Rose’s Amazing Mushroom Soup

 Food  No Responses »
Feb 202011
 

ROSE’S AMAZING MUSHROOM SOUP

In a largeish soup pot, add ½–¾ stick (4–6 Tbsp) of butter. Heat on low until the butter has almost completely melted.

Add 5–6 cloves of minced garlic, or more if you really like garlic.

Rough chop one or two packages of mushrooms and add to the pot.

Increase the heat and cook until the mushrooms give up their moisture and start to brown.

Add a generous handful (about ⅓ cup) of flour and stir until absorbed.

Add one cup or so of good chicken stock and stir until nearly at a boil.

Add one cup or so of milk and stir until nearly at a boil.

Lower heat to simmer. Add fresh-ground nutmeg, pepper, and salt to taste.

Cook until the desired thickness is achieved. You can also add some cream (a few tablespoons) near the end to help thicken, or just cook longer.

“I can’t believe it’s not homemade” Pasta Sauce

 About Me, Food  2 Responses »
Jul 132010
 

In case you haven’t noticed by now, I love to eat. I don’t mind cooking, either, as long as it’s pretty darn simple to make. Pasta sauce is one of those mythical things that invokes images of old Italian ladies bent over gigantic pots, chopping and stirring and cackling quietly under their breath for days while the contents quietly turn into magic. It’s not just tomatoes and water, honey, it’s an ingredient list a mile long and in a language so old modern man cannot hope to grasp it. So if you want sauce and aren’t Italian (or don’t have a loving Italian person nearby), you do like I do: you go to the store.

Well, not so fast, buster! I have a pasta sauce recipe that may not make you open a chain to compete with Olive Garden, but it’s fast and easy and (dare I say it?) semi-homemade without requiring a daft blond woman to dress up in silly garb to make it.

Ready? Set? COOK!

David’s “I can’t believe it’s not homemade” Pasta Sauce

INGREDIENTS

  • Pasta, about 500 g (1 lb), your choice (I like rotini or farfalle)
  • One jar of store-bought pasta sauce, your preferred brand and style, 750 g (26 fl. oz)
  • Ground beef, about 500 g (1 lb), 90 or 95% fat-free
  • Mushrooms, about 500 g (1 lb) or so, your preference
  • Onion, medium, yellow or white
  • Garlic, four or five medium cloves, to taste
  • Vine-ripe tomatoes, three medium (or more, to taste)
  • Olive oil, about 56 g (4 Tbsp)
  • Unsalted butter, about 40 g (3 Tbsp)
  • Dried Oregano, to taste
  • Fresh ground black pepper, to taste
  • Garlic powder, to taste
  • Chili powder, to taste
  • Optional: Parmesan cheese

PREPARATION

Add butter and oil to a large skillet. Dice onion, mince garlic, rough-chop mushrooms and add to pan. Sautée until onions start to caramelize and mushrooms shrink, or until you think everything looks good. Add ground beef to pan and turn the heat up to get everything sizzling. Brown the beef.

Start the pasta water and add the pasta to it when it’s boiling. There’s no need to salt the water, but you can do so if you are a traditionalist.

When the beef, onion, garlic, and mushrooms start to get nice and brown, pour in the pasta sauce. Add oregano, garlic powder, lots of pepper, and chili powder and stir, stir, stir for a few minutes. The pasta water should be ready by now, so add the pasta and cook it until it’s al dente.

Meanwhile, back at the skillet, roughly chop up the tomatoes and add them to the pan. There should be lots of liquid now, so let everything bubble merrily while the pasta cooks. When it’s done, drain the pasta. If the sauce looks ready and tastes great, then it’s ready. It should look like this:

(If you’re drooling, then you know you succeeded.)

SERVING

Not much could be simpler here: put some pasta in a bowl, pour some sauce over it, sprinkle some cheese (or a lot of cheese), and go to town.

LET’S GET CRAZY

What’s that? You say you have lots of time on your hands? Great! Let’s get creative. Try adding some stewed tomatoes, or diced tomatoes, that are pre-seasoned. Add multiple kinds of mushrooms. How about finely-diced celery and carrots? They’d be mighty fine additions, in my opinion. Want to make it heartier still? Toss in some zucchini and summer squash. Maybe some bell pepper, too, for a little zing. Add a lot of chili powder to make it hot, then cool it down a notch with some sour cream. The options are endless…

Piotr’s Polish Potato Salad

 Food  2 Responses »
May 222010
 

Piotr’s Polish Potato Salad

This dish is from my boyfriend Piotr. We made it and brought it to Craft Night, where attendees proclaimed it was laced with crack as they hoovered it down. Yes, it’s that good :) The recipe below makes enough for a large party, so adjust the ingredient amounts accordingly for smaller gatherings.

INGREDIENTS

  • Potatoes
  • Mayonnaise (about a cup for three REALLY LARGE potatoes)
  • Sour cream (about ¾ cup)
  • Yellow or other mustard to taste
  • One medium onion
  • One regular-size and one small-size can, each, of:
    1. carrots
    2. corn
    3. peas
  • One or two dill pickles
  • One tart apple, such as Granny Smith
  • Four extra large hard-boiled eggs

PREPARATION

Boil the potatoes in their skin; let cool, remove the skins, and chop roughly. Dice the onion. Drain the canned vegetables and roughly chop the carrots so they are approximately the same size as the corn and peas. Rough chop the pickles, apple, and hard-boiled eggs.

Combine everything in the dish, stir well, and garnish with dill and a cherry tomato.

Prepare to fend off neighbors, co-workers, and strangers who will appear at your door and ask for some!

Crock Pot BBQ Chicken

 Food  2 Responses »
May 202010
 

Crock Pot BBQ Chicken

This is a simple recipe, but quite tasty. You can make your own barbecue sauce if you’re feeling adventuresome or just use commercial preparations like I did.

INGREDIENTS

  1. One pound (roughly) boneless, skinless chicken breasts or cutlets (about 500 g), cut into large pieces
  2. One third bottle (approximately 4 ounces) of Kraft Original BBQ Sauce
  3. One 28 ounce bottle to Sweet Baby Ray’s Original BBQ Sauce
  4. One medium white onion
  5. Three Tbsp Yellow mustard
  6. (optional) Three Tbsp Dark maple syrup
  7. (optional) Vlasic mild banana pepper rings

PREPARATION

Slice the onion finely (roughly 1–2 mm thick) and spread the pieces out on the bottom of your slow cooker. Turn the cooker on low. Add maple syrup, mustard, and Kraft barbecue sauce. Note: use whatever flavor and brand of barbecue sauce you like; you’re aiming for enough sauce to completely cover all the other ingredients and stay liquid through the cooking process. Add chicken pieces. Pour remaining barbecue sauce over the top, cover, and let cook for six to eight hours. Add liquid if the sauce gets too thick or looks like it’s burning.

SERVING

This dish should make enough BBQ chicken and onions for six to eight generous servings. I like to use hearty whole wheat buns and sometimes add mild banana pepper rings for a little extra zing. Each serving should be roughly 350 kCal, depending on the richness of the barbecue sauce you use.

Stewed Tomatoes and Vegetables

 Food  1 Response »
May 092010
 

Stewed Tomatoes and Vegetables

This recipe is based on a dish my mom used to make years ago. One of the ingredients, Kohlrabi, can be a challenge to find and can safely be omitted if you do not have access to any in your grocer’s.

INGREDIENTS

Olive oil (about four tablespoons)

Two 15.5 ounce cans of italian-style stewed tomatoes

One 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes

Five cloves of garlic (or to taste)

One medium white onion

One medium yellow summer squash

One medium zucchini

Three medium-sized green kohlrabi

Pepper to taste

Oregano to taste

PREPARATION

Add oil to a large skillet and put on medium heat. While the oil is warming, finely dice the onion and add it to the oil. Mince the garlic and add it to the onion and oil. Let sautée for around five minutes. While sautéeing, trim and wash the kohlrabi, zucchini, and summer squash. Thinly slice the kohlrabi into sections around one to two mm thick and about ¾ of an inch square. Add to oil, garlic, and onions. When the garlic, oil, and onions begin to sizzle a little, turn the heat to medium simmer and add the crushed tomatoes. Stir to coat and let sit for around five minutes. While heating the other ingredients, open the cans of stewed tomatoes and dice the zucchini and summer squash into pieces approximately one centimeter thick. Decant the stewed tomatoes into the skillet, add the summer squash and zucchini, and season to your preference. Cover with a lid and let simmer for at least half an hour.

NOTES

This makes a delicious savory side-dish for meat or could be eaten as a stew or thick soup on its own. I would consider dicing some fresh celery near the end of cooking and adding it for additional crunch and flavor, and you can season it with all sorts of herbs as well.

Chicken Mushroom Casserole with Noodle Dumplings

 Food  No Responses »
Jan 092010
 

Chicken Mushroom Casserole with Noodle Dumplings

This is an experimental recipe I concocted today while home sick. It’s completely off the cuff; look for suggestions for changes that might improve it after the main recipe.

INGREDIENTS

  • Boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or cutlets), about one pound
  • One-half of a medium white or yellow onion (or one small onion)
  • One half-bag of wide egg noodles, uncooked
  • Two (10.5 oz.) cans of cream of mushroom soup (none of that fat-free crap, please!)
  • One (6.5 oz.) can of whole mushrooms in water
  • One (6.5 oz.) can of sliced mushrooms, or “bits,” in water
  • Pepper (to taste)
  • Dried poultry seasoning
  • Italian-style breadcrumbs

PREPARATION

Preheat your oven to 350 ºF. Thinly slice the onion. Rinse and pat chicken dry. Liberally apply pepper and poultry seasoning to one side. In a medium (two to three quart?) casserole with lid, layer onion slices, noodles, and chicken. Place chicken with already-seasoned side down and sprinkle the “up” side liberally with bread crumbs. Add mushrooms and water around and on top of chicken. Add soup on top of everything. Fill one of the cans of soup halfway with water, stirring to get as much residual soup off as possible, and pour into casserole. Cover and place into the oven for one hour. Uncover the casserole after an hour, stir ingredients, and cook uncovered for another fifteen minutes to half an hour until the chicken is completely cooked.

This recipe should make five to six servings, depending on the size of the chicken breasts/cutlets. Serve with plenty of veggies.

VARIATIONS

If you have fresh mushrooms on hand, consider sautéing about a cup of them with the onion and a few minced cloves of garlic in a little olive oil (one tablespoon should be plenty) until the onion is just slightly caramelized. This might add some exciting flavor to the dish.

Rice would probably work well with this dish also, though you may need to increase the amount of fluid if so. An unintended, but happy, consequence of my original effort was that the egg noodles “glommed” together and became doughy, as if they were ersatz dumplings. You could make dumplings, of course, but then that would be chicken and dumplings, not chicken mushroom casserole with noodle dumplings :)

You could add additional herbs and spices during preparation time, though in my opinion the soup and herbs used came out really good as they are listed.

Мекици (Mekitsa)

 Food  1 Response »
Oct 152009
 

My friend Darin from Bulgaria shared this recipe for me for Mekitsa, a fried bread they make for breakfast:

400 grams of yogurt (actual real yogurt with live bacteria—“Greek-style” should work)
1 egg
10 grams of yeast
1 cup of water
1 tea spoon of baking soda
1 tea spoon of salt
1 spoon of oil
flour /just enough to make medium density dough/
cooking oil

Mix it together, let the dough rise for 30 minutes. With hands covered with oil or water take some dough and make it into oval shapes, then fry it in a pan. Then you can serve the “mekitsi” (that’s plural for “mekitsa”) with white cheese, honey or jam. People usually serve the mekitsi with a drink, named “airyan” [ah-eer-yan], which is cold yogurt with added water and a bit of salt.

The whole bit shouldn’t take you more than 45 minutes, so it’s worth the effort :) And it should be quite tasty with maple syrup too :)

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