Category Archives: Vegetarian

A Lesson in Pesto

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If it hasn’t already become extremely obvious, pasta is one of my all-time favorite foods.  There are so many variations, from basic buttered noodles to whatever-you-have-in-the-fridge, to traditional recipes: stroganoff, Bolognese, or pasta all’Amatriciana.  I’m usually a “concept cook” who has something in mind [e.g. pasta with veggies] and the actual ingredients I use depend on what I’m in the mood for or what needs to be used up.  I haven’t been one to follow many recipes.  I enjoy the freedom of my slapdash approach to cookery, but I have tasted enough really good food in my years to know that recipes, carefully chosen ingredients, timeless techniques and even a little precision are equally as necessary in the kitchen as passion and creativity.  It also pays to take a few tips from the experts.  I have long loved food blogs, food magazines, food television, cookbooks and hanging out in other people’s kitchens.  Reading about cooking, talking about it and observing other cooks in action are my source of inspiration.  These are as much my hobbies as cooking and writing about food.   I became aware of the noticeable difference that good technique and ingredients yield in restaurant meals, but the breakthrough did not occur at home until I learned about the perfect pesto.

It was just another Wednesday night.  I found myself watching short programs on the Chow network on our Roku on cooking and food.  There was an episode on soup dumplings,* and on the perfect beer,** and then a segment on the perfect pesto aired and changed my approach to pesto forever.

Previously, I have only had a modest appreciation of pesto.  The first pesto pasta I ate was a lunch back in my teenage years at the now-shuttered Grandma’s Restaurant in Fargo, North Dakota.  It was so heavily garlic-y that I was afraid of both pesto and garlic for almost a decade.  I still shudder to think about how much raw garlic I consumed before realizing it would be with me for days.  More recently, I have tasted a pretty good silk handkerchief in a mild, dark green pesto at Bar La Grassa.  Having grown basil in our garden, I’ve also made basil and parsley pestos at home that have been fine on toasted sandwiches and roasted vegetables.  None of these looked anything like the marvelous green pesto I saw that evening on the Chow network.

According to the food writer, Marcia Gagliardi who appeared in the segment, perfect pesto can be had in San Francisco at a restaurant called Farina, on a pasta dish called mandilli al pesto.  I do believe Marcia is right.  When you read about Farina, you get a sense that they are better at what they do than everyone else.  The chefs of Farina make known their belief that only Italians can cook the true foods of their region.  I am not going to dispute that or attempt to prove them wrong.  But I am going to try to learn as much as I can from them about making pesto.  In the segment I watched, Chef Paolo Laboa of Farina explains the process of making pesto while shifting naturally from English and Italian, translating himself, and pausing to emphasize the importance of each detail of his approach.  What becomes immediately clear even through the television is the fact that his pesto is different.  It is bright green and creamy and is almost a perfectly emulsified, glistening paste.  When Chef Paolo adds the pesto to the pasta, it melts, enveloping the thin sheets in a perfect, translucent, green coating.  I’m guessing it is a meal that dreams are made of.  Just looking at it makes you want to be in the Mission District for supper tonight.  Or at our house…

Back to a winter day in Minnesota…  I may never duplicate Chef Laboa’s pesto, but in listening to him, I learned a few things about how to make a better pesto.  First, for a pesto worthy of freshly rolled pasta, you have to ditch the food processor and use a mortar and pestle.  Fortunately for me, I just received one for Christmas from Bjorn.  The one he selected for me is a nice small size that I can comfortably manage to hold.  It is made of non-porous porcelain and a smooth wooden handle and a red exterior that I am happy to store on the open shelves in our kitchen.

I learned from Chef Paolo that the origin of ingredients matters a lot.  Basil pesto universally contains basil, pine nuts, garlic, olive oil, parmesan cheese and salt.  Sure, you can make pesto out of these ingredients produced anywhere, but to begin to approximate Paolo Laboa’s pesto, you need basil that is similar to that grown in Genoa, Olive Oil from Liguria, Pine Nuts from Pisa, and carefully-selected Parmesan.  And you need time.  Lots of time.  After watching the segment and trying to make it myself a few times I realized the making of Paolo’s pesto takes longer than it appears to take on TV.

I did the best I could gathering ingredients.  It is winter, and the basil I found at the store wasn’t the best.  I do believe that the Genovese basil from our garden will be an improvement on the basil available at the supermarket in a clamshell package in January.  I didn’t spring for $18 Italian Pine Nuts but got some from Spain instead.  I tried a few of Chef Laboa’s tips.  Since Ligurian olive oil is not available to me I used light olive oil instead of extra virgin which is too strong and kills the taste of the basil.  I soaked the basil leaves in water because, I learned if you don’t soak the basil there is too much chlorophyll in the leaves.  I crushed the pine nuts with garlic and coarse salt and added 15 basil leaves.  I put my heart into the process of grinding all of the ingredients together and then mixing in the oil.  When the pesto was ready, I added a little pasta water to the pesto to melt the cheese before tossing hand-rolled handkerchiefs of pasta in the pesto.  The end result of my effort did not yield the solid bright-green cream produced by Chef Laboa.  Not even close.  Even so, we thought the result was delicious and immeasurably better than the oily, basil-heavy, oxidized, chunky sludge that I’ve made in the food processor.  If pesto is worth making, it is worth making well.  Will I spend 45 minutes with the mortar and pestle to make pesto every week?  Certainly not.  It is a time-consuming process and a rich dish you can’t eat every week.  Come summer though, when the basil is bursting forth I will make pesto again.  I might not achieve “perfect” pesto, but delicious will be good enough.

*The segment about soup dumplings made me want soup dumplings which are little pouches made of dough that are stuffed with meat and fatty broth that liquefy upon cooking.  Are there vegetarian soup dumplings out there?  I want to try them!

**The writer of the beer segment claimed Supplication Ale by Russian River Brewing Company to be the best beer in the world.  I’m sure I’d like it, but that I’d disagree about it being the best.

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.

Getting Ready for Mexico and a Late Lunch at Rosa Mexicano

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We’re taking a trip to Cancun, Mexico in a week, and so we’ve been looking for ways to sample south-of-the-border flavors as a fun way to gear up and get excited.*  Today, I sat down to write a post about a delicious Mexican meal we ate yesterday, and I made myself a snack to enjoy while writing.  I doubt I’m the only person who gets hungry when reading and writing about food.  I don’t usually snack while I post, but this is the sort of activity weekends are made of at our house.

This simple snack verging on a meal is known in our house as Chip N’ Chee.  It was christened by our friend Jonny, who prefers to top his Chip N’ Chee with kippered snacks.  My version consisted of Nacho Chips, sliced black olives and Colby Jack cheese, melted in the microwave for about 30 seconds, served with smoky jarred Frontera Habenero Salsa and a Tecate beer.  It can be made more elaborately with jalapeno, diced tomatoes, and onions then heated in the oven and served with sour cream and guac, but I went for simplicity today.  Are tortilla chips and melted cheese an authentic Mexican snack?  No, but it has some authentic elements,** and I think it is fair to call it Minnesota-Mexican.***  Yesterday was a lazy day that started with sleeping in and then eating a hearty brunch sandwich.  That sort of morning meal is best followed by either a late lunch, or an early supper, whichever suits your fancy.  We fancied a late lunch.   We were downtown running errands yesterday afternoon and found ourselves hungry, so we decided to stop for a mid-afternoon bite.  I was shuffling through my mental list of restaurants to try, and fortunately, our upcoming trip to Mexico jogged a memory of a recent Heavy Table post about Rosa Mexicano, a new Mexican restaurant in downtown Minneapolis.  I was able to locate the restaurant’s address quickly on my handy-dandy new smart phone.  Rosa Mexicano is a Mexican restaurant that has been around since the ’80’s in New York and Miami, and just recently showed up in Minneapolis on the corners of 6th and Hennepin.  We arrived and were seated immediately in the dining room.  The decor is colorful and sleek, and there is zero kitch which is ubiquitous with Mexican restaurants throughout Minnesota.****  The dining room was wide open, and about half full of diners, which I would imagine is a decent crowd on a Saturday afternoon on which a snowstorm  is expected.  We sat at a two-top in the center of the room, and I faced a tiled blue fountain above which was suspended a mobile with a hundred or so small, identical white human sculptures poised in mid-dive and suspended by fine wire at varying levels above the fountain’s square pool.  Other than the impressive fountain and diver mobile at room’s center, the only decor to be seen are straight-sided glass vases displayed along the wall separating the dining room from the bar, each containing a liquid dyed different colors with, what I guess, was food coloring.  The walls, tables and chairs are painted in blocks of purple and pink, a nod, I’m guessing to the restaurant’s moniker.  Our server was raring to go and encouraged us to try the famous guacamole, which is their signature dish, made table-side on a cart.  I glanced around the room and determined that the big pot of guacamole would be too much for me today unless it was the only thing I was going to eat, so we decided to try it another time.  Again, at the suggestion of the author from the Heavy Table article, and in preparation for Mexico, we decided to select a  flight of three tequilas to share.  We opted for Reposado tequilas; tequilas that have been rested on oak barrels for a time.  We selected the Hurradura, Corazon and Tres Generaciones, and we liked them all, but liked the third the best.  The flight is served in  skinny hand-blown shot-glasses of uneven size and were accompanied by a 4th shot glass containing a salty and spicy tomato-y “Sangrita,” aka, chaser, which we sipped, but didn’t finish.

After perusing the menu for a time I opted for Tacos Vegetales a la Brasa, which are Skillet Roasted Seasonal Vegetables topped with a soft herbed cheese and served with red bean chili, corn esquites and a tomatillo mocajete salsa.  Per the title, the roasted carrots, onions and green and yellow zucchini squash arrived in a small square skillet, with each accompaniment in its own separate dish, perched on top of my plate.  The dish was served with a side of flax tortillas, which arrived in a pink plastic tortilla warmer.  The pink plastic serving dish was, in my opinion, the only cheesy element of the restaurant’s overall presentation, but I guess if you are going Rosa, you go all out.  I was a little nervous about flax tortillas and considered asking them to bring me corn instead, which are served with all of the restaurant’s meat-centered dishes.  I kind of hate how vegetarian dishes are always accompanied by healthier breads and sides than omnivore options.  Just because I don’t eat meat doesn’t mean I am trying to eat extra-healthy all the time.  I presume in this case, the corn tortillas served with the non-vegetarian dishes contain, or are cooked in pork or beef fat.  Unlike the numerous disappointingly dry whole wheat buns I’ve eaten with veggie burgers around the world, the flax tortillas were fresh, not overly grainy and overall quite good.

Bjorn chose the Enchiladas Mole Xico, which consists of two corn tortillas filled with shredded beef seasoned with chipotle peppers and topped with Veracruz mole made with raisins, plantains,  hazelnuts, pine nuts, ancho and pasilla chilis and garnished with Mexican creama and queso fresco.  In addition to our individual plates of food we were served a generous bowl of the house rice topped with cilantro and another ample serving of refried black beans topped with queso fresco as well as two salsas: a smoky pasilla de Oaxaca which we loved, and a salsa de tomatillo y Habanero, which we liked less.

As a whole, we both thought the meal was special.  The food was beautifully presented and the flavors were well-developed and were surprising and unique, compared to almost all Mexican food that either of us have eaten.  There was an obvious attention to authentic flavors and careful seasoning.  Of everything on the table, I most enjoyed the refried beans and the corn esquites.  The refried beans were creamy and tasty.  Corn esquites was new to me, made of fresh corn cut off the cob, and served in a creamy sauce with cayenne pepper and Cotija cheese.  I also enjoyed the dollop of creamy, mild, herbed cheese on top of my veggie tacos.  Using only a touch of cheese has become fashionable in higher-end Mexican restaurants because it is more typical of authentic Mexican cuisine.  It is a contrast to the melted-cheese encrusted plates at a typical Mexican restaurant in the Midwest.  I like cheese though, so I was glad they didn’t skimp.  Bjorn was most impressed with the spicy beef in his enchiladas, the flavorful mole, and the smoky pasilla salsa.   There was plenty to eat without getting stuffed.  In addition to the great flavors, there were certain details of the food presentation that increased our enjoyment.  The water was served out of pitchers containing ice, but there was no ice in our glasses.  The separate serving dishes for each of the meal’s elements made it easier to enjoy their distinct flavors and textures without having them run together on our plates into a nondescript mass.  We left just as it began to snow, feeling warmed, satisfied, and happy to anticipate a trip to Mexico in our near future.

*Not that we need much help to get excited for a free, all-inclusive trip to Mexico in December.

**The most authentic Mexican element of this snack is probably the beer.

***Sitting down to eat and write about this lead me to ponder why there is so much discussion of authenticity in preparing a regional cuisine when we are so blooming far from locales where these cuisines originate?  I think people want you to know that with exceptions of home-cooked meals by people who learned at home, and restaurants that pay attention to authenticity, what you make in your Midwestern home and eat at most Midwestern restaurants is nothing like the local cuisine of say, Tuscany, or Jalisco.  Nonetheless, there are some nods in that direction, and it is great to enjoy food with a measure of global curiosity.  At the same time it is important to understand and appreciate the truly traditional and authentic approach to cooking and eating from different parts of the world.  If I ate only the traditional dishes of our region, I would go pretty hungry as a vegetarian.

****Save for Masa, another downtown Minneapolis where the decor and all surfaces in the restaurant are stark white.

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.

Delicious Soup and Sandwich at the Birchwood Cafe

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I will admit it.  Sometimes we go out for dinner.  I wish I could say it was planned in advance and anticipated.  In reality, it is most frequently a decision made last-minute when we have been busy and we’re too tired to cook.  We are fortunate to live near quite a few great restaurants.  Going out to dinner is a common happening when we’ve been doing a ton of entertaining and the associated cooking and cleaning and don’t want to mess up the kitchen and have to clean it again.   In November, we had a Chili and Chocolate party for 16 friends and out-of-town guests at the beginning of the month, prepared and delivered a few meals to an emergency youth safe-house in our neighbourhood, and hosted Thanksgiving for us and our parents.  Each of these meals required planning, shopping, food preparation and cleanup, and left us a little zonked the day before and the day after.    There will be a series of posts on our November food preparation, but in the meantime, I’ll share a glimpse of a typical meal we ate this month on a busy week night evening.  I’ve been strongly favoring restaurants that make it easy for me to make a healthy food choice and eat a smaller portion.  That is why we’ve eaten at the Birchwood Cafe three times this month(!)   Their menu is full of vegetarian-friendly, healthy choices, imaginative combinations of ingredients, and most importantly, the food tastes great!

Of the three Birchwood meals I’ve had this month, I’ve eaten the Roasted Three Seed Sandwich twice.  I’m hooked.  The sandwich is served on focaccia which is much more appetizing than it appears in the photo above, where the herbed bread looks like a drying out slice of a puffy omelet.  The sandwich’s handle makes reference to a crunchy spread made of pumpkin, sunflower and sesame seeds which is very good.  What really makes the sandwich a hit for me is the combination pumpkin-curry spread, microgreens and very thin, crunchy slices (more like shavings) of  black radish, carrot and chioggia beet.  It is an inspiring sandwich.  I’ve made several sandwiches at home with thinly shaved root veggies since; and I am so glad to have been given the inspiration to include these vegetables in a sandwich.  They add a different textures and flavor and they are capable of so much more than simply being roasted or served in a cold salad.  On this particular evening, I had a half sandwich with a pretty average cup of roasted root vegetable and potato soup.  It was a thin, and sort of nondescript soup.  The crunchy somethings, and the fresh scallions on top were the flavor and texture highlight.  The soup really wasn’t much.  The thick slice of cucumber that my sandwich was served with is slightly softened and briny with vinegar and dill, but I wouldn’t say that it has crossed over into being a dill pickle just yet.

I tasted Bjorn’s soup, and it was definitely the better soup choice of the night.  He had the chipotle red pepper bisque with white rice.  I am not sure, but I think the soup is topped with avocado oil.  I didn’t order it because we eat store-bought  roasted red pepper and tomato soup fairly often, and I thought I should try something else, but this was darned good.  Much more flavorful than the lame, boxed Roasted Red Pepper soup we have at home, as well as the Roasted Root Vegetable watery affair that I ordered.  Bjorn’s sandwich was also decent, according to his report.  It was an 0range-braised pork shoulder shredded with fontina, roasted pear puree, sweet onion and lettuce on a sesame seed buttermilk bun.  As you can see in the picture, Bjorn removed most of the onions.  We both enjoyed a pint of Westside by Harriet Brewing, a copper-coloured slightly-hoppy, and somewhat tart ale.  Even though tonight we did not dine in the same room as Haley Bonar or Mason Jennings as we have in other trips to the Birchwood, we really enjoyed our meal and I’m sure that if December is anything like November, we’ll be back soon.

Roasted Golden Cauliflower Soup with Curry

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Do not adjust your monitor! This cauliflower purchased at the St. Paul Farmer’s Market is an interesting orange-y gold!  I’ve been seeing more and more varieties of vegetables in unique colours lately.  Cauliflower that is orange, purple or bright green; purple potatoes; golden beets; and bright yellow carrots and tomatoes are becoming commonplace at the Farmer’s Market and grocery store.  I don’t remember seeing these varieties much, just a year ago.  I attribute this influx of vegetables in a new rainbow of colors to the masses becoming interested in growing and eating heirloom vegetable varieties and the local food movement gathering broader appeal.  With all of the chatter among thoughtful eaters, people are becoming less suspicious of oddly shaped and uniquely coloured foods.  We as eaters are learning that these characteristics often are accompanied by flavors that exceed those of red tomatoes of uniform colour and size; massive white turkey breasts, and eggs with white shells and pale yellow egg yolks in by immeasurable amounts.  With a special-looking specimen like this golden cauliflower, I wanted it to play a starring role in what we made for our supper.  At home, I have never done anything with cauliflower other that roast it, steam it or eat it raw.  Recently, I sampled a truly delicious creamy, cheesy cauliflower soup at Heartland Restaurant in Saint Paul, and so for a weeknight meal my goal was to make a soup that was warming and delicious, but a little lower in calories and fat than the creamy-cheesy bowl of love from Heartland that I could never duplicate anyway.  I followed some direction from Martha Stewart found in a recipe for Curried Roasted Cauliflower Soup on her website.*  The results were good, but as expected, it was no match for the Heartland Cauliflower soup which elevated all expectations for what a cauliflower soup could be from the first spoonful.  I am not a James Beard winning chef though, and I’m striving to be health conscious, so I’ll cut my soup some slack.  It was a tasty and healthy meal.

I started the soup by roasting the cauliflower.  Martha Stewart’s recipe called for the cauliflower to be drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt.  I used some cooking spray so that the cauliflower wouldn’t stick, but skipped the oil and salt.  The roasted cauliflower came out the oven with a similar colour and texture to macaroni and cheese.**  Next, I added the roasted cauliflower to a pan of sautéed onions.  Again, I used cooking spray instead of the butter suggested by Martha, but followed her lead on adding curry powder and low sodium vegetable broth, water and chopped fresh parsley.

I reserved a few of the best looking florets to top the soup, and gave the entire concoction a whirl in the blender to make it into a uniformly smooth consistency.

We enjoyed this soup with some grainy brown bread toasted with tomato slices, 21 Seasoning Salute** and a little melted mozzarella cheese.  The curry added some kick, and helped to emphasize the golden colour of the cauliflower.  It was a light but satisfying supper and there was enough for both of us to have a bowl re-warmed for lunch the next day.  I’m sure we’ll make this soup again.

*Say what you want about Martha.  She’s got her name on books, magazines, a website and a TV show that have been downright influential to my wedding planning, home keeping, cooking and entertaining and her website is by far the most comprehensive, well-organized resource on these subjects out there.

**Mmmm.  Macaroni and Cheese.

***21 Seasoning Salute is a salt free assortment of dried herbs and spices from Trader Joe’s that is indispensable in our kitchen.

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.

Beans for Breakfast

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My first memory of black beans showing up on my plate at breakfast was in Boise, Idaho in the summer of 2008.  We were in Boise for a wedding, we traveled all the way for Minnesota to be there.  It was very nice to get to meet up with the newlyweds for breakfast the morning after their wedding.  I am not certain of the name of the restaurant that we went to, but it was downtown on the cool pedestrian-only street, it had a Southwestern vibe, and we sat outside on tall patio tables.  If you might know the place I’m talking about, feel free to let me know.  I don’t remember much about the meal, other than loving the black beans, and learning from the bride that a very good Eggs Benedict has a tinge of lemon in the hollandaise.  For a vegetarian, breakfast is an easy meal out.  There are tons of vegetarian options that are made easily by a typical meat and potatoes greasy spoon.  The downside of breakfast is, because it is so easy to throw a veggie and cheese omelet on a menu and call it good, the average breakfast joint can run a little short on excitement for a vegetarian.  Black beans for breakfast in Boise were a revelation to me. Over in England, I’ve eaten a traditional English Breakfast in which kidney beans are a crucial element, but probably because I live in the Midwest, black beans, or beans of any kind are not a frequent accompaniment to my toast and eggs.  I thoroughly enjoyed them that morning in Boise.*

Back in Minnesota a few weeks later we went to the Mill City Café for breakfast.  We don’t venture all over town to go out to eat as often as we did when we were newly dating with students’ schedules, and without the possession of a respectable kitchen.  Even though Mill City Cafe is clear across the river and a ways North, we return to the Mill City Cafe  now and then for sentimental reasons.**  I was delighted to see black beans listed on the menu as a side dish.  I ordered them and happily gobbled them up with the American Breakfast, giving the choice of bacon or sausage included with my entrée to Bjorn.  After these two tasty introductions to beans for breakfast, I have been including black beans in our breakfasts at home whenever I have a hankering for them.  They are a great vegetarian protein, and work especially well when you are heading toward the brunch hours, or when you have a taste for a savory breakfast, which I so often do.

Black Bean Hash is simple, especially when you start with leftover potatoes, which is the only way potatoes make it to the breakfast table in my house.  I start by frying some diced onions in a little olive oil, depending on my mood, I toss in a little minced garlic, then I add potatoes which are chopped into cubes if they weren’t already cubed in their previous incarnation.  I use canned beans.  I think about switching to dry beans because there are so many good reasons to use them, but so far I haven’t made the move.  My holdup is, takes too long to soak them, and doesn’t work well for me because I like to make last-minute decisions about a meal.  I drain and rinse the beans, add some corn that is either thawed frozen corn, or fresh corn cut off the cob***.  I usually add some chili pepper flakes, and dump in some salsa to pull it all together.  In another pan I started some water to simmer to poach eggs.  I was in the mood for a poached egg for this meal, but the egg would be just as good or better fried, or baked directly in the hash in the oven.

One my favorite things about Southwestern and Mexican cooking is all of the delicious accompaniments that these cuisines invite.  Today, I sliced some avocado, and doused it with a lime juice to keep it fresh and bright, and sprinkled it with sea salt, cracked pepper and some chopped fresh dill from the garden.  I also fried some tortillas to add the lovely, salty crunchy carbohydrate to the meal.  To prepare the tortillas, I sliced them into strips and fried them in a little oil, and then dusted them with some spicy seasonings and a little salt and a squeeze of lime juice to help the seasonings adhere.  Finally, and most importantly for my Tex-Mex accompaniments:  cheese and hot sauce.  I keep several different brands of sauce on hand, and today, I also had some mild and slightly salty Cotija cheese to crumble over the hash.  This meal is quick to make as long as you use leftover potatoes, and it is hearty enough to satisfy for hours.  It is a great weekend breakfast or brunch, but would work equally well for dinner at night.

*Boise is pronounced Boyseee by the locals, FYI.

**We’ve seen a few of our favorite local bands play at the Mill City Café over the years, and we had a very nice Valentine’s Day prix fixe multi-course dinner there on our second Valentines Day together.

***The addition of corn to the beans is a combination that provides an essential Amino Acid.  This is important for me as a vegetarian or any person whose diet is light on meat who needs to try a little bit harder to make sure their diet includes the essential combinations of nutrients.  Bodies cannot produce essential amino acids on their own, and need them to synthesize proteins.