Black Gold: Summer Salad for a Fish Taco Feast

Recently a friend added me to a facebook group: Friends who Cook. Last night I tried my first recipe from the group -- I liked the tagline, "Black Gold: Addictive AND Healthy."

Black Gold

Ingredients:
1/3 cup fresh lime juice (about 2 limes, squeezed)
1/2 cup olive oil
1-2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 t. salt
1/4 t. ground cayenne pepper
1 (15 oz.) cans black beans, rinsed
10 oz. bag of frozen corn or corn cut off 3 cobs (cooked)
1 1/2 red bell peppers, chopped
2 tomatoes, chopped
6 green onions, chopped
1/2 -1 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

Directions:
1. Place lime juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and cayenne pepper in a small jar. Cover with lid and shake until ingredients are well mixed.
2. In a salad bowl, combine beans, corn, avocado, bell pepper, tomatoes, green onions, and cilantro. Shake lime dressing and pour it over the salad. Stir salad to coat vegetables and beans with dressing and serve (or refrigerate for an hour or two before serving to allow the flavors to blend).

I went ahead and made the salad about 1 1/2 hours in advance. Pretty yummy, but especially because we took it as our contribution to a fish taco feast at our friends' house. I need to get that recipe -- they grilled rubbed swordfish and the corn tortillas, and spread a spiced mayonnaise on the tortilla, added a cabbage slaw and the fish -- fantastic. 

Tuna Chickpea Pasta Salad

My friends invited us to stop by at a cookout they were having to celebrate their new (and newly renovated) home in West Mount Airy. I was excited to go, but the "potluck" aspect stopped me -- in the middle of painting jobs and reading and cleaning and so on, did I have time to throw something together? I really didn't want to spend too much time going to the store. On the other hand, I always want to show up with something yummy to share.

I looked in the cupboard and found two cans of tuna in olive oil, two cans of chick peas, and a box of orecchiete. Voilà.

Pasta Salad On-The-Fly

1 box any pasta, 16 oz.
2 cans of tuna in olive oil
2 15 oz. cans of chick peas
1/2 - 1 cup sweet or red onion, diced
1 pint of cherry or grape tomatoes, sliced in half
4 T. olive oil
4 T. (or more) lemon juice
2-4 T. flat leaf parsley, chopped finely (or as much as you have -- I have a pot of herbs outside and harvested as much as was ready)
salt and black pepper to taste

This makes a LOT: good for a potluck, to leave some with the hosts who will not want to make lunch the next day after cleaning up, and to take some home. Unless no one else brings anything to the potluck, in which case it should feed a crowd. (You can also make just half a recipe, which works just fine if you have the right bowl to present it in!)

The Perfect *Ricotta* Cheesecake

Okay, so I've perfected my summer cheesecake: light and fluffy, AND I get to use Uncle Roland's zester, AND it helps to have access to my 9" springform pan (and to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods for the ginger snap cookies -- though I imagine any cookies would do).

In short:

Lemon Ricotta Cheesecake with Ginger Snap Crust

Take about 2 cups of crushed ginger snaps and pulse them in a Cuisinart with about 6 T. melted butter. Press into a greased 9" springform pan and preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

5 eggs, separated
2 8 oz. pkgs of cream cheese
1 15 oz. container of ricotta
grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
2/3 cup sugar
1 T. flour.

Beat the egg yolks until light with a mixer or in the Kitchenaid mixer; add cheeses, lemon zest juice, and 2/3 c. sugar and beat until smooth. Pour out into another bowl and stir the flour in with a spoon. Wash the bowl and whisk up the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold them into the cheese mixture (with a rubber spatula). Turn the batter into the pan and place pan in a baking dish large enough to hold it comfortably. Add as much warm water as you can to the larger pan; you're baking the cheesecake in a water bath. Transfer carefully to the preheated oven and bak until the cake is just set and very lightly browned, about an hour.

NOTE: This summer I have used my cast iron frying pan for the water bath, which has worked brilliantly.

Turn the oven off, take the cheesecake out of the water bath, and return to the oven to cool for 30 minutes to an hour. Then cool on a rack and refrigerate until well-chilled before slicing and serving. (Unless your family is too impatient. Then explain to them as they are eating how much better it will taste on the next day.)

No huge innovations here -- I am happy with the ricotta substitution and increasing the eggs to 5, which makes the cake light and high, and I've adjusted the crust to get the right proportions. This might be yummy with ginger instead of lemon in the cheesecake -- I'll try that this autumn.

For Tucker and Kayty -- enjoy!

Everyone's into Quinoa: Corn, Feta & Quinoa Salad

Corn, Feta and Quinoa Salad

Adapted from an adaptation from Everyday with Rachel Ray 

Rachel Ray has become a part of our household – though we did not invite her in. I think I must have accidentally not unclicked some checkbox on some internet site I was exploring—and the next thing you know, we are getting Everyday with Rachel Ray in the mail every month. If I get to it first, I try to recycle immediately, but my daughter insists—and I’m sure she is right!—that there are good recipes to be explored if we just take the time. She stacks the magazines up in a corner of my study, or in her own room, and she’ll probably get to them. Eventually.

In the meantime, I was searching for a recipe for a salad using quinoa, and came upon a blog with a recipe (Corn, Feta, and Quinoa Salad) that had been adapted from that very magazine—an issue which I’m sure is sitting around our house somewhere. We had some friends over for dinner and I adapted it some more myself—in part because whenever we have people over in July it is always beastly hot and better to have done the cooking in the early part of the day. In fact, the evening turned out to be lovely—but this was a delicious complement to the bluefish Steve grilled (and the peach salsa I made as a garnish).

2 cups quinoa, cooked (I used multi-colored)

1 large can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

4 T olive oil

4 T rice wine vinegar

4 T lemon juice

salt and pepper to taste

1/2 - 1 cup basil leaves, julienned

1 cup corn kernels (2 ears of corn)

12 oz. feta cheese, cubed (I quadrupled this from the original recipe -- and my son thought the only thing lacking in the salad was "more feta")

salad greens

Toss quinoa, chickpeas, basil, corn and feta together. In a separate bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Drizzle over the quinoa mixture and refrigerate. Serve chilled or room temperature over salad greens. Yum!

Cheesecake in July

It is almost impossible to bake in the summertime. We don't have whole house air conditioning, and besides, I refuse to heat the house from the inside while it's heating from the outside!

But this summer (so far) has been fairly lovely, and so on Saturday I ventured to bake a cheesecake. Anyone following this blog knows that I have declared the "perfect cheesecake" not once, but twice in recent months. And yet...

Lemon Cheesecake with Ricotta
(on the right is my personal recipe file project, still ongoing!)

Apparently, I need to fiddle with perfection. This weekend I made Mark Bittman's Lemon Cheesecake, but with twists. For the crust, I used Trader Joe's Triple Ginger Cookies (yum!). This was brilliant, a nice change from a straight graham cracker crust. The other innovation was to substitute ricotta for some of the cream cheese -- I used 15 oz. of whole milk ricotta with two 8 oz. packages of cream cheese. I didn't adjust the eggs, and perhaps I might have, but the happy noises coming out of my family's mouths last night confirmed that the ricotta added a certain lightness to the cheesecake. Again, yum.

The best part about cooking and baking, though, beyond the taste sensations exploding in the mouth, is the effort that goes into it. The same day I made a Quinoa Corn Feta salad (adapted from Rachel Ray) and a peach salsa for the bluefish we were grilling, and all that chopping and stirring was positively therapeutic.

Most importantly, for the cheesecake I needed lemon juice AND lemon rind. I walked down to the corner to buy the lemons at our bodega (a nice feature of city life), and then I rifled the drawers looking for my lemon zester.

I don't have a lemon zester in my other kitchen, so only in summer can I replay in my head that scene in the Brooklyn apartment of one of our favorite relatives. "A zester!" I exclaim. "I've always wanted a zester!" "Here, take it," says Uncle Roland. "No, really, I couldn't!" I retort, embarrassed. "Seriously, I've only used it once or twice myself. Take it, and you'll think of me when you use it."

How great is that for a dessert in mid-July? This recipe brought together creativity, fresh ingredients, the convenience of life in the city, the fun and precision of separating eggs, measuring and mixing, plus a chance to use my lemon zester and think about its provenance. Not bad for an experience -- and at the end there was cheesecake.

Thanks, Roland.

The Perfect Brownie

For years I have collected brownie recipes -- copied out of cookbooks, cut from newspapers, and so on, in search of the perfect brownie. Every brownie I make is too dry, or too cakey. In despair, I have purchased brownie mixes. My friend Jennifer expressed her disdain -- how could I, the queen of home baking, use a brownie mix? So sometimes I make Texas Brownies (Sue Kearney's recipe, with sour cream), very yummy, but that's a different treat entirely. (I'll post the recipe next time I make it -- great for a crowd. Requires corn syrup for the icing, though!)

Then last year I was at my sister's house and she had baked brownies for her husband's birthday. O my god. They were delicious!! And she said: "Why haven't you been making Foster's Brownies?"

I would have, really, if I had known they existed!

The recipe makes A LOT of brownies, so it's good to cut it in half. The key, though, is to manage the baking time. If you bake them too long, they are delicious, but too dry. If you manage just right, then someone in your family might say, like my son did yesterday: "There have been far too many cookies in this house over the years, and not nearly enough brownies."

Even a little piece deserves its own plate.

Here's the "modified" version (i.e. approximately a half recipe, but with my own tweaks).

Foster's Brownies

1 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder*
1/2 t. salt
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar (reduced)
2 sticks unsalted butter, melted
1 T. vanilla
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (optional)
2 cups (12 oz.) semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 325.
Lightly grease and flour a 9 x 13" pan (glass is fine). Set aside.
Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt in a bowl and stir to mix. Set aside.
Cream together the eggs, sugar, butter and vanilla in a separate bowl with an electric mixer until well blended.
Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix just until all the dry ingredients are moist and blended. Do not overmix.
Fold in the walnuts (if using) and chocolate chips and stir to blend. Spread the batter evenly in the prepared pan.
Bake 25-30 minutes. They should be slightly soft in the center when tested with a toothpick. Remove from oven and cool 30 minutes before cutting.
Cut into 2 1/2 by 3 inch bars (for a smaller brownie, cut the bar in half down the center or on the diagonal.)

* I usually use Ghirardelli's chocolate or Ah!laska brand, but I was lured at the Freshgrocer (which had neither of my preferred brands) to purchase Hershey's "Special Dark Blend of Natural and Dutched Cocoas." Yum. It really is darker than most cocoas, and the contrast with the Ghirardelli chips was awesome. (I admit, I used twice as many chips as the original recipe called for. But at least I left out the walnuts!)

Of course, AH!LASKA is organic, fat free, and kosher, the first such cocoa on the market. See all about it here.

Blueberry Buckle: The Recipe

So I thought somehow that the photo of my recipe book would be legible to anyone interested, and it seems that it was not.

Here's the recipe I used:

Blueberry Buckle

1/2 c. shortening (I used unsalted butter, softened)
1/2 c. sugar (not reduced as per my usual)
1 well-beaten egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1/2 c. milk
2 cups fresh blueberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (325 if using glass pan). Grease a 11 1/2 x 7 inch pan. (9x13 is okay, but the buckle will not "buckle"...)

Thoroughly cream shortening and sugar. Add egg and mix well. Sift flour, baking powder and salt; add to creamed mixture alternately with milk. Pour into well-greased pan (pour?!? the consistency of my batter had me "patting" the dough into the pan). Top with blueberries. Sprinkle "Cinnamon Crumbs" (a.k.a. streusel) over blueberries. Bake 45-50 minutes or until done (possibly less if you're using a larger pan).

Cinnamon Crumbs: Mix 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (okay, I used 1 t.). Cut in 1/4 c. unsalted butter until crumbly.

Here's what it looked like before baking, in a 9x13" glass pan.

The after picture is here.

This was delicious, especially when warm and topped with fresh whipped cream. Next time I will try to make the "crumbs" more crumby (maybe the kitchen was too warm and so the streusel effect was lost?) and try a smaller pan (perhaps a 9 or 10" square metal pan?) to get the effect of "buckling" from the cinnamon layer, now that I know why it is called a Buckle. My friend who lives in Georgia recommends mixing up the fruit -- she uses blueberries and nectarines. Could one do blueberries and pomegranate seeds, or would that be too crazy?