All Day Cooking-palooza!

Because I was a teenager in the 90s and went to Lollapalooza more than once myself...

Yeah, I was there...what?

Anyway, usually this extravaganza of cooking/food prep happens on Sundays, but because of President's Day, I had an extra day this week and last night was our splurge meal at Max Burger in West Hartford, which I normally love, but made me pretty ill last night.  Which I'm taking as a good sign.

What I made:

1.  Primavera Bolognese

2.  Tuna Noodle Casserole

3.  Sloppy Joe Stuffed Peppers

4.  Asian chicken with cauliflower fried rice

5.  Paleo blueberry muffins

What I  did:

First of all, I'm not going to lie...this little project did take me close to six hours.  But I also made three recipes for the first time, which always adds to the time.  You could also break it down into smaller steps, too.  I could have, for example, processed more of the veggies when I got home from the store yesterday.

1.  Prepped and roasted veggies for bolognese.  This is one of those awesome "hide the veggies" recipes.  It doesn't have to be, but for my little babe, it works best to hide the veggies, so they get roasted, then pureed, before I make the actual sauce.

2.  Made the unbelievably yum smelling marinade for the chicken thighs.  Put those in the refrigerator to let them marinate until I cook them tomorrow.

3.  Made the cauliflower fried rice...mostly out of curiosity.  Plus, I was letting my roasted veggies for the sauce cool a bit before I started working with them.
     It was pretty good; albeit a bit mushy.  I think I may have over-processed my cauliflower a bit.

4.  Made the tuna noodle casserole.

5.  Made the stuffed peppers.

6.  Made paleo blueberry muffins.

How I Did It:

• Karen Lenahan's Primavera Bolognese with spaghetti squash

     Aside from making a massive amount (think double batch; plenty to freeze), its also delicious and  everyone in the house loves it.

                                                    Primavera Bolognese Recipe

     You can also find out more about Karen and her amazing catering/take out/bakery business here:


                                               

   

    Small Kitchen Big Taste

• Asian marinated chicken thighs and cauliflower fried rice  

Nom Nom Paleo Asian Chicken Thighs

       The "rice" I'm improvising from a few different recipes I've seen on-line

Cauliflower Fried Rice:

Ingredients:

1 small head cauliflower "riced" in a food processor
    This a pretty simple process -- cut off the florets and then process in food processor until the              cauliflower becomes a rice-like consistency.

3 strips of nitrite-free thick-cut bacon, cut into small strips

handful of asparagus, trimmed and cut into small pieces

1/2 medium sized eggplant, cubed

handful of mushrooms

small onion, diced

scallions

fresh ginger, grated on a microplane, about a tbsp. total

1 tbsp coocnut aminos

1 tbsp fish sauce

Directions:

1.  Fry up the bacon, removing the bacon from the pan when crisp.

2.  At this point, if you were going for a more authentic fried rice, you'd do a quick, very thin omlette in the pan, but I was making this to have a tomorrow, so I skipped this part.

3.  Start adding in veggies.  You could use a mix of any of the above veggies and there are many others that would probably be pretty good, too.

4.  Once veggies have softened up a bit, then add in the cauliflower and the remaining ingredients.  Cover and cook for about four to five minutes.

This tasted pretty yummy as I took it off the stove, albeit the consistency of the cauliflower wasn't much like rice.  I also don't really love rice, so this doesn't bother me.  If texture is your thing, this might bother you.  I've now used cauliflower as a stand-in for mashed potatoes and found pureed cauliflower to be just as good.  I've also used it to make breadsticks and those were pretty Ok, too.

Tuna Noodle Casserole

Yum...noodles...crunchy topping...so not OK.

I had such a craving for real tuna noodle casserole; you know...with lots of cheese, egg noodles, tuna creamy with canned soup, crushed up potato chips on top...and yes, a nutritional nightmare and not exactly the stuff truly splurge-worthy meals are made of, so I figured tuna was too rich a protein source for someone not to have messed around with this recipe.  I was right...  I found a couple different recipes and sorta combined both to come up with this:

Ingredients

1.  1 large head cabbage (I used purple; its prettty...standard green would work just great, too)

2.  Olive oil, coconut oil, or bacon grease for brushing on the cabagge

3.  Salt and pepper

4.  1 onion

5.  8 oz button mushrooms

6.  handful of the inner stems from a celery heart, diced

7.  4 cloves garlic

8.  ½ can anchovies

9.  2 Tbsp butter

10.  1 ½ Tbsp arrowroot powder

11.  1 can coconut milk or 1 1/2 cups milkl

12.  3 (7-oz) cans tuna

13.  ½ lb frozen spinach

14.  ½ cup Wallaby organic sour cream  (seriously...you'll thank me)

15.  1/2 cup almond "bread crumbs" on top

Directions

• Preheat oven to 400˚ F
• Slice cabbage into disks, brush with cooking fat (I used bacon grease), salt and pepper

• Bake for 230-45 minutes, keeping an eye on it.  This will depend on the thickness of the slices you cut.
• Add the cooking fat to a large pot. Dice the onion and saute the onion in the oil over medium-low heat.
• While the onion is cooking, thinly slice the mushrooms. Add them to the pot and continue to saute. Mince the garlic, add it to the pot, and continue to saute until the mushrooms and onions have released all of their water and become limp. There should be no water pooled on the bottom of the pot.
• Add in anchovies if desired and try to break them up a bit with your cooking spoon
• Add the butter to the pot and allow it to melt. When it is completely melted, add the arrowroot powder. Stir the arrowroot powder and butter together with the onions, mushrooms, and garlic. The mixture will form a thick paste. Continue to stir and cook this mixture for 1-2 minutes, or until it begins to coat the bottom of the pot and turn slightly golden brown. 
• Add in the milk
• Stir to incorporate and bring up to a simmer, stirring additionally occasionally.
  • The sauce will not take too long to thicken.
• Season with pepper and salt (not too much, though, those anchovies will bring a lot of salt)
• Once thick enough to coat a spoon, turn off the heat and set aside
• Add in tuna and sour cream
• You can either thaw your frozen spinach and drain it of water, or just throw it in with the sauce and let it melt in there...I just threw mine in and stirred.
• I then separated the cabbage slices into "noodles" and mixed them up with the tuna sauce 
• Top casserole with almond breadcrumbs

• Preheat oven to 350˚  and bake for 20 minutes

The pre-baked mixture was delicious; just the tuna noodle casserole goodness I had been craving, minus the garbage I didn't want to eat.  Day of, I will heat this up in the oven and viola!  Dinner will be served.

Sloppy Joe Stuffed Peppers

This is a modification of Rachael Ray's sloppy joe recipe, which is a dead-on copy of the types of sloppy joes you remember if you grew up in the 70s and 80s and your mom used a spice packet or some sort of canned sauce.  This just takes out a little sugar and replaces the rolls with peppers and adds some more veggies to the meat mixture.  I took out the brown sugar, subbed in a teensy bit of maple syrup, and added carrots and chopped zucchini.

Cookies, Soup, and Consumption

Just a few exciting things to share today...  I have developed a horrible, 19th century, overly romantic cough that only reminds me of Camille-style consumption.  You know, that horrible disease that  befell upper class women of the Gilded Age, just as they were about to marry the loves of their lives?  In reality, that was tuberucolosis, but for a time, as a child, I didn't know that...it just all seemed romantic.

You know, like this scene from "Moulin Rouge" where Satine collapses.  

So tragic.

So, yeah...like that.  Except not at all really.  

But I do feel crappy and I definitely felt like the only thing that might make me feel better would be a nice, steamy bowl of chicken noodle soup.  Like my Italian grandmother and mom always made. Only one problem:  the noodles.  The pasta.  Ugh.  So what did I do?  

In the past, there were a number of things I could have done.  Well, I could have chosen the easiest of easy options and tore open a package of ramen and the salt might have killed me, but the broth would have been hot...so worth it, maybe?  Yeah, probably not.  

Or we could have ordered some soup from the local Chinese take out, which would have probably come with a side of crab rangoon, at the very least.  Yeah, MSG.  Nope, not happpening.

I could have made my mom's traditional recipe, replete with lots of noodles.  Or, I could hybridize a few recipes and come up with something new, something nutritious and comforting.  Obviously, I chose option three.  I mean, I don't think I'd do a whole blog post about Chinese take out.

I started with Rachael Ray's quick, chicken noodle soup as a base and eventually arrived at this:

Ingredients

2 tablespoons (2 turns around the pan) extra-virgin olive oil

Two big hand fulls of baby carrots (they were the only kind of carrots I had) 

1 parsnip, peeled and chopped

2 medium onions, chopped

3 ribs celery, chopped -- I made sure to take the inner most ribs of celery, where all the leaves live; 

that's where all that yummy celery flavor is 

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 bay leaves, fresh or dried

Salt and pepper

1 tsp ground cloves (my Italian grandmother put cloves in a lot of things...you'd never guess and I 

only figured it out much, much later...it made a lot of her food taste kind of sweet and was also not 

an entirely uncommon practice among Italians in her region of Italy (Marche) which is on the 

Adriatic coast

1 small can diced organic tomatoes

8 cups good quality chicken stock

1 pound chicken breasts, diced

3 handfuls or so of baby spinach (probably more..as much as you can fit in)

3 medium to large size zucchini cut into "noodles"

Zoodles!  This was my first time using them.

YUM!

A handful fresh parsley, chopped

Directions:

I peeled my zucchini and had Mark take over.  He zoodled, while I cut up chicken.  Ick.  

I coated the bottom of my large dutch oven with extra virgin olive oil.

Then I started chopping up my other veggies.  I use a mini chopper for this.  I just find it a lot easier and faster when I have a large quantity of veggies that need to be chopped into small bits.  Its cheating. Whatevs.

As I chopped one group, starting with the top of the list, I dropped it into the hot pan.  This is a Ray-Ray pro-tip:  work next to the stove, so you can, as she says, "Chop and drop."  Easy-peasy.  And who would have thought the same woman who made mac and cheese with hot dogs and ketchup (seriously??!!) would have useful advice and/or recipes?  Well, I did actually.  

I worked through the remainder of the ingredient list, pausing after adding the chicken.  I added the spinach in toward the end and the zoodles waited until the very, very end.

Bottom line:  so delicious, so comforting and warm, plus a ton of leftovers.  Also, Max said it was the "best soup ever!" 

Score.

Snickerdoodles

And yes, I mentioned cookies.  Glorious, grain-free, pretty low carb COOKIES.  I made these beauties last night to bring to my mom's for a family dinner.  

Behold:

The most simple ingredient list imaginable: 

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups blanched almond flour
• 1/2 cup arrowroot powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 5 tbsp coconut oil, melted
• 1/2 cup pure maple syrup
• 2 tbsp pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, combine flour, arrowroot powder, baking soda and salt.
2. In a small bowl, whisk together melted butter, maple syrup, vanilla and cinnamon, until well blended.
3. Add wet ingredients to the dry, using a fork to blend until thoroughly combined.
4. Chill dough in refrigerator for a half-hour (or up to 24-hours).
5. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees.
6. Scoop dough, one tablespoon at a time, and roll into a ball using your hands. Place dough balls on a parchment-lined baking sheet and use a fork dipped in cinnamon flatten.
7. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until lightly golden around edges. Allow to cool on baking sheet for five minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.   I would check these after nine minutes or so.  They will be soft and may not seem "done," but I've found that almond flour baked goods often don't seem done, but they firm up a lot once they cool.

Again, I know I'm doing it right when Max loves them and doesn't suspect there's less than a half cup of sweetner in the entire recipe (which supposedly yields two dozen cookies, but I must make mine big, because I made about a dozen and a half.)

Also....if you're stopping by and checking out my page...SAY HELLO!  I mean, its kinda rude not to say hi...would you not say hi if you saw me on the street?  Wouldn't you greet me if you came into my home?  

Happy snow!  

xoxo,

Tina