summer “tapas” dinner

this was a fun little dinner i scraped together with stuff i found in the fridge. it was perfect for a hot summer evening.

of course, you don’t have to use the exact same components, but keeping the idea of “tapas” in your repertoire is very helpful.

here i had…

homemade hummus: chick peas, tahini, lemon juice, garlic or chives and olive oil in a blender (detailed directions to follow)

homemade pita chips: pita pockets cut into triangles, split apart, oiled, salted, peppered and toasted in the oven (or toaster oven) until brown and crispy

mozzarella, roasted red pepper and basil skewers: pretty self-explanatory. the peppers were from a jar.

three bean salad: one of my faves – so easy, cheap and healthy. here’s my version, but feel free to substitute ingredients as you like! one can dark red kidney beans, half a package frozen lima beans and half a package frozen green beans. dress with bottled salad dressing (i use one called “mediterranean” – sorry, mom!) and some worchestershire sauce (for “depth of flavor”), plus salt, pepper and herbs (fresh or dried) to your taste.

please serve “tapas” outside with wine, if possible.

faux-tanesca pizza

gimme a…

what does that spell?!

faux-tanesca pizza!

slightly different from the original because of the appalling lack of olives, this “puttanesca wannabe” is what i came up with out of the depths of my fridge.

first, trader joe’s 99-cent pizza dough is an absolute necessity. buy one every time you’re there. in all the flavors. it keeps in the fridge, but you probably won’t keep it for long! tj’s crust = quick, easy, yummy dinner.

this is the garlic-herb flavor.

second, saute up your onions and mushrooms in a little olive oil. i don’t have to show you that, do i? okay, just this once.

(yes it’s a weird pan for sauteing, but, patience, grasshopper. there’s a method to my madness.)

you don’t want to cook this sauce too much, because remember it’s going to cook more in the oven (oh! preheat your oven to 400, please) and you want the ingredients to still be recognizable.

(let us pause here for a moment for the story of how my can opener failed me and i opened the crushed tomatoes with a wine key. there was only a small amount of blood and it looks a lot like tomato sauce, right?)

anywhoodles, voila why i was using a sauce pan. to make room for a can of diced tomatoes without most of the liquid.

then i added a little hot pepper (shocker, right?!), some worcestershire and a little bit of sugar (for the tomatoes. always.) oh! and the capers. a lot of capers because to me, they are but candy.

let it cook a bit so some of the liquid boils off. at this point, you could toss it over pasta, of course, but i have this beauty a-waiting:

you know how to do it from here. (and yes, that’s parchment paper. my pan sucks and i canNOT scrape/soak another pizza off it.)

pop it into the oven for 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the thickness of your crust, and until the cheese is nice and bubbly and browning on top. mmmm.

even better cold the next day. if you’re into that kind of thing.

polenta with white beans and tomatoes

this was one of my favorite childhood dinners. it was a go-to for my mom and i recently whipped it up for that guy i cook for sometimes…

as usual and not surprisingly, he suggested an improvement that i think needs to be a permanent addition to the recipe.

how good does this look?

traditionally, this dish was a puddle of polenta (use the easy quick-cook, available in pretty much any grocery store, but add lots of grated mozzarella) covered with a can of white beans and a can of crushed tomatoes, heated, salted, peppered and with plenty of dried rosemary.

the suggestion was to make a polenta pancake (cook it following directions on the box, then fry it up in a cast iron pan) for the glop to be served on. this is a major improvement because of the awesome crunchy texture and browned flavor the pancake adds to the dish.

fourth of july dinner

better late than never, yes? our fabulous fourth of july dinner. the star attraction was cooked by a certain boyfriend of mine. (and i was in charge of the dessert. surprised?)

mussels with fennel

tomato and mozzarella salad

and strawberry shortcake – is there anything more american? oh. apple pie, i guess. pooh.

the shortcake was a plain scone recipe with a lemon sugar topping (see it glistening?), unsweetened whipped cream and macerated strawberries (cut up and allowed to marinate with a little sugar).

very simple, but very delicious. and red, white and blue. like our country.

red wine and tomato risotto

oh man was i desperate last night. it had gotten really late, there was nothing in the house, i had no plan and if my boyfriend hadn’t forced me to make something, i would have eaten a bowl of cereal. (thanks, babe!)

somehow, i came up with this:

red wine and tomato risotto with mozzarella and basil. isn’t the color amazing?! that’s the wine. and see the little chunks of tomato? mmm

because of the lateness of the hour and the hunger and the grumpiness, i don’t have pictures of the whole process (sorry!) but you can be sure we’ll talk about risotto again here at icf. especially as it gets into fall.

so why am i sharing if there are no pictures? because it was feat of cream of ice box that i am very proud of. and if you’ve been reading the blog, specifically yesterday, some (most?) of these ingredients are going to ring a bell and i think that’s very cool.

now, risotto is by no means quick, but it is easy, cheap, yummy and versatile. so it gets major points. oh, and you can easily make just one serving. or two servings. or one and a half servings, as i did last night. i was hungry!

i cooked the rice (you need to use arborio – more on that later) with onions, garlic and red wine (remember yesterday we used the white?) and finished cooking it with warm water until it was almost done. this takes about 20 minutes, adding a little water, letting it cook, adding more, stirring a lot…

then i added what was left of the crushed tomatoes and at the last minute, a handful of grated mozzarella (the kind you put on pizza. molto mario had a mini heart attack somewhere). topped with fresh basil.

would it have been better if i had chicken stock instead of water? and parmesan? of course. but it worked this way and it was delicious.

and i’ve had a request to make it again. so there.

onion and tomato pasta sauce

when you’re looking to make quick and easy and tasty meals on a budget, it helps to have some quick, easy, tasty, cheap tricks up your sleeve. one up my sleeve is what i call caramelized onions, although honestly i’m sure that’s not the technical term and julia probably just flipped. (sorry, babe!) my thinking: onions are pretty cheap, keep for ages and pack a lot of flavor. stock up when you’re at the store!

so i was facing dinner for one with very little in the fridge. i had some pesto ravioli which is a great place to start, but i’m just not really a fan of plain old tomato sauce.

so what was in there? half a can of crushed tomatoes, a giant white onion, some baby spinach (which i also always have on hand – again because it’s cheap, keeps for ages, packs flavor AND is super healthy. are you noticing a pattern here?), some feta left over from a salad and two half-empty (half-full?) bottles of wine.

side note, i don’t generally have TWO bottles of wine open to choose from (you lush), so tonight i’m lucky. basic rule of thumb is not to cook with anything you wouldn’t drink, but there’s not much wine i won’t drink, so pooh.

at first i was thinking tomatoes equal red, but i decided that summer means lighter, so we’ll go with the white.

i started by slicing up a nice pile of onions. this is for one person’s dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow.

then i heated up a skillet with a little olive oil and a tiny spoonful of brown sugar. i’m sure you could use white in a pinch. or honestly, i made these onions without any sugar at all because they have plenty of natural sugars.

then i added the onions and a healthy sprinkling of red wine vinegar. again, be flexible – red wine, cider, white… any vinegar will do because we’re just looking for at acidy bite to go with the sweetness of the onions.

cook the onions down, stirring only occasionally so they get nice and brown.

when you get the desired brownness (as anne burrell on the FN says, “brown equals flavor!”) splash in some wine, which will unstick all the yummy stuck-on brown bits. then i tossed in the tomatoes. at this point, i’m also boiling water for my ravioli. although it doesn’t have to be ravioli, of course. any pasta will do.

because i’m not always the best at timing, i happen to know that in the time it takes to cook ravioli (not long), my sauce in the hot pan won’t cool down so much that it will be too cold to eat when tossed with hot pasta. (does that make any sense at all?) i also like my spinach just barely wilted in my pasta sauce. SO, now i turned off the heat, threw in a few handfuls of spinach and clapped on the lid until the ravioli were ready.

drain the pasta, mix it with the sauce (either in the pan or in your bowl) and top with a little cheese. or don’t.

buon appetito!

egg pizza

i get a lot of inspiration from the food network. that doesn’t generally mean that i write down recipes, or even look them up on the website, but just watching gives me ideas that i like to experiment with in my own kitchen and apply to my own dishes. sometimes, though, i follow directions more closely.

this particular recipe is from ellie krieger and it has turned into a major favorite at my house. it sounds unusual, so bear with me here… egg pizza.

as my 80-something year-old grandfather described it: “a different and unique dinner.” (he’s not very adventurous when it comes to food, but he did have seconds…)

so, start with a crust. i imagine you could use a prebaked bobili or similar, but i started with store bought dough from TJ’s (sorry, mom!).

then ellie wants you to put on a thick layer of greens. i believe she used baby spinach, which i have tried and like okay, but for my money, baby arugula – with its peppery bite – is better. or a mix, if you so desire. and when we say thick layer, we mean THICK layer. keep in mind that it’s going to cook way down.

also, i’ve discovered that tossing the greens in olive oil (and salt and pepper!) keeps them from singeing in the oven.

then, top the greens with crumbles of bacon or pancetta and thinly sliced garlic… or leave this part out if you’re opposed.

the piece-de-resistance is to VERY GENTLY! crack four (raw) eggs and nestle them in the greens.

bake the pizza at 400 degrees and watch the eggs very carefully to make sure you don’t over cook them. the goal here is for the yolks to still be runny and to make a “sauce” for the pizza when broken. getting the timing right took a couple of tries at my house. keep in mind that these eggs are going to look very different from a poached egg or fried egg you might be used to, so relying on visuals may end up in hard-boiled egg pizza, which is so not the point! i suggest using the shake method – wiggle the pan to determine doneness, and for pete’s sake DON’T OVERCOOK! salmonella is overrated anyway.

eat promptly! sometimes we grate some parm over the top and sometimes we don’t. enjoy!

ps – i’ve also heard that if you do it just right, you can save a piece and reheat it… with the egg still gooey enough to make sauce! fancy that.

tortellini

giada – the feelings are mixed, of course, but generally if she can do it, i can do it. so one sunday afternoon (is there a better time for cooking projects? there is? don’t tell me. this one is my favorite) i decided to tackle tortellini.

don’t worry, i’m not insane enough to try making pasta (YET) and the point of this particular tortellini project was using wonton wrapers. i was pleasantly surprised to find them in my local safeway (shocker!), and without  recipe (my usual style, as you will see) i grabbed frozen spinach, ricotta and shallots to make a filling.

so here we go:

first i made the filling. you’ll have to bear with me here – it was garlic, frozen spinach, some ricotta and melted shallots.

then, the filling began. as you see, to get a square, i had to cut off an edge. (hold on to those edges! more to come)

the folding took some skill and i even tried a ravioli (fail)…

…but pretty soon i got the hang of it. just like giada. ta da:

i froze some (they keep for aaaages) and cooked the rest in an asian-inspired broth with yummy veggies.