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Posts Tagged ‘quickie’

Watermelon is a terrific fruit to keep in the fridge as we head in to the warmer months. The fruit is loaded with enough water (duh!) to act as a wonderful hydrant, while providing you with enough fiber and other fruity goodness. The fruit is pretty sweet all through the year – you just have to pick a dark red fruit which feels heavy for its size.

Watermelon is also wonderful as a stand-alone dessert, since its subtle sweetness stands up well to a variety of add-ins and seasonings. The wifey loves her watermelons sprinkled with some salt and pepper; if the fruit is not as sweet as you like, you can always add in some sugar. My favorite add-ins are some freshly grated ginger and some lemon juice. The watermelon cubes can be stored in the fridge for up to a week this way, and are delicious eaten straight out as a cold treat.

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Filed under Dessert, Quick and Easy

Posted on April 14th, 2010 |

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Quickie Cooking – Puff Pastry Pizzette with Broccoli and Corn

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.

♥ Continue reading Quickie Cooking – Puff Pastry Pizzette with Broccoli and Corn

Filed under American, Dinner, Quick and Easy

Posted on April 2nd, 2010 |

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Sunday breakfast: Manchurian Maggi

As anyone who has grown up in India over the past few decades will tell you, Maggi noodles are one of the most craved breakfast items on weekends. The promise of ’2-minute’ cooking was a boon to the Indian mom’s who had to feed hungry tots in a hurry; I truly believe these instant-cook noodles were the initiator of the fast food industry to desi households. And the genius behind the noodles was the flavor packets included with each – with flavors well suited to the Indian palate. Plus, the marketing campaign to include stamps in the packets for an year was brilliant – like with me, I’m sure philately was introduced as a hobby to many Indian kids as a result of this promotion.

Masala was the ubiquitous flavor as I was growing up, but there were various other flavors introduced along the way. The green capsicum was my personal favorite (didn’t hurt that I found some ‘rare’ bird stamps in those packets!), but chicken was always around, and I think Shrimp was introduced at some point also (and pulled back in a couple of years, apparently the instant craze didnt extend to seafood). I remember getting up on Sundays excited to get started watching the Jungle Book and other Sunday cartoons, while my mom got a steaming hot bowl of Maggi ready for me – what a treat!

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Filed under Breakfast, Chinese, Quick and Easy

Posted on March 7th, 2010 |

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Quickie App: Heirloom Tomatoes with Mozzarella

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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Filed under Appetizers, Italian, Quick and Easy

Posted on March 2nd, 2010 |

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Veggie Thursday – Roasted Butternut Squash

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.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 18th, 2010 |

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Looking to spring: Orange Creamsicle Soda

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!)

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Filed under American, Beverages, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 10th, 2010 |

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Quick and Easy: Deli-Flat Pizzettes

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.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 5th, 2010 |

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Quickie Cooking: Turkey Pastrami on Ciabatta

As promised, here is the recipe for using the NewZealand Cheddar I wrote about yesterday in a quick sandwich. To be honest, the sandwich is so quick and easy to put together that it hardly qualifies as a recipe – but then again, that is what sandwiches are intended to be, aren’t they? A quick and easy meal to put together, especially for lunch on a weekend when you’ve already had a heavy breakfast and need just a small snack to hold you over till dinner.

I am also a firm believer that if you use good quality ingredients, you don’t need a whole lot more to gussy up your meals, especially something that involves no cooking and just merely assembling the ingredients, like sandwiches. For this sandwich, I used organic ciabatta bread from Whole Foods, turkey pastrami from my local deli, and the cheddar – that’s it. A few slices of the pastrami, topped with a couple of slivers of the cheese , thrown into the toaster over for a few mins to warm up and melt the cheese, and viola, my light lunch was ready! The fresh bread crisped up beautifully, and as you can see from the picture, the slices were nice and airy enough to ensure the base didn’t overwhelm the fillings. The cheese added a nice tangy undertaste to the meaty pastrami while allowing the smokiness of the turkey meat to shine through.

If you have your ciabatta sliced thin like I did, you can use this to serve up some nice open-faced sandwiches for a crowd; with football playoff season upon us, this can be your take on home-made panini to serve up! The turkey pastrami offers a nice change from the traditional red meats, and you can throw in a few veggies (I like cucumber slices) to hearten up the sandwiches.

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Filed under American, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on January 20th, 2010 |

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Quickie Cooking: Pan Fried Flounder

Fish is one of the healthiest foods around, as long as it is fresh, lightly seasoned, and not coated in ton’s of breading (Long John’s Silver – I’m looking at you). I used to fear any fish other than Salmon or Tuna, but one of my resolution’s for this year was to each more fish, so I figured I’d begin by trying some fresh fish fillet’s from my local seafood mart to begin with.

This week, they said the flounder was fresh (and usually, fresh fish from local sources is pretty cheap also) – so I bought a pound! If you’re in the market and see something fresh but worry about not knowing what to cook with them – don’t fret! In this day of plentiful internet recipes, within minutes of coming home you can find a quick and easy recipe That’s exactly what I did – looked up a few recipes, picked up some easy tips from them, and proceeded to do a quick pan fry of the fillets for a wonderful, crispy coating with minimal effort and minimal fat.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Quick and Easy

Posted on January 12th, 2010 |

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Quickie Cooking: Chicken Kolhapuri

Chicken Kolhapur

Growing up in a typical South Indian Telugu household, most of the day-to-day foods we ate were mostly the bread-and-butter pappu’s (lentils) and southern curries. North Indian preparations, like their excellent Chicken curries, were reserved for special occasions when my mom wanted to try something new, or for when we went out to eat. I looked forward to those meals and always promised myself that when I grew up and became an adult myself, I would have such food every day.

As an adult, however, I quickly realized that it was wasn’t healthy for either my body or my wallet to eat restaurant-made North Indian curries very often, and the best way to meet my cravings for these curries was to prepare them at home. However, given the complexity involved in cooking some of these items, we usually resort to pre-made (the horror!) masala mixes to whip up a quick curry whenever we want to.

Now, while this may seem like blasphemy to the usual Indian canon of healthy cooking from scratch, I distinctly remember that even my mom sometimes resorted to using spice mixes just to avoid having to put together and grind each of the dozen or so spices that give each curry a distinctive flavor. Modern mix packets just take this step a bit further by also included oil and salt in the mix; advanced science allowing for vaccum-packing of such mixes without using much, if any, preservatives or additional junk. The preparation just calls for adding the mix, along with some water or milk, along with the meat or vegetables of your choice to a saucepan, heating for the recommended time and getting a piping hot curry onto the table within 15-20 mins. Quickie Cooking at its finest!

So seek out these packets as your local Indian grocer; Parampara and Sanjeev Kapoor make some of the best tasting mixes which don’t contain too much unneccessary filling. Given the simplicity involved in putting these curries together, I decided to put in a tiny bit of extra effort and upping the health-quotient of these dishes by adding in some fresh or frozen vegetables – this helps counter any extra sodium in the mix, while also adding some texture and freshness to the curry. This week we tried the Chicken Kolhapur – a Maharashtrian dish with a spicy, dark sauce.

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Filed under Dinner, Indian - North, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on December 27th, 2009 |

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