Broccoli Cheddar soup

I made this last night:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/almost-famous-broccoli-cheddar-soup-recipe.html

It was pretty good. I was lazy and didn't use a carrot. I also used milk instead of 1/2 and 1/2

Vegetarian BBQ dinner

While we're still waiting around for the arrival of our little one, I decided to grill up a dinner for us this evening. The CSA is in abundance at the moment, so I'm trying to prepare food that uses the vegetables we get to the maximum! Tonight was no exception, the corn, radicchio, onions, potatoes, and dill all came from the share!

On to our menu:

• Grilled Corn - As per my usual, I like to grill the corn in their husk, so it more or less steams inside. As usual it turned out great, if I do say so myself. I had pinned a recipe for Siracha Street corn recently and thought, now was as good of a time as any to try it out. It turns out I'm not really a fan. While I really like spicy and Siracha sauce, I'm more of a sweet corn purist - I like to taste the flavor of the corn.
• Grilled Radicchio - I'm never quite sure what to do with radicchio, but I had seen several recipes for the grilled variety in past internet searches, so I thought I would try it tonight. The only thing I left out from the recipe was the orange peel, as I didn't have any; also I used Parmesan cheese instead of Romano. I didn't really miss the orange, though I probably could have grilled/cooked the quarters a bit longer. Overall I thought all the flavors were excellent - the radicchio was a little bitter, which was cut by the spicy balsamic marinade.
• Baked beans - well these came out of a can and were prepared on the stove, but I thought they went well with everything, and Ebon likes them :)
• Veggie Italian sausages and grilled onions - I like the Tofurkey brand and the onions were sprayed with olive oil and cooked on top of a foil sheet on the grill - Yum for carmelization.
• Potato Salad - I didn't really have a recipe, I just kind of threw some things together. I boiled some new potatoes - either cut in half or whole depending on their size. When they were tender, I stopped cooking, drained and let them cool for about 20 min (this is where I was doing the preparations of other things above). When they were cool, I cut them into bite-sized chunks. The dressing was a dip that I prepared a few days earlier - 

~1 cup plain lowfat yogurt
~2 tablespoons fresh dill
~1 teaspoon salt
~1/2 teaspoon pepper
~1-2 tablespoons of olive oil
couple pinches of sugar
I mixed the dressing portion together and poured over the potato chunks and mixed everything to coat.

This was a very filling meal, and it would have been much better to have more than just two people to help eat this one!

Spicy Kohlrabi Stew with Tomatoes

I've had some kohlrabi from our CSA share sitting in my fridge for too long. So long in fact that some of it went bad, but I needed to use up the good parts, so I surfed the interwebs for recipes. I didn't really find anything too good until I came across this recipe. There wasn't a picture that I could pin to my YUM Pintrest Board, so I decided to find the cookbook at the library. I requested it and a few days later I had Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the World in my hands.  It took me another few days before I actually looked at the cookbook, but it is very thorough in terms of vegetables, grains, dairy, etc. Pretty much anything vegetarian that you want to cook, you will probably be able to find it.  I might just have to buy this cookbook to have in my arsenal.

Getting to the actual food... Although I had most of the ingredients for the original recipe I found, I opted to make the Spicy Kohlrabi Stew with Tomatoes.

2 pounds kohlrabi heads cut in ~1/4" dice
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
generous pinch of ground asafetida (I didn't have this and opted for garlic powder instead)
1-4 dried hot red chilies - to desired heat (again I opted for ~1/2 teaspoon crushed red chilies/peppers)
5 medium tomatoes peels and finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon sugar (if the tomatoes are sour)
Put the oil in a medium pan and set over med-high heat. When hot, put in the cumin seeds. A second later, put in the asafetida and the red chilies. Stir briefly until the chilies turn dark, a matter of seconds. Now put in the kohlrabi. Stir once or twice and quickly put in the tomatoes, turmeric, 3/4 cup water, salt, and sugar. Stir and bring to a boil. Cover, turn the heat down to low, and simmer very gently for 30-35 min, or until the kohlrabi is tender.

I also cooked up some brown lentils to which I added, ground cumin, coriander, salt, and pepper. This was all served with rice.

I thought this turned out well. Some of the kohlrabi just didn't cook right because it was so big/tough, but the flavors turned out pretty good and the heat was just right. The tomatoes came from my garden and from the CSA share - another reason to use this recipe!
Ebon seemed to like it well enough, so I would make this again if I had an abundance of kohlrabi and tomatoes.  Now go buy that cookbook!

Pea, Carrot, Red pepper, and Tofu stir fry

This was from about a month ago...

We took our annual early-summer trip to Red Fire Farm to pick strawberries over the weekend. We were also able to pick peas and herbs, so peas played into dinner on Sunday. I had some sauce from a previous dinner still in the fridge that I thought would be tasty in a stir fry. So fry up the tofu, I did - golden on each side of the roughly 1" cubes. I had several veggies on hand - 2 carrots, sliced, one red pepper, and a large handful of snow peas - freshly picked! I removed the tofu from the pan and briefly stir fried the veggies in some sesame oil. When the veggies were almost done, I added the tofu back into the pan and poured in the
Nuoc Cham. I covered and simmered for a couple minutes to get the sauce to soak up into the tofu, then took the cover off to reduce the sauce which was a little watery.
It was really filling up with rice and I thought the combination of the sesame oil stir-fried veggies and the sauce was a good flavor combination.
The peas were awesome! I love snow peas, and they taste soooo much better when they have just been picked.

Double Whammy

I got our entire CSA share because our share partners are out of town this week. I have to figure out how to use up A LOT of veggies this week. Fennel was in the share, as were potatoes. Ebon suggested a potato gratin. So I googled potatoes and fennel and got this: Potato Fennel Gratin
The only substitution I made was plain low-fat yogurt for the half-and-half.
I thought the flavors turned out excellent. However, Ebon was not a fan of the fennel at all and he thought there should have been more cheese (I thought it was quite cheesy enough). I must admit the fennel was a bit on the crisp side, so if I tried to make this again, I'd probably saute or roast the fennel, so it would have a bit more flavor and a softer texture. Unfortunately, I won't be trying this again...

I needed something else to go with the gratin, and one of other the recipes I pulled up said "serve this with a bowl of minnestrone or black bean soup..." so I went with the Black Bean Soup.
I didn't have bell pepper, so I used some carrots I pulled up from my garden earlier this week.  I also added 1/2 a jalapeno to give it a bit of a kick, though I couldn't really taste it, so I added the other half to the leftovers that I froze for later. I thought it turned out pretty good. I did have to add a bit more salt and pepper at the end, and it could have maybe used another herb of some sort, but I didn't know what to add and ended up nixing the idea. Again, Ebon ate this, but probably did it out of pity.

Next up - some sort of recipes to use up the fennel fronds and the radicchio. I did find something for fennel pesto - interesting...

Caprese Melted Sandwich

It's been hot here lately and I have not wanted to turn on the oven to do any sort of cooking or baking. So all of my dinner ideas this week have involved the smaller toaster oven, frying pan or broiler. Earlier this week I reheated lasagna I made over the weekend. We had quesadillas (black bean with salsa and cheese, though I should have added some corn from the freezer) on Tuesday and last night after I picked up our CSA veggies and got a haircut, I made an open-faced melted Caprese sandwich. I thought it turned out great.
Ebon bought a baguette that we needed to use up before it got too hard to chew, so I went to the garden and picked some basil for the pesto. I also picked up a roma tomato and some fresh mozzarella from the store.
I made the pesto with garlic scapes (about 4) that I cut from the garlic growing in the garden, the basil - probably about 1/4 cup packed not exactly sure about the amount, and some olive oil. I put it all in the blender, once it was all smooth I added about a 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese and a few grinds of fresh black pepper.
I cut about 2/3 or 3/4 of the baguette in half length-wise and spread the pesto onto each half. Then I sliced the tomato very thinly and put that on top of the pesto. Then I sliced the fresh mozzarella balls as thin as I could, which ended up about 1/4" thick and added it on top of the tomatoes.
I stuck it under a medium broiler for about 5-10 min, enough to heat up all the ingredients and start melting the cheese a bit.

Lovely low-heat (relatively) dinner!

Cream Cheese Brownies aka Zebra Brownies

I made Cream Cheese Brownies for the first time over the weekend. I have always known them as "Zebra" Brownies, which I think is more fun name. A friend asked me to bake something for their dessert table at their wedding. I had every intention of making a practice run of brownies before the actual date, but I had so many things going on last week I was never able to get to it.
I ended up making a double recipe and baked them in a 9x13 baking dish. I was worried they wouldn't finish baking in time for us to leave to actually make it to the wedding, so I turned up the temperature about 10 degrees. Other than that, I followed the recipe to the letter. I thought they turned out pretty good, though Ebon thought they were a little dry - probably due to the increased temperature. I also could have done a better job of spreading out the middle cream cheese layer, there were some spots that had large clumps and others that didn't have much. I would love to try these out again with a single batch and smaller pan.