“Mexican” Rice

I’m not sure how truly “authentic” this particular recipe is, but it makes for a good side for our enchiladas.  The Pie found this recipe on the internet in preparation for a potluck, I think.  It’s very easy, and it makes you look like you know what you’re doing.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Mince a small onion and chuck it in a pan with about two tablespoons vegetable oil and two teaspoons minced garlic and sauté them until translucent.

Toss in one teaspoon chili powder and one tablespoon ground cumin and stir it around.

Pour in one cup uncooked rice.  Pour in two cups chicken stock.  Then add about 1/4 cup of spaghetti or other tomato sauce.

Bring it to a boil.

Pour the whole thing into a casserole dish and stir it to evenly distribute the rice. 

Cover it with aluminum foil and bake it for about 35-40 minutes, until the stock is all absorbed and the rice is tender.

Let it rest for about five minutes before serving.  It’s best to transfer it to a nice bowl so you can stir everything up again.

We had it with enchiladas.  Mmm.

Chicken Enchiladas

This is one of the Pie’s favourite things to make, and one of my favourite things to eat. Being the Pie, he got the recipe from the internet.  Being us, we’ve modified it a little.

It’s definitely a team effort to make, though.  There’s a lot of timing involved, especially if you’re waiting on other dishes.

First, you need to poach some chicken.  You can do this way ahead of time if you like — which I do.

Plop your chicken (you’ll need enough for about 3-4 cups cooked and chopped) in a saucepan with about half water, half chicken stock, and enough liquid to cover the chicken completely. Bring it to a point where it’s just barely bubbling and leave it like that for a while, until the chicken is cooked through.

Drain your chicken and leave it to cool.

Pull the chicken apart with two forks or your fingers so it looks all shredded.  Set it aside for a spell.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Grate 2 cups cheddar cheese.  We made the mistake of using low-fat cheese, which of course doesn’t melt that well.  Always go full fat when it comes to your dairy.

Mince up a large onion.

Coat a large skillet with oil and fry up the onion until it’s translucent, a few minutes.

Add about two tablespoons minced garlic and cook it for another minute or so.

Pour in a 24oz can of crushed or puréed tomatoes.  Then start adding chili powder to taste, probably about two tablespoons.

Let it simmer, but don’t let it get too thick.  Remove from the heat after a few minutes.

Now, mix about 1/4 of your sauce with the cooked chicken, as well as 1/4 of the cheese. 

Stir it up good and set it aside.

Now using the skillet you cooked your sauce in (now empty, but not cleaned), add a bit of oil and heat it up.

Spread a bit of the sauce in a plate and use it to coat both sides of 12 tortillas with sauce. 

Fry them up in the skillet by plopping them in.  Wait until air bubbles start coming up and flip it.  Repeat. 

Plop it on a plate and line the centre with some of your chicken mixture. 

Roll them up and line a pyrex baking dish with them.  You might find it helpful to spread the bottom of the dish with some sauce first, just to keep things from sticking.

Pour the remaining sauce on top of the rolled enchiladas.

Sprinkle with the rest of the cheese.

Bake for about ten minutes, until the cheese is all melty.  It’s handy to use a metal spatula to serve it.

We had ours with Mexican rice and Caesar salad.  YUM.

Polenta Patties

This was a total experiment.

The Pie and I had never tried polenta before, so I bought a tube a while back.  The first time, I just sliced it up and fried it and it was fine, but a little bland.  I had to get rid of the rest of the tube (loaf?), but I wasn’t sold enough on the taste to have a repeat performance of the first time.

I broke the tube/loaf up into chunks and warmed it a bit in the microwave.

Using my hands I smushed it all up into its little bits.

I added minced garlic-in-a-jar and basil-from-a-tube (Pie calls it “green poo”) and mixed that up. 

I tried forming it into patties but it wasn’t sticking, so I added an egg.  You can see my failed patty attempt.

Patties were formed.  In hindsight I should have made them smaller, as you can see later that only the smallest patty remained intact.

I slid them onto a hot skillet with a teaspoon of butter.  It’s handy in these situations to use this weird spatula.  I believe it’s for fish, but anyway, it’s good at handling delicate items (like fish).

Browned on both sides.  If you can keep them together.

And served with some fresh basil.  Not bad. We ate ours with chili.

Best Chicken Sandwich – Ever.

At least that’s what the recipe says.  A recipe for a sammy.  Don’t that just beat all …  Nevertheless this is super easy and super awesome and it serves two, for a romantically messy meal you can eat with your fingers.

It’s from a book called Food Cook Eat by Lulu Grimes that my mother gave to the Pie for Christmas a few years back.  Page 108 for those of you following along at home.

First, slice up a tomato, half an avocado, and wash some leaves of lettuce (get fancy and use arugula or frisé or whatever), and set those aside.

Cut two large pieces of ciabatta or Turkish bread in half horizontally and put that aside as well.

Take a boneless, skinless chicken breast (or a boned, skin-covered one and work some magic with it, which is what I did), trim off the excess sinew and fat, and cut it in half horizontally.

Flatten the pieces out a bit by hitting them with the side of your knife, the flat of a cleaver, your fist, or a mallet.  Work out your frustrations, but don’t go crazy and break the flesh.  You just want to thin it out a little.

Heat one tablespoon olive oil in a large pan and slip in the breast pieces, cooking them on both sides for a few minutes until brown and cooked through.  Sprinkle them with some lemon juice and take them out of the pan.  Put ’em on a plate or something.

Take your bread pieces and put them, cut side down, in the pan. Press them down a bit to soak up the chicken and lemon juices and leave them in there for a minute or two.

When you take the bread out of the pan, rub the cut side with a garlic clove, cut in half, then generously spread all the pieces with mayonnaise. 

Put a piece of chicken on the bottom pieces of the bread. 

Top with tomato, avocado, and lettuce, seasoning with salt and pepper as you go. 

Plop the top of the bread back on and eat the crap out of that thing.  Tada: your sammich.

Go-to Garlic Basil Vinaigrette

Salads here in Newfoundland is a rare t’ing, b’y.  At least for us.  It’s hard to get vegetables that you want to look at that closely.

What this means is we don’t buy those huge bottles of salad dressing, which are usually too strong, too full of extra stuff we don’t want to put in our bodies, and last for way longer than you like the flavour.

We make our little vinaigrettes instead.

The trick with a good vinaigrette is in the emulsification of the olive oil with the vinegar.  You can do this by shaking it vigourously in a closed container, or by whipping it to a frenzy with a whisk.  The choice is yours.

Here we’ve got about two tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, three tablespoons vintage balsamic vinegar, a teaspoon dried basil and another teaspoon minced garlic.  But you can put whatever you want in there.

Shake it up good and stick it in your fridge for up to two weeks.  The flavours will actually improve the longer you leave it in there.

Sweet and Sour Pork, Thai Style

This little hummer (to channel my dad) is on page 210 of 400 Recipes: Wok & Stir-Fry edited by Jenni Fleetwood, which I gave the Pie for Christmas years ago.  I also gave him a wok, which has since self-destructed, but enough about that.

We made this recipe precisely because we had exactly those ingredients in our fridge and we needed to use them up.  And I got to use my new scale on this recipe, too, which was a plus.

Slice yourself up 350g/12oz lean pork (about four small boneless porkchops).  If you put the pork into the freezer for about 30-40 minutes beforehand it will be easy to slice it into thin pieces.  I didn’t do this, and that’s why my pork bits are fat.  But they are happy with the way they look, thank you very much.Cut one small red onion into thin slices (we had half, so were content with that).  Seed a red pepper (see my how-to on doing this quickly) and dice it.  Seed half a cucumber (cut it into quarters and slice off the seed part) and cut it into thin strips.  I misread the recipe at this point so mine ended up in chunks.  Pauvre moi.While you’re in the process of seeding, why don’t you take the seeds out of two plum tomatoes (we used roma) and cut them into wedges as well?  As a finishing touch, cut 115g/4oz of pineapple into chunks (more if you like the stuff, see my how-to on coring) and slice 2 spring onions or scallions (we used 4 green onions) into thin strips.  I set all the veggies in a nice mise en place for the Pie so he’d have everything at hand.  In a small bowl, mix together one tablespoon brown sugar with two tablespoons fish sauce and some ground black pepper.Heat two tablespoons oil in a wok or large frying pan.  Drop in four cloves of garlic, thinly sliced (or, if you are us, 4 spoonfuls of garlic in a jar).  Cook over medium heat until golden, then add the pork and stir-fry for four or five minutes.  Slide in the onion slices and toss.

Add your fish sauce mixture and toss over the heat for three or four more minutes.

Drop in your fruits and vegetables and stir-fry for another three to four minutes, until the vegetables are tender.

Spoon into a bowl (we served ours over rice) and garnish with more sliced onions or fresh cilantro if that floats your boat.  Serves four.

Easy Roasted Vegetables

It’s still winter here.  Honest.

Comfort food time.

Roasted vegetables are a good way to get in your food groups in a way that will keep you interested in maintaining your quotas.  I don’t eat roasted vegetables as often as I should, but they’re a nice way to jazz up a regular plate of meat, side, side, and they’re as easy as Pie (he’s really easy, trust me).  Plus stuff that has been sitting in your refrigerator for a little too long roasts just as well as the stuff you just bought.

Vegetables that roast well are things such as squash, zucchini, eggplant, onions, carrots, potatoes, and garlic.

I am also experimenting here with parsnips and turnip.  You should also experiment.  Try tomatoes, pears, greens … Just give ’em all a good scrub first.

Preheat your oven to 400°F.

Cut up your vegetables (in this case, carrots, parsnips, rootabega, squash, onion, red pepper, and eggplant) into pieces of a good size – the kind of size you’d want looking at you on a plate.

Toss them in a roasting pan with olive oil, sea salt, pepper, and the dried herb of your choice (optional, but rosemary works well).  Here I used whole black peppercorns.

Roast, tossing once or twice, for about an hour, until everything is shriveled, crispy, and tender.  Serve hot with your meal. We had it with pork tenderloin.  Turnips/rootabegas, by the way, need parboiling before roasting.  They just cook so much slower than everything else.  The vegetables are also good cold the next day.  I plan to make a soup from the leftovers.  Stay tuned for that recipe.

Broccomeat/Broccofu

Did I mention that we are broke students who live in Newfoundland, a rock in the middle of the north Pacific Atlantic Ocean?

This recipe arose out of necessity, when the only vegetable we could get in the winter that was half decent was broccoli, and the only protein we could afford was a block of tofu or a thin frying steak that cost two dollars.

Fortunately, we take after our respective parents, and do not lack for condiments.

This is a Pie recipe, and until the night he let me photograph it, I never knew the secret.  Of course, as he says, improvisation is quintessential, and the recipe is not exactly the same every night.  Accordingly, I have provided you with alternative ingredient options: the tofu option (“broccofu”), the steak option (“broccomeat”), the teriyaki version (sweeter), and the black bean version (more sour).

Separate two small heads of broccoli into individual florets, and slice up the tender part of the stem, while you’re at it.

Cube a block of firm tofu — the firmer the better, because it will disintegrate on you.  I love cutting tofu.  It’s like extra hard Jello.

Alternatively, slice a thin uncooked steak into strips.

In a large pan or wok, heat up two tablespoons of peanut or other frying oil with a tablespoon each of minced garlic and ginger from a jar.  If you are doing the teriyaki version, omit the ginger.

When your oil is sizzling with your minced herbs, add your tofu or your steak and allow to brown for a few minutes.  While it’s doing its thing, mix together, in a small bowl, a tablespoon of each of the following (2 if you’re feeling saucy):

black bean sauce (it’s more of a paste) / alternatively / teriyaki sauce

garlic black bean sauce (it’s more of a liquid) / alternatively / sweet and sour sauce

peanut oil

soy sauce

hoi sin sauce

garlic chili sauce

plum sauce

I know.  Everything seems to have garlic in it.  Trust me.  It works out.  Don’t be afraid to improvise with what you have and experiment to cater to your own tastes.  Stir fries are meant to be made up.

Pour the sauce into the pan and stir the tofu/steak until coated.  The Pie wishes to point out that the reason he adds the sauce before the broccoli is because he finds that the florets act like sponges and suck all the sauce away unless it has a chance to coat the other ingredients first.

After mixing in the sauce, drop in your broccoli florets and stems, and heat until the broccoli is bright green.

Serves 2 over rice.  With the rice, the whole thing costs you less than $4.  My cheap brother Kristopf would be proud.

White Bean Dip with Roasted Red Pepper

I got this baby from the Ontario White Bean Producers website.  And then of course I modified it.

First you take your beans.  The recipe called for 2 cups of white beans (white navy beans).  I thought this meant 2 cups of RAW beans, but no, it meant 2 cups of COOKED beans.  As a result, I have SO VERY MUCH bean dip.

Anyway, take your beans, in any form.  If they’re raw, give ’em a good cook.  Simmer them in a pot of water for about an hour.  Make sure that your water doesn’t totally evaporate, and add more water if you have to — burnt beans is a smell no one needs to have in the kitchen.

While your beans are cooking (or sitting politely in their can, waiting on your convenience), take a pan and sauté yourself a finely chopped onion with some fresh sage (or frozen sage if you’ve got it).  Once the onions are translucent, remove pan from heat and plop in 6 or 7 cloves roasted garlic (about one head) just to get them warm and toasty.

In a large bowl (with the aid of an immersion blender) or food processor, combine your cooked beans, your onion/garlic/sage mixture, one or two roasted red peppers, cut in strips (from a jar or make ’em yourself), a few dashes of balsamic vinegar, and a pinch or so of sea salt.  Blend that thing silly until it’s smooth and creamy.

Pile 'em on and blend 'em silly.

Serve as a dip with pita chips or crackers, or use as a bean base in quesadillas, wraps, and sandwiches.

Because I have so very much dip, I managed to foist some off on D and J, and I’m going to try to freeze the rest.  I will let you know how that goes.

Pita chips are yummy.

Basic Burgers

Today is the first day after the Pie and I finished our month-long vegetarian experiment.  Accordingly, we’re going to MEAT IT UP and have ourselves some burgers tonight.  So much for easing back into omnivorism.

There are two very important things to remember when making burgers by hand.  The first is to buy no leaner than a medium ground chuck.  You may think you’ve made a healthy choice with a leaner ground but your burger will not stick together and will crumble as it cooks.  The second is to touch the meat as little as possible, which is quite a feat considering you need to hand-form the patties.  But it is doable, and making your own burgers really isn’t that hard.

There is a third thing you should know about burgers: KEEP IT SIMPLE.  Remember that you are frying or grilling up some ground meat, which, as it cooks, will secrete slippery oil and will shrink into individual particles.  This means that cohesiveness is an issue when making burgers, which is why you don’t touch them too much or get too rough with them.  The more stuff you add to the chuck before forming it into the patty, the more you risk a crumbling burger.  If you’re going to add things to the meat, make sure they’re small things so they don’t mess with the burger’s internal structure.

Gonna get gooey.

So you take your meat.  We made some of these patties out of medium ground beef and others from ground chicken.  I like to leave it out of the fridge for a while because you are going to be working it in your hands and manipulating cold ground meat feels like sticking your hands in the northern Pacific in the winter (which I have done and don’t recommend).  The amount of meat you use depends on the number of burgers you want, obviously.  We find a kilo of ground makes about 9 3-inch patties.

Put your meat in a large bowl that you can easily get your hands into.  Remove your rings and roll up your sleeves.  This is going to get gooey.

Finely (and I’m talking FINE) dice a medium onion and chuck that in with the meat.  Add a few teaspoons of minced garlic from a jar, and a few sprinkles of dried oregano and basil (or any herb of your choice) and a pinch or two of sea salt and ground pepper.  If you’re feeling adventurous you can add a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce and/or Tabasco sauce.  Don’t go too crazy with your ingredients, because you need the meat to be able to stick to itself as it cooks.

If you have no confidence in your patty cohesiveness, or if you have ignored me and purchased lean ground beef, you can add an egg or two, but I think that’s cheating.  Eggs are useful in meatloaf, but they don’t really belong in burgers.  ON burgers, but not IN burgers.

Working quickly, mix the meat with your hands until all your ingredients are just combined.

Grab a handful of the mixture and pat it gently into a patty about the size of your palm.  Make a thumbprint indentation in the centre of the patty and set it aside.  The indentation will keep the patty from contracting too much as it cooks.  Repeat until all the meat is gone.

You can freeze your patties for use at a later date.  Simply separate the patties with wax paper and place them in a freezer bag, tightly sealed, with the air removed.

Heat a large skillet with a bit of olive oil (or a grill, or even a broiler) and get those patties on there.  Once the patties are on the hot surface, you leave them the hell alone.  You may flip the burgers, but you can only do it ONCE, usually about five to ten minutes into the cooking, depending on how well done you like your meat.  Safety-wise, your burger should be cooked to an internal temperature of 160°F.

If you like cheese on your burger, put a few slices on after you have flipped the patty and they will melt into the meat.

Serve on a bun of your choice with the toppings you like.  Very much a crowd-pleaser, and it covers four food groups.