I’m not really a macaroni salad person. Its probably the goopy mayonnaise that coats most macaroni salads, the limp vegetables, the inability to taste anything except a not-that-appealing sauce. Nevertheless, when I saw this recipe on the Kitchn, I knew I had to try it. To me, barbecue sauce is pretty much the ultimate condiment. I could put barbecue sauce on almost anything that wasn’t a dessert. Lucky for me, not too long after I found this recipe, I was invited to a pot-luck, end-of-summer pool party. Perfect.

The recipe starts out by brining chicken thighs for a couple of hours. I went with the lesser amount of chicken because I split off part of the recipe to make a vegetarian option, but if I was making the full recipe I would definitely go for the full 1.5 pounds. I unfortunately didn’t snag a picture of the setup before the chicken went into the broiler, but the chicken gets basted and basically broiler grilled by putting it on a wire rack.

While the chicken was cooking, I chopped up the veggies for the salad. The red onions get soaked for 15 minutes to cut out some of their pungency since they’re raw in the salad.

The sauce is a mix of barbecue sauce and mayo, with a little bit of vinegar. I ended up going for only a 1/4 cup of mayo and more than a 1/2 cup of barbecue sauce, but you can adjust to taste.

Here’s all the chopped veggies mixed in with the cooked macaroni. This was the first recipe I cooked after my previous roommate moved out and took 90% of the pans in the house with her, so I had to cook the macaroni in a large saute pan. An interesting experience.

Once the chicken is cooked, it gets chopped up into small pieces. You can see I pretty heavily basted the chicken with barbecue sauce because you can never have too much barbecue sauce.

The chicken is added to the macaroni and the veggies.

The sauce is poured and mixed in thoroughly to coat everything. This makes a great macaroni salad; the barbecue gives it that different taste that you don’t usually get with macaroni salad, and the chicken gives it a little more heft and makes it a heartier side dish or even a meal. I think the chicken, with it’s cooked-on barbecue sauce, really makes it and adds that other dimension to the dish, but even the vegetarian version was tasty (and, to me, preferable to a standard macaroni salad). This was a great dish for a summer potluck.

Barbecue Chicken Macaroni Salad (from the Kitchn)

Ingredients

For the chicken:

• 1 quart warm water
• 1/4 cup kosher salt
• 2 Tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 – 1.5 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts (3-4 individual breasts)
• 1/2 cup barbecue sauce

For the macaroni salad:

• 1/2 pound elbow macaroni (about 2 cups)
• 1 red or green pepper, diced
• 1/2 red onion, diced and soaked in cool water for 15 minutes
• 3-4 stalks celery, diced
• 1 tomato, seeded and chopped small
• barbecue chicken, cooked and diced as described above
• 2 Tablespoons cider vinegar
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup barbecue sauce
• Salt and Pepper

Directions

1. Combine the water, salt, and sugar in a shallow baking dish, stirring gently until the salt and the sugar are completely dissolved. Add the chicken to the brine. It should be completely covered by the brine. Add more warm water if necessary. Brine the chicken for 1/2 – 2 hours.
2. When you’re ready to cook, turn on the oven broiler and position an oven rack about 5 inches below the broiler. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and set a wire rack on top.
3. Remove the chicken from the brine and discard the brining liquid. Pat the chicken dry and coat each side with some of the barbecue sauce. Arrange the chicken on the rack over the baking sheet and bake for 5 minutes. Flip the breasts, baste them with a little more barbecue sauce, and cook for another 5-7 minutes, until they’re completely cooked through.
4. Let the chicken breasts cool and then dice them into bite-sized chunks.
5. Cook the macaroni in a large amount of salted, boiling water until it is cooked a little beyond al dente. Drain and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking.
6. In a large bowl, combine the cooked macaroni, all the vegetables, and the chicken. In a small bowl, combine the cider vinegar, 1/4 cup of mayonnaise, and 1/4 cup of barbecue sauce. Stir this into the salad mix. Taste, season with salt and plenty of black pepper, and add more mayonnaise or barbecue sauce as desired.
7. This salad will keep unrefrigerated for 4 hours, or up to a week refrigerated.

Over the last weekend my boyfriend was out of town, so I decided to experiment with light meals that might not be enough for him to eat for dinner, but would be fine for me. Namely, I had saved a few recipes of grain-based “salads” that would be quick, cheap and at least moderately healthy. One of them was a couscous recipe from Serious Eats (from their “Healthy & Delicious” series, natch). I substituted a lot of different things in this recipe, but the backbone is still there; in fact, you could argue that the recipe itself is like a template that can easily be adapted for various ingredients. To call this a salad is really kind of a misnomer; it’s a salad in the same way that any mix of vegetables and grains can be considered a salad. This dish can be served hot or cold, as a main course or a side, and it’s dead simple, with few, low cost ingredients.

First, sauté some garlic in oil until it is browned. This recipe doesn’t actually have any onion in it, which is surprising for me because I don’t know when the last time was that I made a stew-type recipe without onions. But it’s just garlic here!

In goes the diced tomatoes, chickpeas, basil (mine was fresh purple basil from my garden) and some paprika. For whatever reason I don’t have crushed red pepper in my spice cabinet, and in hindsight I should have probably added more paprika, or some cayenne too, if I wanted any kick from this. But it was tasty and full flavored without the spice anyway.

The original calls for couscous; I went with the harvest grains blend from Trader Joe’s, which includes Israeli couscous, red and green orzo, split dried garbanzo beans, and red quinoa. It’s a great blend, and it worked spectacularly in this dish. However, wanted to make sure it cooked through, so instead of taking the pan of the stove and letting the couscous cook from just the residual heat and moisture, I cooked this for the time listed on the bag (10 minutes) and then took it off the stove.

Once everything is cooked, chopped scallions and some crumbled feta or goat cheese get stirred in. The presentation looks pretty good here, and you could probably serve it just like this without mixing everything in (or maybe mix in the scallions but leave the goat cheese on top). Served like this, you would likely have larger hunks of goat cheese populating the dish, unless you stirred it up really well.

As it was, I stirred everything in at once. The goat cheese quickly melted and left me with a cheesy, creamy sauce. It was really two different dishes; with the goat cheese on the top, the flavors are all more separate, and you get the thinner tomato-y sauce covering the grains with larger, stronger chunks of goat cheese. With the goat cheese mixed in, the flavors mellow out more and everything melds together (in a good way). The goat cheese flavor is still present, but not concentrated and it mingles well with the tomatoes. As I said before, this dish is tasty and filling as a main course, but it also works well as a side; when my boyfriend got home, we used it as a side to a grilled steak along with some fresh sliced jicama in lime juice. The recipe makes a fairly large batch, so it will keep you going for a while.

Harvest Grains Salad (adapted from Serious Eats)

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 1/4 cups water, divided
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
• 1 (16-ounce) can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained and rinsed
• 1 (14.5-ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup uncooked Harvest Grains blend
• 1 cup coarsely chopped green onions (about a bunch)
• 1 cup crumbled feta or goat cheese

Directions

1. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and cook 3 minutes, stirring frequently until browned.
2. Stir in 1/2 cup water, basil, chickpeas, and tomatoes. Simmer over medium-low heat for 15 minutes.
3. Add 1 3/4 cups water and salt and bring to a boil. Stir in Harvest Grains blend and simmer, covered, for 10 minutes or until grains are cooked.
4. Stir in onions and cheese. Serve hot or cool.

Last weekend we almost found ourselves grilling in the rain again, but at the last minute the sun came out and the grilling gods smiled upon us. It was a good thing, too, because it allowed us to make this amazing Adobo Chicken recipe from the NY Times. The chicken is basically cooked twice which imparts a full, rich flavor throughout the meat and keeps it moist and delicious throughout.

The chicken is poached first in a mixture of soy sauce, rice vinegar and a few spices: garlic, bay leaves, black pepper and a diced chipotle pepper. The recipe called for a dried chipotle, but not being able to find one I substituted a couple of small canned chipotles in—what else—adobo sauce. I figured it would be an acceptable addition.

You want to poach the thighs in a pot where they can fit in one layer, but the liquid doesn’t have to cover them. Just flip them throughout the cooking so that they are cooked evenly on both sides. The recipe called 1 whole cut up 3–4 pound chicken or 2 pounds of bone-in thighs; I’m not sure how that math really adds up, but I do know (now) that 2 pounds of thighs doesn’t really yield 4 servings. Oh well.

The poached chicken is brown and cooked through. It’ll go on the grill to get a nice caramelized and somewhat crisp exterior.

After the chicken is removed the remaining liquid should be cooked down to about a cup. It won’t be thick like gravy, but it will be a very tasty sauce that is spooned over the grilled chicken and onto the rice or mashed potatoes used as a side.

Once grilled, the chicken becomes a darker, more rich shade of brown. It has all the benefits of being grilled (slightly charred exterior, flavor from the charcoal), as well as the benefits of being braised for a while (exceedingly tender and juicy). The grilling also helps to seal up the juices inside.

Like I mentioned before, this only supplied us with one dinner, not two like we usually shoot for. We did, however, have a ton of sauce left over. A few days later, I diluted what was left with a cup of water and braised some more chicken legs in it until the meat was pretty much falling off the bone. This I shredded and used for filling for tacos, and along with some freshly made salsa that incorporated some of the leftover chipotle peppers, made for another fantastic meal.

Adobo Chicken (from the NY Times)

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup white or rice vinegar
• 1 cup of water
• 1 tablespoon chopped garlic
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 dried chipotle pepper or two small canned chipotles in a little of their sauce, chopped up
• 1 whole (3- to 4-pound) chicken, cut up (with legs separated from thighs); or use 2 pounds bone-in thighs or leg/ thigh pieces cut in two.

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients in a covered pot large enough to hold the chicken in one layer. Bring to a boil over high heat; reduce the heat to medium-low or low (you want a slow simmer, nothing more). Cook, covered, about 30 minutes, turning once or twice, until chicken is cooked through. (You may prepare the recipe in advance up to this point; refrigerate the chicken, in the liquid, for up to a day before proceeding.)
2. When you are ready to grill the chicken, start a charcoal or wood fire or preheat a gas grill or broiler. The fire need not be too hot, but place the rack just 3 or 4 inches from the heat source.
3. Remove chicken, and dry it gently with paper or cloth towels. Boil liquid over high heat until it is reduced to about 1 cup; discard bay leaves and chipotle; keep sauce warm.
4. Grill or broil chicken until brown and crisp, 5 minutes per side. Serve chicken with sauce and white rice or potatoes.

A couple of weeks ago, it got uncomfortably hot. Not hot like it gets in the southern river valley where I grew up, and not even that hot for some other more northern climates, but hot enough for me in my un-air conditioned apartment. So instead of baking for desserts, I decided to put my ice cream maker to good use. One of the ingredients I’ve been thinking about for a while is the prickly pear fruits that my local grocer carries. There are few recipes I had been considering, but I decided to slightly improvise a sorbet based on this Lime Mango Sorbet from Simply Recipes.

First, the prickly pear fruits need to be juiced, and this procedure I learned also at Simply Recipes. The ones I bought at the store had already been cleaned of their fuzzy needles and were perfectly safe to handle with my bare hands.

First, the ends get cut off.

One longitudinal slice down the end, and the skin gets pried/sliced partly off to start. Once you get it started, you can pull it the rest of the way off pretty easily.

Once they’ve been skinned, they take a quick spin in the food processor.

It didn’t take long at all to reduce the prickly pears to juice. It is at this point that most recipes launch; the prickly pear juice (after straining the seeds out) can be used in baking, added to cocktails or lemonade, or made into sorbet!

All the sorbet recipes I found had a base that is just simple syrup. Stir your sugar and water until the water turns clear again.

The zest of one lime goes into the syrup to infuse it with lime flavor. I think at this point, before adding anything else, I would strain the zest back out. In the final product the zest clumped together oddly, and while though not horribly unpleasant, was a little too much lime in one bite.

The seeds of prickly pears are edible, but are very hard and are large enough be unmissable Since they would not be a pleasant addition to a sorbet, I strained them out. However, I did want the pulp. This would probably have been easier with a slightly larger grade strainer, but using a spoon to push everything but the seeds through worked ok.

This is what was left over when I called it quits. I got pretty much all the pulp out and into the bowl below. After juicing 5 smallish prickly pears, I got about a cup of liquid and pulp, which is what I was aiming for.

Adding liquor to the sorbet adds a bit of a kick, plus it keeps the sorbet from getting too icy. I chose a good rum to play on the tropical flavors in the sorbet.

Even after setting in the freezer for days, the alcohol kept the sorbet super soft. It melts quickly in the heat, but the texture is fantastic. And the combination of the sweet prickly pear, which is almost melon-like in taste, and the tart lime is delicious. The sorbet was ridiculously easy since all it is composed of is simple syrup and fruit, so there’s no cooking of a custard like in other ice creams. It’s one of those things that would be great to whip together on a whim, just as long as the ice cream maker was clean and ready!

Prickly Pear Lime Sorbet (adapted from Simply Recipes)

Ingredients

• 1 cup water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• zest from one lime
• 1 cup prickly pear juice and pulp (about 5 small fruits)
• 1/2 cup of lime juice
• pinch of salt
• 2 tablespoons rum

Directions

1. Heat the sugar, water, and lime zest in a medium saucepan until the sugar has completely dissolved. Set aside to cool and strain out lime zest.
2. Juice the prickly pears and separate the pulp and juice from the seeds.
3. Put the prickly pear juice, simple syrup, lime juice, and salt into a bowl and mix well. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until completely chilled.
4. When ready to put the chilled mixture into your ice cream maker, mix in the rum. Process the mixture in your ice cream maker according to the ice cream maker directions. Transfer mixture to a plastic storage container and freezer in your freezer until firm, at least 6 hours.

Of all the things I’ve been grilling lately, I hadn’t gotten around to something like straight up hamburgers, which are really kind of the essential grilled food. Don’t get me wrong, I love hamburgers, particularly of the homemade variety. I guess I’ve been making somewhat more ambitious foods lately, so the simple hamburger was not really high on my list. When I did decide that I was in a hamburger mood, it had to be something different, and I was struck with the inspiration of using a recipe from The Taste of Africa for kofta meatballs, but obviously forming them into burgers instead of meatballs. I had made the kofta before and they were phenomenal, so I deduced the hamburgers would be awesome too. This mix of spices makes such a delicious and unique burger, I’m sure I’ll be making it often.

Everything in one large bowl. It’s not surprising that I like this mix so much because it includes some of my favorite spices. All the veggies get chopped up extra fine so that they blend in with the meat well. I like to press the extra moisture out of the onions, too, so that the patties don’t get too wet and fall apart. With the yogurt there’s plenty of moisture anyway.

You have to get in there and really mix everything up with your hands. It’s fun, in a getting-dirty kind of way. I got four medium-sized burgers out of this recipe. When they cooked up they were kind of small in diameter, but thick enough that they were plenty filling.

I stuck these in the fridge until the grill was ready. Cooking them from cold also has the benefit of helping them stick together. I didn’t really have any problems with these falling apart, so I must have done something right.

On the grill. I think I cooked these about 5–7 minutes on each side over medium-high heat, but I don’t really remember. They were well done, but definitely still plenty juicy.

Dressed with lettuce, tomato and onion, with a mild provolone cheese. I also added some ketchup, but I didn’t want anything with too strong of a flavor, since I wanted to spices of the meat to shine through. I wasn’t sure how strong the spices would be, or how the mix would turn out in hamburger form, but they were fantastic. The spices shone through really well and made for extremely tasty burgers.

Kofta Burgers (adapted from The Taste of Africa by Rosamund Grant and Josephine Bacon)

Ingredients

• 1 pound of ground beef
• 3 tablespoons finely minced onion
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro
• 1 tablespoon plain yogurt
• 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon garam masala
• 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1 fresh green chili, seeded and finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• salt and ground black pepper

Directions

1. Put the beef into a large bowl, add all the remaining ingredients and mix well with your hands.
2. Roll into four large balls and flatten into patties 1/2–3/4″ thick. Refrigerate, separated by wax paper or plastic wrap, until the grill is ready.
3. Grill over medium heat, 5–7 minutes on each side, or until the burgers are done to your liking.
4. Serve on a bun with all the hamburger dressings you like.

When the weekend rolls around, I want relatively quick, tasty and filling meal in the morning. We usually get up late enough that we don’t eat both breakfast and lunch, instead relying on our brunch to fill us up until dinner. But we’re also more inclined to go for a traditional breakfast food instead of something more lunchy. Thus, we fall back on pancakes a lot. The batter goes together in a flash, and the whole batch cooks up in less than 20 minutes usually. Normally we go for Alton Brown’s standard buttermilk pancakes, which is our favorite recipe, but last weekend I wanted to mix it up a bit to keep us from getting bored. Flipping through AB’s book I’m Just Here for More Food, I decided to go for the whole wheat pancakes, which are almost identical to the regular pancakes, they just use whole wheat flour instead.

Alton Brown mixes his pancakes in what he calls the “Muffin Method.” Like many of his methods, it starts by combining all the dry ingredients together and all the wet ingredients together first, making sure they are well combined. One thing I should mention is that I never have buttermilk around the house, so I always substitute a little less than 2 cups of milk plus two tablespoons of lemon juice. I actually prefer this combination to the buttermilk because it makes the batter more liquid and the pancakes spread better on the griddle.

The dry and wet ingredients are then combined; more precisely, the wet ingredients are always added to the dry, which makes it easier to mix without overmixing.

See the lumps peeking out? It is important to not try to get the batter smooth, which will result in flat pancakes. Just make sure it’s all combined, and that all the flour has been mixed in from the sides and bottom of the bowl. At this point, the batter rests for 5 minutes.

You can cook the pancakes in a frying pan or sauté pan, but a non-stick griddle pan is the best. No oil or butter needed!

They were definitely tasty, with more body than the regular pancakes. The 100% whole wheat did give the pancakes somewhat of a coarser texture, but it wasn’t unpleasant. I think in the future I might go for the best of both worlds and do 1/2 all-purpose flour and 1/2 whole wheat. Regardless, I know they’ll be on our plates again.

Whole Wheat Pancakes (adapted from Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for More Food)

Ingredients

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 2 large eggs
• slightly less than 2 cups milk, at room temperature
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled

Directions

1. Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl and whisk well. In a medium-sized bowl whisk the wet ingredients until thoroughly combined
2. Stir wet ingredients in to the dry ingredients and mix until the batter just comes together. Do not overmix; there should be lumps left in the batter. Allow the batter to rest for 5 minutes.
3. While the batter is resting, preheat a griddle pan over medium-low heat. If the pan isn’t nonstick, rub it down with a little butter. The griddle is ready when water dances across the surface.
4. Ladle 1/4 cup of batter onto the griddle and cook until bubbles form in the batter and the bottom is golden, approximately 3 minutes. Flip and cook until the second side is golden, about 2 minutes.
5. Serve right away or keep the pancakes warm in an oven set to “warm”, or the lowest heat setting.

Here they are: the first tomatoes from my garden. Small, but plump and red and juicy. What on earth was I going to cook with these, the first tomatoes I had ever grown myself? This frittata was born out of several things. First, I had lovely, fresh tomatoes, and I wanted to showcase them in something simple and something they wouldn’t disappear in. Second, we needed breakfast and I had eggs and cheese. Third, I didn’t want to wait for a breakfast casserole/quiche to bake forever in the oven, but I was bored of the standard omelet. And so the pan frittata was inspired. Not really a true frittata, which is usually cooked mostly on the stovetop and finished under a broiler, because the pans I have access to are not oven-safe, so all the cooking had to happen on the stovetop. In the end it did turn out to be a tasty breakfast that was filling and perfectly showcased the ripe, fresh tomatoes.

Six eggs and probably a cup of shredded cheese – what I had on hand, which turned out to be mixed cheddar and asiago. I ended up using more like a half to three-quarters of a cup of the cheese; I just added cheese to the eggs until it looked like enough for my tastes.

I sautéed a clove of garlic to give the frittata some extra flavor.

In go the eggs (beaten), cheese and the fresh tomato slices are laid on top. This is a small sauté pan (maybe 6 inches in diameter?), but the eggs will puff up a lot. I realized too late that this would have been awesome with some fresh basil or oregano from my garden. Oh well.

I let it cook, covered, for probably 8–10 minutes until the eggs were completely set and cooked through. If I had an oven safe pan, I probably would have let it cook on the stovetop for 3 minutes and then sprinkle it with more cheese and put it in the oven for another 3–4 minutes.

Like I said, it turned out to be a great way to showcase the lovely fresh tomatoes from my garden. It’s kind of like an omelet that never gets flipped over, and because it doesn’t get messed with the eggs stay really puffy. This was a quick and easy breakfast that I will probably make again; maybe I’ll even make a real frittata once I get some oven-safe pans.

Fresh Tomato Pan Frittata

Ingredients

• 6 large eggs, beaten
• 1 large tomato, sliced
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup shredded cheese
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• olive oil
• a tablespoon or two of fresh herbs (optional)

Directions

1. Sauté garlic in enough olive oil to thoroughly coat the pan until browned and fragrant.
2. Combine the eggs and herbs in a small bowl. Pour eggs into a small sauté pan. Sprinkle shredded cheese over the surface and lay tomatoes on top.
3. Cover and cook over low heat for 8–10 minutes, or until eggs are cooked through.

I’ve noticed that ever since I’ve started cooking more and more, I’m starting to collect cookbooks. Usually nothing fancy, but the bargain section of the bookstore almost never fails to tempt me with a $3 cookbook that looks like it would offer the kind of recipes that I don’t get online. I find myself collecting ethnic cookbooks, mostly; I think that mainly it’s to get the kinds of recipes that you don’t find as often on blogs, or at least the blogs I read. I mentioned in a previous post that I had recently picked up another in the Culinaria series, which I like. But the other day I found a book that was clearly published by the same people that published my The Taste of Africa cookbook. I haven’t posted any recipes from that book yet, but everything I’ve tried out of it has been fantastic. Not just good, but pretty amazing. It has a very particular layout, with a particular typesetting and a large main picture of the dish and a few smaller pictures interspersed throughout the recipe; when I opened up a book called Thai and South-East Asian Cooking and Far Eastern Classics (how’s that for a catch-all title) and found the same layout, I had to pick it up (it helped that it was basically free with my rewards credits).

Last weekend I cracked it open and flipped through a few recipes. The thing is quite huge, so I decided I wanted to make some fried rice, and then had to narrow it down to one of a dozen recipes. The one I settled on, Thai Fried Rice, did not disappoint. I’d be lying if I said I followed the recipe exactly – there were just some ingredients I didn’t have – but I think it was the basic of this recipe that led to its success, and It certainly came out delicious.

I think one of the key things that made this recipe so good was it’s first step: cooking the jasmine rice in coconut milk. I had to add more water toward the end to finish the rice off, but otherwise it cooked up fine. After the rice cooks it has to cool completely, spread out on a cookie sheet, so I cooked it earlier in the day to give it plenty of time.

Onions, garlic and ginger all get fried in a large skillet, or better yet, a wok. I do not have a wok, and everything just barely fits in this rather large skillet of mine.

I used pork in this recipe even though the original recipe called for chicken, because it’s fried rice and the point is you can add anything, right? I cooked the fairly small pork chunks most of the way through before the next step.

The pork and rice stir fries for a while. I cooked it as long as I could before I had to add some oil to the mixture to keep the rice from sticking to the pan. The recipe called for a teaspoon of chili oil, which I did not have, so I used some Thai chili sauce and added some more vegetable oil to the pan. I added probably a tablespoon of each to the pan mainly because I felt like it needed a little more juice to keep things moving easier in the pan.

The recipe called for red bell pepper and corn, and I threw in some more fresh green beans from the garden. This only got cooked for a few minutes before the adding the final touch: two beaten eggs, seen here glistening at the end of the spatula and quickly seeping into the rice. The final stir frying happens just long enough to cook up the egg.

Like I mentioned before, this turned out awesome. The jasmine rice and the coconut milk lent a creamy texture to the dish, with two great mellow flavors. Combine that with the kick of the chili sauce and curry powder and the crispness of the quick-cooked veggies, and the egg bringing it all together… it was fantastic. So far this series of books not disappointed, and I look forward to trying more recipes from this and the African book.

Thai Stir Fry (from Thai and South-East Asian Cooking and Far Eastern Classics)

Ingredients

• 2 cups coconut milk
• 1 3/4 cups jasmine rice, rinsed
• 2 tablespoons peanut oil
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 inch piece of ginger, peeled and grated
• 1 pound of pork or chicken, cut into small chunks
• 1 red bell pepper, sliced
• 1 cup corn kernels
• 1 teaspoon chili oil
• 1 teaspoon hot curry powder
• 2 eggs, beaten

Directions

1. Pour the coconut milk into a saucepan and add the rice. Bring to a boil, the reduce the heat to low, cover and cook for 12 minutes, or until the rice is tender. Add water if needed throughout the cooking. Spread the rice on a baking sheet and leave until cold.
2. Heat the oil in a wok, add the garlic, onion and ginger and stir-fry over medium heat for 2 minutes.
3. Add the meat to the center of the pan and stir fry for 2 minutes, until meat is mostly cooked through. Add the rice and toss well. Stir fry over high heat for about 3 minutes more, until the meat is cooked through.
4. Stir in the red pepper, corn, chili oil and curry powder. Toss over medium heat for 1 minute. Add the beaten eggs and cook for 1 minute more.

Last week I started teaching for the summer; it’s a really intense class, and it’s pretty much sucked my will to cook (or do anything) every evening after I get home. Hence the lack of posts… sorry about that! I have plans to make a number of things today, and a few things to post from last week, so hopefully that will make up for it. This post is pretty simple, but I wanted to show off my first produce of the summer from my container garden!

I’m growing a number of things – tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and beans – but the first things that were ripe for the picking were the green beans. They’re a bush bean variety called Kentucky Dreamer, which is a variant of the more well known Kentucky Wonder bean. And boy are they tasty: sweet and crisp. I picked a number of them and wanted to have them as a side, so I decided to keep it simple and sauté them so that they wouldn’t get overcooked or lost in a sauce.

I only had a handful of beans, so I only used half a shallot, chopped.

I sautéed the shallot in olive oil until it was browned, then threw in the green beans for only a few minutes.

And that’s it: fresh, home-grown green beans, sautéed in olive oil and shallots for a few minutes. Just barely cooked, warm with a good crunch and nothing to cover up that delicious flavor.

The same weekend I grilled the pizza I came across this recipe for Grilled Asiago Rounds on King Arthur’s baking blog. While they were suggested for eating with a dip of some kind, I immediately thought that they could be split horizontally for sandwiches and figured I might as well go all out on the dough grilling and try these the same day as the pizza. This required some creative planning to make sure everything went on the grill in order (I wanted to cook the pizza last so that it would stay hot for dinner), but everything worked out perfectly and these rounds cooked up perfectly, and made for fantastic sandwiches.

Instead of all-purpose flour, I substituted the 12-grain flour blend for the overnight starter. This only made up a small part of the flour, so it wasn’t super noticeable in the finished product, but it probably lent a little more heft.

The recipe called for semolina to make up part of the flours that went in at this point, but despite searching I could not locate it in either of my two main grocery stores. Of course, several days later I found it in one, and I probably could have found it at Trader Joe’s, but I just substituted all-purpose instead and it worked fine. I’ll probably make these again, though, and I might try the semolina to see if it makes a big difference in the finished product. Also you can see the shredded asiago cheese that is mixed in at this point. I also completely forgot the parsley that would also be mixed in at this point. Oh well.

Mixed together by hand it made a sticky but cohesive dough that easily pulled away from the sides of the bowl.

After kneading the dough was as smooth as dough containing shredded cheese could be, but it was actually stickier than before. The bakers on the King Arthur blog suggested reducing the liquid a bit if I was substituting all-purpose flour for semolina, and I did to a small extent, but it was rather unscientific and the dough might have been stickier than it should have been. I ended up adding flour through the floured surface it had to be poured onto, and in the end it turned out fine.

I let the dough rise in its bowl, mainly because my dough rising bucket was currently occupied by the pizza dough.

My rounds, all divided. The recipe says you would get 16 four-inch rounds about 1/4″ thick; when I started dividing them I knew that was just not happening, at least not for my purposes. I got about 8 rounds that were probably 4 to 4.5 inches in diameter and somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 inches thick. At this point they can be refrigerated until you are ready to grill them, but luckily my grill was ready and so was I.

In order to get them off my table and onto the grill I needed to oil up a tray and my hands with olive oil and basically cover these guys in a thin layer. This was also necessary when I put them on the grill to prevent them from sticking. I also cleaned and seasoned my grill with a half and onion, stuck on a fork and dipped in olive oil, before I put these on there. They got put over medium high heat (in between the high heat mounded coals and the low heat area) for 2–4 minutes, depending on how fast it looked like they were cooking. I tried to keep the cover on the grill as much as possible to cook them thoroughly. When they got flipped they moved over to the cool side to cook for another 4 minutes. I didn’t cover them with a metal pan to help them cook through – I tried, but there was no covering them all with a pan or covering them and putting the cover on the grill too – but if you keep the cover on your grill, I think it serves the same purpose. In any case, it worked!

They smelled amazing, and it was all we could do to keep ourselves from eating them right after they came off. I think their cool-down time probably helped them cook through a little more too, though. They were perfectly cooked and the cheese just kind of disappeared into the dough, imparting flavor but without any noticeable pieces. The grilled flavor was subtle but present, and the rounds held up great split in half as sandwiches. It was fun to grill the bread (and fast!) instead of baking it, and it was something I will no doubt do again.

Grilled Asiago Rounds (adapted from King Arthur Flour)

Ingredients

Starter

• 3/4 cup 12-grain flour, or all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/8 teaspoon instant yeast

Dough

• All of the starter
• 3/4 cup water
• 1/2 cup all-purposed flour
• 2 teaspoons instant yeast
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 1/4 cups bread flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/2 cups freshly grated asiago cheese
• 2 tablespoons dried parsley, or 1/4 cup chopped fresh

Directions

1. For the starter, in a small bowl, combine the flour, water, and yeast. Cover and let sit at room temperature for at least 8 hours, or overnight.
2. In the bowl of your mixer combine the starter, water, all-purpose flour, yeast, and olive oil, stirring until the mixture is smooth.
3. Add the bread flour, salt, cheese, and parsley, and mix until a soft dough forms. Knead the dough with a mixer for 6 to 8 minutes until it’s smooth and springy.
4. Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with greased plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 45 minutes.
5. After the dough has risen, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and divide it into 8 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball and let the dough rest for 10 minutes while you make sure the grill is hot and clean. You can refrigerate the dough, covered, for up to 3 hours at this point, if you need to adjust your timing or want to prep things ahead of time. Set up your grill so that one section is hot and another is low heat, with a medium-hot section between them.
6. Flatten the balls of dough to 4.5″ rounds about 1/4″ thick. Spray or brush the rounds lightly with some olive oil, and place a few of them on a medium-hot section of the grill. Cover the grill and cook for 2–4 minutes, flip the dough over and move to a low-heat portion of the grill. Cover the grill again and cook another 4 minutes, then remove from the grill and let cool somewhat. Repeat with the remaining pieces of dough.