Recipeless Wednesday

A Little Roasted for Your Crunch

There seems to have been a recent glut of broccoli in California. Our local market has literally had tons of it, all shapes and varieties, for cheap. Consequently, we have been eating it a lot.

Looking for a little something outside the steamed broccoli realm, I thought about the ubiquitous Broccoli Crunch Salad. It really is everywhere. It sits on salad bars in every corner of North America. You can buy a kit to make it in your local big box store. 

There is nothing really wrong with it. It is, usually, pretty tasty. A creamy dressing with some sweetness and some tang coat raw broccoli florets (I really don’t like that word), tossed with some sort of nut, raisins or dried cranberries adding some extra sweetness, and usually there is some salty bacon in there. It ticks all the boxes of taste and texture to qualify as a salad. I’ll even admit to scoffing quite a lot of it more than once or twice.

The thing is is that when I eat salad, I want to feel a little virtuous; a little bit like I am doing my body a favour. The creamy dressing and bacon while tasty, sometimes measure up a little heavy.

The raw broccoli is really delicious but I am going to admit that I think it is a little bit like hard work. I know it sounds like I want all the benefits without the effort but my jaw is almost sore after eating it sometimes. I knew that steaming the broccoli would wind up in a big soggy mistake unless it was treated to nothing but the shortest of steam baths. Roasting the broccoli, like I do cauliflower, seemed like a good and flavour intensifying idea though. You can still preserve some of the crunch as well.

To be honest, I have been roasting all of our brassicas, even the cauliflower for cauliflower and cheese. Everyone has been eating it up.

I lightened up the dressing for the salad by using a slightly sweet vinaigrette with a little bit of nuttiness from some toasted sesame oil. There will be twice as much vinaigrette as you need but it is a handy thing to have in your fridge, just store it in the jar you shake it in. The raisins and onions soak in the vinaigrette for as long as you have time to let them. The raisins plump and the onions mellow so the longer they soak the plumper and mellower your salad will be.

I skipped the bacon, to much guffawing, but you could easily toss some in if you need it. 

This makes quite a lot but two adults and two children polished all but a tiny bit off in one meal.

Roasted Broccoli Salad

8 cups broccoli cut into small flowerlike pieces

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

Fresh ground black pepper to taste

1/2 cup diced red onion

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 cup toasted almond slivers

Vinaigrette

2 tablespoons grainy mustard

1 tablespoon honey

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

1/3 cup olive oil

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

1/4 teaspoon salt

Fresh ground black pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 450º.

Toss the broccoli pieces with 2 tablespoons olive oil, salt and pepper. Place on a baking sheet and roast for about 15 minutes, until they are spot browned. Remove from oven and cool.

Put the ingredients for the vinaigrette in a jar that will hold at least 250ml (1 cup). Put the lid on the jar and shake until the vinaigrette is emulsified. Check the bottom of the jar and make sure that all the honey is mixed in and isn’t stuck to the bottom.

In a medium bowl, use whatever bowl you want to serve this in, soak the raisins and onions in about 1/2 cup of the vinaigrette.

Just before serving, toss the roasted and cooled broccoli and the toasted almonds in the vinaigrette.

Recipeless Wednesday

An Unrecipe

I made something the other day. I have been debating whether to post it or not. It isn't nice. It was pretty but not nice. It was delicious but not nice. Even as I write these words, I wonder whether I should do it or not. I have been lucky enough to be spending the last few months in a seasonless oasis. But, I have decided, if things like this make their way into my market basket, there is little i can do but share it. Throwing caution to the wind, I am going to post this. Not in a nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah way. In a please enjoy and share and remember there is only five more weeks of winter.

***

You don't need a recipe to make hash. It is a pretty simple thing. It can be made plain or fancy. It can be eaten any time of day. It fits every meal.

You take some potatoes and onions and sauté them. You add some meat or fish or, in this case, beautiful green goodness and you sauté it a little more. Add some green onions near the end of the cooking time, almost no matter what kind of hash you are making.If you are want to get carried away, you can top it off with something. It would be the rare combination that a soft poached egg wouldn't suit. Poppy and Stephen think bacon is pretty nice too. Tilly even eats the green bits, but only because they are covered in egg yolk.

Anyway you put it together, it is simple and good and wholesome. It makes you feel good and cozy and that is important.

Rainbow Bread Pudding (almost)

The other day, over at sweet salty, Kate said I was all rainbowy. Well, not me exactly, but my house. And, I am pretty sure she was referring to what we eat and not how we decorate. At least I hope that is what she was saying. 

Well, just as she was saying that, I went and posted this. Then I read what she said and felt all embarrassed and immediately wanted to post something cleaner and brighter, more orange and green, good for the body as well as the stuck in the depths of February soul.

Problem was, we were in no fit state for contact with the general public. We were at the stage of the cold when trying to wipe away the green nasal discharge (am I really talking about this in a post about food? Yes, but I am going to blame it on the fever.) creates shrieking one could easily associate with murder by chainsaw. That and the fact that I could not bring myself to put pants, and by pants I mean trousers, on let alone shoes, jacket, find the car keys (yes, I know the supermarket in less than a block away), load two children into their car seats, etc, etc. This meant that we were cooking with what we had.

We get squash in our CSA, and while I don’t dislike the lovely little orbs, I don’t love them either. It takes a bit of motivation for me to get excited about cooking them up into something good. Luckily, Kate had asked for orange, and since I had a few of these little pumpkin cousins sitting around here, I could do orange.

I could do green, well I guess it is greeny white but greenish anyway. I had some leeks and green onions. I had a slightly stale loaf of bread that hadn’t become the sandwiches it was meant to because preschool and picnics had been called off. While the bread is not very rainbowy, it would have to do for all of the reasons mentioned above.

A one dish, casserole kind of supper was pretty appealing. I couldn’t think to manage getting more than one thing on the table at the same time. Throwing all of my found, and by found I mean rescued from the depths of the refrigerator, ingredients together seemed like the best thing to do. Adding eggs and cheese, I had a Kabocha and Leek Bread Pudding, fodder for the Februariest of souls.

The kabocha can be replaced by any squash you like or have to hand. I chose this one from our ever-amassing collection because it is so niftily neat and easy to peel. I used some myzithra cheese here but, on a higher energy day, when I felt like leaving the house to get some, I may just have chucked it full of little blobs of goat cheese. You could easily substitute some feta as well.

All of this to say that despite feeling like a small person is sanding away at the inside of my throat, I am now challenged to be as colourful as I can be, in the kitchen anyway. So, thank you Kate for the kick in the pants. Unless, of course, you really were speaking of our decorating aesthetic. In which case, please disregard the above.

Kabocha and Leek Bread Pudding (this should handily feed 8)

4 cups peeled, seeded and cubed squash

2 teaspoons olive oil

3 large leeks washed and sliced (about 2 cups)

1 large onion chopped

3 cloves garlic

2 teaspoons olive oil

5 cups cubed french bread (a round boule, a couple of days old is perfect)

4 green onions chopped

1 cup cream

1 1/2 cup milk

6 eggs

1/2 cup myzithra cheese grated

1/2 teaspoon salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Butter a large baking dish.

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Sauté the squash in the first two teaspoons of olive oil over low heat until it is tender. It is packed full of natural sugars, so make sure it doesn’t burn. Browned is okay, burnt is not. Remove from heat.

Sauté the leeks, onions and garlic in the second two teaspoons of olive oil until soft. Remove from heat.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the cream, milk, eggs and salt and pepper.

In the baking dish, mix together the bread, squash, leek mixture, green onions, cheese and egg mixture. Press the bread down a bit to make sure everything is soaked with the egg mixture.

Bake for 40 minutes.

Enjoy with some sautéed greens or salad or, if you must, some bacon.

Good Bad Cookies

There are times when life gets in the way of pretty much anything else. Visitors, and lots of fun, and travel, and lots of fun, and trying to clean your house up into the no-really-this-is-how-we-live-our-children-don’t-make-mess state required for potential buyers to be able to consider living there gets in the way of just cooking dinner, much less writing about it. Now that the house is tidy and we seem to have tracked down all the odors emanating from behind furniture and all the,’ Oops, I appear to be stuck,’ patches have been scraped off the floor and we have returned from what seemed like a cross country road trip which was, in reality, just a few hundred miles up the coast, and our fridge is empty of leftovers, I am back in cooking mode. At least until my new, but not particularly successful, knitting hobby takes over.

Shortly after New Year and in the midst of my determination to not resolve to do anything, I realized that I had to do something with the jar of a certain chocolate-hazelnut spread that someone, silly person, had put in Stephen’s Christmas stocking. Left on its own, it was going to meet no better end than a teaspoon straight into someone’s waiting, and knowing better, gob. At least if I baked it up into something else, it would disperse the no-goodness and it could be more easily shared around.

I made the cookies but I couldn’t post them, too many resolutions would be swearing them off. Something this bad but good needed an audience. So, I waited and, well, I have waited long enough. It is February people (at least it feels that way at home, I am told), and you all need something to do on your snow days (I miss snow days, I really, really do). Plus, you will deserve them after all that shoveling (I miss shoveling, really I do). Plus, if I had some snow to shovel, I would then deserve to eat more of them.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Hazelnut Spread Cookies

1 1/4 cup crunchy peanut butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup chocolate hazelnut spread

Preheat oven to 375ºF.

Beat peanut butter, brown sugar, egg and vanilla together. 

Mix flour, baking soda and salt in another bowl. Mix in to wet ingredients.

When wet and dry are fully mixed, stir in the chocolate chips and chocolate hazelnut spread.

Roll into balls and place on baking sheet lined with parchment. Flatten with a floured fork. 

Bake for about 10 minutes. Careful, these are pretty easy to overbake.

Cool.

Makes about 24.