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KitchenKatalog: Blog 336
Thursday, March 03, 2011, 05:26 PM
We made empanadas pretty similarly to the way we have in the past. The filling is a mix of black and red beans. We also put in onions, garlic and a lot of seasonings. A lot of flavor came from the Chipotles in Adobo sauce and the Habanero tobacco sauce.
They were really good but I think I liked the filling more last time (when Meredith made it). Also, some of them (the ones I folded) did not look as good as the others.
We also had brussel sprouts.
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1044, 2011-03-03_172620
Tuesday, March 01, 2011, 05:56 PM
I was really excited about making this but it was disappointing. I basically followed the recipe below but without pine nuts and I replaced the half and half with non-fat evaporated milk and some whole wheat flour to thicken it. Also, we added Thai basil (we didn't have regular basil)
To roast the peppers, rather than just put them under the broiler, I slided them in half first. This was great because I did not have to rotate them and it was easy to later peel them.
Anyway, the peppers were good (I had a taste) but the whole sauce did not have much flavor. I do not know if it was the milk or not but the only real flavor was the Thai basil. Also, of note is that Thai basil does taste different.
In the future, if I am replacing cream or milk, I am going to use almond milk. The evaporated milk just isn't as good. Also, I may have used a bit too much flour because it was really thick.
Also, we had it with Shirataki noodles instead of pasta.
With the noodles, this meal was very low in points. And we had steamed asparagus on the side.
Roasted Red Pepper Sauce (From The Pioneer Woman)
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Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1040, 2011-03-01_175617
Monday, February 28, 2011, 05:54 PM
The butternut squash soup was pretty standard. It was not the best one but it may have to do with it not really being squash season and it is pretty old.
I do not know what to call the other thing we made but it was tomatoes, onion, garlic, brocoli, chickpeas and chicken. I added some balsamic and other seasoning. I love broccoli in a tomato sauce and this was really good. There was very little chicken (leftovers) so we threw in chickpeas to give it more protein. It was very good.
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1038, 2011-02-28_175447
Friday, February 25, 2011, 11:32 AM
This was a pretty successful meal on the whole. I will go through the item.
The samosa were our normal dough, again done with almond milk. The filling was also pretty standard except that we were running low on curry powder and wanted to save it for the soup so we used garam masala,turmeric,coriander, mustard seed, cumin,paprika, etc (I do not remember them all) and made something close enough. As usual, we served them with mint-chutney and tamarind sauce mix.
The cauliflower was really good and roughly based on the recipe below. Like the samosa, we were trying to save on the curry powder so we did a similar spice mix. I basically followed the first part of the directions but did some of the roasting at a lower temperature for when it was sharing the oven with the samosa. I really liked it and we will do this again. I wonder how it would be with broccoli.Cauliflower is a bit expensive (actually, it was the single most expensive part of the meal), so other things may be better.
Finally, the soup was based on the recipe below but we made a major change. We used So Delicious coconut milk instead of half and half. We used the lowest calorie one with 50 calories and 5 grams of fat per cup. Also, we used splenda (and less equivalent). Finally, we added garam asala and used (much) less fat/butter. It was pretty good though not the best mulligatawny ever. It was also a pretty easy recipe. We didn't really taste the coconut but it was creamy. Half and half would have just been too many calories. Also, the apple was a bit strange but not really bad.
Now, the biggest question is how do I get rid of the tumeric stains I have everyone on my hands.
Overall, this ended up being a pretty healthy meal because of our changes. We will do it again!
Curried Cauliflower (from Summer Tomato)
(This recipe is now in my Recipe Book)
Easy Mulligatawny (from The Pioneer Woman)
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Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1022, 2011-02-25_113210
Tuesday, February 22, 2011, 07:32 PM
We wanted a simple and fast meal and this is what we got. It was really easy. It was the Trader Joes red-pepper spread put on chicken and baked for about 20-30 minutes. And, we had steamed broccoli.
This was easy and good-enough. I want to make my own red pepper sauce next time. Also, maybe we will make a red pepper sauce and serve it on pasta. That could be good!
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1020, 2011-02-22_193202
Monday, February 21, 2011, 11:31 PM
This is based on the recipe below.I actually do not know much about it because Meredith did all of it because I was stuck on campus until around 10:00pm that night.
It was a bit dry and flavorless but we both really liked the idea of it so we may try again with more seasonings.
Mexican Braised Beef (from Thekitchn)
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Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1018, 2011-02-21_233107
Monday, February 21, 2011, 08:10 AM
We saw this recipe a while ago and it sounded easy and fast. The only major changes was we used really light whole wheat bread instead of what they suggest. We found bread with great nutritional information that was still okay. The bread flavor was strong so that may have affected it. We also used a bit more so I added a tad more vinegar.
I liked that this recipe was really low in points and healthy. Plus totally vegetarian. We will probably make it again. Also, despite being "Moroccan", it was rather light on the spices which was interesting. Sadly, we had to use pre-made tomato sauce but next time, we will try to make our own.
Moroccan Spinach and Chickpeas (from SeriousEats)
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Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1015, 2011-02-21_081007
Saturday, February 19, 2011, 10:22 PM
This was a good meal largely inspired by this blog post but with some serious changes. The thing is that their pasta recipe calls for 7 egg yolks though we would have halved it anyway. And it just doesn't sound healthy at all. We made the concession of just using white flour but that was too much egg. So we used egg beaters. Also, even though we had beets (which we roasted later), we did not have time to roast them first so we used canned and then puréed them. Well, still, it all came together strangely. I had to play with the dough a lot to get it the right moistness but it was a very, very streachy dough. After letting it rest for about 35 minutes we started rolling and cutting.
This dough was okay to roll but it did not want to be cut. We had to manually tear the cuts apart. And it was still very, very streachy. I also thought it would all stick but thankfully, in the boiling water, it came apart. I used a lot of salt in the water which did add a nice flavor to the pasta. It ended up fine and tasted good.
We basically followed their lead on the cod but it came out a bit salty. Also, despite our best efforts, it stuck to the pan a little bit. It was thankfully not over cooked but it was salty. Meredith liked it more than I did. Also, we used chives as a garnish/side.
Meredith found a few recipes and made a white wine sauce sans cream/milk, etc. It was okay but very thin. I like the shallot and leak scraps in it. I though they were good even if the sauce was thin.
Finally, we combined the beets we were going to use with some purple majesty potatoes and roasted them with olive oil, garlic and seasonings. It was funny because they were very hard to tell apart until you were in a different light. They were also good.
I had an interesting observation when making this. I have noticed that every time I have made pasta (not including ravioli), the seemingly straight strands twist a lot after coming out of the water. If you look back, this is fairly evident from the pictures. Today, while eating, I remember reading a thing about different dough kneading techniques and one of the things they said about using the stand mixer (my preferred method), was that it creates twisted gluten strands. I wonder if that is what was happening in the pasta and the twists cause them to curl in the heat of the water. Of course, I could imagine the twists counter acting each other but maybe a trend prevails. Just a thought. Maybe next time I will just use the food processor and compare. In that case, it is fully kneaded in like 3 minutes which seems too fast but we will see.
Local copy of recipe copied from comments
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 1006, 2011-02-19_222259