Tag: meal planning

Chickpeas and Couscous

July 21, 2016

It’s hot today, and humid: a good day for a quick, vegan salad supper. My deck garden is starting to supply some of the ingredients, and the others are pretty much pantry staples for us. Here’s how I throw together a Chickpea-Couscous salad for two:

2/3 c couscous

1/2 c cooked (canned) chickpeas

1 c cherry tomatoes, halved

1 c broccoli florets, divided into very small pieces

1 small red pepper, diced into 1/4” squares

a handful of chives, finely chopped

a handful of mint leaves, finely chopped

a handful of oregano leaves, finely chopped

1/4 c olive oil

1/4 c lemon juice

salt and pepper to taste

Put the couscous in a 2 cup measuring cup and add 2/3 c boiling water. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes.

Drain the chickpeas and rinse well: I use half a standard tin, so I freeze the other half for next time.

Mix the olive oil and lemon juice together.

Mix the chickpeas, cooked couscous, all the veggies and the herbs, pour in the dressing, mix some more, add salt and pepper to taste, and refrigerate for an hour or more.

That’s it. You can serve it over lettuce, or not. You can add garlic, or not. Or harissa spice. Or raisins. It has veggies, protein, carbohydrates, and a bit of good oil. And it takes less than ten minutes to make. What could be better on a hot and humid day?

A Very Special Apple Pie

October 31, 2015

As I’ve mentioned on and off in this blog, my husband BD has a specific and rare food allergy to lauric acid, one of the fatty acids found in a wide range of fats. It significantly limits his (and by extension our) diet. One of things off-limits has been pastry, because it’s generally made with either lard, butter, or ‘vegetable shortening’, which usually contains at least one of the fats that have high levels of lauric acid.

But yesterday I found a pastry pre-mix at a bulk food store that is made with only soybean oil. Soybean oil is on the ‘ok’ list. So I gave it a try. (I’ve tried making pastry with a safe oil before, to less than edible results.) But this one worked! And last night – serendipitously at his 60th birthday dinner – we had apple pie for dessert. Lovely, clove-y, gingery (cinnamon is off-limits), apple and cranberry pie.

BD had apple pie for breakfast, too, this morning. I can’t say I blame him – if I hadn’t had pie for 5 years I would too! Now, we’re not going to start having pie a lot. It’s still not healthy. But for special occasions, yes. And I went back out this morning and bought quite a lot of the pastry mix. It’s in the freezer. Christmas isn’t that far off!

Kitchen Gadgets I Wouldn’t Want to be Without #2: The Stick Blender

October 25, 2015

The simple stick blender is a gadget I use almost every day. In the last two days, it’s been used to make smoothies, blend a roux into chicken broth to thicken a stew, and transform left-over roast vegetable salsa into pasta sauce.

I often don’t use electric appliances – I own a hand-held mixer, but usually I mix cake or cookie or muffin doughs by hand, with a solid dinner fork. I might as well use a few more calories up before I eat what I’ve baked! But blending is a different thing.

My sister gave us a traditional blender as a house-warming present the year BD and I moved in together – 1979 – and we still have it. BD uses it to make hummus weekly, and I use it occasionally, but the stick blender has replaced it for most uses. It’s just simpler, and easier to clean.

I’m on my second one. The first one I bought was bottom-of-the-line, inexpensive, since I wasn’t sure how much use it would get. Eventually it burned out – but not immediately – so I bought a better one. Two in fifteen years isn’t too bad!

Here’s how I transformed the salsa to pasta sauce – I’ll start with the salsa recipe, full of local, seasonal vegetables bought at the farmers’ market on its last day for this year.

Roasted Vegetable Salsa

2 red peppers

2 small eggplants (about 3 inches each)

1 medium zucchini

6-12 garlic cloves, depending on how much you like garlic

1 small onion

10-12 grape/cherry tomatoes, preferably roma type

1 cup finely diced butternut squash

1/2 c olive oil

2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

rosemary

basil

oregano

sea salt

black pepper

1/2 c feta cheese

Preparation

Peppers: seed and dice finely

Eggplant: peel and dice finely

Zucchini: dice finely

Garlic: peel and dice finely

Onion: peel and dice finely

Tomatoes: dice finely

Squash: peel and dice finely

Toss diced vegetables with olive oil and spices and spread on parchment paper on two cookie sheets. Roast at 360 degrees F for 30 minutes. (A higher temperature than this destroys much of the goodness of olive oil.)

Add 1 Tbsp each of dried rosemary, basil, oregano, and 1 Tbsp sea salt, and 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper, plus the 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar. Mix well. Adjust seasonings to taste and add more olive oil if desired. Let sit at room temperature to blend flavours.

Just before serving, add 1/2 c feta cheese. Serve with crostini.

This makes about 3 cups. I had just over a cup left over.

To make pasta sauce:

Add 1 c chicken or vegetable broth, preferably low sodium as there is a fair bit of salt in the salsa. Bring to a boil gently. Cool somewhat, and blend in the saucepan with a stick blender.

This gives you a creamy, tangy pasta sauce. Use as a vegetarian sauce with more cheese if desired, or, add ground chicken, turkey or whatever you like.

Now, those of you who follow this blog know that BD is allergic to all dairy. So I actually made two versions of this, one with feta and one without, and did this sauce twice: both worked well, but I would definitely add ground turkey or spicy turkey sausage to the dairy-free version for protein.

Slow-Cooker Cassoulet: A Portable Feast

October 22, 2015

I do love my slow cooker.

A new cinema opened in our general area a few months ago. It plays first-run and art-house movies, and it does matinées every weekday afternoon. It has become our primary place to go to a movie with friends, also retired, who, like us, prefer the matinées. But here’s the rub: our friends live 22 km (13 miles) south of us, and the theatre is another 20 km (12 miles) south of their house. Realistically, this means that the post-movie dinner is always at our friends’ house, which means they are always doing the cooking. We could go out, but its difficult and frustrating for BD with his allergies.

This week (the movie was Bridge of Spies, by the way, which was excellent), I said ‘enough – I’ll cook.’ Then, of course, I had to come up with something that was easily portable and could be left over the afternoon. And as I know my friends’ fridge is always full to overflowing, that really only left me with the option of a slow cooker meal.  So I wandered around on the internet for a while, found a few similar recipes, modified them for BD’s allergies – and here is what we had. It was really good and very easy. You may need to adjust the spicing to suit yourself; this is fairly mild to suit our friends’ palates. It cooked on a low setting from about nine in the morning to about seven at night, except for the half-hour we were driving.

Slow Cooker Cajun Chicken and Sausage Cassoulet

(Serves 6)

Ingredients

3 spicy turkey sausages cut into 1/2-inch slices

6 skinned and boned chicken thighs (about 2 1/4 lb.), sliced into 2-inch pieces

1 teaspoon salt

1 /2 medium onion, chopped

1 medium-size bell pepper, chopped

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 c frozen lima beans

1 14 1/2-oz.) can diced tomatoes

1 1/2 cups chicken broth

1 8oz package frozen chopped spinach

1 Tbsp celery seed

1 1/2 teaspoons Cajun seasoning

1/2 c safflower oil

2 Tbsp flour

Preparation

Cook sausage in a large cast-iron frying pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally, 4 to 5 minutes or until browned. Remove sausage with a slotted spoon, and drain on paper towels, reserving drippngs.

Sprinkle chicken with celery seed. Cook chicken in hot drippings over medium-high heat 2 to 3 minutes on each side or until browned. Remove chicken. Add onion, pepper and garlic to pan, and cook, stirring often, 5 minutes or until onion is tender.

Add tomatoes, lima beans, spinach, salt and cooked ingredients to slow cooker. Using the oil and flour, make a roux to thicken the chicken broth. Add the thickened chicken broth to the other ingredients; add the Cajun seasoning. Cook in a slow cooker on low all day. Serve with good crusty bread and a salad.

Cajun Spice Mix

Ingredients

  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 2 teaspoons garlic powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon onion powder
  • 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons dried oregano
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons dried thyme
  • 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)

Canadian Thanksgiving

October 10, 2015

There are few things more lovely than an early October morning in Ontario.  The sky is a brilliant blue, the roadside and woodlot maples all shades of fire.  I’m going early to the farmer’s market, because this is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, and the market will be extra-busy.

We’re having Thanksgiving dinner with my brother and his family, my adult niece and nephew home for the weekend from jobs and university, along with the youngest niece, in the last year of high school.  Our contribution to dinner will be the wine, and dessert.  I’m making pear crumble and raspberry cake.  If it’s a nice day – and it’s supposed to be, warm and sunny – we’ll arrive, chat, go out for a walk with Ginger, their labradoodle, come back to the house, open the wine, get in each other’s way in the kitchen, and sooner or later eat turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, salad and squash.  Then we’ll all be too full for dessert, so we’ll talk some more, and have coffee and dessert an hour or so later, after the dishes are done.

The market this morning was indeed busy.  I bought pears, and the vegetables for this week’s meals, and two beeswax tapers for our dining room table.  (It’s dark now when we eat dinner, or nearly so, and we like the smell of beeswax rather than artificial waxes.)  Every stall at the market was heaped with local produce – an overabundance of choice, in deep, jewel-like colours:  the purples of plums and cabbage and beets; the reds of peppers and apples and tomatoes; the oranges and yellows of carrots and pears and golden beets, and all the shades of green of brassicas and lettuces and string beans.

Canadian Thanksgiving has its origin in the Harvest Festival of the Anglican and other churches, and there couldn’t be a better time of year for it.  It’s not the huge holiday of Thanksgiving in the USA.  But it’s still a time for many families to get together, celebrate the harvest, enjoy the autumn weather and each other.

I’ve got the pears ripening in paper bags with an apple in each, and tomorrow I’ll make the crumble and the cake.  Here’s the cake recipe: it’s never failed me.

Raspberry Cake With Lemon Drizzle

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) all-purpose flour

1/2 cup (125 mL) whole wheat flour

1 tsp (5 mL) each: baking soda, baking powder

1/2 tsp (2 mL) each: table salt,,ground ginger

2 large eggs

3/4 cup (185 mL) sunflower or safflower oil

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) granulated sugar

2 tsp (10 mL) pure vanilla extract

2-1/2 cups (625 mL) fresh raspberries

1 c semi-sweet chocolate chips, if desired

1/2 tsp (2 mL) finely grated lemon zest

Lemon Drizzle (optional):

1 cup (250 mL) icing sugar, sifted

Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

Juice of 1/2 to 1 lemon, as needed

In large mixing bowl, whisk or stir together all-purpose and whole wheat flours, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and ginger.

In separate large bowl using wooden spoon or whisk, beat eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla until well blended. Stir in raspberries and zest (and chocolate chips if used). Add to flour mixture. Mix well.

Pour batter into greased bundt pan. Bake in centre of preheated 350F (180C) oven until tester inserted in centre comes out clean, about 50 minutes.

Let cool 15 minutes in pan, then turn out on to wire rack.

If making lemon drizzle, in small bowl stir together sugar, lemon peel and enough lemon juice to make an icing of drizzling consistency.

Drizzle icing over warm or room temperature cake.

Makes about 12 servings.

Crumble, Crisp or Buckle: Fall Fruit Desserts

October 4, 2015

Saturday mornings are for visiting the farmers’ markets, and this time of year the stalls are overflowing with fall fruit: plums, apples, raspberries, grapes, and pears. I wanted to buy some of each!

I had promised dessert for a dinner with friends last night, so I did buy some pears along with my usual apples. Driving home, I reviewed what I could do with them, and settled on one of my favourites, a pear-and-ginger crumble. It’s so simple and tastes wonderful. Here’s the recipe, which uses oil rather than butter because of BD’s allergies; you can use butter, of course, if you want.

Pear-and-ginger Crumble

6 medium pears, peeled, cored, and sliced

1/2 cup dried cranberries

6 pieces candied/crystallized ginger, chopped into small pieces

1/2 c brown sugar

3/4 c oatmeal

3/4 c all-purpose whole wheat flour

1/2 c light oil – I use safflower, but sunflower or corn works too

1 tsp powdered ginger.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spread the sliced pears over the bottom of a 9″ square pan. Sprinkle the cranberries, chopped ginger, and 1/4 cup of brown sugar over the pears.  Add about 1/4 c water (unless the pears are very ripe) to provide moisture.

Mix the dry ingredients (including the other 1/4 cup of brown suger) with the 1/2 c oil and spread over the fruit.  Bake for 40 minutes.  Serve warm, with ice cream, cream or yogurt if you want.

Now, I call this a crumble; others might call it a crisp.  I also have a recipe for a fruit buckle, which is slightly different.

1/4 c light oil

1/4 c brown sugar

1 egg

1/2 tsp salt

2/3 c whole wheat flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/3 c liquid – milk, buttermilk, or water all work

2 cups chopped fruit

Topping:

1/4 c light oil

2 Tbsp brown sugar

1/3 c whole wheat flour

1/2 tsp cinnamon, ginger, cloves or a mix

Preheat the oven to 350.  Mix together the first 1/4 c oil, sugar, egg and salt; add 1 c flour, baking soda, and liquid and mix well.  Spread in a 8 or 9 inch greased square pan; cover with the chopped fruit. Mix together the remaining ingredients, spread over the fruit.  Bake at 350 for 40 minutes. (This recipe is adapted from the Blueberry Buckle recipe in my beloved Harrowsmith Cookbook Volume 1. I don’t know why it’s called a ‘buckle’; the recipe originated in Nova Scotia, so it may be a regional term.)

Both of these are very simple to make and are adaptable to many fruits or combination of fruits. (I also like to think they are healthier than a pie, although I may be fooling myself with that thought!)

What are your favourite fall fruit desserts? Please share your recipes!

Dreaming of Soup

September 25, 2015

It must be fall.

I woke up this morning from a dream about making soup. Italian wedding soup, to be precise. Of course, I’m craving it now, but as I have none of the ingredients in the house, and no trip to town planned for today, it will have to wait a day or two.

I don’t usually dream about food, but I think a number of factors came together to produce this dream. I was planning menus yesterday, and thinking about making soups for lunches, now we’re home all day. I have either a doozy of a cold or the worst fall allergies I’ve ever experienced – can’t tell which, as my nose is running like an open tap but I have no aches, pains, or lack of energy – so there’s an association with soup as a comfort food. Plus, I actually did make soup yesterday.

While I was away, BD bought the biggest cauliflower he could find, on the basis he didn’t need to buy any other vegetables. (This is the man that eats the same thing every day for breakfast, and another ‘same thing everyday’ for lunch, unless I intervene.) Half of it was still left when I got home Tuesday. We ate part of it in a frittata, but there was still a chunk left, so I looked around for what else we had – potatoes, half a box of frozen vegetable broth, garlic, onion. Definitely enough for soup.

Some years ago I bought myself a second slow cooker, a small one. Except ‘slow’ cooker is the wrong term for this device: it’s a fast cooker. The chopped cauliflower and potato, frozen broth, and garlic was boiling within an hour on high, and then simmered away for another half-hour or so until I could first mash it, and then use my stick blender to puree the mix. I adjusted the seasonings, added cumin, and voilá! -today’s lunch. I’ll turn the ‘fast cooker’ on soon, on low, and bring it back to a simmer, and eat it for lunch with sourdough toast and a sharp cheese for me, and hummus for BD.

And tomorrow when I go to town, I will buy what I need to make Italian Wedding Soup (with chicken or turkey meatballs, for BD’s allergies). I suspect the ‘fast cooker’ is going to be out on the kitchen counter most days now, as the bite of fall sharpens the air, and good long fall hikes sharpen the appetite.

What are your favourite soups? Do you have recipes to share?

Not Too Much

September 4, 2015

This morning, as always, just about the first thing I did when I got up was make coffee.  As it dripped through the filter, I did a few morning chores, putting out the recycling and putting away last night’s dishes from the dish rack.  Then I reached for my favourite mug, and stopped.

That mug holds about 325 mL of coffee (12 oz.). Not a bad size, but I tend to drink coffee either while I’m writing or while I’m reading…and I rarely finish the cup.  Usually the last quarter-mug or so goes down the sink, and I start again.  And I know this is the case – so why do I keep using that mug?

It’s not just at home.  I tend to order the medium size from take-out places – and I never finish those, either.  What an incredibly bad and wasteful habit!  And why am I just thinking about it now?  It’s not like BD hasn’t been bugging me about it for thirty-five years. (Actually, he has been bugging me about drinking coffee, period.  He hates the stuff – the taste and the smell.  He drinks it under protest at the end of overnight flights if he needs to drive, and that’s it.  And perhaps I’ve grown so inured to his complaints about coffee in general I didn’t listen to the specifics. A point I need to consider.)

So now I’m sitting here at my computer with a smaller cup of coffee…and I’ve finished it.  Too small a sample size to draw any conclusions, of course.  But it’s got me thinking about portion sizes in general.

Portion size creep and its effects on the health of populations has been well documented for restaurant meals and packaged foods.  I remain annoyed at one of my favourite bistros whose burger – and I love an occasional, well-made, burger – remains at half-a-pound.  It’s just too big.  A friend and I share it, occasionally, when we lunch there.  Large portions are either eaten, increasing calorie, fat, and sodium intake beyond what is reasonable for most people, or it’s wasted.  But restaurant portion creep has also affected what we see as a reasonable meal size in our homes.

I’ve been reviewing our meals in my mind as I write this.  BD needs more food than I do, and he is by no stretch of the imagination over-fed. I, on the other hand, could stand to lose some inches. But we tend to eat the same amount of food at dinner, and at brunch.  Otherwise, no.  But while three blueberry pancakes and three turkey breakfast sausages are appropriate for him at brunch, are they for me?  Or am I eating that much just because it looks ‘right’ on the plate?  Meals based around pasta, quinoa or couscous are simply split between two bowls; occasionally I keep some of mine back for lunch the next day, but not as often as I should.

As fall approaches, and we eat more slow-cooker meals, I can see this as even more of an issue – it’s just too easy to fill up two bowls with chili or stew without really thinking about it.  I’m not worried about what I eat – our vegetable-and-fruit rich diet, low in meat, fat, added sugar, and sodium, is pretty healthy.  But it’s still quite possible to eat too much of healthy foods.  So I think it’s time to introduce a new discipline into my life – that of being mindful of how much food I am taking.

Michael Pollan summed up what he believes our approach to food should be in seven words:  Eat food.  Not too much. Mostly plants.  It’s those middle three words I need to take more seriously, for my own health and that of the planet. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Kitchen Gadgets I Wouldn’t Want to be Without # 1: the Mouli-Julienne

September 2, 2015

home

I’ve had this little manual food processor for at least thirty years.  Surprisingly, I still have both the original box and all five of the processing discs, but not the manual – not that it’s needed. It’s only got three parts: the body, the handle, and the disc. This is one of the simplest but effective tools I use in the kitchen.

Today I used it to make just enough carrot-and-broccoli slaw for lunch.  It took two minutes, I used up part of the broccoli stems I’d saved from making a stir-fry earlier in the week, and the slaw was, of course, super-fresh and therefore very tasty.  Stuffed in a kamut wrap with a bit of sliced sharp cheddar, it was a darned good lunch, along with iced green tea and greek yogurt and blueberries.

Over the years I’ve used it to grate cheese, slice radishes, cucumbers, and just about any other sort of vegetable you can think of, shred potatoes for potato cakes…even grate frozen butter for pastry. It cleans up easily:  if I’ve grated cheese, I usually put it in the top shelf of the dishwasher – the whole thing, not just the wheel; if I’ve been doing vegetables, I just hand wash it.  The wheels haven’t rusted or significantly discoloured, and they remain sharp.

I went on-line to see if they are still available; there are a few on e-bay (one described as ‘rare, vintage’ (!)) and a similar product by Westmark on Amazon.  I no longer remember where mine came from; it might have been a present from my parents, as I know they also had one.

It’s easy to use, does what it’s supposed to, has lasted a very long time, and uses no electricity.  Four stars in my book!

What are your favourite kitchen gadgets, the ones you can’t imagine cooking without?

Chili and Corn Bread

August 31, 2015

One of the aftermaths of the surgery and treatment I had last fall and winter was to leave me with what is best described as acquired irritable bowel syndrome. It might pass with time, I was told by my doctor; meanwhile, eat a good sugar-free live-culture yogurt every day, and re-introduce foods high in fibre – especially insoluble fibre – slowly.

This meant a few adjustments to our meal-planning. Legumes – kidney beans, white beans, black beans and lentils – whether in salads, stews, soups, curries or chili – were a large part of our dinners. But the effects of eating them were far too unpleasant to ignore the doctor’s advice!  So for the last eight months they’ve been gone from our dinner table. We just ate more poultry to replace them, and hoped it wouldn’t be a permanent situation.

I went back to eating raw apples, skin and all, and raw cabbage and carrots, in the past six weeks. When there were no ill effects from those, I decided it was time to reintroduce legumes.  So this week I tried black-bean chili, served with corn muffins…and happily, all went well.  It wasn’t quite my usual chili – I used half the beans I normally do, and added some spicy turkey sausage to round out the protein, but next time I’ll add a few more beans, and leave out the meat.

It will be good to get back to eating less meat.  For all our relationship BD and I have tried to eat meat or fish (now because of his allergies only poultry meat) three times a week, choosing eggs, legumes, or cheese-based meals for the other four. Once he could no longer eat cheese, that ratio moved up to four meat-or-fish to three non-meat; and then my issues moved it to six meat-or-fish to one egg-based dinner a week.  It bothered us – there are a myriad of good reasons, for both personal health and the health and sustainability of the planet – to eat less meat.

But now I can start planning legume-based meals again, once a week to start, and we have recently re-introduced small amounts of cheese to BD’s diet without problems.  Home-made vegetarian pizza is on the menu again!  And lentil soup…and dhal…and baked beans.  Just in time for fall!

Black Bean Chili and Cornbread for Two

Two cups de-skinned and chopped Roma tomatoes (or one 19 oz can)

¼ c diced onion

½ c diced red, orange, or yellow pepper

1 c black beans, cooked (or ½ c beans and the meat from one spicy turkey dinner sausage)

½ c corn niblets – fresh or frozen

3 Tbsp chili powder

1 rounded tsp chopped garlic

Oil for browning

Brown the onion and garlic in 1 Tbsp of oil in a heavy frying pan. Add 1 further Tbsp of oil and the chopped pepper, and the sausage meat if using. Cook until the meat is brown throughout.

Put the tomatoes, the onion mix, and the black beans in a oven-proof pot or a slow cooker. Add the chili powder and stir well.

Cook in a 300 degree oven for two hours. If using the slow cooker, I cook on low for 6 hours.

Before serving, taste and adjust chili seasoning. Add the corn a few minutes before serving – it should be cooked but not mushy.

Serve with cornbread/muffins:

1 cup soymilk (or regular milk)

1 egg

2 Tbsp corn oil

¾ c flour

1 ¼ c corn meal

1 Tbsp baking powder

3 Tbsp sugar (optional – I leave it out, especially if I’m using sweetened soymilk.)

1 ½ tsp chili flakes (also optional).

Mix together the milk, egg and oil. Blend the dry ingredients together and add to the liquid. Spoon into either a greased 8″ pan, or greased muffin tins (I use silicon, so no greasing) and bake at 425 for twenty minutes. Makes 8 medium muffins if you use the muffin tins.