Lemon Verbena & Tomato Pasta
Nothing proclaims “SUMMER!” like a simple tomato and herb pasta. Basil is a perennial favorite herb to use, of course, along with thyme and oregano. Dill is another. This year, though, I decided to plant a new herb in my garden: lemon verbena. As its name suggests, it’s quite lemony! Its softly fragrant leaves are tender enough to eat raw, but are sturdy enough to be easily chopped, and the verbena is managing to thrive in my garden even though my tomato plants have woven themselves through and around the verbena to become a tomato jungle.
Thanks to lemon verbena’s lemoniness, it’s perfect with seafood and light vegetable dishes, plus its attractive long and slim leaves make a pretty edible garnish on almost any plate. And if you crush the leaves and then add them to a pitcher of cool water, you’ll get a refreshing, faint lemon taste. Oh, and one last thing to think about when plotting out the residents of your next season’s herb garden: lemon verbena is a perennial! I’m just hoping mine can survive this season’s tomato onslaught…
Lemon Verbena & Tomato Pasta
2 servings whole-wheat pasta of your choice (I used Tinkyáda’s brown rice spaghetti)
About 20 cherry tomatoes, sliced in half (or 10 per person)
Handful of lemon verbena, chopped
6 fresh green or wax beans, minced (optional)
Drizzling of extra-virgin olive oil
Pinch sea salt
A few grinds of pepper
A few slices or gratings of a hard, aged cheese like Parmesan or Manchego as garnish (optional)
Prepare pasta according to package directions, then drain and immediately toss with remaining ingredients. If you don’t have lemon verbena, substitute other fresh leafy herbs like basil, oregano, or parsley. Chives would also be a nice substitution or addition.
Enjoy!
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Tags: lemon verbena, pasta, summer, tomatoes
Orange & Olive Salad with Macadamia Nut Dressing
Traditional fats are one of the building blocks of food: they carry flavor, they provide a creamy taste and texture, and they have more nutrients per gram than their cousins carbohydrates and proteins. (When I say “traditional” fats, I mean fats from whole foods — both plant and animal — not man-made, refined fats that are the mainstay of most processed foods.) And if you know just a little bit about how fats themselves are built, it’s easy to use them to your advantage.
Fats from whole foods are composed of a mixture of various kinds of fats — no food is 100% one particular fat. When we say something is “saturated” or “monounsaturated,” what we’re really saying is that the food in question is primarily a saturated or monounsaturated fat. Or a polyunsaturated fat. Those are the three chief types of fats: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. Almost all food labels distinguish between saturated and unsaturated fats; most oils and many other labels also state the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated breakdowns. That’s where a little knowledge can come in very handy.
For now, let’s just focus on one particular aspect of fat-type characteristics: how fats react to temperatures. Saturated fats can handle high heat (over the stove, in the oven) and are solid at room temperature. Put them in the fridge, and they get even harder. Butter is a great example of this, or unrefined coconut oil. Palm oil is an even better example. Palm and coconut are stable enough to not deteriorate (i.e., go rancid) for at least six months, even when kept at room temperature.
Monounsaturated fats can handle medium heat and are liquid at room temperature; in the refrigerator, they turn into a cloudy semi-liquid. Think of olive oil and peanut oil. Monounsaturated fats can be kept for about three months at room temperature or six months refrigerated.
Polyunsaturated fats are too delicate to heat — they’re very liquid at room temperature and equally free-flowing in the refrigerator. They’ll deteriorate much more quickly than monounsaturated and saturated fats, even when they are refrigerated. Examples include flaxseed oil, walnut oil, and pecan oil. Be sure to consume these must-be-refrigerated oils within no more than six months, preferably within three.
Like oils, whole nuts also have different fat profiles depending on which fat is their primary fat. Different nuts also contain different amounts of fat by weight — chestnuts are almost oil-free, almonds and hazelnuts are fairly unoily, pecans and walnuts are considerably oilier, and macadamia nuts are richly oily.
Seeing as nuts are primarily unsaturated, if you grind nuts into butter, the nuts that are the oiliest will make the most free-flowing butter. Macadamia nuts are so free-flowing, in fact, that a spoon stuck into chilled macadamia nut butter will come out of the jar dripping. That makes macadamia nut butter the perfect topping/dressing for fruits, salads, desserts, breads, you name it! Dip a square of dark chocolate into it, garnish soup with it, drizzle it onto a bowl of oatmeal. Even straight from the fridge, you’ll find that macadamia nut butter is easy to work with and that it is one of the most creamy and delicious things you’ll ever taste.
Olive & Orange Salad with Macadamia Dressing
On a plate, arrange mixed lettuce leaves, halved olives — black or green — and orange sections. Drizzle salad with macadamia nut butter and serve.
It is seriously that easy! Two minutes of effort yields a surprisingly balanced plate of creamy and salty (the nuts and olives) and sweet and bitter (the oranges and lettuce).
Enjoy!
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Tags: fats, how to store nuts, how to store oils, macadamia nut, nuts, olives, orange, salad
Cranberry-Chocolate Cake
As a kid, I always liked marbled pound cakes and swirled cheesecakes. And two-toned frozen yogurts. Somehow, seeing two flavors intertwined on one plate (or in one cone) makes both of them doubly delicious. And you know what the best part is? It’s ridiculously easy to make marbled and swirled desserts — doing so usually just involves a bit of judicious pouring and/or fork-dragging. (Or, in the case of a thick soup garnished with a curlicue of cream, some skilled spoon-dragging.)
This cranberry-chocolate cake topped with a vanilla batter is an easy two-toning feat: just pour the top layer over the bottom layer, get the cake into the oven ASAP, and sit back and enjoy the scent of chocolate permeating your kitchen.
Cranberry-Chocolate Cake
This cake is gluten-free. If you’d like to make it with wheat, simply substitute 1 1/4 cups whole-wheat flour for the gluten-free flours in the bottom layer and then 2 T. of whole-wheat flour for the 2 T. brown rice flour in the top layer.
For the bottom layer:
1/2 cup almond flour*
1/2 cup brown rice flour
1/4 cup teff flour*
2 tsp. baking powder
Pinch sea salt
3/4 stick of butter (6 T.)
1/4 cup cocoa powder, preferably non-Dutched
3/4 cup maple syrup
2 eggs, preferably from pastured hens
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries OR 1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries
For the top layer:
1/2 stick butter (4 T.), preferably from pastured cows
2/3 cup whole-milk Greek yogurt OR pureed pumpkin
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 egg, preferably from pastured hens
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 T. brown rice flour
1 tsp. baking powder
Pinch sea salt
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and grease an 11×7 glass pan.
To make the bottom layer, in a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the flours, the baking powder, and the salt. Set aside. Melt the butter, cocoa powder, and maple syrup in a medium saucepan over low heat, whisking often to speed along the process. As soon as you have a smooth, well-blended mixture, scrape the chocolate into a large mixing bowl. Stir in eggs and flour mixture, then gently stir in cranberries. Pour bottom layer into greased pan.
In a clean mixing bowl, cream together the butter, yogurt, and maple syrup until smooth. Beat in remaining top-layer ingredients and then pour into pan on top of the chocolate layer.
Bake for 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. (If you hit a cranberry, try another spot.)
Garnish with additional cocoa powder or chocolate curls if you like, or serve the cake with dollops of whole-milk Greek yogurt that’s been sweetened to taste with maple syrup.
Enjoy!
* You can easily grind almonds and teff in a coffee grinder if you’d like to make your own flour — it’ll take 10 seconds and save you a chunk of change if you already have sliced/slivered almonds and whole teff grains on hand.
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Tags: blueberry, cake, chocolate, cranberry, dessert, gluten-free, greek yogurt, naturally sweetend, whole grain
Tomato & Chickpea Toss
What to do with all those perfectly ripe and sweet summer tomatoes? Not to mention peppers and onions and beets … as Shakespeare might say, ’tis a delightful dilemma. Last week, I chose to resolve that dilemma — my garden is kicking into High Tomato Season — by putting all of my random leftovers together in a bowl and tossing them: roasted peppers, onions, and beets (I had roasted a panful of veggies the night before), canned chickpeas, and a wedge of Salem blue cheese from Wisconsin. My excess-tomato solution could have just as easily involved roasted or pan-fried eggplants or carrots, or sautéed green beans, or wilted spinach, or whatever else I found in my larder or at the market. Ain’t summer grand?
(Side note: our good weather may only last for half of year, but in terms of variety of produce, Michigan ranks #2 in the country. Only California beats us. Let’s make the most of our bounty!)
Tomato & Chickpea Toss
Serves 2 as a light course and can easily be doubled or tripled. If you’d like to make this a dinner course, add a cup of cooked grains and double the amount of dressing.
12 cherry tomatoes
2 roasted peppers
1 roasted onion
1 cup chickpeas, drained
2-3 roasted beets
1 cucumber, chopped (optional)
Wedge of blue cheese (or other strong-flavored variety, such as goat cheese or an aged Manchego), crumbled
2 T. extra-virgin olive oil
1 T. balsamic vinegar
Toss all ingredients together in bowl, adding a pinch of sea salt if you’d like. A few sprigs of fresh herbs would make a nice garnish.
Enjoy!
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Tags: blue cheese, chickpeas, peppers, summer salad, tomatoes
Dilled Bacon, Potatoes & Tomatoes
Bacon. Potatoes. Sublimity.
Those were the guiding principles behind a recent bacon-infused dinner. After cooking my two strips of bacon, I knew I was going to have plenty of tasty bacon grease happily burbling away in the pan. Why throw that out when you can cook something in it…say, something that would absorb that luscious rendered bacon fat and make the most of it? Besides, the deal had been (unwittingly) sealed earlier that day — or at least set into motion — when I’d gone to the farmer’s market and had stumbled upon small, rounded, oh-so-cute organic potatoes at one of the stands. Those unassuming earthy jewels would be the ideal partner for my bacon drippings! And the golden cherry tomatoes that I’d later find in my garden literally made the deal even sweeter.
Dilled Bacon, Potato & Tomato Mélange
Serves 2 as a light main dish; recipe can easily be doubled or tripled according to your needs.
4 strips good-quality bacon (Applegate Farms makes a nice one, or better yet visit your farmer’s market to find local and pastured hog products)
About 8 small round potatoes, sliced into 1/4″-thick rounds
12 cherry tomatoes, halved
Pinch of sea salt
Sprig of fresh dill, 1 or 2 tsp. of the ferny fronds torn off (the main sprig will be used as garnish)
Get the bacon cooking over medium heat in a covered saucepan. If your bacon is more of the val-pak variety, you might want to use a deep-bottomed pot to ward off bacon grease splatters. (See the Summer Bacon Pasta post to learn more about what distinguishes great bacon from val-pak bacon.) The bacon will probably take about 10 minutes to cook, but may take more or less depending on what kind of pan you have and what kind of bacon you have. Carefully turn the strips over with long tongs at about the halfway point.
When the bacon is crispy and brown, lift it out of the pan and place it on a folded paper towel to drain. Remove the pan from the heat and let it cool for a minute before adding the sliced potatoes to the bacon grease. (If you add them right away, the still-very-hot grease will begin to splatter. Dangerously.) Cook the potatoes over medium-LOW heat for about 3 minutes or until the bottoms are golden. Flip them over and cook for another 2 minutes or until they’re just beginning to turn golden.
Add tomatoes and cook for another 2 minutes or until the tomatoes just start to shrivel. Sprinkle a dash of sea salt over the potatoes and tomatoes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in lettuce and dill. (The residual heat will wilt the lettuce.)
Split the dish into two portions, plate, and crumble 2 strips of the cooked bacon over each portion. Add additional pinch of salt if desired and garnish each plate with large fronds torn from the remaining sprig of dill.
Enjoy!
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Corned Pork Meatballs
“Corned” meatballs might sound odd, but I’m hearkening back to the original meaning of “corned” here, back when corns referred to any small grains. Often, those grains were coarse grains of salt used in brines and pickling solutions. That’s where we get corned beef from — it doesn’t have anything to do with the kind of corn that grows on long stalks, but it does have a lot to do with salty brines.
Rolling these meatballs in coarse, grainy cornmeal makes them corny in both the traditional and modern sense of the word. The cornmeal also provides a nice crunch and is a healthy swap for commercial breadcrumbs. (Breadcrumbs are a snap to make yourself, though: just buzz some staling slices of bread through a food processor, pour the fresh crumbs into a screw-top glass jar, and stick the jar in the freezer. You’ll have breadcrumbs any time you need them! Fresh crumbs can also be briefly toasted to deepen their flavor before adding them to recipes.)
When shopping for cornmeal, be on the lookout for the coarsely milled variety. The finer meal is nicer for baked goods — if you mill the cornmeal finely enough, it becomes corn flour — but the coarsely milled cornmeal works better as a breadcrumb stand-in. It also imparts a more pronounced crunch and flavor to savory cooked dishes.
Corned Pork Meatballs with Basil & Mint
1 pound ground pork, preferably from pastured hogs
1 medium onion, minced
1/4 cup or so of fresh basil leaves, chopped
1/4 cup or so of fresh mint leaves, chopped
1 egg
Pinch sea salt
Cornmeal
To make the meatballs, place pork, onion, herbs, egg, and salt in a large glass mixing bowl. Use your hands to thoroughly combine them. The mixture will be very wet, so add enough cornmeal to make a mixture dry enough to roll into balls. (It’s best to add the cornmeal a bit at a time, mixing the meat each time, until you’ve reached a nice consistency. If you dump in a large amount of cornmeal at once, you might wind up with a too-dry mixture that will be crumbly. Add a little water if this happens.) Stack the balls on a plate as you roll them.
Scatter some cornmeal on another plate and roll the balls in the cornmeal one by one until each is completely covered. In a large saucepan, heat about 1 T. of extra-virgin olive oil over medium heat for about 1 minute. Add meatballs — working in batches if your pan isn’t big enough to hold them all — and cook them for about 5 minutes or until they’re golden-brown on all sides. You’ll have to shift them around with a spatula (or gently shake the pan) to make sure you cook them evenly.
The meatballs make tasty appetizers, or you can include them with your favorite pasta dish. They’re also great with eggs in the morning. If you have leftover meatballs, you can quickly re-fry them on the stovetop to bring back the cornmeal crunch, or you can serve them cold. I actually preferred their flavor when I sampled them cold the next day — their overnight stint in the refrigerator made the basil and mint flavors stand out more.
Enjoy!
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Sautéed Portabello Salad
Grill them, stuff them, use them as hamburger toppings … portabello mushrooms are a favorite summer treat. But my favorite way to enjoy them is to slice them very thin and sautée them with extra-virgin olive oil and a pinch of sea salt so that you wind up with portabello crisps. It’s the perfect base for a quick salad featuring whatever is plentiful in your garden or at the market. You can also snip a few fresh herbs to go on the top of your crisp-yet-cool masterpiece.
Portabello Summer Salad
This serves two for a side salad or one for a main, but you can vary the amount of veggies depending on what’s available and plentiful. Just be sure to slice the portabellos very thinly before cooking them.
Extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt
2-3 portabello mushrooms, thinly sliced
2-3 medium tomatoes (Romas work well), chopped
Handfuls of fresh lettuce, roughly chopped if they’re big leaves
Fresh herbs (such as chives, basil, or dill), minced
Balsamic vinegar
In a medium- to large-sized saucepan, heat the oil over medium heat for 1 minute. Slide in the portabello slices, making sure each one is fully touching the pan, and let cook for about 3 minutes. Flip over slices, season with a pinch of sea salt, and continue to cook for another 2 minutes. The mushrooms should be shriveled around the edges and turning a vague golden brown through their mushroom/earthy color.
Lay the tomatoes and lettuce out in sections on a plate, leaving a section for the mushrooms. Add the cooked mushrooms to the plate and scatter the herbs over everything. Drizzle the remaining oil from the pan onto the plate — add some fresh oil to the tomatoes and lettuce if you like — then drizzle on a few threads of balsamic vinegar only onto the tomatoes and lettuce. (The mushrooms will be so richly flavored from having been sautéed in thin slices that they don’t need any additional seasoning.) Serve promptly.
Enjoy!
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Tags: fresh herbs, mushrooms, portabello, salad, tomatoes
Caribbean Corn-Coconut Chowder
Chowder is one of America’s great culinary contributions: a hearty one-pot meal that you can customize to your stomach’s delight. While many chowders sprang out of a seafood tradition (think Manhattan and Boston clam chowders), there are also vegetable-based versions. I created this one to make use of plentiful summer crops like corn and tomatoes and plentiful summer herbs like cilantro.
Since I also had leftover brown rice in the fridge, I threw that in to give the chowder some extra body and flavor. You could just as easily use a quicker-cooking grain/pasta like quinoa or a whole-wheat orzo if you don’t have cooked brown rice on hand. Likewise, if you have frozen corn rather than fresh corn, you can substitute that, too. (Although it’d be a shame not to partake of fresh summer corn, especially for 20 cents an ear!)
Caribbean Corn-Coconut Chowder
Serves 4 people.
2 ears husked fresh corn OR 2 cups frozen corn
1 15-oz. can diced tomatoes
1 medium onion, chopped
1 cup canned black beans (you can also add the bean juice if you’d like; I use Eden canned beans, which are canned in BPA-free cans with water, sea salt, and a bit of kombu seaweed — all great additions to soup!)
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1/4 cup whole coconut milk
1 cup water
1 cup cooked brown rice OR 1/2 cup raw quinoa or 1/2 cup raw whole-grain pasta*
Fresh cilantro, chopped (use a few sprigs if you’re cilanto-timid or a whole handful if you’re a fan)
1 tsp. dried pineapple sage OR 1 tsp. dried oregano OR 2 tsp. fresh oregano
1 tsp. dried fenugreek (optional)
Sea salt to taste
To prepare the fresh corn, bring a large soup pot halfway full of water to a boil. Ease ears into it and simmer for 3 minutes. Promptly pull out ears with tongs, rinse out pot, and refill with cold water. Place ears in cold water and let cool while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. (If you don’t promptly chill the ears, they’ll continue to cook and will be too mushy.) Remove ears and pat them dry. Use a sharp knife to cut kernels into a large bowl.
Combine all ingredients except corn in the rinsed-out soup pot and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the corn during the last minute or two. (By adding it at the end, you’ll preserve its wonderful sweet crispness.)
This soup can be served warm or cold. Like all tomato-and-spice-containing dishes, it’s even better the next day! Avocado wedges and corn chips make nice garnishes.
Enjoy!
* If you use raw quinoa or pasta, add another cup of water to the chowder to account for the liquid the grains/pasta will absorb.
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Tags: black beans, brown rice, chowder, cilantro, coconut milk, corn, fenugreek, pineapple sage, tomatoes
Summer Pasta with Bacon
Good bacon goes with everything — I have a sneaking suspicion that bacon ice cream would be a hit. (Especially if you paired the bacon with pecans.) When I say “good” bacon, I’m referring to bacon from pastured hogs that snort and snuffle about on an actual farm. You can find this kind of bacon at your farmer’s market, online, or at your favorite well-stocked grocery store. My current easy-to-find favorite bacon comes from Applegate Farms. They also make darned tasty hot dogs, deli meats, and sausages. Eatwild.com has plenty of suggestions for finding pastured animal products at farms in your area.
Aside from improved flavor, better nutrition, and a much more pleasant effect on the environment, one of the big perks of good-quality bacon vs. conventional bacon is that it has not been injected with brine to make it taste better. (It already tastes great!) That means splattering is kept to a minimum when you’re cooking the bacon…and that means you can use the bacon grease to fry and flavor other ingredients. In this case, I chopped up a variety of veggies from my garden and tossed them into the pan with the bacon a minute or two before the bacon was done. Those four strips of bacon were all I needed to have a single-skillet, deliciously-bacon-seasoned dinner!
Summer Pasta with Bacon
This recipe serves 2 but can be easily doubled or tripled.
2 servings of whole-grain pasta of your choice (I used Tinkyáda’s tricolor vegetable brown rice spirals)
4 strips of bacon, preferably from pastured hogs
Assorted summer vegetables of your choice (I used 2 small cucumbers, 8 cherry tomatoes, 2 small peppers, and 12 green beans), chopped or sliced*
Fresh basil, thyme, rosemary and/or sage as garnish (optional)
Prepare the pasta according to package instructions. When the pasta is al dente, drain it, rinse it with tepid water, and set it aside.
While the pasta is simmering, cook the bacon in a covered skillet over medium heat for about 8 minutes, occasionally turning with tongs. If you’re using good-quality bacon, this shouldn’t be too messy; if you’re using the value-pak variety, you might want to use a very deep pot and long tongs to avoid making a mess out of your stove and burning yourself. Value-pak bacon is also probably going to take longer to cook because it will have more saturated fat than bacon from pastured hogs. (Looking for and buying the good stuff is really, really worth it!)
Add the vegetables and cook for 2 more minutes or until vegetables have softened. Turn off the heat. Stir the drained pasta into the skillet to warm the pasta and mop up the flavorful bacon grease, then serve promptly.
Enjoy!
* Other tasty summer vegetables include zucchini, eggplant, corn, and anything else you find in abundance at the farmer’s market, in the produce market, or in your garden.
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Tags: bacon, cucumber, gluten-free, green beans, pasta, pepper, summer vegetables, tomato
Cucumber & Apple Salad
Scandinavians do a lot with crisp, sweet vegetables and fruits. So do Russians and Pols (and anyone else who lives in cooler climates where you’re more likely to grow carrots than bananas). I drew on those sweet-and-cool traditions to make a simple summer salad featuring two of Michigan’s best crops: apples and cucumbers. Nothing beats a hot day like a quick-to-assemble summer salad! If you have an herb garden, feel free to substitute different herbs for the dill and mint.
Cucumber & Apple Salad
Serves 2 as a side dish or 1 as a main meal. You can just multiply the ingredient portions to match your needs. You could also toss in some cooked brown rice to make this a heartier salad, although the salad would lose a bit of its sweet crunchiness if served that way.
For the dressing:
Approx. 1/4 cup Greek yogurt
1-2 T. apple cider vinegar
1/4 tsp. dried OR 1/2 tsp. fresh dill
1/4 tsp. dried OR 1/2 tsp. fresh mint (mince or tear mint into small pieces if it’s fresh)
Sea salt to taste
For the salad:
1 medium or large cucumber, chopped or thinly sliced
1 firm, crisp apple (Fuji and Pink Lady apples are my favorites), chopped
1 carrot, grated (optional)
1 small onion, minced (optional)
Whisk dressing ingredients together in a small bowl. These are approximate measurements — if you like your dressing to be more sour, add more vinegar; if you are a huge mint fan, add more of that. If you want your dressing to be thinner but don’t want the sourness of added vinegar, add a teaspoon of cold water.
Mix salad ingredients together in a large bowl, then toss with the dressing. Serve immediately.
Enjoy!
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