44. Potluck Tomato Zucchini Dip

This recipe didn’t come from anything, though it did go to a potluck, and it was part of my ongoing efforts to clean out my cupboards. Unfortunately, these sorts of things don’t always go perfectly… So a girl has to improvise.

I expected I was making something like these, a zucchini dish that would be more like a side or a hot veggie dish. I started with a big can of diced tomatoes with oregano, garlic, and basil in them, two large zucchini, and half a small log of garlic herb goat cheese. I imagined pinterest-worthy food. What I got was surely delicious but not fancy… which I guess is what to aim for!

I roasted the zucchini and didn’t count on how small it would be after that! Mixed with the cheese and the cooked tomato, it looked like a cheesy dip but not at all like a fresh, zesty hot side. I think I needed more veggie volume to make that work. Still! When I put it onto a cracked-pepper triscuit, I realized it still had great potential as a party dip.

At N’s house, I foregrounded that I might have made a disaster food, but people liked it! So… this might not be the thing to aim for when you are trying to make a fancy dish, but if you just want something delicious and veggie-ful, try it out!

Zucchini Tomato Surprise Dip

 

1. Cook 1 can of herbed diced tomatoes in a pan on the stove top; add a little olive oil if you want.
2. Slice and roast zucchini, at least two large ones. (If I did this again, I’d also cut them into quarters and make every slice at least 1/2 an inch thick. Grease that pan!)
3. When tomatoes begin to thicken, add cream cheese or herbed goat cheese. When zucchini have roasted for 30 minutes, mix all ingredients together and serve on crackers or pita chips.

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42. Kristin’s Zucchini Bread

27This recipe, like the Avocado Bread from Khadija, was one I found while trying to clean out my cupboards. You know how after a while you have amassed the odds and ends of many different recipes and you have ingredients you didn’t even remember you bought? This summer I’m hoping to get rid of those odds and ends via recipes from blogs I respect, like this one: http://www.yellowblissroad.com/zucchini-bread-recipe/ Yellow Bliss Road is a great example of someone who has turned her passion into a full time job, but who also just produces a really great product.

I found grating zucchini (one of the two ingredients I was trying to finish up; also had a lonely almost-empty bag of flour) very soothing, but I ran into a problem: no eggs in the house! After a quick google search for egg substitutes, I thought I would throw in some applesauce… no go for that either. For a girl who claims to be clearing out the cupboards, I seem to be doing an awful lot of running out of things!

What I did have, however, were two sad neglected apples. I cut them into pieces and grated them straight into my pile of zucchini shavings, added all the other ingredients, and hoped for the best. The result? DELICIOUS. Like, maybe my new favorite sweet bread. It’s moist in the middle but has some integrity to it, and caramelized-crunchy on the exterior… I was totally pleased. Probably even better with eggs, like Kristin intended, but I’m quite pleased. When life gives you no eggs or applesauce, you can still turn old zucchini and apples into the perfect breakfast treat.

Caprese Salad: Eating Salad without the Greens

I have had the goal of eating 4 salads a week, and yesterday, we’d run out of salad greens. What we hadn’t run out of was ripe, delicious, garden tomatoes. Mostly I wanted to use cherry tomatoes, but I caved and used the ripest of the San Marzanos too.

You see, salad is a funny thing: some people consider potatoes coated in mayonnaise to be a salad, and others see only things with lettuce as a base as the healthy form of ‘salad.’ I’ve tried to stick to my belief that anything with a veggie base is salad, and caprese salad (characterized by the combination of tomatoes, basil, mozzerella cheese, and sometimes balsamic vinegar) is a wonderful variation that is filling while still being refreshing. I knew yesterday afternoon that I was in the mood to eat something unhealthy and I wanted to head it off with something fresh and lighter. This worked perfectly.

I sliced all the tomatoes up to bite size (no exact measurements here; just use what you want based on servings you want to have) and tore the basil leaves. I cut the mozzarella down to quarter-inch cubes or crumbles, whichever happened faster, and threw in a dash of olive oil and a dash of balsamic vinegar and a few grinds of crunchy salt. The salad worked up well but I got overzealous and added a bunch of dried basil, which rehydrated into a pretty overwhelming level of basil-ness. I didn’t think I could overdo basil, given my love for it, but this was that. Basically: add basil, taste, add more if you want it.

I know a lot of people who like to do the caprese combination on toast, but I would advocate eating it out of the bowl like a regular salad. After all, it’s one less piece of toast in your life, and it’s so tasty even when it’s in a bowl by itself (and even when it has too much basil!). This combo could be stretched to a full meal if mixed with some whole-wheat pasta or quinoa, or it could be served on a pizza/flatbread for a new variation on the timeless margherita pizza. Regardless, it makes me happy my definition of salad is pretty broad. 🙂

Preserving leftovers for eating later!

Husband and I have been taking a hard look at our food expenses; we aren’t being super irresponsible with groceries and restaurant expenses, but it seems like an area where we could trim back a little just by wasting less. I hate it, but there are drips and drabs of food that get thrown out because we either get sick of it, or it sits in the fridge too long, or we just miscalculate and make too much.

One place where we have room to work harder is when we have these parties – they are potlucks, and pretty much always involve more food than is needed. This time, since soup is involved, I’ve got one plan: I read online that many soups that freeze well can be frozen into ice cube trays and then stored in freezer bags until needed. I like this, because the soups I’m making might actually make nice sauces in the future.

If you have favorite ways to preserve extras after a party, do comment! I am especially in need for bread reuses (though I do love croutons and french toast for that), because i think we may have excess homemade bread tonight. 🙂

The Return of Pumpkin Spice: Squash Scones/Cookies

Sometimes, the way I choose my cooking plans is crazy. For instance, when I type “pumpkin cookie shortening” into google because 1. no one makes cookies out of butternut squash and 2. I am running low on inspiration for what to make out of all this squash and 3. somehow I am out of butter AND vegetable oil in my house. Sigh. I’m a mess.

But the internet rewarded me, in the form of this recipe – http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10671/pumpkin-cookies-iii/. It has a cute backstory about a simpler time, and with a couple substitutions (adding chocolate chips, swapping pumpkin puree for mashed roasted butternut squash), the cookies were all set to go.

I made them a little haphazardly big, and because they are so fluffy and cake-y when they come out, they remind me of scones. Everyone has some cookie memories, but I have some lovely scone memories: it was one of the first things I baked all by myself, and I loved the fact that the dough was almost savory and the chocolate chips I put in them made them into a sweet treat. My sister and mother and I once shared a wonderful afternoon at a tea room drinking herbal teas and eating scones with lemon curd… it’s just one of those simple-pleasure foods, something that isn’t necessary but is rather delightful.

So these cookies/scones came with me to a little backyard campfire across town that we attended over the weekend, and they have been my quick go-to breakfast for days, and they seem inexhaustible… much like the squash from which they came, I guess. Still, if you want a treat that reminds you that fall is coming, but don’t quite want to break out the pumpkin puree yet, this is a pretty great way to get your veggies; Vitamin A and C in a cookie!

Homemade garlic croutons – more white bread uses!

Husband mentioned off-hand the other day that a bag of the garlic croutons he likes on his salads cost 3 dollars. Granted, 3 dollars is perfectly fine expenditure if it makes him happy, but it got me thinking: we still have a lot of white bread from the pantry giving us two spare loaves, and it seems like the perfect canvas on which to create croutons.

I experimented by cutting stacks of the bread into small, 1/2 inch cubes, though I didn’t sweat it if some pieces weren’t uniform. I covered them with pepper and salt and garlic powder and some oregano flakes, then shook them up in a bowl to cover evenly. Then I added three tablespoons of olive oil, trying to distribute it through mixing the bread, but again, not sweating it too much. I layered it out on a cookie sheet and put the croutons into a 425 degree oven until most of the pieces were turning brown, probably somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes, but I was cooking other things so I didn’t pay good attention to the time.

The oven did a great job of making a soft bread into a crunchy crouton! The necessary step after that was complete cooling before I put them into the plastic bag I was going to store them in – I know that any leftover moisture can seep out and be trapped with the croutons, turning them into soggy oil bread… much less delicious sounding, you know? I let husband sample them and he pronounced them good! I always remember croutons being the thing that got me through salads I didn’t like, a little savory crunch for all that green. While not as easy as buying the three dollar bag, these are pretty easy and cost pennies total to make. I recommend using all leftover bread, even that which is heading toward being stale, to make these croutons!

 

Basil/Oregano Mashed Butternut Squash

I’ve become a big fan of dips – give me a variety pack of hummus flavors, or a savory baba ganoush, or a pile of guacamole any day and I’ll lay into it. I wasn’t expecting that butternut squash would make such a fantastic dip, though; rather than a recipe, today I present something I affectionately call a “mess-cipe” – something that easily could have turned out terribly as an experiment in the kitchen but which instead turned out delicious!

I was eager to roast up the butternut squash, so I added basil, oregano, and some last sprigs of rosemary that I had handy but after it finished cooking I kinda… left it in the oven to cool? I went about my afternoon, busy, and then came back to cooled-off, gooey squash. It was easy to separate the chunks from their skin, but then I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. My thought was “Pasta sauce,” along the lines of some you might have seen used on “butternut squash mac and cheese.”

I didn’t have a lot of cheese available, but I added cheese and milk, and used the food processor to mix it up. I made Husband a bowl of pasta and covered it in the sauce, which he vouched was sweet but flavorful, a perfectly fine dinner. What I noticed, though, was that since it was all fairly cool, it was really firmer than a sauce… more like a dip.

Instead of serving myself pasta, I dug a tortilla chip into the mixture, and crunched into it… PERFECT. While not a normal dip for tortilla chips, the mixture was too smooth for me to want it on something else soft like pasta, so I got the satisfying crunch and also the yummy flavor of butternut squash. I cannot give you exact measurements, but I definitely recommend that you try something like “mashed butternut squash” and have chips or crackers with it – the flavor is unusual but the texture is perfect for a dip.

French Toast: How to make white bread exciting again.

As I’ve mentioned before, Husband and I work at a food pantry. We were leaving the other week and the leader of the pantry, L, came up to us and said “We defrosted these loaves of bread, can you take them? We don’t want them to go to waste!” I dislike food waste, but I also don’t eat a lot of plain, white sandwich bread. We took it home, but I worried we’d let it languish without consuming it ourselves.

On Saturday, though,  I decided to whip up one of my breakfast favorites that I rarely make when there’s no bread in the house. I mixed about a cup of whole milk, three eggs, two tablespoons of brown sugar, and a dash of vanilla and cinnamon with a whisk, then dipped slices of bread into the mix and fried them on a griddle with butter on it. I left the first pieces soaking too long, so they fell apart, but after that, I dipped slices in quickly and fried them, adding extra cinnamon if one side looked particularly sparse. Whereas Egg in a Basket is savory, this was a tasty, sweet twist.

Husband prefers his french toast with honey and I preferred mine with butter and jam. We made about half a loaf of bread’s worth, and the leftovers kept in the fridge and were nice to reheat and eat the following morning.

I remember that there was a little hippie restaurant near where I went to college that, for special occasions, would be where my friends and I would get breakfast. Their best dish, in my opinion, was french toast layered with sweetened cream cheese and strawberry preserves, usually served with a side of home fries just to vary up the textures and flavors. It makes you feel well-fed to eat something with such heart, but still full of sweetness. I might be able to use up those extra loaves of bread yet. 🙂

Turning Leftovers into Freezer Meals

I’m still working on two or three dishes I cooked up during Husband’s last trip – when I am at home alone, half as much food gets eaten and twice as much gets cooked because I start thinking about all the things I have in the kitchen, and all the recipes people have sent me, and I just make things until the fridge is full. I have my pick of things to eat, but they inevitably become leftovers.

One tactic I’ve seen a lot of people do is freeze things almost immediately after making them, anticipating how they will not really want that food for multiple meals in the same week. I, however, begin with optimism that we will eat, for instance, chili for days on end. Husband is pretty good about it, as I’ve said before, I love the luxury of eating something different every day. So it appears that I need to practice freezer meal prep!

Pinterest has a few links about it, but I’m especially intrigued by meals that, when reheated, retain the same awesome flavors and textures they had when first made; any freezer meal recipes out there that don’t taste like freezer meals? I’d also love to get better at packaging up more freezer meals, i.e. “meal prep” ahead of time, but for now, I think I have to stick with just doing a better job of not letting leftovers get old and then get thrown out. I want to be able to cook a lot and experience variety, but I also really want to avoid trashing any real food.

There is nothing like spending all summer to try to grow just a few buckets of tomatoes to make you appreciate every grain of rice and lump of stew that you sadly throw out because it’s gotten too old in the fridge. Time to use my freezer to save food. 🙂

Following the Ingredients to… Macaroni and Cheese

I am not a recipe writer; I’ve been learning a bit about food blogging lately and that seems to be the most daunting of the aspects of it: what if my recipe works for me but fails because I forgot some detail I needed to tell the readers? Perhaps this is why I like trying other people’s recipes and tweaking them, because it is easier than writing my own.

Lately though, since I started daily posts, I’ve found that I don’t get around to enough new recipes a week to keep the blog full up on only completely new recipes. For instance, we were quite tired the other night, so I did something I call “following the ingredients” – I start with one thing I know I want to eat, then add things that I think will be good until a food emerges.

For me, it started with some pasta shells. They looked like they were aching for some cheese, so while they boiled, I scrounged in the fridge. I found a smoked gouda spread that we were given a long time ago; since we don’t sit down with fancy crackers and cheese spread very often, it really hadn’t found a home, but I had a hunch it would make a good cheese sauce, if I added (consults fridge) the last of this block of cream cheese!

When the shells were finished, I put some leftover cream from when I made liquid truffle, and began dissolving the two kinds of cheese into it. In went my go-to spices for italian food: oregano, garlic, sea salt, cracked pepper. The bowl of recently-picked cherry tomatoes stared up at me accusingly, reminding me that there was no vegetable matter in this dish. I sliced them all up in halves and threw them in with the pasta on the side. The cheese sauce smoothed out, and a few leaves of basil later… something was born.

Husband loves cooking this way, just throwing in what we have, not worrying too much about recipes or whether the flavor mixes are perfect, but personally? It feels like a one-off – when I’m a little lazy, it’s great, and I’ll tell you – smoked gouda cheese spread doubles as a killer mac and cheese sauce. Recipes still are my favorite though: getting to be a part of that difficult, long-term creation process starting with originator of the idea and coming all the way through a bunch of grandmothers and mothers and food bloggers and pinterest-pinners all the way down to you. It’s pretty special.