Baked Spinach and Mushroom Rigatoni

It’s been a cold start to spring here and we were craving a nice hot casserole.  I found a recipe that intrigued me in a magazine, but about an hour before dinner time I realized that this “baked” casserole was actually cooked in a slow cooker and took 4 hours.  PAH.  So I winged it.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and find yourself a large 9 x 13″ baking dish.

Quarter a red onion and slice it up.

Wrangle yourself about 1lb mixed mushrooms and slice them.  I found these handy mixed packages at the grocery store.

Crack open a 28oz can of diced tomatoes.

Defrost 2 10oz blocks of frozen spinach.

Also, grate up about 1 cup mozzarella cheese.

Boil up a pot of salted water and cook 1lb rigatoni.  When it’s cooked (it can be on the al dente side), drain it and set it aside.

Now, haul out a frying pan, add some oil and butter to it, and sauté your onions until softened and starting to brown. Mix that with a few teaspoons minced garlic.

Dip those out and do the same for your mushrooms.

Now you line up your ingredients.

Mix them all up, except for the cheese.

Now here’s the thing.  This recipe actually called for you to add about 4 cups ricotta cheese at this point.  I even bought the ricotta.  But I forgot.  So there wasn’t any.  So I leave it up to you whether you want to add it or not.  But you probably should.  Mine ended up feeling like it needed more sauce.

Plop your pasta mix in your casserole dish and sprinkle the top with mozzarella.

Bake for 30 minutes, until cheese is melted and everything is bubbly.  Serve with a sprinkle of parmesan cheese.

Eggs Benny, Two Ways

Two weeks ago the Pie and I decided to head downtown for a late Saturday breakfast and we ended up at the Bagel Cafe, which is consistently voted as having the best breakfast in town almost every year.  We’d never been before, so it was an interesting experience — the place is pretty cozy so I wouldn’t recommend going in a big group — but the menu was massive and I had the best breakfast I have ever had.  It was eggs Benedict served with a sliver of smoked salmon and a dreamy, creamy Hollandaise, but instead of the standard English muffin, this poached beauty was perched atop a genuine Newfoundland cod fish cake.  It was truly one of the more divine things I have eaten in recent memory.

And I can’t stop thinking about it.  So I had to recreate it.  I mean, who did I think I was?  This, then, is what I did the following weekend.

So first, for the man I married who refuses to eat fish, I whipped up another batch of English muffins.  And then I learned that he has never had eggs Benedict before.  I was shocked.  I order them pretty much every time we go out for breakfast, but it never occurred to me to find out if he had ever done the same.  And then I made the fish cakes, which conveniently store well in the refrigerator.

For the Hollandaise, you want to get your whisking arm limbered up.  Set a large pot of water to simmer on your stove and find a metal bowl that fits snugly over the opening but that does not touch the water (if you’re poaching eggs you probably have a large pot of water already on the simmer so this makes things easy).  While that’s heating up melt as well 10 tablespoons unsalted butter and set that somewhere convenient.

Into the metal bowl goes 3 egg yolks and 1 tablespoon lemon juice.  Whisk that until it’s frothy.  

Set the bowl over the pot and keep whisking.  Lift the bowl away from the heat every once in a while to make sure that it doesn’t get too hot and curdle.

Keep whisking until you produce a thick creamy substance that forms strings when you lift the whisk away.  This is called a sabayon, and that’s basically the structure of your Hollandaise base right there.

Away from the heat, and whisking all the while, trickle in your nice hot melted butter and mix until fully incorporated.

Season with salt and pepper.

And maybe a little Tabasco sauce.  Taste it and season again accordingly.

Keep the Hollandaise warm (but not hot) while the rest of your chaotic morning is going on.  I did this by putting it a bowl of hot water.  This is enough sauce for 4-6 eggs, by the way.

You should also be toasting your English muffins (if you’re using them) and frying up your fish cakes (which you should be eating because they’re awesome).  And if you’re using peameal bacon, fry that up as well.

Now everything else is a matter of timing.  Everyone has their own methods for poaching eggs, and how long they take will depend on the size of the egg, how many you are cooking, water temperature, blah blah blah.  Gordon Ramsay had a neat tip, though: swirl the water into a vortex before sliding in your egg.  The circular direction of the water will ensure that all those little tendrils of egg will end up stuck to the egg itself, making the finished product nice and round.  I also tried the Julia Child method here, where you poke a small hole in the fat end of the egg with a pin.

Then you get your water simmering and you dunk each egg for 10-15 seconds and then you haul them out.  This pre-cooks the whites a little bit so the egg stays in shape a bit better.

THEN you add a bit of vinegar to the water.

And crack your eggs into the barely simmering stuff, one by one. Let them do their thing for 3-4 minutes, depending on how hard you like ‘em poached. When they were done I plopped them in a bowl of hot water to stay warm while I set everything up.  This also washes the vinegar off the eggs. Drain them on a clean towel before you put them on your muffins or they’ll get soggy.

Smear a dab of Hollandaise on your toasted muffin, layer on a piece of peameal bacon, follow that with the egg and more Hollandaise and a sprinkle of parsley or chives and salt and pepper.

Alternately, plop a dollop of sauce on your crispy fish cake, ladle on the egg, more sauce, and a flake of smoked salmon.

Eat it while it’s hot!

Guinness Lamb Stew with Wild Rice

I know you all think I’m weird because I don’t like soup.  But spooning hot liquid into my mouth (and spilling it down my face, because that’s how I roll) is not my idea of a good time.  I do, however, have a fondness for stew.  Especially stew with beer in it, because beer is a great tenderizer of things.  And because I like beer.

I’ve had this stewing lamb in my freezer for a while and I decided it was probably time I do something about it.

So I took it out, put it on a plate, and patted it dry with a paper towel.

Then, in a bowl, I took a small scoop of flour, added salt and pepper, and gave it a stir.

Into that I hucked the lamb cubes, and gave them a stir as well.

I heated up my trusty cast iron skillet with a few tablespoons olive oil inside.  Then, shaking the excess flour off the lamb, I plopped it in the skillet to brown.

While that was going on I cut up some vegetables: carrots, an onion, and a package of mushrooms.

I didn’t have any potatoes, that classic stew thickener, so I decided to use rice.  This wild rice blend from Trader Joe’s is excellent.

I took the browned lamb cubes out and put them on a plate to rest a few minutes.

Then I added a bit more oil to the pan and chucked in the vegetables, giving the onions a wee bit of a head start in the cooking.

Once they’ve softened you can add the rest.

Now you can chuck the meat back in.  Then I plopped in some parsley, Newfoundland savoury, rosemary, and thyme.  If I’d had sage I would have used that, just to make up the lyrics to that “Scarborough Fair” song.

I also added a few more tablespoons flour.

At this point I ran out of space in my pan so I transferred the contents of the skillet to a larger saucepan.  I used a bit of beef broth to deglaze the pan a bit and poured that into the pot, along with the rest of the beef broth (about 3 cups).

Then came two cans of Guinness stout (minus a sip or two, for quality control of course).

Then the rice.

Then I brought it to a simmer, lowered the heat, and let that gently bubble away, stirring every so often, for about an hour.

Excellent. Even more so the next day.

ChickenSalsaCheese

Cait:  the whole recipe is: you take chicken and you put salsa and cheese.

You can read the instructions above ↑ or the ones below ↓.  The results will be the same.

This recipe is an oldie, but a goodie.  The first time Cait cooked me dinner, probably over a decade ago, it was this dish.  She’s been pressuring me to put it on the blog for a while now, so I’m capitulating.  

This recipe involves three ingredients, no more, no less.  Though if you wanted to add a side of rice or other vegetables, feel free.  Only Cait will judge you.  And she will judge you hard.

Cait and I have been trying for years to come up with enough ridiculous three-ingredient recipes to make a cookbook.  So far, we have ChickenSalsaCheese.  Although really that’s probably enough, with variations like ChickenFingersSrirachaBrie. It would be a quick read.

Preheat your oven to 375°F.

Take a dish.  Put some chicken in it.  However much you want.  Or that fits in the dish, probably in a single layer. I may have put some salt and pepper on the chicken. Don’t tell Cait.

Take some salsa.  Put that in the dish too, so it’s all up in the chicken’s grill.  Whatever kind you want.

Take some cheese.  Grate some.  However much you want.  Then sprinkle that on top of the salsa and the cheese.

Bung that in the oven.  Cait cooks everything for 45 minutes at 375°F.  Even hot dogs, she says.  So she bakes this for 45 minutes.  I suggest a little less, but that will depend on how much chicken you have and whether or not it’s on the bone.  And how much insulating salsa and cheese you’ve plonked on it.  Properly cooked chicken has an internal temperature of 160°F and its juices run clear if you cut it.  So go with that benchmark and you should be good.

For the sake of colour and substance (I am married to a boy after all), we served our ChickenSalsaCheese with rice and some kale chips.  The Pie even folded his into a wrap.  Cait was unhappy when I texted her a photo of it (not an Instagram – I’m not that much of a hipster), but she lives 3000km away and can’t do anything about it. Yum!

The King of Cream Soups

This is a variation on my other cream of broccoli soup recipe, but I like this one better because it uses less cream and the thickener is cauliflower instead of starchy potatoes.

And I have called it the king of cream soups because it’s my favourite of them all.

And also because I found this old cushion cover embroidered by one of my great aunts and decided it would make a nice backdrop.

Start with your vegetables: onions, broccoli, and cauliflower. I ended up making a relatively small soup, so I only used 1 onion, 2 heads broccoli, and half a head cauliflower.

Chop the onion up relatively fine and heave it in a pot with some olive oil and some minced garlic. Sautée that on medium heat until the onions are translucent.

While that’s on the go, chop up your broccoli.

Shave the tough skin off the stems and use that as well.

Broccoli is good for you, so use it all.

Do the same with the cauliflower.

Heave those in the pot as well, and give them a stir.

At this point I added about 4 cups chicken stock, but you can use as much as you’d like, or water, or any other stock.  Enough to make a soup of it, I guess.

Then I simmered it until I could squish the cauliflower with the back of my spoon (broccoli will become squishier faster, so the cauliflower should be your test).

Then out comes my brszzht — I mean, immersion blender.

And now you add the sauciness: here we have dijon mustard, Worcestershire (“wooster”) sauce, a dash of cream and two big spoonfuls of plain yogurt. Give those a good stir to mix.

Serve it hot (I guess you could serve it cold if you liked, but that’s weird) with some grated cheddar cheese.

Fit for royalty?  Absolutely.

Wingin’ it Wednesday: Oliver’s Stew

Sometimes things don’t always work out exactly how you want them to.  But that’s okay, because you can learn from what you’ve done and move on.  So while this recipe was a little bland for my liking, I’m sure with the right combination of spices it would make a great mid-winter slow-cooker bowl of comfort.  I called it “Oliver’s Stew” because it has a gruel-like consistency that reminded me so much of the musical based on Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, specifically, this song. Nonetheless, I know some of you out there like your stews to be on the mushy side, so maybe this one is for you.

I started with some chicken thighs, and pulled the skin off them. There are only a few people in the world I will handle raw chicken for. The Pie is lucky to be one of them.

Then I quickly browned them in a cast iron skillet.

Cut up an onion and some garlic.

And gathered some herbs: mustard, rosemary, and savoury.

A red pepper.

Some chick peas.

Some rice.

And some chicken broth.

I hucked that all in the slow cooker with some salt and pepper and let ‘er rip. I ended up adding more liquid later on as it all got sucked into the rice.

Shortly before serving I added some frozen corn and peas for colour.

And there you have it — the chicken has fallen off the bone and lays in these lovely strips and the peas and corn and pepper add a nice pop of colour.

Pork Ragu with Fettucine

Oh winter.

While Gren may adore this particular season (at least until his little feet get cold), I do not. Some days I just want to wrap myself up in as many blankets as I own (which is quite a few) and count down the days until spring. But I can’t, and this is why people invented comfort food.

This particular recipe comes from a recent issue of Real Simple magazine, and it does the trick. The Pie and I have a resolution to use our slow cooker more (because it’s AWESOME), and it was really nice to come home the other day to a house that smelled like awesome had been slow-cooking in it for hours and hours. And the preparation takes no time at all. I did ours the afternoon before, which was a weekend, and put it in the fridge overnight. Then before I left for work the next morning I popped the crock on the pot and turned it on and blamo kablam it was done.

So let’s get around to that preparation, shall we?

Start by scrubbing and chopping up a large carrot. I ended up using two because I wasn’t sure if mine qualified as large or not. Do the same with a medium onion and 2 cloves of garlic (I may have used the whole head, but I really like garlic and this head was pretty old).

For spices, you’re going to need about 1 teaspoon dried thyme, 1 teaspoon dried oregano, and about 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt and 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper. But feel free to add more or less if you choose.

You also need a large (14oz) can of diced tomatoes and a small can of tomato paste. The recipe calls for just 2 tablespoons of the paste, but that’s like a third of the can and I would just have to figure out what to do with the rest of it so I used the whole can.

Chuck all your vegetables and spices and canned goods in a 4-6 quart slow cooker (for scale, this one is 6 quarts).

And you need a hunk of pork shoulder or pork butt (haha, butt), about 1 1/2 lb.

Trim off the larger hunks of fat and cut the shoulder/butt in half.

Pop that in the slow cooker as well and give everything a stir to coat it in tomato juice (the acids in the tomatoes will help to tenderize that sucker).

Cover it and let it cook on high for 5 to 6 hours or low for 7 to 8 hours, until the pork is super dooper tender.

About twenty minutes before you want to eat, cook up a package of fettuccine according to the package instructions (normally fettuccine takes about 12 minutes to cook to al dente).

While that’s on the go, take two forks and shred all that lovely slow-cooked pork in the slow cooker.

Drain your pasta and plop it into the slow cooker on top of the pork stuff and give it a thorough stir.

Serve, spraying bits of tomato juice everywhere (at least, that’s what I did). Grate some parmesan on top and eat your way into ragù heaven.

The recipe says it serves four but the Pie and I think that serving size is immense, so we would say that it more accurately serves 6-8, and it’s especially good the next day when all the juices have been sucked into the fettuccine. When I brought it to work everyone became jealous of my delicious leftover lunch.

Wingin’ It Wednesday: Rooty Toot-Toot Soup

I made this as a fridge clean-out soup back before Christmas.  I had some beets left over from making lip gloss and I sure as heck wasn’t going to eat them as-is (because beets, to me, taste like dirt).  Couldn’t waste them, though.  Nope.  So I thought I would chuck them in a soup, hide the flavour that way, while revealing the lovely colour that they do have going for them.

First I chopped up an onion and sautéed it with garlic in olive oil until it was soft.  Then I added in chopped carrots, parsnips, and a sweet potato.

We’d had some steaks the night before and I’d fried up three from the package.  The leftover one had been rather runty and was so marbled I thought the Pie might find it too tough, so I basically minced it and chucked that in as well, with some beef broth.

Simmer that down until the vegetables are soft, then purée them with an immersion blender and shazam, cheery, rosy soup! If you find it a little thick, feel free to thin with water or more broth.

Pork Tenderloin with Pomegranate Braised Cabbage

I actually cooked this recipe up on Hallowe’en, but with my garnish it looked so darned festive I had to push back the publishing date to sometime when people start thinking of roasting chestnuts and Frosty the Snowman.  But for authenticity I am listening to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor while I type this up.  Spooky.  Yet festive.

Anyway, there are lots of things you can do with pork tenderloin, and they’re extra handy when you’re in a rush because they cook so quickly. In addition to roasting up nice and tender in the oven, you can also slice up raw tenderloin into medallions for a fast fry, which is what we do here.  This recipe, modified a bit, comes from a recent Every Day Food.

First you want to peel off all the silvery skin on your pork tenderloin, to make it extra tender.

Then you can slice it up into relatively thin medallions.  Mine are about 3/4″-1″ thick.

Then you will take a small cabbage (red one will be prettier, but I prefer the taste of green) like this one.

And chop it all up into shreds.

Now, heat some oil in your beautifully seasoned cast iron skillet and cook your pork medallions on medium-high until they are done all the way through and slightly brown on the outside.  Put them on a plate somewhere and cover them to keep them warm.

Then take your cabbage and plop it in your still hot skillet.  Cook that, tossing occasionally, until it’s all wilted.

Then pour in about 1 1/2 cups pomegranate juice.

Raise the heat a little bit and let that simmer down until it’s reduced to about half and starts to thicken.  I used unsweetened juice, so I suspect if mine had had more sugar in it it might have thickened a bit more (notice how there are two incidences of duplicated words in that sentence?).  At this point, add in about 3 tablespoons butter and a dash of red wine vinegar and you’re ready to serve.

I garnished my rather sadly coloured green cabbage with some steamed frozen peas and some fresh pomegranate seeds for festivity’s sake, and we had roasted potatoes on the side.  It was highly tasty.

Spaghetti Squash “Pasta” with Bacon, Mushrooms … and Squash

It’s only after he spends the evening helping me put all this together that the Pie tells me he doesn’t like spaghetti squash.  Well, too bad.  I like it just fine.  And it’s a great gluten-free pasta replacement.  Plus it’s good for you and stuff.  Not to mention kind of cool.  This recipe involves a bit of pre-preparation, but then you can just toss everything together at the end and it looks like you planned it or something.

Start by preheating your oven to 400°F.  Put a cooling rack on a baking sheet and line it with BACON.  However much bacon you want. Alternately, you could fry this up, but I figured I’d do all the cooking parts at the same time, plus I needed the stove top for the other stuff.

Take a spaghetti squash, cut it in half and scoop out the stringy bits and seeds.  Brush with olive oil, salt, and pepper and place cut side down on another baking sheet.  I also cut up another, non-spaghetti squash I had lying around and put that on the sheet as well.

Shove the bacon and the squash into the oven.  Let the squash roast for about 45 minutes, until it’s all tender and smooshy.

Cook the bacon, flipping halfway through, for 15 to 20 minutes, or until it’s as crispy as you like it.

Gren tried being extra affectionate with the Pie in the hopes he might get some bacon.  His dastardly plot was unsuccessful.

While that’s on the go, cut up some other vegetables.  I used an onion, cut into strips, and some mushrooms, sliced.

I sautéed the mushrooms in a bit of butter and caramelized the onions in olive oil on low heat.

Then I chucked the bacon (chopped) in the pan with the onions and mushrooms and left that on a low heat while I prepared the squash.

I cut up the other squash into cubes and tossed that into the pan.

Then I took a fork and went to work on the insides of the spaghetti squash.

I love how it really looks like spaghetti.

Then I chucked all that into the pan as well and tossed it.

Added in a jar of basil pesto, gave it a good stir.

Tada.  It ain’t pretty but b’y was it tasty. Especially with a bit of parmesan cheese dusted over top.