Mediterranean Chickpea Salad

Salad
2 cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/2 cucumber, diced
Red pepper, diced
1/2 red onion, diced
Chopped parsley
Feta cheese crumbles

Dressing:

Zest and juice of one lemon
1 garlic clove, mashed into a paste
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Combine salad ingredients in a large bowl. Combine dressing ingredients in a small jar or sealed container, shake until well mixed. Pour dressing over salad and toss well. Allow salad to sit in the refrigerator for one hour before eating.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Top Iron Chef Cambridge

Can I first just say that I am SUPER excited for Top Chef: All Stars to premiere tonight? Top Chef is one of my favorite shows ever. I like to express my inner culinary nerd every once in a while. It's bound to be really dramatic and the food will be crazy - all of the contestants are immensely talented. I recently ate at Mike Isabella's (from the Voltaggio season...is one of them on the new show???) Mediterranean restaurant in D.C. and it was an incredible experience. I feel like maybe I might do some Top Chef analysis in this blog over the next season...how do we feel about that?

Over these last two nights, it was more like Iron Chef Cambridge, and the secret ingredient was 2 small strip steaks I bought on sale one day.

Meal #1

Balsamic Glazed Steak
I marinaded the first steak in a clove of chopped garlic, 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and salt and pepper. I let it sit about 30 minutes, then seared it in a super-hot pan with olive oil and butter. It's so thin it takes only 5 minutes to cook. The sugars in the vinegar caramelize and give the meat a crusty outside.



Arugula Salad with Pears and Blue Cheese
Totally simple and utterly delicious. Arugula leaves, crumbles of blue cheese, diced ripe pears, and a handful of thinly sliced shallots (what I had left from Thanksgiving). Pears and cheese is one of my favorite winter treats. I didn't even make a real dressing - I just sprinkled the salad itself with olive oil, my beautiful 18-year aged balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper. It is sweet, tart, and crispy.



Meal #2

Pan-cooked Strip Steak with Blue Cheese
I didn't fuss with the meat on my second evening. The steak was simply coated in pepper and seasoned salt, and cooked very quickly in butter and olive oil. As I took it off the pan to rest, I sprinkled the steak with some blue cheese crumbles. I covered it with foil and let it sit for 5 minutes. When the foil came off, the cheese had melted ever so slightly. Then I laid it on top of more arugula dressed with balsamic vinegar.



Roasted Dill Potatoes
I love dill - I think its a very underrated herb. It's absolutely delicious on roasted potatoes. Mine were medium size red-skinned, which I cut into quarters. They take 45 minutes in the oven and they are done. Easy as can be. Go heavy on the dill (I used dried but fresh is even better) and salt right as they come out of the oven.



The lesson I learned this week is that buying a set of ingredients that will work in several forms is very smart and very time saving. Pick up small packs of meat when you notice something on sale - steaks, pork chop, lamb chops, etc. all work with this template.

Hearty and Healthy Mexican Lasagna

For dinner tonight, I brought back a recipe I love that I haven't made in a very long time - Racheal Ray's Mexican Lasagna. This lasagna has two convenient qualities - it's made in no time, and it is huge! This meal could easily feed 4 or 5 people, or if you are cooking for one, like me, feed you for a whole week. I'm not a huge fan of Racheal Ray anymore, though it is true that her 30 Minute Meals was the first Food Network show to really suck me in. I give her credit here - I began cooking at 7:15 and was eating by 7:45.

I, of course, made a few tweaks to Ms. Ray's recipe, but my changes are really just personal preference. I use ground turkey instead of chicken, mostly because I can never seem to find ground chicken in my local stores. I use fire-roasted tomatoes over taco sauce, and to make it a bit healthier, add low-fat cheese and whole wheat tortillas. The result is a yummy casserole full of chunky meat and vegetables. I like to serve mine with a dollop of sour cream, and a sprinkle of hot sauce. It keeps amazingly and like Italian-style lasagna, is often better the next day, once the flavors meld more. I'd imagine it would freeze fabulously as well.

Apple Turnovers

Fall in New England means apples. It's a yearly tradition for most people I know to go apple-picking at one of the many local orchards. I sound like a snob - but I just can't eat supermarket apples anymore!

This year I headed out late in the season. My good pal Maria and I scored a 1/2 bushel of Cortlands, MacIntoshes, and Romes. With apples in tow, we went back to my apartment to bake up some treats! I'd picked up some frozen puff pastry at Trader Joe's earlier that day, so we decided to make apple turnovers. We didn't really follow a recipe - just chopped up a few apples and tossed them with brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, a bit of flour, and lemon juice. We found out quickly that you don't need much filling in each square of pastry!


Maria and I folded the pastry and sealed it shut using a fork. About 15 minutes in the oven is all you need - the puff pastry browns and crisps up, the apple filling sort of melts. They are so delicious and make you feel cozy! They were so simple, using pantry ingredients and frozen pastry, and took only 30 minutes in total. I can't wait to start my Monday morning with an apple turnover for breakfast!

"My lady, my tuna"

I have a soft spot for tuna. The number of tuna fish sandwiches I have eaten in my life must be in the thousands. In fact, tuna salad was my earliest specialty, the first dish I can ever remember making on my own. Many Saturday afternoons at home, my mom and I would split a can, and she always had me make it. She told me she liked the way I did it better. I probably wasn't doing anything she couldn't do, but I think she wanted to encourage my budding interest in food. I've made it the same way for 25 years - a can of solid albacore tuna, drained to it's last bit (I hate tuna juice!), then mixed with mayo, pepper, and my secret ingredient, Lowry's Seasoned Salt. If a red onion or bit of celery are around, sometimes I dice it up small and add it. And often, I add a spoonful of pickle relish, my personal favorite. Then I spread it on slices of toasted wheat sandwich bread, and cut it diagonally, always. I prefer a slice of tomato if I can get it, but plain will do.

It's an ultimate comfort food to me and I've tried it many more ways over the years. I always notice recipes with tuna. I've made tuna pasta salad, tuna melts, tuna casserole, and tuna in tomato sauce. Tonight, I tried Campanelle Pasta Salad from Giada DiLaurentiis to sate my tuna craving. It has so many of my favorite ingredients - artichokes, tomatoes, capers, and of course, Italian tuna, kept in olive oil, rather than water. If you think you don't like tuna, try this version. The fishiness is much more subtle after marinating in the oil. It's a richer taste and texture.

During tomato season, this dish would be extra sweet! These little yellow ones were perfect.

The way this recipe is written, it makes a tuna sauce really. The tomatoes (I found cute yellow ones), artichokes, and tuna break down to be much less chunky than I initially expected. Next time, I would probably add another can of tuna. The biggest edit I made was significant - I added about 3 tablespoons of the 18-year aged balsamic vinegar I purchased recently in Portland, NH. It's the most delicious vinegar I have ever tasted! It's flavor is sweet, lightly sour, and so much deeper than a cheap version. It really upped the flavor of the pasta, counteracting the salt of the tuna and capers.

Delicious aged balsamic vinegar in a pretty bottle from LeRoux Kitchen in Portsmouth, NH. They carry an excellent selection of olive oils and vinegars, all of which you can taste in the store. They say this 18-year balsamic is their best seller!

The pasta is just delicious. Sweet, salty, sour, thick, and hearty but light. Giada rarely lets me down. It makes a huge amount of food, and will be great to bring for lunch this week.

On the Fly Stir Fry

Hello, friends. I'm finally back to the blog after a nearly 2 month leave! Life's been quite busy lately and I haven't had much time for cooking, or blogging for that matter. Unexpectedly, several events in my life converged into a one month window. First, I moved to my own apartment in Cambridge, bittersweetly saying goodbye to my trusty sous chef and best taste-tester, Ken. That aside, I have managed to find the only studio in the city with a bigger kitchen than living space! I've also realized just how many kitchen items I've acquired over the years - by far the most of my boxes!

In the midst of this, I am moving into a different position at my job, which is exciting and overwhelming at the same time. And I've just been accepted to Boston University to start my MBA in January part-time. So yeah...there's a lot going on!

I miss cooking, though, and sharing with my friends. Now, I've returned to action with an on the fly stir-fry - Orange Scented Chicken and Peppers, I call it. I used to make stir-fry almost weekly, usually with frozen mixed vegetables, tofu, and a coating of Trader Joe's General Tso's Sauce. I overdosed on the meal a few months ago but have re-entered it into my menu, since it's an easy dish for one. I changed it up - chicken instead of tofu, fresh red and yellow pepper, onion, and garlic instead of frozen. Though I had my trusty TJ's sauce in stock, it felt too sweet and thick for me on this particular evening. Soy sauce would be better, and I spotted a rogue orange I'd bought for another recipe weeks ago. I added some of the juice, then a bit of zest. What Chinese restaurant doesn't serve a meat dish with an orange sauce?


The result was salty with a little sweet and the fragrance of orange. I served it over brown rice. It was much lighter than the heavy TJ's sauce and ten times healthier! Stir-fry is definitely back for me.

The Yummiest Sauce Ever

Do you have a steak in your freezer? Do you have access to a store where you can buy a steak? Because you need to go get one now and make this recipe - Hanger Steak with Cherry Shallot Sauce. This is so delicious, I can barely describe it. I saw the recipe made last weekend while on 5 Ingredient Fix on the Food Network, and it was one of those moments where I immediately said - I have to have this steak.

I don't eat a lot of beef but I get a craving for it every once in a while, especially when it's paired with a sweet sauce. This cherry shallot sauce is incredible and true to the name of the show it came from, it has only 5 ingredients - garlic, shallots, olive oil, pomegranate juice, and cherry preserves. The sauce is savory and sweet, but not too sweet. It was all I could do to keep Ken from eating the rest of it with a spoon.

Cherry Shallot Sauce...how could you not want that?

I grilled up a simple steak and finally, I cooked it well for the first time! Cooking beef to the correct temperature is challenging and I've had my share of failures, either overcooking it or having to throw it back on the grill several times to get it right. I covered the meat in tons of sauce, full of the shallots and chunks of cherry. On the side I served some yummy baked sweet potato fries. It was heaven, especially on a cold, rainy night.

That is some good eats.