pause when I’m done. If it was a tasty snack, I might think that I want a little more, but if I give my mind and stomach ten minutes to catch up with each other, I usually find that I’m satisfied.

Amélie and a Simple Pasta with Butter and Cheese

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One of my favorite films with a memorable food-moment is Amélie, a simple and joyful French film from 2001.  [Spoiler alert…] Amélie is a solitary character with a wonderful internal life.  She observes the world exactingly.  She appreciates simple pleasures and amusing oddities in the goings-on around her with her eyes open, and her mouth closed.  Amélie finds joy in her private life, but also experiences a lack human closeness.  Throughout the movie she launches a series of secret undertakings that bring beauty, life, love and joy to her father, her neighbours, her co-workers and the man who helps her at the vegetable stand.  Her mischievous initiatives become a catalyst for change, new possibilities and happiness.  Waging her secret campaigns for improvement in the lives of others brings Amélie vicarious joy, but she experiences isolation on her own.  One evening, Amélie stands in the kitchen of her darling little apartment, making herself a bowl of noodles, clearly on auto-pilot.   She drains the pot of pasta, and uses a rotary grater to top the noodles with cheese, all the while staring in apparent contemplation of the state of her life.  The quiet evening in her safe haven ends in lonely and frustrated tears at the realization that she is living outside, without meaningful connections of her own.  I love so many things about this film, and I watch it now and then and discover more that I enjoy.  What I have enjoyed since the first viewing is that simple bowl of noodles.  You can do so many things with food, and especially pasta, but so often, the simplest are the most perfect and enjoyable.  Boiled noodles, a little butter, salt, pepper and sometimes, some grated cheese served as simply as possible is a plate of food that manages to nudge on sublime.

Here is my most recent bowl of buttered noodles with cheese.  We had only lasagna noodles in the cupboard, so I boiled them in an ample amount of water, lightly salted.  Once they were cooked al dente, I drained them and used a pizza cutter to slice the broad noodles to an imperfect approximation of papardelle.  I thank Martha Stewart for including  broken and jagged shards of lasagna noodles in a pasta recipe in the cookbook Dinner at Home for inspiring the use of spare and broken lasagna noodles in a non-lasagna dish.  I stirred a little butter thinned with a splash of warmed vegetable stock to allow the noodles a thin coating.  I topped the bowl with finely grated white cheddar, ground pepper and a tiny shake of salt.  It was delicious.  No further elaboration is required.  As for Amélie, she finally succeeds at taking the joyful leap into living her life  when she  removes a literal and figurative mask of protection and reveals her identify to a man whom she secretly admires.  In opening herself up to the possibility of success or failure at love, a life that Amélie has previously observed as an outsider begins to unfold.  Our moments of real pleasure in this life are so precious-they are best enjoyed through attention and fully and openly savoring every delicious experience, no matter how simple.

Lazy Saturday Brunch Sandwich

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We try to get up early on the weekend.  Not as early as on a weekday, but as most people do, we only get two days a week that are our own, so we like to stretch it out and pack in as much as we can into the daylight hours.  We have both been exhausted from a very busy November, so this morning we both slept in.  It surprised me that I could stay in bed for almost 10 hours, but clearly, it was needed.  When I finally got up and made coffee, I was hungry!  All of that sleeping was hard work.  So I set about to make a quick breakfast, well brunch actually, because it was too late in the morning to call the meal breakfast in my books.

I had a hankering for avocado on toast.  I have long loved avocado slices on a sandwich.  I adore homemade guacamole (especially my homemade guacamole), but I only recently discovered the lusciousness of eating a lightly seasoned avocado mashed on a slice of toast.  The heat from the toasted bread brings out the rich and unctuous nature of an avocado.  Eating the avocado simply on its own on a grainy slice of toasted bread lets the avocado be the star.  Since avocado contains “good” fat, it is healthy too.

I sort of felt like having an egg, but I wasn’t feeling very ambitious, so I put it to a vote.  Bjorn voted “yes” to an egg, so the above sandwich was born.  I’m sure Bjorn would have enjoyed a fried egg, but I’m not very good at frying eggs, so the egg ended up scrambled in a little bit of butter.  While the eggs were slowly cooking, I toasted 4 slices of grainy and fiberous New England Brown Bread by Country Hearth.  This bread is a staple in our pantry.  There are only 90 calories and 4 grams of fiber in a slice of this stuff.  It has become my favorite bread for toast.  I sliced and slightly mashed an avocado, and stirred in a shot of lime juice, a pinch of red pepper flakes, salt and pepper- all of which I consider to be essential seasonings for an avocado.  I also sliced a ripe, red tomato.  Once the eggs were mostly set, I added shredded Colby Jack cheese, chopped fresh chives and a little salt and pepper.  I lightly buttered one slice of toast –this bread is very grainy, and is pretty dry without cheese, butter or some other spread on it– and mashed 1/2 of the avocado on to the other slice for each sandwich.  I piled on the eggs, and sliced tomatoes.

The last step was to salt and pepper the tomato slices lightly.  Eggs, avocado and tomato are all foods that taste best with a little salt and pepper.  Seasoning each element of the sandwich kicks up the flavor, it is just as important to use a very light touch on each so the sandwich doesn’t become too salty and peppery as a whole.  I put the avocado-topped slice of toast on top of the egg and tomato slice, Bjorn ate his open-faced.  Either way is great.  The sandwich is tasty and gave me plenty of energy to get moving and make something of the day.

Poached Egg and Cinnamon Toast

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We sit down for a hot breakfast at home most weekends once, if not twice.  Sitting down to eat something hot rather than scarfing down a granola bar or toast on the run between our house and our desks starts a weekend morning out right.  Since it is so easy to make a good breakfast at home, we find we enjoy it more than going out and spending an hour and $15 for a breakfast in a crowded diner.  Sometimes we make an elaborate meal.  Huevos Rancheros, Breakfast Pizza, French toast, Belgian Waffles, Scrambled Eggs with Sautéed vegetables and cheese, bacon or sausage, veggie bacon or sausage, coffee, juice and fruit all show up upon occasion.  But there are also days when the preparation takes only minutes.  When it is Saturday, and you are eating breakfast at home, both of these breakfasts are very enjoyable, depending on the day.  Today we wanted to get going on our day so our Saturday breakfast needed to be quick, so I decided to keep it simple with poached eggs and toast.  We had a little cinnamon swirl bread leftover that we purchased for an elaborate French Toast affair.  I toasted two thick slices, and brought a shallow pan of water to a simmer on the stove.  I added a tablespoon of white vinegar to the water to help keep the egg together.  I simmered the eggs for a few minutes until they yolks were beginning to get firm.  We ate the toast with butter.  I added a touch of fat-free chocolate milk to my cup of coffee to make a quick “at home Mocha”.  A poached egg needs only to drain well, and be served with a little cracked pepper and salt.  This breakfast is as quick and simple as it gets.  It was satisfying without weighing us down, which is a great way to start a Saturday.

Sort of Stroganoff

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One of the downfalls of loving to cook and eat is getting into bad habits of having too much of our favorite foods, too often.  Like many concerned eaters, we’ve recently watched the documentary, Forks Over Knives, and what we took away was a desire to go “Plant Strong” in our diet.  To us, going Plant Strong means that meat (for Bjorn), complex carbohydrates and processed foods (for both of us) are playing a smaller role in our meals.  We’re also aiming for scaled back portions when we do use these ingredients.  We want to do this for our health, to shake off some bad habits we’ve acquired and to shed what we carry that comes along with those bad habits.  We’re trying to put whole fruits and vegetables the center of more of our meals.  We’re gardeners, veggie lovers and avid Farmer’s Market shoppers, so this isn’t new.  We have just renewed our focus on putting the nutrient dense, delicious natural foods in the starring role they are meant to play in our diet.  I am also trying to take little shortcuts and make substitutions to reduce the fat and salt used in our cooking, without sparing flavour.  So far, we’re feeling good about the changes and I think we’re enjoying more variety and creativity in making a shift away from our pizza-pasta-burger routine we fell into over the summer.  I love pasta a lot so we will still eat it, but a smaller amount, and prepared in a more thoughtful way.  Tonight, our supper took the form of a lightened up, veggied-up, cobbled-together concoction with some characteristics that harken back to a traditional tangy and rich Russian-style Mushroom Stroganoff.

The recipe was simple, and came together quickly.  I started by sautéing two small yellow onions with non-fat cooking spray, and just a little bit of olive oil.  Then, I added chopped button and cremini mushrooms.  I love mushrooms and can hardly resist adding them to every pasta meal I make, along with peas and spinach.  They go with practically every sauce, and taste great together!  Bjorn, being pleasantly open-minded as an omnivore has no problem foregoing the traditional beef in the stroganoff on a run-of-the-mill Tuesday night.  To make the sauce, I loosely followed a Beef Stroganoff recipe, minus the beef from on of favorite my blog-haunts,  Skinnytaste, using a can of tomato soup.  We didn’t have Worcestershire Sauce in the cupboard, but after a quick Google search, Bjorn informed me that soy sauce with a shot of hot sauce would do the trick as a stand-in for Worcestershire Sauce.  I used Braggs Liquid Aminos and Sriracha, aka, Rooster Sauce.  We like deeply flavored sauce, so I added a healthy shake of paprika and some crushed garlic and let the sauce cook a bit.  After cooking the onions and mushrooms and adding tomato soup the sauce was pretty thick, so I used some low sodium vegetable broth to thin it out a little.  I cooked egg noodles separately in lightly salted water and when they were well on their way to al dente, I added peas to the sauce pan.  When the noodles were nearly cooked, I stirred in some low-fat Buttermilk and a few generous handfuls of fresh spinach leaves into the sauce.  Buttermilk gives the creaminess and tang of sour cream you want with a Stroganoff, but is low in fat.  I had it on hand because I am planning to make another recipe that subbed buttermilk for a higher fat dairy product, so that is what I used, but low-fat sour cream would have been fine as well.  The spinach and peas don’t belong in a traditional stroganoff, but they sure taste good!  We enjoyed this cozy, richly flavored, savory dish with a little shaved parmesan and we both found the supper to be tasty and satisfying.  With a few little tweaks to our cooking and eating habits, in time, we will see a positive result, I think.  I also think we’ll enjoy some delicious suppers in the meantime.

Taco Salad – Mac and Cheese Mashup

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For a person who loves to cook, I sure do struggle to do it sometimes.  The problem isn’t a lack of ingredients.  We keep our fridge, pantry and freezer well-stocked with all of the staples I need to make a healthy and delicious bean and vegetable soup; a roast beef dinner with all of the trimmings or even a simple salad or plate of pasta.  The problem also isn’t a lack of inspiration.  I read enough food magazines and blogs to have enough under 30 minute meals in mind to feed us for months.  The issue is, without a huge amount of free time, and so many tasty restaurants nearby, it is easy to cave in on a night when we’re tired, and go out and relax over a restaurant meal rather than prepare it, and have to clean up afterwards. There is nothing wrong with those relaxing dinners out.  I am so glad to have the freedom to do this sometimes, but we go out more than I’d like to admit, and more than realistically we should on our budget.  Every now and then on those tired days, inspiration strikes, and leftovers pair with an easy pantry staple, and we surprise ourselves by pulling together a quick, easy satisfying meal.  The rules on these nights are:

1.  Use whatever needs using;

2.  Make something yummy that makes you glad you are eating at home;

3.  Make it quickly and with as little mess as possible; and

4.  Work together.  Many hands make light work.

Tonight, the stars aligned over our kitchen, and a very easy, very craveable meal was born, which is best described as a Taco Salad – Mac and Cheese Mashup.  Pictured below, is the vegetarian version.  It was darned good.

Before I go further, let me say a few words about Macaroni and Cheese.  Boxed Macaroni and Cheese, specifically, Kraft Dinner is my ultimate comfort food.  To me, Kraft Dinner is one thing, and Macaroni and Cheese is completely something else.  I really like traditional casserole-style macaroni and cheese made with real cheese now and then, but it is Kraft Dinner that is my true favorite.  I have been making it since I was very very little, and no matter what anyone tells me about preservatives, or orange powdered sauce mix, I don’t care.  I’m always going to eat it.  I love it so much that I wrote a paper in my college composition class called The Kraft Dinner Connoisseur.*  Both Kraft Dinner, and a traditional, from scratch Macaroni and Cheese have a solid place in my recipe repertoire.  Tonight, it is Mac and Cheese, out of a box, yes, but Kraft Dinner, no.  I keep a box of 2% Velveeta Shells and Cheese in the cupboard.  It is a nice portion for two, with some leftovers.  It might be a teeny bit healthier, being that it uses 2% milk fat instead of whole milk fat in the cheese sauce.  And another plus, you can make it even when you have no milk or butter on hand, since all you do is stir the pre-mixed cheese sauce into boiled noodles.   Pictured here is the omnivore version…

I made the Mac and Cheese and added a a nice creamy scoop to our bowls, the rest was leftovers.  Leftover magic!  We had tacos last night, and so we reheated the ground beef taco meat, and the vegetarian Taco Filling by Fantastic Foods** and added a scoop to our respective bowls. Bjorn assembled the fresh taco fixings:  Chopped tomatoes, and avocado, cucumber, chopped green lettuce and radicchio, chopped green onions, salsa, a sprinkle of Monterey Jack cheese and a few crumbled chips.  It was GREAT.  And by great I mean yummy, creamy, and indulgent, and I dare say, somewhat complex, since the meal consisted of two distinct dishes that usually only end up on the same plate at a pot luck.   It met requirements for a meal that needs to satisfy, be quick, use what we have, and require very little cleanup and make us happy to eat at home.  And now, I even crave it when we aren’t in need of a quick fix.  If you aren’t  morally opposed to eating Velveeta 2% Shells and Cheese, and you need a quick and tasty supper, give this mashup a try.

*If a person who wrote a paper in college entitled The Kraft Dinner Connoisseur wasn’t destined to be a food blogger, I don’t know who is.  I got an A.

**Yowza.  For a person who believes in the health benefits of from-scratch home-cooking and avoiding preservatives and commercial foods, I’m really showing my convenience food-using stripes in this post.  I stock a few convenience foods that we eat purposefully because they are delicious and they make life easier.

Caprese Sandwich– the Best Sandwich of the Summer

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Summer is over when I say it is!  Or at least when the weather starts behaving as though autumn has arrived.  As long as I am picking delicious tomatoes from our garden daily, and walking outside comfortably in flip flops at 5 p.m., it is still summer in my books.  No matter what people say, I am not going to yank out the perennials and I’m going to keep watering our vegetable garden until it frosts.   I am not going to eat like it is October yet either.  I’ve got months and months of soups and roasted vegetables ahead of me, and so for this week, while tomatoes are still bountiful, I’m going to live it up, and enjoy the last precious days of delicious tomato season.  A tomato may just be the most tasty and versatile of all of the summer fruits.  I made myself a Toasted Caprese Sandwich that I ate for lunch when I was home alone.  Since I was home alone, there is no meat-eaters counterpart to the sandwich in this post.

If it isn’t obvious, a meat eater would probably enjoy this sandwich just as I did, or with the addition of crispy bacon, and perhaps mayonnaise instead of basil and mozzarella if that person is a BLT purist.

A sandwich that starts with a tomato like this is impossible to mess up.  This one came from our square foot garden in the back yard.   I see some amazing heirloom tomatoes at the Saint Paul Farmer’s Market, which we check out most weekends.  We just walked right by them this year because we have had a regular supply of our own.  To start with, I assembled all of all of the elements of a caprese.  I sliced up the tomato and some fresh mozzarella and coarsely chopped some basil, also just-picked from our garden.  I toasted the bread only slightly.  I like to pile on the toppings, and so I needed the bread to have a little bit of give to keep it all together.  I think any version of a tomato sandwich should be eaten on either really fresh bread or toasted bread.  Without bacon, all of the sandwich elements are cold, and that little bit of heat from the toasted bread lets everything get cozy and comfy and meld together rather than being one ingredient stacked on top of the next.  In addition to the delicious sandwich fillings being a sure win, this sandwich was destined to succeed because it is made on City Rye.  City Bread is my favorite bread in the whole world.  It is made in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I grew up.  I stock up on Rye and Pumpernickel every time I am there, and when the freezer is empty of City Bread, it is time to go back, or to entice friends down to Minnesota for a visit.*  I don’t think the people of Winnipeg know how lucky they are to have such a prevalence of wonderful bread available in almost all of their grocery stores.  I think it has something to do with the large Ukrainian population in the city.  When the Ukrainians immigrated to Winnipeg, they brought with them wonderful bread baking which is now engrained in the city’s dietary culture.   I am certain that there are other great breads like this in the world, but in Winnipeg, there is no searching.  City Bread is available almost everywhere.  There are even a few other brands of bread that are quite good available in Winnipeg grocery stores.  I grew up with City Bread, so I am partial to that particular bakery, and I accept no substitutes.

I dressed the sandwich with a olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper.  I used a silicon pastry brush to lightly brush the toasted bread and mozzarella with oil and balsamic vinegar.  You only need a touch.

I ate my sandwich with a cup of coffee.  Kind of an odd beverage pairing, I know.  The sandwich was my breakfast and my lunch.  A cold Diet Coke, or a glass of milk would have been a much more appealing option.  This sandwich was the summer’s best.

*Please come, and kindly bring bread.

Linguine with Chunky Vegetable Sauce – A Simple Monday Night Supper

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So many Mondays, we come home and feel too wiped out to cook.  We tend to cook a lot over the weekend.  On Monday we both come home tired, hungry and wanting to relax instead of preparing and cleaning up after a meal.  The obvious result is, many Mondays we go out to eat.  We tend not to plan ahead which leads us to pick a place we know well.  We often issue last-minute invites to family members in the neighbourhood who might want to join us in making the transition back into the weekday grind a little kinder to our weary souls.  The Groveland Tap is right up the street, and it has been a go-to place to meet up for a burger and a tasty beer on these lazy nights.  They have great happy hour specials on beer and appetizers that seem always to be going whenever we’re there.  The Nook is also becoming a regular in the Monday night rotation.  The Nook has a long wait most nights of the week because their burgers are the best.  Monday nights they run a $1.25 mini-burger special after 8:30 p.m., but if we arrive a little earlier than that, we’ve managed to sneak right in before the rush for cheap burgers starts.  We are lucky to have these friendly, casual spots close home to lean on, and especially grateful that we have friends nearby to join us.   The downside is that it becomes a little too easy to get into the habit of never cooking on a Monday.   Lately, we’ve been trying to eat a little healthier, and to eat out a little less to help us stick to our budget.  This is certainly no Nook burger and fries, but it still hits the spot.  It is a simple pasta dish with a chunky vegetable sauce that I’m posting as a reminder to myself that there are some meals that are so quick and consistently delicious that I can even tackle cooking them any night, even on a Monday.

This is a meal that comes together up in 15 minutes or less.  A pasta with a simple sauce can go any direction that our appetites desire.  I grab whatever vegetables I have on hand or that need to be used up.   I almost always have fresh mushrooms in the fridge, peas in the freezer because these are staples in my diet, and favorites that are easy to use in many meals.  There is alway an onion, some sort of pasta and usually a can of good tomatoes in the cupboard too.  If Bjorn is in the mood, it is easy to add chicken or a few frozen meatballs to his plate.  Fortunately, Bjorn is happy enough to go without meat fairly often which makes meal preparation even easier.  I gather, wash and chop the veggies and get some olive oil heating in a pan.  As soon as I remember, I start boiling water for the pasta.  Today I opted for Linguine noodles.  They cook quickly, and they must be al dente to be any good, so I get the sauce almost ready before starting the pasta.  The sauce is simply sautéed onions and mushrooms, depending on mood, garlic.  Once those are cooked, I add a can of San Marzano tomatoes and chop them to manageable chunks in the pan.  For a canned tomato, San Marzano tomatoes are a little spendy, but they are special, as far as canned tomatoes go.  They are only grown in one region of Italy where they get their distinct flavor from volcanic ash present in the soil.  They make pasta with tomato sauce more of a taste treat than a simple, plain tomato sauce straight from the jar.  There is nothing wrong with sauce from the jar, but ever since I discovered San Marzano tomatoes when I have pasta with tomato sauce, it is what I want to taste.  When the sauce is good and bubbly, I salt the pasta water, add the noodles and start a timer.  A few minutes later, I add a few handfuls of peas to the sauce.  I like to drain the linguine out a little short of boiling time and finish cooking it in the sauce.  When I remember to, I reserve a little pasta water to loosen the sauce if I’ve made it too chunky.

If the sauce is chunky enough to count as a serving or two of vegetables, I don’t even make a salad.  I top the pasta with some cheese and a small handful of fresh basil leaves from our garden.  The cheese can be anything from grated Grana Padano to shredded cheddar, although fresh mozzarella is definitely my go-to when it is in the fridge.  This meal is so simple, and so delicious.  Even on Mondays, I’m running out of excuses not to cook.