Category Archives: Recipes

Green recipe page rollout

Well, I finally kicked my Green Recipes page out of the draft stage and into the spotlight.  Since this is not a food blog, per se, I was surprised by the number of recipes and food posts that I’ve amassed in 20 months of blogging here.  Well, okay, I like to cook and eat — maybe I shouldn’t be THAT surprised 😉

Now you can click on the handy dandy “Green Recipes” tab at the top of the home page anytime to view recipes and get inspiration for your own cooking.

To keep things green, all recipes are vegetarian, and many center around seasonal eating and locally grown food.  I purchase beans, grains, and nuts from bulk food bins to cut down on packaging (I bring my own plastic bags and twist ties to the store and use them over and over again).

Bon appétit!

Asian vegetable dumplings

A recent failed attempt to eat at Selam (an Ethiopian restaurant that we’ve been wanting to try) resulted in a scramble for lunch plan B.  Happily, we landed at Bobo Noodle House, where I discovered their vegetable dumpling pho.

Perfect little flavor-packed dumplings floating in a rich, salty broth along with shitake mushrooms, tofu, and mung bean sprouts.  Mmm, I would happily have a bowl of this daily.  Despite being pretty reasonably priced, I cannot eat lunch at Bobo every day, so I set out to recreate the dish.

I had most everything on hand other than the dumpling wrappers, which required a stop by the freezer case of an international grocer.  I bought the wrappers, despite a couple of somewhat sketchy ingredients, including propylene glycol.  (When I mentioned to Matthew that propylene glycol sounded sketchy as a “food ingredient,” he replied that it’s what they use in antifreeze — yum!)

I based the seasoning for my dumpling filling off of this recipe, which I tossed in the food processor with the following:

  • Most of a block of extra firm tofu
  • Chopped carrots and bok choy, lightly steamed
  • Sauteed mushrooms

Warning: Each dumpling wrapper (mine were round and ~4 inches in diameter) will hold only a TINY amount of filling.  The above recipe will fill about 50 wrappers.  Just saying.

Before assembling my little dumples, I prepared a simple soup with veggie broth, dried shitake mushrooms, soy sauce, and more of the bok choy.  With that simmering on the stove, we worked together to assemble the dumplings.  The dumplings cooked in the soup for 2-3 minutes, and then we sat down to enjoy my creation.

A few notes:

  • The dumplings are best fresh.  We cooked eight for each of us.  I made up the other 30-some dumplings and froze them for later.
  • If you don’t want soup, you can steam the dumplings, or make potstickers.

More pasta, please

I’m happy to announce that our pasta making adventures continue, and I have a recipe for you.  While searching for whole wheat pasta recipes for our first attempt, the mention of using alternative flours*, such as spelt and farro, caught Matthew’s eye.

We bought spelt flour from the bulk bins  of a natural food store, and we were on our way to some delicious pasta.

Recipe

  • 2 1/2 – 3 cups spelt flour (you could substitute whole wheat flour)
  • 3 eggs
  • 2 T. olive oil
  • 1/2 t. salt

Mix flour and salt in a bowl and make a well in the center.  Beat the eggs and oil in a separate bowl, then pour into the well and slowly incorporate the flour.  Add more flour as needed, 1/8 cup at a time, if the dough is too sticky.  Once the dough becomes firm, switch to using your hands (if you weren’t using them already) to knead the dough for 10 minutes.

Cover the bowl, and set the dough aside for at least 30 minutes.  Use this time to prep the rest of your meal!

After the dough rests, cut it into four chunks — you’ll repeat the next steps with each chunk.  We don’t have a pasta maker, so we use a rolling pin and our pastry cloth to roll the dough out as thinly as possible.  Roll it very thin, until it’s almost transparent (I still need some practice on this step, but Matthew’s got it down).

Now it’s time to cut your noodles.  If you used a pastry cloth to roll out the dough, carefully transfer the dough to a cutting board and cut the rolled dough into strips — ours usually end up between 1/8 and 1/4 inch wide.  We just use our pizza slicer for this, but as we continue our pasta making, we may upgrade to something with multiple wheels that would allow us to cut more than one noodle at a time.

Drape the finished noodles over the edge of a colander or large bowl to dry slightly while you work with the rest of the dough.

To cook, bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Depending on the size of your pot, you may want to cook these in two batches.  If you rolled your pasta dough very thinly, the noodles will cook in as little as 2 minutes — you can test at this point and see if they need another minute or two.  Set a timer and don’t go anywhere, or you’ll have a soggy mess!

Drain and toss with a bit of olive oil, then top as you wish.

Topping suggestions

  • Spinach, garlic, and red bell pepper, sauteed in butter and olive oil (pictured below)
  • Sauteed mushrooms and garlic
  • Your favorite red sauce
  • Olive oil and freshly grated Parmesan cheese — simple and delicious!

*Here are some links where you can learn more about spelt and farro, which are ancient forms of wheat.  They contain more nutrients (and flavor!) than our everyday, bred and engineered for maximum output variety of wheat:

New flavor

A couple of weeks ago, I made my inaugural visit to Penzeys Spices, a chain that happens to have a location here in St. Louis.  I prefer to buy most of my spices and herbs at Golden Grocer, a small, locally owned, natural foods store that sells a variety of spices and herbs in bulk.

I favor this option because 1) bulk containers mean I can bring my own bags (plastic, yes, but I’m reusing them) and then fill my glass spice jars at home; 2) I can buy a 2-3 month supply and avoid buying a too-large amount of some obscure seasoning that turn to sawdust long before I use it; and 3) I haven’t done any official price comparisons, but I’m pretty sure I come out ahead financially with this option compared to buying prepackaged jars in a regular store.

Anyway, over the past couple of years, we’ve heard good things about,  and seen some interesting recipes featuring, smoked paprika (which Golden Grocer does not carry).  When we found ourselves in the neighborhood of Penzeys after a visit to the Maplewood Winter Market, we walked on over to investigate.  We came out with smoked paprika, szechuan peppercorns, and one other item that I don’t remember right now.

Sadly, Penzeys does not have bulk containers that you can use to fill your own bags, so we left with some unnecessary packaging.  We asked the cashier if they had ever considered offering bulk jars, and she acted like it would be nigh unto impossible.  Sigh.

Anyhow, we put the Szechuan pepper to use as soon as we got home, incorporating it into our lunch stir-fry.  We were enjoying the flavor, until, a few bites into our meal, we noticed that we couldn’t really feel our tongues.  It wasn’t that it was spicy hot, it just had this disconcerting effect.  Apparently this is a “normal” effect of this pepper.  We ended up picking out most of the peppercorns because the tingly numbness was just weird and made the dish less enjoyable.  I’m not sure what we’ll end up doing with the remaining 4 oz. of the pepper.

Later that same week, I experimented with the smoked paprika.  I made a super simple smoked paprika cream sauce as a topping for polenta with sauteed mushrooms and asparagus.

To make the cream sauce, I toasted the smoked paprika (~2 t.) in a bit of olive oil on the stove top — about 5 minutes on low heat.  Then I whisked in a half cup of cream and left it on the heat until just warmed.  I added salt to taste.

The result?  Delicious!  I resisted the temptation to eat the smoked paprika cream sauce by the spoonful (well, mostly resisted), because it went fabulously with the mushrooms and polenta.  This sauce would taste good on a variety of things — pasta, scrambled eggs, other veggies — let the experimenting begin!

The photo evidence of my creation suffered from poor light conditions — I’m sharing anyway, but be forewarned, the photo does NOT do justice to the deliciousness.


Retrospective menu

I fell off the cooking wagon for a couple of weeks, but I got back in the swing of things last Thursday night with — hmm, now I can’t quite remember.  Ah, right, lentil sloppy joes.  And I roasted some broccoli and cauliflower for a side dish — delicious fresh out of the oven, but not so great as leftovers.

I opened a jar of our canned tomatoes for the sloppy joes.  I saved some of the tomatoes and used them to make County Vegetable Soup with Pasta on Friday night.  This recipe comes pretty close to what I made — the main difference is that my recipe calls for pesto as a garnish.  Also, I used whole wheat shells for the pasta, which I cooked separately and added to the bowls when serving to keep them from getting mushy.

I love sitting down to dinner and doing a tally of all the garden and local produce in the meal.  The soup was a great one for this: the leeks, carrots, zucchini, green beans, tomatoes, and basil for the pesto came from our garden, and the cabbage was locally grown (we didn’t have much luck growing cabbage this fall).  This is a wonderful soup — really hearty and flavorful — perfect for these frigid days.

On Saturday night, I found my cheesy side with a baked macaroni and cheese dish (recipe from 1000 Vegetarian Recipes, our go-to cookbook).  On the side, a serving of steamed, grated beets with butter and salt, as well as a small roasted beet salad.

I finished my cooking spree with Swiss Chard risotto on Sunday night.  Instead of arborio rice, I used oat groats.  Instead of the normal time-intensive risotto procedure of adding small amounts of broth at a time while stirring almost continuously for an hour, I added the liquid in two installments and simmered it with minimal stirring.  The oat groats produced a creamy, hearty risotto, which I paired with roasted root vegetables (garden potatoes and beets, plus local sweet potatoes).  Risotto recipe coming soon, once I get it out of my head and into the computer — which I hope occurs before I forget what I did 😉