As the temperature is firmly in the 80s around here, comes the realization the summer is well and truly upon us. And what better way to celebrate summer sunday’s that with those old-fashioned childhood treats of icecream sundae’s (get it?). While ice cream tastes great during any season, sundaes work best during summer, when the ice cream melts quickly but the addition of a few other select accouterments go a long way towards dragging out the dessert into a delicious meal-ender.

For my first sundae of the season, I chose to keep it simple – because, like with most things in life, sundaes are best when kept simple. Throw on too many ingredients and you lose the essence of this wonderful melding of flavors. So start with your favorite ice cream flavor (or 3, if you really must), add some textured toppings, and a sauce of some sort to bring it all in together – and voila, a perfect sundae. Here, I used vanilla icecream which really is the best base for all kinds of sundae toppings – and complemented it with some of my homemade ganache and some toasted walnuts. Done.

The ganache adds a silky, smooth, warm touch to the cold, classic flavors of the vanilla, while the toasted walnuts (simply heated in the toaster over for a couple of mins) add a crunchiness that works wonders with the softness of the overall dessert. Walnuts also have a subtle, nutty flavor which I really like with chocolate – it adds a bottom note to the sauce without overpowering it like pecans would, for example.

Enjoy the summer, enjoy the ice cream, and there will be other ice cream sunday’s to follow, I am sure!

This will be a quick post, in honor of the food item the post describes – scrambled eggs. They are one of the best breakfast items – short, quick and easy to make. They are much more forgiving than an omelet (a broken omelet being very easy  to transform to scrambled eggs, ofcourse!), and equally customization. All you need is a saute pan, some butter or olive oil, eggs, and whatever other meats or vegetables you want to add in to the eggs.

Scrambled eggs with onions, peppers and bacon is a classic breakfast item in countless diners across the country; I decided to switch it up a bit by using Pastrami for bacon – it retained the salty punch of the bacon in the dish, but also added a nice dollop of the cured-meat flavor to the eggs.

THE RECIPE: Scrambled Eggs with Green Peppers and Bacon

You’ll Need:

• 4-5 slices of good deli pastrami, chopped into pieces
• 1 big onion, sliced
• 1 big Green pepper, diced
• 4 eggs
• 1 tbslp milk or cream
• 1 tbslp olive oil or butter
• Salt and pepper to taste

The Method:

• Heat the oil or butter in a saute pan on medium heat.
• Add in the pastrami and cook till slightly browned (about 3-4 mins) – you can leave for a few more mins if you want it cripsy, just make sure you keep moving it around or lower the heat so it doesnt burn.
• Add in the vegetables and cook an additional 5 mins till the peppers are tender. Add a little more oil as needed to ensure the meat doesnt stick to the bottom of the pan.
• Separately, break the eggs into a bowl, add in the milk and whisk till frothy
• Once vegetables are cooked, add in the egg mixture and gently move around to distribute the meat and vegetables
• Allow the eggs to set for a couple of minutes. Then, gently break them up and stir around the pan till they reach the level of doneness you desire. I usually let them go for 2-3 mins more as I don’t like my eggs too soft.

I love pizza, but I have become something of a pizza snob recently – I’ve tried most of the home delivery options available and they are, to put it kindly, eatable maybe once an year. There is definitely some good pizza to be had in little restaurants and pizza places all over New York, ofcourse – but for days when we are just looking to stay home I and have a pizza nothing but my own home-made pie will do.

For days when I don’t have a ball of pizza dough waiting for me in the freezer, I’ve come up with a way to get the same thin-crust crunch and cheesy goodness that a pizza provides – Pizzettes (or tartlettes, or flat mini pizzas, or whatever you want to call them) made from good old Puff Pastry sheets! We always have some sheets lying around in the freezer – and these little pizzette are so easy to put together individually that they can be customized to whatever toppings we are in the mood for.

Last night, we had frozen corn and broccoli on hand -  the wife just wanted corn whereas I went in for more texture and nutrition and piled on the broccoli. We just thawed the veggies in the microwave, used some regular tomato ketchup as a pizza sauce, roughly cut the mozzarella and baked these individually in the toaster over. Talk about an easy-going dinner – no fuss, no hassle and ready in a few mins with minimal clean up - wonderfully easy for a Thursday night!

THE RECIPE: PUFF PASTRY PIZZETTES with Broccoli and Corn

YOU’LL NEED:

• A few sheets of Puff Pastry – thawed per instructions on the package, makes 4 pizzettes if you use the regular Pepperidge farm versions
• 1/2 cup of frozen corn and broccoli, thawed in the microwave
• 4 tblsp tomato ketchup
• Fresh Mozzarella cheese, sliced or shredded

THE METHOD:

• Pre-heat the toaster oven to 450 deg F
• Roll out the puff pastry sheets into a rectangle, and divide into four mini-rectangles
• Roll out each mini pizzette into the desired thinness – you want to leave them slightly thick if you want more toppings on them
• Fold each edge about an inch thick for each of the pizzettes, and seal the edges by using the tines of a fork and press the corners down into the dough.
• spread about a tbslp of the ketchup on each pizzette, taking care to stay within the folded edges.
• Spread with the thawed veggies and cover with shards of the cheese.
• Toast individually (or two per cycle if you have the space) in the toaster over at 450 for 10 mins or so till the cheese bubbles

I am a big fan of having eggs for breakfast – they are easy to eat, fill you up with a nice dose of protein, and are damn tasty in whatever form you choose to have them – half-boiled with a pinch of salt, omelets, or heuvos rancheros if u’re feeling frisky. An egg salad, however, often gets treated as a lunch – but lately I’ve been making a simple version of it that really hits the spot for breakfast and almost makes me wake up a few mins early just to enjoy it in peace.

Using celery adds a nice crunch to the salad, and I add a nice dollop of dijon mustard to punch up the flavor. Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper round out the flavorings -  eggs and mayo being the building blocks that make up this really easy to put-together recipe. Eat it by itself for breakfast (great cold out of the fridge), or if you really want you can make a lunch of it by bringing it to room temp and sticking it between some deli flats.

THE RECIPE:

YOU’LL NEED:

• 4 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
• 1 rib of celery, chopped
• 1 tbsp Dijon Mustard
• 2 tbsp low-fat mayonnaise
• fresh cracked sea salt and black pepper, to taste

THE METHOD:

• Mix all ingredients together and store in a container in the fridge. That’s it, that simple!

There is a Subway outlet right below my apartment building, and when I first moved in here (which was the first time I’ve lived by myself, away from family), it became my source of sustenance for a few weeks till I learnt to cook for myself. I convinced myself that it was a cheap and healthy way to eat out, loading my sub with veggies and taking advantage of half-priced footlong deals (this was before the ubiquitous $5 footlong was introduced).

One of my favorites used to be the pastrami sub; I’d never eaten Pastrami before, and started really enjoying the delicious flavor of the thin slivers of meat. Honey mustard sauce was my condiment of choice, cheddar my cheese and pile on the cucumbers and onions. I miss those sub nights, so I’ve started building my own pastrami sub – its is much cheaper, I get to use my choice of bread, and use much tastier, fresher, deli pastrami instead.

I kept the building blocks the same – cheddar cheese to top the pastrami with, cucumbers and tomatoes to go with the meat, along with a few leaves of spinach nestled under the pastrami, and a nice dollop of store-bought honey mustard sauce. Fresh whole wheat kaiser rolls from the neighborhood bakery worked best; they were hearty and thick enough to handle extra slices and all the veggies without disintegrating into a wet mess that normal sandwich rolls would. A couple of minutes under the broiler  (open-faced to melt the cheese), adding in the veggies and my better-than-Subway Pastrami sandwich was ready to be devoured! (Minus the Jared guilt trips!)

THE RECIPE: HEARTY PASTRAMI on KAISER ROLLS

YOU’LL NEED:

• 1 whole wheat kasier roll (or bulkie roll)
• 5-6 thin slices of fresh deli pastrami
• 1 large slice of cheddar cheese
• 4-5 baby spinach leaves
• 3 cucumber slices
• 3 tomato slices
• few onion slices if desired
• 1 tbspn honey mustard sauce

THE METHOD:

• On bottom half of the roll, place spinach leaves and top with pastrami slices
• Top pastrami with cheddar slices
• Place both halves in toaster over and broil till cheese melts (couple of mins)
• Remove onto plate; on top half, spread honey mustard sauce and top with vegetable slices
• Combine halves, press hard to compact sandwich and devour.

Perfect Pastrami indeed

]]> http://eatlovecook.com/2010/02/hearty-pastrami/feed/ 0 http://eatlovecook.com/2010/02/roasted-butternut-squash/ http://eatlovecook.com/2010/02/roasted-butternut-squash/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:35:04 +0000 keviv http://eatlovecook.com/?p=264 Roasting butternut squash with brown sugar and olive oil helps intensify the sweetness and result in a light, warm vegetable side-dish for winter.]]>

One of the tastiest and easiest ways to get a quick side of veggies prepared is to roast them, as I’ve written about before. This is especially true for vegetables that have a nice, sweet flavor of their own, like the ubiquitous butternut squash, which has lately been bandied about in food magazines and TV shows as the perfect winter vegetable. Roasted butternut squash, which you can thrown in to the oven without much of a fuss as you go about your other baking, added a perfectly light side of vegetables to my Thursday dinner; I can also see it being a good complement to heavier meat dishes like tandoori chicken or a roast loin of pork. Plus, this is a veggie that is chockful of vitamins and minerals that will help you brave the chill.

The butternut squash has a subtle flavor reminiscent of pumpkin (and from what I read, it treated interchangeably with a pumpkin Down Under), which gets concentrated through a nice long roast in the oven. To intensify the sweetness and to get a nice caramelized exterior, I tossed the cut cubes with some olive oil (side-stepping the melted butter a lot of the recipes called for) and brown sugar – this resulted in a lovely golden brown char on a few pieces and infused the vegetables with a gentle, warm sweetness.

Don’t be intimidated by this bulbous vegetable with tough skin; with a sharp knife and a sturdy cutting board, it is quite easy to cube into pieces. A strong vegetable peeler is needed to remove the tough skin (I cut the squash into flat quarters first, scoop out the insides, peel the skin and then cube them); however, the long roasting time ensures that you can leave the skin on if you like – I couldn’t tell the difference between pieces I left the skin on and the ones I removed it for after the roasting was done. Or, you could just bypass all this and pick up a bag of pre-cut cubes of the squash that are increasingly available at a wide range of grocers!

THE RECIPE:

YOU’LL NEED:

• 1 butternut squash, cubed into 1-inch pieces
• 2 tbslp extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tbslp brown sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper (optional, if you want some heat)

THE RECIPE:

• Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees F
• Toss squash cubes with salt, olive oil and brown sugar (and pepper if using), ensuring the pieces are evening coated with all ingredients
• Use a large-enough baking dish to ensure all pieces are spread in one layer; line with foil and put in the squash mixture.
• Bake for 40 mins and serve warm.

Go to any personal finance sites or blogs over the past year, and one of the ‘tips’ you are sure to find ‘brown bag lunches’ as one of the first mentioned in saving some extra dough every year. I figured out that packing lunch at home rather than wasting $5 for insipid cafeteria food was an easy way to leave myself with some extra cash after a few months of graduating – though at that time, I relied on mostly rice and curry to lunch on.

I soon found however that one cannot subsist on the typical Indian lunches alone; you get bored and may get tempted to just eat out for a few days. So I learnt to mix up my lunches, taking a variety of wraps, sandwiches, pastas and leftovers from dinner – it made planning for a week of lunches fun, and made me actually look forward to unpacking my brown bag on most days!

One of the easiest lunches to take are wraps; a wide variety of filling work well when rolled up along with a few greens within a pliable wrap, and for the most part you can pre-assemble them the night before or even a few days before.  If you are lucky and have access to a toaster oven at work, you can warm up your wrap ahead of lunch and snicker at suckers paying top dollar for cold / stale / over-sodiumed wraps at the cafeteria. Our old floor at work had a beat up old oven that worked well enough for me to crisp up hummus wraps or tuna sandwiches. A few months ago we moved in to a brand new floor with  luxurious wooden paneling, fancy paintings, a huge kitchen area, 3 microwaves but alas, no toaster oven! So I had to come up with a filling that would taste great cold or at room-temperature – and nothing fit the bill better than a  spicy, smooth curried chicken salad.

Curried chicken salad for me was an accidental invention (I have since discovered that a lot of the TV chefs have their own version). I started off with a traditional turkey waldorf salad recipe, but found it too bland for me. So the next time I had some roasted chicken at hand, I decided to mix it with curry powder; I used desi golden raisins instead of the dark brown Sunkist ones, and substituted cashew pieces for the walnuts since I had those on hand. I omitted the apples, as the salad had enough sweetness from the raisins, and added some cilantro leaves for garnish. I used low-fat mayo to cut down the richness and let the curry flavor come through.

The chunky salad was excellent between burger buns or as a quick snack by itself. However, when I tried to use it within wraps the chicken pieces kept sliding out and led to pretty messy fingers – not what I was looking for at lunch. The solution was simple – use the food processor to make a thick paste out of the chicken, mayo and curry seasonings, and then mix in the cashews and raisins for added texture. Some fresh spinach leaves added color to the wrap, and the chicken paste ensure a stay-in-place wrap filling. You can pre-assemble the wrap the night before and wrap in foil (I cut the wrap in half after wrapping with foil, so I have two easy–to-eat halves); you can toast the tortilla’s ahead of assembling if you prefer a more toasty flavor.

THE RECIPE:

YOU’LL NEED:

• 1 cooked chicken breast, chopped
• 2 tbslp medium curry powder (spicy/mild can be used depending on your taste preference)
• 1-2 tblsp low-fat mayonnaise
• 1tsp ground cumin
• 1tsp garlic powder
• 2tsp salt
• 1tsp black pepper
• 2tbslp golden raisins
• 2tbslp cashews, chopped and toasted
• Few fresh cilantro leaves (optional)
• Fresh baby spinach leaves
• Whole wheat wraps

THE METHOD:

• Place chicken pieces, mayo, curry powder, cumin, garlic powder, salt and pepper into food processor; process till smooth.
• Empty the chicken paste into a bowl, and mix in cashew pieces and raisins.
• Toast wraps for a few seconds if desired.
• For each wrap, use about 4-5 spinach leaves and 1-2tbslp of the chicken salad (depending on the size, thickness of your wraps).
• Roll up wraps and use toothpicks to secure if needed.
• Cover in foil, and cut into halves.

The end of Superbowl Sunday marks the beginning of a couple of dreary, cold, dark winter months – February and March continue to be cold in Jersey, with no sports to look forward to till the April NFL draft and no warm weather to look forward to till spring. So to cheer myself up, I’ve started treating myself to a weekend soda-pop treat – orange creamsicle sodas. The bright orange color and fizziness of the drinks offer a wonderfully zesty alternative to the snow and cold outside, and they are a cinch to make so you can enjoy them on a moments notice.

Get yourself some orange-flavored soda (I prefer Fanta, but Crush is easier to find around here), some heave cream, and a tall glass – that’s all you’ll need. The creaminess of the drink is balanced by the sweet, orangey fizz of the soda – and the white foam that forms magically on top is a thing of beauty to look at, and also offers a nice head comparable to some of the best draughts. Sit back, sip your creamiscle soda and wait for the warmer days of spring (and add a peg or two of vodka if you need a little more cheer!)

THE RECIPE: ORANGE CREAMSICLE SODA:

YOU’LL NEED:

• Store-bought Orange Soda, chilled
• Heave Cream

THE METHOD:

• In the bottom of a tall glass, put in 1/8 cup of cream (adjust according to taste)
• top glass with cold orange soda
• Mix gently with spoon without disturbing the foam head.

Sometimes you want the taste of pizza without going through all the effort of getting a pizza crust ready, crank up the oven, load up the pies and wait for the piping hot pizzas. And sometimes, you have some left-over pizza sauce you need to use up, some veggies about to go bad, and some cooked chicken that you’ll too lazy to make chicken salad from. On those days, using deli-flats and the toaster oven to pull all these ingredients together into mini pizza-type ‘pizzettes’ is the perfect answer to getting a quick pie fix.

Deli-flats (we get the Whole Grain Pepperidge Farm version at our local mart) are 100-calorie flat breads cut in rounds – you can use them for putting together some healthy sandwiches, or use each half of the flats as a base for these pizzettes. The recipe is customizable to whatever odds and ends you have left in your fridge, and any cheese you throw on there will work – just make sure you broil them enough to melt the cheese fully to get a nice pizza taste. They make a great dinner along with some soup, or for a weekend lunch.

THE RECIPE: DELI-FLAT PIZZETTES

YOU’LL NEED:

• A packet of Deli flats (thin rolls)
• Some pizza-sauce (homemade or store bought)
• Few sliced or chopped vegetables (I like green pepper and onions)
• A bit of cooked chicken breast (roasted will do just fine)
• Mozzarella cheese to top – sliced or shredded (Cheddar or other quick melting will work too)

THE METHOD:

• Turn toaster oven to broil.
• On each half of the deli flats, spread about a tblsp of pizza sauce
• Layer on a few chopped veggies and chicken; do not overload the toppings, this is after all a mini-pie
• Top with cheese (if using both cheddar and mozzarella, sprinkle cheddar under mozzarella)
• Working in batches (depending on the size of your toaster oven), put in each pizzette in the toaster oven and broil till cheese is melted and bubbling.

No recipe for tonight – just a simple ode to one of my favorite home cooked meals of all time – fried chicken and waffles. I have never been ‘down south’, but given my love for most southern dishes, I feel like I’d fit right in down in Savannah! Shrimp and grits, buttermilk biscuits, peach cobblers, and ofcourse fried chicken with waffles  – as the song goes, these are a few of my faaavotire things!

Fried chicken with waffles is just one of those perfectly balanced food pairings that offer such a delightful contrasts of tastes and textures- sweet and savory, crispy and soft, tender and with a bite. The dark golden skin of the chicken pairs with the light brown waffle to present some form of a foodie yin and yang – yes, my friends, the first time I savored these two items together in one place, at a now defunct hole-in-the-wall in St.Mark’s Place, the experience was nothing short of religious.

This is also the perfect home-cooked meal to provide some much needed comfort during the long cold winter days; I usually make this for Sunday brunch before I curl up on the couch for an 8 hour football marathon. I’ll post the recipes individually for these somewhere along the line, but just know that nothing is easier that throwing in some chicken pieces to fry while you whip up a batch of whichever waffles you want – I like something hearty with this like my Wheatgerm Waffles.

Making this at home lets you control the greasiness of the chicken, and ensure your waffles are healthy enough to make this sinful Southern Treat almost good for you! You can make the chicken however you want – the traditional buttermilk-fried variety, or my favorite – spicy cajun style. Drizzle on some warm maple syrup onto the waffles, allow some of the syrup to coat the chicken, grab a bottle (or three) of your favorite brew and settle down for some crispy, crunchy, sweet and delicious taste nirvana….you might love the dish so much you may just start talking with a twang!