What's in the fridge pasta

Once upon a time there was a blog with recipes. Then there was a wiring project, then an infant who didn't want to be set down, a kitchen remodeling project, then a toddler who could open doors. Lately, there's been a distinct shortage of recipes as a result.

Recipes in our house have morphed somewhat. Here's an example, on the table in less than 30 minutes, or 40 if you have a toddler around to "help".

"What's in the fridge?" pasta

• Start cooking one box of rotini, or 3/4 box, if that's what's in the cupboard
• Saute a few crushed cloves of garlic and sometimes part of an onion (chopped) in a splash of olive oil.
• Add a chopped red or green pepper, saute a few more minutes. Also a cup of fresh tomatoes (chopped), or not.
• Add salt, pepper, oregano.
  
• Add 10 oz of frozen (thawed and squeezed) spinach, or some sad-looking fresh spinach
• Add some chick peas (1-2 cups, cooked for another recipe the other day, or one drained can, if you eat things from cans, which we mostly don't any more), or not.
• Add some dried and soaked sundried tomatoes, or some oil-cured sundried tomatoes, or not.
• Toast some walnuts in the oven, or not. (Don't stir them in until everything else is done cooking.)
  
• Cook until the noodles are done, stir in the "sauce", top with walnuts, mozarella cheese (or not), serve with some romano (or parmesan) cheese

In the photo: Dalton enjoys making chopped tomatoes (from our garden) with his Dad.

Awesome ginger cookies

(Originally posted on Friday, December 22, 2006 by Tim)

Carol's delicious ginger cookies:

• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 1 c sugar
• 1/4 c dark molasses
• 1 egg
• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 t cloves
• 1/2 t ground ginger
• 1 t cinnamon
• 2 t baking soda
• 1/2 t salt
• 3.5 oz crystallized ginger chips, minced

Combine butter, sugar, molasses, egg, beat well. Sift dry ingredients together. Add to wet mixture. Mix well. Add ginger chips. Chill one hour. Form 1-inch balls. Roll in granulated sugar, place on a baked greased cookie sheet, 2 inches apart. Bake 8-10 minutes at 375. Makes 3 dozen cookies.

Stealth posted by Cathy.

Day 2 of just us 3

(Originally posted on Tuesday, August 1, 2006 by Tim)

Today was day 2 of just the three of us. It was a more productive day than yesterday. We got out of the house and to the gym a whole hour before we did yesterday. We also managed to get two loads of laundry done, two pages of Baby Dal?s scrapbook done, the back porch cleaned out, and we cooked a full dinner.

The garden has started producing tomatoes and the appetizer for dinner was a tasty caprese. For those of you not familiar with caprese, the main ingredients are tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella cheese. Two of those three ingredients were home grown for tonight?s appetizer. I?ll have to add cows to the back yard next year so I can make my own mozzarella cheese as well. I'll have to check my lawn and garden catalog and see which kind of cows make mozzarella.

The main course tonight was mushroom casserole. This dish is my own recipe that I developed while trying to duplicate a meal I had at Shakers. I?ve refined it to the point where I like it better than the Shakers' version. The only thing I feel it lacks is appetizing color. As you can see from the recipe below, it is a mixture of spinach, roasted red bell peppers, pasta, and portabella mushrooms. This gives it the colors green, red, brown, and off white. When you have this meal at Shakers, it is baked in its own dish. This allows them to layer the various ingredients. For my recipe, the entire meal is baked in one dish and then spooned onto plates. Unfortunately, it is not solid enough to keep its shape. I?ve tried layering it, but it looses the layers upon serving. I mix the ingredients to make sure that each person gets a relatively even distribution of each ingredient on their plate. The downside of this is that the colors green, red, brown, and off white get mixed together to make a rather unappetizing brown color. I expect it will provide me amply opportunity to use Parent? sayings in the future. ?It all mixes together in your stomach anyway.?

Mushroom Casserole
2 big portabella mushrooms, stems removed and cut into 1 cm cubes
1/3 cup Marsala wine
1 tbs honey
1 tbs soy sauce
1 tbs olive oil
1 tbs hot sauce
Lots of fresh ground black pepper
1 package (10 ounces?) frozen creamed spinach
1/3 pound orzo (or other small sized pasta)
1 can (15 oz) vegetable broth
1/3 pound mozzarella cheese, grated
1 1/2 cups spaghetti sauce
1 ½ roasted red bell pepper chopped into 1 cm squares
Red pepper flakes (to taste)

Mix Marsala, honey, soy sauce, olive oil, fresh ground pepper, and hot sauce in a Tupperware container that will just hold the mushrooms. Add the mushrooms to the marinade and allow to sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. Add the entire mix to a pan and sauté over high heat until all the liquid is gone. Set mushrooms aside.

Bring vegetable stock to a boil in a pot and add orzo. Cook until al dente. Drain.

Microwave the creamed spinach according to the directions.

Mix mushrooms, creamed spinach, orzo, roasted red bell peppers, red pepper flakes, and spaghetti sauce in a greased 9 inch casserole dish. Sprinkle the mozzarella cheese on top. Cover and bake until bubbly at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Uncover and bake an additional 10 minutes or so if you would like the cheese to be a bit browned. Remove from oven, allow to cool slightly, and serve.

My best example of a great tasting entrée that looks utterly unappetizing is dolmas. Remember when you were in cub scouts and they taught you how to determine what an animal had been eating by examining its stool in the forest. These things look like owl poo to me. Cat and I made a big plate of these for a party once. They were absolutely delicious and they were also hardly touched. There were lots of leftovers for us. In my opinion, someone needs to come up with a way to dye the grape leaves bright red and this dish would be a tremendous hit. This could be accomplished by crushing lots of red bugs. It would even be organic!

We had an interesting day with Baby Dal. Cat and I have both been reading baby books by the Sears (not the department store). In one of them, Cat found that babies of Dalton?s age sleep 14-18 hours a day. Now he has been sleeping a lot. In fact, he slept so much yesterday that I wasn?t sure if he was a wake for 6 hours. As it is my sacred duty to worry in the family, I was a bit concerned that he might be sleeping too much. Baby Dal can be very considerate at times. He didn?t want his Dad to worry. After sleeping peacefully for much of the day, he woke up at 5 pm and then proceeded to cry almost exclusively until 9 pm when he went back to sleep. We really weren?t able to come up with anything to console him for more than 15 minutes despite the use of all tools in our current arsenal.* I even sang parts of ?American Pie? to him.

It has been very hot here and I?m thinking that might be the issue. We don?t have air conditioning and what I have read says that babies should be naked at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. It was 85 today and humid. If he?s cranky again tomorrow, I?m pushing for us to take him to Barnes and Noble. It?s comfortably air conditioned there. Cat thinks that it would be rude to take a screaming baby into a quiet bookstore. Heck, if he?s that bad, I?ll buy a book or something.

*Note the outrageous hair on Baby Dal in the picture above. I tried to cool him down by rubbing a wet wash cloth over his head. It stopped his crying for a minute or two until he realized how silly he was going to look.

Smooties, revisited

(Originally posted on Sunday, July 2, 2006 by Cathy)

Tim and I don't really agree on appropriate formulations for smoothies. His recipe is much too thick, and verges on being desert instead of breakfast.

So, I present you with....

lower guilt smoothies

• One over-ripe banana
• 1/2 to 1 cup of orange juice
• 1 to 1.5 cups frozen fruit (pineapple is my current favorite, strawberries are good too)
• 1 cup plain organic yogurt (not vanilla, too sweet)

Blend until smooth, offer half to Tim, who will refuse. Put half in the fridge. Go look for it in an hour or so and discover it is no longer there. Blame a dog. (Alternately, pour entire blender contents into a 1L drink container and drink.)

Unlike Tim's recipe and typical coffee shop smoothies, this is a thinner, drinkable smoothie, not requiring a spoon. It is also much less sweet than a coffee shop smoothie, since it gets all its sweetness from the fruit used.

Tofu and veggies baked in parchment paper

(Originally posted on Saturday, April 1, 2006 by Tim)

I found a hilarious article on the BBC web site today. Apparently, some artist has made a statue of Britney Spears giving birth to her son on a bear skin rug. She is naked and on all fours. The statue is supposedly a tribute to the pro-life movement and the artist has been taking flack from both sides. The pro-choice people are protesting because it?s pro-life. The pro-life people are protesting because it?s got naked people in it. The best part of all is that Britney had a cesarean section.

It?s been a big week for cooking here. I think we have made three new meals. Cat made a tasty corn chowder and I made the two other meals. The meal from last night was rice and beans. The triumph on that meal was that I cooked the beans from scratch while deftly avoiding burning the house down. To accomplish this, I used a high tech gadget called a crock pot. Outside of the lack of copious amounts of smoke, the recipe didn?t turn out the way I wanted. I was aiming for Mexican style beans and I ended up with something closer to spicy baked beans. I plan to cut the sugar in half and add some cilantro and cumin next time. I?ll post a recipe once I have something I like.

The other recipe that I made was fennel and tofu baked in parchment paper. It?s a modified version of something I found in a magazine while Cat was getting new glasses at the optometrist. The original recipe called for scallops, but the tofu from our Kung Pao tofu recipe made a fine replacement. The fennel root gave the dish and interesting flavor. I was expecting it to be very licoricey. Instead, the fennel added some heat with a mild licorice background.

Tofu in Parchment
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 15 oz can of white beans (drained and rinsed)
1 fennel bulb (halved, cored, and thinly sliced)
½ cup fresh parsley (chopped)
2 tsp olive oil
½ tsp salt
½ tsp fresh ground pepper
1 lb Kung Pao tofu

Kung Pao Tofu (just the tofu part)
3 cloves crushed garlic
2 tbs Japanese rice wine or sherry
2 tbs cornstarch
½ tsp salt
Lots of fresh ground pepper
1 lb extra firm tofu (cubed)

The day before the meal, mix all of the Kung Pao ingredients except the tofu. Toss the tofu in this mixture and marinade overnight in the refrigerator .

Pre-heat oven to 400^oF. Place marinated tofu in a greased baking dish and cook until the outer coating begins to just slightly brown. Remove tofu from oven.

Mix tomatoes, beans, fennel, parsley, oil, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Place 4 sheets of parchment on the counter and spoon the bean mixture in the center. Top the bean mixture with the tofu. Cover with 4 more sheets of parchment. Fold up sides of parchment to seal edges and bake at 400^oF for 15 minutes. Remove from oven, cut parchment open, and spoon the contents onto plates. Make sure to be careful of the steam when you cut open the parchment package.

Working with the parchment was a pain. It didn?t hold the folds I made very well. I?m thinking of using some of those black office binder clips on the sides next time.

I was surprised by how well this recipe turned out. I didn't expect it to be all that good. Cat's comment was, "If you didn't think it would be any good, why did you try it." I guess I just wanted to play with parchment parchment paper. It's like bubble wrap for your oven.

Mmmmmm, turkey leg

Cathy left town to see her family today so it is a bachelor’s weekend for me and dogs. As you can see, I decided to celebrate in style. Turkey legs were one of my signature foods when I lived alone. They are easy to prepare and quite tasty. In addition, they tend to be pretty cheap. Somewhere in my life, I acquired a taste for dark meat. It has been my impression that this is contrary to the population at large. Most relegate dark meat to the same category as broccoli stalks, apple cores, and onion skins. They are all unfortunate side products that come with the things that people really want. As such, I usually can get what I want at a discount. On a side note, I have a recipe that makes tasty use of onion skins. I could have sworn I had written it up, but I can't find it now.

Bachelors’s Baked Turkey Leg
One two pound turkey leg
3 tbs of vegetable oil
3 tbs fresh chopped parsley
Salt
Fresh ground pepper

Remove your only baking pan from under the dishes in the sink and wash thoroughly (remember, this is a bachelor’s recipe). Pour oil in pan. Next, remove turkey leg from plastic wrapping and place in pan. Pause cooking motions to yell at dogs for standing on your feet. Rub oil into turkey leg and sprinkle with parsley on all sides. Liberally salt and pepper the leg.

Push dogs out of the way and set the oven to bake at 350^oF. Place pan in oven uncovered. Allow to bake for 20 minutes and then run back into the kitchen to turn off fire alarm caused by splattered grease hitting the heating element in the oven. Remember to jump over dogs when returning to kitchen. Cover pan with aluminum foil and cook until leg exudes a clear (not pink) liquid. Allow leg to cool for 10 minutes, throw dogs out into the backyard, and enjoy.

Gravy

(Originally posted on Saturday, July 16, 2005 by Tim)

It has been a long time since I?ve written up a recipe here. We actually haven?t been making many new meals lately. To be more honest, I haven?t been making many new meals of late. Cat has been trying new things and she?s found a few that are quite good.

Our big score this summer has been ?Chicken Fried Tofu?. Dave and I had a long discussion on ICQ over this one. He objected to the fact that the actual recipe contains no chicken and is not fried. This recipe come from our cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon. Yes, that is her real name. I would guess she blames her parents. Almost all the meals we have made from this book have been good or great. We may have had one recipe that was OK. Once.

The best part of the Chicken Fried Tofu is an accompanying recipe for vegetarian gravy. Crescent goes on and on about how great this gravy is. I?m a pretty skeptical person and take all such ramblings with a nugget of salt. In Crescent?s case, I should just get over my cynicism. Whenever she goes on and on about something, it?s really good.

Vegetarian Gravy
4 cups vegetable stock
1 whole head of garlic, unpeeled
1 carrot, halved
1 onion, chopped
1 bay leaf
½ tsp coarsely crushed peppercorns
¼ cup nutritional yeast
½ tsp paprika
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
Extra salt and pepper to taste

Place stock, garlic, carrot, onion, bay leaf, and peppercorns in a pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and allow to simmer for 45 minutes. Remove from heat and pour stock through a strainer. You're interested in the garlic in the strainer and the stock so make sure to save both.

Allow garlic to cool. Squeeze the garlic cloves out of the skins into the stock. Mix in the paprika and nutritional yeast and place on low heat.

Melt the butter over low heat. Whisk in flour and cook until flour paste browns slightly (3 to 4 minutes). Slowly add butter/flour mixture to stock with stirring. Simmer stock until slightly thickened. Season with salt and pepper.

This stuff is amazing. I like to season it with lots of salt and fresh ground pepper, but I'm like that.

Hot Fudge Sauce

(Originally posted on Saturday, September 11, 2004 by Tim)

I would like to state that bags of cookies, or potato chips, or any other snack are just plain evil. The "can't eat just one" ad campaign was clearly directed at me and did not just apply to Lays' potato chips. About a week ago, I happened to be walking down the cookie isle and picked up a pound of Nutter Butters. I am especially susceptible to Nutter Butters because they are sweet AND salty. All you need to do is add a little MSG to them and I'd be in heaven. Needless to say, I brought them home and they were gone in two days. While I didn't eat each and every last one, I would estimate that Cat and dogs did not get more than 10%. Whenever they would approach the bag, there would be lots of growling and snarling. I feel that I handled it very well. At least I didn't bite anyone. The bad thing about chowing down on 1/2 pound of Nutter Butters for dinner is that it tends to throw off my system. I end up having trouble focusing on things, my productivity gets shot to hell and I'm generally unsafe to operate heavy machinery.

After last week's binge, I can confidently say that I've learned my lesson. Well, at least I've learned my lesson until a month or two from now when memory fades and I find myself next to a big can of Pringles.

This recipe is off an unsweetened baking chocolate box. It is good hot fudge sauce, but I am mostly writing it up so that I can throw the ragged piece of carboard box containing the recipe in the trash.

Hot Fudge Sauce
2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate
1 tbs butter
1/8 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/8 cup whipping cream

Microwave chocolate and butter together until butter is melted. Pull the mix out of microwave and stir until chocolate is completely melted. Add cream and sugar and stir until well mixed. Microwave for 5 minutes more or until sugar is completely dissolved. Pull teh mix out of the microwave every 2 minutes or so and stir. Add vanilla and mix well. Store in the refrigerator.

I like to have this on vanilla or nigh vanilla ice cream with sliced bananas. Cat likes to put it on strawberry ice cream which is just wrong.

Pear Chutney

(Originally posted on Friday, September 10, 2004 by Tim)

Finally! A little free time to write. I've been swamped this week after we spent last weekend at Brian and Anduin's place near the nation's capital. I've taken on alot this term with the preparation for my classes and I really need the free time on the weekend to catch up. I have no regrets on last weekend though, I had a great time and I'm just too old to let work stop me from having a life.

I did find a little time earlier this week to indulge in an activity that combines one of my hobbies with one of my obsessive tendencies. I made a very nice pear chutney. The hobby part of this activity is the cooking and the obsessive behavior is not letting anything go to waste. I don't know if you picked up on this in my jam recipe post, but a large part of the motivation for making that jam was to keep the grapes from spoiling. This behavior was evident last weekend when Brian and Amy brought a very tasty lemon curd to Brian and Anduin's house. I complimented them on the spread, asked for the recipe and then wondered out loud where I might find lemon trees in Virginia. They then proceeded at length to try to explain to me that money could be exchanged for lemons in an edifice known as The Grocery Store. Sigh! Some people just don't get it.

When we got back, I found that one of the Emeritus faculty at Radford had brought in a big bag of pears from a tree or trees in his yard.

FREE FRUIT GOING TO WASTE! JAM MAN TO THE RESCUE!

In the end, I went with a chutney instead of a jam. There are more chutney recipes for pears than jam recipes for pears on the internet. The ingredients for chutney are more exciting than for jam as well.

Pear Chutney
2 tbs butter
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 onion, chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped
6 small pears, hand picked from someone's yard, peeled and chopped
1 tsp salt
2 tbs balsamic vinegar
2 tbs lemon juice

Melt butter in a skillet over medium high heat. Add next three ingredients and cook until mixture is carmel in color and a little thick. Add pears, salt, vinegar and lemon juice. Reduce heat and simmer until chutney thickens. Allow to cool.

I tasted the chutney and found it to be quite tasty. It is sweet and salty and a bit hot from the peppers. However, I was a bit stumped as to what we would eat it with and started thinking about how I might make a jam out of the hundreds of pears that were laying about in our Emeritus faculty's yard. Cathy came to the rescue on this one by making an excellent marinated tempeh that went very well with the chutney. Maybe she will post her recipe some time. This chutney would also go very well with pork or with ham.

Vegetarian sausage...no wait, vegetarian bacon...no wait, vegetarian sausage

(Originally posted on Saturday, August 28, 2004 by Tim)

Cat and I don't watch any TV and we don't get a paper. I generally get my daily news on the CNN and BBC websites. While there, I always check the science news sections to see if there is anything interesting that I can link on my web page for my students. Many stories are not of much scientific interest, in fact, you get stuff that I think could easily be included in the National Inquirer's science section.

For instance, take this recent story on the discovery of a deep cave in Croatia.

CNN Headline: EXPLORERS FIND WORLDS DEEPEST HOLE
Excerpt from story: At the foot of the Velebit cave are small ponds and streams, including one of the largest known colonies of subterranean leeches...

Now if we interpret the data a bit differently, we have a great National Inquirer story.

National Inquirer Story Headline: SCIENTISTS DISCOVER HIGHEST LEVEL OF HELL RULED BY LEECHES
Excerpt from story: Explorers find worlds deepest hole.


I often find really great rant material in these stories, like the BBC's recent article about the use of genetic algorithms in blocking email spam. The introductory paragraph had this in it, "Few would have thought that when Crick and Watson discovered DNA, that it would help in making a tool to fight spam."

A H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H !

Francis and Crick did not "DISCOVER" DNA. The DISCOVERY of DNA began shortly after the end of US civil war when Friedrich Miescher isolated it from the pus in surgical bandages. Between then and the 1940's, the covalent structure (which atoms are bound to which atoms) was worked out. In 1943, Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty conducted conclusive experiments demonstrating that DNA carried genetic information. Francis and Crick did not discover DNA. They elucidated the three dimensional structure of DNA. It was good work, but looking at it in the context of what had gone before, they've gotten a hell of alot more pretige than their contribution should merit. One or both of them was apparently very good at marketing.

Needless to say, I immediately linked the BBC article to my web site with the title "What's wrong with this headline!?!". Apparently people were beating the stuffing out of the BBC over the course of the day because Cat noticed that, by dinner time, they had changed the word "discover" to "unravelled" in the introductory paragraph.

When the BBC changed the text I immediately unlinked the article from my class page so as to not confuse my students. It seems to me in writing this that I could have left it in. Let's look at the sentence again.

"Few would have thought that when Crick and Watson UNRAVELLED DNA, that it would help in making a tool to fight spam."

The author or editor over at the BBC tried to be clever by using the weasel word "unravelled", but there are still two things wrong with this sentence. The first isn't so obivous unless you're a scientist. Watson and Crick discovered the three dimensional structure of DNA. In other words, they discovered the shape of DNA. The shape of DNA has pretty much nothing to do with the theories that would be applied to blocking spam. If they want to make this sentence more correct, it should read, "Few would have thought that when Gregor Mendel unravelled the principles of genetics, that it would help in making a tool to fight spam."

Ok, not exciting if you haven't studied this stuff. Let me rant about the obvious thing that is wrong. Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA in 1953. In 1953, there was no interet, there was no email and there was no spam. Few would have thought the discovery would be helpful in fighting spam because SPAM HADN'T BEEN INVENTED YET! It's like saying, "Few would have thought that when the ancient Egyptians discovered gold, that it would help in the construction of super computers."

It's been almost 2 hours now, and I think I'm through ranting. This wasn't even the news article I had planned to write about. How about a recipe on how to make veggie breakfast meat.

Vegetarian Breakfast Sausage or Bacon (you decide which it most resembles)
10 oz Tempeh (cut into thin strips)
3 tbs soy sauce
1 tsp chili sauce
1 tsp cider vinegar
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp Pickapeppa sauce (in the catsup section of the grocery store)
3 cloves garlic (crushed)
Pam

Mix all ingredients well except the tempeh strips. Place tempeh strips in this marinade and allow to set several hours at room temperature or overnight to several days in the refrigerator. Fry up marinaded tempeh in a frying pan sprayed with Pam until slightly browned or really crispy depending on your taste.

Cat and I had these this morning with pancakes. They are more spicy than the Morning Star breakfast links we get at the grocery store. We tend to swap these in and out with the commercial links depending on our desire for spice and how lazy we are feeling.

Sweet and Savory Tofu and Vegetables

(Originally posted on Friday, August 27, 2004 by Tim)

Cat and I stopped by the Radford Faculty Club Friday social tonight and had a very nice time. I have to say that it is a very friendly environment. I think that we have been invited to dinner by a couple who are emeritus and near emeritus faculty. In addition, Cat hit it off with a guy in math who is interested in the web package she has been writing. There may be some commercial possibilities there. If nothing else, they got to have lots of web geek talk. "I use tcl to write my web package on an open ACS platform that runs on an AOL virtual server." (Cathy says I got it wrong)

Ummm...ok. I was busy drinking more beer than I have had in the entire previous year combined (2 beers). I see more beer in my future as you get a bottle of Samuel Adams for $1. I'm planning on requesting that they serve Bass as well (all beers $1) and that will make the place pretty much Heaven as far as I'm concerned. After we left the club, we went downstairs to the pool room and bowling alley (I'm not kidding). Now this room is open to everyone on Radford campus, but seems to be very under utilized. I think it must be related to the fact that they don't serve or allow beer, or sitting on the tables, or sitting on the butt height half walls, or marmalade shots (maybe it was masses shots), or gambling. Apparently they've had enough problems with gambling that it merited a sign. I'll have to say, that with all the rules chasing people away, they had some very nice tables. I mean they looked like 1970's bowling hall quality tables, but they were hardly used. Despite my remarks it's a nice little perk as it isn't crowded, no one is smoking there, and pool tables are $1.25 per person per hour. Bowling in $1.25 per game. It's very possible that our pool games may improve significantly over the next year. Enough of my rambling though, the title says I'm going to post a recipe.

This is a recipe that I have been meaning to write up for a long time. It is mostly my own. The idea for the sauce comes from a Japanese cookbook that I have.

Sweet and Savory Tofu and Vegetables
1 lb tofu pressed
1 red pepper (chopped into 1 cm pieces)
1 small or medium eggplant (chopped into 1 cm cubes)
1 head's worth of of broccoli florets
1.5 cups of uncooked white rice
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup sake
Pam
Toasted sesame seeds

Cook rice according to manufacturers directions. Steam broccoli for 8 minutes or follow the directions on your vegetable steamer. Spray a dutch oven with Pam and set to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Saute red pepper and eggplant for 5 minutes or until slightly browning. Add a half cup of water, cover and cook until eggplant and pepper are tender. While eggplant and pepper are cooking, mix sugar, sake and soy in a bowl.

Chop pressed tofu into 1-2 cm cubes. Add to eggplant and red pepper and increase heat to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Immediately pour soy/sake/sugar mixture over vegetables and tofu. Stir fry until all sauce has been absorbed or boiled off.

Arrange broccoli florets in a circle on a plate. Fill circle with rice. Place a mound of vegetables on top of the rice. Sprinkle vegetables with sesame seeds.

I really like what this simple sauce does for the tofu and vegetables. You can substitute in for your favorite vegetables with this recipe and I bet a chicken/tofu substitution would be tasty as well.

Pressing Tofu

(Originally posted on Monday, August 23, 2004 by Tim)

Ok, I know this is lame, but I've gotten into the habit of pressing tofu for many of the recipes in which I use it. Well, that's not the lame part. The lame part is I'm going to post a recipe on how to do it. Let's picture it as a sub-recipe. I've actually made this great sweet and savory tofu and vegetables dish that I want to post, but everytime I think about it I am overwhelmed by the thought of posting a recipe and describing how to press tofu. Yes, I know that I already posted how to press tofu in a past recipe, but it just doesn't seem fair to make you go back and read through an entire recipe of my rambling just to pick out where I discuss pressing tofu. Once I've completed this post, I can link to it. That will save you the trouble of wading through the wandering babble and it will save me the angst of having to describe pressing tofu again.

Pressing Tofu
Block of tofu
Collander (Corgi bite marks are OK)
Bowl just a little smaller than collander
Big plate
Cans of dense food
Heavy books

Place collander on plate to catch water that will be squeezed out of tofu. Place tofu block in collander. Place bowl right side up on top of tofu. Stack heavy cans and books in bowl. Let tofu be pressed by the weight of the cans for 30 minutes.

This is a wonderful way to firm up your tofu and make it take up more marinade or sauce in recipes.

Mmmmm, grape!

(Originally posted on Wednesday, August 18, 2004 by Tim)

We have a row (isle, rack, stand, whatever you call them) of grape vines in the backyard. It was overgrown with five or so other types of plants when we moved in, but Cat hacked it back to grape vines and some plant with orange flowers in the first week. I was initially very excited about the grapes. We had a vine in the yard in Mukilteo, but it never produced much. The row of grapes here is much larger and was already producing quite a crop when we moved in. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was somewhat dampened when I tried a few of the green beauties and found they were quite sour and seedy. I'd liken the experience to tasting vanilla extract for the first time. You're expecting something that tastes delicious, but what you get is quite bitter. Hmmm, seems there are a number of things in life that fit that analogy.

In any case, I assumed we had some sort mutant grape vine that was designed to grow well in the harsh Appalachian climate. Something designed to survive months of banjo music without chewing off its own roots. I stopped thinking about the grapes and gave up my hopes of making my own wine from them.

Two days ago, Cat pointed out to me that the grapes had turned red. On trying one I found it to be rather sweet, although still seedy. It's too bad the grapes ripened so close to the start of classes at Radford. I would have liked to try and make some wine, but I'm afraid I can't show up to class with purple feet (at least until tenure). I was trying to decide what to do with the grapes when I realized that we have run out of the blackberry jam we made in Mukilteo last summer. I looked on the Web and found the following recipe by Ellen Skennar of Herberton, Queensland. I ran a test batch tonight and it makes a very tasty refrigerator jam.

Appalachian Grape Jam
Red grapes from your backyard
Sugar

Pick grapes from the backyard. Squeeze grapes and separate the skins into one saucepan and the pulp (with seeds) into another saucepan. Add a little water to the skins and simmer for 10 minutes. Also simmer the pulp for 10 minutes or until its structure breaks down. Press the pulp through a strainer to remove the seeds. Combine skins and pulp. Add a volume of sugar equal to that of the skins and pulp and simmer until jam gells. You can tell a jam has gelled by placing a little bit on a plate and allowing it to cool. If the cooled jam forms a skin when pressed with your finger, it is done. If you have a candy thermometer, gelling occurs around 220 Fahrenheit.

The next step will be to pick the vine in earnest and make a large batch of canned jam. If you're reading this and you're on our gift list, I'll give you three guesses on what you're getting for Christmas.

The Kitchen Wiring is Done So Let?s Make Marinara Sauce!

(Originally posted on Monday, August 2, 2004 by Tim)

We still have a bit of reconstruction to do, but we have finished all the wiring in the kitchen. The ceiling fan is now controlled by a switch rather than a pull cord. Huzzah! We were able to wire the ceiling fan without conduit by using the drop ceiling and the molding where the tile meets the wall. The molding is almost 2 inches wide so we pulled it down (slightly challenging) and punched a 1 inch hole in the ceiling and in the wall in the under the molding space.

It turns out that kitchens are circuit hogs. To meet code, you need to have two small appliance circuits in the kitchen that do not share with anything else. In addition, we have a floor outlet circuit, a light fixture circuit, a dishwasher circuit, and a stove circuit. The stove circuit eats two slots in the breaker box bringing us to a grand total of seven circuits for the kitchen.

We actually didn?t make marinara sauce tonight, but I?ve been meaning to post my recipe. I think it?s my own original recipe that I made up in graduate school. However, in graduate school, I compulsively followed recipes to the letter. I actually did very little, if any experimenting with cooking then and would refuse make a meal if I was missing an ingredient. Needless to say, it seems a bit out of character that I would have made up a marinara sauce recipe, but that is how I remember it. If I adapted it from someone else?s recipe, la la la la la la I can?t hear you.

Marinara Sauce
1 can diced tomatoes (28 oz)
1 can tomato paste (6 oz)
1 can tomato soup
1 tablespoon dried basil
1 tablespoon dried oregano
½ tablespoon red pepper flakes

Mix all ingredients together in a saucepan and stir frequently over medium heat for 15-20 minutes. Cathy had commented that this sauce gets more flavorful with sitting in the refrigerator and I agree. It might be better to heat it over very low heat for a couple of hours. I seem to remember Mom and Grandma cooking marinara sauce for a very long time and that might be the trick. If so, this could be a great crock pot recipe. It could be set up in the morning and acquire flavor over the day?s work. I serve this with rotini because I find the twists in the pasta hold the sauce quite nicely. In addition, rotini are just the right size to eat with chopsticks.

Strawberry-Pineapple Smoothies

(Originally posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 by Tim)

I've decided that I'm too obsessive to be a professional packer. It takes me far too long to pack a box. If professional packing was an art form, I might have a chance. When I am filling a box, the most important things to me are that all the space be used, and that everything in the box follow a theme. Some excellent box themes are as follows.

1. Rice bowls, cereal bowls and small plates (things from the kitchen).

2. Christmas ornaments, Jenga and juggling clubs (things from the games closet).

3. Telephones, headsets and digital alarm clocks (things that have speakers).

4. Beef jerky, vienna sausages and dog biscuits (things Cathy wont eat).

5. Concrete blocks, weight lifting equipment and a hydraulic jack (things dogs can't eat).

In addition to me working on making each box just so, we've also been trying to make meals that use up as much of the stuff in the fridge as possible. This has resulted in us making some meals, like snow pea risotto, that we haven't made in some time. We've also had as many smoothies this week as we have had in the previous 6 months combined. Here's my smoothie recipe.

Strawberry-Pineapple Smoothies
2 cups frozen strawberries
3/4 cup frozen pineapple
1 frozen banana (can be thawed)
3/4 cup orange juice
1 six ounce yogurt (any kind will work)

Place all ingredients in blender and puree on highest setting. Pour into glasses and enjoy. Feel free to add more orange juice if you want something that doesn't require a spoon.

Chocolate Birthday Ice Cream

(Originally posted on Wednesday, June 2, 2004 by Cathy)

Here's the ice cream we had for my birthday:

2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup sugar
6 oz unsweetened chocolate
4 cups whipping cream (Tim says "not the double super heavy stuff")
1 Tbsp vanilla
1 tsp instant coffee (yes, really)
1 cup of chopped walnuts

Beat the sugar into the eggs.
Put the chocolate into a sauce pan with 1/2 c of the cream, the vanilla extract, and the instant coffee. Melt over low heat, mixing chocolate into cream. (If the chocolate clumps, then add more cream.)
Add more cream and stir until mixed. Keep adding cream, up to 3 cups.
Increase the heat to medium high, stirring continuously until the chocolate mixture starts to steam.
Stir the hot chocolate mixture into the eggs.
Stir in the remaining 1c cream.
Cool.
Freeze in the ice cream maker. Stir in walnuts when the ice cream is nearly done. If you want more solid ice cream, put it in the freezer a few hours before eating.

Makes 1 quart of ice cream, which for the record, is enough to keep two people (one of them a chocoholic) in ice cream for at least a week - possibly longer. :)

Tandoori Tofu and Vegetables

(Originally posted on Saturday, May 29, 2004 by Tim)

As Cathy already posted, we are making tandoori tofu tonight. It smells wonderful, but feels like a cheating. The tandoori marinade is yogurt and "commercial tandoori marinade". It's the sort of recipe that has me trapped in the ethnic foods aisle of the grocery store for about a half an hour. The first 15 minutes is spent trying to find the tandoori related liquids and pastes. After that there is the required agonizing over what is closest to "commercial tandoori marinade". Is it "Paul Newman's Tandoori Ranch Salad Dressing" or "Texas Bob's Fire Hot Barby-Q Tandoori Sauce". In the end I settled on "Neera's Spicy Tandoori Indian Grilling Paste" because it had "spicy" in the name, and because it was manufactured in the Indian culinary center of the universe, Prescott Arizona.

Tandoori Tofu and Vegetables
2/3 cup "Commercial Tandoori Marinade"
1 cup plain yogurt
12-16 oz. firm or firmer tofu cut into 1/2 inch squares
1 medium eggplant sliced into 1/2 inch rounds
1 green pepper cut into 2 inch squares
1 red pepper cut into 2 inch squares
1 medium red onion cut into 8 wedges
1/4 lb button mushrooms
1 pint cherry tomatoes

Mix the "Commercial Tandoori Marinade" and the plain yogurt. Add the tofu to this mixture and marinade overnight in the refrigerator or for several hours at room temperature.

Remove the tofu from the marinade and set aside. Toss the eggplant rounds in the marinade and allow them to sit for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 450^oF

Remove the eggplant from the marinade and set aside. Coat peppers, onion wedges, button mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes in remaining marinade (there will not be too much marinade left for this).

Place the tofu and vegetables on baking sheets that have been sprayed with PAM. Arrange all pieces so that they are not touching each other (this took me three baking sheets). Put loaded sheets in oven and bake for 10 minutes. Flip tofu and vegetables and bake for an additional 10 minutes. Serve hot with brown rice.

This meal was tasty, but the flavor was very similar to a tofu satay recipe that I have yet to post. I'll probably make the tofu satay in the future because that recipe is slightly better and doesn't require "commercial tandoori marinade". The official recipe for this meal has you grilling the tofu and vegetables on skewers. If you're a fan of grilling on skewers, it works great on them as well. I just don't feel I get enough of a difference in taste with the grill attachment on our oven to make it worth the additional cleaning time.

OMG, a recipe! (Potato and Kale Stew with Corn Dumplings)

(Originally posted on Saturday, May 29, 2004 by Cathy)

No photo of this one, since it's somewhat of an ugly duckling. (We're not actually making this tonight, we're making experimental tandoori tofu, more on that later)

Dumplings:
1 c cornmeal
1/2 c white flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
5 tbsp cold butter (substitution probably unwise)
1/3 cup skim milk
1 egg, beaten

Mix the solid ingredients in a food processor, then cut in the butter. Add milk and egg and run the food processor until the dough just sticks together. Chill. Form into 1 inch balls.

Stew:
8 cups veggie stock
12 large garlic cloves (or more!)
1/2 c sherry or cheap-o white wine
2 bay leaves
1 tsp ground coriander
1 fresh jalapeno pepper, with or without seeds, chopped into rings
2 large potatoes, in 1/2 inch cubes
3 large carrots in 1/2 inch pieces
3 cups kale - stemmed and chopped into edible chunks
3 tbsp cornmeal
1/4 c cream
1 tomato, chopped
1/4 c chopped cilantro
1/2 t salt (more or less depending on saltiness of stock)
lots of black pepper
1 tbsp sacred substance

Bring stock, garlic, cheap wine, bay leaves, coriander, and jalapeno to a simmer for 10 minutes. Drop in dumplings and simmer until they rise (5 mins?) and a minute or two longer. Scoop out the dumplings, put escaped garlic cloves back into the pot. Eat any broken/smooshed/asymetric dumplings, remembering that most of them are needed for the recipe later on.

Put the potatoes, carrots, and kale into the pot, simmer partly-covered until the potatoes are almost tender.

Sprinkle the cornmeal over the mixture, and add the cream. Cook another minute.

Stir in the tomato and carefully add the dumplings, again eating any defective dumplings. Simmer for a few minutes to allow any remaining dumplings to warm up, then add the cilantro, salt, pepper, and lime juice.

What to do with January's Tempeh marinade - spring rolls

(Originally posted on Saturday, April 3, 2004 by Cathy)

Waay back once upon a time, I posted a tempeh marinade, but never got around to posting a recipe to go with it. Here's one we've made a bunch. (You may want to add dark sesame oil or ginger to the tempeh marinade as well.)

• 5 romaine lettuce leaves, sliced into thin strips
• 2 scallions, chopped
• 1/2 bunch mint, chopped
• 1/4-1/2 bunch basil (Thai basil if the asian market you visit for the wrappers has it), chopped
• 1/4-1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped
• 1 carrot, shredded

Mix all the salad stuff together in a large bowl.
Also prepare:

• 1/4 cup chopped unsalted peanuts
• 3 oz cooked bean thread noodles (asian market, or maybe the grocery store) - drop into boiling water, let stand a few minutes, and drain.
• 12 oz marinated and baked tempeh, cut into strips

Now here's the fun part. Obtain a package of Vietnamese rice-paper wrapper sheets. These are NOT eggroll wraps, these are dried and come as large (8 inch), very thin dry noodle disks. You may need an asian market for these, unless your grocery store is really stocked. Ours is, Mom's isn't. YMMV.
The rice-paper wrappers are softened by sitting them in a large plate of hot water for a minute or two. Plan to destroy the first few you try - you need it to be just *barely* soft enough to work, since it will get softer while you stuff it. If the wrapper is at all cracked before you soak it, don't bother. Toss it and use another. They're cheap and come in huge packages anyway.
Soak a rice paper wrapper. Put part of the salad mixture, a few noodles, a bit of peanuts, and a piece of tempeh onto the wrap, and roll it up like a burrito (except with more swearing).
Serve with dipping sauce of choice - I like soy sauce with a bit of garlic pressed into it, or we have a great recipe for a sweet sauce with hot pepper in it that I might post in another month or three.
Makes about 12-18 rolls, depending on how full you stuff them, and how many pieces of tempeh you eat as you go.

Tofu French Fries

(Originally posted on Sunday, February 15, 2004 by Tim)

I was hoping to have a tofu french fries recipe for you today. Cat and I went out to Zao Noodle for Valentines Day (Thanks Mom and Dad). A franchise just went up in Seattle. When Cat and I were dating, we used to go out to the one in Palo Alto. It was there that we learned of the marvel called wasabi peas "A Happy Present from the Earth". These can be purchased en masse at most asian grocery stores. We get strange looks from the cashier when we walk up to the check out counter with 2 bunches of baby bok choy, a pound of tofu, and 20 bags of wasabi peas. I've tried pointing to the text on the bags and exclaiming, "A Happy Present from the Earth!", but this seems to frighten cashiers for some reason. Perhaps a bad childhood experience with legumes?

What does all this have to do with tofu french fries? Well, when Cat and I went to Zao Noodle, they had Tofu French Fries on the menu. I had never seen them before and had to try them. It was a tough decision to pass on the "Happy Present from the Earth", but we do have 15 bags in the pantry at home. The tofu french fries were served in a martini glass with vinegar, peanut, and chili dipping sauces. The were grey in color and about twice the width and height of regular french fries. It was a very interesting appetizer with one main drawback, tofu doesn't taste like much of anything on it's own. Zao Noodle hadn't done anything to spice up the tofu fries. They provided the sauces as the source of flavor. It seemed to me that the fries could be much improved by a marinade. I was on a mission.

We stopped off at the grocery store on the way home for dinner and picked up a couple pounds of tofu for experiments. When we got home, I assembled the marinade we use for Kung Pao Tofu (haven't written that one up yet) and cut one pound of tofu into slabs. I marinaded the slabs overnight and woke up the next morning raring to go. Cat came downstairs to find me filling the deep fryer with oil at 10 am. After some negotiations, she convinced me that I should wait until dinner to try out the fries (I wasn't planning on eating them for breakfast, I just wanted to make them).

We spent a good portion of our day trying to find an acceptable place to stash a geocache we have put together. One of the rules for placing a cache is that you do not want to be within 0.1 miles of another cache. Before yesterday, I thought we had alot of parks in our area. Now I think we have too few. We spent about four hours looking for a spot 0.1 miles from another cache which was not too traveled and not close to railroad tracks. We found one that works just before sunset and then raced home to try out the tofu fries.

I'm afraid that the end is going to be a bit anti-climactic. I pressed the marinaded tofu between a bowl and a strainer to remove excess water and then dropped it into hot oil. My result was very different from Zao Noodle's in that I managed to blacken the tofu fries on the outside while leaving a soft white middle. Zao's fries were coooked almost all the way through. My fries were tasty, but not superior to baking tofu with this marinade. My thought is that I need to remove more water from the tofu before deep frying. I'm not quite sure how to do this yet, but I will keep thinking about it.