Quick: Make me some bread

Is there anything better than a fresh loaf of yeast bread out of the oven? Possibly not. But woman does not live by yeast bread alone, and quick bread is the great utility player that fills the gap between having enough time, ambition and oomph to make that perfect risen loaf that takes hours, and no time at all. Quick breads — for when you're just slightly motivated. (Or have too many zucchini or bananas.) There's a demotivational poster in there somewhere.

The quick part is generally referring to the relatively short mixing time; figure on an hour and a half in between when you fire up the oven and when you actually remove it from the pan. Also figure in time to cool before eating or storing, because most quick breads reward waiting for a full cool down before attempting to slice them. Less mangling that way. 

Almond apricot bread with lemon thyme

From "Quick Loaves," by Jean Anderson, a book that features recipes in a variety of loaf forms, from quick breads to meatloaves. This book takes a quick mix approach, with one variety for quick cake mix approach and one for quick breads. The premise is that you keep the mix on hand in the freezer (it contains butter) so it's ready to pull out when you need it. If you plan ahead, it's fairly speedy, but otherwise it's not going to be a time saver the until the second batch you make. But you might want to after the first batch. She also makes batches of spice mix by the apparent vat, which I probably wouldn't go through while it was at peak freshness, so I opted for Penzey's cake spice instead since I have it on hand, but you could approximate hers with a generous half teaspoon cinnamon, ¼ teaspoon ground ginger and a smidge of ground nutmeg.

Ingredients

2½ cups Quick Cake Mix (see below)
2 teaspoons fresh lemon thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon lemon zest (I used a mix of both)
1 teaspoon three-spice mix (see note)
½ cup chopped dried apricots
½ cup sliced almonds
¾ cup milk
1 extra large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

Preheat oven to 375. Grease and flour a loaf pan, or use the baking spray with flour in it.

Combine cake mix, thyme and or lemon zest and spice mix in a large bowl. Stir in apricots and almonds. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients. Mix milk, egg and vanilla. Pour into dry ingredients and just barely combine. The recipe specifies leaving it lumpy with whiffs of flour showing to avoid overmixing Pour into prepared loaf pan. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes. I had to bake this for much longer than the original range the recipe indicated to have a toothpick come out clean. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan and then remove it to cool.

Quick cake mix

4 cups sifted flour
2 cups sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) cold butter, chopped

Method

There are two ways to approach this one. 

The original recipe suggests mixing the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a food processor and then removing half of it to a bowl and adding half the butter to the food processor bowl and pulse until it looks like about the size of lentils. Then remove that bunch from the processor and repeat with the remaining half. Store in a gallon freezer bag, making sure to squeeze out all the air. You'll be using only portions of this for the various recipes, so you can refresh with more as you need, mixing any remaining mix together in the bag.

I get why she suggested that approach: There's definitely no way the processor is going to make consistent work out of that large a batch if you try to do it all at once. My take on that method was it would annoy me and get crumbs everywhere, so I instead just measured half the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and butter in separate batches and then combined the two in the freezer bag. Either works; I just figured all that transferring of crumbs was going to make a hot mess that would annoy me more than measuring twice.

Rating: A nice loaf to have on hand for breakfast slathered with butter. The almonds seem to disappear in there once it's baked, but I'm sure there's a background note in their somewhere, and the apricots and cake spice give it a nice flavor. It popped right out of the pan, so points for loaf release. As for how I feel about the mix approach, ask me after I make my second recipe using the mix, and then we'll see if I make a third, which would require me to augment the mix.

Oh, and if you don't speak Midwestern and need a rating decoder ring, "nice" is a perfectly good thing. "Fine" is an OK thing, and "just fine," well, it's not actively bad, but we're certainly not actually raving about it. If we hate it? "It doesn't speak to me."

 

Maple nut bread

From Country Living's "Country Mornings Cookbook"

Ingredients

1 cup flour
¾ cup whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup finely chopped walnuts
¼ cup butter
⅔ cup milk
⅓ cup maple syrup
1 large egg
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Topping:
3 tablespoons finely chopped walnuts
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan.

Combine flours, baking powder, salt and ¼ teaspoon cinnamon in a large bowl. Stir in ¼ cup walnuts. In a small bowl, combine melted butter, milk and syrup. Stir in egg and vanilla. Add wet ingredients to dry, stirring just enough to combine. 

Pour batter into prepared baking pan. Combine topping ingredients and sprinkle on top of the batter. Bake for 40-50 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from pan and cool on a wire rack. 

Rating: Dave said nom nom, but I think that might mainly be because of the topping, which would make anything taste like breakfast. I found myself wondering if I put it on quinoa mixed with kale if it would taste inhalable. The loaf itself is more bread-like than some quick breads are. Carrot and zucchini bread, for instance, really seem more like moist cakes in loaf form, but the whole wheat in this one gives it a bit more solidity, which is not a bad thing when it comes to getting it out of the hot pan. About that: If like me you're used to automatically flipping a loaf upside down to remove it from the pan, be advised that the precious topping is going to try to scatter all over the counter. I just spooned it back on, but next time I might try levering the loaf out of the pan with a large metal spatula instead. 

Dark spices and coffee give this a darker color.

English honey loaf

From "Pillsbury's Best 1,000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off Collection." The winning baker was Mrs. Harry A. Winer of Kansas City, Mo., who was a winner in the senior category of whatever year that was.

Ingredients

2½ cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
¾ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon cloves
½ teaspoon allspice
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
⅓ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
⅓  honey
1½ teaspoons lemon zest
½ cup cold strong coffee
½ cup chopped nuts
½ cup raisins

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan.

Combine flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, allspice and ginger in a small bowl and set aside.

Cream shortening and sugar. Add eggs, one at  time, beating well after each addition. Blend in honey and lemon zest. Add coffee and dry ingredients alternately, blending well after each addition. Stir in nuts and raisins. Pour into prepared baking pan and bake 55 to 65 minutes until it passes the toothpick test. (I found it took 65 minutes in my oven.) Let cool for a half hour before removing from pan and cooling fully on a baking rack. 

Rating: Reminiscent of ginger bread, only more breadlike than cakelike and not as sweet. Fine on its own, but better with a slather of butter to soften the spice. Decent texture, and it came out of the pan without a quibble or even the need to tack back a few bottom bits together.

Maxine's black walnut bread

From Midwest Living, August 1995. The recipe comes from Maxine Nelson of Indiana who made this winning recipe for the Elkhart County Fair. 

Ingredients

1 cup sugar
1 8-ounce carton sour cream
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1¾ cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped black walnuts

Method

Preheat oven to 325. Grease and flour an 8-by-4 loaf pan.

Combine sugar, sour cream egg and vanilla in a large bowl. (It did not specify using a mixer and I didn't feel the need of one.)

In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir into creamed mixture. Fold in walnuts and pour into prepared pan. Bake for 65 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes before removing from pan to cool completely on a rack. 

Rating: This was the easiest to make out of all the recipes and the most pantry friendly. It also baked just exactly the amount of time specified and came out of the pan perfectly without resistance and without splitting the top. Decent texture and moisture thanks to the sour cream. Really needed no adornment, although I suppose one could apply butter if so desired. I can see why it passed muster with judges. Out of all of the recipes I tried, this one most nearly lives up to its "quick" name.

Kale salads aren't just for winter

Halloumi croutons are a nice touch.

Many of our local crabapple trees are in full bloom, signaling a seasonal shift. The early blooming varieties are shifting from canopy to carpet as spring waxes and wanes on its way to sudden summer.

So you might think kale season is about to be behind us, since it's often used as a reliable way to get greens in winter. But here's a reminder (to gardeners like me, at least) that kale sneaks up on you, so incorporating some throughout the growing season when the leaves aren't yet riddled with holes will leave you far less to deal with after frost hits.

Kale salad with halloumi croutons and preserved lemons

From Food & Wine, February 2024. I would link to it online, but I can't find it on their site. The original called for mint instead of lemon balm, but I don't do mint and I have an exuberant quantity of lemon balm growing even in winter, since it self sows wantonly and hitches a ride inside in pots.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
2 tablespoons olive oil
1½ tablespoons Dijon mustard
1½ tablespoons sherry vinegar
1½ tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon maple syrup
½ teaspoon za'atar
¼ teaspoon kosher salt

2 bunches lacinato kale, stems removed and leaves coarsely torn or chopped
1 cup shredded purple cabbage
1 tablespoon thinly sliced preserved lemon peel, about 1-inch long
Canola oil for frying
1 8.8-ounce package halloumi cheese, patted dry and cut into ½-inch pieces
½ cup dried tart cherries
¼ cup fresh lemon balm leaves, chopped
¼ cup fresh parsley leaves, chopped

Method

Combine shallots, olive oil, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, syrup, za'atar and salt in a small bowl.

Combine kale, cabbage and preserved lemon peel. Toss with ⅓ cup of the dressing and massage well into kale leaves. 

Heat ½ inch of canola oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add halloumi in a single layer. Fry, turning often, until golden brown on all sides. Remove from pan to drain on a paper towel on a plate. Let cool 5 minutes.

Add halloumi cubes, dried cherries, lemon balm and parsley to kale mixture. Serve along with the additional dressing available on the side.

Rating: Tangy. The combo pack of the salty preserved lemons and the lemon balm work well here. And crunchy cheese chunks are just fun. Nicely colorful. 

 

Kale and fennel salad with cherries

Adapted from Dan Buettner's "Blue Zones Kitchen: One Pot Meals," which aims to marry up those flavors we like with stuff that's also good for us and not so time-consuming that it discourages one from making them. I cut the amount of fennel in half because I find that unless it's roasted, fennel can easily overtake a dish. My take is that this serves 6 as a side salad.

Ingredients

1 bunch kale (dinosaur kale works well), stems discarded and leaves torn into bite-size pieces
½ fennel bulb, sliced very thinly (a mandoline does an admirable job, if you have one)
4 to 6 tablespoons apple balsamic vinaigrette (see below)
½ cup pitted fresh cherries
¼ cup pine nuts, toasted
Fennel fronds or other chopped fresh herbs for garnish

Dressing:

½ cup apple cider
½ cup olive oil
¼ cup balsamic vinegar
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
4 teaspoons Dijon mustard
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves (if you've got lemon thyme, that's a bonus)
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Method

Combine dressing ingredients, either with a whisk or blender until emulsified. Place kale and fennel in a large bowl. Add 2 tablespoons of the dressing and massage into the kale. Add more dressing to taste. Top with cherries, pine nuts and herbs. Chill until ready to serve. This benefits from having more time for the kale to absorb the dressing.

Rating: The dressing bears repeating. While it does a decent job of breaking down the kale, I actually appreciated the dressing more when I tried it with a simple lettuce and arugula salad with pepitas. As for the salad itself, it was a good counterpart to an otherwise brown meal. I liked the cherries and pine nuts both flavorwise and for looks. I also drizzled some of the dressing over some chicken before roasting and it worked well as a sort of marinade.

Tuscan kale salad with pecorino and lemon

From  Crate and Barrel

Ingredients

2 small heads of lacinato kale, stems and ribs removed, leaves coarsely chopped
3-plus tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 ounces Pecorino cheese
2 tablespoons toasted pine nuts

Method

Place kale in a large serving bowl. Sprinkle with kosher salt an a drizzle of some of the olive oil and then massage it in with your hands for a minute.

In a small bowl, combine lemon juice, mustard, 2 tablespoons grated Pecorino, ½ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon black pepper. Whisk in 3 tablespoons of olive oil until combined.

Pour dressing over kale and toss to combine. Garnish with pine nuts and some Pecorino cheese shavings.

Rating: Super simple and fast to make, and sometimes the simple things are simply good at being what they are. Far less fuss than the other recipes and with fewer odd ingredients to assemble. Not quite as elevated perhaps as the other recipes in terms of ingredients and looks, but I still would feel fine serving it to company.

Super seedy kale salad

From Bon Appetit, Winter 2026, a recipe adapted for the home kitchen from Nick Curtola, executive chef at the Four Horsemen in New York.

Ingredients

For dressing:
1 large garlic clove, finely grated
⅓ cup olive oil
¼ cup almond butter
¼ cup fresh lemon juice (you'll use the zest of a lemon below, so I'd zest it first before juicing it)
¼ cup white wine vinegar
2 teaspoons Calabrian chile paste
2 teaspoons onion powder
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons water

Salad:
2 tablespoons olive oil
¼ cup pine nuts (raw shelled sunflower seeds were listed as an alternative)
3 tablespoons raw shelled pumpkin seeds
Zest of 1 lemon
⅓ cup golden raisins
2 bunches Tuscan kale, ribs and stems removed and leaves thinly sliced

Method
For dressing, in a medium size bowl combine combine garlic, ⅓ olive oil, almond butter, lemon juice, vinegar, chile paste, onion powder, sugar, water and a large pinch of salt and whisk together well, (Incorporating the almond butter takes some vigorous whisking, so I recommend a large bowl than the ingredients would seem to call for to allow for splashing room.)

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a medium-size non-stick skillet over medium heat. Cook pine nuts and pumpkin seeds until golden brown, stirring as you go to avoid burning them. Remove from heat and add lemon zest, raisins and a generous pinch of salt.

Put about a quarter of the salad dressing in a large bowl. Add chopped kale and massage with your hands for a minute to combine. Add enough of the remaining dressing to coat to your liking. Then mix in a quarter of the nut-raisin mixture. Garnish with remaining mixture and serve.

You could pass the remaining dressing on the side for people to suit their taste. For us, adding all of it would have resulted in a completely drenched salad; perhaps the bunch size in the restaurant is different. At any rate, you won't mind leftovers of the dressing, which can be made ahead.

Rating: Dave, unprompted, called this a pleasant combination of flavors and textures. This is a perfectly lovely salad all around. The dressing has a nice balance; you detect a very subtle amount of heat but the almond butter and other flavors temper that. It's a nice combo of crunch between the kale and the nuts. It hits a cook's sweet spot of effort vs. outcome: Fairly minimal upfront effort with good enough for company outcomes. The dressing could have all sorts of uses. This was my favorite of the four recipes I tried and is going in the keeper pile, despite the price of pine nuts.

Leftover factor: Since we made the entire recipe, which is said to serve 4 (quite, quite generously) we had leftovers. We added grilled chicken and a tad more of the leftover dressing for a perfectly passable lunch. 

One more in the pile to try: Better Homes & Gardens posted a copycat recipe of Chick-Fil-A kale crunch salad. I've never been to one, so I can't vouch, but it looks interesting.

Yellow label tea, only it's red

 

What the L?

This morning I opened up a new box of Lipton tea, only to be confronted by tea bags that now sport a white L reversed on a red background. It's actually fairly nice looking, and I give them no notes about typography choice. But really, why?

This move was apparently made nearly a year ago, and I've certainly bought the multi-sleeve pack of tea at least once in that time but this is the first time we've encountered it, which probably says something about local store stocking....

At the time it was announced, Food Business News reported that the rebrand was a move to “refresh the image of the brand and keep relevant with consumers.” I'm sure there were focus groups involved that told them so. 

Like most repackaging moves companies make, I fail to see how this will make them more relevant with consumers. (Oh, my tea has a snazzy L on it so I feel more hip while drinking it??) At least they didn't make themselves unrecognizable on the shelves, as many brands do when they tread down that path. But the part that puzzles me in this case is the box still retains its trademarked (literally) Yellow Label black tea verbiage when the label side that's most visible is in fact, no longer yellow. (If you flip it over, there is a residual yellow label of a sort.) It's a choice, but one that's kind of a head-scratcher.

The box notes that Lipton Yellow Label tea is iconic. I would concur. It's the basic tea many of us grew up with, and while I certainly have developed near addiction levels of devotion to some Harney's products, Lipton still wins points for what it is: a reliable, basic black tea that's comparatively value priced as tea aisle offerings go. 

But when I googled to learn more about this brand shift, it hit me why they went with the red. Much better favicon than that yellow:

Beans and greens soups, from fancy to basic

 

OK, I'm not sure which ones count as fancy. Maybe the ones with fried halloumi cheese crumbles or frizzled onions, which seemed like potential nice touches. I tried three soups recently that fall into the beans and greens genre, and they really weren't repetitive. 

As a bonus at the end, a way to assemble your own beans and greens soup recipe based on a sort of Garanimals version of what's in your refrigerator and pantry at the moment.

Autumn vegetable soup

From dietitian Ellie Krieger in the Fine Cooking Oct./Nov. 2009 issue. Serves 8-ish as a starter. She specifies lower-salt versions of everything when possible.

Note: Depending on what sort of soup pots you've got on hand, you might not need to deploy your biggest one to house this recipe, but quite possibly your second largest. Err on the large side.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
3 medium carrots, peeled and chopped small
1 large onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups ½-inch cubes of peeled butternut squash
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
Pinch of cayenne powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 quart chicken broth
1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes
4 sprigs fresh thyme
2 cups thinly sliced kale
1 cup cooked chickpeas

Method

Heat oil a large soup pot over medium heat. Cook onion and carrots until beginning to soften. Add garlic and cook for another minute. Add squash, allspice, cayenne and salt and stir to combine. Add broth, tomatoes and thyme. Cover and bring to a simmer, cooking for 10 minutes. Add kale and chickpeas and cook, covered, for another 10-20 minutes until squash is tender. Discard thyme leaves.

Rating: Nice, and a fairly fast fix if you prechop all the veggies like I did. Pretty pantry friendly, too. A perfectly viable entry into the beans/greens soup category.

Beans and greens soup with halloumi cheese crumbles

From the Winter 2026 issue of Bon Appetit by Rebecca Firkser. Makes either 4 very hearty main dish servings or 8 side dish servings.

Ingredients

1 large bunch Swiss chard
6 tablespoons olive oil, divided
6 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
¼ cup double-concentrate tomato paste (the stuff that they sell in a tube)
3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons hot smoked Spanish paprika
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
2 15-ounce cans chickpeas or white beans
4 cups broth
1 package halloumi cheese
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon lemon zest

Method

Remove ribs and stems from Swiss chard. Chop the ribs and stems into small pieces. Coarsely chop chard leaves and set aside. (They get added at different stages.)

In a large deep pot, heat 5 tablespoons of the olive until garlic is fragrant. Add chopped chard stems and leaves and cook until nearly tender. Add tomato paste, butter, paprika, red pepper flakes and some salt. Cook a minute and then add beans, smooshing them up a bit as you go. Then add chicken broth, bring to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, pat halloumi dry and break into large crumbles. The recipe recommends using the coarsest grater grind to accomplish this. 

In a skillet, heat remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Add cheese crumbles and cook in a single layer over medium high heat until golden brown. Stir in lemon zest and season with pepper. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add chard leaves to soup and cook for 5 minutes until wilted. Adjust soup seasoning as needed. Serve soup in bowls with cheese crumbles. (If you're making the main soup ahead, make the cheese crumbles shortly before you're serving it. If you've got leftover soup/crumbles, I'd suggest storing them separately in the frig.)

Rating: I liked the smoked paprika flavor, which added a lot of depth to the broth, and it was very filling, as it should be given the plethora of beans in it. I thought the halloumi crumbles brought some additional interest to the soup. Dave liked it without notes. For some reason even though I usually like Swiss chard, I found myself really noticing the chard flavor and not in the best way, so if I make it again, I might try it with kale or spinach. 

Dilly bean stew with cabbage and frizzled onions

Adapted from the Better Homes & Gardens January/February 2026 issue. The original recipe comes from "Something From Nothing" by Alison Roman. Serves 4.

Ingredients
2+ tablespoons butter, divided
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced
2 15-ounce cans white beans (I used Great Northerns)
4 cups broth
2 cups coarsely chopped green cabbage
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 cup fresh dill, chopped, divided
Sour cream for garnish

Method

Heat 2 tablespoons of butter and olive oil in a large pot over medium high heat. Add onions, coarse salt and some pepper, and cook until the onion gets browned and crispy, a state the recipe refers to as frizzled. You'll need to restrain yourself from the natural temptation to stir them often, since you want them to have more crisp and less soft caramelized onion texture. In other words, the kind of onions you end up when you get distracted while cooking. 

I personally found it hard to distract myself on purpose, but a good way to kill time is to smush up the beans a bit with a fork so some of them are broken up to add creaminess but you've still got plenty of whole beans. I find it easier to do this before adding them to a hot pot.

When onions have frizzled, remove a quarter of them from the pan to a small bowl and set aside to use as garnish later.

Add some of the broth to the pan to deglaze it and then add beans and remaining broth. Bring to a simmer and cook for 15 or 20 minutes to let flavors blend. Leave pan uncovered so it cooks down a bit. Add cabbage and vinegar and cook for another 15 minutes. Remove from heat and add half of the dill. Season with more salt, pepper and vinegar as needed. 

Serve garnished with remaining dill, frizzled onions, sour cream and a bit of softened butter (or a drizzle of olive oil) as desired.

Rating: It may not be the lookiest color-wise, but it's got nice flavor. The only green left visible after that pale green cabbage is cooked is the dill, which does double duty for flavor and color. The smushed beans lends creaminess. All around a decent soup for a day where the incipient hints of spring green up outside have been countered by a light glazing of ice and snow.

What's in the house? Make it into a soup following a simple formula.

Beans and greens soup basic formula

It's great to try new recipes to expand your repertoire, but don't let the perfect ever been the enemy of perfectly fine. Sometimes you're not going to have some of the ingredients called for on hand but you still want soup. That's when you take one from Category A, Category B, etc., until you've assembled a soup. This is one of the more forgiving soup formulas:

Column A, meat, pick one, unless you're opting for meatless:

1 pound ground pork breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, ground chorizo or ground beef
8 ounces chopped sausages, like kielbasa, chorizo, etc.
4 ounces chopped pancetta

Column B, beans:

About 2 cups cooked beans, either Great Northern, cannellini, navy, kidney, black, garbanzo, etc. Include the cooking liquid if you cooked them yourself, or drain and rinse them if canned and add a ½ cup water to make up the difference

Column C, greens:

2 cups of chopped kale, collard greens, Swiss chard, beet greens, arugula or spinach (if using baby spinach leaves, you can leave them whole)

Column D, vegetables:

Generally I'll make sure to have at least these basic three to start:

1 medium onion, chopped small
2 carrots, peeled and diced
2 celery stalks, diced

These next are all optional, and you wouldn't probably toss all of these in, but it's nice to have one or two additional veggies according to what you have on hand:

3 or more garlic cloves, diced
Fennel bulb/stalks, chopped small
Swiss chard stems, chopped small
1 bell pepper, chopped small (red for color is nice)
2 cups cubed butternut squash
1 medium zucchini, chopped

Column E, tomatoes

Pick one from which ever one of these you have on hand. If you opt for paste, add a cup of water to compensate for the lack of liquid:

1 14.5-ounce can chopped tomatoes and their liquid (or break them up if they're whole)
1 15-ounce can tomato sauce
4 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons double-concentrate tomato paste

Column F, broth
4-6 cups broth. The amount you need is going to vary based on how much stuff you threw into the pot, but figure on at least a quart. And yes, in a pinch you can make up some of the difference with water since the veggies will help make it more broth-like.

Column G, aromatics

OK, this is where you can really tailor a soup to your taste and to a season. If you're using a highly spiced meat, keep that in mind before going hog wild on either spices or salt, but if you're avoiding meat, then this is where you'll want to put in some care to amp up the flavor.

Herbs and spices: If you're feeling in a chili-ish mood, add chili powder and ground cumin to a dish with black or red beans. Allspice and cloves add a rich touch to a veggie soup. If you want an herb base, a bay leaf is a good start, or sage leaves, basil, oregano, etc. Fresh is dandy, and you can just add whole stalks and fish them out before serving, or you can use dried if that's what's available. 

The condiment shelf: Chili crisp, black bean paste, soy sauce or tamari, fish sauce, gochujang. Basically a tablespoon or so of one of those would be a good place to start and then taste-test from there. Just remember, this is going to intensify in flavor as it cooks.

The cheese drawer: The end hunks of hard cheese like Parmesan are a big flavor booster, particularly if you aren't using meat.

Method

1. If you're using meat, in a large deep-sided pot, cook your meat of choice until it's no longer pink if ground meat, or saute sliced meat until browned on both sides. You might need to add oil for lean meat. Remove from pan and drain on paper towels; you'll add those back in later.

2. In the same pan, cook the onion, carrots and celery over medium heat until softened. If you didn't use meat or if it was quite lean, you'll need to add a tablespoon or so of olive oil to the pan. If you're using chopped fennel or Swiss chard stems, add those to the onion mixture to cook at the same time.

3. Once the core vegetables have softened, add remaining vegetables of choice like garlic, bell pepper, squash, etc. Cook for another 5 minutes. 

4. Add beans, their cooking liquid or equivalent and whatever form of tomato you're using. Add broth as needed, keeping in mind you'll be adding the meat back in later along with some greens, so be generous. Add any aromatics. Cook for 20 minutes.

5. Return meat to the pot. If you're using kale as your green, add that at the same time and cook for 10 to 15 minutes more or until kale is tender. If you're using softer greens, cook the mixture after adding meat for 10 minutes and then add the greens for another 5 minutes. Adjust seasoning as needed with salt and pepper.

Like many soups, the flavor will deepen if made ahead and reheated.

Breakfast egg sandwiches, only for lunch

 

In between the sky is falling posts and cat videos, my Instagram feed quickly seemed to default to offering me all sorts of variations on what people refer to as breakfast sandwiches. Something that you can prep a bunch of for the week and quickly zap in the microwave on the way out the door or at the office. 

Since I've never been a big breakfast eater except on Sundays when we treat it as more like a brunch, I never really saw the point. But the same premise definitely applies to a fast lunch fix, and I find I'm still in need of those, so I decided to test drive some of the more promising recipes out there from Instagram-land and beyond.

Freezer egg sandwiches

From Better Homes & Gardens, January 2020 issue

Ingredients

8 eggs, beaten
⅓ cup milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground pepper
6 English muffins, toasted
6 slices cooked bacon
6 slices Cheddar cheese
Fresh spinach leaves, optional

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 13- by 9-inch pan with tin foil. Spray with cooking spray. Combine eggs, milk, herbs, mustard and salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Pour into prepared pan and bake until set, 8 to 12 minutes. Slice into six pieces, then each piece in half. Stack two slices on one half of an English muffin, then top each with a slice of bacon and a slice of cheese. (If using spinach, you can tuck that in on top of the cheese before topping with remaining muffin half once you're ready to reheat them.) Bake until cheese melts.

To assemble ahead and reheat, wrap prepared sandwiches in plastic wrap after assembling them and before melting the cheese. Ostensibly you can freeze them, then remove the plastic wrap and reheat them in a paper towel in the microwave for a minute or two. 

Rating: Tasty. The herbs and mustard give the eggs some character. It's a bit like bacon cheeseburger topping meets egg sandwich. As for their instructions about reheating, well, I'm not a microwave fan in this case because of what it does to bread products, so I opt for reheating in a 350-degree oven until the cheese melts and sandwich is warmed through. I couldn't bring myself to try it from a frozen state, but I'm not imagining that being the work of a moment. It still counts as tasty fast food, at any rate.

Tomato, feta egg sandwiches

This is kind of like a bit of a caprese version of an egg sandwich, or at least one that incorporates flavors of peak summer with pesto and tomatoes. Adapted from the Instagram post of ellena_fit; go there if you want a video how-to. She cut her frittata into 4 pieces that were a bit deeper to make 4 sandwiches, but given my pan dimensions (8-by-10) it made sense to cut them into 6 because otherwise it would have hung over the edge quite a bit.

Ingredients
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 teaspoon olive oil
8 eggs
A generous ½ cup of cottage cheese
2 tablespoons torn fresh basil leaves or 1 tablespoon oregano leaves
½ salt, plus more for sprinkling
½ cup crumbled feta
6 English muffins, split and toasted
6 slices of mozzarella
Pesto for spreading 

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place tomatoes in a mid-size baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with some salt. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until smooshable. Remove from oven. I chose to smoosh a few of the tomatoes and leave the rest whole.

Combine eggs, cottage cheese, herbs, ½ salt and a generous grind of pepper. Pour over tomatoes in pan. Sprinkle top with feta. Bake for 20 minutes until set. Let cool slightly.

Cut egg bake into 6 pieces. Spread toasted English muffins with pesto. Top muffin bottoms with a square of egg bake, a slice of mozzarella and the English muffin tops. Bake at 350 until cheese is melted and sandwich is heated through.

I opted to store the egg bake separately after serving us sandwiches for lunch because I was concerned that the amount of liquid in the pesto and tomatoes might result in a somewhat soggy sandwich if stored assembled, but I suppose that depends on the nature of your pesto.

Rating: The tomatoes and feta help bring more to the egg party, and pesto pairs nicely with the tomatoes. This sandwich had surprisingly good structural integrity, which can be an issue with this type of sandwich. With prebaked, precut egg bake squares it's no more trouble to make than any sandwich for lunch and it's another way to get a decent hot sandwich into the rotation on a cold day along with the soup du jour or semaine.

Bacon, egg and cheese bagels

Also from ellena_fit on Instagram.

Ingredients
4 bagels (the everything bagels worked well here)
8 eggs
½ cup cottage cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
4 slices of cooked bacon, chopped
½ salt
4 slices smoked gouda or cheddar cheese
Sriracha mayo for spreading, or see Cane's dipping sauce recipe below

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-by-8 pan. Combine eggs, cottage cheese, chives, salt and a generous sprinkle of pepper in a bowl. Stir in bacon. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool slightly. Cut into 4 squares. Spread bagels with mayo or dip. Top each with a quarter of the egg bake and a slice of cheese. Return to oven and cook about 5 minutes until cheese melts.

Rating: This was my favorite one so far. The everything bagels really brought a little something to the party, as did that dip. (Oh, that dip. It should probably be illegal.) The bacon comes through and the smoked gouda is a nice touch. 

Cane's sauce

From Diane Morrisey's Instagram post, her version of a dipping sauce from the Raising Cane restaurant. The flavor deepens a bit if you refrigerate it for a time instead of trying to use it right away. She paired hers with homemade fish sticks, which seems like another really yummy usage, and she includes a recipe at that link.

1 cup mayonnaise
¼ cup ketchup
½ teaspoon cayenne powder
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
2 teaspoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Combine all sauce ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Definitely a little kick to it, but not like get-me-water hot or anything.  The sauce is a definite keeper.

Did I need to try yet another version? Possibly not, but I did it anyway:

Spicy maple breakfast sandwiches 

Adapted from "good mood food” from Kale Me Maybe’s Carina Wolff. This one drew my interest because of the homemade sausage and I liked the idea of cutting out circles of egg bake to match the English muffin size. More on that later.

Ingredients

2 tablespoon olive oil, divided
2 pounds ground pork
⅓ cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt, divided
1 tablespoon Calabrian chili
10 eggs
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 small onion, diced
⅓ cup milk
2 cups baby spinach leaves
10 English muffins, toasted
10 slices cheese of choice, I found pepper jack works well here

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9-by-13 pan with parchment paper.

Heat olive oil in a large nonstick skillet. Combine pork, maple syrup, garlic powder, ¼ salt and Calabrian chili in a bowl. Form into 10 patties. Cook in oil until cooked through, flipping half way through. Remove from pan and set aside on paper towels.

If needed, add additional 1 tablespoon olive oil to the skillet; depending on the fat content of your meat you might have plenty in the pan. Cook onion and bell pepper and until softened. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Combine eggs, milk and remaining salt in a bowl. Stir in sauteed vegetables and spinach. Pour into pan and bake 20-25 minutes or until set. 

Cut egg bake into 10 pieces. Place egg bake on an English muffin. Top with a sausage and a slice of cheese and English muffin top. Bake until cheese melts. Alternatively, you can assemble them and then either bake or microwave them later. I did resort to the microwave once with these, because, well, I needed to clean my oven after some of the egg bake fell off a sandwich onto the oven floor. A minute on high wrapped in a paper towel will heat them through and melt the cheese, providing you don't mind rubbery cheese. 

Rating: The sausages definitely bring a lot to the party and have some merit on their own. That said, if you want to simplify the prep, if you've got a good breakfast sausage brand you like, you could cook that up instead. The frittata portion is fine, and adding the spinach to the bake itself is a good call, but it's really that sausage patty doing the work. The original recipe called for ground turkey, but I wound up with pork on hand instead, so it's possible that affected the patty size. As it was, those 10 patties were pretty much small breakfast sausage size, so I didn't see the point of having equally small rounds of egg bake when the muffins were significantly bigger diameter, so I skipped that bit. I tried this once following the egg bake instructions and wound up with nearly double the amount of egg bake to sausage ratio, so I took another whack at it to rationalize for my use case.

Takeaways

So am I enamored with the make-ahead breakfast sandwich genre? Well, not entirely. The part where I had some prepped sandwich portions to assemble quickly certainly had merit. After trying the microwave approach I definitely did not appreciate what it does to cheese, so I prefer the oven, but I get that if you were transporting them to an office setting they're better than nothing. 

The key: Something that makes them tasty, and generally that something is going to come in the form of meat. The one vegetarian option I tried compensated by bringing in more flavor to the egg bake portion, which helped, but the meat was definitely doing the heavy flavor lifting in these sandwiches. Everything-seasoned bagels are also a plus, and there's no reason to settle for bland cheese. 

That said, as much as I adore advance meal prep as a practice, it can't really hold a candle to my preferred breakfast sandwich of softly scrambled eggs piled on a brioche bun, topped with a slice of cooked bacon and a slice of smoked gouda cheese melted in the oven. Because good things often do reward spending just a bit more time, when you have it. 

Fixing the leftovers: What to do when a soup recipe doesn't cut it

It started life as pumpkin Parmesan soup.

Years ago I described my cooking style as relentless. I routinely tried more than 200 new recipes a year, sometimes five of them in a single meal (my definition of an extravaganza). Then I  drifted away from that into just sort of cooking, because when you've tried a few thousand recipes you have more or less figured out what works together and find yourself riffing on what's available that you feel like cooking. Plus I got super busy during the pandemic and some how never got back any semblance of work-life balance and a dependable, uninterrupted meal time.

Now I would describe my cooking style as diligent and strategic. My goal is more to consistently have something tasty to eat for every meal rather than trying to hit any specific target, and preferably to pull that off without burning myself out so I no longer think it's any fun to cook. The key to that is pacing, and leftovers play a crucial role.

Leftovers are a fantastic resource, providing you plan for them so you don't wind up eating the same thing multiple days in a row. That's where the freezer is your friend, and again, having a menu that schedules when you'll pull those out to thaw and recombine in new pairings. Unless I have company, I try to alternate major cooking days with days where I can coast on a previous day's labor for at least some portion of a meal.

So the Chicken Marbella leftovers and their wondrous sauce get paired with a new pan of baked brown and wild rice. The rice leftovers come out a few days later to pair with a roasted pork tenderloin and a piquant salad. The leftovers from a lunch of quiche and cream of spinach soup go into the freezer to each come out later to pair with something else. The dreamy caramelized onion dip leftover from entertaining gets tossed with pasta and some pancetta.

This is all dandy until you run into a dud. If you were disappointed in a recipe upon first serving it, aside from some soups, dressings and dips where flavors intensify with time, your enjoyment isn't likely to improve with reheating another day. 

I tried a recipe for Parmesan pumpkin soup from the "5 in 10 Cookbook," which features the gimmick of things you can make in 10 minutes with 5 ingredients. I thought the combo of a can of pumpkin puree, milk, broth, nutmeg and Parmesan cheese had some promise, and it was certainly fast. But it was simultaneously thin and stringy (from the cheese). The flavor was OK, but it seemed watered down, which might seem an odd thing to say about something that you eat with a spoon, but it just seemed to lack all body. 

I wasn't looking forward to another helping of that awaiting me. I contemplated augmenting it with a super thin white sauce, but that seemed like more effort than this slight recipe deserved. Then I realized its runniness could be my friend: I brought the leftovers to a boil and added a couple cups of radiatore pasta. There was just enough liquid to cook the pasta and wind up with a creamy sauce. So it went from runny soup to roni soup, and now I had a new entree for the leftover menu. 

It ended up life as a pasta sauce.

Bolognese Boursin soup

Converting soups to pasta can also work in reverse. I had leftover black bean Bolognese sauce on hand when I saw Amy Sheppard's Instagram post on making Bolognese sauce into soup. I had two cups of sauce, added a quart of broth, a round of Boursin and a handful of chopped parsley and it yielded a very nice, super fast soup. Definitely would repeat.

It started as pleasant pasta sauce and ended up as really nice soup. 

Along those same lines, the Star Tribune Taste section recently published a New York Times piece on three soups that repurpose the components of other dishes, including hummus, three-bean soup and pesto pasta. All look plausible.

Three newish tech features I really wish had happened sooner

Closing one of the tabs in split view is as simple as hitting the X next to it in the top tab window.

One of the tradeoffs of leaving work is no longer having a captive audience to share my delight in new tech features that crop up. Admittedly, I just as often had to share updates about the status of the latest bug, but I also got to spread good news when one of our software providers implemented a feature that could make our work lives better. Hence the reason you're seeing me dispense tech advice into the ether, because I just have to share it somewhere. 

Chrome's new split screen feature

Why, oh why, couldn't this feature have existed while I was working? So many programs I worked with were web-based, and having a super slick way to have two browser windows open side by side without any need to manually manipulate the window widths would have been a total game-changer. Just hold down the shift key before clicking on the second tab you want to add to a split view and then right-click to pick "Add to new split view." If you right-click on one of the combined tabs again under "arrange split view" you'll see options to rearrange the order of the tabs, close one of the open tabs or just restore them to separate tabs. (Or you can right-click on any tab to select that feature and then navigate to add a different tab in split view.) It may not have been available when I could have made the best use of it, but I've still made great use of this new capability, starting with having my Christmas shopping Google spreadsheet open next to a website for shopping. You can also drag and drop a window into a split view, which I learned from this post.

Windows 11 glyphs palette

Another feature I totally would have killed for at work, but one that's still super handy for things like inserting fractions in a blog post. I've used the Windows-V clipboard history feature to pin the fractions, but now can use Windows-V to get at an extensive Symbols panel and history as well as clipboard history, and it remembers your most recently inserted, so I'm finding that just as handy as the clipboard history since I don't need to cull the history to keep the fractions at the top.

Split view in Slack

Also just too late for most of my work life: Slack's new split view. It lets you see two conversations, two channels or two canvases side by side. Just click on a channel (or DM or canvas), Control-click on another channel and then right click on the first channel top pick open in split view. For canvases and lists, the option is under the three-dot menu at the upper right.

Windows+Shift+Minus for an em dash

This one isn't super new, apparently, but it was new to me when I ran across it. This was a development in keyboard shortcuts that I missed when it first happened, probably because I wasn't on Windows 11 at the time. Sure, some people think the em dash is like the mark of the AI devil, but you won't convince the style committee of that one. I worked in a program that had stomped all over any other existing em dash shortcut except for the Alt 0151, so that would have been super helpful.