Despite the fact that Spring seems to have sprung (at least around these parts — temps in the high 70s here this week!), it’s not too late to try this hearty and healthy winter salad recipe, found on the Epicurious website.  This is our second attempt at cooking with kale, and we think it turned out just as good as our first.  We’re fans of roasted potatoes already and liked the idea of incorporating one of the healthiest vegetables on the planet for a “super food” side dish.  Kale is rich in vitamins K, C and A and contains tons of health-boosting nutrients that do things like help with diet and digestion, provide antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties, prevent cancer and lower cholesterol.  Seriously, what doesn’t this leafy green do?  If you’ve never tried kale, this potato salad is a good introduction to it.  The salty, Parmesan-crusted potatoes complement the slightly bitter kale, and the lemon-tahini dressing brings it all together with rich, bright flavor.  Surprisingly good!

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Regular readers may recall this post back in May, when we wrote about a side dish involving a “new-to-us” ingredient:  quinoa.  We liked the dish and the flavor of the quinoa, although the texture of this tiny grain is somewhat unusual and takes a bit of getting used to.  So, eight months later, we decided to make it again and maybe try to get used to it.  For me, understanding the health benefits of quinoa helped outweigh my issue with the texture.  Quinoa is a complete source of protein, since it provides the full spectrum of nine essential amino acids.  Quinoa is also high in magnesium (for cardiovascular health), copper and manganese (for a healthy immune system) and fiber (for digestive health.)  Who cares if it seems like you’re picking little seed remnants out of your teeth for days after eating it — think of it as saving some of the healthy for later!  I’m kidding of course — the texture isn’t that bad.  And quinoa’s health benefits are no joke, so it’s worthwhile to find a way you like to eat it.  I found Chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe in InStyle magazine (Feb. 2012 issue) and figured it would be a good vehicle for giving  quinoa another shot.  In addition to the quinoa, the ingredients are all things we already like:  edamame (could also use fava beans), lemon, avocado, garlic, radishes, basil, cumin, red pepper flakes and olive oil.  Combining lots of different textures enhanced the overall consistency of the finished dish.  Quinoa will likely never be my favorite side, but we enjoyed this salad and will make it again (sooner than eight months from now.)

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For the Super Bowl this year, we served one of our bar-food-at-home favorites, grilled wings.  We did the buffalo version and tried a new Asian-style as well (which I ended up loving even more than the buffalo-style.  Updated post coming soon.)  Because the wings were our dinner that night, I wanted to serve a healthy side dish, preferably one involving vegetables.  The two possibilities that immediately came to mind were celery salad and cole slaw.  Our much-loved celery salad recipe seemed a bit too fancy for wings and football, and we thought this flavorful hot & sour slaw would compete with the flavor of the wings a bit too much.  Instead, we combined elements of each into a lighter, sweet-yet-tangy coleslaw with tons of celery flavor.  Win, win.

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Despite the mild temperatures many of us have been experiencing so far this year (not complaining!), it’s still technically winter, and we’ve been attempting to cook more seasonal foods.  We have a favorite butternut squash recipe, so when we saw Chef Zane Holmquist cooking this winter squash dish on the Today Show, we thought it would be an interesting new spin on an old favorite.  We were not disappointed.  The squash flavor goes really well with the sweet apple, peppery arugula and rich, complex cranberry vinaigrette.  The salad itself is pretty simple, with butternut squash (or some other winter squash), apple, arugula, toasted pumpkin seeds and salt & white pepper.  The cranberry vinaigrette is made with cranberry juice, dried cranberries, shallot, lemon juice, canola oil, fresh thyme, green Tabasco sauce and salt & white pepper.  We may not be breaking out the winter coats, gloves and scarves this season, but we’ll definitely make this side dish another time or two before “winter” ends.

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So, what’s going on this weekend?  Anything happening in the wide world of sports?  Just kidding, I am aware that Super Bowl Sunday is upon us.  I’m not really a football fan (much to Dan’s chagrin), so the final championship is actually my favorite game of the season, no matter who is playing (sorry Daniel.)  Although Dan’s beloved Steelers aren’t playing in the Big Game like they did last year, we’ll be watching the Giants and Patriots duke it out, in between all the over-hyped commercials, while enjoying some type of delicious football fare.  This football season, we experimented with making sports-bar-appetizer food at home, including grilled buffalo wings, jalapeno poppers, potato skins and these stuffed mushrooms. The wings were our favorite, but the mushrooms would also make a really good (and relatively healthy) addition to any Game Day appetizer sampler.  Happy Super Bowl, everyone!  I’m off to choose which color jersey I’ll be rooting for this year.

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This recipe is a great way to turn stale, leftover bread into a delicious and different side dish.  Over the past year or so, Dan has been experimenting with making homemade bread (recipe to come, once he has perfected it.)  During one of his more prolific experiments, we had a couple of baguettes that we didn’t get a chance to eat before they started to get stale.  Rather than throw them out, we consulted one of our favorite recipe sites, Epicurious, for a recipe with bread as one of the main ingredients.  We discovered this bread salad recipe, which is similar to a panzanella we have previously enjoyed, but is a little less hearty and therefore more suitable as a side dish rather than a main course.  It was really easy to throw together, incorporating many ingredients that we almost always have on hand:  bread, cucumber, celery, green onions, Kalamata olives, parsley, basil, good olive oil and red wine vinegar.  The original recipe also calls for capers, but we left them out because I don’t really like them (they make me think of mutant peas.)  Feel free to add capers if you like them — they probably add a nice salty flavor.  That’s another thing we like about this fresh and easy side dish — as good as the original recipe is, you can add (or subtract) whatever herbs, veggies and seasonings you prefer.

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Anyone else resolve to eat more vegetables in 2012?  While we don’t usually make formal resolutions, we are trying to work more vegetables into our diet this year.  Cauliflower is an excellent choice as a substitute for potatoes or other starch because it is low in fat and carbs, but high in fiber and vitamin C.  The only tricky part can be making it taste good if, like me, you’re not really a fan of cooked cauliflower.  Roasting the cauliflower with brown butter is a good option.  So is smothering the cauliflower with a cheesy sauce.  Although not the most healthy vegetable side dish around, this recipe by Whitney Miller (winner of the first season of the reality cooking show “MasterChef”) uses cheddar cheese, butter, milk and cream to mask enhance the cauliflower’s natural flavor and make it edible delicious.  We used 2% lowfat sharp cheddar cheese and fat free milk to make it slightly more healthy and will definitely make this one again.  Now, if someone could somehow make exercise more appealing, we’d be all set for the new year.

Continue reading “Cauliflower “Mac-N-Cheese””

Tis the season!  Tis a lot of seasons actually:  football, holiday, holiday party and — at least around here — jalapeno.  We planted jalapeno plants in our garden a little late this year, so only recently harvested the ripened jalapenos.  (Just in the knick of time too, before we lost them to our first frost.)  We got a pretty decent crop and wanted to do something a little different with them.  Continuing our football season theme of trying to make various “bar foods” at home (see, e.g., wings and tater skins), we decided to try jalapeno poppers.  We found this recipe on the site allrecipes.com and made a few changes to attempt to make it a teeny bit more healthy.  The jalapeno poppers turned out great and were easy to prepare.  They took some time start-to-finish, but according to reviewers of the original recipe, they can be assembled in advance (and frozen even), then cooked just prior to serving.  We think it’s the filling ingredients that make these poppers so good:  cream cheese, cheddar cheese and bacon.  We added some chopped up homemade pickled jalapenos for an extra kick (we used this recipe for amazing pickled jalapenos — not too spicy and not too pickly — just right.)  If you have access to good-sized jalapenos (little ones would be tricky to work with), we highly recommend these for any upcoming holiday (or football-watching) gatherings.

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It’s not too late to try a new side dish for your Thanksgiving meal this year, especially one as easy as this cauliflower.  I’m usually not a big fan of cooked cauliflower, but I am a fan of butter and things roasted in butter, which is the key to this side dish.  We’re also fans of Michael Ruhlman and found this recipe in his new cookbook, “Ruhlman’s Twenty,” which contains 20 fundamental techniques and 100 recipes.  The cauliflower recipe is in the section on roasting, and as Ruhlman states, this cooking method creates “caramel-nutty flavors that are beautifully enhanced by the flavor of the browned butter.”  Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

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