Brussel Sprout Deliciousness

This recipe was in Gourmet back in November, and while I folded over the corner to someday make it, I then pretty much forgot about it. I saw it some time later on Orangette, but didn’t think too much about it. Last weekend at the store, however, I had a craving for brussel sprouts (a veg I never ate until four months ago. So many years wasted!) and remembered this.

Mr. Pea is always game to try new things, and when we got in last night from work we started cooking. This recipe comes together very easily, and it is so tasty. We cut a tablespoon of butter and half a tablespoon of olive oil out of it, but you could easily add it and be quite happy.

The original recipe called for 3 T of pine nuts–lacking pine nuts, we used chopped almonds. We over-toasted them a little but it gave the dish a yummy smokiness that worked well with the earthiness of the sprouts.

So you’ll need:
1/2 lb fettucine
3 T chopped almonds
1.5 T extra virgin olive oil
1 T unsalted butter
3/4 lb brussel sprouts, trimmed and shredded in food processor
pecorino romano or parmesan for sprinkling

First, get your fettucine started. The rest of the recipe only takes six or seven minutes to make, so you want your pasta at least boiling away when you start the other pan. Make sure you save 1/2 c or so of pasta water.

In big, deep skillet, add butter and oil over medium heat. When foam subsides, add nuts and toast a few minutes. When toasty, add sprouts and cook for 4 or so minutes. Add fettuccine and toss, adding pasta water as needed to make it a bit more saucy, less sticky.

Serve in bowls with cheese. Serves four.

Zesty Noodley Goodness

I made these noodles the other night as part of a very tasty meal including a peanut-crusted chicken (I’m serious) and steamed broccoli. Finally, it was a victory for the last issue of Cooking Light, which had been a bit of a bust all month. These noodles are delicious warm, and I think they would make a fabulous summer salad. Add some red bell pepper for color and you’re on your way.

This has a few steps, though. First, you have to make the orange oil. That’s right, orange oil.

In a little pan over medium heat, combine:
1/2 c canola oil
2 T toasted sesame oil
3/4 t orange rind (I use my handy microplane for this)
1 small clove of garlic, minced
good pinch red pepper flakes

Allow to cook for 10 minutes–mine barely simmered away–stirring occasionally. Remove from heat. We’re only going to use a little of this but it’ll keep in the fridge for a month. And trust me, once you taste it, you’re going to want to taste it again.

Ok, so in the meantime, cook up 4 ounces of soba noodles. As a side, this made four mid-size servings, but I easily could have eaten half of the dish myself. I’m hungry like that sometimes.

Chop 1/2 c of green onions/scallions and 1/4 c of cilantro. When the noodles are done, toss with 2 1/2 T of the oil, plus 1/2 T rice vinegar, 1/2 T soy sauce, and a pinch of salt. Add onions and cilantro, toss, and voila. You’ll thank me later

Insanity! and cookies.

Well things have been rather zany here in the last couple of weeks. I’ve had lots of day job-related craziness, including an interview for a new day job, and what followed was kind of a haze. In short, it looks like we’re moving away to a new New England town. Cooking came to rather an abrupt halt last week, but this week it’s picked back up. Today I’ll talk about these cookies, which I made and photographed a week ago, and then later I’ll talk about a delicious soba noodle salad I made last night.

A week or two ago I made pad thai. We didn’t have any peanuts in the house and I didn’t have the time to schlep to the store with the bulk bins, so I had to buy one of those enormous jars from the grocery store. We’ve had these languish in the pantry for ages before, so this time I am working on moving the peanuts out in all kinds of ways. These cookies, for example, are peanut cookies. That’s right, peanut cookies. Not peanut butter. Peanut. They are very tasty, very buttery, and have a nice drizzle of chocolate on top. They’ll kill your diet in no time, but they sure are yummy. The recipe is from Epicurious.com.

You’ll need:
1 stick of unsalted butter, softened
1/2 c white sugar
1/2 c packed light brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 c peanuts
handful (1/4 c, maybe?) chocolate chips, optional

Begin by creaming butter and sugars together. When fluffy, add vanilla and egg, and beat to combine. Add flour, powder, and peanuts, beating to combine. Drop by tablespoonful on a cookie sheet, about 2″ apart, and bake in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes, until light brown. Remove to cool.

Meanwhile, in a double boiler (or, in my case, a metal bowl over a small pot of simmering water), melt the chocolate. Drizzle over cool(ing) cookies. By the end I had more clumps of chocolate than drizzles, but either way, it was tasty.

Makes about 30 cookies.

Sweet Potato Pizza

This has been one of those weeks, despite that its only Wednesday, that has been an entire whirlwind. Traveling, for one thing, lots of meetings, busy at the day job, the list goes on. Last night when we got home from work around 6:45, I really wanted pizza without going around the corner for it. I made a normal one, with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and ground turkey, and then I made this. I saw the last lonely sweet potato on my counter, and thought, hmmm…..

And this was really, really good. Who knew? Mr. Pea even preferred to the turkey!

So you start with some crust. I use a wheat crust recipe that I know I’ve linked to in the past–it’s from cooks.com and requires very little rising time–but you can go and use whatever floats your boat.

Then, jab a sweet potato with a fork and pop it in the microwave for 5 minutes. Let it cool.

Once your dough is spread out on your baking sheet/pizza stone/whatever, spread it with a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Then press a giant clove of garlic, and spread it around, too.

Take your now cool potato, split it, and put chunks all over the crust. Gently squish with a fork to make “sauce”.

Top with mozzarella, salt and pepper, and some arugula. I’d add more if I made this again, which I certainly will!

Good intentions

Today I was going to tell you how to make these lightened white cupcakes with chocolate frosting. I made them for superbowl Sunday and we ate them as the hometown team was destroyed by the Giants. And while watching the commercials, which really don’t seem as funny to me now as they did ten years ago. But I digress.

So I went to dig up the old issue of Cooking Light that the recipe was in, but I can’t find it anywhere. I looked all over, coming to a startling conclusion: we have an obscene number of magazines in this house. And an obscene number of magazine stashes, somewhere around 8 or 10. I was never a magazine person, but something seems to have changed, as now I currently get…..um, five subscriptions. That would explain why I can’t find any. Mr. Pea, I think, has 3. We have just stacks and stacks. I’m letting a couple of my subscriptions run out, and several were gifts, but still. Holy cow.

Anyway, that’s all I have for today. Last night we finally had a success out of the latest Cooking Light, though we were eating at 8 and too hungry to pause for photography. I made an Italian turkey sausage risotto with arugula. Yum.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

I finished this book last night and am itching to talk about it with someone.

Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma is a searing criticism of the modern American food chain. The criticism is based around a thorough analysis of how our food chain works, and a history of how it got to be the way it is. It then offers alternatives and a good deal of proverbial food for thought along the way. The underlying argument is that the current industrial food chain–that is, enormous farms using copious chemicals to grow obscene amounts of corn, primarily, and then force-feeding that corn to animals not made to digest it (cows) in factory farms–is dangerous to both the environment and the nation’s health. The corn craze has fed into (ha) the obesity epidemic in this country, as most processed foods are made with crazy amounts of corn by-products, like high fructose corn syrup.

What’s interesting is that Pollan also explores one of the alternatives to the production system of US agriculture–what he calls Big Organic. While purchasing organic foods certainly improves the environment on one hand by limiting use of chemical fertilizers, it’s also a problem when I, for example, out on the east coast, purchase organic stuff made in CA and trucked all the way out here. The amount of petroleum used in this process (petroleum, incidentally, is also used in mass quantities to produce, harvest, and feed corn to everyone) is also problematic.

In the long run, then, what he encourages (if only implicitly) is a return to a sustainable food chain, one in which people buy locally from preferably organic suppliers, and one which values both the care and quality of meat sources but allowing cows and chickens and pigs and so forth to live on the land, rather in factory farms, treating them humanely and cleanly. He notes that the rise in food poisoning in America, for example, has a lot to do with the wretched conditions of these factory farms; he also points to the potential problem of people ingesting lots of antibiotics via their meat. Antibiotics are needed because of the close conditions of factory farming; when cows are allowed to be cows, instead, such antibiotics are unnecessary.

Anyway, it’s a very thought-provoking book, and certainly enough to motivate me to continue changing my eating patterns, something I’ve been working on, anyway. But where I live, organic/free range stuff tends to be very pricey, which is a potential block to anyone looking to create change. However, as Pollan points out, in the scheme of things, this might not be a huge price to pay.

Your thoughts?

Oh, and a shop update!

I forgot to mention–Sweet Pea’s spring line is finally up! Come take a peek!

Long time away and resulting kitchen disaster

After my last post, I made some lovely superbowl treats that I even remembered to photograph. And then the winter mess arrived. We were beset by regular flu, nasty colds, and food poisoning for the next few weeks. There wasn’t much activity in our house at all, and unless popsicles count as “food” that I “cooked,” well, there just wasn’t much to report.

But we’ve been better now for the last couple of weeks, so I thought it was high time to get back on the blogging wagon. And what do I have to tell you about? A cooking catastrophe. Here it is:

I got my latest issue of Cooking Light in last week and have since tried to make two dishes from it, both of which did not turn out so well. At least the second one was edible, if not particularly interesting. But this? I don’t know what happened here. I’m hoping you can tell me.

This is supposed to be a mac-and-cheese casserole with ham and peas. You bring some milk to a simmer, add a few seasonings, and then add some shredded low-fat cheddar and some shredded swiss. All of my cheeses, despite my efforts at whisking, turned into a glob. I tried to blend it in to no avail. What happened? I know swiss is a common fondue cheese, so it must melt and blend ok for someone; I also have used this cheddar in other m-and-cs, with no problem! The picture of the casserole looked so good, but mine, well, not so much. We popped it in the oven to see if that would help but instead ended up with warmer glob of cheese, pasta, and a bath of milk on the bottom. My husband the saint ate some of it, but I thought it was quite nasty.

So can you help a gal out? What went wrong here?