Chili-Spiced Broccoli Stems & Tomatoes

Sometimes kitchen “scraps” are actually the best part. Plenty of classic dishes are based on that “Waste not, want not!” mentality: French ratatouille, Spanish paella, wedges of Italian polenta served with garlicky white beans. Good thing there have always been thrifty cooks among us! Just goes to show that great flavor doesn’t have to have a big price tag attached to it.

Some thrifty-minded ideas take a little extra thought, like tossing unused veggie ends and bits into a freezer bag for a batch of homemade broth down the road. (When the bag gets full, dump the carrot ends and onion scraps and whatever else you’ve got into a pot, cover the veggies with water, and gently simmer everything for an hour. Strain out the liquid, discard the veggies, and voila! you have homemade broth. If you have any meat bones on hand, throw those in, too. Then you have stock.) Another save-it-for-later idea is to toss the rock-hard rind on a hunk of Parmesan into a bag. The next time you make soup, sauce, stew, or anything you want to thicken and intensify, add the rind to the pot and let it work its Parmesan-imbued umami magic.

But my favorite use of a commonly overlooked “scrap” is broccoli stems. They taste even better than artichoke hearts — but are much, much easier to get at than artichoke hearts — and have the bonus of being pleasantly crunchy, too. To enjoy the stems, first cut off the top where the trunk turns into bifurcating branches, then trim off the bottom 1/2″ or so. (If the broccoli is older, the stem may be very hard and woody at the bottom. Keep trimming the bottom until you hit a crisp, still-moist point.) Turn the stem right-side up so that one of the cut-off flat ends is resting on the cutting board. Trim away the sides of the stem, rotating the stem as you go so that you can easily trim all of the sides. You’ll see that the center is pale green; once you trim away the drier, woodier outer layer, you’ll have a slim stem that doesn’t show any marks of branches or leaves coming off of it.

You can cut the trimmed stems into pieces and cook them with the florets if you like, but I prefer to eat the stems raw. I like them even better than the flowery part!

Chili-Spiced Broccoli & Tomatoes

Toss chopped tomatoes and thinly sliced broccoli stems (see above paragraphs for instructions on preparing the stems) with extra-virgin olive oil, a sprinkling of chili powder, and either a squirt of lime juice or a drizzle of red wine vinegar. You could add any other veggies you’d like to this, of course, or even add strips of cooked chicken and some crumbled soft goat cheese. Just be sure to try some of the broccoli stems all by themselves so that you’ll know what they taste like. Bet you can find plenty of other uses for the part of the broccoli you used to throw away!

Enjoy!

Herbs Hung to Dry

If you’ve ever had a garden, wanted a garden, or just had an empty windowsill begging to be populated, you probably already know that most herbs are ridiculously easy to grow.  Just make sure they’re well-watered — poke your finger into the dirt to see if it feels dry and needing water or if it’s already moist and doing just fine, thank you — and be sure to pinch off flower buds to keep your herbs leafy and green.  (Unless it’s the flowers you’re after.  Most herbs, though, are valued for their leaves.)  Hardy herbs like sage, chives, and mint come back year after year with minimal effort.  You just can’t go wrong!

Another huge advantage of growing herbs is drying them at the end of the season, thus supplying yourself with enough dried herbs to get you through to next summer.  In the case of perennial herbs, this means that you can stock your pantry for $0!  Just keep reusing the same jars for the same herbs and give them a good washing in between batches.

To dry your herbs, rinse them in cool water, pat them gently dry with a towel, and gather the ends in a bunch, as though you’re assembling a bouquet.  Tie the ends tightly with a cotton string and then hang the herbs from whatever surface/object in your house is hang-able.  In my case, that’s the finials on my curtain rods.  Thick-leafed herbs like sage take longer to dry than small-leafed herbs like thyme, but generally speaking, they’ll be nicely dried out in about two weeks.  I knew mine were ready when a single mint leaf broke off the dried stem and drifted gently to the floor.

To harvest your dried herbs with a minimum of mess, place a large sheet of waxed paper on a counter top.  Pull your fingers along each dried stem, knocking the leaves off onto the waxed paper, then curve the paper into a tube and slide the herbs into your jars.  That’s it!  Your dried herbs will be much fresher and more flavorful than anything you could buy at the store.

Some great herbs to hang and dry: mint, thyme, sage, lemon verbena, oregano, rosemary, and lavender.  (They make great teas and infusions as well!)

These herbs tend to lose all color and flavor when you hang them: chives, basil, cilantro, parsley.  They do, however, freeze exceptionally well.  Just wash them, pat them dry, chop if you’d like, and spread them out thinly on a sheet of waxed paper.  Place another sheet on top, slip the whole thing into a freezer bag, and tuck the bag into a safe, it-won’t-be-squished-there corner of your freezer.

Enjoy your herbs, both fresh, dried, and frozen!

Lavender & Mint Herbal Bouquet

Herbal bouquets are a great way to dress up your windowsills and your meals.  (Beverages, too!)  Most herbs are sturdy plants that will last a week or more in a vase, especially if you refresh them with cool water every day.  And the best part about having herbs close at hand is that you’re more likely to use them: a few fresh mint leaves in your tea, a sprig of thyme tucked into your chicken and pasta, some fresh lavender sprinkled over your salad.  You can make bouquets out of herbs you cut from your garden or fresh herbs that you buy at the store or farmer’s market.

As cooler days approach, you can keep the indoor herbs tradition going by transplanting some outside herbs into a pot and placing them in a warm and sunny spot inside.  (But be careful not to put them right next to a heat vent, because too much hot air will dry them out.)  Indoor herbs will add natural fragrance to whatever room they’re in.  Some of them — sage and chives come to mind — are so powerfully pungent that you may actually want to leave them outside.  If your formerly outdoor plants don’t take kindly to being shuttled inside, try growing new plants from seeds.  As long as you give them nutritious, well-drained soil, they ought to sprout within 7 to 10 days.

In the meantime, enjoy your fresh-cut herbal bouquets!

Ingredients for Salads & Cleaners

Here’s a quick little fact that’s helpful in the kitchen and everywhere else in the house: most things are either water-soluble or fat-soluble.  Given the fact that the “soluble” half of those descriptions means “dissolve-able,” if something is water-soluble, you can dissolve it and therefore remove it with water.  If it’s oil-soluble, you can dissolve it with oil.  This doesn’t hold true for every single thing you’ll come across — turmeric stains, for example, or industrial-strength glue — but when you’re tackling a basic cleaning project, you might as well see if you can handle your task by whipping out what you’d usually use to make salad dressings.

An acidic water-based liquid like vinegar or citrus juice is your best bet in the Homemade Water-Soluble Cleaners category.  As far as the Oil-Soluble Cleaners go, you can use whatever oil you have on hand.  I tend to use my least-expensive option to attack things like sticker residues and adhesive gums.  Note that most things are water-soluble, so try your vinegar/citrus juice remedy first.  If that doesn’t work, then go for the oil.  If that doesn’t work, you might have to resort to Old-Fashioned Elbow Grease (scrub with a light abrasive, like lemon juice mixed with borax or baking soda to form a gritty paste).  Soaking might work, too — I once had to leave water sitting in a fondue pot for a solid week to lift off the strands of burnt-on cheese.  Should you find yourself in a impossible scenario wherein none of these suggestions work, try using a non-toxic cleaner like the ones made by Seventh Generation or another environmentally-minded company.

And by the way, if you’d like to make a salad dressing with your Solubility Cleaners, just whisk together the oil and vinegar/citrus juice in a 2:1 ratio, sprinkle in some salt and pepper, and add a dash of dried or fresh herbs/spices of your choice.  You may also wish to add a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard to make it tangy, a bit of honey for sweetness, and/or some Greek yogurt or whipping cream to make your dressing thick and creamy.  Making your own dressing is as easy as removing spots and residues!

Repurposed San Pellegrino Bottle

Recycling is fantastic, but there’s something even better: repurposing!  And the kitchen has tons of potential for finding new uses for things you might otherwise throw out or recycle.  (Composting is repurposing, too — you’re nourishing your garden with food scraps rather than grinding them down the drain.)  From flimsy plastic containers to classy glass jars, you can reuse more than you’d think.

I wash out my cheapie containers and then use them when I’m taking non-liquid, non-heated, non-acidic items to a party: it’s far easier to hand over your cookies or cornbread to the host in a container that you don’t have to have returned.  Whenever I get a nice glass jar, though — it may have originally contained peanut butter or olives or applesauce or what have you — I keep those for myself so that I have handy glass jars for leftover sauces, canned pumpkin, coconut milk, etc.  Screw-top jars are great for making dressing, too, because you can just pour/sprinkle in all your ingredients and then shake the jar like crazy to get a nicely-emulsified, creamy dressing without having to worry about any errant splats of oil and vinegar.

My favorite thing to recycle, though, is pretty bottles.  Wide-necked ones can be filled with multi-colored stones, shells, or sand; narrow-necked ones make nice vases.  If it’s a bottle with a cork, you can keep vinegar in it, although you definitely want to keep anything edible out of direct sunlight and in a cool, dry place.  (Sunlight will hasten food’s demise.)  If you like the look of decorative liquids in bottles, either fill them with dyed water or something else you’re not planning on eating.

Have fun with your repurposing!  You can often find intriguing glass containers at garage sales, too, and for 10 cents apiece.  I like to snatch up dollar-a-dozen, plain glass plates and champagne/wine glasses whenever I see them — it’s fun to paint them as I see fit, and at less than 10 cents each, if my creation doesn’t come out exactly the way I’d envisioned, that’s fine.  I can always use another pretty vase.

Enjoy!

Triple-Nut Jumblecake

When it comes to most things in life, I think it’s safe to say that the difference between “failure” and “success” is largely a matter of perception.  This philosophy is certainly true in the kitchen!  It’s even more true when it comes to baking — you never know when breads won’t rise or muffins will turn out to be too grainy or cakes will have an odd shape.  Most of the time, everything still tastes great, but it doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to and/or it doesn’t have the expected texture for that particular category of baked goods.  (Too-crumbly muffins, for example, wouldn’t be too crumbly if they were meant to be scones…but then they wouldn’t be shaped like muffins.)

Enter the Jumblecake.  I made up this new category of baked goods last week when my triple-nut muffins didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped they would.  (I had used all freshly-ground nut flours in place of wheat, and I think the added moisture of so many nuts backfired in terms of muffin structure.)  To put it bluntly, the muffins were a disaster: they came out of the oven completely concave.  They tasted fabulous, though, and were actually one of the best baked goods I’d ever concocted.

I tried to use the concave muffins as cups to hold more tasty items like fruit and/or ice cream, but they were so tender that they fell apart under the strain.  I resorted to enjoying them straight out of the muffin tin with a spoon, which was fine by me but not the classiest way to serve them.  That’s when I decided to spoon all of them into a large bowl and then serve spoonfuls of them as individual heaped Jumblecakes.  In that form, they could be garnished, adorned with fruit, nestled next to ice cream, whatever I wanted.

So, that’s the trick: if your baked good doesn’t have the shape or texture you expected, make it into a Jumblecake!  This works for any and all baked goods that are cake-/bread-like in nature.  (Doesn’t work for soft items like custards, cheesecakes, or pies.)  Your guests will be impressed by your one-of-a-kind, highly-customizable baked item and will probably ask for the recipe.

Whether you share the secret of your success is entirely up to you.

Homemade Hand Creams

If you’re in the kitchen a lot, you’re probably washing your hands a lot, and your hands  probably feel dry from time to time.  You could buy expensive hand creams to alleviate that, of course…or you can use the oils and minerals you already have to make your own products.

Not only is making your own far less expensive, you get a very high-quality product without a bunch of fragrances and preservatives.  (I began making lotions years ago, when I got frustrated with the scarcity and expense of unscented products.)  The only two caveats with homemade creams are that because they are made without preservatives, you cannot leave them in a hot place (they will melt) and you should make sure your hands are clean before poking a finger into your lotions so that you don’t contaminate them (they are not made with antibacterial chemicals the way commercial lotions are).

To make hand cream, you’ll need a large glass bowl, a small glass bowl (or a small glass measuring cup), a whisk, and a way to heat your oils and boil your water (I use my stovetop, but you could also use a microwave).  Have a clean container ready so that you can transfer your lotion to it once it’s emulsified.

These three lotions are: (top) Lanolin Cream, (middle) Cocoa Butter Cream, and (bottom) Coconut Cream.  The Cocoa Butter Cream is a mix of oils and waxes — it’s thick rather than fluffy — but the other two are water/oil emulsions and are consequently lighter in texture.  I’ll give you the recipe for making the Coconut Cream since it’s the easiest one to make and has the nicest texture.  Home-beauty author Janice Cox has written several books on how to make body, bath, and hair products at home, so if this lotion intrigues you, check out her Natural Beauty at Home!

Coconut Cream
Makes 8 ounces — you may wish to cut this in half depending on the size of your jar/container.

2 T. stearic acid powder*
1/4 cup coconut oil, preferably unrefined
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp. baking soda

Melt stearic acid and coconut oil at a low temperature on the stove (or in a water bath) inside of a glass container. Alternatively, you can put the mixture in a large glass bowl, put it in the microwave, and use short bursts of microwave power. The goal is to melt it slowly — do NOT make it so hot that it bubbles. Swirl/stir often to help the stearic acid flakes melt into the oil. The mixture will have to end up in a large glass bowl, so if you don’t heat it in that to begin with, know that you’ll have to pour the oil mixture into the glass bowl when it’s hot and still very pour-able — stearic acid goes solid at room temperature.

While you’re melting the oil, boil some water. Add 1/2 tsp. baking soda to a heatproof measuring cup (i.e., Pyrex glass) or a small glass bowl. When the water is boiling and the oil/stearic acid is melted, pour 1/2 cup of water into the container with the baking soda and slightly swirl to dissolve soda (it’s easiest to use a heatproof measuring cup so that you can measure it as you’re pouring it). Slooooowly trickle water mixture into oil mixture (oil mixture must be in large bowl at this point!) and whisk briskly. This is the fun part: the clear oil and the water will turn into a beautifully rich, fluffy white cream! It’ll look like whipped cream, actually.

Transfer lotion to final container (one with a screwtop) and let sit uncovered until the cream is completely cool. Wipe out large bowl with a paper towel before attempting to use soap to clean it — soap won’t remove the waxy stearic acid.

If you’ve used unrefined coconut oil, your lotion will have wonderful scent of fresh coconuts…heavenly. This is by far my favorite cream!

* Stearic acid is actually a fat (fats are technically known as fatty acids). Plants contain it, animals contain it, our bodies contain it, we eat it in whole foods all the time — it’s nothing weird or unnatural. You can find stearic acid at candle-making shops or online at shops like www.mountainroseherbs.com (which sells an astonishing array of herbs and raw ingredients for making personal-care products).

Enjoy!

Roasted Beets & Greens

Hey, we’re all hanging onto our pocketbooks for dear life nowadays, so why not make the most of your groceries?  Fresh beets are the perfect example of a food that has hidden potential — namely, two ingredients for the price of one.  No sense in throwing away the tasty greens when you can use them in everything from stews to soufflés.

This dish of roasted beets and wilted greens is also easy on your pots and pans because you double up on individual ingredient preparation when you roast the garlic along with the beets and cook the greens along with the pasta.  And the roasted garlic dressing can be made in a food processor or with the old-fashioned fork-and-bowl method, whichever is easier for you.  (I’m partial to simple forking.)

Roasted Beets & Greens with Garlicky Dressing

Note: one beet = one serving, so just increase the amounts accordingly.

1 beet with greens, separated (snap off the greens from the top of the beet and set aside)
2 T. peanut oil OR melted butter/ghee OR coconut oil
Sea salt & cracked pepper
5 cloves garlic, UNpeeled
1 serving whole-grain pasta
1-2 T. extra-virgin olive oil OR cold-pressed walnut oil
1-2 tsp. cider vinegar
Handful of chopped walnuts (toasted or raw, your choice)
Crumbling of goat cheese, herbed or plain

Heat oven to 375 degrees F. While oven is heating, prepare the beet by peeling it and cutting it into 1″ chunks/cubes. Be sure to use a plastic or glass cutting board — a wooden one would be stained purple from the beet juice. Toss chunks with peanut oil, sea salt, and pepper, then spread out on a flat baking sheet and roast for 25 minutes.

Place cloves into a square of aluminum foil, oil, salt, and pepper, and bend the edges up and down so that you’ve made a pouch. Add to beets when you’ve hit the 25-minute mark and roast everything for an additional 10 minutes.

During those final 10 minutes, chop the reserved beet greens. Cook the pasta according to package directions, adding the greens during the final 2 minutes of cooking. Drain together.

Make the dressing by combining the roasted garlic, olive/walnut oil, and vinegar with a fork or in a processor. (Simply squeeze each clove to make the roasted innards slide out. Be careful, though — they’ll be piping hot and will stick to your fingers! It’s best to let the cloves cool slightly before handling them.)

Toss pasta and greens with beets and dressing and garnish with walnuts and goat cheese.

Enjoy!

Lime Sections

Limes have a certain pizazz that lemons just don’t.  Grapefruit doesn’t, either…in fact, not even tangerines can match up to a lime’s potential to play a sweet/sour role as a  keynote flavor or background blend.  A squirt of lime juice also lends a dish a Mexican or Caribbean flavor that an orange simply can’t provide.    Besides, not many populations are nicknamed after fruits — Limeys and Kiwis are the only ones I can think of.  (The British acquired theirs because their navy routinely stocked its ships with limes to prevent British sailors from getting scurvy, a deterioration of the body that happens when vitamin C is in scant or no supply.)

From a cook’s standpoint, there’s also a lot to be said for the juiciness of limes vs. lemons — despite their smaller size, limes yield just as much juice as lemons do, especially if they’re squeezed at room temperature rather than fresh from the fridge.  This juiciness has to do with their thin skins, which equals more juice per volume and wedges that are more easily compressed and wrung out.  A lime’s skin, however, is its Kryptonite as well as its headlining feature since it means that the lime will dry out and shrivel more quickly than a lemon or orange or grapefruit.  The low humidity of a refrigerator will hasten its descent into hard woodenness.

Hence, the best way to store limes is on the counter, not in the fridge.  Once cut, a lime wedge won’t fare any better than a refrigerated whole lime, however, and for the same tendency-to-dry-out reason.  The best way I’ve found to prolong the life of my limes is to place the cut sections in a ziploc plastic bag with a small piece of damp paper towel — that arrangement seems to provide enough humidity to keep the lime juicy for about a week before it begins to mold.  It’s still not a terribly long-lived fruit, but if you have extra pre-cut lime wedges on hand, just pop them into a cool glass of water for a refreshing drink.  You can also use them to zip up salad dressings, add zing to fish (or nearly any other dish), make guacamole, acidulate water, etc.  The limeabilities are endless!

Simple Two-Bean Pasta Salad

Even though most stovetops have four burners, why not do some creative subtraction and just use one?  (Assuming you have a big enough pot.)  Dishes based on starches, grains, and vegetables are prime candidates for honing your math skills:  just figure out how many minutes each item takes to cook and then subtract them from the longest-time-taker to the shortest-time-taker, making a mental note — or a physical one — of when you’ll need to add each item.  The following recipe is an easy and delicious exercise for flexing your math muscles in the kitchen.  (The math-based, one-pot method may seem like a lot of work when you first start doing it, but with a little bit of practice, you’ll be amazed at how much time you save … and how many fewer pots you have to clean!)

Simple Two-Bean Pasta Salad

Note that this recipes has four items that require simmering:  carrots, green beans, pasta, and spinach; cooking times are noted for each item in descending/mathematical order.

(makes enough for 4 servings)

Enough whole-grain pasta of your choice for 4 servings (I used corn spaghetti, which takes 8 minutes to cook)
1 lb. green beans, rinsed and stems snipped off (this will take 5 minutes to cook)
2-3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into 1/4″ rounds or chunks (if you like crispy carrots, plan on 1 minute of cooking time; if you’d like them more tender, plan on 3 minutes of cooking time)
2 cups loosely-packed spinach, chopped (this will cook in 1 minute)
1 15-oz. can pinto beans, drained
Extra-virgin olive oil & white balsamic vinegar for tossing

Get a pot of water boiling. Add pasta and begin the countdown to the next-to-be-cooked item. In my case, the pasta took 8 minutes to cook and the green beans took 5, so I set the timer for 3 minutes.

As soon as your friendly timer beeps, add the beans and set the timer for 4 minutes so that you’ll know when the final minute is at hand. <Beep!> Add the carrots and spinach to cook for the final minute, then quickly pour it all into a colander to drain. (Unless you want tender carrots, in which case do the math accordingly.)

Stir the drained pinto beans and about 2 T. each olive oil and balsamic vinegar into the drained pasta and veggies, then taste to see if you’d like to add more smooth richness (the oil) or piquancy (the vinegar). Salt and pepper to taste, then serve immediately. A hard cheese like Parmesan or Manchego would be a nice garnish.

Enjoy!

Refreshed Asian Stir-Fry with Salmon

Just before I slipped off to sleep last night — a surprisingly sound one considering that I’d just watched another two episodes of my new favorite show, True Blood — I had a culinary ephiphany:  the term “leftover” needs to be revamped.  (Pun intended.)

“Leftover”  sounds distinctly unappealing, doesn’t it?  I mean, who wants what’s left over?  Even dedicated garage-sale shoppers like to get there at the crack of dawn to get first dibs on what’s laid out in the garage or scattered across the lawn.  Calling something a “leftover”  doesn’t do it justice at all, especially when that leftover can be re-purposed and used to create something totally new and innovative.  Leftovers aren’t leftovers at all — they’re founts of inspiration.  They’re tasty ways to save money.  They can be the ultimate convenience food, particularly if we go with the well-nigh-forgotten definition of “convenient”:  affording accommodation or advantage.  (Which commercial “convenience”  foods most certainly do not — they afford poor health, strained economies, and overburdened health-care systems.)  It’s time to re-create the concept of leftovers!

Henceforth, leftovers won’t be leftovers in this e-kitchen:  they’ll be “refreshed” foods.  And to usher in the new era, here’s how I made Monday”s dinner into Wednesday’s lunch by pairing it with Tuesday’s dinner!

Refreshed Asian Stir-Fry with Salmon & Noodles

As the name implies, I simply added salmon and noodles to Monday’s stir-fry (two posts down).  I’d baked the salmon the night before for dinner and had saved half of it, so all I had to do was use a fork to break it into chunks while I boiled water for the brown rice noodles.  As soon as the noodles had finished cooking, I drained them, added the already-cooked stir-fry to the noodle pot, slid the drained noodles back into it, added the chunked salmon, stirred it, and put the whole thing back on the stove for a minute or two to heat it all through.  Right before serving, I drizzled on a bit of extra sesame oil and soy sauce.

There you have it!  A fantastic lunch in 7 minutes.  (Or however many minutes it takes to cook whatever kind of pasta you choose to use.)  How’s that for refreshing?

Enjoy!

Hand-Painted Milk Jugs

Looking for easy and inexpensive ways to spruce up your kitchen decor?  Try your hand at glass painting!  Plates, jugs, vases, glasses–your inner Monet might just be clamoring to get out.  Now that it’s summertime and garage sales are in full swing, it’s easy to pick up champagne glasses for ten cents apiece or serving platters for a buck.  Your local craft store (in my case, Munro’s in Berkley) will carry a full palette of colors for painting glass and ceramics.  Some can even be baked the next day and thus be rendered dishwasher-proof.  (Read the fine print twice to make sure that the paint you choose is safe for use on eating utensils.)

You don’t have to be a still-life painter to pull off a nifty geometric design or subtle layers of color shading.  The former can easily be done by drawing out your design on a piece of paper first and then taping your self-made stencil inside of the glass or underneath the plate; the latter can be created in under a minute with a bit of judicious sponge blotting.  Or you can just let your creativity flow and see what happens!

Sunflower Sprouts

Windowsills are a great place to grow kitchen herbs and sprouts.  If you have an unobstructed east- or west-facing window, whatever you choose to plant will have a very happy home; if you give your plant some toothsome kitchen scraps, it’ll have an even happier home.  (In my case, whenever I use eggs, I add a little bit of cold water to the eggy bowl, swish it, and then pour it into the plant.  Crushed eggshells also make great fertilizer.  Just be careful not to overfeed your house plants–if you do, mold can develop!)

This spring, after going on a what-do-I-already-have? rampage through my pantry, I  wound up planting dried Northern beans, some wheatberries, and raw sunflower seeds.  And guess what?  They all grew!  (Which really made me think about that old wives’ tale I’d heard as a kid about watermelon seeds growing in your belly…)  The raw sunflower seeds from Trader Joe’s did the best, so I planted another batch and then gave the seeded soil some windowsill real estate.  I planted them with the intention of snipping off the sprouts and adding them to my salads, but they’re looking so cute that I may have to let them become sunflowers…

…or not.  It is getting to be lunchtime, after all.

Roasted Red Pepper with Chicken & Noodles

Leftovers can be magic–especially versatile leftovers like roasted red pepper and chicken.  Just add a bit of pasta and olive oil, sprinkle with parsley, and poof! you have a delicious meal.  With a bit of purposeful overproduction, in fact, you can create your own healthy freezer meals/leftovers.  (But be sure to stick with your original plan and actually save the extra portions.  Eating them all at one sitting defeats the whole scheme!)

There are many reasons to create your own next-day delights:  you know EXACTLY what the ingredients are (let’s face it–you’d have to be a chemist to correctly pronounce the ingredients on a typical frozen dinner), your own leftovers are much more fresh than store-bought ones (how long have they been sitting on the shelf? in the warehouse? in a truck?), and you can control the portion size.  Also, since you’ve already tested the meal and you know you like it, you can treat yourself to a potluck-style surprise by simply not labeling your leftover.  It’s like going to your favorite restaurant and just asking for the chef’s special.

To make roasted red peppers for this dish or for any other meal that strikes your fancy:

[Optional:  place a tray or a piece of aluminum foil underneath the center of the main oven rack to catch any possible drips.]  Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.  When it’s piping hot, place the whole washed pepper directly on the rack.  Roast for about 20 minutes or until the skin of the pepper begins to blacken and blister.  (You may wish to turn it over halfway through the cooking time.)

Remove pepper from oven and IMMEDIATELY place in ziploc bag.  Seal and let the pepper rest until it’s cool enough to handle.  (This could take 30 minutes.)  When you remove it from the bag–which will be foggy with condensation–the skin will be very easy to peel off.  Remove stem, seeds, and all skin.  At this point, you can purée the roasted pepper for dips or smooth sauces, slice it into strips to serve alongside main dishes or on sandwiches/wraps, or cover it with olive oil and save it for later.  (You can refrigerate roasted red pepper for about a week.)  If you’d like to flavor your pepper, add garlic and/or herbs to the oil.  They can be directly added to the dish later on.

Happy roasting!

At times, a kitchen can seem like a place of chaos–there are bubbling pots on the stove, you have three glass pans of vegetables roasting in the oven, meat waiting to be filleted, and bread rising in the sunny patch in the corner.  And don’t forget about dessert!  (Granted, this scenario might only take place during the holiday season or if you’re hosting a medieval-style feast.)

Even if you’re only boiling some noodles and preparing a simple marinara sauce, however, cooking is a lot more fun if your kitchen is organized.  That means it’s relatively clean, your utensils/equipment are easy to access, and there’s a rhyme and reason to where you keep them.  (This also helps you remember where you put that heat-proof spatula when you realize the eggs are two seconds away from burning onto the pan.)

To make my kitchen easier to manage, I keep all of my commonly-used utensils right by the stove.  This includes several spatulas, an assortment of wooden utensils, my main whisk, a ladle for soups and sauces, and long-pronged spaghetti forks.  That way, everything’s in plain view and takes only a second to grab.  My drawers are divided into baking tools (measuring spoons, pastry scraper, mini-spatulas, attachments for the mixer, pastry cutter, etc.) and food-prep tools (peeler, garlic press, salad spoons, egg slicer, meat hammer, etc.).  The cupboards are divided in a similar fashion–baking tools (mixing bowls, mixer, measuring cups, etc.) and cooking tools (frying pans, pots, loaf pans, baking dishes, etc.).  Another cupboard is reserved for fun tools that I don’t get to use every day, like my fondue pot and my Belgian waffle-maker.  Packaging materials (wraps, foils, baggies) get their own drawer, as do heat-protective devices like potholders, trivets, and oven gloves.  (I’m not keen on reaching into hot ovens, but I don’t mind as much when I’m wearing non-slip heat protection all the way up to my elbows.)

How you organize your tools is up to you–everyone has a different way of sorting out life’s matters.  Just remember that a few minutes of organizing now could avert many, many kitchen mishaps (and near-misses) along your culinary path!