Tangy Bean Thread Noodles with Cilantro and Lime

Bean thread noodles are what I buy by accident when what I really meant to buy were rice stick noodles.  So they tend to accumulate in the back of my pantry.  Quick and Easy Thai is one of my favorite cookbooks, but I tend to make the same handful of recipes over and over.  I was cleaning out my pantry and found yet another bag of neglected bean thread noodles and found something to make with them.  This dish was pretty quick to make, except for the 1,000 years it takes to prep the cilantro.  I don't like the stems very much so I end up having to take all the leaves off and it takes forever.  I know I should attempt to embrace the stems because it would make my life easier.  But I just can't do it.

We didn't eat this dish as directed.  It's supposed to cool to room temperature.  This was so quick to make because we started dinner late, we were starving, and we wanted to eat ASAP so we could play computer games.  It's also supposed to be eaten with lettuce leaves.  Oops.

That said, the noodles were quite tasty!  They were what I consider to be mildly spicy and what normal human beings would probably consider to be moderately spicy.  The lime juice was significantly more noticeable than I expected.  I figured it would be barely there, maybe the fish sauce helped it out.  I'm definitely going to make them again.  Maybe if I'm not super hungry I'll actually follow the instructions for eating them.

Take note of this artistic presentation.  It'll be all the rage in New York by next week.  

Spicy Sausage Ragu in the Slow Cooker

I'm back from falling off the face of the earth!  I was super pregnant at the time of my last post.  As a result of having a new baby around, most of my dishes over the last two months have been of the "what can we make really, really fast?" variety.  Most of them were tried and true quick favorites.  We also had a freezer full of pre-made food donated by friends and family, which is *awesome,* especially during the first few weeks when painkillers and coffee are food groups.

Since I'm on maternity leave, I decided to experiment with my slow cooker.  I bought a copy of The Italian Slow Cooker and used a recipe from it for the first time last week.  Generally, if the first recipe I try from a new book in my cookbook army isn't very good, it takes a long time for me to use the book again, I guess I'm judgy that way.  The Spicy Sausage Ragu was a huge success!! Not only did my husband and I love it, there was enough left to freeze!

It doesn't look pretty, but trust me it tastes fantastic!!

Olive and Egg Salad

Don't let the picture fool you, this is an awesome salad!  It's a great way to use hard boiled eggs.  The recipe can be halved to use this salad as an appetizer or the full recipe makes an excellent entree.  The dressing is simple; it's just lemon, garlic, and olive oil.  It adds a nice tang to the salty olives, slightly sharp red onions, and toasty pine nuts.  Even though there is a good bit of chopping, this salad is relatively quick if you're using left over hard boiled eggs.

The recipe is from my new Lebanese and Syrian cookbooks, Saha, by Greg and Lucy Malouf. I've had another of their books, Turquoise, for many years and I learned that they published Saha first.  Of course the last thing I need is another Middle Eastern cookbook, but I couldn't help myself!  I'm very glad I bought it.  It has fewer recipes than Turquoise, but so far all of them that I've tried have been fabulous. 

One Year Later: Green Enchiladas

I've been making these green enchiladas for years.  I wrote a post about them about a year ago. They were one of the first dishes I started making regularly while learning how to cook, and the first from-scratch enchiladas I ever made. Back in the day, I used canned enchilada sauce and I thought I was a cooking wizard because I could bake enchiladas in the oven that came out still resembling their ingredients instead of gooey charcoal.  Bonus points for being tasty! I think that in the past year, I've perfected them and wanted to post my updated recipe. 

These green enchiladas aren't terribly pretty, but they are awesome. They're creamy, cheesy, tangy, and if you add chili powder, just a little bit spicy.  I've changed the recipe a bit over the years. The original recipe is from Cooking Light, but I don't think these are very healthy.  But that's probably because I changed the recipe to include a ton of cheddar cheese, because I have to choose between healthy and cheddar cheese, the cheese will always win. If you use Herdez or Goya brand salsa verde, the sauce is mild and safe for the spicy-adverse. But I add extra chili powder.  I also season the chicken with some adobo seasoning and add some extra garnishes.  I make the full batch of sauce and then slightly less filling and tortillas to serve 2 people (3 enchiladas each).  The "proper" portion for this is two enchiladas per person.  If you decide to scale this up to serve more people, increase the amount of sauce!  The enchiladas should be completely covered with sauce when you bake them. I also omit the step of cooking the tortillas in chicken broth.  I've tried this a few times and it did nothing for me.  It seemed unnecessary and increased my enchilada assembling time.  If you want to make your tortillas more pliable, steam them.

Homage to the 80s: Cream Cheese and Mushroom Chicken with a Twist

Last month, I made some home made cream of mushroom soup.  While it tasted okay, it wasn't thick enough for a meal.  The blog where I found the recipe also suggested using the soup in a recipe for cream cheese chicken.  Working ahead, I made a large batch of the soup and froze it.

I remember growing up in the 80s when my mom cooked all kinds of stuff with canned cream-of-something soup.  I know that a lot of canned soups have a ton of sodium in them, and so using my own soup sounded like a good idea.  The picture of the cream cheese chicken from A Year of Slow Cooking did not look appetizing to me.  What made me want to make it? Cream cheese!! Also, pasta.

Now, my picture isn't very pretty.  This dish looks kind of scary.  It's also not healthy, since it contains a ton of cream cheese.  That said, holy crap is it good!  I will definitely make this again, especially in the winter, it's very hearty.  The chicken, cooked in the slow cooker, shreds very easily and incorporates well into the sauce.  I think I may have overshredded the chicken. Looking back, I think I should have left some larger pieces. The mushroom flavor is earthy, but not overwhelming.  The cream cheese makes it awesome.  I won't be serving it to guests because it's just not attractive, even with chives (chives make everything look better!).  But don't let it stop you from making it!  It's basically effortless if you make the soup ahead. 

I promise, it doesn't taste like Klingon food!

Caspian Fava Bean Omelet

Or, more accurately, fried eggs amidst fava beans and dill.  That's not a bad thing, but I definitely feel like the description in my new book was a little off.  Maybe my definition of "omelet" is somewhat rigid, I was imagining using beaten eggs.  After actually reading the recipe instead of just skimming the ingredients and thinking, "this contains fava beans and a ton of garlic, awesome!" I realized that I'd basically be pouring four eggs into a pan filled with fava beans, dill, and spices.  I was a little concerned about how this vegetarian dish would turn out. Of all the new types of cooking I've tried recently, Persian seems the most challenging right now.  The ingredients are mostly familiar (except for some spices and fruits that aren't available), but the cooking methods are completely different from anything I'm used to.  So, I was a little apprehensive about cooking this dish.

According to my new cookbook, Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, the Persian name for this dish is "baqala qataq." There are several different ways to spell "baqala qataq," but from my searching, I learned that it's a dish from Gilan, a province along the Caspian sea.  I really wanted to see a picture of how this dish should look, but despite my fearsome google-fu, it took me several minutes to find a picture of what this meal should look like.  Thankfully, my meal looked somewhat like the picture, except that I mauled my eggs.

One thing that I will absolutely do the next time I make this: use fresh fava beans!!  The book specified fresh or frozen fava beans. My grocery store had neither.  So, I bought a 1 lb can of fava beans.  While the dish still turned out well, I think that the canned beans added more salt, and their texture was probably different from the real thing.  I also suspect that canned fava beans don't absorb water as well as fresh or frozen.  And lastly, removing skins from canned fava beans is a huge pain in the butt.  With fresh ones, a few minutes of boiling and they slide right off.  Not so with the canned beans.  I don't recommend them.

I should warn you that this picture is not pretty.  Canned fava beans are beige.  Also, one of my egg yolks broke.  And at the end, I wasn't quite sure if the yolks were done, so I stabbed them a few times with a butter knife.  And my pan was too big.  Despite its homely appearance, this dish tasted quite good!  I love fried eggs, and I'd venture to say that if you like them too, you'd enjoy this dish.  Think of it as fried eggs on top of some tasty sauteed beans with spices.  There is a ginormous amount of garlic in this dish, but its bite is taken out by the long cooking time.  And it's balanced out by 2 cups of dill.  Overall, this is a very flavorful, garlicky, dill-y way to eat fried eggs.  I made the full recipe this time, and it was too much food.  One egg per person is definitely okay, especially when serving this dish with rice and a small salad.

Maybe stabbing the eggs wasn't the best idea ever. 

My First Foray into Persian Cooking

I just received my copy of Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies.  I've been intrigued by Persian cooking since I came across a few Persian recipes in a Middle Eastern cookbook.  Main ingredients in Persian cooking include a lot of foods I really enjoy: pistachio nuts, pomegranates, onions, garlic, dried fruits, and fresh herbs.

Instead of starting with something simple, I decided to throw myself in and make pistachio soup and Caspian olive and pomegranate salad.  Realistically, I should have picked just one of these and then accompanied it by something simple.  Instead, I spent a long time in the kitchen.  In the book, the picture of the soup is a nice, light green.  Because pistachios are green, right?  The recipe called for raw pistachios, and I can only get roasted.  So, maybe that's why my soup wasn't green.  Regardless, when I first sat down to eat, Dave and I were extremely skeptical because it didn't look anything like the picture.   The color, was, in fact, kind of off putting.  But, we were wrong to doubt the soup!

The spice mix was perfect, a nice body from the cumin and coriander and just a little kick from the cayenne.  The soup didn't taste like cream of pistachio, instead, it was pistachio with a little garlic, some cumin, and a little bit of sour tang from the orange and lime juices added at the end.  I didn't deviate from the recipe other than to omit the garnish entirely because I can't get barberries without ordering them online.  This soup can be made vegetarian by substituting vegetable broth for for chicken broth.  Even though I was halving the recipe, I added the full amount of garlic, spring onion, and leek, so the recipe below is how I made it.  If you want your soup less leeky, just use half a leek. 
 

I can't walk from the kitchen to the dining room without sloshing my soup all over the place.

I Swear There are Enchiladas Under All That Sauce!

Rick Bayless has another name for these enchiladas, but I nicknamed them "deconstructed enchiladas" since the tortillas are folded at the bottom and all the fillings are dumped on top.  I'm sure my use of "deconstructed" isn't entirely correct, but that's what I've been calling them forever.

This recipe is great if you like spicy tomato sauce and have some leftover chicken laying around.  I always tell myself that I'm going to buy a rotisserie chicken and use it as a source of shredded chicken and then I never do.  So, for this batch of enchiladas, I sliced some chicken breast, seasoned it with adobo, and cooked it in a nonstick pan.

This sauce is very flavorful, and it can be spicy if you use a whole jalapeno (or more!).  Definitely let it reduce enough, otherwise you'll have watery enchiladas.  I add less broth than the recipe calls for and eyeball it from there.  I use both the sour cream + milk mixture and cilantro as garnishes, I think they're both necessary to complete the dish.  The sour cream mixture has a nice cooling effect and the cilantro adds some green to the dish. 

As Close to Pi as I'm Going to Get

Yesterday was Pi Day, 3/14.  I should probably turn in my nerd card since I didn't bake a pie.  I think I've baked approximately 3 pies in my entire life (4 if you count the Meringue Debacle of 2003).  While they were good, they can't hold a candle to my mom's pies.  Last night I got home from work and had a choice.  I could attempt to cobble together some sort of pie-shaped thing with ingredients already in my pantry.  Or, I could just cook dinner and then play computer games.  I decided to make a dish that most closely approximated pi(e).  Behold, kofte kebab over crispy pita with tomato sauce and spiced yogurt!  I am the first to admit that this dish isn't the prettiest plate in the world, but it tastes awesome.  And although it requires a decent bit of chopping, the cooking time is relatively short, about 10 minutes for the lamb and tomato sauce.  The yogurt doesn't require cooking and is spooned on cold. Since it's not cooked, nonfat yogurt works just fine.  I adapted the yogurt sauce a little to make it more flavorful.