Day 24: Iced Cantaloupe Soup with Jalapeno and Basil

It is hard to remember wanting to make a cold soup just a few days ago when today it is drizzly and overcast.

Iced Cantaloupe Soup with Jalapeno and Basil

This is basically the same thing as the Thai Cantaloupe Salad with Chile that I made a few weeks back, only you add ice and puree the whole thing.

This is super easy with no cooking and comes off very sophisticated. The authors recommend using a food processor, but next time I will use a blender because the processor didn't chop up the ice very well.

Blend one chopped up cantaloupe (no seeds or rind, obviously) with 2 cups ice, salt, pepper, sugar, and lime juice. Stir in a little grated lime zest.

I made this ahead of time and put it in a pitcher in the fridge. When ready to serve, you have to stir it a little as it starts to separate. Pour into serving bowls and garnish with diced jalapeno, red onion, and fresh basil.

This is so DELICIOUS! It may sound a little weird, but it is refreshing and has a little zip and the toppings are really essential to make it taste far more complex than it really is. This is one of my favorites so far.

45 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.

Day 23: Smothered Broccoli with Peppers, Onions, and Raisins, Greek Pot-Crushed Potatoes

I have been dreading this recipe because the photo is so ugly in the cookbook. I was given a suggestion to make a meal out of all the recipes that don't seem too appetizing, but I don't think I could emotionally handle all of that at one meal.

Smothered Broccoli with Peppers, Onions, and Raisins
Greek Pot-Crushed Potatoes

Bonus: Karen's mom's Baby Back Ribs

Let's start with the least appetizing of the bunch, the Smothered Broccoli. I am not sure I would call anything "smothered" and expect people to want to eat it, except maybe if it said "Smothered in butter" or "smothered in hot fudge" or something like that. Also, I think of smothered as something slow cooked, but this recipe tells you to cook your onions for only 3 minutes!

This recipe has too much in it. First, you steam your broccoli and then set it aside, on a serving platter, to get cold while you make the rest of it.

Then you saute bell peppers, thin-sliced red onion, fresh rosemary, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper. THEN, add raisins. THEN, add toasted pine nuts when you pour the whole mess over your broccoli. It should be called Cold Broccoli with Way Too Many Ingredients. This seems so wrong to me. Pine nuts and raisins and rosemary and peppers and broccoli? Everything tasted great by itself. If you took a bite of broccoli and it had a bit of red onion, that tasted fine. A little broccoli and a pine nut, interesting, but fine. But all of it together is really not delicious at all. The rosemary over-powers and call me a backwoods simpleton, but broccoli and raisins might not have ever been meant to be on the same plate together.

I might make this again without the pine nuts or raisins. But I would also toss the broccoli in with the saute to heat them up a little before serving.

Whew, raced through that one, now onto the Greek Pot-Crushed Potatoes. These were really tasty. Thin slice red potatoes and boil them until tender (about 8 minutes). Drain them and then use the same pot to saute 8 large garlic cloves with salt and pepper, red pepper flakes, and water. The water is essential so the garlic doesn't burn. Add fresh oregano, cook until fragrant and then add the potatoes back to the pot. Smash the potatoes with your wooden spoon as you blend them into the garlic mixture. Blend in chopped parsley, lemon juice, and thin sliced green onion.

The parsley and lemon were essential here and really rounded out the flavor in the potatoes. This tasted a lot more interesting than plain old mash potatoes and since you didn't peel them and then mashed them gently with your spoon they still have a lot of texture and color. Good side dish for most any meal.

Now the main entree was NOT from the How to Eat Supper, but our friend Karen brought over some tasty ribs to a party and I convinced her to give me the recipe.

Karen's Mom's Baby Back Ribs

2lbs pork baby back ribs
garlic power and/or any type of seasoning you like. I added pepper.
1 container of your favorite BBQ sauce. (1+ cup)

Rub meat with spices and let sit for half an hour to 3 hours.
Cover baking sheet with foil, transfer ribs to sheet-meat side up, and then cover tightly with foil.
Cook for 2 hours at 250 degrees. Check for doneness at 1 1/2 hours. Meat should separate easily from the bone.
Set oven to broil.
Uncover ribs and baste with your sauce.
Broil 5-6 inches from heat, 8 to 10 minutes, or until desired crispiness. Turn and baste a couple times during the process.

YUM!

44 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.

Day 22: Filipino-Style Chicken Adobo (Chicken in Tart Garlic Sauce)

I have to stop and plug my very neat new kitchen item, a

French Butter Bulb made by my friend Barbara Dunshee. This keeps your butter nice and fresh right on your counter and looks cool to boot!Back to the cookbook! I have turned to this recipe thinking, this looks easy to make!--and then remember it needs to be marinated over night and then I push the recipe aside and look for something else. Well, this time I actually managed to do some planning in advance and made it happen.

Filipino-style Chicken Adobo (Chicken in Tart Garlic Sauce)

I love recipes that call for chicken thighs because they are quick to cook, delicious, and a cheaper cut of chicken when it comes to shopping organic.

This recipe is very simple but requires a few dishes. The day before you want to make this, marinate 8 chicken thighs in a metallic or glass bowl along with 1/4 cup soy sauce, 10 chopped garlic cloves, black pepper, 1 and 1/4 cups cider vinegar, 2 broken up bay leaves, and 1 cup whole canned tomatoes and their juices, breaking up the tomatoes with your hands as you put them in the bowl. Cover that and stick it in the fridge for 18 plus hours.

The next day, turn out your chicken mix into a big pot and bring to a gentle bubble. Cook for 25 minutes or so, until your chicken is 175 degrees. Then remove the chicken so that you can brown it. Keep cooking the sauce to reduce it. The cookbook says to skim the fat, but there was no fat for me to skim. You are going to cook the sauce down by half.

In a big skillet brown your chicken in your preferred oil. Once chicken is brown, turn over, add 2 thin-slice onions and cook the chicken and onions, stirring occasionally so that the chicken doesn't stick.

I served this by also cooking the Working Mother's Barley, which is my favorite.

Scoop some barley into a plate, add a couple pieces of chicken plus lots of onions and top with a generous ladle of the sauce. Delicious! They aren't kidding that this is tart. Very flavorful and tastes like you spent a lot more time making it than you did. The vinegar is seriously mellowed out by the end of cooking. It was even better the next day. The sauce really penetrated into the chicken.

42 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.

DAY 21: Asian-style Chopped Salad on Lettuce Spears

Incredibly refreshing, this is easy to make in advance with no cooking required and easy to modify with whatever fresh ingredients are on hand.

Asian-style Chopped Salad on Lettuce Spears

This is very similar to a traditional Vietnamese cold salad. Make a dressing, add it to chopped vegetables and cold noodles and serve on lettuce leaves for eating by hand.

The dressing is similar to nuoc cham, only they don't add lime juice. Combine garlic, red peper flakes, fish sauce (always use the fish sauce, I know it is stinky at first, but it adds so much!), water, vinegar, and sugar in a food processor. At this point, the recipe calls for switching to a slicing blade on your food processor. I don't have a slicing blade, so I dumped the dressing in a smallish bowl and then thin sliced by hand radish and Walla Wall Sweet onion and put it in the dressing to marinate.

In another bowl, combine cooked, drained cellophane rice noodles, shredded napa cabbage, sliced sausage ( I used Portuguese sausage but you can use any type of chorizo or Asian sausage), sliced basil, cilantro, and mint. The authors usually say cilantro optional in their recipes. I am starting to think they don't like cilantro, but I think it is absolutely essential in any Southeast Asian dish.

When you are ready to serve, mix the dressing/radish/onion blend into the salad and add salted peanuts, crushed if you like, and a chopped apple. The apple was a nice, crispy and juicy touch.

To serve, let guests put their desired amount onto lettuce leaves, add a squeeze of lime, roll up, and enjoy!! This is fun since everybody is active and creating their own little "spears". I also added baby corn and scallions to the serving platter. It would also be good with tofu, chicken, or pork. You could even shread the lettuce and just serve it as a big salad. Next time I would save the lime wedges and just put lime juice directly in the dressing.
Ok, this is Trevor and my friend Jennifer. You can barely see our friend Karen's hand. She was over but was eating a special diet this week so she is eating something different, which is why she is so ungenerously cut out of the picture!

41 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.

NEW DRINK

POMEGRANATE PIMM FIZZ

Muddle lime with raspberries and mint. Add 1 part PIMMS and 2 or 3 parts Pomegranate Beverage OR Limeaid. Shake and serve over ice with a lime wedge. YUM!

Day 20: Quintessential Pesto with Linguine and Lynne's Retro Garlic Bread

I am glad I have been forcing myself to go to the gym as these recipes are not for the dainty!

Quintessential Pesto with Linguine
Lynne's Retro Garlic Bread

Basil is in season and I have been getting it in our farm share so I just keep on with the pesto! A friend just told me a trick the other day, make a double or triple batch of pesto but before adding the cheese, freeze half of it for another day. That was easy to do!

I will spare you the pesto part of the recipe as I covered it just a few posts ago, but the very interesting thing about this recipe is how they cooked their linguine.

Again, they said to start with a pound of linguine. Last time I did this, I had way too much pasta and not enough sauce. So I used a little over half a pound. Boil a gigantic pot of salted water. (Side note: tons of salt in your pasta water is essential. Do not worry about getting too much salt in your diet. The trick here is that the salt makes the water cook at a higher temperature and then your pasta will cook faster and have less chance of getting all gummy.)

When you toss the linguine in the water add 1 or 2 peeled, thin-sliced red potatoes and 1/2 lb or more of 1" slices of green beans. Then your veggies cook right with the pasta and the potatoes are creamy and no extra mess of an additional pan. RESERVE one half cup of pasta water before draining. Toss pasta and veggies with your pesto and add some of that reserved water to spread out the sauce.

This was a revelation for me. Why haven't I ever thought of this before? You can do this with lots of different veggies and then it is ready to toss with whatever sauce or flavorings you prefer.

Lynne's Retro Garlic Bread is a crowd pleaser. Split a baguette down the middle and separate the halves. Put them on a foil-lined baking sheet, face up. My baguette was so long and skinny I had to cut it into several pieces to all fit on the sheet. Set aside for now.

Turn oven to 400. In a saute pan, combine 3 T olive oil, 3 T butter, 1/4 cup water, 5 minced garlic cloves, dried basil and dried oregano, and salt and pepper. Set over VERY LOW heat. I used the olive oil here because the heat is kept medium-low to low the whole time. Gently cook, covered, for 10 minutes. when the garlic is soft, uncover and cook a few minutes more until all of the water is cooked out. Then divide on top of your baguette. Top with 1 cup shredded Asiago or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Cook in oven for 10 to 15 minutes until cheese is nice and bubbly. Serve immediately. Taste of the proverbial heaven.

Luckily I looked very carefully at the recipe before I started as, once again, the authors screwed up their given cooking times. In the book it says, 5 minutes prep, 15 minutes oven. But they forgot after 5 minutes prep, there is 10-12 minutes of stove time and then 15 minutes oven time. But I worked it all out and the pasta was just placed on our plates when I took the bread out of the oven. The bread was so good we ate the whole thing. Oh boy, do I need to get to the gym again tomorrow.....

40 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.

DAY 19: Oven Crisped Lamb, Peppers, and Greens (Variation) and Turkish Almond Sauce

Whew! When your computer gets a virus, it is an excellent opportunity to procrastinate and not work on your cooking blog! Computer is still being worked on by husband, not sure when I will be able to get my photos off of it!

Oven Crisped Lamb, Peppers, and Greens (Variation from Crisped Pork)
Turkish Almond Sauce

After I didn't buy the extremely expensive lamb chops in protest the other night, I realized I had a large, expensive, organic, leg of lamb in the freezer. I bought this from our favorite ranch, THUNDERING HOOVES--(which I will spare you my normal rant, just go to their website!)

The main part of this recipe is easy. Toss your meat with the veggies, spices, and oil and then roast in the oven at 450 degrees, turning occasionally, until nice and crisped. (In truth, I turned it down a hair and cooked it longer, about 35 minutes)

The original recipe calls for Pork Tenderloin, but I have had this leg of lamb for a month now and have been trying to think of something to do with it. If you are using tenderloins, slice them into 1/2 inch thicknesses, if using lamb, cut away the fat and make do. It was hard to cube the leg into equal size pieces and there was a huge amount of fat and membrane to cut off and it made a big mess all over the counter. Pork tenderloins are much easier to work with! It was well worth it, however.

Toss your meat with a mix of hot and sweet sliced peppers, onions, a handful of mixed greens, your seasoning mix, and oil. The seasoning mix is allspice, coriander, cumin, paprika, salt, pepper, and garlic. Definitely a little exotic to the Western palate here, I only wish more American cooking used spices like these.

Now at this point, they, the authors, whom I usually listen with rapt attention to everything they say, tell us to toss with 1/4 cup good-tasting extra-virgin olive oil. In fact nearly every one of their recipes, be it a saute to a roasting to a salad all say use good-tasting, high-quality, extra-virign olive oil. I go on a sharp tangent from this belief.

A) Good olive oil is expensive. Half the time you can't even taste it with how the meal has been cooked.
B) You should NEVER, EVER bring extra-virgin olive oil to a high cooking temperature. It has a very low "smoking point" that makes it taste bad AND has the added danger of releasing carcinogens. Geez.

I usually cook with canola oil that can take a higher temperature. It has the added bonus of being less expensive than the olive oil I only use the extra-virgin olive oil for flavoring things that aren't cooked, like salad dressings, pesto, or adding a drizzle after something is done cooking to add more flavor. OK, I am done with my rant, back to the recipe.

While your meat is cooking, you can assemble the Turkish Almond Sauce.

First mix a minced clove of garlic and a few tablespoons of a minced sweet onion with 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar. Set this aside for 10 minutes. I think this is to mellow out the flavors.

Then you beat in 1/4 cup good-tasting extra-virgin olive oil until the sauce is creamy. (I stuck to this part as the olive oil is not cooked!) Then you add salt, pepper, one cup plain whole-milk yogurt, (I used non-fat and it still tasted fabulous. I think these people want us all to be fat.) a cup of coarse chopped almonds and chopped cilantro. The recipe says the cilantro is optional but I think it is essential. One can never have enough cilantro.

To serve, I made another recipe of the no-cook whole wheat couscous and set some cooked lamb mixture right on top and then a large portion of the almond sauce.

This dinner was excellent. The almond yogurt sauce with the olive oil and cilantro balanced perfectly with the gamy lamb and spicy, roasted veggies. And this time the couscous was good because the meat and the veggies and the sauce mixed in with everything. I will be trying this with pork very soon. if you don't like lamb, I know the pork will be just as good.

38 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.