Quick Pumpkin Pasta

Here's a delicious recipe for pasta that is quick and easy.  I'm not sure how healthy it is - it does call for cream, sour cream, and cheese.  You can sub things in though, I'm sure.  I did not choose to sub and made it as is.

1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tablespoons salted butter
2 cups canned pure (unsweetened) pumpkin puree
2 cups canned chicken broth
1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
2 Tablespoons minced fresh Italian parsley
1/4 cup shredded Romano (or Parmesan) cheese
1 pound penne or rotini pasta
1 pound cooked, crumbled sweet Italian sausage, optional

Directions:

1. In a large skillet, sauté the onion and garlic in butter, over medium heat, until soft, not brown.

2. Whisk in the pumpkin, broth, both creams and seasonings to taste.

3. Simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until slightly thickened.

4. Meanwhile, boil the pasta in salted water until al dente.

5. Drain pasta and stir into pumpkin sauce, simmering 2-3 minutes more until thick.

6. Stir in parsley and garnish with Romano, more parsley and sausage, if desired.

Enjoy,

Molly

OK, kale...Now what??

We've got a really pretty stand of kale coming along in the garden, first time raising it.  So now what?  Anybody have a good method for cooking kale or any good recipes?

Crock Pot Meals

Well good old October seems to be creeping up on us here, and despite highs around 97 today, I'm determined to embrace autumn.  I had an early dismissal from school today and came home and baked an apple spice cake, which is currently making my house both smell delicious and feel like a sauna.  Worth it.

Anywho, I left for work yesterday morning with a pork loin in the crock pot, and decided I should try to use it more this year.  I had parent teacher conferences last night, so it was really nice to come home around 8:30 and have most of dinner cooked for me already.

I really like using the crock pot for roasts, but I was wondering if you all have other uses for them.  So many of the recipes you see online are crap and are for lazy cooks.  While I like the convenience of the crock pot, and am in that sense lazy, I still like to use real ingredients.

Care to share any ideas?

Molly

Pease Porridge

One day last October, I undertook to make lentils and rice, one of our old faves.  At that time, I had been experimenting with adding more vegetables to the broth, celery, carrots, onions, etc. to add depth to the flavor.  This time, I went out to the garden and just started picking one each of the end-of-season vegetables - a beet, a carrot, celery, a stalk of chard, a stalk of self seeded dill, and so on - I don't remember what all at this point.  I added everything I could find, roots and greens including the carrot top and the beet greens.  In no time, the soup outgrew the pot and had to be moved over to the 12 Qt Revereware.  Soon it was no longer lentils-and-rice-with-some-added-vegetables-for-flavor and had become end-of-season-pease-porridge-with-lentils-and-rice.  Turned out to be excellent, a real hit.

I tried a reprise a couple of week later by which time there really wasn't anything left in the garden except chard so it turned out to be chard-soup-with-lentils-and-rice.  We discovered that chard soup is really not very good, so the second try was a real disappointment.

Here we are coming to the end of the garden season again, so yesterday I took another crack at Pease Porridge with Lentils and Rice.  I found a beautiful carrot in the garden with really spicy greens, a beet with greens, a double handful of green and yellow beans, several stalks of celery with leaves, three stalks of chard, fresh parsley, some red potatoes, a really nice selection of colorful (red, orange, and green) bell peppers which were really good this year, and a few end-of-season tomatoes still good enough to dice.  I also cut up some red, yellow, and green pepperocini into pepper rings and minced half of a hot red pepper for a little zing and added some sprigs of winter savory, thyme, and marjoram from the herb garden.  All this in 14 cups of water with ~1 1/4 cups of green lentils and ~ 1 1/4 cups of rice.  Oh yeah, onions and garlic, of course, dash of mustard, salt and ground pepper, etc.

Mom really liked it.  I liked it well enough but not as much as the original - still too much chard flavor.  So in the future, no more than one stalk of chard, ever, maybe even just leave it out.  Chard is not a soup flavor.  The other thing, I started adding the vegetables at the same time as the lentils.  Some of the tougher veg (e.g. beets) needed extra cooking time so by the time everything had cooked up, the lentils and rice were way over-cooked.  Probably better to make the veg soup first then add the lentils for 55 min and rice for 20 min at the end.

So, the concept of cooking up whatever veg you have in a flavorful soup then bulking it out (and adding protein) with lentils and rice makes a nice pease porridge.  Be creative and enjoy.

Dad

Amaretto Chicken

I finally had a chance to try this recipe on Friday, and it was delicious!  It's a simple recipe for chicken that could probably be adapted to be vegetarian.  The sauce is what I loved, so it doesn't much matter what protein you use.  I made it as is and served it over curried rice.  I suggest the curry powder in your rice, it makes the dish taste a bit less Asian.

Enjoy!
Molly

24 ounces boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons salted butter
3 cups sliced mushrooms
1 clove garlic, minced
3 tablespoons Amaretto
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
steamed rice, for serving

Directions:

1. Sprinkle chicken breasts with salt, pepper and curry powder and rub in well. Coat with flour (reserving the rest of the flour for later use).

2. In large skillet, melt butter and brown chicken on all sides. Add mushrooms, garlic, lime juice, and amaretto. Stir well and cook for 1 minute.

3. In small bowl, whisk chicken broth into reserved flour and add to chicken mixture. Cover skillet, reduce heat to low and simmer for about 30 minutes. Serve over rice.

Gotta love the glop

Some nights, no matter how much you want to eat more veggies and eat healthier meals, you work after school until 5 only to have to go back for a meeting at 7.  Last night was that night.  In my brief 2 hour break, I whipped up some good ol' fashioned glop.

To be honest, this was TomCat's suggestion for dinner one night this week.  I'm proud of continuing the tradition of calling it "glop," so whenever I hear him say it, I basically have to make it.

Anyhow, I've found that glop is one meal I make completely lame-ly...yes, I just made that word up.  I literally just saute the meat, cook the pasta, and throw it all together with cheese and plain tomato sauce.  It's so satisfying.

Last night I realized that glop, like mac n cheese, can be fanc-ified or veg-ified.  This would probably be good, because in the end you're still eating pasta, cheese, sauce, and meat.  However, the addition of other ingredients would take away from the quick preparation.

I'm of the opinion that every know and then, you just need to chow down on some glop.

Molly

Beans and Potatoes Cooked to Ham

I believe this is an old Schurz family favorite which we have enjoyed pretty regularly over the years.  The basic recipe is pretty simple:  cook beans (usually green) and potatoes in ham broth, preferably meaty; season to taste.

I had made a meaty ham broth from a couple of ham hocks and frozen it last week and undertook the conversion to final product today using red potatoes and wax beans from the garden.  I can't bear to see a soup coming along without thinking to add some onion, celery, carrot, etc, so out to the garden for fresh celery leaves and a carrot, complete with fresh carrot greens which have a nice spicy flavor, an orange bell pepper as long as I'm there, a bulb of garlic from our inadvertent garlic crop, sprigs of rosemary, sage, and marjoram from the herb garden, and about half of that little red pepper to give it some life.  Add a dash of mustard and a bay leaf from the spice cupboard.  Don't forget to touch it with some fresh ground black pepper.  Yup, I think we could feed this one to Grandpa.

Dad's Reasonably Awesome Gourmet Mac and Cheese

I've been making a passable multi-cheese mac and cheese for a while, if you're interested in a chow down on a pile of carbs with added protein and reasonably good flavor.  My technique was to cook the noodles, drain, then bung the cut up cheese into the pot and stir until the cheese had melted from the heat of the noodles, adding seasonings as desired.  Recently, I was moved to investigate an upscale version of this lowly dish.  I am not the first to have this idea and a quick Google search lead to many recipes for "Gourmet Mac and Cheese".  Snobby mac and cheese chefs invariably make a separate cheese sauce starting with a rue and adding cheeses, almost universally more than one variety in each recipe.  I tried this and was kinda disappointed with the rue approach:  the butter and flour really did not add anything except empty calories and detracted from the flavor of the cheese, I thought.  I decided to try the separate sauce but without the rue; I eschew the rue, so to speak.

Noodles:  any pasta will do, I suspect (well, I wouldn't try it with angel hair and spaghetti. linguini, etc. would  seem weird to me).  The classic is elbows, of course, but I am kinda partial to spirals and Mom likes large shells. Picking your favorite pasta can be part of the fun.  I know the official position is "au dente", just a little hard in the center, but I like mine cooked through, just soft throughout.  Cook in water with salt, drain, and set aside.

Cheese:  This is the next part of the fun.  Mac and cheese is best with a mixture of cheeses, I think.  Generally, I use whatever we have on hand which would be cheddar, Swiss, American, and any odds-and-ends.  This is a great way to clean out the cheese drawer.  Got an old cheese end with mold on it?  Cut of the mold, chop it up, and throw it on in to the mix.  Got one that got a little dried out?  In it goes; it will still melt and be OK.  Many of the foo-foo recipes call for Gruyere and I have used it when we had an old end hanging around, but it's usually out of my price range.  Our store sometimes sells deli cheese ends for less than $3/lb; you get what they put in but it often gives a selection of cheeses (typically American and Munster) that work great here and the price is right.  And of course, I almost always include some Velveeta.  I know, I know, that's not upscale, that's Kraft Cheesy Mac in a box, but it gives a nice smooth texture to the cheese sauce.  Anyway, clean out your cheese drawer, clean out your deli's cheese ends, or go out and buy Gruyere and Stilton, but have fun choosing a selection of cheeses.

The Method:  I cook the noodles (see above) and make the sauce from melted cheese.  I cut the cheese up into cubes about 1/2" (alternately, shred the cheese).  I use about the same weight of cheese as dry weight of noodles (one pound of cheese for one pound box of mac), mixed variety, as discussed.  I put the cheese into a sauce pan on the store top and heat, stirring pretty much constantly and adding small quantities of water as needed to prevent burning.  Melting with water is what I substitute for melting into a rue.  I like it better; you can make a rue if you want.

Seasoning:  Here is the next piece of fun.  Regular ole mac and cheese is basically just cheese sauce on noodles sometimes with hot dogs cut up into it.  The upscale version goes a lot further.  First, I put in chopped onion and minced garlic.  Then any vegetable such as might be included in quiche.  Most recently I have been using a can of diced tomatoes with jalapenos in both applications.  We're coming into tomato season, so we might soon see one with diced fresh tomatoes.  Those peppers are coming in too, so I expect we'll have some of them in.  Broccoli also works.  For additional flavor, I like dill and celery seed.  In my most recent, I used the leaves and flower head from a stalk of fresh dill and some celery seed, plus a shake of mustard, salt, pepper, a little paprika...just round up all the usual suspects.  I bet you could do a nice one with a basil base but have not tried that yet.

Cooking:  I add the sauce with seasonings and veg to the noodles and mix then turn into a Pyrex baking dish.  Lately, I have topped with a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.  You can make a crumb topping of egg, bread crumbs, Parmesan, salt, pepper, etc and spread it over, but I think that tends to come out too dry.  Pop into the oven, temp pretty frangible but I tend to use about 350, and cook 'til done (you'll know; basically you just need to make sure it's hot and the onion are cooked).