Our Eats for the Week

Last week, I tried really hard to eat out of our pantry and freezer, and as a result, I saved quite a bit on our grocery bill—I only spent $50 total for the whole week! I'm going to do my best to do it again this week...especially since my good friend Joanna gifted me with 2 grocery bags FULL of pantry staples. (She and her husband, Jason, are moving away from Birmingham :( and she didn't want to move any of the food in her kitchen.) She has great taste, and a lot of her gifts to me were wonderful things like quick-cooking barley, roasted jalapenos, roasted red peppers, cans of beans and tomatoes, couscous, arborio rice...etc. So the menu this week will be based on some of the things in there.

Tonight, though, we're having Joanna and Jason over for a last dinner together at our house. To share from of our Parisian honeymoon, I'm making a traditional (or, as traditional as possible) French bistro meal.

Le Menu
Apéritif
Champagne, olives, baguette
Plat du Jour
Filet de Boeuf avec Sauce au Poivre Vert {steaks with green peppercorn sauce}
Gratins Dauphinois {individual potato gratins}
Salade Vert {green salad}
Le Dessert
Clafoutis aux Prunes {plum clafoutis}

The rest of the week...
Monday- Chicken, veggie & udon-noodle bowls
Tuesday- Black-bean soup, spinach salad
Wednesday- Lemon-harissa chicken, couscous
Thursday- Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez's Chana Punjabi (via The Wednesday Chef)

Friday, we're off to Danville, Kentucky for the Brandon Family Reunion 2009! We're sure to enjoy some great Southern cookin'.

Food, Inc.

This film stokes the small flame that burns in me...
and I have a feeling that after I see it, it will become a giant wildfire.






p.s. Sign this petition

This Week's Menu

Sunday - Tilapia, millet-veggie salad with tomato vinaigrette
Monday - Spinach-cauliflower tart, green salad
Tuesday - Chicken paillards with lemon pan sauce, brown rice, green beans
Wednesday - Pasta with roasted veggies
Thursday - Turkey burgers, salad, homemade potato chips

Mr. Bean

If you are like me, regularly drooling over fabulous foodie blogs like 101cookbooks.com, chocolate and zucchini, and Last Night's Dinner, you've hopefully heard about Rancho Gordo beans. But if you haven't, consider this my hearty endorsement.

I must admit, I'm not tough to please in this department. I love beans. Refried beans, lima bean soup, black beans and rice, white bean dip, three-bean salad...I love 'em all. But aside from once making the aforementioned lima bean soup with a ham hock and Publix brand dried limas, I'd never cooked beans from scratch. Why take all that time when canned beans are so easy?

...Because they taste so much better, that's why. Truly. And Rancho Gordo heirloom beans...well, they're in a class all their own. I'll let their Web site explain more. I got my dad a few varieties for Christmas, and he loved them, so I'd been meaning to order some myself. I finally got some, but then it took me a month and a half to get around to cooking them. But, the day finally came, and I am here to report that They. Were. Awesome.

I ordered black beans, craberry beans, and Christmas Limas. I decided to try the Christmas Limas first. I soaked them for 5 hours, then cooked them for another 3 1/2 hours. With nothing but water and a dash of salt in the last 30 minutes of cooking, the beans cooked beautifully and created a mohogany-colored pot liquor. The beans themselves were nutty, tender, and creamy. Fabulous.

I ate a bowl—plain, save for some Louisiana hot sauce—for lunch one day, but I wanted to try a little something more...exciting, so I built a vegetarian salad using the beans, some veggies, a zesty lime dressing, and a few handfuls of cooked whole-wheat couscous. It ended up being a light, filling, healthy one-bowl meal.

Veggie-Couscous Bowls
serves 4 as a side, or 2 for dinner with leftovers
Of course I now must recommend dried heirloom beans for this salad, but if you must, canned beans will work in a pinch. One 14.5-ounce can of drained, rinsed black beans or butter beans would work well here.

1 small lime, zested and juiced
Extra-virgin olive oil (to taste)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 ripe avocado
3/4 cup vegetable broth
2/3 cup whole-wheat couscous
1 cucumber, peeled and diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1/2 pound dried Christmas Lima beans, cooked and drained

In a medium bowl, combine the lime zest and juice. Whisk in olive oil, tasting as you go, until you get a dressing that you like. (We like ours on the very tangy side, but just keep tasting as you drizzle.) Add salt and a few grinds of pepper. Dice the avocado, and put it directly into the dressing. Set aside.

Bring the broth to a boil in a saucepan over high heat, and then stir in the couscous. Remove from heat, cover, and let steam for 5 minutes. Fluff with a fork.

In a large bowl, combine the avocado and dressing, cucumber, red pepper, and beans. Toss gently to combine. Add the couscous, and toss to evenly coat everything with the dressing. Serve.

A Simple Snack

One of the coolest parts {for me, at least} about marrying a man with a Palestinian family is his mom's cooking. She makes a lot of really delicious Arabic dishes—hashweh, mjaddarah, mashi, kibbeh—that I absolutely love, but I don't know how to make almost any of them. There are recipes, of course, but the thing about these dishes—and it's what makes them really special—is that the food is made by women who "measure" by memory, sight, and taste, not with recipes. So to learn how to make these recipes the right way, I'll be spending some long afternoons in the kitchen with Jason's mom and grandma. And I can't wait.

In the meantime, when an Arabic "recipe" involves just one ingredient, I know I can handle it. Lebneh is thickened yogurt, and it's a breakfast staple. Jason's mom lightly salts hers, so I do, too. I absolutely adore lebneh, and lately I've been spreading it on my toast in the mornings. It's traditionally served more as a dip, but I find it's a perfect partner for whole-wheat bread. With a drizzle of olive oil, it's deeeelish.

Oh, and—if you like Greek yogurt, this is essentially the same thing, only when you make it yourself, it's about 1/3 the price. At my Publix, a big tub of plain yogurt costs almost the same as a single serving of Fage Greek yogurt. Sheesh.

Here's what you need
A smallish collander (I use a silicone strainer with a handle, not a stand-alone colander)
A bowl that the strainer can rest on without it touching the bottom
Paper towels
1 pint plain yogurt (I use low-fat, but the full-fat kind gives a slightly thicker end result)
Plastic wrap

Here's what you do
Place the strainer over the bowl, and line it with one layer of paper towel, covering the strainer's entire surface. Scoop out the yogurt into the paper-towel-lined strainer (wash, dry, and save the container). Smooth it out so it's even and flat on the top. Wrap with a layer or two of plastic wrap, and place in the fridge. Leave it alone for at least 8 hours, but 10 to 12 is even better.

Scoop the lebneh back into the cleaned yogurt container (or into a tupperware). When ready to serve, spoon into a serving bowl and drizzle over a healthy amount of extra-virgin olive oil and a pinch of kosher salt...or drizzle with honey and serve with berries...or use on tacos or baked potatoes instead of sour cream...or...

It's that good. :)

It's Been a While

Have you missed me? I've missed you. I'm not sure what happened to this little blog of mine...I have neglected it, and that's just silly of me. Blogging isn't hard, and it isn't that time-consuming. But at the end of the day, it gets pushed to the bottom of my priorities list, and I end up choosing to be lazy on the couch instead of keeping up with forlorn and forgotten Amuse Bouche.

Le sigh. Anyway, I don't have any new recipes to share, mainly because since we're been gone so many weekends that my shopping trips have been sporadic and my meals have been based upon convenience. I realize that convenient meals are good ones to share, but lots of times I finish eating before I even remember to take a picture.

Here's the thing: Planning a wedding takes a lot out of you, even when you have a supermom who does all the heavy lifting for you. (Thanks, mom!) It just feels like my brain is on another planet. This spring has been a whirlwind of parties, showers, lunches, dinners, rides in cars and on airplanes, and a whole lot of smiling for the camera. In short, it's been an amazing few months...the best ever.

I do think there will be a little bit of melancholy this summer after all the hubbub has gone. But--lucky me--I'll have a sweet, wonderful husband to get me through. And this blog. I promise, my friends, I will be back and I'll have an army of fabulous food, including some Paris-inspired menus. (Did you know we're off to Paris for the honeymoon? Swoon.)

Until then...

Pasta Mama

Last I left you, I promised to tell more about my homemade pasta experience. As you may know, I am getting married in May. This past year has been an exciting, wonderful time in preparation, but I must say…the last couple of weeks have been especially wonderful, because we’re beginning to receive wedding gifts.

Among said gifts is a hand-crank pasta maker. Growing up, I spent a handful of Saturdays with my dad, rolling out pasta in the kitchen, and then slurping the fresh noodles with some kind of homemade sauce, and thinking to myself that there was never anything more delicious. I am among the lucky few to have grown up with a father who does things like makes pasta from scratch, bakes sourdough bread, preserves lemons, and uses the Thanksgiving bird for scratch-made stock. What can I say? The man is unique, and I am a more educated and inspired cook because of him.

I digress. Making pasta is among one of the easiest and most satisfying, if not time consuming, things you can make. Flour and eggs magically transform into a ball of supple, golden dough. Actually, let me back up. They transform into the golden, supple ball when you use the correct amounts of ingredients. For my inaugural pasta making, I followed Mario Batali’s recipe for basic egg pasta dough, which is the same as the one found in the Italian cooking Bible, The Silver Spoon Cookbook. Their recipes were as follows: 4 cups all-purpose flour + 4 large eggs. Maybe a teaspoon of olive oil. And a sprinkling of water, if the dough looks dry. Perfect, I thought. It can’t be wrong. If millions of Italians use this and an expert of Italian cooking uses it, it’s got to be perfect.

Not so much. I don’t know if my flour was extra thirsty or the package of organic large eggs had an ego problem and was exaggerating on the size, but the combination listed above yielded a bowlful of hard, crumbly dough that weighed about 10 pounds. Let it rest, I told myself. Maybe it will get better. It got worse. I couldn’t even roll it!

Fuming at Mario Batali in his smug orange clogs, and frustrated at wasting 4 beautiful organic eggs and almost all of my flour, I almost gave up. But then I remembered how great homemade pasta is. So I started over. This time with a scant 3 cups of flour and 4 more eggs, plus another egg yolk and about a teaspoon of olive oil. Belissima—it was perfect. I later found a Batali recipe calling for 3 1/2 cups flour and 4 extra-large eggs. Perhaps I just got a dud recipe.

(4 eggs plus 1 yolk -- perfect!)

(Nice and moist...much better this time.)

(Beautiful ball of dough, with the bad one in the back. For shame.)

It rested (next to the offending lump of unyielding, rock-hard dough, just to show it what it should look like) for 40 minutes or so, and then Jason helped me roll it into silky strands of fettuccine.

My advice for making pasta: First, start with 4 eggs + 1 egg yolk and 3 cups of flour (unless your eggs are enormous). You can always add more flour to a gloopy dough, but you can’t take it out. I’m not here to make a liar out of Mario Batali (or any number of internet sources that all gave the same amounts of ingredients), but the 4+4 thing didn’t work for me. Secondly, almost every recipe says to make the dough on a large cutting board by mounding the flour and creating a well in the center in which to put the wet ingredients, but I don’t have a large enough board. I made a well in the middle of flour in the largest bowl in my kitchen, and it worked just fine.


My Pasta Dough
Serves 4 to 6 depending on cut of pasta

3 cups all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil

In a very large bowl, or on a large wooden cutting board or clean countertop, mound the flour into a mountain shape. Use your fingers to make a well in the middle, turning the mountain into a volcano. Add the eggs, egg yolk, and oil into the center of the well. Use a fork to lightly scramble the eggs, and then slowly but continuously stir the eggs, incorporating a bit of flour each rotation.

Keep stirring in this manner until about half of the flour is incorporated. The dough will look raggedy. Scrape the dough off of the fork, and then use your fingers to finish mixing in the remainder of the flour.

Transfer dough to a lightly floured work surface. (Skip this step if you’re already working on the counter. Duh.) Knead the dough for about 5 minutes until it’s elastic and smooth. Cover with a clean kitchen towel, and allow to rest for 30 to 45 minutes at room temperature.

Divide the dough into 4 equal pieces, and follow your pasta maker’s instructions for beautiful, tasty pasta.