Jami Sorrento was our June Daring Cooks hostess and she chose to challenge us to celebrate the humble spud by making a delicious and healthy potato salad. The Daring Cooks Potato Salad Challenge was sponsored by the nice people at the United States Potato Board, who awarded prizes to the top 3 most creative and healthy potato salads. A medium-size (5.3 ounce) potato has 110 calories, no fat, no cholesterol, no sodium and includes nearly half your daily value of vitamin C and has more potassium than a banana!
This potato salad was of my own design. I’m always a little light-handed with seasonings when I don’t follow a recipe, so I’m pretty proud of how well-seasoned this turned out. The flavors were delicious and balanced.
Here’s the recipe.
russet potatoes apple cider vinegar salt green bell pepper matchstick carrots lowfat yogurt, sour cream, mayonaisse, or some combination of these cilantro scallions ground cumin ground corriander paprika hing or garlic powder black pepper lime juice
Season a pot of water with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and two teaspoons of salt for each quart of water. The vinegar in the water helps prevent overcooking, and potatoes need lots of flavor, so don’t skip seasoning the water. Chop the potatoes in cubes and put them into the water. Turn on the heat and bring the potatoes to a boil. Once they’re done, drain them, and add more vinegar to taste while they’re still hot.
Chop the green bell pepper into small pieces, and mince the matchstick carrots. The goal is color and flavor, but not Giant Pieces of Carrot! but adjust according to taste. Chop a couple handfuls of cilantro and the green parts of one or two scallions.
Make the dressing: Mix the spices into the base. It should be strongly seasoned, because potatoes can hold a lot of flavor, and cold foods need more seasoning than hot foods. For four medium potatoes I used appproximately 1 t of cumin, 1/2 t of corriander, 1/2 t of paprika, 1/4 t of garlic powder, 1/2 t of black pepper, a squeeze of fresh lime juice, and a hint of cayenne, to taste.
Stir the dressing into room-temperature potatoes along with the pepper, carrot, cilantro and scallions. Salt and pepper to taste.
Note that it’ll get spicier and more delicious after a day or two.
So I’ve wanted to make veggie burgeres from scratch for a while. And last weekend, I did.
Here’s the recipe.
For the Burgers:
1/2 c. brown rice 1 15 oz. can black beans ~1/2 can whole corn kernels ~1 c. quick cooking oats olive oil lowfat yogurt ground cumin ground corriander paprika garlic powder black pepper salt
For the Avacado Sauce:
1 ripe haas avocado light sour cream juice from half a lime salt pepper 1 or 2 handfuls of cilantro 2 small or 1 large scallion 1/2 an average jalapeño
Cook the brown rice ahead of time according to package directions, adding a scant half-teaspoon of salt. It takes about 45 minutes to cook, so it takes more forethought than white rice. I wouldn’t recommend using white rice in these burgers. Brown rice is chewier and has a much more substantial texture that works well in burgers. I think white rice would just disappear into mush.
While the rice is cooking, do other stuff, like make this delicious avocado sauce: Scoop the avocado out of its shell. Put it in a blender with the white and light green bits of the scallions (save the tops for something else), the half jalapeño (use more if you want it spicier), the lime juice, and a couple big spoonfuls of sour cream. Blend! Add salt and pepper to taste, and some garlic powder or fresh garlic to taste. Adjust the amount of sour cream to get a sauce you like and reblend.
Once the rice is done (and preferably cooled a little bit, so it doesn’t get too mushy during the mixing), put it in a bowl. Drain and rinse the black beans and heat them with a little bit of water in a pan. Mash them up a bit. They shouldn’t be too watery or too dry, with some unmashed pieces still left. Add them to the rice.
The corn can either be cooked in a pan with a little olive oil or added in as is. I cooked mine until it was just starting to brown. This will make it a bit sweeter. Either way, add it into the bowl. Mix this all up.
Now it’s time for spices. There are a lot of words in this post, so here’s a picture.
Cook these, stirring almost constantly, on medium heat, until the spices are fragrant, but not burnt. Add this lovely hot oil and spices to the burger mix. Also mix in salt, to taste.
Add two tablespoons of yogurt, and mix in oats a bit at a time until the mixture starts to get a bit more dry. Oats are a stabilizing agent. If you try making a patty with the rice, beans, and corn, it’ll look ok at first, but it won’t hold its shape or stay together well when you try to flip it in the pan. I didn’t want the burgers to get too dry, so I made another test burger with less oats than I finally ended up using. I wasn’t measuring, but I probably used at least 3/4 cup, possibly a bit more.
Make the patties and put them in a lightly oiled pan. Cook them on medium heat for a few minutes on each side, until they’re nicely browned. If there are enough oats in the mixture, they’ll hold their shape when you flip them.
We ate them in a flatbread, with cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, and avocado sauce.
Yes, that’s potato salad on the side. More on that tomorrow.
I’ve been wanting to try this for a while now. And today was finally the day.
I used the usual Publix crust and made my own barbecue sauce. I chose a cucumber and tomato salad with a lemon dill dressing for a side dish, because I thought something fresh and citrusy would complement the sweetness and heaviness of the pizza.
I used a sauce recipe from Serious Eats. I didn’t have dark brown sugar, so I used light, and I made my own worcestershire sauce using this recipe (it’s in the jam jar).
I followed the recipe as given, though my can of tomato sauce was 15 ounces. Once it was done, though, I decided to add another can of tomato sauce, because it seemed too thin for pizza, and I was worried about it being too strong.
I cooked some zucchini slices in a pan with some olive oil, and then I cooked the soy curls with oil and some of the worcestershire sauce.
I topped the crust with sauce, soy curls, zucchini, green onion, and mozzarella. I wanted to add some smoked gouda but the only one at Publix was made with animal rennet, so I had to skip it.
We thought we might need some additional sauce to dip the pizza in after baking, but it was a pretty fast bake at 500 degrees, and it didn’t dry out much at all.
Next time, I’ll probably make the sauce a little less sweet, and depending on what I’m using it for, I’ll add some tomato paste to make it a little thicker. But I like the recipe, and now I know for sure that it’s the smokiness of barbecue that I don’t like - the vinegary sweet sauce is pretty delicious.
Flatbread has been around long enough to just say forever, and it has incarnations all over the world. Every culture (at least in agricultural climates - I don’t know much about arctic cultures that are more dependent on hunting) has a variety of flatbread that forms a staple in their diet.
India alone has a wide variety of flatbreads, like chapati, roti, dosa, and paratha, just to name a few. The Americas have tortillas of different varieties. Europe has plenty of flatbreads as well, from the fancy crêpe to the humble crisp bread.
One of my cooking goals has been to expand my knowledge of the fundamentals and the science of cooking: if I want a certain result, what techniques do I use? My baking in particular needs work in this area. I can follow a bread recipe, and adjust a dough if it’s too wet or too dry, but if someone told me to make a loaf of bread from scratch without a recipe, I’d be out of luck.
I’ve been searching for an angle for this blog. I don’t have the skills to develop new creative recipes on my own, and I don’t have an amazing cookbook collection to use and review. But I think I’ve found my angle: learning techniques that will help me develop recipes, review cookbooks with real knowledge, and explain cooking techniques in a way that makes sense for beginners. Following recipes is a good first step. Watching someone who cooks by instinct is another. It’s easy to become a decent cook doing either or both of these, but it takes more to make it to the next level. Some people go to culinary school. I certainly don’t have that luxury. That leaves me to depend on my current knowledge, everything I can read, and plenty of experimentation.
So I’ve decided to start with flatbread from around the world, along with their traditional accompaniments. I’ll find and follow recipes, discovering techniques that different recipes share, and adding those techniques to my playbook independently from their recipes. There will be math: proportions and cooking times. There will be mistakes and failed experiments. And there will be blog posts to document it all.
First up: pita bread, the ubiquitous middle eastern bread eaten with just about everything. Will my homemade pita puff up and create perfect pockets? We’ll find out soon.
Ramen. Cheap and not particularly good for you (don’t read the nutritional info if you care about your sodium intake).
We don’t use the flavoring packets because even “Oriental” flavor has beef extract (whatever that is) in it. So instead we use Seitenbacher broth powder.
This time we sauteed a brick of tofu in some olive oil. When the tofu was done we removed it from the pan and added the vegetables: broccoli, carrots, snow peas, and green bell pepper. We always follow the Most Important Vegetable Rule: don’t overcook them. It’s tricky with different types of veggies because carrots take longer to cook, but for soup we just threw it all together and hoped for the best, and it worked out okay.
This salsa was inspired by Chipotle’s medium salsa, which is my favorite of theirs. I’ve been waiting for the roma tomatoes at the grocery store to be ripe, and now they are, so it’s salsa time!
4 or 5 ripe roma tomatoes 5 or 6 tomatillos 2 cloves of garlic, peeled 1 jalapeño 2 green onions 1 or 2 handfuls of cilantro 1 or 1 1/2 t apple cider vinegar 1 t salt drizzle of olive oil sprinkling of black pepper
The great thing about this salsa is that it’s blended instead of chopped, so the prep work is minimal. Wash the tomatoes. Peel off the papery husks off the tomatillos, and wash them well to remove any stickiness and some of the waxiness. (Tomatillos are weird.) Wash the jalapeño. Peel the garlic. Put all of this on a baking sheet (with aluminum foil for much easier cleanup). Roast in a 400 degree oven until they look nice and roasty. I didn’t keep track of time, just checked them regularly.
Once they’re in the oven, there’s a little more chopping to do:
I don’t like raw onion, except for green onions, so I use those. Chipotle’s salsa uses red onion, so if you like red onion, use a comparable amount of that chopped small instead. One thing to note is that it’s easiest to wash cilantro before pulling the leaves off the stems. But don’t wash the whole bundle at once, because it’ll rot in the fridge a lot faster if it’s been washed.
Pull the tray of vegetables out of the oven once they’re nice and roasty:
Now the tomatoes need to be peeled. They need to cool for a little while first though- tomato innards are hot!
This particular batch came out quite soft and cooked. The last time I made this kind of salsa, the tomatoes weren’t nearly as mushy. The tomatillos were so soft I could just squeeze them out of their skins. It was a messy process, and it ended up like this:
Next: blend it all up! I used an immersion blender. A food processor or a regular blender would also do the job.
Then I threw in some green onion, cilantro, a teaspoon of salt, a sprinkling of black pepper, a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, and a drizzle of olive oil. Mixed it all up and put it in the fridge to cool and meld.
I made a salsa like this once before and it was closer to Chipotle’s, though I’d used lime juice instead of apple cider vinegar. This one was quite different, but still delicious.
When this biscuit recipe showed up on Serious Eats, I knew I had to give it a try, and I knew I wanted bean soup or chili to go with it. Then I procrastinated. And then I finally went grocery shopping and found a bag of mixed beans. They have a seasoning packet with them (ham flavor - contains no actual ham) that I threw in the trash.
Instead of soaking them overnight or using the “quick cooking” method that still takes a couple hours, I used my pressure cooker. It’s the only reasonable way to cook beans. I let them cook for about 25 minutes.
I chopped up a stalk of celery, a few green onions, a couple of carrots, and two smallish red potatoes and threw them in, along with salt (beans need lots of salt, I probably used at least two and a half teaspoons), black pepper, and some dried herbs: basil, marjoram, thyme, and just a touch of oregano.
Next time I’ll cook the beans in the pressure cooker for longer. Some of the beans came out crunchy and I had to let it cook for at least another 15 minutes. I’ll also cook the vegetables separately. Mysteriously the celery was still crunchy once the potatoes were cooked.
The biscuits came out great. The dough was really sticky at first but once I folded it and patted it out again on a floured counter it got smoother. I used a glass to cut them and I think the thickness of the glass edge pushed down and squished the dough, so they didn’t rise as much as they could have. Biscuit cutters are definitely on my shopping list.
Despite these little issues, the whole meal was yummy. One bowl of soup and a couple of biscuits were very filling.
A couple posts ago, I said “Cream sauce makes things fancy.” The same thing works for rosemary and parmesan cheese. These potatoes are delicious and fancy, and they’re easy to make. I discovered a secret today that makes them even easier.
We were going to make boiled potatoes with butter, salt and pepper, so there was already a pot of water heating on the stove. Rosemary parmesan was a last minute decision, so I thought quickly, and boiled the potatoes first before pan frying them.
I cooked them in lightly salted water until they were soft but before the corners started rounding. I put the pan right on the same burner after draining the potatoes and poured in some olive oil (not extra-virgin, since the heat destroys the subtle flavors anyway). Potatoes soak up a lot of oil, so I was sure to be generous.
After I put them in the pan I added hing, black pepper, rosemary, and salt. I fried them on medium-high (closer to medium) heat and resisted the urge to stir too often, so they wouldn’t fall apart. I wasn’t sure how delicate they were, but they held up really well. They also stuck much less than raw potatoes, so besides the faster frying time, that was an added bonus.
Pre-cheese:
I’ve made these with regular grated parmesan from a shakey container, and they’re good. This time I used a container of grated cheese from the refrigerator section, and the freshness was obvious in the way it melted more in the pan instead of melting a little but then just toasting. I turned off the burner as soon as I added the cheese so it wouldn’t burn. It still got crispy and awesome.
Renata of Testado, Provado & Aprovado! was our Daring Cooks’ April 2011 hostess. Renata challenged us to think “outside the plate” and create our own edible containers! Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 17th to May 16th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!
I was pretty excited about this challenge, but life got in the way and I waited until the last minute to actually make something. I had the idea to make a box out of cracker dough. It didn’t quite come out looking like it did in my head, but when all was said and done, it was still pretty neat.
Lots of photos ahead!
I used this recipe for a basic cracker, and added parmesan (about half a cup), rosemary (maybe about 3/4 teaspoon), and thyme (1/4 teaspoon).
I rolled out the dough to what I thought was a decent cracker thickness and used Christy’s gorilla cookie cutter and a pizza cutter.
Then we put them in the oven, and about twenty minutes later, we pulled them out:
I used a glass container as the mold for the box. We wrapped the cracker dough around it, like so:
And baked it for a while. It looked like this once we flipped it over:
I promptly noticed it was Stuck. I realized I should have buttered the container first. But with some cutting and coaxing we managed to get it off mostly intact.
We baked it for a bit longer, but it wasn’t quite to where I wanted it to be. I decided to toast it some more the next day, right before assembling the whole thing. After some more baking:
It started curling in on itself where it had cracked as we removed it from the glass container. It still mostly held together, though, and after this second (actually third) baking, it was sort of crispyish.
The crackers toasted a bit more and they definitely got crispier.
Deliciousness.
I cut up a cucumber, a stalk of celery, and a couple carrots. I also cut the tops off of a red pepper and an orange pepper and carefully cut out the white bits and seeds.
Dip! Sour cream. Dill. Black pepper. Salt. Lemon juice. More deliciousness.
Another picture of the final plate, complete with gorilla:
