Nothing Like a Deadline to Inspire Me: Brussels Sprouts with Pomegranate

Blogging has been a great way for me to rediscover my writing voice – I’ve wanted to be a (full-time, professional, PAID) writer since I was approximately 6 years old. After hanging on to this idea for a couple of decades, I somehow lost sight of this ambition in my twenties (ironically, the era of my life when I was a full-time, professional, paid technical writer. Maybe all those software instructions just sucked the creative juices out of me. Imagine that.).  At any rate, blogging has been a nice gateway drug back into the writing life. It’s led to some other projects that I’ve enjoyed very much and generally made me feel happy about having some creative output that doesn’t (1) get eaten and disappear forever or (2) require any sort of cleaning up afterwards.

My current relationship with goal-setting is far too complicated for this post; suffice to say that I’ve tried to take a systematic, planned approach to integrating my writing into my regular life, complete with editorial calendars and timelines and to-do lists, etc. As a result, I have blogged less in the last 2 months than I have in the last 2 years. It’s inevitable that I was going to post something today, because it’s the last day of the month and I’m looking at how little progress I’ve made towards the written goals which allegedly are supposed to keep me accountable. Clearly it’s time for a new system.

Wondering what the quilt looks like?

My personal How I Wish I Was Spending My Time trifecta is Cook – Craft – Write (not necessarily in that order), and it appears that I can sustain 2 at a time. The last couple of months have included a lot of cooking and I finally finished the quilt for my friend’s soon-to-arrive baby, so writing has fallen by the wayside. I just got a couple of new craft magazines and inspiration for another writing project, so odds are good that David is taking over the cooking as soon as he gets through finals week, and I’ll be blogging about what an amazing cook he is.

This particular recipe is a dish I took to a Seder that we attended earlier in the month. Potlucks are always a huge bummer, because we inevitably can’t eat 99.9% of what’s there and it makes us collectively feel very sorry for ourselves. The recipe comes from the amazing and wonderful Tori Avey, who writes as The Shiksa in the Kitchen and also as The History Kitchen (a marvelous way to lose a couple of hours – such fascinating stuff!). We love Brussels sprouts and we love pomegranates, and this looked very pretty on a white serving platter with toasted walnuts sprinkled all around.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Pomegranate Molasses

2 lb. Brussels sprouts, or however much is on the stalk or in the container you pick up in the produce department

¼ cup olive oil

Salt and pepper

1 cup walnuts, toasted (don’t skip the toasting!)

2 tbsp pomegranate molasses

Fresh pomegranate seeds, optional (this is for the garnish. I couldn’t find any actual pomegranates so we skipped it and everyone was still perfectly happy with the end result)

Preheat the oven to 450 and cover a cookie sheet with aluminum foil.

Wash the sprouts and cut them in half, then toss with the olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Roast 15 minutes, until they are barely tender and some of the outer leaves are starting to crisp up.

Toss the sprouts with the walnuts. Pour onto a serving platter, drizzle with the pomegranate molasses, and sprinkle with the fresh pomegranate seeds, if you’re using them.

This dish holds well at room temperature and tastes just fine a couple of hours later. We put it in the warming oven for a bit, but I don’t think I’d necessarily recommend that because the sprouts got more cooked than I like. If you make this in advance, just give it time to come to room temperature rather than blasting it with the microwave – although it really is easy enough that you could make it at the last minute.

Pasta Primavera, or It Can't Be FroYo Dinner Every Night, Kids

We’ve been enjoying a family staycation this year during the kids’ spring break. If Imaginary Mom was in charge of things, each night would feature a new and exciting – and delicious! – dinner with fresh seasonal ingredients, prepared in my spotlessly clean gourmet kitchen. Because *I* am in charge instead, last night we had FroYo for dinner. 

The one night I was organized enough to produce dinner after a long day of family fun, we had this, our very favorite springtime dish. We invariably make it on the first warm sunny day of the year, either by accident or design. The ingredients are things we typically have in the fridge, and the whole thing comes together in the amount of time it takes to boil water for pasta – perfect for those days when you can’t bring yourself to come inside and cook until the kids are ready to gnaw their own arms off. 

I could wax poetic about all the possible variations on the ingredients, but it’s the last weekday of staycation and we’re off to do more fun things. Suffice to say that you want to limit yourself to 3-4 vegetables, and use spring-y ones – by this time of year we should all be sick and tired of broccoli and cauliflower and potatoes and squash. If Imaginary Mom had a vegetable garden, she’d go out back and harvest something to throw in here, but I think we’ve established that her crazy overachieving self is not running the show around here these days.

Pasta Primavera

1 ½ cups chicken broth

2-3 sprigs fresh thyme

2 carrots, peeled and diced

8-12 stalks asparagus, broken into 1-inch pieces

1-2 zucchini or yellow squash, diced

1 cup frozen peas

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 lb short pasta

Parmesan cheese, for serving

Put a pot of water for the pasta on to boil. 

In the meantime, put 1 cup of the chicken broth and the fresh thyme in a skillet large enough to hold the pasta. Bring it to a simmer, then add the carrots and cook 2 minutes. Add the asparagus and cook and other 2 minutes. Add the squash and cook 4 minutes.  The broth should be just about cooked away at this point; add the olive oil and stir, then add the peas and cook until they’re thawed and just barely cooked.

In the meantime, cook the pasta as soon as the water boils. Drain well and add to the skillet, along with another ½ cup of broth. Stir to combine, add salt and pepper to taste, and serve with Parmesan cheese on the side. 

Breakfast of Champions: Lemon Rice Soup

Well, now - this is embarrassing. I jotted down the ingredients for this recipe, which I'm always losing in my file, and saved it as a draft.....except I actually published it. Oops. No instructions, no snappy commentary at the beginning, just 4 ingredients with no explanation whatsoever. Note to self: Pay attention. So here it is again, with a little more useful explanation.

We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging.

My kids love eating at this little diner near our house. The food is nothing particularly special, just your standard Metro Detroit Greek-ish place that's a step up from a coney, but there are huge windows on 3 sides of the restaurant so you can watch all the goings-on while you eat (which is either distracting or exciting, depending on how you look at it). I also think they love it so much because you can get any menu item at any time of day, which means that their desire to eat lemon rice soup at breakfast can be easily accommodated when the grownups want omelettes.

Jen, this post was bit of a lemon!

This is one of my very favorite soups, but not every coney serves it, the quality isn't consistent, and we're never entirely confident that it's safe for David and John to eat. I have a big file of recipes I've collected from random places over the years; this came from the Detroit News Lifestyle section sometime in the late 80s. It's so completely perfect that I've never seen a need to alter it, just a bit of salt and pepper at the end.

It is a bit of a princess, as soups go - you can pretty much ignore it at the beginning, but the egg and lemon part takes a bit of fussing and you have to be careful to keep the heat low or you'll cook the eggs (in an icky way). That little bit of bother is more than balanced out by the absolute simplicity of the ingredients; you don't have to chop a single thing.

Lemon Rice Soup

6 cups chicken broth
1/2 c. rice
1/4 cup lemon juice (from an actual lemon - if you use bottled lemon juice you'll be sad when it's time to eat this)
3 eggs

Bring the broth to a boil in large saucepan. Add the rice, reduce the heat, and simmer about 20 minutes, until the rice is very tender.

In a very large measuring cup, whisk together the lemon juice and eggs. When the rice is done, slowly add about 1/2 cup of the broth to the lemon-egg mixture, stirring the entire time. If you rush this step, the egg will start to cook and the soup will look extremely gross; take your time and go slowly.

Once the broth, lemon, and egg are mixed, slowly pour the mixture into the saucepan, stirring constantly. Add salt and pepper to suit your own taste - is it lemony enough? add a little more lemon juice if you need to - and serve immediately. I suggest eating it all in one sitting since it never seems to reheat well.

Note: If you go too quickly with the pouring and stirring and end up with grody eggy clumps or strands in your soup, get out your immersion blender (which is a really handy thing to have around the kitchen, and has saved me from getting burned putting soup into my blender) and blend the heck out of this, then pour it through a strainer before serving (yes, it's a bit of overkill but I really don't like egg clumps in my soup). You'll end up with a thick soup with no distinct rice bits, but it will still taste very good.

Lemon-Marinated Chicken, or What To Make For a Crowd Without Giving Yourself a Panic Attack

March was a rough month around here.  The four of us passed around the same horrible virus again and again, and we were all at various stages of sick for the entire month. We missed our annual spring celebration. We missed making corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day. And we sure didn’t make any great dinners (well, OK – one great dinner. But it was for other people and they paid to be here and we planned it back in November), so we’ve mostly been having the same 4 things over and over again. Nobody could taste anything so cooking felt pretty pointless.

I emerged from the fog of the Nyquil fumes and realized that the lunch I volunteered to cater for the volunteers at a church fundraiser was just around the corner. I like cooking for an appreciative audience and the request was made before I got sick, but naturally I didn’t plan the menu in advance. Given all the constraints – time, money, and what was humanly possible given all the other things I was catching up on that weekend – this recipe seemed to fit the bill. It’s from my Banrnes-and-Noble-bargain-rack-surprise-favorite, The Food and Cooking of the Middle East, which I’m so glad I bought and which has never disappointed me.

The only hard part about this recipe is remembering to marinate the chicken in advance. I don't think I'd marinate it overnight for dinner the next day – I don't want the chicken to get mushy – but marinating the night before for lunch seemed just right; if I made this for dinner I’d throw it together in the morning (yes, it's that easy) before I left for work.

I served it with mjadara, fattoush, and David’s excellent hummous, which made the omnivores AND the vegans happy.  It scales up very, very easily – it was no more work to make this for 40 people than it was to make it for 4, really. 

Lemon-Marinated Chicken 

2 whole  boneless skinless chicken breasts, trimmed

3 tbsp olive oil

3 tbsp lemon juice

2 tsp cider vinegar

2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 cinnamon stick, broken in half

Grated rind of ½ orange

6 cardamom pods, crushed

Mix together the ingredients for the marinade. Pour over the chicken and refrigerate for at least 6 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350. Put the chicken in a baking dish (if you’re scaling this up, make sure your pan is big enough to hold the chicken in a single layer) and bake for 20 minutes, basting occasionally with the marinade if you’re so inclined (I was not).

Take the chicken out of the pan and shred or chop coarsely. Return it to the baking pan, stirring in any marinade remaining at the bottom of the pan, and return to the oven for 10 minutes. (If you happen to be in a commercial kitchen with a warming oven available, put it in there to hold instead).

This is delicious as-is. The original recipe has it served in pita, with a tahini dressing drizzled over the top and pickled vegetables on the side. You could serve it on fattoush for a healthy-ish main dish salad, or dip the pieces in hummous when you're too lazy to chop more carrots or bother with a fork.