Green Bean Pesto...

Or "How to Get Rid of Produce"

I had some slightly sad green beans (off-season...what did I expect), some slightly sad cilantro, and a slightly sad lemon. What to do...


Ingredients:
1 quart green beans, washed and snapped
3-4 cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup cilantro, coarsely chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup walnuts
1/4 cup yogurt (or sour cream, or ricotta, or some other tasty dairy product)
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
dash ginger
1 lb pasta
2 bullion cubes

Put the water on for your pasta with the bullion cubes. Over medium heat, saute garlic and cilantro in olive oil with the salt and pepper. Typically I wouldn't cook the cilantro, but in this case I had to cook out the sad.


Add the green beans and cook until they have turned a darker green and are a nice al dente. I am fairly sure that overcooking would lead to a kind of icky pesto. Allow them to cool a little bit before you stick them in your food processor/blender/what have you. By this time, your water should be bubbling away; cook the pasta al dente.


Pulse the green beans and other remaining ingredients until the mixture reaches the consistency of coarse polenta/grits (depending on how Italian/Southern you are!)


Add about 1/3 of a cup of the pasta water and a dash of ginger and whirl again to combine. Stir it into the pasta and serve with a handful of parmesan or a dollop of yogurt. So very tasty!

a dorm-room classic, but better!

I learned from my mother to create menus for each week before I go shopping; it saves you money and never leaves you sitting in the car on your way home "what the crap am I going to make for dinner!?" When I'm having menu-writer's-block I turn to my very small collection of cookbooks for inspiration.

One of my favorite cookbooks EVAR is The Japanese Kitchen by Hiroko Shimbo. She's basically the Julia Child of Japanese cuisine. Out of 250 recipes, none that I have tried has been bad. I love her so. The book is full of helpful illustrations, because some of the techniques are not used by your typical American home cook. And (thankfully) there isn't a single glossy photo. Those dang glossy cookbooks seem to fall apart if you breathe on them too hard.
ANYWAY, I was flipping through the Shimbo book and found a recipe for ramen broth, which I immediately knew I had to try. I have altered it a little (my love doesn't eat pork), but the recipe is essentially the same.
For those of you who love Vietnamese food (hi, Mommy!), this broth is quite similar to the broth used for Pho.

Ingredients:

2 lb beef soup bones (found in the frozen meat section of the grocery store, conveniently in a 2 lb bag) or pork knuckle bones, cracked by the butcher
2 lb chicken thighs, with all the skin and bones and whatnot
1 small onion, quartered
1/2 head of garlic, cut across the cloves to expose all of their deliciousness
the green part of a leek (RINSE WELL)
1 oz ginger, an inch or two square (depending on how much you like ginger), sliced, with skin
10 oz chukasoba a.k.a "Japanese curly noodles" or a couple ramen packages without the powder.

Put the meat bits into a large pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a hard boil and cook for one minute.


Lots of yucky stuff will float to the top, but we'll throw that away. Drain the meat and rinse off all the aforementioned yuck.

This is the yuck.

*Aside: if you are squeamish about raw meat, this may not be the recipe for you. When I was knuckle deep in bone marrow while rinsing the beef bones when I realized something. After months of working up the guts (no pun intended) to work with meat, my squeamishness has been cured. End aside*

Return to the pot or stick in your trusty slow cooker with all the aromatics. Simmer on low (high in the slow cooker) for seven hours. You heard me. This is another recipe for people with patience (i.e. people who are not me)

These are the tasty bits

Boil up your chukasoba according to the package directions, and rinse well with cold water until they are no longer starchy and slimy. Divide into bowls, pour over as much broth as you want, and garnish with anything you want. A little scrambled egg, some meat, or cold vegetables would be great. I went for fresh cilantro with some water chestnuts. Oh, lordy, how I love water chestnuts. I found it also needed a little tamari or soy sauce for extra salt and flavor.

Sesame Noodz

Today...sesame noodles! Super quick, super easy, super tasty!
Sesame seeds are one of my favorite things in the whole wide world of cooking. The seeds themselves, sesame oil, sesame paste. They are all delicious and work well in sweet or savory applications.

THAT BEING SAID, I must warn you, sesame oil should not be used as cooking oil. This is not because it will catch fire or release poison gas or anything. It just loses its flavor, and you end up using too much to get a good sesame flavor and your food goes to the table way too greasy.

My sesame noodles have mainly Japanese flavors, which means the sauce contains sweetener. I use honey because it really imparts a nice flavor and yields a thicker sauce. You can easily use sugar or splenda or stevia or whatever other junk you have lying around the house, though. And my cooking pretty much revolves around using what I have. This sauce is rather sweet, so if you think you may want to cut back, add half the honey and taste.

A few other things you may notice are the following:

• I've used dry sherry in this recipe. You can use mirin (rice wine) if you want, but it is just too hard to find mirin that doesn't have a gazillion additives. You can also use any other dry wine, or nothing, but sherry is my favorite.

• I've used basil in place of going out looking for shiso and ground ginger instead of fresh (it was snowing in VA this weekend, and we are straight up plowless in our town).

Step 1: Ingredients

2 tbsp honey or other sweetener
1/4 tsp ground ginger or 1 tsp fresh ginger
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/8 tsp dried basil
1 tsp sesame paste
1 tbsp tamari
1 tbsp roasted sesame oil
3 scallions
1/2 small head of cabbage or bok choy
1/3 to 1/2 cup of onion
2 tbsp butter
1/4 cup dry sherry
1 lb pasta

Step 2: Sauce

Whisk together honey, sesame paste, sesame oil, tamari, 1 tsp of the sherry, and the spices. Chop the scallions and add to the sauce. Set aside to marry.

Step 3: Cabbage

Roughly chop the onion and saute over medium heat in the butter. Chop the cabbage while the onion sautes.

After it cooks down, add the remaining sherry. Because you love sherry. Turn this to low and let it hang out and soften some more. Typically I cook everything al dente, but undercooked cabbage is just a bellyache waiting to happen.

Step 4: Pasta

Cook the pasta al dente in well salted water, according to the package's instructions. You can use any noodle, udon, bean threads, soba, yam noodles...but again, it was snowing, and I didn't feel like heading down to the specialty store for the good noodles.

Step 5: Finish up

Add the sauce to the noodles and stir well. The add the cabbage and serve!

Bruschetta Pasta!

After the ups and downs of an extremely busy past couple of weeks, you, dear reader, are finally given a post from your third author: A.K. My needs when cooking are simple: I want to enjoy food the way it was meant to exist, to prepare as much as possible from scratch, to avoid eating foods that my body cannot handle and to make things as delicious as possible! I strive to eat all natural, all the time and to only eat "whole corn", meaning, to me, kernel corn or course ground cornmeal. My recipes may also sometimes lack certain things, simply due to my long list of food allergies.

Now, without further ado, onto my first recipe for you! I present a favorite, simple dish: Brushetta Pasta.

To prepare this, you will need:

• Pasta. I am still using pre-prepared pasta, so I use about 3/4 a box. If you make your own, more power to you! Simply prepare enough for the amount of people you wish to serve.
• Six fresh tomatoes
• Three cloves fresh garlic
• 1 large onion
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup fresh basil leaves
• Mozzarella or parmesan cheese, to taste (optional)

1) Prepare pasta as one normally would, by boiling it in water with a little salt and olive oil, or however you prefer to.

2) While this is cooking, begin by chopping all six tomatoes, being careful to save the juices. I like to chop them into chunks about the size of your average dice (this analogy is made more complicated if you, like me, are a huge geek. I am thinking of a standard D6, geeky friends!). You can then set these chopped tomatoes aside in a bowl. I do this first to allow the tomatoes to sit and let the juices flow out of them a bit.

3) Next, I chop the onion and garlic. I like to dice my onions to be fairly small, but leave my garlic in medium sized pieces, perhaps two millimeter cubes. While you are making preparations, you should wash and tear up or cut your basil into small pieces, tearing or cutting each leaf into at least quarters. I usually simply rip herbs and greens instead of cutting them because it makes them less smushed, but the choice is yours. Set the basil aside once you have prepared it.

4) Following this, place the onions and garlic in the pot you plan to cook in with the olive oil. I generally cook almost everything except stews and soups in a large wok, but if that is not available to you, use a good sized sauce pan. Fry the onions and garlic in the oil until they are soft and they fill your kitchen with a wonderful aroma.

5) Add the basil and cook it in the oil with the onions for a bit so that it gets soft and the flavors mix. At this stage of cooking it is hard to give a time estimation, but I would suggest a couple of minutes, while keeping a weather eye on things and making sure to stir continuously.

6) Once things are fragrant and looking delicious, add your tomatoes. Stir everything up. Allow these to come to a boil and then let them simmer for about fifteen minutes, or until your sauce is of the desired texture. It should yield a very chunky sauce that has little in common with a standard tomato sauce, since there are no crushed tomatoes involved.

7) Serve over your choice of pasta, which should have been finished and drained at some point. If you wish, you may choose to add mozzarella or parmesan cheese to the top, but it certainly isn't nessesary. Season each portion with salt as desired. I like to add salt to tomatoes all the time, but my partner prefers to allow the basil to speak more strongly.

8) Enjoy. This is a good nom!