Hell, YES, You Can Cook!!

Yes. Squash Can Taste Like Something Other Than Candy.

So, I’m a nice Italian American girl. I did NOT grow up eating “squash” unless you meant zucchini and its blossoms.

But every Thanksgiving, we would do the traditional American meal (with Ravioli on the side for my Sicilian Grandfather). And that meal always include sickeningly sweet squash, cooked with butter and maple syrup and cinnamon. It always had a pan of sweet potatoes dressed up with more maple syrup, maybe some marshmallows, and lots of brown sugar.

Ick. And more ick.

So.

Here I am to save you and your squash.

Step one: Get a squash. This one was butternut, but you can use acorn, honeynut or any other ‘sweet’ squash. Cut it up into chunks. Sometimes I peel it, sometimes I don’t. It depends on how sore my wrist is on any given day, you know?

Now. Do NOT grab the sugar. Nuh, uh.

Instead, brush the sqash cubes/bits/chunks with some olive oil and then sprinkle on good coarse salt. Or if you don’t have that, use regular salt.

Next, put on some spices that you like. In this image, I used a bit of cumin (cuz I love it), some black pepper and some fresh rosemary.

But you can use: sage, thyme, chipotle pepper, or chili powder, or adobo, or whatever the heck makes your mouth happy.

I like to add cranberries, too. If you don’t have fresh ones, add some craisins.

Or orange slices!

Or apples.

You get it?

This is a dish that you can just adjust to your own taste. The point is that when you have a food that is already inherently sweet, it is a delicious twist to add savory and spicy flavors to it.

I’ll add a recipe to the recipe page, but the basic idea is this: cut up a squash. I prefer to peel it, but have also made it with the peel on. Heat your oven to 350, melt a stick or so of butter or pour half cup of olive oil and add in your herbs and spices. Spread the squash (and any additions like cranberries) on a baking sheet and brush on your herb butter. Bake. Every ten minutes or so, brush on some more flavored butter or oil. Turn the pieces to cook evenly. When the squash is tender, remove and serve.

So. Good.

Chicken. Mmmmmm.

Yum.

It’s finally cool out, after one of the warmest Octobers in memory. The air is crisp. The leaves are golden. The heat is coming on at 2AM.

So it’s obviously oven-roasted chicken time.

I know what you’re thinking. “Who, me? Roast an entire chicken? All by myself?”

Yes, dear friend. You can do this.

It’s actually way way way easier than making a tuna sandwich. I promise.

First: get a chicken. Defrost it. If it has guts and a neck tucked inside, take them out. (Want to be really brave? Save them in a plastic bag in the fridge and I’ll teach you how to make fabulous chicken broth.)

Next: rinse off the chicken, inside and out. Yup, right in the sink. Just rinse it.

Place said chicken in a roasting pan.

Put about a half a stick of butter in a small dish, and add in some rosemary (fresh or dried), some sage (same) and some salt. Melt the butter in your micro or on the stove. Brush it over the top of the chicken and put the pan in a preheated 350 degree oven.

Go read a book or something. Do yoga. Have a glass of wine.

Come back in 45 minutes and use a spoon or pastry brush to put some of the drippings and butter back on top of your chicken.

Go back and read some more. Or wine some more.

In about another 15 or 20 minutes, check on your chicken.

Is the skin looking golden and slightly crispy? Awesome. You’re done.

Is it still looking pale and not crips? Give another ten minutes. Come back and check again.

When it’s ready, shut off your oven and put the chicken on the counter for five minutes to settle and cool a bit. Then grab a good knife and carve away.

See? Easy peasy. Seriously.

ANYONE can roast a chicken and make it sensational.

Optional cool things to do: place a couple of pieces of lemon or orange inside of the cavity before baking. Or a half of an apple and a bit of onion. Yummy.

You can add any spices that you like to the butter. Cumin is a favorite here, but other spices are good too (garam masala, paprika, turmeric, chili powder). Experiment and enjoy!

The “Art” of Food

I’ve been trying to experiment a bit with foods lately. I’m interested in improving my health by decreasing the fats and sugars that I consume. I’m also hoping to find foods that are more environmentally friendly than our usual American fare.

Add in the fact that I get bored easily and you can imagine how much fun I’m having with new ancient grains.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend from Uganda. She was telling me how much she misses eating millet, the way she did at home. I heard the word “millet” and recognized it as an old time grain, but had no idea of how to prepare it.

So when I found a package of Bob’s Red Mill Millet, I obviously scooped it up and brought it home. I logged onto the internet and found a handful of recipes using either millet flour or the unground whole grain. I read a few, scanned a few more and took a look through my kitchen to figure out what I could do.

Since we were in the middle of another wicked heat wave, I opted for a cool millet salad. I wanted to make one with a ginger/peanut sauce for one simple reason. I LOVE ginger/peanut sauce. Think Thai food, right? I also have a big bag of candied ginger that was one of my early pandemic panic items. (What, you didn’t worry that you’d run out of candied ginger?)

Several of the recipes I’d read had listed possible additions to the salad, including veggies that ranged from peppers to cabbage to fresh peas. In other words, it looked like I could just toss in whatever was on hand.

First step, of course, was to simmer the millet in salted water until it had softened.

While that was happening, I pulled out some veggies. I had some aging grape tomatoes, one orange bell pepper, and lots of carrots. I chopped them up and when the millet was cooked and rinsed in cool water, I added them to the bowl. A little spritz of peanut oil and I mixed it up.

I made a batch of sauce (see the recipe) and thought that my salad was finished.

I tasted.

DEEEELISH. Seriously. The texture was a wonderful combination of veggie crunch, creamy sauce and satisfying bits of tender grain. Sweet, salty, nutty and just plain good. It was a hit!

Except…….I didn’t like how it looked.

It was just too……bland. Too blond. Too beige. Too bleh.

See what I mean?

Taste and texture were fine. But it didn’t look appealing, at least not to me.

Back to fridge, where I dug around a little more.

I found some nice dinosaur kale and the last bits of a head of purple cabbage.

Chop, chop, mince and chop again. Add them in, toss it around a little more. Sprinkle on some slightly crushed peanuts.

At last!

A healthy, very easy new summer favorite. And it looked great, am I right?

Sometimes You Just Gotta Punt

So I went to the Farmer’s Market the other day. This market is one of my favorite signs of summer; full of local produce, locally made soaps and jams and jewelry and breads. Locally raised meats, and eggs and cheese.

I love it.

I love going there on Friday afternoons and seeing what I can find for the week.

Of course, these are early days for markets in New England, especially up here in Northern Massachusetts. Sure, the lettuce is great and the eggs are plentiful, but we are weeks away from tomatoes and cukes and summer squash.

But this is the season of the wonderful, woefully underappreciated garlic scapes.

The scapes are the tall loops of stalk that the garlic bulb sends up in early summer. They are filled with all of the flavor of a garlic clove, but they’re more tender and a bit less bitter.

I’ve been using them for years, cut up and sauteed in place of the minced cloves. But the other day I realized that in my enthusiasm over the market’s reopening, I’d bought more than I could use in such a casual way.

I had four big piles of garlic scapes, and I needed to find a way to use them.

Enter the world of “Garlic Scape Pesto”.

Holy yummeramma.

This is the point where I need to remind you that I had NO IDEA of what I was doing. None. I’d never made this dish. In fact, I hadn’t made regular old unexciting basil pesto for a few years.

But I had those scapes. I had a husband who loves pasta. I had some time. And I had the internet.

I researched “garlic scapes” and “garlic scape pesto” and “what the hell does one do with so many garlic scapes” and a few other items.

And I read. I read around ten recipes for pesto made with scapes. I noticed that they all had a lot in common. Mince the scapes as finely as you can, add olive oil, salt, pepper and some good cheese.

So, I put my scapes into a food processor. I minced the living daylights out of them. They were still woody and tough. So I added about 1/4 cup of olive oil. Mince again. Add some salt. Add some pepper. Mince even more.

Still woody. Still kind of tough.

So….on a whim, I added some fresh lemon juice. Where did I get this idea? Well, I had some extra lemons around. And I know that lemons and summery garlicky salads go together.

Juice in, mincing on.

Finally, I seemed to have a decent garlicky paste.

I put it in a fry pan, and warmed it up. I realized that the bits of garlic scape were still sort of chunky in there. I like a creamier pesto texture. So I added in about a 1/2 cup of cream and I grated in a bunch of Romano cheese.

Now, most pesto recipes call for Parmagiano cheese, but I prefer Romano. That’s what I had, that’s what I used.

And I also added a couple of tablespoons of pignole nuts. Because yum.

I stirred it all. I simmered it.

It was all VERY easy. The whole shebang took me about 15 minutes, tops.

When Paul came home from work, I cooked up some frozen spinach ravioli and put the pesto on top.

Deeeeee-lish.

Very garlicky, but who cares? As long as both members of the sleeping squad eat it, who really cares?

You should try this. So easy. So simple. But you still get to casually mention to your work friends that “last night I made some garlic scape pesto ravioli.” I guarantee they’ll be impressed.

Onions Happen

So I have been using, and thoroughly enjoying, “Misfits Market” ever since the pandemic started. Back when I was too scared to venture out into the grocery store, and when the farmer’s markets were closed down, I learned about this site. You get to order veggies and fruits that aren’t “good” enough to be sold in stores. They’re organic. They’re fresh. They cost a fraction of what they’d cost you in the store.

So we get a big box of produce every week from Misfits.

The problem is that you can’t really specify what amount you want. One week I ordered “ginger” and found myself with so much of the delicious root that I know have ginger extract, two growing ginger plants, and two bags of frozen ginger.

An abundance of goodness, right?

Last week I actually entered my local grocery store. I bought some good salad ingredients, including a pretty large red onion.

Which I forgot when the time came to place my Misfits order. The order in which I clicked on “red onion” for this week. True to it’s magical nature, Misfits sent me FIVE big, sweet, perfect red onions.

Ruh, roh and Yahoo. All at the same time.

Onions won’t last very long in a warm house. They’ll sprout, go soft, get moldy, and generally lose all of their deliciousness in about ten days.

So what was a nice old lady to do?

I decided to cook ’em down, as they say. I put all five of my red onions on the cutting board. I sliced them up, without worrying too much about thickness. I put them into a frying pan with some olive oil. I turned the burner on medium.

I stirred.

I stirred a little more.

As the onions softened, I added a coating of salt. Then a bit of black pepper.

Best part, though? I poured on about a tablespoon of honey.

I stirred some more.

After the onions were all soft and starting to caramelize (you need to know this word. It sound so “chefy”. It just means they got brown on the edges), I added a splash of balsamic vinegar. Then I stirred a whole bunch more as I sipped a glass of wine.

In the end, this is what I had:

Yummoh. I had a nice pan full of sweet, a bit spicy, gently oniony goodness.

I have since eaten this wonderful onion jam, onion compote, onion mix on a cheeseburger, a bean burger, a taco and with grilled cheese.

See?

Ten minutes alone with a vegetable overload, and you can have a fabulous condiment for the next month.

I KNEW you could cook.

Yes, You Can Stir Fry Like a Pro!

Way back in the early 1980s, when I was a new wife/cook, I wanted to learn how to make Asian food. Everybody back then was into “stir fry” and I wanted to learn.

When you’ve been raised by Italians, the idea of mastering Asian cooking can seem overwhelming.

But I bought myself all of the specialized equipment, like a big wok, a special slotted spoon, a bamboo steamer. I was scared. But I tried it.

Fast forward 40 years, and I have the best, easiest, most adaptable recipe for you!

I made this last night, and it was so delicious that there were no leftovers. That’s a huge thing in our house! Because, you know, Italian Momma’s make too much of everything every damn time.

Anyway, I made my stir fry with items we had in the fridge and cabinets. I used shrimp, and pea pods and peanuts and scallions and some aging mushrooms. I had some soba noodles, so we used them.

I cooked it all in a big sauce pan (the wok rusted out 30 years ago) and it worked out fine.

The thing about this style of cooking is that it’s all about the spices and oils. I learned a long time ago to always keep Extra Virgin Olive oil, Peanut Oil, Sesame oil, Vegetable oil and ghee in the kitchen. I also have jalapeno oil, chili oil and coconut oil. The more the better, future chefs; this is a key to good cooking!

I also keep soy sauce, hoisin sauce and fresh ginger around all the time.

I hope you enjoy this recipe. The idea here is that you can truly substitute every single key ingredient.

If you don’t like or have shrimp: Use beef, chicken, tofu, scallops, pork

If you don’t have these veggies: use green beans, carrots, peppers, corn, broccoli

If you don’t have peanuts: use sesame seeds, cashews, almonds or just skip it.

No Asian noodels? Use spaghetti, or fettucini, or rice.

Adapt. Adjust.

Enjoy. The main idea is this: you need to have lots of sliced ingredients. No huge hunks of anything; just slice and dice before you start. And then you must have really hot oil. One hint that I always use: heat the oil, and then add some ginger/garlic/onion. If it immediately starts to simmer and kind of bubble around the edges, your temperature is good. If nothing happens, turn up the heat. But if it immediately starts to smoke, turn it down. Stir fry cooks quickly, so the idea is to do all of your preparations, and then start cooking about 15 minutes before you plan to eat.

Moroccan Lentil Soup

I’ve been trying to cut way back on the meat consumption in our house. My husband isn’t a fish eater, and I just watched “Seaspiracy“, so I’m off the salmon diet, too. There are only so many ways to eat tofu, and for everyone’s safety, we limit the amount of beans we consume in a week.

Enter the simple lentil.

In a fit of paranoia during the early pandemic days, I ordered about a million pounds of red lentils. There are lots of them left, as you can imagine!

So. I read a few recipes, tweaked a few things, and made this incredibly easy, delicious lentil soup. Healthy, super inexpensive, and the whole thing took about 30 minutes.

The secret of this dish is the spice. North African food often contains a wonderful combination of warming spices, like ginger and cinnamon, paired with more pungent ones, like paprika, hot pepper and cumin. This one was no exception. It was supposed to contain fresh or dried mint, too, but given that this is early spring in New England, my garden mint hasn’t appeared yet.

So I skipped it.

******THIS magic trick is a key to cooking. If you don’t have a spice….leave it out (unless it’s the key ingredient. Like, don’t leave the ginger out of your gingersnaps.)

*********Another trick? If you hate the taste of something, leave that out, too! In this case, most of the recipes I read included cilantro. I despise cilantro. I left that out, too.

But I love cumin, so I added more of that.

You get the idea.

Ginger Carrot Soup. Really.

I have been horribly ignoring this blog. Mea culpa.

It just started to feel like work, and love of food should never be work.

So.

I pledge to share some wicked easy recipes again over the next few days. I might not have photos, but I got food.

This is the story of ginger carrot soup. It begins with my absolute obsession with really fresh carrots in the summer. Now, I must be honest and admit my abject failure as a gardener. I’ve tried to grow carrots at least ten times in my life, the most recent being last summer when Covid panic had me believing that if I didn’t grow it, it wouldn’t be available.

I carefully and gently planted carrot seeds in a fabric planter which stood on my deck. I faithfully watered it, weeded it and was ecstatic when the green shoots appeared. I watched and waited, watered and weeded, all summer long. Finally, when fall was approaching, I carefully dug into the soft soil of the planter, gently uprooting my carrots.

Hahahahahahahaha!

After almost four months of careful gardening, the biggest carrot I produced was the size of my pinky finger. The others came in sizes ranging from “raisin” to “pretzel stick”. They wouldn’t have fed a mouse for more than a day.

Luckily for me, the farmers in our area actually know what they’re doing. I ate about 10,000 fresh carrots this summer, and blanched and froze about 10,000 more, give or take. But now it’s winter. The carrots aren’t as sweet, and I am less likely to eat them raw.

This is especially true this past week, after partially dislocating my jaw while eating eggplant.

Really.

So I found myself faced with a nice big bunch of slightly wilting carrots. I wanted the nutritional value of my favorite veggie, without the need to chomp it.

I decided on a batch of carrot soup. Because it’s winter, I wanted to add some warming spices to make us feel both full and comforted. I opted for ginger because I love it, and because I accidentally bought way too much a couple of weeks ago.

It took about five minutes to prepare my soup, and about 3 hours for it to simmer. Today at lunch, it was pure heaven.

Carrot Soup.

Competitive Cooking?!?

So I went to visit my Mom last weekend. At 90 years old, she doesn’t get up and about very much these days. She watches a lot of TV. Most of her TV watching consists, for reasons that defy explanation, of violent cop shows that make me cringe. Like NCIS and CSI and those other bloody acronyms. Bleh!

But this week I was in luck, or so I thought when I came into the room where Mom was settled with her cat in her lap and the TV on.

“I’m watching the Worst Cooks in America!” Mom announced cheerily. I settled in to see what the strangely named program might be about.

I was aghast.

In the first place, the very idea of calling anyone the “Worst Cooks” seemed wrong to me. I mean, the whole idea of this particular exercise in bloggery is to convince everyone in the world that cooking is easy. You don’t chef shame people just because they are nervous about making food.

Second, this show made these poor innocent souls spend day after day in a “cooking boot camp” lead by two professional chefs who would have fit very nicely in the Army infantry. They barked, they criticized, they shamed people for ridiculous, non-cooking related things like how they wore their hair and whether or not their countertops were clean.

I swear, I almost lost it when they started griping about “mis en place“. Call me a commoner, but if you’re not cooking in Paris, you shouldn’t force the French language into your kitchen.

But most horrifying of all to this happy home cook is the fact that this was one of those awful competitive cooking shows.

I absolutely loathe the whole idea of cooking as a competitive sport!

Food is love.

Cooking is sharing that love.

A meal is for sustenance, pleasure and community. It’s a sense of comfort and belonging. “Breaking bread together” is one of humanity’s oldest rites of peace and harmony.

So watching ten poor slobs sweating and crying as they desperately tried to attain the perfect sear on their sea scallops made me feel pretty sick to my stomach. Although I did get over that when they started eating the food. Still, it was upsetting to see all that negative emotion related to my favorite hobby.

To me, cooking is NOT about perfection, or racing to beat the clock (unless you have a toddler, then all bets are off). It’s not about the perfect balance of salty and umami. It sure as hell isn’t about “mis en place”.

So, dear readers, please cook.

Don’t watch stupid shows that are designed to make your blood pressure rise. Just cook food that sounds/looks/smells good. Share it with people who love you. Eat it. Use the bread to soak up the sauce. Leave the dishes till morning.

Food is love.

Competitive cooking, my ass.

Some things are just wrong.

Tofu For Two

Paul and I are omnivores, but we lean toward eating meat most nights. He doesn’t like fish (except for shrimp) and we haven’t done much in the way of vegetarian cooking other than pasta marinara and the rare foray into dal.

But we are aware of both the health and environmental impacts of meat eating, and we’re trying to change our carnivorous ways.

So last week I bought us some nice firm tofu. It sat there in the fridge for several days, making me feel guilty. But I didn’t cook it because…..I wasn’t sure of how to make it taste delicious. So I decided to go to another cook, one with better eating habits than mine.

I asked my daughter what to do!

I like tofu crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, but I wasn’t sure of how to get that. So I checked with Kate, who is a wonderful cook. The trick is to drain the tofu really well and then to toss the cut pieces into corn starch before frying them. Now, I knew the cornstarch trick, having used it on shrimp, chicken and beef in the past. I just didn’t know you could use it with tofu.

Tofu cubes in cornstarch. Dried noodles waiting their turn.

And here’s the tofu, all crisp and yummo.

My point here is to tell you that no matter how long you’ve been cooking, or how good you think you are at it, there’s always more to learn. And you don’t have to find a detailed recipe to do that learning!

One of my favorite things to do is to read cook books. I know, weird, right? But it’s better than reading any more political stuff right now, and there are only so many romance novels a persoan can take.

So I read cookbooks. I especially love to read old recipes. I have a collection of cookbooks from my mom, my late mother-in-law and from various books stores. I love to read them because they show me how much has changed in terms of our understanding of nutrition, and how much has come back around again. And it shows me how easy we have it. (One cookbook starts its roast chicken recipe by telling you how to kill and pluck the hen.)

And I love to talk to other cooks to get tips that I can use in my own meals. Sometimes it’s a cooking trick, like the cornstarch. Other times it’s learning about a new spice, or a combination of flavors.

To become a confident cook, you need to learn new ideas and then make the meal your own. Experiment. Have fun.

Remember: if it turns out horribly, you can always eat a bowl of cereal.

To learn about my fabulous Crispy Sesame Tofu, go to the recipe page and get the basics!