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.  

Orecchiette with Toasted Breadcrumbs

Here's a simple, quick dish for a work night.  It's certainly not the healthiest thing out there, but it's fast and it tastes good!

Lemon Chicken!

When I was in college, the Chinese delivery guy knew the code to my dorm.  I lived on Chinese delivery for my first three years of college, until a sorority sister found a caterpillar in her lo mein and that was it for me until there was another place to order from, because yuck.

I order Chinese occasionally and lemon chicken is one of my favorites.  This recipe from Ken Hom is much better than delivery unless you're in the mood for some battered and fried chicken.  This chicken isn't crunchy because there's no batter.  The sauce is much more citrus-y than some delivery places that make a cloying, overly sweet lemon sauce.  I doubled the sauce so that it would flavor my rice.  However, the recipe below is a single batch of the sauce. The recipe is relatively simple but it does require a bit of physical work because you have to drain your wok and wipe it down.  So if you have a wok with short handles, oven mitts are a good thing to have around.

Curried Chicken Sandwich with Apple Raita

The general impression I got when I told people that I was pregnant was that with a baby, I was basically never going to cook again.  That once I ran out of tasty food brought by friends and family, my diet would consist of frozen meals that contain no flavor yet somehow account for my weekly total salt intake.  Well, I definitely cook fewer new or elaborate things.  And I get sushi carry out more than I should.  But my husband and I still make our own meals most nights.  Just simpler, easier ones on work nights.  Usually regular rotation recipes that are quick, easy, and that one person can make solo if they need to.  But, sometimes I make something new!  I bought America's Test Kitchen: Simple Weeknight Favorites after seeing an awesome looking pasta recipe from it on another food blog.  I made a Penzey's run last weekend.  So, instead of leaving with the one thing I needed, I came home with a huge bag of spices, including some curry powder.  This curried chicken sandwich is fantastic for a work night!  It takes about 20 minutes to make.  I was skeptical of putting apple in the raita. It has a little kick and a little tang but it works really well.  I made sandwiches for two people, but a full recipe of the raita.

I served some rice with my naan sandwich.  Because one can never have too many carbs.  

Poached Tuna with Kumquats and Jalapenos

This dish takes less than 15 minutes from start to finish.  It's great for a work night. I served it with some couscous from a box.  I put it in a pot to cook before I began my prep work on the tuna and they finished at about the same time.  Don't overcook the tuna!  This batch was 2 minutes on one side, 3 on the other since my steaks were a little on the thick side.  The tangy kumquats and hot jalapenos play nicely together.  If you think the jalapenos at your grocery store might be on the more mild end, get a serrano instead, the spiciness is really important.

Cream of Broccoli Soup

When I was a kid, cream of whatever soup came in a can, contained my monthly sodium intake, and was usually used to flavor chicken and rice.  It was almost always beige, even if the "whatever" in the soup was a green vegetable like broccoli or asparagus.  In other words: yuck.  That said, home made cream of whatever soup is really good! And in the case of cream of broccoli soup, it's actually green! There's a lot of broccoli in it and not a lot of whatever would make the soup beige.

This recipe is from The New Moosewood Cookbook and is vegetarian.  It has relatively few ingredients and is easy to make, especially if you have an immersion blender.  I seasoned mine with a bit of black salt at the end, that's what the flecks are in the picture.  Even though there is no heavy cream in this soup (I used 1% milk), it was still nice and creamy (and healthier).

Bowtie Pasta with Mascarpone, Asparagus, and Hazelnuts

Back when I was first learning how to cook, this was one of the first "fancy" pasta dishes I tried to make.  In the beginning, I'm pretty sure I added way too much water to the sauce and ended up with watery, bland pasta with some asparagus and cheese on it.  But, I got better at it and it was on regular rotation in our house for about a year.  Then I started accumulating cookbooks.  I wanted to try Indian! Thai! Stir Fry! Mexican!  And this recipe was forgotten for a few years.  

A few weeks ago, I cleaned out my cookbooks to donate some to charity (and make room for more!) and found a "Best of Bon Appetit" cookbook.  This recipe was in it.  I got nostalgic and decided to make it again.  I'd forgotten how much I like it!  It's quick, easy, and vegetarian.  The sauce is pretty mild so it does need some salt and pepper.  But, it's very creamy, slightly sweet, and goes well with the roasted asparagus.  I added some sauteed garlic for extra flavor.  If you can buy blanched hazelnuts in bulk at your grocery store, that will make this dish really quick because then you don't have to do it yourself.  Honestly, if you're strapped for time, leaving the husks on will make your dish less pretty but I don't think it's worth it to remove them unless you're serving guests or have the time to spare.  My main alteration to this recipe is that I barely added any of the reserved cooking water to the sauce.  I did it very slowly and stopped as soon as the sauce reached my desired consistency, which for me was still relatively thick. It was easy to stir and coat everything, but not watery at all.  I definitely recommend this dish for a quick work night dinner.  I served it with some cantaloupe.

Beer and BBQ Pulled Chicken Sandwiches

I was at a party a few nights ago and someone was discussing the awesomeness of chicken cooked in beer and barbecue sauce.  I've always wanted to try a pulled meat recipe that included beer.  Cooking with wine is fun, so why not beer?  I searched the internet for a good crockpot recipe and found one with only a few ingredients.  This meal requires very little prep work and could be tossed into the slow cooker in less than 10 minutes.  But that's no fun!  Instead, I made my own BBQ sauce.  The recipe suggests that a thinner sauce is better for cooking the chicken, so I didn't leave mine on the stove for very long.  After I poured some in the slow cooker, I let it cook more to thicken it to my desired consistency.  The BBQ sauce I made freezes well.  If I was in a hurry, I'd just use a bottled sauce.  The chicken is amazing! The meat didn't taste like a chicken drowned in beer, it was a very mild flavor that went really well with the BBQ sauce.  My sauce isn't overly sweet, which I think is a good match for the beer.  The smoked paprika gave it a slight kick. After 8 hours in the slow cooker, the chicken required zero effort to shred.  When it was completely cooked, it took about five minutes to shred, mix with the sauce, and put on a bun.  This is a great dish for a work night if you can get it in the slow cooker in the morning (and it has a keep warm setting).  It's also great for leftovers.  I served it on an onion roll with some foil baked corn on the cob and a small salad.

Quick Vegetarian Dinner! Hearts of Palm and Avocado Salad

This salad involved a bit of chopping but it still didn't take very long to make, about 15 minutes.  The dressing has mayonnaise in it, but not a lot.  It's a pretty healthy vegetarian meal. It would also make a good side dish for a meat entree though you might have leftovers. I made a half recipe, using only one can of hearts of palm.  It made plenty of food for two people for a light dinner on a warm day.  The dressing is tart, but not overwhelming so the hearts of palm aren't smothered.  The original recipe called for yellow cherry tomatoes.  I didn't have any, so I used orange grape tomatoes and it was fine.  I preferred the hearts of palm sliced a little thinner than 1/2 inch.  It's annoying to only use half an avocado in a recipe, so I just ate the rest of it tossed with some lemon juice.

Agedashi Tofu

I've loved agedashi tofu since I first had it back in law school.  It's pretty easy to make at home.  I use instant dashi instead of making my own from scratch.  It's easier, faster, and I can make mine more mild because I don't like the strong bonito flavor of full-strength dashi.  I've made this dish many times, and it's really important to get the silken tofu, it makes a huge difference.  Wegman's doesn't usually carry it and so I've substituted soft and firm and it will work, but if you can get silken tofu, it's worth it.  For this batch, I stopped by my local Korean supermarket and got some silken tofu.  The tofu is lightly crunchy on the outside and the silken tofu melted in my mouth.  The garnishes are a nice touch.  I used daikon, ginger, green onions, and a mix of basil and mint.  I served this with a side salad and some left over Asian style slaw.

Quick Beef Stroganoff

Normally when I hear the words "beef stroganoff," I think of the uber salty and gross frozen meals I used to nuke for lunch at work.  The ones with the limp noodles, mushy vegetables, and "meat" of questionable quality.  But I love egg noodles and the picture for this recipe gave me hope that beef stroganoff could, in fact, be edible and even tasty. True to its name, this dish was very quick!  I loved it, and will definitely make it again for a good work night meal.  The sauce was nice and creamy, I added extra hot paprika to give it a kick.  I used skirt steak instead of flank steak because I didn't feel like buying 2 lbs of steak when I could get  1/2 pound instead. I used full fat sour cream instead of nonfat. The only other change I made was to buy crimini mushrooms instead of the exotic blend, which my grocery store didn't have.

Carnitas Tacos with Pineapple, Jalapenos, and Tomatillo Salsa

A few weeks ago I made carnitas in my slow cooker and froze the leftovers. Initially, I decided that the meat was definitely an ingredient rather than something to throw in a bowl with some cheese, lime, and pico de gallo.  There's a fantastic Mexican restaurant near me that serves amazing carnitas tacos with pineapple, pickled jalapenos, and habanero salsa. They're unbelievably addictive!  I've wanted to try and make something similar for a while. I decided to make a green salsa instead of attempting to use habaneros.  At the restaurant they pickle their own jalapenos.  To make this a quick meal, I bought a can of them instead.  Since this dish was made from leftovers, it was super fast.  All that needs to be done is defrost and warm up the meat, chop the pineapple, and make the salsa.

Tecate will always be "Hellboy Beer" to me. 

Quick Dinner! Pork Souvlaki with Tzatziki Sauce

This dish is super fast.  It needs to marinate for 20 minutes, but you can make the sauce in the meantime.  Serve it with a quick salad or some store bought tabbouleh and you're good to go!  I made the tabbouleh in this picture because I had the extra time. Here's the recipe I use. It took me about half an hour to make the souvlaki and tzatziki, including the marinating time.  In addition to being a quick dinner for a work night, this dish tastes great.  The lemon and oregano make the pork interesting and the simple grilled onions add some extra flavor.  As always, I served it with some extra lemon wedges.  Even though I halved the amount of pork because I'm cooking for two, I made the full amount of tzatziki because I wanted extra for my pita.

Super Fast: Piquillo Pepper and Chickpea Soup with Chicken

This soup took about 20 minutes to make, from start to finish.  It would have been even faster if I had used pre-cooked rotisserie chicken as the recipe suggested. I had to cook and shred a chicken breast.  I tossed some rice in my rice cooker while I was doing other stuff and it was ready to go when it was time to make dinner. The hummus is mostly in the soup for the creamy texture, the main flavor is from the piquillo peppers, which are different from normal roasted red peppers. They have a little bit of spice to them, but nothing so hot that this soup is off limits for the spice adverse.  If you like roasted, slightly spicy peppers, this is a fantastic work night soup that is made with relatively little effort.  I served it with a salad that I made while the soup was heating on the stove.

The Dowager Countess would not approve of my silverware placement.

"Pesto" Crusted Mahi Mahi with Asparagus

I've become a little obsessed with coating fish with panko.  It's easy, relatively quick, and there are tons of variations!  This picture is terrible, but my camera was telling me it had .0001 seconds of battery life left and so I didn't get a chance to redo it. The crust looks burned, but it really wasn't that bad.  That said, I don't recommend the power burner for heating oil  Just sayin'.

The sauce from the asparagus goes well with the fish, too!

Panko Crusted Fish with Quick Caper and Lemon Sauce

Here's a quick fish dinner!  Searing fish with a panko crust is a pretty quick way to cook fish. The crunchy panko crust is quite tasty. I've been making a sauce with shallots, garlic, lemon, capers, wine and butter and it's really good!  I also season the flour with some salt, pepper, and garlic or shallot salt.  I buy mahi mahi, rockfish, or halibut, depending on what I can get.  This picture is of mahi mahi.  I served it with some spinach sauteed with garlic, but any green vegetable will do. I've paired breaded fish with broccoli and asparagus and sometimes I add a small salad.

Yeah, I really need to start using some smaller plates.  The fish and spinach look like they're having an armed standoff.  

Fettuccine with Sausage, Basil, and Sun Dried Tomatoes

I love pasta!  I'm always looking for fast, simple recipes with only a few ingredients for when I don't feel like spending a long time cooking.  I figured Mario Batali's book, Molto Italiano, would have some good stuff.  The snobby part of me internally scoffed at the idea of buying a book from a celebrity chef.  But, I got over myself and ordered it.  I'm glad I did!  A lot of the recipes look very tasty and easily doable on a work night.

I already had all the ingredients for this recipe in my kitchen except for sausage. I don't know if you have this problem, but I make a lot of recipes that call for 1 tablespoon of tomato paste, leaving me with the rest of the can, even when I buy the small one.  It gets put in some tupperware and then it goes into the fridge until it achieves consciousness. It's not pretty.  This recipe is a great way to use up leftover tomato paste!  If you make the full recipe, it needs 5 tablespoons.

I made 2 servings of pasta but the full recipe of sauce. I suspect that if I'd halved the sauce, the dish would have been maybe little bland.  I used fresh garlic from my husband's grandmother's garden.  Soooo good. The recipe calls for fresh tagliatelle but I didn't have any, so I used some dried fettuccine and it was fine.  If fresh pasta is easily accessible to you, go for it!

Stir Fried Pork with Garlic Scapes

A few weeks ago, my husband and I visited my in-laws.  They took us to the West Side Market and I bought some garlic scapes on a whim.  I'd never cooked them before, but my mother in law said they were pretty awesome.  She suggested that they would taste good with pork.  I looked all over the internet for a tasty sounding pork and garlic scape recipe and stumbled across this one from Tigers and Strawberries, one of my favorite cooking blogs.  I'm sad that it hasn't been updated in a while, I've tried so many of her recipes!  I modified this one a little because I didn't have time to go to the grocery store and made it with what I had already.  So, no pressed tofu or dried mushrooms.  But it still worked out really well, and the garlic scapes really are quite tasty.  They have the consistency of Chinese long beans unless they're blanched.  I wanted a bit of a crunch, so I didn't bother.  They taste like garlic, but lighter and crunchy.

This dish is pretty quick to make if you marinate the pork and then chop everything while it's sitting in the fridge.

My frog chopstick rest is fabulous. 

Pork with Grapes and Tarragon

This relatively quick dish has a fantastic sauce.  I used seedless red grapes and the tannins really do make the wine sauce pop. Normally I imagine that a sauce with grapes would be overly sweet, but that isn't the case here. Since I could only buy large bunches of red grapes, I added a few more than the recipe required. The tarragon and splash of vinegar counteract the sweetness of the fruit to create a balanced sauce. I served it with rice pilaf from a box and some simple sauteed green beans with shallots.

You can almost see my reflection in the sauce. 

Ginger Carrot Soup

I'm a bit of a computer game addict, and Diablo III came out last Tuesday.  As a result, most of my meals have been either take out sushi or something I can make really fast so I can spend more time sitting in my dimly lit computer room punching demons in the face.  The meals I make when I'm in game addict mode don't make very good blog fodder since most of my fastest recipes are old ones that I've been making forever.  But, I managed to try a few new things, including this ginger carrot soup.  It's healthy, quick, and very tasty! If you make this soup, I definitely recommend an immersion blender, it makes it a lot easier. It's a creamy, slightly sweet soup with a small kick of ginger. It's vegetarian and vegan. It's also a pretty color and tastes like it takes a lot more work to make than it really does.

Definitely break up the orange with something green like a mint sprig and serve with a side salad.