Couscous and veggies with lime-chili dressing

This is a nice little meatless main dish recipe that I’ll haul out again in fresh produce season. It worked well both warm and cold.

Lime couscous with summer veggies

Adapted from Better Homes & Gardens, July 2013

Ingredients:

1 1/3 cup couscous

2 cups water

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 bag matchstick carrots

1 zucchini, halved lengthwise and cut into ¼-inch slices

1 yellow squash, halved lengthwise and cut into ¼-ich slices

6 green onions, sliced diagonally into 1½-inch pieces

Juice and zest of 2 large limes

¼ cup olive oil

1 tablespoon honey

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon chili powder

1 can garbanzo beans

½ cup toasted chopped walnuts

Method:

Bring water to boil. Remove from heat, add couscous (and salt to taste). Cover and let sit for 5 minutes. Fluff into a large bowl.

Meanwhile, cook carrots for 5 minutes in 1 T. hot olive oil. Add zucchini, yellow squash and green onions and cook until tender crisp. Add carrot mixture and garbanzo beans to couscous mixture.

Mix together lime juice and zest, olive oil, honey, salt and chili powder. Pour over couscous mixture and toss together. Top with walnuts. Serves 5.

Followup: Just made this over quinoa. Think I like it even better that way. 

Chicken fajitas

Sometimes I’ll hit a dry spell with a cookbook and think it’s time to part company with it, but then a recipe will help redeem the book and it stays on the shelf. This recipe, while not a major wower, falls into the category of perfectly acceptable fast food that has a side benefit of being labeled as diet food without tasting like it. So the cookbook lives another day.

Chicken fajitas

Adapted from “New Dieter’s Cookbook” from Better Homes &Gardens

Ingredients:

8 six-inch flour tortillas

1 small onion, sliced into rings

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 red pepper, chopped

1 tablespoon cooking oil

9 ounces chicken cutlets, cut into bite-size pieces

1/3 cup purchased salsa

2 cups shredded cabbage

¼ cup low-fat plain yogurt

1 green onion, sliced, for garnish

Method:

Put tortillas in a low-heat oven while you prepare the filling so they’ll roll more readily.

Stir-fry sliced onion for 2 minutes in part of the cooking oil. Add red pepper and garlic and stir-fry until the veggies start to soften. Remove from skillet and set aside. Add remaining oil to skillet and stir-fry the chicken until cooked. Return veggies to skillet and add salsa.

Serve chicken mixture on tortillas. Top with cabbage, a dollop of yogurt and some sliced green onions.

Serves 4.

Because I was making this as a take-to-work supper, I had to assemble the fajitas in advance and warm them up, which did impinge on their structural integrity. So after a few days of that I opted to put the chicken mixture over brown rice, which was perfectly viable alternative. Probably not quite as diety, but probably not horribly unhealthy either.

Other new recipe also-rans this week:  Penne with broccoli, olives and pistachios from last Thursday's Taste section. I tried this because I had leftover anchovies on hand and I like broccoli and pistachios, so it seemed like it stood a fighting chance. In some recipes the ingredients come together and transcend their individual parts, in others they never quite meld. This falls into the latter category, and also into the group of recipes labeled as worth trying, but not repeating. Save yourself the effort.

Coq a la biere

This is like the fast-food version of coq au vin only with beer. That’s not to say it’s a fast fix by any means, but it doesn’t involve two days in the kitchen, and no flames are involved. Counting my advance chopping, I probably spent two hours on this dish, and some of that time was spent just enjoying Verloren while the Jensens rocked out Osmo and the gang’s version of Beethoven’s Sixth.

The recipe exemplifies why I’m on my cooking-through-the-cookbooks quest. It’s a cookbook that came into my possession who knows when and despite its manifold attractions, I’ve never cooked anything from it. Essentially all the recipes make me drool, but I’ve never gotten off my duff to tackle them. That’s partly just overall inertia, and partly the fact that the recipes are long and a little dense, so they’re best made when you can set aside some time without distractions. But based on the results from my first foray, I’d say it was worth the effort. And two hours beats two days by any math.

Chicken Braised in Beer

From “French Farmhouse Cookbook” by Susan Hermann Louis

I’m not going to take the time to transfer the entire recipe, since any adaptation I did to it was pretty minor, and especially since she has delightful phrasing worth reading on its own (we are instructed to cook the pearl onions at a “lively simmer,” a phrase that just made me smile.) This link takes you to the full recipe with details about the book, so I’ll just list ingredients and basic details.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

8 pieces of chicken (use a mixture)

1 large onion, cut in half, then thinly sliced crosswise

2 tablespoons flour

4 cups dark beer

1 bouquet garni comprised of the following wrapped up in cheesecloth: 5 parsley stems, 3 bay leaves, 2 green leek leaves, 12 sprigs of fresh thyme

1 tablespoon butter

40 pearl onions (this is nearly all of two of the standard size bags), peeled

1 cup chicken stock

10 ounces bacon, cut into bite-size chunks

12 ounces cremini mushrooms, sliced into quarters

½ cup parsley leaves

Method:

The chicken gets browned in the oil on all sides in stages, then set aside. The sliced onions get browned in the same pan. The flour is added and stirred/cooked to make a roux. Then all the chicken goes back in the pan along with the bouquet garni and the beer. It gets simmered partially covered for most of an hour. The recipe calls for removing the chicken and reducing the sauce, but I just let the chicken cook a little longer while it reduced over high heat.

Unlike traditional coq au vin, the bacon, pearl onions and mushrooms aren’t added until near the end of the cooking process and are referred to as garnishes. The premise is this makes their flavors be more discrete rather than blended. It does result in more last-minute fuss, as each one gets cooked separately, but it’s darned tasty.

We paired this with a green salad and an apron’s worth of potatoes from the basement larder roasted until they squealed. All-in-all an official Sunday: an afternoon spent exploring the Museum of Russian Art, followed by a suitable extravaganza of food and then time to settle in for the finale of “Downton.” Worked for me.

Like bacon and eggs, only better

There, all better. That’s how I felt after a brunch of coppa cups, Christos tomato soup and salad. We’d gone to bed way late after I slithered home from another night shift, and it was way too late for breakfast. I didn’t think I had anything in the house to make for lunch, and then I remembered seeing this recipe on the website of Northern Waters Smokehaus, a fine food purveyor in DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace, just across from Lake Avenue Cafe, one of my favorite places to have lunch in Duluth. I had some coppa left over from another purpose that was best used sooner rather than later, so there you go.

I didn’t bother with the fancy cheese lattice called for in the recipe on the site, which I’m sure would elevate it even further. But I’m only so perky after a night shift, and that’s a lot to expect right after waking up. As it was, these were sublime without that extra touch. No need to salt these, the fine coppa from Bill’s Imported Foods took care of the salt factor.

Coppa cups

Adapted from Northern Waters Smokehaus

Ingredients:

Coppa, 2 thin slices per muffin cup, or enough slivers to cover the muffin cup

eggs, 1 per muffin cup

pepper for garnish

Method:

Spray as many cups of a muffin tin as you’re using with nonstick spray. Line with coppa and bake for 10 minutes at 350 to crisp cook the coppa. Remove from oven and crack open an egg inside each cup. (I found it worked well to crack open the eggs into a custard cup first and then slip them in.) Return the muffin pan to the oven and bake until the outsides of the eggs are set or cooked the way you like them. I baked these for 12½ minutes at 350 in a convection oven; at that point the outsides were set and the insides still had that slight bit of gooey runniness to the yokes that’s my idea of perfection.

Dave said he had been hoping the lunch solution somehow involved eggs, but this was even better than he envisioned. Plus, they’re kind of cute on the plate. Next time I might gild the lily by trying for the cheese crisp garnish.

Meanwhile, all the savory goodies on the Northern Waters site make me even more impatient for winter to end and it's time to ride to Duluth for lunch. Clearly some of that pancetta needs to come home in a saddlebag.

Greek chicken salad

“Not a bad concept, but the dressing needs some work” is the entry in my long-running food diary about the latest new recipe I tried. Really, Greek salad with grilled chicken should be a no brainer, but this is from a diet cookbook after all, and one related to a lame reality show at that.

I picked this cookbook up on the give-away shelf at work since there looked to be a few recipes in it that stood a fighting chance. I thought this was one of them, but while I improved upon the dressing somewhat, it would take further work to be a true keeper.  I get that they’re trying to keep the dressing calories down, but I don’t think yogurt was really the way to go with this one.

Greek salad with grilled chicken

Adapted from “The Biggest Loser Family Cookbook”

See full original recipe in the book here.

Ingredients:

8 cups of spinach

2 chopped tomatoes

1½ cup chopped cucumber, seeded

3 ounces crumbled feta

1 cup grilled chicken cubes

1 tablespoon yellow mustard

2 tablespoons cider vinegar

1 tablespoon fat-free plain yogurt

1 tablespoon olive oil

1½ teaspoons honey

2 tablespoons chopped red onion

2 garlic cloves, minced

½ teaspoon Greek seasoning (I used Penzey’s, or you can roll your own)

Method:

Toss spinach, tomatoes, cucumber, feta and chicken in a large bowl. Mix up remaining ingredients for dressing in a small bowl and toss with salad.

Since I was making this dish to eat over a period of days for lunch, I mixed up the dressing separately and just tossed it with some of the remaining mixture. This had the advantage that it let me decide after the first day that the dressing really wasn’t cutting it and added the Greek seasoning, which helped a bit. But I still say that yogurt has no business in that dressing and needs to go. And no way was I going for the 3 tablespoons of yellow mustard originally called for. Because that’s just uncalled for.