Grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches with kale pesto

Grilled cheese and tomato with kale pesto
From newpotato.com

Ingredients

Butter, room temperature, for spreading

8 thick slices sourdough or country bread

Kale pesto (see below) or other prepared pesto

Sliced Fontina cheese (about ½ pound for 4 sandwiches)

Large tomato, thinly sliced

½ cup grated Parmesan cheese

 

Kale pesto

½ cup pumpkin seeds

1 bunch kale, about 8 ounces (Lacinato works well here)

2 large garlic cloves, peeled and left whole

½ cup grated Parmesan cheese

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

½ to ¾ cup olive oil

Method
Toast pumpkin seeds in a medium saucepan. Remove from pan and let cool.

Bring salted water to a boil in the saucepan. Add garlic and kale and blanch for a minute. (You might need slightly longer if you use a tougher variety of kale.) Remove from pan and plunge into cold water to stop the cooking process. Drain well.

In a food processor, combine ½ cup grated Parmesan cheese, pumpkin seeds, kale and garlic. Process until well combined. With motor running, add lemon juice and enough olive oil to reach desired consistency. Season to taste with salt.

Butter bread slices on one side. Place butter-side down on a work surface. Spread tops of bread generously with the pesto. (You will have an abundance of leftover pesto. This is not a problem, because it is tasty.) Top bottom slices with half the Fontina, then the tomatoes, then the remaining  ½ cup grated Parmesan cheese, then remaining Fontina. Top with bread slice and press down slightly.

Preheat a panini press or skillet. Transfer sandwiches to prepared pan. Cook until toasty on one side, about 5 minutes and then flip over until toasted on the other side if you're using a skillet. And this is one case where I'm reminded why panini presses rule, since flippage is a chance for slippage. Keep careful watch, since Fontina takes a bit of time to melt, but then it goes straight from solid to liquid.

Rating: Ooey, gooey goodness. A satisfying hot mess to eat. While I'm sure any pesto would do, the kale pesto has the advantage that the kale stays a nice bright green and the pumpkin seeds give it a nice nutty flavor.

Herbed buttermilk biscuits

Since the herbs are a fairly subtle flavor in these, they could work either along side eggs for breakfast or with soup and salad for supper.

Herbed buttermilk biscuits

From Fine Cooking, March 2003

Ingredients

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

¾ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

3 tablespoons shortening or lard, chilled

2 tablespoons chilled butter

¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk

Method

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt and soda. Stir in dill and parsley. Cut lard and butter into small chunks and cut into flour mixture using a pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse meal. Make a well in the center and add buttermilk. Mix just until combined.

Turn the sticky mixture out onto a lightly floured board. A bowl scraper helps with this. With lightly floured hands, form dough into a flattened round and then fold it over on itself about six times. (You're building up layers here.) Pat it out again into an even thickness about ½-inch thick. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate 20 minutes.

Remove cutting board from refrigerator. Cut the dough into desired shapes with a cutter or just into squares or triangles as you prefer. Makes 8 to 12 depending on the size you choose. (I prefer to cut mine out without a cutter to avoid rerolling, since it’s both tedious and detrimental to the texture.)

Place on parchment lined sheet about 2 inches apart. Bake about 9 to 12 minutes, depending on biscuit size, until raised and golden brown.

Rating: Tasty carriers for butter. Nice texture. The herbs are pretty subtle. Actually fairly fast to fix on a weeknight once you make yourself start, the hardest part to everything in life.

Lentil soup with apple and bacon

 

Still cooking new soups. But we might see 50 degrees later this week. Sure, there's still snow on the beach, but Sea Salt is open again.

Lentil soup with apple and bacon

From Food and Wine, November 2016, a recipe from Vivian Howard’s cookbook "Deep Run Roots"

Ingredients

6 slices of thick-cut smoked bacon

1 medium leek, white and light green parts only, thinly sliced

2 celery stalks, diced

1 medium carrot, peeled and diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger or ginger paste

1 teaspoon ground cumin

8 cups chicken broth

½ cup apple cider

1 cup green lentils

1 Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and diced

1 teaspoon chopped rosemary

Method

In a large saucepan, cook bacon until crisp. Remove to a plate. In drippings, saute leek, celery, carrot, garlic and ginger until they begin to soften. Stir in cumin and cook a minute until fragrant. Stir in broth, cider and lentils. Bring to a simmer and cook until lentils are tender, about 40 minutes.

Stir in apple and rosemary and cook another 10 minutes until apples are softened. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serves 6.

Rating: Nice flavor with bacon and cumin. Not the lookiest soup, as is the case with most lentil recipes (except the pretty red ones), but one can’t have everything.

Winter blunder land

Make it stop.

Signed, Minnesota

Red lentil soup with spiced oil

This is one of my favorite things to do with lentils, and a great emergency soup. It's very pantry friendly, and if you don't have fresh ginger I have made it with 1 teaspoon of ginger powder instead and it was still tasty.

And today might just count as an emergency. It's almost the Ides of April and there's a stupid blizzard outside. What the hey?  

I like to have this soup in the freezer to pull out for emergencies, but since a freezer decided to go permanently offline and took what was left of my soups from last fall with it (and what was left of the farmers market meat, alas), I was starting from scratch on the soup supply this morning. Rats.

Red lentil soup with spiced oil

Adapted from Gourmet, March 1991.

Ingredients

4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

2 onions, chopped

5 garlic cloves, minced

4 teaspoons grated fresh ginger or ginger paste

½ teaspoon ground cumin, plus ¼ teaspoon for topping oil

½ teaspoon ground coriander

1 cup red lentils

1 cup chopped canned tomatoes

3 cups chicken broth

1½ cups water (if using tomato liquid, reduce water by a corresponding amount)

1½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

¼ teaspoon turmeric

Method

In a large saucepan, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add onions and cook until softened. Add garlic and ginger and cook for a minute. Add ½ teaspoon cumin and coriander and cook for a minute until spices release their fragrance. Add lentils, tomatoes, broth and water. Bring to a simmer and cook until lentils are tender, about 30 minutes or so.

Let cool slightly and puree in a blender, or use a stick blender in the pan. Rewarm soup in saucepan.

Heat remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil in a small pan. Add red pepper flakes, turmeric and remaining ¼ teaspoon ground cumin and cook until fragrant. Serve soup drizzled with flavored oil. 

Makes about 6 cups, and like many such soups, gets even better when prepared in advance and reheated so the flavors have time to really sink in. After having our first servings, I just add all of the oil to the remaining soup to swirl it in and it works fine. Don’t be tempted to skip the oil; that’s what takes this from a good soup to a really good soup.

Rating: Total keeper. Nice ginger and cumin flavors, and just a nice amount of heat that doesn’t overwhelm the other flavors. I've been making this for decades and I'm still not tired of it. I am tired of winter, however.