Asparagus Soup

First off, I apologize for not posting much this week. Fortunately, Sandy passed lightly over my area. We had a night of wind and rain, but we didn't lose power. However, I was swept up in Halloween. This year I've been taking time to enjoy as many of the perks of each season as I possibly can. I feel like cooking has helped me do this because there are so many flavors I feel I ignore or don't enjoy thoroughly. I'm really bummed that there's only one more month of fall. I'm also a little nervous because I'm only a little over half-way through all the recipes for the fall section of the cookbook.

I do have a mini-cook-a-thon planned for Sunday though with some friends, and I think I might do a recipe or two on my own this coming week.

Not to mention, this month also includes Thanksgiving where I hope to use a desert from the cookbook for a family gathering, and I'd really like to have a second Thanksgiving feast with all my friends if schedules allow for it.

Regardless, tonight I bring you a recipe that is not from the Beekman cookbook but is still really tasty. Well, if you like asparagus. If you don't, then maybe this isn't the soup for you.

Ingredients:

1 tbsp unsalted butter
1 large shallot, peeled and chopped
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1 lb asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1.5" pieces
2.5 cups lower-sodium chicken broth
1 slice whole wheat or white bread, torn with your hands
1.25 cup fresh parsley leaves
1 cup 2% Greek yogurt

Directions:

1. Melt the butter in a pot over medium heat. Saute the shallot and thyme until it is tender, about four minutes. Add the asparagus and chicken broth. Make sure the asparagus is covered. Bring to a simmer and cook until the asparagus is tender. It should be a bright green color. This should take 5-8 minutes.

2. Add the torn bread and parsley. Make sure the bread is submerged. 

3. Pour the mixture into your blender. When using the blender, make sure you leave the plastic part in the center of the lid out so that the steam has a place to vent. Otherwise, you might wind up with an explosive mess on your hands. To prevent the soup from spraying out the top, cover the hole with a towel so that the steam can escape.

When you pour it in, don't fill it too far. I think I actually poured too much in there. It worked, but I had to use a spoon to push things down a few times. When you fill it about half-way, that isn't really an issue.

4. Puree until smooth.

For this recipe, the bread is really important. It's what thickens your soup and gives it a texture.  I'm really digging the color of it. I used almonds as a garnish, but they're not really necessary. Like, who was I trying to impress? Myself? My cat? Whatever. It tasted good.

Zucchini Lasagna that's not lasagna at all how dare it call itself that

Anyway, I was browsing the internet when I came across a forum post for what was called "Zucchini Lasagna". It's supposed to be one of the carb-reduced recipes or whatever. I don't particularly buy into that nonsense because any diet that supports you eating a pound of bacon for breakfast doesn't sound like a diet to me. (In fact, the only diet I support is a healthy one combined with exercise.)

The twist in this recipe is that instead of pasta, you use strips of zucchini. According to the poster, if you peel the zucchini first, nobody can tell it's not pasta, which is totally a lie probably created on pinterest. I made the lasagna regardless because I like veggies, and I like cheese. I like them separate, and I like them together. So, even though this is some faux lasagna, I'm down to make it.

Ingredients:

2 medium zucchini
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
3/4 cups ricotta
3/4 cups cottage cheese
1 egg
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp parsley
1/2 tsp basil
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp fresh grated Parmesan
2 cups shredded Italian cheese blend
1 large bunch of fresh baby spinach
3 Roma tomatoes, thinly sliced
1 1/2 cups tomato sauce

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

I sliced my zucchini pretty thin with a knife. I could have used a vegetable peeler, but I felt that might make it too thin. (You want them about 1/8-1/4 of an inch thick.)

Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Blanch your zucchini in it for 1-2 minutes. In a skillet, heat the oil. Add two of the garlic cloves (chopped up), and the onion. Saute for 8-10 minutes, or until the onion is soft. 

In a bowl, mix the ricotta, cottage cheese and the egg. (You know what, you don't even really need that egg. I totally forgot about it until after I'd mixed everything, and I just got on with the rest of my life. It all tasted good in the end.) Add the remaining garlic cloves (chopped up), oregano, parsley, basil, and parmesan and mix.

Now, get all of your ingredients together. You might want to lightly grease the pan you're going to cook in, but that's up to you. Then you begin to layer your ingredients.  

Zucchini.

Baby spinach.

Tomatoes.

Cheese goo.

Onions and garlic bits.

Sauce.

Then repeat it until you hit the top of your container. 

When you're done, put some more parmesan cheese on the top because it's delicious and you love it. 

Cover it in aluminum foil and bake for 30-35 minutes. Then take the foil off and keep baking for another 10-15 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and golden brown.

Let it cool for about ten minutes before you eat it unless you want to burn your face. I know with Halloween coming up, some of you want to look authentic, so here's your opportunity. Who needs make-up when you can just do it with zucchini lasagna not lasagna?

A Note on the Weather

In the next few days there's supposed to be some storm coming through that my mother is losing her business over because she likes to be prepared.

Back around the whole Y2K panic, my mother had a well stocked supply of food in the cellar because the computers were all going to go haywire, and we wouldn't be able to buy food for a while. When Y2K didn't happen and everyone got on with the rest of their lives, we seemed to have a never-ending supply of EVERYTHING NON-PERISHABLE.

But, it will be really rainy here with some wind, and trees are big on collapsing and knocking out powerlines around here. (Don't they realize how inconvenient that is?) If I don't post early next week, it's probably because I don't have power. Have no fear though, I'll be back to posting at the end of the week when the power has returned. (Fingers crossed.)

Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

This isn't a recipe from the Beekman Blog, but something a friend of mine suggested I try because it's quick and healthy. Obviously it tastes good, otherwise I wouldn't be putting it on the blog.

Quinoa is easy to find, and it's full of protein and fiber, which are both important.

I think my favorite thing about it is that when it fully cooks, it kind of looks like a little UFO or Saturn because there's a thin band that puffs out around the middle.

You boil your quinoa first to cook it, and while it's boiling you hollow out your bell peppers.

Sorry about the weird shadows. They're me and the peppers.

Then, you add whatever you like to your quinoa. I like to use lemon juice, capers, scallions, garlic, shallots, and sometimes other pieces of the pepper, but really it's up to you. There's plenty of herbs and vegetables you can use. I bet asparagus would be great now that I think about it. Some spinach. But keep in mind you'd have to cook the asparagus and spinach before you use it.

There I go, adding in capers.

I'm pretty sure I'm adding red pepper here.

Once you have it all mixed in well, you stuff your red pepper with it. 

If you cut it right, you can use your top as a little lid. Then you pop it in the oven at 350 degrees until the pepper starts to look soft and a little wrinkly (about 15 minutes).

As you can see, I didn't cut the one on the left properly, so I had more of a ring to put on it. (I guess I liked it.)

Quick, simple, and filling.

Quinoa can be used for a lot of things. Cooking it with orange juice and cranberries would make an excellent breakfast idea with more health value oatmeal. 

So give it a shot if you haven't already. It's good for you, and it's not like it's brussel sprouts.

Carmelized Pear Bread Pudding

Bread pudding would have to be one of my favorite deserts. It's a comfort food for me. It's best served warm, with pockets of sweetness hidden in all of those nooks and crannies. My friend made a version of it for the 4th of July this year. It was humid and disgusting out, and we were inside without air conditioning with the oven heating up the bread pudding. I ate it, even though it was really hot because it was bread pudding. It was delicious, and I have no regrets.

Plus, I like bread pudding because it's a recipe that you can let sit around while you go and get on with the rest of your life.

I can't find the exact recipe online, but this one is close.


CUSTARD

10 cups stale bread, cut into 1”-1 ½” cubes
5 eggs
1
⁄₃ cup granulated sugar (increase to ½ cup if using unsweetened bread)
¼ cup (yes, ¼ cup!) pure vanilla extract
pinch of sea salt
2 cups whole milk
1cup heavy cream

PEAR TOPPING

2 pounds pears (about 6-8 medium), peeled, quartered, and cored
6 Tablespoons unsalted butter  
¾ cup granulated sugar
Additional 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened, to grease pan
Preheat oven to 350°.

To make the custard:

Whisk together eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt in a large enough bowl to hold your bread cubes.  Whisk in the
milk and cream.  Toss in bread and with your hands push down on the bread to submerge it into your
custard.  At this point you could cover the bowl and refrigerate the pudding overnight or you could
continue with the recipe while occasionally stirring or pushing down on the bread to keep it covered with
the custard.

Caramelizing pears:

Melt butter in a large skillet (big enough to hold all your pears in a single layer) on low heat.  Sprinkle the
sugar evenly over the melted butter and lay your pears over the sugar.  Turn the heat to high and allow the
pears to cook undisturbed for 8-10 minutes.  Once the juices and pears begin to caramelize, carefully shake
the pan to distribute the heat and turn the pears over onto their other sides.  Once the pears and juices are a
medium amber caramel, remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool for 5 minutes.
Pour the bread and custard into a greased 9” x 13” pan.  Distribute the pears and their juice evenly over the
pudding.  Bake in the middle of the oven for 40-45 minutes or until the custard is set and the bread that is
popping up between the pears is crispy.  Allow to cool 10 minutes before serving.  This pudding is great on
its own or with a pear-brandy-spiked vanilla sauce.
Storage:  This bread pudding is best served the day it is made but any leftovers can be wrapped in plastic
and refrigerated for 2-3 days.  Re-warm in a 300° oven for 10-15 minutes



When we made it, we used whole milk instead of heavy cream to try to reduce some of the fat content.

Here is ours soaking. We kept pressing it down with a potato masher to make sure it stayed down.

After we baked it, we tore into it before I realized I hadn't taken a picture of it. So, here's a picture of the part we didn't eat right away.

Whoops. My bad.

 I had so much left over that I wound up eating it for breakfast the next couple days. I figure it's better than eating ice cream for breakfast. Or candy bars. Not that I regularly eat either of them for breakfast, but the logic works well enough for me.

Beer Braised Beef with Onion Dumplings

This is the first recipe from the Beekman cookbook that we had to add to because the flavor garnered by the recipe wasn't enough.

There's two parts to this recipe: the beef stew and the onion dumplings.

I'm not a red meat eater myself, but fortunately the rest of my friends who were there are. I did eat some of the dumplings though, and they're awesome.

How the beef is cooked in this recipe here is closer to what we actually did to spice up our beef. (Not the colcannon part.)

Here's the beef after we browned it.

There it is in the pot. I'm not sure why it looks so orange. It's not that orange when you actually make it. It's more brown.

We had to add many spices to the stew. I tried some of the broth before we added things, and you could barely taste anything. I was surprised since any of the other recipes we've made were really flavorful.

The onion dumplings however, were absolutely wonderful in every way. 

Dumpling Ingredients:

6 tbsps unsalted butter, melted

1/3c finely chopped onion

1/4c buttermilk*

2 tbsps chopped fresh dill

1c flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/2c bread crumbs

*For buttermilk, I just take one cup of milk, add one tablespoon of vinegar to it, and mix it together. It works as a simple substitute.

Saute the onions in one tablespoon of the melted butter until they're tender, which should take about five minutes. Transfer this to a small bowl and stir in the buttermilk, dill, and two more tablespoons of the melted butter. 

In a medium bowl, mix together the dry ingredients except the bread crumbs. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients. Then mix until everything is moist. 

In a separate bowl, mix the remaining melted butter with the bread crumbs. Take the dumpling mixture and, using a tablespoon, create a rounded ball of the batter. Drop this is in the crumbs and roll until coated. You should make about twelve dumplings with this. 

These dumplings will be dropped in the stew while it is cooking, and they should be in there twenty minutes before you're ready to serve the stew.

Here are our dumplings in the stew.

And here everything is, all cooked and plated to be served.

So, as I said before, the beef stew needed a lot of spices to give it more flavor, but once we did, my friends seemed to really like it. 

My mom made a similar stew when I was younger, except without dumplings. Those are the best part mom, so what's up with that? Hmmm?

Not that my mom will read this. She's not exactly skilled with the internet.

Braised Fennel

I've been using a lot more fennel than I have in a long while, but I really like the flavor of it. I can't believe all of the different ways it can be used, especially since I'd never even realized it existed beyond a seed this year. (I mean, I knew the seed came from somewhere, but it never occurred to me to find out where and to see if it was edible.)

This recipe calls for us to use Pernod, but Pernod is quite expensive. It's also only sold in large bottles (at least from what I've seen), and I don't think I'm going to be using Pernod to cook all the time either. So, we substituted with Sambuca, which is fairly similar and sold in smaller bottles.

It's incredible easy to make, but if you don't like licorice, it might not be the recipe for you. Fennel has a licorice flavor, and it's only enhanced even more with the Sambuca in there.

I couldn't find the recipe online, but a similar one can be found here at The Kitchn.