Pasta salad

I am a sometimes contributor to this blog. Recently I made a pasta salad. I am not usually a fan of whole wheat pasta, but I used a rotini that was half whole-wheat/ half regular and it worked. I like pasta salads in the summer because I like pasta and you can eat them cold, which seems to make sense in the summer.

The salad contains roasted peppers that led to Ev's now-famous Pyrex tragedy. Along with the mozzarella the roasted peppers make the salad. Next time I make this I might use spinach instead of kale.

Jon’s Pasta salad

12 oz. Pasta
Kale
2 roasted peppers (see below for roasting instructions), chopped
Fresh Herbs (basil, oregano and rosemary)
Mozzarella, cut into small cubes
Dressing

Cook pasta in plenty of water until al dente. Drain. Meanwhile, saute kale in a small amount of olive oil until just wilted. Toss all ingredients together with dressing. I dressed this with a mustard vinaigrette (olive oil, red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, salt, pepper and herbs). It was pretty good.

How to roast peppers safely

Place peppers in a broiler-safe baking dish on the top rack of your oven. Turn on the broiler. Carefully turn the peppers with tongs every five minutes or so, cooking until the skin is charred all over or your Pyrex explodes because you didn't heed the first instruction.

Sweet potato gnocchi

I was out of town for the weekend at a Sacred Harp singing. I stayed with a friend's parents, and we made this for dinner on Friday night. I didn't take any pictures this weekend, so I'm including a couple that I took a few months ago. Just in case you aren't Italian, gnocchi are little Italian potato or flour dumplings.

This is good company food. It's pretty impressive (homemade gnocchi!) but doesn't take that long to make if you start with cooked sweet potatoes or cook them in the microwave. I usually pop the sweet potatoes in the oven a couple days before I'm planning on making this so they'll be ready when I want to use them. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com, but I don't use their weird sweet potato cooking technique. I just bake the things like I would if I were eating them plain. The spice combination of garlic and nutmeg is really nice. I'd like to try this with butternut squash sometime, too. I think that would be good. I like to dress these with just a little olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and parmesan cheese, but butter is good too. You can use a standard tomato sauce, but it will overpower the delicate sweet potato flavor.

Rolling a snake of gnocchi dough

Sweet potato gnocchi

2 8-oz sweet potatoes
1 clove garlic, minced or pressed
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 large egg
2 cups all-purpose flour

Bake the sweet potatoes until they're soft, either in the oven at 425 F for 40-60 minutes or in the microwave for 6-9 minutes. Scoop the flesh into a medium mixing bowl and mash. It's OK if it's a little lumpy, but you will be able to feel the lumps in the finished product. Add the garlic, salt, nutmeg, and egg and mix thoroughly. Add the flour, about 1/2 cup at a time, mixing after each addition. You might not use all the flour. You want to use just enough to make a soft dough. After adding about 1 cup, you'll probably have to start kneading it instead of mixing it with a spoon. When you have a soft dough, roll it between your hands into snakes about 1 inch in diameter and cut the snakes into small pieces (see above pictures for rolling and cutting). You might need to incorporate a little more flour during this process if the dough is still sticky.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Drop the gnocchi into the water several at a time. (They don't all have to be cooked before you add more, so you can stagger the additions.) When a gnocco (yep, that's the singular) rises to the top, scoop it out with a slotted spoon and transfer to a bowl or colander. When all the gnocchi are cooked, eat them quickly. They are best fresh out of the pot.

Frozen peas

Sometimes I get hungry but nothing sounds good. Or I have an upset stomach that needs some food to settle it. Or I'm not hungry but really feel like eating. When I get like that, I reach for frozen peas. When my siblings and I were little, my mom would give us frozen veggies as a snack at night because she didn't want us to have junk or eat just for fun, but she wanted us to have some food if we were hungry. Now I find them comforting. Frozen corn is good, and frozen mixed vegetables are decent, but frozen peas are the really good stuff.

Inspiration soup

It's August in Houston, a.k.a. NOT SOUP WEATHER. But I have a small freezer, and I had four quarts of chickpea cooking water in it, which meant that at least one quart would fall out every time I opened the freezer. So on Sunday, I pretended it was cold outside and made a nice hearty soup. I call this inspiration soup because I didn't have much of a plan when I started. I knew I was using a chickpea broth base. The rest of it just happened to be in the fridge. The tofu skins were really nice in this. I used the ones labeled fu bao. I don't know if this is the "official" name. I cut them into thin strips, and they kind of reminded me of the egg in egg drop soup. They were savory and protein-full and slightly chewy. Here is the recipe, but if you make inspiration soup, you should just let your fridge be your guide.

Close-up of some tofu skins in my soup

Inspiration soup
2 tsp olive oil
1/2 large yellow onion, diced
1 rib celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp curry powder (I used Penzey's Balti seasoning)
3 leaves kale, washed, thick center rib removed, and cut into thin strips
4 oz tofu skins, cut into thin strips
1/2 cup cooked chickpeas
1 1/2 qts chickpea cooking water
1 3/4 tsp salt

Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion, celery, and carrot and saute until onion is translucent. Add the paprika, cumin seeds, curry powder, and kale. Cover and saute/steam until kale is wilted. Add the tofu skins, chickpeas, broth, and salt. Heat through. Add salt and pepper to taste as deemed appropriate at the table.

"Healthy" oatmeal-chocolate chip-pecan-dried cherry cookies

I got this recipe from my mom. One of my aunts lives in Michigan and sends us big bags of dried Michigan cherries every year. They're nice and tart, great in oatmeal, granola, and these cookies. They're also good eaten right out of your hand, which is how we eat a lot of them. I call the recipe healthy because it has whole-wheat flour, not much sugar, whole oats, dried fruit, and nuts. It also has two sticks of butter, hence the quotation marks. It's sure tasty, and it must be healthier than cookies with a ton of butter and none of the good stuff. At least that's what I tell myself. The batter has so many "goodies" that it barely sticks together. Consequently, you don't have to cook it for very long. As you might be able to tell from the picture, I just barely burned the first batch.

"Healthy" oatmeal-chocolate chip-pecan-dried cherry cookies

1 cup butter, softened (two sticks)
1 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 tbsp milk
4 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups oats (I use old-fashioned, but quick-cook and instant are fine too)
12 oz chocolate chips or chunks
1 cup chopped toasted pecans or walnuts
1 cup dried cherries or raisins

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the wet ingredients and mix thoroughly. Add the flour, baking soda, and cocoa powder and mix thoroughly. Add the oats, chocolate chips, nuts, and cherries or raisins and combine. Bake at 350 F for 8-10 minutes. They will continue to cook a little when you take them out of the oven, so err on the side of undercooked.

Spinach-chickpea-tofu skin curry

This is the curry that we served with the salad from the last post. I was just going to use the spinach and chickpeas, but I learned that one of our guests isn't big on beans. It turns out she likes chickpeas just fine, but I wanted to make sure she'd have something substantial even if she picked around the beans. The tofu skin was perfect for that. For this recipe, I used the wet kind. It was labeled "fu chang" at the store. I don't know if that's the official name for it. It is wrinkly and has a nice chewy texture. Like regular tofu, it doesn't have much flavor of its own and picks up the flavors of a dish nicely.

Spinach-chickpea-tofu skin curry

2 tsp vegetable oil
1/2 large yellow onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced or pressed
2 tsp curry powder (I used Penzey's Balti seasoning)
1 1/2 tsp amchoor (powdered sour mango)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1 small tomato, diced
2 cups cooked chickpeas, or one 15-oz can
1/2 cup chickpea cooking water, if you have some
2 oz tofu skins, chopped into 1-inch pieces
1 big bunch of spinach, washed thoroughly*, or one 10-oz bag of spinach

Heat the oil in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for about two minutes. Add the garlic and cook until onion is translucent. Add the curry powder, amchoor, salt, and cumin seeds and saute for one minute. Add the tomato and saute for one minute. Add the chickpeas, chickpea water, and tofu skins and cook until liquid is reduced by about 1/3. Add the spinach in batches and cook until wilted. Serve with naan or basmati rice. You'll probably want to add a little salt at the table.

*Greens can be pretty dirty. They do, after all, grow in the ground. Gritty food is extremely icky, but this technique gets them really clean. Fill a large bowl about halfway with water. Put your unwashed greens in there and fill the bowl most of the rest of the way with water. Most of the dirt will sink right down to the bottom of the bowl. To make sure you've got everything, rinse the leaves under a light stream of tap water before wringing them out and cooking them. Of course, if you buy the pre-washed bagged stuff, you don't have to worry about this. But it's a bit more expensive, and you might get salmonella. (Note: you probably won't get salmonella.)

Mango-lentil-yogurt salad

Sorry about the blurry picture. I can't always tell on my camera screen whether something is in focus. This one wasn't. A few days ago I had two friends over for a goodbye dinner before they moved to San Antonio. My initial plan was to serve spanakopita and carrot salad. They seem like good company food. But the day before they were going to come over, I found out that one of them is avoiding dairy, so I had to change my plan. The salad had been on the menu for later in the week, so I bumped it up a couple days and also made a spinach-chickpea-tofu skin curry, which will get its own post. The yogurt is not integral to the salad, so the non-dairy guy didn't have any, and the rest of us were happy.

I based this salad on something I saw in the most recent Bon Appetit. The original recipe calls for roast chicken, but I decided to recplace that with French lentils. They are smaller and darker than regular lentils, and they keep their texture better. Any bean would probably work, but I thought the lentils were perfect. Unusually for me, I used a purchased mango chutney in the dressing, and I was really glad I did. It had just the right blend of flavors and was basically no work. I felt so semi-homemade! (Maybe the completely homemade yogurt made up for it.) Also, the original recipe calls for arugula, which isn't our favorite green, so we just used red-leaf lettuce and supplemented it with fresh herbs and baby greens from my garden. You'll probably have some leftover lentils. I have been using them in green salads at lunch. They are very lightly spiced, so they shouldn't ruin any other flavor profiles. They would probably also be good in a pasta or grain salad. And just in case you aren't an Indian spice expert, kalonji are also known as nigella or black onion seeds. They are small black seeds that often top naan. They kind of look like black sesame seeds and can be found in Indian and Middle Eastern grocery stores.

Mango-lentil-yogurt salad
This recipe will make 5-6 salads.

Lentils:
1 cup French lentils, rinsed
Splash of red wine
1 tsp curry powder

Dressing:
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp mango chutney, large pieces finely chopped
Juice of 1 lemon or lime
1 tbsp curry powder
1 1/2 tsp water, or more

Salad:
2-3 large lettuce leaves for each portion, rinsed and torn
Fresh herbs, such as basil, Thai basil, mint, and oregano, if desired
2 mangoes, peeled, pitted, and sliced
Plain yogurt
Kalonji and/or cumin seeds to garnish, optional

Cover the lentils in plenty of water in a medium saucepan. Add red wine and curry powder. Bring to a boil and lower to a simmer. Simmer until lentils are soft, about 20 minutes. Drain and reserve lentils.

Whisk together the dressing ingredients, adding a little extra water if needed to make a nice dressing. To assemble the salads, put the lettuce and herbs in bowls. Top each with several mango slices and about 1/3 cup of lentils. Pour 1-2 tbsp of dressing on each salad and top with a dollop of yogurt. Garnish with seeds.