Saturday, January 26, 2013

Mother Hubbard's Lentils and Rice

Sometimes we make mjadara on purpose, because it's completely delicious and everyone likes it. Sometimes we make it because everyone's been sick/busy/distracted and the grocery shopping hasn't gotten done, and the cupboards are bare. Guess which reason it got made this week?

The blog Caramelized OpiNIONs sums this dish up perfectly: "infinitely affordable, incredibly delicious...(with) ingredients that are dirt cheap, easy to find, and even easier to store for long amounts of time." And, even more usefully: "There is no vowel sound between the M and the J. Pronounce the M the way you would say "Mmm" with the first whiff of a wonderful meal, then say the rest of the word as transliterated and you've be just fine."

This dish can be spelled many different ways - mujadarra, mejadra, moujadara, mudardara - and some variations call for bulghur wheat instead of rice (also delicious but not GF-friendly). My Aunt Sue makes a version that contains just lentils. Many recipes skimp on the onions and oil but this is the best part - do NOT skimp on the olive oil as it flavors the whole dish. And if you see it on the menu at a Middle Eastern restaurant - for goodness' sake, don't pay restaurant prices. Bring me a bottle of wine and I'll cook it for you for free.

Mjadara

3 1/2 cups of chicken or vegetable stock, or same amount of water plus some bouillon
1 cup lentils
1 cup rice (we prefer short-grain rice with this particular dish)
salt
about 1/2 cup olive oil
2 large onions, sliced thinly (or more, if you're crazy about the onions and eat them out the pan while everyone else is setting the table)

Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan (the big cast-iron one is perfect for this). When it's hot, add the sliced onions, stir to coat with oil, and cook on medium-high until they begin to soften. Turn the heat down and cook the onions until they're dark brown and very soft and just starting to crisp up. You'll have some extra oil swirling around the bottom of the pan.

While the onions cook, heat the stock or water to boiling. Add the lentils, cover, and simmer about 10 minutes. Add the rice and about 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Recover and cook about 30 minutes, until the rice and lentils are cooked and all the liquid is absorbed.

Pour the onions and oil over the top of lentils and rice and serve. It's also good with a dollop of plain yogurt or some hummous.




Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Sick Soup (GF Chicken Noodle)

January has been a bumpy month for my family and I the recipes I've been choosing reflect that. I was all set to post something healthy and crunchy today until my son started whimpering in his sleep last night, and (barely) woke up this morning with what appears to be the flu. He's an exceptionally healthy kid minus the GF thing, so it's extra pitiful when he's under the weather; there was no way I could resist his whispery, scratchy little voice pleading for homemade chicken soup for lunch.

In addition to being ridiculously healthy, he's also not a picky eater (did I mention he's also smart, handsome, and charming?) but there is not a GF soup on the market that he'll touch. I can't say I blame him - I've tasted all the GF noodle soups out there and I haven't yet found that would make me feel better if I was sick. My daughter is a purist - she thinks the soup isn't homemade unless you start out by chasing the chicken around the backyard (thank you, Laura Ingalls Wilder) - but you can knock this together in 15 minutes if you have leftover cooked chicken in your fridge.

Sick Soup (GF Chicken Noodle) - the 30-minute version

This is so simple, it doesn't even warrant an ingredient list. Chop up the half onion hanging out in the fridge after someone made tuna salad this weekend. Chop 2 ribs of celery and 2 carrots, then saute all the vegetables in a large pot with a splash of oil.

When the veggies start to soften, add a carton (or can, or whatever) of chicken stock; when you discover that you only have about a cup of it leftover and failed to buy more at the grocery store yesterday, throw in some water and a teaspoon or so of Better Than Bouillon (which is, but barely. Chastise self for not having homemade chicken stock in freezer. Remember that frozen stock takes forever to thaw and would mess up your quick soup plan. Congratulate self for having Better Than Bouillon in fridge for just such an emergency.) Simmer the veggies until they're soft, about 10 minutes. Add some leftover chopped chicken (half a breast should do it) and a couple of handfuls of these nifty little GF alphabet noodles that you've been trying to find an excuse to use:

Sam Mills Alphabet Pasta for Kids

Simmer 8 minutes or until the noodles are done. Keep an eye on these, because overcooked GF noodles are just nasty. If you're a purist and don't like the murkiness that happens when you cook your noodles right in the pot you can cook them separately but then you'll have more dishes to wash....and who wants to wash extra pots when you could be cuddling your sick child? Add white pepper (so your son won't see the pepper and complain, even though he loves the *taste* of pepper) and salt to taste.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you make the soup this way, you have to eat it all that day. These noodles soak up all the broth if you let them sit for any amount of time - say, overnight in the refrigerator - and you'll end up with something that resembles chicken noodle stew. Still tasty, but not at all the same. If you've made a big batch of the broth part, just cook your noodles separately and ladle them into the bowl before you put the broth in. Sorry about the extra dishes.

15-minute version: 
Heat your broth in a pot on the stove while you're chopping the veggies. Cook the veggies in the microwave for about 3 minutes (the Pampered Chef microwave steamer is perfect for this), then drain. Add to the broth,  along with your noodles and chicken. When the noodles are done, so is your soup.

10-minute version:
If you have leftover plain white rice in your fridge, as all the GF folks probably do, add that to the boiling broth instead of noodles. Your soup will cook in the amount of time it takes a pot of broth to boil, plus a couple of minutes for everything to heat through, but you'll still have homemade soup and look/feel like a superhero.

5-minute version:
Seriously?! I was kidding. I suppose you could do the whole thing (on a smaller scale) in a 4-cup Pyrex in your microwave, but then your house won't smell as good. If 10 minutes feels like too long to wait for homemade soup, write a blog post while it simmers to take your mind off the wait.


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Lamb and rice pilaf that will get you out of the bathtub

Some weeks just suck. There doesn't have to be a particular reason for it, but everything can be clouded with a sort of general malaise, and things that normally don't make much impact can piss you off all day long. The cumulative effect of this over several days is that at the end of dinner one night, you'll announce that you're going to go hide from your family, in the bathtub.

I used to adore long hot baths, but they lost much of their appeal during my beached-whale stage (also known as the third trimester of pregnancy, when The Tub Just Wasn't Deep Enough). After the kids were born, I would spend my previously-luxurious baths making lists of all the things I could be doing instead of lolling in overpriced French bubbles. Then I realized I was mostly bored during long hot baths, and that was pretty much that: I can't stand to be bored.

Fast-forward to this point in my life, when all the normal busy-ness of life with 2 kids and 2 working parents has simply piled up. I love all the parts of my life - separately. The sum total is a little overwhelming most days. So I went to go hide in the bathtub. The prime 80s-era decor of the upstairs bathroom is far from soothing, but the fan is on the verge of giving up the ghost and drowns out sound from the rest of the house, and our water heater is ridiculously oversized for this house so we have virtually unlimited hot water. As I was lolling in my overpriced French bubbles and adamantly refusing to think about anything useful, the most marvelous smell wafted under the door....

We'd already eaten dinner so I assumed this was some sort of olfactory hallucination, a conjuring of the comforting dinner I wished I'd had. I have a great imagination but not this great - I actually got out of the tub before the water was cold and wandered downstairs to find a great big giant wonderful pan of this lamb and rice pilaf on the stove. My husband and son are going camping this weekendbut can't eat any of the food provided, so they're bringing a cooler full of things that keep well and taste good at any temperature. If I don't eat it all before they leave this weekend, this dish will fit the bill.

Lamb and Rice with Chickpeas 

5 cups cooked rice (we use long-grain white or basmati)
1/2 lb ground lamb
1 small onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 15-ounce can of chickpeas, drained
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/3 teaspoon cinnamon

In a Dutch oven or large skillet, combine the meat, onions, and garlic. Break the meat up as it cooks so there are no large lumps.

When the meat is almost completely browned, drain any fat and add the chickpeas. Stir in the seasonings and rice, and add salt and pepper to taste. You'll use more salt than you expect - usually close to a tablespoon.

This is wonderful hot, served with tzatziki. It's wonderful room temperature at a potluck. It's wonderful eaten cold straight out of the fridge. And it keeps forever. It makes a nice side dish to a more complicated meal, and all the food-allergic people can eat it safely; only the vegetarians will miss out.







Monday, January 14, 2013

The Second Most Comforting Thing I Know How to Cook

Sometimes you just need comfort food. 

It's never healthy - nobody turns to salad for solace on a sad, gray, overcast day when they're fighting with their significant other and not getting anything done at work and mentally recalling every stupid decision they've ever made. Comfort food should be hot and squishy and full of fat and calories; it should fill you up physically and emotionally and, preferably, taste really good straight out of the fridge and not require very much chewing. 

This is the stuff. It has 7 (seven!!!) kinds of dairy products (for the purposes of hyperbole, we're going to assume that Velveeta is actually a dairy product) and it is freakin' fantastic. This recipe was given to me by a former co-worker who took his mac and cheese very seriously indeed. His endorsement of the recipe was so heartfelt and detailed, I broke one of the Cardinal Rules of Entertaining and cooked it, completely totally untested, for 80 people at my 40th birthday party. It did not disappoint. 

If you feel inclined to substitute anything low- or non-fat for any of the ingredients below, please go find another recipe. 

Chaz 'n Cheese 

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 pound elbow macaroni
8 tablespoons (1 stick) plus 1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded Muenster cheese
1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded mild Cheddar cheese
1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded Monterey Jack
2 cups half-and-half
1 cup (8 ounces) Velveeta , cut into small cubes
2 large eggs , lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon seasoned salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly (ha! as if that will make a difference!) butter a deep 2 1/2-quart casserole.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the oil, then the elbow macaroni, and cook until the macaroni is just tender, about 7 minutes. Do not overcook. Drain well. Return to the cooking pot.

In a small saucepan, melt eight tablespoons of the butter. Stir into the macaroni. In a large bowl, mix the Muenster, mild and sharp Cheddar, and Monterey Jack cheeses. To the macaroni, add the half-and-half, 1 1/2 cups of the shredded cheese, the cubed Velveeta, and the eggs. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer to the buttered casserole. Sprinkle with the remaining 1/2 cup of shredded cheese and dot with the remaining one tablespoon of butter.
Bake until it's bubbling around the edges, about 35 minutes.  

This recipe doubles, triples, and quadruples beautifully, depending on how many people you're feeding or how much comfort food you think you need. Chaz claims you can make this in advance and hold it in the fridge without baking for day or two if you add a little extra liquid; I haven't personally tried that but he was right about everything else he said about this recipe. He also says that it keeps for at least 3 days but the leftovers have never lasted long enough for me to test that, either. 


Wednesday, January 9, 2013

A weeknight dinner for when your monkey is in a lot of stress


This beef stir-fry recipe is one of our favorite recently-rediscovered recipes from How to Cook Everything, the cookbook I would take with me if I was expecting to be stranded on a desert island with a reasonably well-equipped kitchen and a good grocery store. (Hey, it could happen.) (I have a recurring fantasy about cooking my way from cover to cover, a la Julie and Julia. I know. Kinda sad.)

It's actually more like Stir-Fried Onions with Beef when we make it - the really good, sweet, carmelized onions that show up on homemade mjadara and make onions a nutritionally significant part of your meal. There are plenty of health claims related to onions: have been used for medicine for 4,000 years, antioxidants, lower hypertension, blah blah blah. My very favorite claim comes from wiki.answers.com, which states that "onions calms animals down. An owner of a large group of old world primates said that she relies on onions to keep her primates healthy during the winter. Especially when primates have been exposed to viruses or when your monkey is in a lot of stress, onions can be the solutions."

There you go. Can't get a much stronger recommendation than that.

This recipe was in fairly regular rotation until we became addicted to Ginger Chicken, and is a great fallback recipe for weeknights when you want to eat about 15 minutes after you walk through the door. If you've had the foresight to do the slicing in advance and buy pre-minced ginger and garlic, this is a completely realistic time frame. And if you have a fancy-schmancy rice cooker with a preset option, you won't even have to remember to start your rice first.

Stir-Fried Beef with Onions (for when your monkey is in a lot of stress)

3/4 - 1 lb flank steak
2 Tbsp peanut or vegetable oil
2-3 large onions, thinly sliced
1 tsp minced garlic
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp peeled, minced ginger
1/2 cup stock or water
1 Tbsp hoison sauce or soy sauce (we use the gluten-free kind)

Slice the beef as thinly as you can (this is easier to do if the beef is still slightly frozen), then cut the slices into bite-sized pieces. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until it smokes. Add 1 Tbsp of oil and the onion. Stir and cook until the onions soften and char slightly, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and remove from the pan. Set the onions aside.

Add the remaining oil to the pan, then the garlic and 1 Tbsp of the ginger. Stir and immediately add the beef. Stir every 20 seconds or so until the  beef loses its color, just a minute or two longer. Stir the onions back into the pan. Add the stock or water, the remaining ginger, and the hoisin or soy sauce. Let some of the liquid bubble away for a minute, then serve immediately over rice.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Starting the New Year on Entirely the Wrong Foot

My friend KT brings a hot cheese dip to every New Year's Eve party. It's the absolute most irresistable food I've ever encountered, which is a really serious statement from such a dedicated omnivore. This means that no matter how well my healthy eating resolutions have lasted through the holiday season (no eggnog! no fried appetizers! no McDonald's drive-thru while Christmas shopping! ONE chocolate truffle!), it all goes completely to hell the minute she breezes through the door with her Crockpot.

I've tried putting it in the kitchen, away from the rest of the food, with the hope that out of sight means out of mind. I've tried filling up on raw veggies before she arrives. I've tried sending all the leftovers home with her so I don't end up eating it for breakfast for the remainder of the week (although that year I somehow ended up at her house much more frequently than usual for a couple of days...). I've tried asking her to bring other things to the party - which she graciously does, along with the Crockpot of Doom.

So this year, I decided to quit pretending. I love this dip. I do all my New Year's party hostessing from my station next to the Crockpot, and I stockpile tortilla chips for the leftovers (ever since the year I discovered, via extensive trial-and-error, that it really doesn't taste as good as anything else). It's my traditional New Year's Day breakfast. I built this year's party menu around this dip; I set up a nacho bar with all sorts of toppings and made pitchers of margaritas....and inevitably, everyone stood around the Crockpot and ate this dip and ignored everything else. As they should.

Ridiculously Good Cheese Dip

3 tubes of Jimmy Dean's Hot Pork Sausage
8 blocks of cream cheese (yes, that's 4 pounds. There's probably a Costco size available.)
2 cans of chopped or diced Mexican tomatoes
Chopped pickled jalapenos to taste

Brown the sausage and drain it. Put all the ingredients into a large Crockpot and cook on low. As soon as the cream cheese melts, open a bag of tortilla chips and begin testing to make sure you put in the right amount of jalapenos. Continue testing at regular intervals for 3 hours, scraping down the sides of the Crockpot so the cheese doesn't get all crispy on the sides before you officially serve it.

Leftovers keep beautifully in the fridge for as long as your willpower holds out.