wendy’s world

george and i get a box from our local CSA, fully belly farm. with just the two of us, if the week gets really busy and we have to grab food out a few times, we can have trouble keeping up with the weekly deliveries. recently, i ended up with a glut of potatoes. this idea came to me as i stared into the fridge trying to figure out what to do with them.

basically, this is just lasagna made with sliced potatoes instead of pasta noodles. I suppose that makes it a gratin, but ‘lasagna’ fits the flavor profile better, i think.

total prep time should be less than half an hour for a hearty and tasty meal.

thinly slice your potato. (have the dish ready that you intend to build the lasagna in so that you don’t cut too many potatoes. i make just enough for two servings since george and i aren’t real big on left-overs.)

in a microwave safe dish, cook the potato slices in a little water for about 5 minutes. this cuts down baking time significantly, an important element for me. just be careful not to cook them to mush. 

while that cooks, make your red sauce (mine is normally a doctored jar sauce) and prepare any other vegetables that you want to include–quickly cooking any that you think need a little attention (last time i sauteed some greens and shredded some summer squash and carrots).

grate and set your cheese to the side. this time around i used mozzarella and goat cheese because it was what i had in the fridge. i used the goat cheese sparingly (it can over power a dish quickly for me).

then construct your lasagna. i always start with a touch of sauce on the bottom. then just layer, making sure that you end with cheese on top (you should have two or three layers of each ingredient (sauce, potatoes, vegetables, cheeses)). 

bake at about 350 for about 15 mins or until the cheese is bubbly and browning.

cut and serve with a salad, some bread, and a nice glass of red wine. can it really get much better than that… and in just a half hour! this is certainly a do-over in our home.

enjoy!

on a recent family trip to new york, george and i had an amazing pizza.  it was a thin white crust pizza with goat cheese, balsamic, arugula, and parmesan. the goat cheese was like none we’d ever had before.  it was almost as creamy as cream cheese and tangy, but not sharp.  and while the menu did not say it, if the balsamic wasn’t a reduction, it was from a $100 bottle.  it was just great.  

in fact…it was so good that i had to attempt to recreate it at home.  i have to admit that i did a great job!  

when i started making it, i didn’t remember that i’d written down the ingredients in my little blue book.  so, instead of parmesan, i used mozzarella (the good kind that comes in ball shape in water).  i also did not have arugula.  so, i used some baby mixed greens.  to get as close to the goat cheese that we had there, i mixed the white chevre goat cheese that we can get here with an equal part of cream cheese before i put it on the pizza.  i reduced some great, but inexpensive, local balsamic vinegar.  

for the dough, i make mine in the bread maker that my parents gave us years ago–just use the dough setting.  if you don’t have a bread maker, you can use a mixing bowl, but you’ll have to pay attention to rise and punch down times.  always let pizza dough set for about a day (overnight is best).  it gives the gluten a chance to develop.  i always divid my chunk of dough into four balls (usually a loose fist size).  that’ll translate to four pizzas the size of a dinner plate. then i coat a plastic food storage container with some olive oil for each ball.  put the lids on and set the dough in the refrigerator.  don’t put the lids on tightly or they will just pop off and freak you out while you’re watching television.  

here’s how the construction goes…

start with the regular white pizza dough.  toss it thin for more of a Naples style. new york pizza is thin in this tradition normally. (i build our pizza on a piece of aluminum foil sprinkled with cornmeal rather than building it directly on the pile.)

brush olive oil over the top.

dollop the goat/cream cheese around and sprinkle the mozzarella/parmesan.

put in 450 oven for about 10 minutes (we have a stone that we leave on the bottom of our oven all the time. i put the foil on the stone.)

throw on the salad.

drizzle the balsamic.

cut and serve.

yum, yum!

tastytime juice (a lemonade-type alcoholic beverage)

in a graduated glass, mix… 

2 cubes of frozen lemon juice (i squeeze the juice in season and freeze it in ice cube trays then transfer the cubes to ziplock bags.) 

1 tbsp mint simple syrup (i pick the mint from our front yard and use it to infuse a simple syrup mixture. then i freeze it.)

1 1/2 oz vodka

1 1/2 oz coconut rum

1/2 oz sugar free french vanilla syrup (we use  ”torani”.)

fill the glass up to 9oz with diet tonic water and stir. 

serve over the rocks.

a tasty time treat! 

i know that no-one reads this blog anymore.  i haven’t posted for a very long time.  so, i am not surprised.  but just in case someone is looking for a carrot cake recipe, i want to go ahead and post.  

modifying a couple recipes, i have found what i think is excellent carrot cake.  george really likes it, but has commented that it is not exactly your ‘traditional’ carrot cake.  

this one is really moist and very good for you–no refined sugars, no processed ingredients.  so, i thought i’d share.

dry ingredients:

2 cups whole wheat flour

3/4 cup wheat germ (you can buy a jar of this at most grocery stores)

2 tsps baking powder

2 tsps baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 tsp ground cinnamon

wet ingredients:

1/2 cup honey

1/2 cup maple syrup (make sure it is pure)

3 large eggs

2 tsps vanilla extract

zest from one orange (i just use the smallest grater and rub all the orange off)

other ingredients:

2 apples grated (i use red delicious)

4 large carrots grated

1/2 cup shredded coconut (try to find unsweeted.  sweeted works fine, but negates the totally unrefined claim )

1 cup chopped pecans

1 cup raisins 

pre-heat oven to 350 and butter a 9-x-13-inch pan (mine is glass). I use real butter so that the unprocessed claim remains. 

mix dry ingredients and sit aside.

beat wet ingredients with an electric wisk until frothy.

stir in the dry ingredients a little bit at a time until it is mixed well.

stir in the other ingredients one ingredient at a time until mixed well.

spread in pan.

bake 45 to 50 mins. use the clean tooth pick test.

after it is cool, i put cream cheese frosting on it sparingly.  the frosting is just room temp 8 oz square of cream cheese beat with 1 tbsp honey, 1 tsp vanilla and 1 tsp orange extract (you could put more zest in instead of orange extract).

enjoy.

corn and shiitake fritters

george saw a recipe in the july ‘food and wine’ that he wanted us to try. so, yesterday for lunch a fried up some corn and shiitake fritters. i modified the recipe slightly, given what we had in the house and that i try to avoid buying milk. here’s what ended up being my version. you can compare with ‘food and wine’ for the ‘real’ one.

about 2 cups frozen corn
1 egg
1/4 cup plain soy milk
about 1/2 cup vegetable oil
4 dried shiitake mushrooms
1/4 cup diced onion
1/2 cup white all-purpose flour
1/4 cup wheat all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper

put the dried mushrooms in a container with a couple cups of water. the container needs to be large enough that it won’t boil over in the microwave. heat on high for about 4 mins. then let set.

put about 1 cup corn in the blender with the egg and the soy milk. puree until smooth.

remove the mushrooms from the water. squeeze each one. then dice, discarding the stems.

in a skillet, sauté the onions for a couple mins in a little oil. add the mushrooms and a few grinds of pepper. after about 5 mins, stirring pretty regularly, but not necessarily constantly, add the remaining corn. cook about a min. scrape out onto a plate and stick the plate in freezer to quickly cool off the mixture.

while that cools, whisk the flours, baking powder, salt and pepper in a bowl large enough to hold everything. mix in the puree from the blender. last, add the onion and mushroom mix from the freezer.

give the skillet a quick wipe to make sure there isn’t any onion or mushroom bits left in it that will burn. then add about 1/4 inch of oil (there needs to be enough to slightly come up the sides of the fritters, but they don’t need to be swimming). when the oil is hot, spoon in the batter to make patty size fritters. flatten them with the spoon so that when you flip them in about 3 mins you’ll have two flat sides.

after about 5 mins total cooking, remove to paper towels to drain a bit. eat right away.

yum! yum!

so, the difference between a fritter and a hush puppy is in the flour and the amount of oil in which it is cooked, it seems. we really liked these. and a little frying never hurt anyone. enjoy.

my compliments to grace parisi at ‘food and wine’ for the original recipe which this one closely follows.

i love the smell of cucumbers. its reminds me of the food of childhood.

it’s sorta funny. without knowing it, my mother essentially raised me vegetarian. it wasn’t a choice, per se, but an economic necessity. meat really was a treat back then. and the meat that was the treat (sliced spam baked with pineapple rings out of the can, fried bologna, and the occasional fried chicken) demonstrated the modesty with which we ate when i was young. there’s a line in a rich mullins song, where he is reminiscing about his own childhood that speaks to mine… “my mom could make a gourmet meal out of just corn bread and beans.”

there were staples in our menu… corn bread, black-eyed peas, butter beans, purple hull peas, green beans. in the summer those would be augmented by the things that didn’t jar well… fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions. we’d slice the cucumbers and serve them in a bowl of vinegar with a little pepper, i think. i remember the contrast of hot and cold on the plate. hot corn bread, hot black-eyed peas and green beans, cold tomato slice with a fresh green onion and a few slices of cucumber touched with vinegar.

honestly, i don’t know why we dressed the vegetables the way we did sometimes… ketchup in the black-eyed peas, mayonnaise in the butter beans, vinegar on the cucumbers… oh, and there was always some trace of bacon drippings in something. as a child, i couldn’t imagine a stove without a drippings jar.

but back to smells…

i love the smell of cucumbers. the cucumber i sliced last night was tossed in our salad, but i think tonight i’m going to put some in a bowl with some vinegar and pepper.

there just isn’t much that smells more like summer for me than a cucumber.

i was at home this afternoon grading and doing laundry. i decided to put some bread on to knead in our handy-dandy bread machine that my parents gave us at least a decade ago.

from time to time i make pizza this way. i haven’t done it in a while, so,i thought i’d share here how it ended up today. (george says, “very good.”)

for dinner we had two pizzas (about 6-8 inches each).

pre-heat oven to 450. i have a pizza stone in the bottom of our oven.

pizza 1–bbq… wheat bread dough, bbq sauce, carrots, asparagus, diced fresh onions and fresh tomatoes, with cheddar cheese (at least i think it was cheddar. it was some of the fancy cheese that i shredded and froze during lent when we decided to eat vegan).

slice the carrot into pretty thin rounds and cut the asparagus into half inch segments. toss the dough into as close to a circle as you can get while you microwave the vegetables for about 2 mins. put the dough on the pile with a little polenta. spread a couple tbsps of bbq sauce on the dough. top with the vegetables and cheese. bake for about 10 mins.

pizza 2–red sauce, pesto and goat cheese. for this one, i put a couple tbsps of regular red pasta sauce as the base. then i put dollops of pesto and goat cheese. i sprinkled some grated white cheese on top (again, i’m not really sure what kind it was since it was from lent, and i didn’t think to label the ziplock bags), and a little bit of grated parmesan. again, bake for about 10 mins.

as an aside, last weekend, george and i ate one of my childhood sandwiches… peanut butter and banana. yum-yum. smash up the banana in a bowl with about equal amount of peanut butter. the smear on some good bread… i think as a child we only ate white bread, but i put it on good wheat bread. yum yum!

that’s all for now. happy eating.

my last real ‘domestic day’ seems to have been nov 30th–i wrote about it on this blog, so i know. i guess that i was due one. so, today was a domestic day. that usually means that on top of the regular chores and such that i have to do, i get to do some other domestic stuff. if you’ve read my blog before, you know that what i love to get to do is cook.

so, today i cooked. i made macaroni and cheese. no, not from the blue box, from scratch. george and i had bought some really fancy cheeses before lent. then we decided to eat vegan for lent. i was concerned that the fancy cheese would not last the 6 weeks of lent. so, i grated it and froze it. however, i forgot to label the bag. so, today, we had macaroni and cheese for lunch made with penne pasta and fancy cheese the name of which is lost forever. homemade mac and cheese is just incredible… get a little fancy with it and it is even better. i use the basic recipe from ‘joy of cooking’.

oh, and i actually baked, too.

i’m a cook, not a baker, but i saw this recipe in the may issue of ‘food and wine’ and had to try it–lemon cake with crackly caramel glaze.

it’s a bundt cake. i have very positive childhood memories involving bundt cakes.

it just came out of the over, but man, the batter tasted great!

i have to let it cool, then add the syrup, then make and top it with the caramel glaze. this should be wonderful! i’ll let you know how it comes out.

i hope you get to do the stuff that makes you smile some today.

dropped off the final dissertation in berkeley today!

also picked up my robe!

yay!!!!

i successfully defended my dissertation this evening!

that’s all… just wanted to share!