Eating my vegetables

I occasionally I enjoy cooking when I am not stressed about dinner. Mainly weekends have been lately busy with classes and catching up with friends and finishing up projects. This weekend I had a great time cooking and prepping food for the upcoming school week. 

This year I have started to prep food for a week and froze them mainly meat including fish. It is almost like the blue apron but not much cutting on weeknights. I like coming home when dinner is ready to go and to tackle classes. 

This is a super easy vegetable dish we all love. The recipe includes cauliflower, carrots, and potatoes. Our little miss helped me to cut vegetables, and she was so proud that she gets to help me to cook. Not only that she was so happy to finish all her food.  

This year Nicolette is taking, swimming, karate, and music. I am super excited for her, and she is too. I am looking forward to seeing her creating music. 

Eggplant + Pasta = Heaven

Our local grocery store is flooded with eggplants and of course I stumble upon this recipe from a blog which I frequently visits. I thought I should give this a try mainly it was the season, We love egg plant, and wanted to add a twist to our regular mundane pasta dishes. The results were amazing.

At the end we had more reasons to love this dish and a bonus no meat in this dish at all. 

I loved the subtle mint flavor and the kick from red peppers. Cheese makes it so much better. I took this for lunch at work and works great with a small salad. My oldest had this for dinner and he liked it very much. We will be making this few times this year. At least before the end of the egg plant season. 

Ingredients
1 medium eggplant, cut into 1-inch cubes

1 pint cherry tomatoes

3 cloves garlic, whole

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

1 pound rigatoni pasta

1/4 cup torn fresh mint leaves

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 cup grated Parmesan

Directions

Watch how to make this recipe.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a large bowl combine the eggplant, cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper, and red

pepper flakes. Spread the vegetables out in an even layer on the baking sheet. Roast in the oven until the vegetables are tender and the eggplant is golden, about 35 minutes.

While the vegetables are roasting, place the pine nuts in a small baking dish. Place in the oven on the rack below the vegetables. Roast until golden, about 8 minutes. Remove from the oven and reserve.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, stirring occasionally, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain pasta into a large bowl and reserve 1 1/2 cups of the cooking liquid.

Transfer the roasted vegetables to a food processor. Add the torn mint leaves and extra-virgin olive oil. Puree the vegetables.

Transfer the pureed vegetables to the bowl with the pasta and add the Parmesan. Stir to combine, adding the pasta cooking liquid 1/2 cup at a time until the pasta is saucy. Sprinkle the pine nuts over the top and serve.

Recipe courtesy of Giada De Laurentiis

Canning freshness straight out from the garden…

Yes, I don't know what better way to explain this new interest or rather a process of mine. I have been navigating the internet how to pickle beans (I mean green beans) and I found a way which I like very much. No idea how it all going to turn out but sounds like a great plan to lock away the freshness of backyard vegetables. 

Perhaps for some Bloody Mary’s in future and I feel it is not that fancy without pickles as a garnish. Moreover you need few pickles after drinking few of those. I also found out that I cannot find okra pickles from MA because that is not a northern thing. I had to buy a bottle while I was in VA. 

One thing I like about this particular recipe is it really adds heat to pickles with few black peppers and red chillies. I can’t wait to try some with my salad. 

Salad Dressing

I always use to buy the salad dressing because it is inexpensive, so many varieties, and and the convenience. There was this day I ran out of dressing and wanted to eat my salad. What happen next was invention of dressing at home. After a bit of research online. I was making my own salad dressing. The best part  was I am in control of what is going in my dressing. So far I made one with lemon, and this is my attempt to make with ruby red grapefruit. I am so pleased with both batches which leads me to eat more salad. 

My version

1/2 cup of grapefruit juice

3 tbs of olive oil

2 tbs distill white vinegar 

1 shallot finely minced

2 garlic cloves finely minced

1 tbs of honey

few pinches of crushed red pepper flakes

Dash of salt and pepper to taste

Place everything in a mason jar and shake. Simple as that and pour generously on your salad. 

Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner Bowl

Kale, Beans, Quinoa, Roasted Beets, Carrots, Potato, and Hard Boil Eggs this has been my go to lunch bowl. Closer to work and when I had to do work shops I would usually go to this place called good eats to get something for dinner. I love their dishes mainly because they would serve something along this line. Also they would served hand cut fries which was die for. 

This is my home made version of it less the fires. I cooked quinoa with millet I used a vegetable stock to lightly flavor. My mantra for this is one cup of grain for two cups of liquid.

Sautéd kale with a bit of olive oil, 2 cloves of garlic, and onions. Add a bit of lemon juice for the zest. Then I tossed beans with greens as well. 

Roasting root vegetables adds a bold flavor to this bowl. You can use any kind of herbs you have in hand to add a bit of flavor to your root vegetables. I have used rosemary and parsley this is totally up to you.

Assembling this bowl is so much fun! I add green to the bottom of the dish and grains. Top it off with roster vegetables and a halved hard boil egg. Add salt and pepper to your taste. 

Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner Bowl

Kale, Beans, Quinoa, Roasted Beets, Carrots, Potato, and Hard Boil Eggs this has been my go to lunch bowl. Closer to work and when I had to do work shops I would usually go to this place called good eats to get something for dinner. I love their dishes mainly because they would serve something along this line. Also they would served hand cut fries which was die for. 

This is my home made version of it less the fires. I cooked quinoa with millet I used a vegetable stock to lightly flavor. My mantra for this is one cup of grain for two cups of liquid.

Sautéd kale with a bit of olive oil, 2 cloves of garlic, and onions. Add a bit of lemon juice for the zest. Then I tossed beans with greens as well. 

Roasting root vegetables adds a bold flavor to this bowl. You can use any kind of herbs you have in hand to add a bit of flavor to your root vegetables. I have used rosemary and parsley this is totally up to you.

Assembling this bowl is so much fun! I add green to the bottom of the dish and grains. Top it off with roster vegetables and a halved hard boil egg. Add salt and pepper to your taste. 

Warm Salad for Cold Days

Kale, Quinoa, Blackbeans, and fried Tofu

Dinner in a hurry

Last night I was exhausted running around and getting errands done and It was a lot to get done. I did not feel like making anything for dinner and luckily I bought chicken thighs from Costco. 

So it was chicken, potatoes and kale for dinner!

Redskin potatoes, with garlic spring onions, and parsley. To make it bit creamy I add a bit of half and half, butter, and cheese. Added salt and pepper to taste.

Kale was sautéd with garlic, onions, soy sauce, sesame oil, and chili oil to give a tiny bit of heat. 

Served the baked chicken on a bed of mash potatoes and kale! Glad we decided to eat at home! I still have some left over baked chicken to make a salad to in the lunch boxes! 

Citrus tea with honey

New England weather makes me to make tea out of anything in order to fight cold days. Citrus is always flooding markets during this time and you can’t get enough of it. Grape fruit seems to fit into this lovely slot of tea making. 

I use one whole grapefruit twice to make this warm sweet tea. Squeeze out one half of grapefruit into a glass add few spoons of honey according to your taste and top it off with warm water. This is such a sweet tea which will keep you go back to your glass until you finish it off!

Getting more greens in

Getting into the habit of eating more greens is always challenging for starch eating fanatics like us. That being said we are more conscious about eating all our greens before offering it to chickens. Salads take the back burner in our menu mainly I was the only one who was consuming it. However that has changed two kids have joined the wagon and I am thrilled to see every one at least eating a little bit of green before their real meal. 

This green salad is my own spin to store brought mixed greens. I buy them in bulk and it stays in the refrigerator for couple of days. In order for us to have salad every single day it need a bit of prep time. I like to do this late in the night or first thing in the morning so it is always ready before meals. 

My grocery list includes

1 box of arugula
1 head of romaine lettuce
1 English cucumber
1 bag of carrots 
1 bag of turnips
1 heart of celery 
1 bunch of kale
1 bunch parsley/ cilantro 
1 bunch spring onions
1-2 cans beans of your taste chickpeas / black beans

I use a handful of each green including the cucumber can be stretched for couple of days. This is a great way to add salad before a meal. Finally a little bit of beans add that extra protein. 

This works for us right now than the store kind. 

Mushrooms, Marsala Wine, & Pasta…

 

I am a huge mushroom fan, well it goes back into decades. I still remember how my mother made the first mushroom dish it not fancy as involvement of marsala wine and an oven. it was simple but tasted great with rice and curry. I might give it a try if I can find the same mushroom which we use gather up from our garden in Sri Lanka. I don't know what exactly that is called. But I wanted to say it is very mush like the oyster mushrooms you could find in a Chinese grocery store. 

But this dish was from Smitten Kitchen. I love her blog and often I make dishes from her blog. which involves cremini mushrooms and marsala wine. I just could not skip it because I had both of these lovely ingredients in hand. 

I loved the creamy texture and it was a great dish to make and leave it in the refrigerator to heat up later. More time read, create, and spend with children. However, next time I make this I would love to incorporate some anchovies and see how it would taste with these lovely creamy combinations. Great recipe to try!

Caramalized Onions and Mushrooms

This is one of the great recopies I found during holidays and made it twice. This looks and taste really good on mashed potatoes. I usually use them as a topping and a side dish. Very easy and simple to make.

Kale Sambol

Kale has become one of my favorite greens. We make them in so many ways from cooking to sambols. This is one of our all time favorite way to prep kale in a hurry. Kale adds so much nutrition to the meal and make a scrumptious addition to regular mundane rice and curries. 

Finally it was pot roast...

Christmas, was fun to celebrate with our neighbors and family. We unanimously decide we are going to go low key for christmas lunch since we have fun at our neighbors with desert. I have write a post of that next year. Any way I want to write about my beautiful and perfect pot roast.

This is a such a wonderful meal to make for a gathering. Although I do not eat meat anymore I am assigned to cook meat for the rest of the family without any complain. I do some times find this very challenging because I have been eating meat for a ling time. But I am not going to vent about that lets get to the post of perfect pot roast. After browsing few blogs and recipe books I decided that I am going to make this with much influence form Pioneer Woman.

I did add 1 cup of red wine and it was so rich in color and the entire family enjoy it. While serving it I noticed it was easy to serve since it was cooked to tender. Meat was almost falling apart and it was delicious with mash potatoes according everyone. Of course little Nicolette was not a big fan of pot roast. 

Below is the recipe. 
Ingredients
1 whole (4 To 5 Pounds) Chuck Roast
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
2 whole Onions
6 whole Carrots (Up To 8 Carrots)
Salt To Taste
Pepper To Taste
1 cup Red Wine (optional, You Can Use Beef Broth Instead)
2 cups To 3 Cups Beef Stock
3 sprigs Fresh Thyme, or more to taste
3 sprigs Fresh Rosemary, or more to taste

Preparation Instructions
First and foremost, choose a nicely marbled piece of meat. This will enhance the flavor of your pot roast like nothing else. Generously salt and pepper your chuck roast.
Heat a large pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Then add 2 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil (or you can do a butter/olive oil split).
Cut two onions in half and cut 6 to 8 carrots into 2-inch slices (you can peel them, but you don’t have to). When the oil in the pot is very hot (but not smoking), add in the halved onions, browning them on one side and then the other. Remove the onions to a plate.
Throw the carrots into the same very hot pan and toss them around a bit until slightly browned, about a minute or so.
If needed, add a bit more olive oil to the very hot pan. Place the meat in the pan and sear it for about a minute on all sides until it is nice and brown all over. Remove the roast to a plate.
With the burner still on high, use either red wine or beef broth (about 1 cup) to deglaze the pan, scraping the bottom with a whisk to get all of that wonderful flavor up.
When the bottom of the pan is sufficiently deglazed, place the roast back into the pan and add enough beef stock to cover the meat halfway (about 2 to 3 cups). Add in the onion and the carrots, as well as 3 or 4 sprigs of fresh rosemary and about 3 sprigs of fresh thyme.

Put the lid on, then roast in a 275F oven for 3 hours (for a 3-pound roast). For a 4 to 5-pound roast, plan on 4 hours.

Cranberry and Pear Jam...

 

 

Cranberry is truly native to Massachusetts and I was over excited that I was able to make this unique fruit to pickles and delicious jams this year. I have made two kinds jams this year one has pear in it other is a spiced jam and so good with a piece of toast. My favorite was pickled cranberries. They were truly yummy! I used the left over jelly with sparkling water to add a bit of a festive color to my mundane water. 

From my last visit to costco I decided I am not going to buy any more cranberries. However, my past visit to costco I walked out again with a bag of cranberries I do not know how that happened. Well I told myself again I am not going to buy them again, but this time for sure I know I wont be able to get it because we are done with cranberries at least in New England this year!

I love this simple pear cranberry jam. After few attempts I decided to cook the pear with vanilla for a while and then add the cranberries. It is absolutely divined and the vanilla is very subtle. This is the last of cranberries for us this year.

Canning Cranberries...

Canning has become part of my cooking rituals. I like the fact that I could easily make a gift while I am cooking. Because it tis the same time I would spend in cooking a meal and I can do the canning as a part of cooking. End of the day I had made a gift, which I could tuck away for the right moment. Sometimes, if I am visiting someone in a hurry I can always take a canned item. This cut my time in half so I don't have to look for a gift or stop halfway through a drive. 

Not only that we get to enjoy some of the fresh fruits off season. Which we have come to love specially the pickles and jams. I am still a novice when it comes to jams. But I have tested all my boundaries making many kinds of jellies. 

Some might say I enjoy cooking but actually I don’t when I come to think about it. Certainly enjoy feeding my family. I know when I was young my mother stayed at home and often surprised us with many treats which to today I dearly hold those memories to my heart. 

Being isolated from many family members, its hard to ask someone to recreate those dishes. Although, I have come to recreate my own dishes with what is readily available to me at my finger tips. I often go through few blogs which is close to my heart to recreate those dishes which I have come to love. 

A little bit of a busy weekend...

Wide Rice Noodles

 

 

 

I remember when I was a kid I would ask my mother to make noodles. It was such a big preparation, because it needed vegetables to thinly cut and cook the meat. Getting all the ingredients together was a such a big task. I can recall to this day I was so eager to help her to make this dish because it was one of my favorite; which my mother prepared. No one to this day was able to make this lovely dish for me, but I am not complaining glad that I can cook. 

I decide to make this one pot meal to my children. The feedback is not so great but I know they liked it. My oldest really liked this because it includes his favorite meat and fish. I have make my own twists to this but still stick to the main old recipe which was handed me to by my mom. I knew how to make this by watching and helping her. 

I feel like I always make this extra because it takes a long time to prep. 

Ingredients:
1 leek white and green part
1/4 of white cabbage
2 carrots thinly sliced as matchsticks
1 medium white onion
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 inch piece of ginger
1 ripe tomato diced
choice of your meat chicken/pork/beef thinly sliced drizzled with soy sauce and extra sauce for cooking
shrimp coated with soy sauce
egg omelet cut into stripes
salted fish cut into thin small piece for frying (salted cod works fine)
1 pkt of wide rice noodles
Oil for frying and cooking
sesame oil
Chili oil 

Add two tablespoons of oil to a big wok and fry the salted cod and place aside. Add beef with soy sauce to the pan and cook until  brown and turn over to cook the other side. Once this is cooked move to another bowl. Cook shrimp  and set a side. Basically cook meats and the omelet and set a side. To the same pan add two more tablespoons of cooking oil and brown the ginger and garlic mixture. To this add the carrots, cabbage, and leeks white and the green part. Cook the vegetables until they are wilted then add all the cooked meat including the omelet. Do not add salted fried fish at this point. Mix them well and add the noodles. At this point drizzle some soy, sesame, and chili oil to the mixture and add the salted fried fish and serve hot.

 

 

 

Above is a picture of our garden before we decided to pull all our green tomatoes. Yes, with some help before everything freezers we thought it was a good idea to pull our tomato plants and add them to the compost. The result, I ended up with so many green tomatoes. Again I have not make fried green tomatoes. Because I have been making salsas and chutneys. 

First I made a batch of green tomato chutney then salsa and then chutney again. That is exactly how I finished all our green tomatoes. One reason not to have fried green tomatoes. I have not yet, open any of my chutneys. Mainly I think it needs some curing time to get all the flavors to blend in.

That being said we had our first snow showers this past weekend, and our chicken did layed eggs on that day. I think we have two ladies on the clock laying eggs for us. Yeah!!! For the Rhode Island Reds they are the best layers. 

Back to green tomatoes, This years salsa has some extra heat from habanero chillies and jalapeños. I have been using the left overs to add heat to curries and sambols we make constantly to keep us warm. 

Making yogurt @ home

Making yogurt at home has become an extremely a fun project to do. Plain yogurt satisfying our less sugar craving desires, while adding benefits to our health. But it was hard to get, little one to eat, because she has tasted the store kind. 

She would say, but, “I like the kind with the fruit on the bottom.” Yes, I agree if I am six too. In order to satisfy her I would try to mix in a small amount of jam into the plain yogurt but she would insists she likes the fruit on the “Bottom.”

In order to get her to eat without complaining, I decided to make few with our tiny weck jars it was an adorable and successful attempt! 

Why not add a bit of honey, says a voice in my head, so it was honey. I love it and my older guy gulp it down. Hmm… I don't know how I am going to keep up with him. 

Making yogurt was a really good thing that had happened to us. 

Best Potato Salad Ever!

 

 

Summer makes me not want to cook, mainly because the heat gets into me. Past few weeks have been crazy here over MA. it was a great change to use to clear the refrigerator and make few cold dishes my son and I always find ways to eat cold food. I bought a bag of red skin potatoes few weeks back and wanted make sure that I use all. 

i like potato salad made with redskin potatoes because it adds a beautiful color to the dish. After spending few hours in the net I was able to narrow the dish to few recipes. Funny thing is I like few ingredients in one and I did not like some in the other. 

Usually what happen in a situation like this is I create my own with mix of recipes. It was the birth of our potato salad add one more thing I was able to clear out few almost empty bottles from the refrigerator as well and it is always a plus making space!  

We loved it so much I could not take any pictures of the potato salad because it was gone, we were too hungry to control ourselves to take few pictures of the potato salad on a dish, kind of sad. 

However, I was able to capture the process of making the salad you could see the dressing minus the redskin potatoes.