August 2007
Monthly Archive
Monthly Archive
Posted by Emily on 31 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Musings, Recipe, Side dish, Vegan, Vegetables, Vegetarian

I discovered a way to get D to eat green peppers…stuff them with yummy things and bake until sweet. We have had a recent onslaught of green peppers from our CSA and from our garden along with yellow, red, and orange ones of all varieties. I made up this recipe using what I had on hand and it was one to put in the “that’s a keeper” book. Pilaf is a very old way of cooking rice used by many cultures. I like the wikipedia entry on the subject.
What you need for my dish:
What to do:
1. Dry roast the rice in a frying pan over low heat for 10 minutes, stirring so as not to burn. 2. Heat the oil in another pan and saute the onions, peppers and garlic. 3. Add the stock to the rice along with the cooked peppers, onions and garlic. Let simmer until the liquid evaporates. 4. In the mean time, slice two green peppers in half, keeping the stems, and remove the pith and seeds. Brush them with oil. 5. When the rice is done, fill the green peppers with the pilaf, place in a shallow baking dish, and cook for about 15 minutes at 350.
Posted by Emily on 18 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Musings, Soup, Vegetarian

So, wow, I sure do have a lot of corn and cucumbers on my hands with the recent CSA boxes. After some searching I found this great recipe for a cold summer soup in Sheila Lukins’ All Around The World Cookbook.
P.S. After weeks of heat and no rain, it is raining nonstop today and our house is dark. I had to take the photo above perched in a window so as to shed some decent light on the soup.
What you need:
Posted by arif on 16 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Musings, Vegetarian
I’ll refrain from posting the recipe or pictures on this one, since the recent movie by the same name has everyone making ratatouille (which is a wonderful thing).
Still, after making a huge batch of the eggplant, zucchini. and tomato concoction over the weekend, and facing a night that I didn’t really want to cook too much, poaching some eggs and setting them on top of a mound of ratatouille with a slice of toast worked nicely.
Posted by Emily on 11 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Main Course, Musings

Polenta is a wonderfull base for many vegetable and meat sauces with an Italian bent. I like to use it when I get a little tired of pasta. The grainy yellow flour is a type of cornmeal made from ground maize, which is cooked into a kind of porridge with a wide variety of uses. You can make your own polenta, or you can buy it ready made at the store.
For this easy week-night dish, I used the store baught polenta, which comes in a tubular plastic casing, and sliced and fried the rounds in oil in a frying pan. (Do this as you are making the sauce so that the rounds are nice and hot and crispy just as the sauce is ready to eat.)
To make the sauce:
Saute red onion and garlic in olive oil until translucent. In the meantime, heat up some water on the stove and pour a cup of the hot water over a 1/2 cup of dried wild mushrooms to reconstitute them. Let these sit for about ten minutes, then drain them, reserve the mushroom stock for another night, and slice up the wild mushrooms along with two cups of sliced domestic mushrooms.
Add one chopped red pepper and the mushrooms to the pan.
Add a splash of red wine.
Let this simmer for about 5 minutes.
Add the sliced smoked lamb sausage and simmer for another five minutes.
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serve the sauce over the hot polenta slices and garnish with fresh cherry tomatos and basil.
Posted by Emily on 04 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Get Real, Main Course, Musings, Pasta, Recipe, Salad, Vegetarian
Reading last weeks New York Times Magazine on this rainy Saturday afternoon, I came accross this recipe for summer pasta which uses the same ingredients in the salad I made yesterday and is a new twist in pasta salad.
Posted by Emily on 03 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Get Real, Musings, Salad

Want to savor the last month of summer? How about a Caprici salad in a to-go box?
Slice up a cucumber and two tomatoes from the garden, CSA, or local farmers market. Add some fresh basil, cubed mozzarella, a dash of salt and pepper and a splash of olive oil and balsamic vinigar. Toat it with you to work. Take a BREAK over your lunch hour to walk to your favorite park. Sit under a tree in the shade and eat the perfect summer meal as it was meant to be eaten. Take your time. Let the ants crawl over your bare feet. Believe me, you will be a breath of fresh air as you walk back into the office or wherever you need to return to on this mid-week afternoon. Remeber how much you will miss this come february in Minnesota!
Posted by Carol on 03 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Musings
It is only a small step from sourdough, yogurt and other hummy earthy concoctions to a carboy full of Chardonnay bubbling in the basement. While it’s best when taken through the process in all its steps, but, failing grapes from the vines the next best thing is a “wine kit” which produces up to 26 bottles of the home made stuff … . . amazingly good.