Feeding Friendship: Spinach

This round it was my turn to pick our featured ingredient. You may want to be sitting down for this if you know me well...because I picked spinach.

It's the leafy green that I tolerate the best, mostly thanks to the good people of Italy and their insistence on putting it in delicious ravioli. I had seen some at the farmer's market recently, and decided to go for it. I thought about making said ravioli on my pasta machine (and I will, someday) but I ran across a recipe for Creamy Spinach Enchiladas on the Real Simple magazine Pinterest and my gut reaction was "yum!" so I decided to try them out. Their recipe calls for frozen chopped spinach, but I bought fresh (isn't fresh always better??) so I'm not sure I really had the correct amount of spinach they call for, but it worked out in the end. Also, their ingredient list includes items for a red cabbage salad that I (shockingly) didn't make, so if you decide to make this, don't just buy the whole list without realizing you'd be getting a salad too.

I started out by washing my spinach...and then washing it some more. Man, this stuff was gritty. Next, I chopped up all the leaves, removing all the large stems. Then I put in on my kitchen scale, hoping to reach the 10 oz the recipe calls for in the frozen bag, but my entire bunch was less than 6 oz when chopped, but still looked to me like a whole lot of spinach, so I just decided to go with what I had.

chopping the leaves

I put most of the spinach in a medium bowl and started adding the other ingredients: 1 cup of formerly frozen corn, 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese, and 1/2 a can of green chilis. Because I am a  wimp when it comes to spicy food and because it just seemed like a lot, I reduced the amount of canned chilis by half, using half in the filling and half a can on top of the enchiladas. I thought this worked out fine and kept them from overwhelming the dish. 

colorful filling ingredients

My favorite grocery store, Wegman's, has a new campaign touting the benefits of "eating the rainbow" to get all your daily fruits and veggies. I'm usually terribly about this and eat a lot of beige, so I was happy to have some colorful ingredients in my bowl. Next I gave them a good stir and started on the creamy sauce. Instead of a cup of heavy cream, I used light cream, and I'm sure you could use half & half too. Then you just add salt & pepper to taste. 

cream sauce

 Next, it's time to load up your tortillas. Now, the optimal tortilla size for this is 6-inch, as the recipe states, but I didn't pay attention to that and had 8-inchers. I therefore ended up making fewer, but bigger enchiladas than if I had smaller tortillas. No matter.

fill 'er up!

I Pam'd the Pyrex pan and then arranged them all seam side down so they wouldn't pop open. Last, I  poured the sauce over all the rolled tortillas, then added the final 1/2 cup of cheese and 1/2 can of chilis. 

ready for the oven 

You cook these the first 15-20 minutes with the pan covered with foil, then remove it for the last 10-15. About half an hour later, I pulled them from the oven. 

done!

I waited for them to cool for a few minutes and them plated them with some Goya Arroz Amarillo (my favorite). George put salsa on his, but I am a purist. 

doesn't look like the home of spinach, does it? 

Even though I thought these would be good, I was secretly afraid they would be too spinachy or that they wouldn't be filling enough as a meal. I was actually wrong and enjoyed these. George even said they were "a good dish," which is doing pretty well for something that's both green and vegetarian (ok maybe the tortillas were made with lard and are not technically vegetarian; I don't happen to care). These were quick and easy- even easier with frozen spinach- and would be a quick weeknight meal for anyone, which is why, I'm sure, that Real Simple published the recipe. I might throw some beans or rice in them next time or use a white Mexican cheese instead, but overall I was pretty pleased with how these worked out.  

Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding

You may remember that I discovered a lovely blog that taught me how to make challah bread (see I Holler for Challah, if you missed it). She mentions in her recipe that you can add dried fruit to your bread, which I have done before, but as soon as I read that, my mind immediately ran to chocolate. If you can insert dried fruit, surely you could do the same with chocolate chips. So, the other day I decided to test my theory by rolling the chips inside each of the 3 ropes that make the braided bread. This came out pretty well, but in the future I think I would sprinkle a few chips between the strands as I braid them, just to distribute a few more chips around. Unfortunately, we weren't doing a good job of eating this delicious bread very fast, and it was a little bit dry, so I feared that it would soon mold. Then I remembered how to save stale bread: bread pudding!

My very scientific search of the web found many bread pudding recipes, and a few chocolate bread pudding recipes, but no chocolate chip bread pudding recipes, so I decided to invent it. I used the "Best Bread Pudding with Vanilla Sauce" recipe on AllRecipes.com because vanilla sauce is very important to bread pudding, in my opinion, and because it didn't call for insane amounts of eggs. I then substituted out the cup of raisins for a cup of milk chocolate chips- who wants raisins in a chocolate dish? Not this kid. Here is the ingredient list for the bread pudding:

• 3 eggs, beaten

• 1 1/2 cups white sugar

• 2 tablespoons light brown sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1/4 cup butter, melted

• 3 cups whole milk

• 10 slices hearty farmhouse-style bread, toasted and cut into cubes ...or chocolate chip challah

• 1 cup chocolate chips

I started out by cubing my remaining chocolate chip challah. I might cube them a bit smaller next time.

waste not, want not!

After turning the oven on at 375, I started to get the pudding ingredients in order in a large bowl. The bowl needs to fit you bread pieces later, so plan accordingly. You simply whisk together the eggs, milk, cinnamon, butter, and sugars- no need for electric beaters. 

ready for whisking

 Then add in your chocolate chips. The cinnamon mades the batter look spotty, not the chocolate.

chocolate time!

The recipe doesn't really call for it, but web consensus is to let your bread soak in the creamy pudding mixture for at least 10 minutes, if not longer. I stirred mine a couple of times to rotate which pieces were at the bottom, and to distribute the chocolate chips, which tend to sink. 

soaking time

While my bread was soaking and oven was warming, I got my ingredients ready for the vanilla sauce. You'll need: 

• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1 pinch ground cinnamon
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 1/4 cups whole milk
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

I melted the butter and kept it separate until I was ready to make the sauce, once the pudding was nearly done baking. It'll take around 10 minutes to thicken, so build that into your baking timeline so you won't have to wait on the sauce once the pudding is done. 

ready for action

Once the bread had soaked a while, I Pam'd a casserole dish and spooned the bread chunks into it, then poured the remaining liquid and chips over the whole thing. You don't want too much bread sticking out the top of the liquid or it may get overly brown. I baked for 25 minutes (convection) and then put the casserole lid on for the final 25. I took it off again at the end and cooked another 5-ish minutes until I was sure it was done. Checking for done-ness is a little tricky since a pudding is a bit liquidy and the chocolate complicates things, but I inserted a knife in the center and stopped cooking when it came out not completely dry, but mostly, and was pretty clean too. Here is the finished product: 

Mmmmm!

Extreme pudding closeup! 

After it cooled a little, I spooned portions into bowls and smothered them with the vanilla sauce. This was a little slice of heaven. It's not the most traditional bread pudding, but it's pretty darn tasty. 

Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding with Vanilla Sauce

Feeding Friendship: Strawberries

I was at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago when I smelled the fresh strawberries at a particular stand. Many sellers had strawberries, but only one smelled so amazing, so I had to buy some there. I decided to make a Martha Stewart recipe for strawberry cake to use them up and randomly decided to take pictures for the blog, so I was thrilled when Ellie chose strawberries as our ingredient.

These berries weren't the biggest, and many were shaped a little oddly, but they smelled and tasted great

So, at the risk of offending Ms. Stewart, I'm going to call this recipe "Strawberry Identity Crisis Cake" because it's a cake that seems like it should be a pie. It's made of fruit and baked in a pie pan, for Petey's sake! It should be pie! But it's not; it's delicious cake instead. Here are the ingredients:

6 Tbl unsalted butter, softened, plus more to grease pie plate

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup + 2 Tbl sugar

1 large egg

1/2 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 lb. strawberries (I think 3/4 lb would be fine, I had extra) 

First you preheat your oven, then sift together dry ingredients, per her directions at the link above. Making your batter in a stand mixer makes it so easy.

butter, sugar & egg

At some point you'll need to hull and halve your berries, and I whipped out my new kitchen scale so I would know when I had a pound ready to go. I like this scale because it does metric weights too.

right on the nose!

Then you pour your batter into your buttered pie plate and arrange the berries on top. I thought mine came out pretty:

pretty pie

Then you add your last 2 tablespoons of sugar on top. This seemed a little excessive to me, and I actually scrimped on the sugar a little (!), but in hindsight, the sugar forms this awesome sort of crunchy layer on top that reminds me of the life-changing gooey butter cake, so you may want to go whole hog on the sugar here. 

ready for the oven

My cake was looking so pretty and at this point I wondered why the one in Martha's photo looked like kind of a mess. Turns out that the batter sort of bubbles up and covers the berries, so your pretty pattern isn't going to matter much in the end product. Oh well. Around and hour (and several toothpick stabs) later, I pulled the cake out of the oven. We ate it straight, but it would be very good with either whipped cream or vanilla ice cream (or both, I won't tell). Here's the finished product:

slice of strawberry heaven

 I brought a piece in for my coworker who is leaving to go work overseas (sniffle) because I got sick and missed baking for her going away party. I asked her how she liked the cake and she said, "What did you put in it, crack?" ;) She offered to be my first online customer if I every opened a bakery. So, despite its  confused semi-pie status, this is one tasty cake. I recommend it!

Feeding Friendship: Lentils

For this round Ellie chose the humble, yet powerful lentil as our key ingredient. I have a good lentil pasta soup recipe, and one for a lentil and rice "casserole" that we used to put in burritos when I was younger, but I wanted to branch out. In my continuing quest to try cooking more Indian food, I had already found a recipe for Dal Ke Samose (lentil samosas), so this was an easy choice try to it out. The recipe I used is from a blog called Food Wanderings, which you should check out, so I won't reproduce all the directions. Here's the ingredient list though for planning/shopping purposes.

Filling:
1 cup toor dal/ split pigeon pea/lentils
1/2 cup spring onions, finely chopped
1/4 cup mint leaves, chopped
1/4 cup coriander leaves, chopped
1 green chili, finely chopped
1 tsp red chili powder
1 tsp garam masala spice mix
1 tsp roasted cumin powder
Salt to taste

"Glue"
3Tbl water
1/4 cup AP flour
(I might cut this in half if you don't intend to make millions of samosas, you can always make more glue)

Dough:
1 package frozen spring roll wrappers, thawed to room temperature

 I didn't use all the spices listed because I wasn't crazy about the idea of mint, and wasn't sure what to do about coriander leaves, so I just omitted those. The author's idea to use spring roll wrappers is genius and was a big time saver over making dough.  It also meant the crusts were thin and even, which (let's be real) wouldn't be likely with homemade dough.

Your first step is to prepare your lentils, which means rinsing them, picking out the weird ones, and then boiling them until they are tender. Mine were a little too done at 45 minutes boiling, so I would start checking them at 30.

rinsed

boiling

tender 

You basically just mix in your spices and cut your spring roll wrappers in half, then stuff the mixture into the wrappers. 

spice mixture

cut your wrappers in half, making 2 strips

I had to really burn the grey matter to understand the folding instructions on her page, but practice made perfect(ish). They weren't unclear, I just have trouble doing spacial reasoning based on 2D pictures. My samosas were increasingly triangular, and after about lucky number 9 they started to look like her pictures, more or less. The step I added to her process was to put a little water/flour "glue" along the left edge of your wrapper after you make the first fold she talks about. So, you've got glue running along the left edge starting from the top of the diagonal fold and going to the top of the wrapper. This helps your little dough cone stick together better while you are filling it with lentils and prevents leaks later. 

filling the dough cone with lentils

finally starting to look samosa-esque

Her recipe says this makes "10-12." Either I'm seriously under-filling my samosas, or this is a terrible estimate. I got tired of filling around #14 and could have probably made 10 more with the amount of lentils I had left. So I'd estimate more like 2 dozen, depending upon how much you stuff yours. 

The next stage is frying and her suggestion to use a wok is a good one. The high sides helped keep the samosas in check and the pan heats up quickly. I used canola oil, but you can use whatever strikes your fancy. 

frying the samosas

the finished pile

The nice thing about the spring roll wrappers is that they make it obvious when they are done. When they are golden and bubbly all over, you're good to go. After I had gone through all these steps I had a moment of panic thinking about the red dipping sauce I had seen in her photos. I hadn't planned anything for the sauce and was suddenly overcome thinking of all the hard-to-find Indian sauce ingredients that I surely hadn't bought. Imagine my relief to read these 3 words: serve with ketchup. Done. I whipped up a little quinoa pilaf to go on the side and called it a night. Not too hard overall, you just have to start early due to the 30 minutes of lentil boiling you'll need to do ahead. 

I thought they were tasty and not very spicy, just flavorful. George ate about a half dozen in one sitting, so they passed the husband test. All in all, I would definitely recommend this recipe. 

Feeding Friendship: Pizza Pizza!

This time around, Veronica chose pizza as our cooking challenge. I was so happy, since pizza is one of the things I make when I'm too tired to deal with making something complicated. Her reference to dessert pizza gave me a flashback to birthday parties at Pizza Hut in the late '80s where the buffet always had a dessert pizza topped with fruit. So, I decided to do one of each- savory and dessert pizzas this time around.

My go-to easy pizza secret is using Indian naan flat bread as the crust. Wegman's makes good naan, and I like using the roasted garlic variety for pizzas. The naan is about as big as your head, so it makes a good personal sized pizza that can be customized to your taste. It's extremely simple to make, and you can make any or all elements from scratch- or not. First, pre-heat your oven to 350. Then I slap the naan on a baking sheet and cover it with pizza sauce (Wegman's makes "to go" sauce that isn't canned, so I use that) and shredded mozzarella. Slices of a traditional mozzarella work well too.

most of my ingredients for semi-homemade weeknight pizza

ready for toppings!

Now the toppings are up to you. We like pepperoni, each with a different secondary topping. We both like pesto and chicken with toasted pine nuts, which also goes well on naan. 

Olives for me, onions for George

Once you're done topping and the oven is hot, pop in your pizzas for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese is melted. I like to turn off the oven and use the broiler for just 2-3 minutes on low to crisp up the pepperoni. This requires constant supervision! Do NOT turn on the broiler and then go feed the cat or clean something or otherwise wander off, because your delicious pizza will scorch. Keep an eye on it and take it out before it gets too brown. 

ready! 

mmm! nom nom naan

For my dessert pizza I thought about getting very fancy and making a crust out of cinnamon roll dough and topping it with cherries and sugar glaze to sort of re-create the Pizza Hut experience I remember. That involved a lot of guesswork, though, so I got inspired when I saw this Pillsbury recipe on Pinterest for a spring "pizza" made out of a big cookie. I didn't make this exact thing due to my pathological need to make baked goods from scratch (as opposed to dinner, apparently), but I cribbed the idea. I halved this recipe for sugar cookie bars from A Little Bit Crunchy A Little Bit Rock 'n Roll and put the dough in a pizza pan instead of rectangular baking pan (this is not a Little Caeser's cookie pizza). 

thick sugar cookie dough

dough spread into the pizza pan

Around 10 minutes later I pulled the cookie pizza out of the oven, just as the edges were beginning to brown. It looks remarkably similar on film, but was in fact now a real cookie...just a really big one. 

cooked, I swear

As the pizza cooked, I made the vanilla frosting called for in the bar recipe. It was ready just about the time the cookie was done, but I had to wait a while to frost it so the hot cookie wouldn't melt the frosting. You can obviously use pre-made frosting too, but after looking at the ingredient list on that stuff, you may not want to. From this point you can do tons of cute things for toppings from sprinkles to spring (or any holiday) M&Ms, to crushed Cadbury candy eggs, etc etc. I just had plain chocolate chips around, so that's what I used, but the holiday candies would be very cute too. I don't think I could bring myself to do jelly beans, but whatever floats your boat. Here's the finished product:

chocolate chip "pizza"

close-up!

Try a slice! It's delish!

All in all, my little pizza experiment worked pretty well. The half recipe of both dough and frosting filled up the pan and made a soft, buttery cookie crust for the pizza. The sky is the limit on dessert pizza, just like the real thing! 

Feeding Friendship: Beer me!

Welcome to my slightly delayed FF post for this round. After making my stout cake last time around, I got to thinking about all the dishes that can be made with beer and decided to choose it as our featured ingredient. I actually made 2 items because one was stupid easy and I wanted to try the other recipe. Very quickly, I'll show you the Beer Bread recipe I found and then I'll move on to what the author calls "tipsy chicken" and what I'll call Beer-Brined Grilled Chicken with Curry.

First, to the bread. This was probably the easiest recipe for bread I've made. You literally just dump the ingredients in a bowl, give it a good stir and pour the stuff in a bread pan. No fooling around with yeast because you're adding beer. I foolishly bought a case of Woodchuck Hard Cider a while back because I love it so much, but I don't drink that often, so it just sits. I decided that the hard cider would make a great bread because it's lightly sweet and slightly apple-y, and I was right. Here the link to the recipe on AllRecipes.com. I used 3 cups of 50/50 wheat flour (yes, they sell that) instead of 1.5 cups each of white and wheat flours. I'm sure you could go full on wheat and it would be just as good. Here's a short photo montage of the easy process.

dry ingredients in the mixer

mmm Woodchuck

batter is thoroughly mixed

stir a couple tines with a spatula for good measure

into the pan...

out of the oven!

nom nom nom

See how easy? Just don't burn it and you're good to go! On to the main event- the chicken. I had been wanting to try a "beer can chicken" recipe on the grill because I hear it keeps you bird nice and moist, and it generally looks fun. I thought that this was what my recipe was, but I didn't read thoroughly enough, so I failed in my goal to make beer can chicken, but succeeded in making tasty chicken, which is more important. The good news is that you don't have to use a whole bird for this, you can just do various parts, if you prefer. Also, there's no awkward bird propped up on the beer can part, which made me nervous. You can find the full recipe here. You basically just need some chicken, a beer, water, and a bunch of spices. I wanted the chicken to be flavorful, but not super spicy, so I cut the chili powder in half and traded the cayenne pepper for garlic powder. It already had curry, cumin, paprika, and chili powder, so I was certain it wouldn't be bland. 

To start with you soak the chicken (or parts) in a water/beer mixture for an hour or more. I used a whole bird and don't have many big pots, so I thought I could get away with a gallon plastic bag. This is not a good idea without a bowl or some sort of support mechanism, as I learned when my bird listed and poured funky beer/chicken water all over my counter. Sigh. I decided to use Sapporo beer because I like it and there weren't too many choices of craft beers in my store in cans that weren't IPAs or stouts, which I don't love and didn't want to overpower my chicken. Here's my setup for brining. 

remember to use a bowl, this is dumb

spices!

that's a lot more color than I usually use

If you read the recipe, you may be saying to yourself, 2 Tablespoons of curry AND 2 Tbl of cumin? But curry has cumin in it! And you would be right. But I love cumin, and if loving cumin is wrong, I don't want to be right. However, I had quite a bit of the spice rub left over, despite having a bigger bird than they called for, so you could either half the recipe or just save the rest for later. Maybe you'll cover your chicken more thoroughly too. So after I ditched the brine, I decided to rub the bird down with ~1 Tbl of butter. After successfully carrying off a Thanksgiving turkey, I knew that butter is the key to even browning and spice adhesion, so I went off recipe to add it. Then I smeared the spice mix all over the inside and outside of the bird. 

Post-rub chicken

While the bird was brining, I cleaned the grill and prepped the charcoal. I also started some hickory wood chips soaking in water. We kick it old school with the barbecue grill at our house, so if you do too, I highly highly recommend a chimney starter. Apparently making all the coals cuddle up next to each other in the "chimney" helps them spread the heat faster, and gets your fire started better and faster, with no lighter fluid at all. Observe: 

en fuego!

So right before I was ready to bring the bird down, I dumped the coals carefully in 2 strips along the outside of the grill, leaving a space in the center between them. The grilling calls for indirect heat, so that is how to you do it - put the bird in the center above a space and have the heat coming from adjacent coals on either side. A shout out to my Webster's grilling cookbook for that technique! Ideally you would also add you wood chips before you get the bird there so you don't have to stick them through the grate. Ahem. 

our intrepid chicken is ready to go

I love the smoky flavor of hickory or mesquite- flavor you taste and see!

I crossed my fingers, put on the lid, and left it for half an hour. This is what I found when I went to turn the bird: 

Hurray! What a pretty bird!

some nice grill marks too

The part after the turn took a little more than half an hour- probably 45 minutes- to get it up to 165+ internal temperature. Always use a thermometer with whole birds like this- no place for guesswork here on the road to Salmonellaville. After letting the bird rest a bit- not as long as I should have, probably, since we were starving- we cut in. George did the carving after some initial confusion on my part. 

Despite the lack of a beer can in its butt, the bird stayed moist and the rub was really tasty. I think you just have to be careful not to overcook it. 

Here's what our crack team of carnivores did during the carving. 

Yep, hunted for bugs outside. Sheesh. 

When we had carved as much as we reasonably could off the bird, I started to pitch the carcass and George started making a joke about what his dad would say about us wasting "half the chicken." Then I realized that, duh, I was wasting the chicken! I plopped the rest in a stock pot with some onion, carrot, garlic, bay leaves, salt and pepper and let it boil a few hours for chicken stock. Smells great and will be lots of soup stock later! Anyway, I would definitely recommend this recipe. Lots of flavor and on the whole not that much labor. 

future soup