Posts filed under ‘Appetizers’
Quickie App: Heirloom Tomatoes with Mozzarella

Heirloom Tomatoes with Mozarella

This was an easy appetizer we made towards the end of the summer, when delicious, ripe heirloom tomatoes were still available at our local farmers market. Why am I posting this now, when there are still snow showers in the air? Well, because I am tired of this dark and gloomy weather – it is March already, shouldn’t we be looking forward to some brightness?! This eatlovecook take on the classic Italian combination of tomatoes and mozzarella is sure to brighten up your mood and your palate instantly.

This is such a quick snack to make, and it’s one of those dishes where the taste comes purely from the ingredients, so make sure you have the best ones available. Thick slices of the sweet, succulent tomatoes get covered with a slab of fresh, soft mozzarella (buffalo would be best) and gets broiled in the toaster oven. A little salt, pepper and a quick drizzle of olive oil is all the additional flavor you’ll need – we also like a tiny piece of red pepper for texture and color on top. That’s it – throw it in the oven for a couple of mins – no fuss, no effort – just what a lazy summer day calls for!

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Veggie Thursday – Babycorn Tempura

Babycorn-Tempura

To avoid getting bored on Veggie Thursday’s, the one day in the week where I eat no meat (and to be honest, crave for on occasion), I’ve taken to experimenting with new vegetables and techniques. My endeavor for tonight was to finally use up the container of baby-corns the wifey and I had picked up on a whim a week or so ago, but had been too lazy make a Chinese dish out of as we’d originally intended. I was still not feeling like putting too much effort in to preparing them, so the answer simply was to go a little more East and prepare an easy, simple, Japanese-style tempura batter and deep fry them.

Ok, so this was a bit of an easy way out -  who doesn’t enjoy vegetables battered (the good kind involving flour and water) and deep-fried into an appetizers? But tempura-style deep frying involves no fussy seasonings and a very thin crust of batter, allowing the natural flavors of the vegetables to take the foreground. Deep frying them at a high temperature for very little time ensures a crispy exterior while keeping the amount of absorbed oil to a minimum. Just a few cracks of sea salt over the hot tempura is all the additional flavoring you need – like I said, not very fussy at all, and perfectly easy and appetizing for a tiring Thursday evening!

Babycorn has such a delicate flavor and an amazing texture – biting into the tempura add a little crunch to the rough and chewy vegetable. Corn is also a healthy, light vegetable which is available pretty much all year round around where I live, and now that I know an easy way to use up any babycorn we forget to use, it may just become a new staple around our house!

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Ridiculously easy Goat Cheese-filled Puff Pastry

Goat Cheese Pasty Shells

Puff pastry is one of the most delicious things in this world – crispy, flaky, buttery, and filled with goodness. At times when we crave the puffs but are too lazy to pull out the pastry sheets and roll them out, etc., we turn to the Pepperidge Farm puff pastry shells. And at times when we are too lazy to even whip up a quick filling for the shells, be it savory or sweet, we stick a hunk of whatever soft cheese we have on hand and end up with a deliciously decadent, ridiculously easy-to-make appetizer.

This is a simple, straightforward recipe for days when you want to just pop a couple of these in the toaster oven for a quick snack, or for when you have the oven cranked up for a day of baking and want a bonus appetizer without any extra effort. This can also stand in as a deceptively sophisticated-looking Hors d’oeuvre, and you could easily kick it up a notch by just mixing a few spices, herbs or veggies in with the cheese. Over the weekend, the wife and I just wanted to snuggle in and not do too much cooking, so we kept it simple and used up a dollop of some flavored goat-cheese that we had on hand to enjoy a hot snack on a cold Sunday night.

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Cheddar Dill Cornbread

Cornbread right out the oven

Now that I have recovered fully from two nights of gorging myself on dishes as varied as green chili fritters and sweet pumpkin pie, with only the traditional turkey being left out from the Thanksgiving celebration, I finally figured I would get back to writing about food rather than just eating it.

Even though there was no Turkey for us this year (replaced by my aunt’s wonderful Indian food, so we didn’t feel too badly) I wanted to have atleast a little hint of the traditional Turkey Day cuisine while watching football, so I made a Cheddar Dill Cornbread as one of the dishes we took to the dinner.

This has become one of wifey’s favorite dishes – and it all started with a random episode of Barefoot Contessa we watched one Saturday afternoon. The steps to put this together were so simple that once we realized that we had all the necessary ingredients needed for the bread, it took us under an hour to get the hot, crumbly, cheesy bread out of the over to warm us on a chilly Saturday evening. Perfect as a pot-luck dish, this bread works as a wonderful sponge to soak up everything from turkey gravy to the bean sauces in mexican dishes.

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Desi Chinese: Vegetable Springrolls

Desi Chinese Springrolls

Like most young couples who grew up in India, wifey and I count Desi Chinese food amongst our favorite cuisines. Despite our tastes being polar opposites in most other foods, we both share a love for most of the common desi-chinese dishes like vegetable manchurian, chicken drums of heaven, hakka noodles, and the new favorite at our weekend dinner table: vegetable springrolls.

These golden-brown crispy rolls of delicious goodness live on the delicate balance of healthy and unhealthy food – they are packed with the fibrous goodness of cabbage, carrot and onion, but are deep fried and absorb quite a bit of the oil. They work well as an appetizer for a weekend family dinner or an impressive pot-luck dish , but I warn you – they are so delicious that you will be tempted to make a bunch at a time and keep munching on them through the week.

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