Baked risotto with carrots and squash

Baked risotto with carrots and squash

Adapted from “One Pot” from the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 small onion, finely diced

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon powdered ginger (or 2 tablespoons minced peeled fresh)

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1½ teaspoons coarse salt

3 medium carrots, peeled and cut diagonally into ¼-inch slices

1 cup Arborio rice

½ cup red lentils

2½ cups water

1 small butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

Method

Heat olive oil in medium Dutch oven. Cook onion, garlic, ginger, cumin and salt until onion is translucent. Add carrots, rice and lentils, stir for a minute to coat. Add water and bring to a boil. Add squash, cover and transfer to a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes or until rice is tender and water is absorbed. Let sit, covered, for 10 minutes before serving.

Rating: Tasty. It's not quite that texture you get with pan-simmered risotto, but it's not complete mush, either. Interestingly, the red lentils seem to sort of melt, leaving just their color and nutty flavor behind. A good side dish for fish or chicken, or a good meatless main dish.

Proscuitto-wrapped herbed pork tenderloin

Again I made a recipe from Ina Garten’s make-ahead themed cookbook and just made it real time. But it was real tasty, and so fast to fix it hardly mattered.

Herbed pork tenderloin

From "Make It Ahead" by Ina Garten

Ingredients

1 pork tenderloin (a pound or slightly more)

1 tablespoon fresh rosemary leaves, chopped

½ tablespoon fresh thyme leaves

½ tablespoon kosher salt

5 to 6 thin slices prosciutto

Method

Mix rosemary, thyme, salt and some grinds of black pepper in a small bowl. Set aside. Rub tenderloin with olive oil and place in roasting pan or on rimmed baking sheet. Press herb mixture over tenderloin. Wrap with prosciutto. Tie up with twine or food loops if necessary. (I omitted this step, since it seemed that the prosciutto wasn’t going anywhere on its own, and it worked out fine.)

Bake in preheated 450 degree oven for 25 minutes, or until 140-145 degrees in the middle of one end. Tent with foil and let rest 15 minutes before slicing. Serves 3, so buy two tenderloins and up the proscuitto/herb ingredients if you're feeding a group.

Rating: Quite tasty, and very fast to fix. It calls for serving with an accompanying apple chutney recipe that’s no doubt delightful, but I had some beet chutney on hand that needed using up, and that paired nicely.

Make ahead: The instructions say you can assemble the pork completely, wrap and refrigerate for up to 24 hours before proceeding with roasting.

Thyme olive fish in parchment

It might qualify as ironic that the first recipe I tried from Ina Garten's "Make It Ahead" wasn't made in advance. The recipes are a mix of the sorts of dishes you might expect to make ahead: casseroles, gratins and such. But there are other recipes that just give instructions on how to reheat the food. All the recipes have instructions for cooking the food immediately as well.

I have the book on loan from the library. I know, I don't need additional recipes, but it's Ina Garten and it's make ahead, which hits two buttons. Now I just need to get my life in order so I can actually make the dish ahead.

Herb-roasted fish
From "Make It Ahead" by Ina Garten


Ingredients
2 fish fillets
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
4 sprigs fresh thyme
4 green olives
Beaten egg white

Method
Cut 2 12- by 16-inch sheets of parchment paper. Fold in half and cut into heart shape. Place a fish fillet along the fold. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Drizzle each fillet with 1 tablespoon olive oil and 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Top each with 2 thyme sprigs and 2 olives. Brush edges of parchment paper with egg white. Seal edges together and tuck under. Place on rimmed baking sheet and bake in preheated 400 degree oven for 15 minutes.Serve in packets.

Rating: Fine. Makes a nice enough bit of almost sauce between the olive oil and lemon juice. The make-ahead bit comes in when you assemble the packets the night before.

Chicken with mushrooms and white wine sauce

Chicken with sautéed mushrooms

From “One Pot” from the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living

Ingredients

1¼ pounds chicken cutlets (or chicken breasts thinly sliced and pounded if need be)

Flour for dredging

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoons butter, divided

2 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves

1 pound button mushrooms, cut into quarters

¼ cup white wine

¼ cup broth

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley leaves

Method

Heat olive oil and 1 tablespoon butter in a large saute pan over medium high heat. Season chicken with salt and pepper. Dredge in flour, shaking off excess. Cook cutlets until deep brown on both sides and cooked through, about 3 minutes a side. Remove from pan and keep warm.

Reduce heat to medium. Add remaining butter, thyme and mushrooms to the pan, cooking until mushrooms have softened. Add wine and broth and raise heat to medium high and cook until liquid has reduced and thickened somewhat. Return chicken to pan. Serve chicken with sauce, garnished with parsley.

Rating: Quite tasty and very fast to fix. The chicken is moist and the sauce silky. I’m sure I’ve made several such dishes in the past, but I’m not letting that bother me. The usual suspects can be arresting.

Split pea soup with ham, no cans

I confess that growing up I adored soup from a can: Campbell’s tomato paired with gooey toasted cheese sandwiches were a favorite, but so, too, was the pea soup that came of the can with those ridges built in. Just add water and heat.

These days I’m far more trouble to myself than that, and can’t remember when I last prepared a canned soup. Possibly some time before the turn of the century. Obviously while I sometimes feel frantically busy, I clearly have the luxury of way more time than most busy moms do, and I’m not dissing anyone who dutifully opens up the canned variety to feed their kids. Way better for them than fast food, and likely in another few decades, those kids will have fond memories of those same ridged piles of glop that came out the can.

That said, this soup kicks that canned variety’s ass. And it’s comparatively fast to fix as split pea soups go. I have a go-to yellow split pea soup that I love that makes great use of a ham bone, but it’s one of those soak-overnight, simmer-forever varieties. This one claimed to only need to simmer for an hour to cook the peas, with no presoaking. I was skeptical, based on past experience with some other recipes, but it totally turned out to be true. Even the handful of garden peas I added that had dried on the vines cooked up in about that amount of time.

Split pea soup with ham

Adapted from Meredith Deeds’ recipe for Split Pea Soup With Ham and Pumpernickel Croutons from the Jan. 7 Taste section of the Star Tribune.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion, diced

2 celery stalks, diced

1 large carrot, peeled and diced

1 pound dried split peas

8 cups broth (and no, I didn't use cans here either, but you can, and I won't judge)

2 sprigs fresh thyme

1 bay leaf

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

6 ounces ham, cut into ½-inch cubes

Method

Heat olive oil in large Dutch oven or a stockpot over medium-low heat. Cook onion, celery and carrots until softened, stirring to promote even cooking. Rinse peas, sifting through to remove any chaff. Add peas, broth, herbs and seasoning to pot. Bring to a simmer and cook, covered, for about 1 hour, until peas have softened and broken down slightly. Add ham and simmer for another 10 minutes to warm it through and incorporate the flavor.

Rating: This is what the canned stuff wants to be when it grows up. It’s easy to make ahead and pull out of the freezer on a cold Saturday when it’s stupid cold outside, like today. (The original recipe has browned croutons in it, and I’m sure they’re tasty, but the split pea soup of my memory involves no croutons, and really, like pea soup needs added carbs?)

Pork chops with dill horseradish sauce

This recipe highlights the good points and bad points of photographing all the new recipes I try. The good point in this case is the flavor of the dish; the downside is discovering that your camera battery has run out before you remember to add the dill that actually makes the dish look attractive. But this way we got to eat sooner, because quite often we just give up on trying to get a fantastic shot because we want to eat fantastic food.You're just going to have to trust me on the dill bit.

Pork chops with cider, horseradish and dill

From “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook” by Deb Perelman

Ingredients

½ cup cider vinegar

½ cup apple cider

2 tablespoons horseradish

½ teaspoon salt

Pinch of cayenne pepper

4 bone-in loin pork chops, about ½-inch thick

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill

Method

Mix together vinegar, cider, horseradish, salt and cayenne. Set aside. Season chops with salt and pepper. Brown pork chops in olive oil over medium high heat until seared on one side. Flip and cook until lightly browned, about another minute. Transfer to a plate.

Add vinegar mixture to pan. Simmer until mixture thickens. Return pork to pan. Cover and cook about 5 minutes more. (I covered mine because the chops were a little bigger than ½-inch thick; you might leave it uncovered otherwise.) Serve topped with pan sauce and dill.

Rating: This made a nice tasty pan sauce without resorting to flour or cream. Good flavors and fast to fix. The cider tempers the heat of the horseradish to make it on the mellower side of sharpness. Perelman refers to it as a glaze, but I think it’s more on the saucier side. Like that’s a bad thing.

Spanish-style chicken

This recipe is from a cookbook I had checked out of the library and then suggested someone buy me for Christmas (thanks, Wendy!). It is the only cookbook I received, bizarrely for me, so at least I didn't pile on too much. But it brought me right back to where I was this time last year when I started this blog with the gimmick in mind that I would try at least one new recipe from each of my ridiculous number of cookbooks. It was a fairly ambitious goal, given that I had 226 cookbooks at that point, but not out of the realm of possibility, given that I've made more than 200 new recipes in several other years in my life.

But of course life intervened in the form of massive amounts of work and the occasional familial health disaster, and by mid-way through the year, it was clear that goal was made of unobtanium. (And my cookbook collection only grew.) So now I'm left to ponder whether to hit reset and try again, or try some other gimmick like cooking my way through specific cookbooks. Basically, the underlying goals behind the gimmick are to make better use of my existing resources and to make myself get back in the habit of trying more new things after a few years of just coping in between bouts of relentless work. 

So I haven't decided yet where I'll try to wind up or how I'll approach it, but either way, here's one new recipe in the can from a new-to-me cookbook:

Spanish-style chicken

From “One Pot” from the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living

Ingredients

1 whole chicken cut up, or about 10 pieces of any part of the chicken

Smoked Spanish paprika or pimenton

1 tablespoon or more olive oil

6 garlic cloves, minced

1 heaping tablespoon tomato paste

1/3 cup sherry vinegar

2 cups chicken broth

A jar of marinated piquillo peppers cut into strips (or if you can’t find those, use roasted red peppers and add a pinch of cayenne pepper to make up for the heat)

½ cup pitted green olives

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Method

Heat a large Dutch oven over medium high heat. Add olive oil. Sprinkle chicken with coarse salt and paprika and brown skin-side down in batches. Flip over and brown for a few minutes more.

Remove chicken from heat and reduce heat to low. Add garlic and tomato paste, scrapping up brown bits with spatula. Return chicken to pan, skin-side up. Add vinegar to deglaze pan. Add chicken broth, peppers and olives and bring to a boil. Transfer to a preheated 400-degree oven and bake, uncovered, for 25 minutes.

Depending on thickness of sauce, at this point you can remove the chicken from the pan and keep covered while you return the pot to the stove and boil down the sauce to reduce it further. Add most of the chopped parsley to the sauce, then serve chicken topped with sauce and more parsley. Couscous, polenta or quinoa would make good absorbent side dishes.

Rating: Nice; although I suspect having the smoked Spanish paprika or the piquillo peppers is crucial. You could probably get by with having a substitution on one or the other, but not both without sacrificing some of that smokiness. There's not much chopping involved, so while it takes about an hour overall, much of that time you don't have to be paying attention to the chicken. And having just one pot to clean plus a few prep implements really is a plus I hadn’t considered when first eying this cookbook, but it’s helpful. I stored the leftovers in the pot and plan to heat it up in that again, so there’s even more dishes economy going on.

Tip: For some reason I was slow to tumble to this one, but leftover bits of tomato paste freeze well. I measure out 1 tablespoon globs and freeze them flat on a sheet, then transfer them to a plastic container. That way you can just chip out the amount you need when you need it, since so few recipes actually call for an entire can of tomato paste.