#cookinginterrupted

It’s been busier than usual at my house with a lot of work travel and some big school projects. I’m still trying to cook dinners on a regular basis instead of falling back on take out or premade meals. So far I’ve been relatively successful by “MacGyvering” some of my dinners. Basically like the lead character from the television show “MacGyver” I improvise but instead of making some contraption to capture a criminal or escape a sticky situation, I use the ingredients on hand to get dinner on the table.

Let’s review my MacGyvered dinners:

First up were some enchiladas. I wanted to put together something on Sunday night that go right in the oven on Monday night. I had a left over grilled chicken breast that had previously marinated in a spicy sirracha sauce and some assorted vegetable (not so ripe tomatoes, slightly wilted green onions, and an old red bell pepper) that I wanted to use up. I figured I could dice up the chicken, roast the vegetables along with some frozen corn, mix it all together with some sour cream and cheese, and then wrap it up in tortillas. It was relatively simple to do the roasting and assembly of the enchilada while watching The Good WIfe on television and then just put them in the refrigerator until the next night. When I got home from work, I covered the enchiladas in some cheese and the smooth salsa I had in the house instead of going to the store for enchilada sauce and then baked them for about 25 minutes. The enchiladas were delicious and had the added benefit that they used up a bunch of thing in my refrigerator and saved me from going to the store.

The second MacGyverd dinner was for a recipe I’ve made in the past for Shrimp and Artichoke Linguine Alfredo.  I wanted to make this pasta as it is super easy to prepare since everything goes in the food processor and I could feed my kids some of the linguine with pasta sauce from a jar thus avoiding cooking something completely different for them. I had almost all of the ingredients for this dish but was missing the chicken broth, celery, and rosemary. I wound up replacing the celery with the white and light green parts of a leek, the chicken broth with a mix of water and vegetable broth, and the rosemary with another woody herb, thyme. Overall these swaps were not noticeable at all once the sauce was blended together and them simmered with the shrimp in it and again I was pretty pleased that I was able to make dinner without going to the store.

After a warm summer in California, it is finally cooling down enough here to turn on the oven to cook. I especially love to roast vegetables like butternut and acorn squash, carrots, parsnips, and beets. These roast vegetables can be served next to something like a roast chicken or pork or they can be combined with other ingredients to make a salad that shines as a meal all on its own. I recently tried two great salads the features roast vegetables.

The first salad I tried was a Squash, Apple and Warm Lentil Salad from the Food and Wine web site. The recipe calls for cooking dried lentils but I used the Trader Joes pre-steamed lentils instead. I just sautéed the shallots and garlic and then mixed in 2 cups of precooked lentils along with a ½ teaspoon of thyme leaves. I cooked the lentils just for a few minutes until they were warm. The roasted squash and apples were simple to make and cooked in the exact amount of time in the recipe. I wound up skipping the cloves in the spiced butter since I did not have it and added in a little powdered ginger instead. When I arranged the salad on the plate, I layered the component differently than the recipe with some lentils on the bottom, the squash, apples and lettuce in the middle and then the rest of the lentils sprinkled around. Overall the salad was delicious and a great vegetarian meal for dinner.

It’s peak tomato season right now and I’ve been looking for new ways to include them in my dinners. I recently tried out two new recipes, which in addition to incorporating tomatoes did not take too long to cook which is also helpful since it’s been hotter than usual where I live.

The first recipe I tried was Ginger Garlic Shrimp with Tomato Sauce from the Food and Wine web site. The marinade is really easy to make and the shrimp cook really quickly on the grill. The sauce takes a little longer but it is worth the effort and the while meal was done in about 30 minutes. I got most of the skin off the tomatoes before seeding and chopping them and also skipped the lemongrass in the sauce because I did not have any. Still the ginger, cilantro, and lime alone added a lot of tangy heat to the sweet tomatoes and the little bit of skin that was left was not noticeable after the simmering. I think the sauce would also be great on fish like halibut or maybe swordfish. Overall the adults at my house (including my mom who was visiting and doesn’t like anything spicy) liked this dinner.

The second recipe I tried was for Crispy Chicken Cutlets With Cherry Tomato Panzanella from the Bon Appetit web site.  I’m a big fan of panzanella which is a kind of bread tomato salad and I like the way this one incorporated both raw and cooked tomatoes. This recipe called for a bone in skin on chicken breast however I simply used a boneless chicken breast that I pounded flat and it came out very nicely. I followed the recipe and used a regular yellow onion pickled in white vinegar but next time I think I’d use a pickled shallot instead for a more mellow flavor. Again this was a great dinner that came together in about a half hour including cutting everything up and cooking. If you have any extra chicken and panzanella I recommend serving it over a bed of arugula for lunch the next day.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I love having people over for dinner in the summer. I have a table in my backyard that can seat up to 12 people (twice as many as my regular dining room table) and I find it really easy to put together a dinner with make-ahead salads and grilled entrees. A few weeks ago, I had another dinner party and tried out two new recipes, one for a salad and one for grilled shrimp.

The first recipe was for a Jicama, Radish, and Pickled Plum Salad from Bon Appetit. This salad follows the current trend of mixing together fruits with vegetables in a single dish. The salad consists of a plum sauce that is pretty simple, as it just requires simmering for 25 minutes before straining. I made the sauce the night before the party and used crushed red pepper flakes instead of gochugaru as well as leaving out the juniper berries as I did not have them. The rest of the salad prep consisted of a lot of slicing, dicing and chopping. I cut up the jicama, radishes, and cucumber the night before since I knew they would hold up and not turn brown in the refrigerator. I assembled the rest of the salad about an hour before my guests arrived so I could just pull it out when we were ready to eat. Overall the salad turned out great and all the adults and even two of the kids (not mine) ate it.

Like I mentioned in my last post, it has been really hot in Northern California so I’ve been trying to limit my cooking to outside on the grill. However since I love pasta, I’ve made a few exceptions to cook inside trying a new pasta recipe and repeating another pasta recipe with an ingredient I love.

The new recipe I tried was the Summer Pasta With Zucchini, Ricotta and Basil from the New York Times. I knew I had to try this recipe as I love ricotta (especially the fresh kind that the Whole Foods by my house carries) and it is totally zucchini season at the farmers market. This summer pasta dish is so good and cooks quickly enough that your house will not get hot. The ricotta and garlic basil paste combine into a creamy sauce coating the pasta with a bit of pop from the lemon zest. When you make this recipe you do need to be careful not to burn the finely diced onions in the first step. The recipe calls for medium high heat but I would recommend medium low or even low heat or aiming for a larger dice (maybe ½ inch pieces) so they get soft over the 5 or so minutes of cooking time. Overall this is a great dish to cook on a weeknight.

The end of June was busy for me and the weather in Northern California was really hot. So instead of trying new recipes I spent the most of the time grilling chicken and hamburgers and making simple salads for dinner. I did find a couple of great resources that I want to share that helped me improve my cooking and can help you too.

First I found this great video series called Mad Genius Tips from Food and Wine. One of the videos had a great tip for how to make the make the perfect size hamburger. A lot of the time my hamburgers come out too round like a slightly flattened tennis ball and I was considering buying a burger press to get them nice and flat until I saw this video. The tip from the video is to use two tops from deli salad containers to get your burgers the exact right size and thickness to match the bun and to keep the meat from getting warmed by the heat in your hands. I’ve tried this technique three times now and works like a charm. I was so happy I did not need to buy a burger press that I bought a fancy new digital meat thermometer instead.

The second thing I found actually all the way back in May was this comparison that the Food52 web site had done about how to store your herbs for maximum freshness. I really like to use fresh herbs in my cooking and often buy them at the farmers market since you often get a larger bunch at a lower cost there instead of at the grocery story. Food52 highlighted a few different ways to store the herbs depending on how delicate they were including storing basil out on a countertop instead of in the refrigerator and covering herbs like parsley or cilantro while storing them in water in the refrigerator. I followed all the suggestions and was able to keep parsley for almost 4 weeks in the refrigerator and basil on my countertop for over 2 weeks.

About two months ago I got an unexpected package in the mail with this cookbook in it. My college roommate and best friend had been to the bakery and liked it so much that she sent me the cookbook as a surprise. The cookbook is full of amazing baked good that your grandma would make but each recipe has an ingredient like buttermilk, sour cream, and even coffee to give the cakes and cookies more flavor. I've made a few recipes from the book and they've all been very popular.

The first recipe I made was for a Hummingbird Cake. I'd never heard of this type of cake before but the recipe called for two ingredients I was trying to use up: pecans and ripe bananas. I skipped the mace in the recipe since I did not have it and felt that 1/2 a teaspoon would not make a material difference in the final cake. The recipe is very easy to make as it just requires a lot of mixing and results in a cake that is kind of like a moister, more flavorful banana cake thanks to the addition of the pineapple. I also made the cream cheese frosting from scratch which was very simple and much better that canned cream cheese frosting. I took the final cake to my office to share with my coworkers who loved it.

The second recipe I made was a Chocolate Heaven Cake with Chocolate Buttercream frosting. I also made this cake for a coworker who had helped me out a lot and who loves chocolate. Again the recipe is fairly simple to mix up. It has 2 cups of freshly brewed coffee in it to give it another dimension of flavor. Again I decided to make the chocolate frosting from scratch instead of cheating and using pre-made frosting and decorated the cake with a ring of sprinkles around the edge of it. The final cake had an amazing flavor and was finished off by the end of the day.

Some people may think it is weird to have sandwiches for dinner. That dinner should only be a composed meal of somethinglike chicken breast, steak or other entrée style meat with one or twoaccompanying side dishes or maybe an elaborate bowl of pasta or complex salad. WhileI love all of those things, I think sandwiches for dinner are great since they can be rather filling and even a meal in themselves depending on how many vegetables are included in them. In face the only downside to sandwiches is that they are hard to photograph to show all the great things that are in them.

 Here are two sandwich recipes that I think are great for dinner.

The first recipe is for a Curried Chicken Sandwich from Bon Appetit. This sandwich has a nice contrast between the moist chicken with the very crunchy slaw. It is great for a weeknight meal since you can get your chicken set up in the brine and prep the fennel-celery slaw the night before you want to eat it. I skipped the celery seeds in the slaw as I did not have them but I think I would get them next time to punch up the flavor. I liked the slaw but it does makes more than you really need for the sandwiches so you could either cut it in half or make the full amount and eat the leftovers separately with another meal. The recipe calls for grilling the chicken but I could also see broiling it if you didn’t want to be outside grilling say like in the winter. If you have leftover buttermilk after making the brine, check out my recipe suggestions to use it up.