Rotini with Spinach & Ricotta

So Simple, So Good.

Put the pasta water up to boil.

Chop an onion and start it sweating in a tad of olive oil.

Wash and chop a bunch of spinach.

Drop the pasta in the pot.

Throw the spinach in with the onions and cook until it wilts.

Remove the pasta from its pot to the pan with the spinach and onions, using a slotted spoon.

Stir in 1/2 - 1 cup ricotta cheese (use the purest you can find - read the ingredients - there should be only milk, vinegar, and salt).

Add a little pasta water to thin if you like.

Salt & Pepper to taste.

Top with a dollop of ricotta and little grated Parmesan if you like.

 

Summer Stir Fry With Tofu

 Take what's in the share, chop it up and stir fry it.

Green Cabbage

Radishes

Cauliflower

Onions

a little canola oil

 Brown up some tofu, add a touch of toasted sesame oil. Mix up a batch of peanut sauce (the recipe is elsewhere on this blog) to toss the tofu in.

 

 We skipped the rice/noodles on this one and had some Trader Joe's vegetarian egg rolls instead.

Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burritos

Ingredients: serves 2
2 sweet potatoes

1/2 cup diced onions

2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1/2 minced fresh green chile
2 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. ground coriander
1 can black beans (15-oz., rinsed &drained)
1/4 C. lightly packed cilantro leaves - chopped - optional
1 T. lemon juice
4 six-inch flour tortillas
tomato salsa for topping

Preparation:

1. Pierce the sweet potatoes several times with a fork, then microwave on high for 6-8 minutes or until a fork goes in easily. Let them cool a bit.
2. Saute the diced onions and garlic in 1-2 tsp olive oil
3. scoop out the potato flesh into a bowl, add the beans and mash together.
4. Stir in the spices, lemon juice and cilantro if using
5. Warm the tortillas in the microwave (wrap in a towel and heat on high for 30-60 second)
6. place 1/4 cup or so of filling in tortilla and roll up.
7. Place filled tortillas in a casserole or baking dish, cover with a damp towel (paper or cotton), then plastic wrap (or the dish's cover if it has one) and microwave on 70-80% power for 5 minutes or until heated through/

I served these with cucumber and radish salad: peel cukes and slice thinly. Slice radishes thinly. Dress with plain non-fat Greek yogurt, dried dill, salt & pepper to taste.

Pasta with zucchini and Ricotta Salata

Pasta is my go-to dish for a quick supper. This is a standard combination of my favorite flavors. I always start with onion and garlic sauteed with in olive oil. Here I've added sliced zucchini, fresh basil, chopped fresh tomatoes and small white beans and crumbled Ricotta Salata cheese - a dry salted ricotta cheese made from sheep's milk - which is sort the Italian version of Feta Cheese, a similar texture - drier, and less salty. You may have noticed that I never tire of eating pasta with vegetables and feta, I am becoming very fond of Ricotta Salata as well.

Spinach & Sun Dried Tomato Fritatta

There are so many delicious things you can do with fresh spinach. This was a quick supper with eggs, kind of a fritatta. I used one bunch of spinach from the CSA box.

Wash the spinach well, especially if it just came from the farm market or the CSA box and still has dirt and sand clinging to it.. I usually put it in a big bowl of water, push it around gently, lift it out of the water into a collander, dump the water (and the sand and dirt) - or use it to water the plants, then repeat that process two more times or until there is no more dirt in the bottom of the bowl when I remove the spinach.

Chop the spinach bu piling up the leaves, slicing them into strips one way and then slicing the other way to cup those strips into pieces.

I made this a few weeks ago and used sun dried tomatoes - but if I make it now, I would use fresh tomatoes -mmm - makes my mouth water just thinking about fresh Jersey tomatoes...
For this fritatta, I chopped about 1/3 cup of sun dried tomatoes.

Grated about 1/2 cup Parmesean cheese

Sauteed one chopped yellow onion in 1 tsp olive oil

I beat 6 eggs with a little soy milk, then poured them into the ovenproof saute pan

I cooked the fritatta on top of the stove until it was almost set, then sprinkled the mozerella and Parmesean cheese on top and popped it into a 400 degree oven just until the top browned

Pasta with Greens, Herbs & Feta

The CSA box has been full of lettuce the past couple of weeks. Lettuce is wonderful, but D. was away for the week and three heads of lettuce is a lot of salad for two people to eat , so I cooked up the Romaine into this modified version of Molly Katzen's Pasta with Greens & Feta.

 I washed and chopped the Romaine ( I triple wash all my greens the same way I do the spinach (see Tofu topped with Spinach and sun dried tomatoes). I think Romaine lettuce has a wonderful flavor when sauteed lightly. Mollie Katzen uses it with Spinach in her recipe, but I decided to let the Romaine solo here.

 Went out on the deck and picked some oregano

 and purple basil

 I sauteed some onions in about 2 tsp olive oil, then added the lettuce and cooked it till it was wilted but still had a little crunch at the center.

 Then I threw in some Feta cheese

 Tossed the veggies with the pasta and some pasta cooking water

 and topped with freshly grated Parmesan

Very simple, quick and easy supper with wonderful flavors.

Spinach & Ricotta Pizza

Another use for the spinach in one of our first few CSA boxes of the year. Bought the whole dough to make the crust at Trader Joe's.

Washed and chopped the spinach...

Diced a few sun dried tomatoes...

Grated some Parmesean...

Sauteed an onion in a little olive oil, then added the spinach and cooked it just till it wilted and was still bright green

Threw some dollops of Ricotta cheese on the crust, sprinkled on the tomatoes and a few chopped Calamat olives, then the spinach and onion mix, then the Parmesean. Baked it at 450 for 5-6 minutes.

Day 69: Pasta with Eggplant, Onions Peppers, Olives & Feta

A last, lonely bag of sauteed eggplant, onions, peppers, and tomatoes was in the freezer from August. So, I boiled up some pasta (Barilla Plus - for the extra protein). Heated up the veggie mix. Put the two together with about 2 cups of pasta water (ALWAYS save some pasta water when you drain the pasta, it inevitably comes in handy). I threw in some shopped calamata olives and topped it with feta cheese - sorry I didn't take a picture - it was very tasty.

Day 24: Pasta with Cauliflower, Kale & Onions

It was the second Night of Hanukkah and I was scheduled to work from 2:30 until 10 pm. My husband usually stops by the hospital on his way home from work (and the gym) and has dinner with me. Now, Hanukkah is a minor festival - but it is a holiday, and we we ate out on the first night,so I wanted to have something a little more special than cafeteria food. There are still lots of veggies left from the last CSA share of the season, luckily they are winter vegetables and they keep well. I decided to use a head of cauliflower, a bunch of kale and some onions - that looked kind of like this










The list that came with the CSA share says they are pearl onions, but they look like spring onions or bulb onions to me. In any case, I halved a bunch of them (quartered a couple that were larger) and put them in a pan with some EV olive oil to cook for a few minutes while I washed the cauliflower and broke it into florets. I added the cauliflower to the pan and let that cook while I re-washed a bunch of Kale and chopped that up. After the cauliflower began to soften a bit, I added the Kale. I re-hydrated a handful of sun-dried tomatoes and sliced them up, and quartered a handful of Kalamata olives. I added those to the pan, along with a little dried basil and oregano and some salt and pepper. I let this cook while I boiled a pot of water and cooked some orichette pasta (just short of al dente). I transferred the pasta to the pan with the vegetables using a slotted spoon. I added about a cup of the pasta cooking water and simmered everything together until the pasta was done. Then, I added about a cup of crumbled Feta cheese and  about 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese and tossed. I packed two portions of that pasta up and took it to work. I re-heated it when we were ready for dinner and it was pretty fabulous.

Day 4: Black Bean Chilaquile

I was too tired to type when I got home from work last night, so here is last night's entry.

I am a book person. I love them, and I have a lot of them. I have a bookshelf full of children's books in the guest bedroom even though my kids are grown. I have a full set of the "classics" given to me by a favorite aunt and uncle, all the books from my french literature class at college, two shelves of books on Jewish topics, and lots of paperbacks (including the full Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovitch).  I have forty-seven cookbooks on a little blue bookshelf in my kitchen, a dozen more on the top shelf of one of the cabinets and six or seven more that I never use (but can't seem to part with) on a shelf upstairs (in the guest bedroom with the children's books).

Everyone tells me that books are obsolete. I know I could put more books on one of the new electronic readers than I have on every bookshelf in my house. I know I can find just about every recipe in every cookbook I own somewhere on the web, but I like books. I can't part with the books I read to my son and my daughter in the rocking chair, I really do re-read the books I love every once and a while (have I mentioned my notoriously bad memory? Sometimes it's like reading them again for the first time).  I love to read the inscription that tells about the typeface, I love the way a new book smells, I love the way a book feels in my hands.

I have a lovely wrought-iron cookbook stand and when I cook from a recipe I prop the book up on the stand. My kids bring their laptops into the kitchen, put the recipe up on the screen, play some music from their i-tunes library, and look up the definitions for cooking terms they're not familiar with. I'm not there yet. I'm stubbornly old fashioned, yes, and I don't have laptop. Instead, I have two college educated children and four cars. Maybe by the time I can afford to buy the laptop, I will be ready to give up the cookbook on the pretty wrought iron stand...maybe I'll get a Kindle too.

The long awaited point here is that I followed a recipe for last night's dinner. I made Black Bean Chilaquile from the MooseWood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites cookbook. Of course the recipe is available on the web (http://www.food.com/recipe/black-bean-chilaquile-43471 - here's one place, I'm sure you can find more). I used spinach from this week's CSA share, CSA corn I froze in August, Garden of Eatin' baked tortilla chips and low-fat instead of fat free cheddar. I used store-bought salsa. I took the chilaquile out of the oven just as I was leaving for work; took my portion with me and re-heated it in the microwave a couple of hours later, it was a little jumbled together but tasty. The family verdict was that I should make it again sometime - and I can do that - because I pretty much followed the recipe for once.

Day 1: Risotto with orange cauliflower, onions, garlic, and asiago cheese

I've been procrastinating. I'm going to try to blog about 365 days of vegetarian dinners, starting today. I was supposed to start on the first of the month, but today will do just as well, I suppose.

I've been a vegetarian of one sort or another for more than thirty years now and the first question that non-vegetarians ask me has not changed in all that time; "What do you eat?" I'm going to try to answer that question here.

What I eat has changed over time. In the seventies, every vegetarian recipe took out the meat and put in lots of butter, and cream and cheese, as if we had to compensate for what we'd lost. Frances Moore Lappe told us we had to eat the right combination of proteins at every meal, so I built menus around the best amino acid matches. There were no frozen veggie burgers, only TSP (textured soy protein), tempeh and tofu.

When the frozen food industry discovered the vegetarian market, I was seduced by the variety and ease of the new products appearing every time I visited the grocery store and went through a period of building meals around the latest and greatest frozen soy protein - Gardenburger, Boca, Morningstar Farms, and Amy's burgers, various veggie hot dogs, pseudo chicken patties, fake Italian and breakfast sausage, even Quorn "roasts" and tofurky.

I worked my way through every Mollie Katzen cookbook. I've tried ethnic recipes from around the globe and I am a big fan of epicurious.com. Lately, I've joined in on the newest craze; I have a CSA share and for the last twenty four weeks I've been building meals around what is in the box I pick up every Thursday. That has been more fun than I could have imagined, and more work.

For thirty years or so, though, one thing hasn't changed, each evening I answer the question of "What's for dinner?" and the answer never includes meat. So, here goes.

Day 1
Risotto with orange cauliflower, onions, garlic, and asiago cheese



There was a lovely head of orange cauliflower in last Thursday's CSA box. Tonight it morphed into an even lovelier risotto. Here's how it happened.

• I didn't have any stock around, so I put a potato, 3 old small carrots, part of a turnip, half an onion, a handful of green beans, some parsley, and a teaspoon of Verdurette (see below) in a pot with about 6 cups of water and set it to boiling.
• I rinsed and cut the cauliflower into florets which I put into a roasting pan, tossed with 1 tablespoon olive oil and some salt and pepper, and put into a 400 degree oven.
• While the stock boiled and the cauliflower roasted (I stirred it around every once and a while), I minced 3 small cloves of garlic and a leftover half of a white onion and began to sautee that in about a teaspoon of olive oil
• When the onions were soft and starting to brown, I added half a box of arborio rice and sauteed that for a few minutes with the onions and garlic, then I began to add the hot broth (I left it on low and scooped out liquid from around the vegetables with a measuring cup) 1/2 - 1 cup at a time, stirring pretty constantly
• In between stirrings, I grated some asiago cheese - about 3/4 cup I'd say.
• After about 20 minutes or so, the rice was cooked and the cauliflower was starting to brown but not yet mushy. I mixed the cauliflower into the rice, then mixed in the cheese and a little salt and pepper.
• We added a spinach salad (spinach from the CSA box, dried cranberries, walnuts and a little feta cheese, balsamic vinagrette) and that was dinner.
• Yummy!

Verdurette is a recipe to preserve vegetables with salt, French, as you can tell from the name. You can find many versions if you search on-line. I leaned to make this at a food preservation class I took with Leda Meredith http://ledameredith.net/wordpress/ her recipe is basically 4 parts vegetables (1 part each leafy greens, root vegetables, alliums, & fresh herbs) and 1 part salt.