Salad Days

The sun is out and the temps are getting warm enough (on certain days) for me to turn off the heater. Yay! It's a sign that winter is finally ending.

I have food issues during the winter. I love food. All the time. But for some reason when the snow is falling, I get this urge to consume everything edible in the house. Inevitably, I get the craving for salad, but it's hard to get excited about salad when it's freezing cold outside.

Spring and summer mean going back to lighter meals for me and being ok about it! Yay, again!

I'm a big fan of salads. I could eat salad all the time as long as I have a variety of things to put on it. I poach salad ideas from everywhere and love to find new recipes. Plus, with my winter overeating, it's definitely necessary to get into some low-cal/healthy eating habits. Salads are kind of happy food, too. I mean, they make me happy.

My parents can attest to the fact that as a kid salad bars were always a favorite of mine. But the salads usually took the form of ranch soup, drowning in so much dressing all of the nutritional value was trumped by the buttermilk concoction. I like a well dressed salad, but I've gotten much better. I've also gleaned some salad dressing tips and tricks from cookbooks and restaurants (prepare your salad in a BIG bowl that you can toss it in and then you can use less dressing).

I haven't gotten over my need for lots of cheese in the salads, though. Love the cheese.

Anywho, I'm going to try and post some of my favorite salad links here for you. Sometimes it's easier to follow a recipe than to try and get inspired by your fridge leftovers and pantry staples.

Here's a super easy one for grilling season (and it has an AMAZING flavor that you just wouldn't believe). It's Sam Zien's recipe for Grilled Hearts of Romaine. Easy and tasty (and there's video instructions with it).

Enjoy!

Treppeda's

Saturday evening, we had the extreme pleasure of eating out at Niwot's Treppeda's with Mike's friends from The Cove. Niwot is a tiny little town just north of Boulder -- I actually worked in the area for about a year (less because the office relocated there partway through my employment), so I knew the area but not this particular restaurant.

It's like a little piece of Italian elegance hidden out there!

We started the evening at the bar with appetizers and drinks. There was an olive and smoked meat tray, bruschetta and marinated tomatoes, fresh bread from a local bakery, and calamari with made to order marinara.

Joe, one of The Cove posse told us that all of the ingredients are organic and they can tell you where everything comes from. This movement has definitely hit the Boulder eating scene hard and is a concern for some folks -- seeing as how all of these guys worked on a film about ocean preservation and pollution (essentially) it is important to them to know where the seafood comes from (there's an ap for that!).

After catching up and hanging out, we eventually moved on to our table (this restaurant is tiny folks so I would plan on getting there early or plan on partaking of the wine menu at the bar while you wait).

I had the Risotta Capesante e Zucca -- risotto with butternut squash and scallops. It was to die for. Creamy and sweet with three giant scallops resting in the center. Yum! Mike had the duck. I'm not normally a duck fan, but this was amazing.

Sorry no pics for you guys. I'm working on my photography skills -- I'm not sure the effort will be worth it since I've been a pretty sad case with a camera all my life (I used to decapitate people in pics regularly, when they were standing still. Go figure!).

Anyway, if you're in the Boulder/Niwot area, I'd definitely suggest checking out this place. It's intimate and the food is great. And on the Saturday that we were there, there was live music as well.

Crostini Weekend!

Crostini, if you haven't had them (and I bet you have) are little toasted pieces of bread topped with yummy goodness. Really, you can make them with just about anything you have on hand. They make great snacks, appetizers, or, in our case tonight, dinner.

Yesterday I baked up my second loaf of No Knead Bread (you might recall the first loaf, posted here). This time around, I went for roasted garlic and Asiago cheese. I followed the basic instructions and let the dough sit overnight. The following morning, I roasted a whole bulb of garlic. I then added the freshly roasted cloves to the risen dough (I just pressed them into the loaf). Then I sprinkled grated Asiago over the whole thing and plopped it into my heated Le Crueset to bake. 45 minutes later, Mike ventured downstairs for a taste of the fresh baked loaf.

I'll admit, since we were planning on eating out with Mike's Cove friends, I'd planned on wrapping the loaf for tonight (still working on my timing so I have a fresh loaf with my meals). But since I couldn't let him have first bite without diving in myself, I made a half batch of the Walnut Pesto recipe posted by Smitten Kitchen here.

This was my first time trying the pesto and it was fantastic! We sliced up a little bit of a leftover brie wheel to go along with it and had a tasty and elegant snack. This particular bread method results in a really crusty bread that I find is perfect for crostini. Trust me, we'll be doing this again as a fairly inexpensive appetizer when we have company.

Tonight, I'm continuing the crostini trend with Anne Burrell's recipe for Grilled Eggplant and Ricotta Crostini (using one of the eggplants from my produce delivery). I'm also going to attempt my first Caponata (our friend's mom makes a great one -- I don't have her recipe yet, so I'm playing with one I found this week. We'll see how it turns out.) I'm hoping it'll be a bit of a lighter meal considering how much I've indulged lately (more posts on that to come!).

Produce Delivery

Yesterday was Produce Delivery Day! Yay! Here's what we got:

Avocado

Carrots

Red Onions

Eggplant

Rainbow Chard

Yukon Gold Potatoes

Banana

Murcott Tangerines

Braeburn Apples

Romaine Lettuce

Spinach

Valencia Oranges

I already have some things I'm thinking about making with this stuff. I'm totally loving eggplant right now. I have a crostini recipe that I may try (started a loaf of no-knead bread today for this). I'll keep you posted.

I did some interesting things with last week's box as well. The fruit we usually just eat. The beets got roasted for salads. I also made quite a few chopped salads this week (more on that later). The avocados went into salad and on these yummy burgers Mike made (mine had Pig Stand on it -- yum!). And then the spinach and the leeks both got turned into creamy dishes. I haven't perfected the creamed spinach, but if I can find a link for the leeks, I'll share it with you in a few days.

Lentil Soup

I mentioned that I was making my lentil soup the other night since it was so nasty out: soup warms my soul, and my toes. It makes me happy : )

Mike is always complaining that he can't stand certain food items. Inevitably, they'll be items that I'm experimenting with or am currently in love with. He always says he doesn't like lentils and then when he sits down with a bowl of my soup, he has to admit that mine are ok (and then he goes back for seconds).

Lentils are yummy. Embrace them! I love getting lentil soup at the Indian buffet and the Moroccan restaurant. I've made a lentil and italian sausage soup that is to die for. But my favorite is lentil vegetable soup.

I buy these big bags of red lentils (or whatever color they have at the time) at the Pacific Ocean Market -- cheap!-- or from the bins at Whole Foods. One bag is good for at least 4 pots of soup, depending on how much I'm making. We had company Sunday so I used up 2 cups, but for just me and Mike, 1 cup gives us leftovers for the week.

So without further adieu, my lentil soup recipe (and it's really kind of versatile, so feel free to play).

2 tbsp olive oil

1 onion, chopped

2-3 garlic cloves, minced

2 celery sticks, chopped

2-3 medium carrots, chopped

1 can diced tomatoes

1 cup lentils

4-5 cups chicken broth

2 bay leaves

Thyme

Salt and pepper

Heat your olive oil in a big, heavy-bottomed soup pot. Add in your onion and garlic and saute until tender (you don't want to burn your garlic so you can wait until the onion is almost cooked through to add it if you prefer). Next add your celery and carrots. I let them cook in the oil for just a couple of minutes to get them started, but you don't really need to. Add your tomatoes (just a standard sized can), lentils, broth, and bay leaves and season with thyme, salt, and pepper. Bring the soup to a boil and then lower heat. Cover and simmer until the lentils are cooked through (I let mine go for an hour, usually, but it probably takes less time than that).

Serve with crusty bread. You can also add a dollop of sour cream to your bowl, if you like.

Piece of Mind Cost Me $18

Baking can be great fun or great frustration in my kitchen. On a good day, I can zip through a few recipes no big deal, happy as a clam and full of dough and batter. On a bad day, I cuss like a freaking sailor. Yesterday was a cussing day.

It was in part rainy and snowy, making for an exhausting drag-yourself-around-the-house-like-a-zombie day; it was really hard to get out of bed even after a full night's sleep.

So I decided it was a soup day. And you need bread with soup. Need it. But the only thing I really had time to make was a quick bread. I've been meaning to try and replicate these scones I had at this little coffee shop in Charleston, and have been looking for a test recipe. They were sun-dried tomato and basil scones. And there was cheese in there, too, but I can't recall what kind.

The recipe I found called for dried basil rather than fresh (note to self: try fresh next time around) and grated Asiago cheese (I think either a milder cheese like mozzarella or a full-blown Cheddar would be better).

I mixed everything according to standard scone instructions (and another note: make sure you choose a bowl big enough to work your hands around in. I think I bruised up my knuckles using one that was too small. Mixing scones any other way than with your hands really doesn't work.) and rolled the dough into a round. I usually prefer to make drop scones, but the recipe was for a round so I followed instructions.

I preheated my oven and baked the things at the maximum time. When I pulled them out, I thought they looked a bit undercooked but told myself it was just the cheese melting. Nope. After they cooled and I pulled them apart, it was clear that the scones were half raw inside.

So I heated the oven and popped them back in.

Meanwhile, I had also made my first batch of cheese biscuits (crackers more than biscuits, really) and wasn't very happy with how they came out. They had the right consistency but pretty much fell apart when I tried to remove them from my very greased baking sheet.

At this point, you can imagine I was getting pretty annoyed. For a while now, I've been questioning whether our oven is heating to the correct temperature. Yesterday proved to be my breaking point. I decided that if it the oven was in fact running off temperature, it might be a big part of the frustration with these recipes. So, out of extreme exasperation, I finally broke down and found an oven thermometer at WilliamsSonoma.com, called the store to confirm they carried it, and drove over there to pick it up.

$19.52 later (that's with tax), I discovered that the oven I was using has indeed been heating to about 25 degrees lower than the setting. Good to know! I doubt our landlord will pay to have the ovens calibrated, but at least now I know how to set the freaking thing so that I can bake correctly.

Personally, I think it was money well spent. In reality, I guess I don't have to use the thing more than twice here, but it'll certainly come in handy if we move.

And the scones did finally bake and my subsequent cheese biscuit batches came out much better. So after all that I had a yummy snack and bread to go along with my soup (which thankfully proved not to be frustrating at all).

If you're interested, here's the thermometer I bought. Pretty inexpensive and it clips right to the oven rack.

Bread!

Ever since I read Cathy Erway's The Art of Eating In, I've been dying to try the No Knead Bread method that came out in 2006. Here's the NY Times article that started it all. I'm likening it to the slow-cooker method. You know, you put all of your ingredients in the slow cooker, leave to go to work and when you come home you have dinner ready. That's a bit what this bread method is like.

First, you have to plan a day ahead of time to make it. I started mine around lunchtime with the intention of having it baked and ready for dinner the following evening (I had made some semi-clam chowder and we had at least one leftover meal left out of it).

It really couldn't have been easier. I mixed my bread, salt, and yeast and then added the water per the instructions. I also tossed in a couple of teaspoons of fresh chopped rosemary. I then wrapped the bowl in plastic wrap and left it.

Now, I think that although my recipe worked, I have a sneaking suspicion that my kitchen is way too cold to actually allow the chemicals to all work their magic. I found a tip online where the person heats her oven to 350 for one minute and then turns it off, placing the bread into the warmed oven to rise.

The instructions for the following day are to roll the dough into a ball and leave under a towel to rise for two hours. I left mine for an hour and a half with no real results. The tip did say that eventually even bread left in a cold kitchen will rise, but I stuck mine in the oven for 30 min and then proceeded with the baking instructions and it worked fine.

After plopping the dough into the hot Crueset pot, I sprinkled about 1/4-1/2 cup flaked Parmesan over the top. And voila! 45 minutes later we had bread.

Mike walked in the door about 30 minutes after that and promptly ate half the loaf. We had more with the soup and it was fantastic!

So here's my recipe adapted from the NY Times adaptation:

Rosemary Parmesan No Knead Bread

3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons fresh chopped rosemary

1/4-1/2 cup Parmesan flakes

In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups (that's 1 cup and 10 tablespoons since my measuring cup didn't have eighths) water and chopped rosemary, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth -- I used plain dinner napkins) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. I sprinkled my Parmesan over the dough at this point, trying to get all of it on the surface of the dough and not the heated pot. Cover the pot with the lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes (I only allowed mine 15 since it was already a bit browned from the melted cheese and I didn't want to burn that), until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

The way I see it, the possibilities with this recipe are endless. I'm going to do some research on how to make sweet loaves (Erway mentioned a couple that were baked in her book), but I'm thinking of doing roasted garlic next -- roasting the garlic and then mixing them in on the second day. Kalamata olives are also a possibility. Man, just thinking about it is making me hungry and I've already come up with a few more to try as well!