Belated New Recipe Thursday Post
When you're really busy, and you and your roommate are on wildly divergent schedules, and you're single and not cooking for anyone other than you, sometimes your diet can become a bit ... monotonous. You get home late, and you default to whatever easy thing you know how to make a single portion of (or maybe two portions, so you have leftovers for lunch tomorrow.)
My default suppers tend to be either udon noodles and tofu in spicy broth with whatever veggies we have or pasta with fresh tomato sauce and chickpeas. Both fine things, but not precisely thrilling culinary adventures, particularly after the fifth Tuesday night in a row.
So we at the Eyrie have declared irregular Thursday nights "New Vegetarian Recipe" nights. I am also going to try to incorporate some tried-and-true recipes into my weekly diet, just for variety, but selected Thursdays will be for brand new recipes or experiments.
This past Thursday was the first one. sabotabby has already posted about it, but since it was a wonderful success, I'm posting about it here, too.
For our first event, we invited courtly over.
sabotabby wanted to try to make blackened collard greens with the greens we've been growing on the roof. I didn't have a recipe for blackened collard greens, but Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone had a recipe for braised collard greens, so sabotabby tried that.
sabotabby tells you how:
Ingredients:
Collard greens-as much as you can get. *
1/4-1/8 cup of butter, depending on the amount of greens.
Two cloves of garlic, thinly sliced.
Half an onion, diced.
Salt and pepper
Hot pepper flakes
Here's how to do it:
• Get your collards. Wash and de-stem them. The recipe called for four bunches-I used about half a plant.
• Brown the butter. I didn't know what that meant. Apparently, all you do is heat the butter in a pan until it turns brown.** I do this accidentally all the time. Huh. The result is supposed to taste somewhat like bacon.
• While that's happening, boil a pot of salted water. Throw in the collards for 10 minutes.***
• Fry up the garlic and onions in the butter.
• Take 1/4 cup of water out of the pot that you've boiled the greens in. Drain the rest of the greens, and throw them in the pan with the garlic and onions. Then add the water you've saved.
• Put some salt on. The recipe called for a teaspoon, but that was way too much. Put some pepper and pepper flakes on.
• Fry for 30 minutes, until greens go from "they're green! They must be healthy!" to "Man, this is really bad for you."
I think I'd like to try cooking the greens longer, and perhaps slicing them into smaller bits beforehand. Also, less salt. Otherwise, they were pretty good-very little can be all that bad with half a cup of butter.
When I presented the New Recipe Thursday idea to sabotabby, she asked if we could make something with mushrooms. So I found a lovely recipe for khumb matar masala (mushrooms and peas in cashew curry gravy).
We used black cardamoms instead of green, because that's what we had. We also omitted the optional mace, because we didn't have that, and used cashew butter rather than grinding cashews in a mortar and pestle.
I wound up adding more tomato paste than the recipe called for, and a bit of what I think is ground cumin, because when I tasted the mix, those seemed like the right things to add. The result was entirely satisfactory.
courtly brought dessert. And how!
Almond brittle
Here's the almond brittle recipe. It was yum.
angrykat's amazing ricotta cheesecake
This was lovely. Ricotta cheesecake is much lighter and fluffier than the cream cheese variety, and, to me, it tastes more authentic and proper. Not that I object to cheesecake in most forms! Here's courtly's write-up.
Happy diners!
So that was New Recipe Thursday, the first. After the meal, we headed out to hear Jesse Dangerously rap in Kensington, which was perhaps not the most sensible thing for me to do before having to get up at o'dark-thirty for a flight to Edmonton, but was fun.
Possible future experiments include adventures in Ethiopian cooking, veggie dim sum, and any other fun recipes we find.
Suggestions?
*Recipe called for four bunches; if you're cooking for a small number of people, then I would halve the entire recipe. We used a the leaves from half a collard plant-the big plant, since the other plant looks kinda stunted. -z
** Yep. That's how it's done, though we should have stirred it while it was browning, apparently.
*** Possibly longer. They were pretty tough.
My default suppers tend to be either udon noodles and tofu in spicy broth with whatever veggies we have or pasta with fresh tomato sauce and chickpeas. Both fine things, but not precisely thrilling culinary adventures, particularly after the fifth Tuesday night in a row.
So we at the Eyrie have declared irregular Thursday nights "New Vegetarian Recipe" nights. I am also going to try to incorporate some tried-and-true recipes into my weekly diet, just for variety, but selected Thursdays will be for brand new recipes or experiments.
This past Thursday was the first one. sabotabby has already posted about it, but since it was a wonderful success, I'm posting about it here, too.
For our first event, we invited courtly over.
sabotabby wanted to try to make blackened collard greens with the greens we've been growing on the roof. I didn't have a recipe for blackened collard greens, but Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone had a recipe for braised collard greens, so sabotabby tried that.
sabotabby tells you how:
Ingredients:
Collard greens-as much as you can get. *
1/4-1/8 cup of butter, depending on the amount of greens.
Two cloves of garlic, thinly sliced.
Half an onion, diced.
Salt and pepper
Hot pepper flakes
Here's how to do it:
• Get your collards. Wash and de-stem them. The recipe called for four bunches-I used about half a plant.
• Brown the butter. I didn't know what that meant. Apparently, all you do is heat the butter in a pan until it turns brown.** I do this accidentally all the time. Huh. The result is supposed to taste somewhat like bacon.
• While that's happening, boil a pot of salted water. Throw in the collards for 10 minutes.***
• Fry up the garlic and onions in the butter.
• Take 1/4 cup of water out of the pot that you've boiled the greens in. Drain the rest of the greens, and throw them in the pan with the garlic and onions. Then add the water you've saved.
• Put some salt on. The recipe called for a teaspoon, but that was way too much. Put some pepper and pepper flakes on.
• Fry for 30 minutes, until greens go from "they're green! They must be healthy!" to "Man, this is really bad for you."
I think I'd like to try cooking the greens longer, and perhaps slicing them into smaller bits beforehand. Also, less salt. Otherwise, they were pretty good-very little can be all that bad with half a cup of butter.
When I presented the New Recipe Thursday idea to sabotabby, she asked if we could make something with mushrooms. So I found a lovely recipe for khumb matar masala (mushrooms and peas in cashew curry gravy).
We used black cardamoms instead of green, because that's what we had. We also omitted the optional mace, because we didn't have that, and used cashew butter rather than grinding cashews in a mortar and pestle.
I wound up adding more tomato paste than the recipe called for, and a bit of what I think is ground cumin, because when I tasted the mix, those seemed like the right things to add. The result was entirely satisfactory.
courtly brought dessert. And how!
Almond brittle
Here's the almond brittle recipe. It was yum.
angrykat's amazing ricotta cheesecake
This was lovely. Ricotta cheesecake is much lighter and fluffier than the cream cheese variety, and, to me, it tastes more authentic and proper. Not that I object to cheesecake in most forms! Here's courtly's write-up.
Happy diners!
So that was New Recipe Thursday, the first. After the meal, we headed out to hear Jesse Dangerously rap in Kensington, which was perhaps not the most sensible thing for me to do before having to get up at o'dark-thirty for a flight to Edmonton, but was fun.
Possible future experiments include adventures in Ethiopian cooking, veggie dim sum, and any other fun recipes we find.
Suggestions?
*Recipe called for four bunches; if you're cooking for a small number of people, then I would halve the entire recipe. We used a the leaves from half a collard plant-the big plant, since the other plant looks kinda stunted. -z
** Yep. That's how it's done, though we should have stirred it while it was browning, apparently.
*** Possibly longer. They were pretty tough.