Tag Archives: olive oil

March 7, 2013

Tomatoes and fresh mozzarella with chimichurri

The happy accidents that occur when you have leftovers you don’t know what to do with. That is the topic for discussion today.

I am not speaking of composed leftovers, as in when you make a composed dish and there is more than you can eat in one sitting. Such as a casserole. That would be King Daddy’s department. That man can eat leftovers like nobody’s business. No, I am speaking of the odd bit of leftover steak, the small chunk of Parmesan cheese or the half a bunch of parsley. I tend to let those kinds of things sit in the fridge until…oh, oh…they’re moldy or wilted or have solidified into a paleolithic rock.

So, here in Week 4 of being a vegetarian for three days during Lent, I had these things left over: some chimichurri from a Char-Broil recipe that I will unveil in mid-April (nothing like writing about a cheap meal on income tax day when you haven’t even filed your own taxes, yet), some fresh mozzarella from the previous night’s eggplant Parmesan, and some cherry tomatoes. I don’t know why nobody’s thought of this until now (and apparently nobody has because I Googled it and nothing came up), but chimichurri, mozzarella and tomatoes is delicious!

I cannot give you my top secret chimichurri recipe until April, but I can give you Michelle Bernstein’s recipe, which is pretty darn tasty. Chimichurri is an Argentinian parsley-based sauce with lots of garlic and olive oil. Once you make this, you may never go back to pesto again. Here’s the recipe from a post I did a couple of years ago.

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Tagged as chimichurri, garlic, mozzarella, olive oil, parsley, tomatoes

January 4, 2013

Roasted butternut squash and kale

Winter in a pan.

So here’s a tip for you. If you love butternut squash, and the only person I know who doesn’t is Mark (dammit), you will want to seek out the grocery stores that sell it already peeled and cubed. Some things are worth paying extra. Peeling and cutting up a butternut squash is taking your life in your own hands. They are tough suckers and completely unstable on a cutting board. I can battle flair-ups on my screaming hot grill, stick my hand in boiling water to retrieve a stray spaghetti noodle and hack through the joints on a chicken, but I give up on cutting a butternut squash.

That said, if you overindulged during the holidays, this is a great healthy way to get back on track in the new year. Thanks, Kim Council, for the inspiration.

Kale and Butternut Squash

2 cups butternut squash cubed

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

1 bag or one large bunch kale

1 medium shallot, sliced into thin rounds

Juice of one lemon

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Add the butternut squash to a sheet pan lined with foil. Drizzle with olive oil, toss and add salt and pepper. Roast 20-30 minutes or until the squash is tender and beginning to brown. Reserve.

Add two tablespoons of olive oil to a large sauté pan over medium heat. Add the kale. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook until the kale wilts but is still crisp tender. Add the shallot and cook for another five minutes. Add the lemon juice. Mix well and add the squash.

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Tagged as butternut, kale, olive oil, shallots, southern cooking, squash

October 27, 2012

Lemon pasta with mushrooms and cherry tomatoes

Quick! You can still find cherry tomatoes in the Farmer’s Market. Grab them! It will be another seven months before they’re back in season.

Yes, I know. You can buy them in the grocery store year-round. But they’re not the same and you know it. Part of the joy of eating seasonally is deprivation. Those home-grown tomatoes taste all the better when you’ve waited more than half a year for them.

So, even the Meat Eater (Mark) lapped up this recipe, which really isn’t a recipe at all. It’s just a procedure. You cook 8 ounces of pasta until it’s al dente. Preferably you do this using the Harold McGee method of not boiling the water. I swear it makes the pasta taste even better. In the meantime, you film a saute pan with olive oil and add 8 ounces of sliced mushrooms. Brown those and then add a little more oil and the juice of half a lemon. Throw in the cherry tomatoes and saute until their skin starts to crack. Mix it all up with the pasta and top with some snipped Italian parsley. That’s it! You can throw some shredded Parmesan cheese in there if you want. And why wouldn’t you?

Grilled vegetable salad

It has been a bad week for me. Deliciously bad, but I must now atone. This week brought me fried chicken from Popeye’s (I have a chef friend who told me once that when he goes on picnics he just picks up Popeye’s, lets it come to room temperature and thinks he couldn’t do it any better himself), hamburger and Tots from Sonic (we were helping a friend move – no time for dieting), Krispy Kreme pumpkin spice doughnuts (limited time only!) and Blue Moon sandwiches (got to feed the girls at P.E.O. – our meetings are very strenuous).

So I wiped off the Char-Broil infrared grill, threw some marinated vegetables on there and made a veggie salad. It’s hard to make fattening food on a grill. Macaroni and cheese just slides right through the grates.

If you would be so kind as to hop on over to the Char-Broil site and grab the recipe I would surely appreciate it. You won’t gain an ounce.

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Filed under salads, Uncategorized, veggies

Tagged as gorgonzola cheese, grilled vegetable salad, grilled vegetables, lemon juice, olive oil, onions, peppers, southern cooking

September 10, 2012

Tri-color pasta salad

This is the year that I learned I do not want to be a caterer. I am about to cater my second event, a wedding reception for our dear youth minister and his lovely soon-to-be bride. The first was also a bridal reception. And the thing that makes me know I am not cut out for this career is the math. Oh, my God. The math.

How do you know, for instance, how much 50 people will eat at a 6 p.m. reception? That was my first dip in the catering pool. I thought, “Geez, it’s dinner time. They’ll eat a lot.” So I made a lot. Too much, as it turns out. Of course, if you have a choice – and you almost always do – you’d rather have too much than too little. But there was way too much. Those people ate like birds.

This time out, it’s for 150 people. That’s a lot of people. The reception is also at 6 p.m. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been madly consulting catering websites to figure out how much pasta salad to make, among other things, for 150 people as an appetizer portion. The recipes are daunting. One of them calls for starting with nine pounds of pasta. Nine pounds! If I cooked that much pasta at once, I’d be standing at the stove (and liberally drinking) for about 12 hours. Fortunately, there is a committee to help me with this.

I have discovered two very important things as I’ve gone about my almost-done catering career. First, ask a professional. I have one. His name is Christo Gonzales and he’s a private chef in New York City. In the flash of a second after I asked him how much food to make I got this back via Facebook: 3 pieces per person for a single appetizer and 4 ounces for something like pasta salad. OK, then. Math. Math. If I need 150 portions of pasta salad at 4 ounces per serving that would be (pulling out calculator now) 600 ounces. OK, 600 ounces. Now, 600 ounces divided by 16 ounces (1 pound) is 37.5 pounds of pasta. No, that can’t be right. Can it? I hate math. Did I tell you I had to have a math tutor all the way through high school? My dad, who was an accountant, tried to help me but I would just break down sobbing so he stopped.

Then I turned to my other new discovery, a website called Yummly. If you go on this site, and find a recipe that’s close to what you want to do (or just use one of theirs), you can type in the number of servings and it will calculate the ingredients for you! No math!

OK, my head is hurting now. Here’s the pasta salad I’ll be serving at the reception, cut down just for your own home use. It makes about four cups. I think I can at least get my head around that.

Tri-color pasta salad

3/8 cup olive oil

1 ½ tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

8 ounces tri-color corkscrew pasta

½ red pepper, julienned

½ yellow pepper, julienned

½ green pepper, julienned

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

1 ounce sliced black olives

4 ounces Monterrey Jack cheese, cubed

Whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, Parmesan cheese and black pepper. Set aside.

Cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente. Drain and mix with the dressing in a large bowl.

When pasta has cooled to room temperature, add the peppers, tomatoes, black olives and Monterrey Jack cubes.

Roasted tomatoes

I was right! A few weeks ago I wrote about the savage attack on my fledgling tomato plants and I blamed the groundhog that lives under our bedroom deck. So yesterday, Mark came running out of our bathroom and hissed, “Come here!” And out the window I saw this:

I know it’s not the best photo in the world because I had to take it from the bathroom window. But there’s the little bastard trying to get every last leaf off the plants.

So I am relying on tomatoes from the Farmer’s Market to make roasted tomatoes. There is nothing better than the concentrated flavor of a roasted tomato and they are beyond easy to do. My first order of summer with the roasted tomatoes is to combine them simply with pasta and freshly shredded Parmesan cheese, adding the olive oil the tomatoes roast in as the sauce along with a little balsamic vinegar. But they are also delicious stirred into soups and stews and as part of a grilled or roasted vegetable platter. Yes, you can freeze them because most of the moisture is drawn out in the roasting process. But I am too greedy in the moment and I never have enough to freeze.

And if you’re wondering about the pinch of sugar, I believe this is a Southern thing but it always works. We add a pinch of sugar to many vegetables, particularly to tomatoes and squash. It seems to bring out the richness. Or we think it does.

Roasted tomatoes

Vine-ripened tomatoes

Extra-virgin olive oil

Sugar

Salt and pepper

Slice the tomatoes in thick slices and place on a foil-lined cookie sheet with a rim. Drizzle liberally with extra-virgin olive oil. Sprinkle with a small amount of sugar. Salt and pepper to taste.

Bake at 300 degrees for several hours or until tomatoes have shriveled and started to turn brown around the edges. Don’t throw away the olive oil! It’s now infused with tomato flavor and is wonderful as a pasta sauce with a little balsamic vinegar.

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Tagged as olive oil, pasta, roasted tomatoes, soups, southern cooking, stews, tomatoes

March 22, 2012

Please read me

I’m sneaking one in on you. You looked at the title and you clicked because you were curious.

Ha! Kale!

No, no, don’t go away. This is one you’re going to like. I promise! This is a snack. A healthy snack. You will never know you’re eating kale. Kind of. In a way.

The end of kale season is near and I know all you kale haters are happy about that. You can now confidently go to the farmer’s market and not worry about making eye contact with the poor farmer trying to peddle his kale.

But let’s all face it. We’re heading into swimsuit season and you’re going to need a little help. Maybe a lot of help. So Kale Chips. Couldn’t be simpler. And they almost have negative calories. Just coat kale leaves in a little olive oil and bake them until they’re crispy. After they come out of the oven, sprinkle a little freshly ground salt over them. I made a complete cookie sheet of them the other day and I ate every single chip. They’re also delicious as a garnish for soup or as a crunchy element in a salad.

This is the last you’ll hear about kale this year. Please don’t hate me.

Kale chips

1 bunch kale or one 16-ounce bag fresh kale greens

2-3 tablespoons olive oil

Freshly ground salt or kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. Pull off the ribs from the kale, either bagged or fresh. If you’re using bagged, just distribute the kale over a foil-lined cookie sheet. If you’re using fresh, cut it in bite-sized pieces. Bake until crisp, about 20 minutes. Sprinkle with salt to taste and toss.

N0te: Be careful with the salt in this recipe. It can easily overpower the kale. A light hand is called for.

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Tagged as kale, kale chips, kosher salt, olive oil, snacks, south, southern cooking

January 10, 2012

Kale

No, don’t run away! Don’t click over to that other food blog you like so much! Stay here, I beg of you. This won’t hurt. I promise.

Kale is what’s for supper if you’re a vegetarian in January. It’s apparently the only thing that grows in the dead of winter, like the big dark green leafy weed it is. Well, it’s not a weed. It’s a member of the cabbage family that doesn’t grow a head. But, it’s also related to wild cabbage, which you could call a weed. If you go to the farmer’s market in January, pretty much all you will see are farmers selling kale, radishes, sweet potatoes and winter squash. It will be that way until April.

Since the Mayhew New Year’s Day menu required some sort of green, and because the green of choice was kale, we had a lot left over. You can’t just buy a couple leaves of kale. You have to buy a mess of it, as we say in the South. So here’s what you do and I promise you will actually seek out kale after you try this: just saute it. Don’t cook it until it’s mush as we Southerners love to do. Just give it a quick dip in some olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

One of the great magic tricks of the culinary world is cooking any kind of greens. You will start with a skillet full to overflowing and think you’ve got way too much in the pan. Within minutes, you’ll have enough for three servings, if that.

Sauteed Kale

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

1 pound kale, sliced into thin ribbons

2 garlic cloves thinly sliced

Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil over medium high heat in a skillet. Add the vinegar and the kale. Stir constantly to start wilting the kale. When it is reduced by half, add the garlic slices. Continue cooking until the kale is completely wilted but still a vibrant green. Add salt and pepper to taste.

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Tagged as balsamic vinegar, farmers market, garlic, kale, new year's day, olive oil, south, southern cooking

August 17, 2011

Caprese salad

One of the most honorable uses of tomatoes in the summer is to assemble a Caprese salad. Ya’ll, I had to look this up but Caprese salad means salad in the style of Capri and originated in the Italian region of Campania.

I think my first revelation about this came years ago when I realized that mozzarella for this salad does not come in a plastic bag hanging in the cheese section of the supermarket. In fact, most supermarkets don’t carry the kind of mozzarella you need which is fresh, fresh, fresh and in a ball. Sometimes it comes in a plastic tub filled with liquid. Lately, I’ve seen it at The Fresh Market just wrapped in plastic. You have to have this or don’t even bother.

The second thing you have to have are real tomatoes. You can only make this salad during tomato season. It drives me absolutely up the wall to go into a restaurant in January and see this salad on the menu. I always ask the waiter if the tomatoes are in season. Trick question. The waiter is usually clueless and assures me they are. Liar, liar, pants on fire! If you order this salad in January, you will get what you deserve: flavorless orbs injected with chemicals to turn them red picked by slave labor in Florida. Not so appetizing, eh?

So, because I am so blessed to have a great farmer’s market nearby, this time of year I pick up not only the traditional red tomatoes, but also sweet yellow ones and beautiful heirlooms like the green zebra. Layer them with the fresh mozzarella, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, add a sprinkling of freshly ground salt and pepper. Serve with crusty bread for sopping up the dressing. Fall into a chair delirious with the bounty of the summer harvest.

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Filed under cheese, salads, Uncategorized, veggies

Tagged as caprese salad, farmers market, fresh mozzarella cheese, olive oil, south, southern cooking, tomatoes

March 2, 2011

Chimichurri

Doesn’t that name just scream fun? Even if you don’t know what it is?

I will have to digress for a moment before I actually get to the recipe. I have had occasion over the years in several of my jobs to meet various famous people. And I have come to this conclusion. If you are nice before you become famous, you will be nice after you become famous. And if you’re not, you won’t.

Michelle Bernstein was raised up right because she’s really nice. Michelle is what they’re calling these days a “star chef.” She’s won the James Beard Award and she also beat the stuffing out of Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. I met her last fall at the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium, where I am quite certain she was bitterly regretting agreeing to make lunch for 500 extremely knowledgeable and food-obsessed writers, chefs, industry professionals and hangers-on like me. The reason I came to this conclusion is that I watched her direct a team of other chefs in an outdoor assembly line and I will tell you the girl looked like she was about to have a heart attack. At the end of the meal, she just stood there hugging her husband for a very long time and I know her next stop had to have been the nearest bar. The food was fantastic. And in the middle of all that, in the heat of battle, she sweetly agreed to let me take her photo. And at a meet-and-greet later on that day, she was just delightful and Southern people put a pretty high premium on delightful.

I am telling you all of this to say that last fall I did not understand that Michelle Bernstein would change my life with her chimichurri recipe from Cuisine a Latina, her cookbook. I had heard of chimichurri for years, but I’m not the biggest parsley fan on the planet and chimichurri is mostly parsley. But I was so wrong about this sauce. Traditionally, it’s served with grilled meat in Argentina. It’s like their national catsup.

So after a particularly parsley-heavy funeral food marathon, I had some left over. I made the sauce. I grilled a hangar steak. And I tried the meat and sauce together. Something happens when that vibrant garlicky, slightly spicy sauce hits that charred medium rare meat that is unexplainable. It is unbelievably good and ya’ll have just got to try it. It makes me want to be Argentinian, which would also make me a lot more interesting.

Michelle Bernstein’s Chimichurri

1 cup finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley leave

2 tablespoons fresh oregano

2 tablespoons minced garlic

2 teaspoons crushed red pepper flakes

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Note: Traditional Chimichurri must be made at least an hour before serving.

Put parsley, oregano, garlic, red pepper flakes, and vinegar into a blender or food processor and process until it becomes a coarse paste. Use a rubber spatula to scrape mixture into a bowl or other container. Stir in olive oil; add salt and pepper. Let sit for at least one hour before serving.

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Filed under beef, sides, veggies

Tagged as chimichurri, garlic, michelle bernstein, olive oil, oregano, parsley, red wine vinegar, south, southern cooking, southern foodways alliance

Tag Archives: olive oil

Tomatoes and fresh mozzarella with chimichurri

Roasted butternut squash and kale

Lemon pasta with mushrooms and cherry tomatoes

Grilled vegetable salad

Tri-color pasta salad

Roasted tomatoes

Please read me

Kale

Caprese salad

Chimichurri

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