Good Real Food

I started out with the best intentions to make a traditional tabouli salad…but the great veggies in the fridge kept calling until I had created a new favorite salad.

What I used (veggies can vary)
-1 cup bulgur
-2 cups hot water
-juice of one lemon
-3 cloves garlic smashed with the back of a knife
-1/2 cucumber cubed
-4 radishes cubed
-7 cherry tomatoes, quartered
-1/2 red pepper chopped
-1 handful parsley chopped
-1/2 avocado chopped
-1/2 cup corn (fresh or thawed)
-1/2 tsp salt
-1 tbsp olive oil
Squeeze the lemon into a stainless steel bowl. Add smashed garlic and dry bulgur. Cover with the boiling hot water and let stand for 1/2 hour. In the meantime, chop all the veggies. Add them to the cooked bulgur, toss with salt and olive oil and serve luke warm or put in the fridge for an hour to cool before serving.

No Comments »

Ah the lovely Radish. A sure sign of spring. But fodder for recipe inspiration? I recently served my colleague lunch at my house where a radish sandwich was the main course. She had never tasted one, and looked at me sideways, but in a polite way. I think I successfully converted her. (spread hearty bread with Neufchâtel or cream cheese and top with sliced radishes.)

Surely, these are the crown jewels of the veggie world!

No Comments »

this is a minor variation on my usual kale recipe which involves sauteeing garlic and onions for a few, adding crushed red chili, followed by roughly chopped kale and cooking, covered till done to your liking.

The minor variation is this - cook your garlic over very low heat for a longer time - 10 minutes maybe, to really infuse your olive oil.  Turn up the heat to medium and add lots of very thinly sliced onions and cook till those are brown.  Then add your chili and kale and cook as usual.

The extended time on the garlic and onion really makes the sweetness of the onions and the flavor of the garlic pop, and creates a really nice contrast to the bitter flavor of the kale.

It was different enough from the usual that my daughter commented on it, hence this posting.  Enjoy.

By the way, in case you didn’t know this, the trick to getting truly brown onions is time.  Turn down the heat once you start to get a bit of color and cook, stirring frequently.  It takes a while, but the flavor is well worth it.

2 Comments »

Last night we hosted 20 some folks for my birthday party/fundraiser for the Progressive Technology Project (which would be where I work).
Because I’d just returned from a rather taxing week away, I decided to keep the food for the shindig as easy as I could, and though I hadn’t made this recipe before, figured it was simple enough and fairly straightforward and how could you really go wrong with veggies and beans and broth anyway?

As expected the soup came out nicely, though I can certainly see why the cooks that I lifted this recipe from added some bits of meat.  I sort of thought that some stew meat/pork/lamb would be a nice addition, though you’d want to change the cooking order a bit if going that route.  In any event, here’s a soup that’s quick to make, dead simple, and is filling and warming and everything else that winter soups should be.  Enjoy.

1 Comment »

What the heck is this? Well, it is practically the only local vegetable available (Wisconsin) so I should try it. This is what led me to buy one of these strange things today to take home and test it out.                                                                                                                        I found online a CSA farmer in California who fell in love with these Heirloom roots. “The black Spanish radish is an antique radish, a throwback to a time when people counted on storing roots to survive the winter.” He talks about his journey growing them and also has some interesting Recipes. I was inspired by the Asian influenced one on the site and created this salad using: 1 black spanish radish, two carrots, four scallions, 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp lemon juice, 1 tbsp rice wine vinigar, 1 tbsp sugar and 1/ 2 tsp salt. It has a very fresh spicy bite with a really clean finish that tasted amazing with a glass of beer. I brought the mixing bowl over to D right after I tasted it. He gave me a sour look for bothering his reading, but I held up a fork to his mouth. His eyes closed as he chewed and he reached for more with  a boyish grin.                                                                                 

No Comments »

delicious and insane is how I’d describe this beet pesto recipe that I got from the nami-nami blog - delicious because come on, it’s beet pesto - beets, cilantro, garlic, and pine nuts - what’s not to like? Insane because when you toss this with pasta (reserve a bit of cooking water) and some olive oil, the pesto colors your pasta a beautiful, intense lustrous red that has to been seen to be believed. You look at the color and can’t help but wonder what beets were thinking when they decided that that was their color of choice.

We ate this pesto tossed with whole wheat fettuccine and it was lovely.

1 Comment »

Made another recipe from nami-nami-blogspot.com, this time the Beetroot soup with Goat’s cheese. We’ve been a bit meat and carb heavy recently since that’s what my wife’s been craving and I don’t argue with pregnant women, about food at least. This week though, we all hit that mid-winter point where we had deep vegetable cravings - I think the little one devoured almost a head of lettuce on her own over the weekend. Anyway, when I saw this recipe using not one, but three of my favorite vegetables - beets, parsnips, and celeriac, I knew I’d be making it.

We had it with a large salad, fresh baked sourdough bread, and some cheese and radishes. It was lovely - very simple to make, very tasty, and wonderfully light and cleansing after too much heavy foods. If you’re looking for a simple vegetarian soup, give this a shot.

2 Comments »

No pretty picture this time - seems my camera is having trouble focusing, which is understandable when confronted with such tasty food. You’ll have to take me at my word that this meal wasn’t just tasty, but was pretty too.

The only credit I can claim in this line-up was the combination. I’d read this recipe for braised red cabbage with prunes on a blog earlier in the week, and it sounded easy and wonderful. I’d been planning to make it, but wasn’t quite sure what to make with it. That problem was easily solved while chatting with our meat and poultry farmer at the St. Paul Farmer’s market this morning. I saw pork chops, and thought about what sort of meat my wife was likely to be craving and briefly pondered side dishes and cooking methods.

It took longer to type that than it did to think it.

So, pork chops in hand, me the kid came home and a few minutes of googling turned up this lovely recipe for braised pork chops. And there you have it - two braised dishes coming together for an easy and lovely meal.

While the pork chops were good, I think the real star here is the cabbage. As I said to my wife, “how can anything this purple be bad for you?” In truth, it’s the combination of the orange juice and the almost melt-in-your-mouth prunes that really push this over the top. The recipe for the cabbage makes a lot, which was my intention. I’m already dreaming of the cabbage for lunch later this week over brown rice, maybe with a slice or two of fried haloumi cheese on top.

2 Comments »

currently making sweet potato dal via this recipe from google.

Yesterday, made empanadillas from this recipe filled with leftover cabbage soup from my last post - they were delightful and disappeared much more quickly than the soup had, though with the amount of butter in the dough, it isn’t much surprise.  Unless I did my metric conversion wrong in which case - oh, nevermind.

And finally, my kid has chicken pox and I think that garam masala may be the Indian equivalent of ketchup in that it sneaks into many many dishes and makes everything it appears in taste better.  Maybe.

No Comments »

I can’t really take credit for either of the items that graced our table this evening - a lovely rice and smothered cabbage soup via The Wednesday Chef (where do I know her from?) accompanied by squash fritters based on this recipe with light modifications courtesy of me. No pictures cause the camera has been acting up a bit, but it was a truly lovely supper. My wife was in the mood to cook, so she took charge of the soup while I tackled the squash and by some odd miracle, we finished up everything right on time as the small one was starting to get peckish - in both the hunger and mood senses of the word. Since we’re expecting another child, I added a few sausages to the menu to bump up the protein, but they could easily be left out for a really nice vegetarian meal that is just perfect for a winter Sunday supper.

Two notes on the recipes - we switched out the arborio rice in the soup for some already cooked left-over brown rice and vegetable broth for the beef stock, we also spiced up the squash fritters with cayenne and skipped the powdered sugar. The fritters were great. We felt that the soup was missing something, which C and I both agreed was a green flavor - likely solved by the addition of some chopped up parsley at the very end. In summer, basil or other fresh herbs would do nicely, maybe even arugula. The soup recipe is quite simple - though does take some time, and seems to be a good place from which to make multiple modifications.

1 Comment »