gastronoms

Whenever my friends and I get together at someone’s apartment, I always insist on buying the cheese. Everyone thinks I have some sort of special cheese selection process, but really it’s because I get to walk around the cheese store taste-testing my heart away, and if I bring my final choices to someone else’s home, I don’t have to worry about sitting around eating leftover cheese in my apartment all day. Whatever. Moo. I regret nothing.

You can’t have cheese without a fine cracker and a jam, and apricot preserves are among my favorite spreads of all time. The sweetness of the apricot combined with the tang of goat cheese? Don’t get me started.

The same goes for seafood: a sweet glaze over a meaty fish can be everything! I like to balance glazed dishes with a quinoa and roasted veggie side, so the saltiness of the vegetables and heartiness of the grains give the dish body. (Can’t get quinoa? Try couscous).  Apricots are actually chock full of vitamins, beta-carotene, and much lower in carbs than most fruit, but the sugar in the jam kind of cancels that out in a way. Well, you have to take the good with the bad, right? At least you’re getting your fruit and vegetables.

This dish serves four. If you want, quadruple the recipe to make enough to store in the fridge for a few days. You can use the glaze on anything from chicken to roasted fish or tofu.

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When a man gets sick, it’s like the absolute end of his world. While physical injuries, stress and heartache are taken with strength, the common cold is something that can turn any dude into a total baby. So when The BF caught a cold last week, I had to get all Florence Nightingale on him and stock up on medicine, OJ and tissues. However, cracking open and heating a can of soup doesn’t really scream homemade love, so I grabbed a few veggies and got to work.

Chicken noodle soup is the norm, but mushrooms are so hearty that they’re a great substitute for heavier foods. Ginger, lemon and turmeric are great for settling the stomach and boosting the immune system, and eggs give the soup a silky texture like no other. While I used chicken breasts already in my fridge, using leftover pulled rotisserie chicken will also add some awesome flavor to the soup. If you’d rather cook it yourself, just sprinkle 2-3 skinless, boneless breasts liberally with salt, pepper and old bay, drizzle with olive oil, cover and cook at 350F for about 20 minutes, or until meat is no longer pink and juices run clear.

This soup serves 4, or one semi-hungry guy who insists on homemade soup for lunch every day for a week.

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Now that my mom works from home, she spends most of her free time out attending work events and having dinner with friends. However, this means that she does far less cooking, and a lot of her ingredients end up spoiling. I spent this past weekend at her house and, ever-obsessed with repurposing leftovers, I raided her kitchen to find orphaned ingredients for making a big dinner for her and a couple of friends.

After spotting a can of crushed tomatoes with basil, a few jalapenos, leftover cilantro, ginger, lemon and a bag of rice, there were few ingredients left to buy and few ingredients left in her kitchen doomed to the dark side!

I really dislike coconut or anything coconut flavored/scented, but light coconut milk has such a light, almost undetectable fragrance and taste that I really enjoy substituting it for things like milk, heavy cream and and broth. It’s especially great if you’re cooking something creamy for vegans, but since I was making chicken it was kind of pointless. However, if you are vegan, I would recommend making the sauce and using it for anything from pasta to tofu. Everybody wins!

This dish is best served over rice, and I recommend making coconut rice to make the dish just a bit more creamy. Just substitute the amount of water in the recipe with coconut milk.

This dish serves 4.

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We normally have the same old appetizers during holidays - foie gras and jam (not homemade), fruit, and maybe some cheese. There just isn’t any time to make appetizers, especially when there’s so much delicious food to be had! This Easter, however, our dinner guests were actually bringing dishes, leaving my mom and I de-stressed enough to actually put together an hors d’oeuvre or four. What fun!

If it didn’t mean gaining a thousand pounds, I could eat spinach artichoke dip by the bucket, and after seeing this Spring Vegetable and Goat Cheese Dip in the latest issue of Bon Appetit, I figured making a spinach artichoke dip of my own couldn’t be all that difficult.

…..And it wasn’t.

I took some leftover fontina and cheddar from the pan of mac and cheese I made, and used fresh spinach instead of frozen because I was too lazy to thaw the frozen kind out. Surprisingly, it didn’t turn out watery. You can even make this dish ahead of time, keep it in the freezer, and reheat it in the oven whenever you’re ready to have guests. And reheating frozen food is the BEST way to entertain!

This dish serves plenty.

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Wholesale grocery facilities can lead to seriously strange impulse purposes, and a recent trip to Costco with my mom landed me with an enormous package of cherry tomatoes and a two-pound bag of spinach. Of course it was only AFTER I left that I wondered: …..WTF am I supposed to do with all of this? Luckily spinach significantly reduces in volume once it’s cooked, so getting rid of that was no problem.

As for the tomatoes, I roasted them to bring out some of the tomatoes’ best flavors and to soften them up enough to create a rich sauce that will coat pasta or crostini better than any creamy, fatty substitute. With the erratic weather changes and allergy season rearing its ugly head, adding turmeric to pretty much everything has been a great way to boost immunity and reduce inflammation in my joints. I haven’t had a cold in ages!

This dish serves four.

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Keeping seafood and meat in your freezer and beans or grains in your pantry will take the stress out of any last-minute meal. I usually have a bag of frozen scallops or shrimp, but they can make for a pretty light meal - especially when you’ve got hungry guys coming over for dinner. Adding lentils, pureed potatoes and a small bit of sauteed swiss chard (really, two huge leaves leftover from another meal) totally beefed this dish up while still keeping it healthy.

The secret to a well-made scallop is to do one thing: Leave. It. Alone. Salt and pepper, a teeny, tiny bit of oil and butter, and high heat are all you need to create the perfect scallop. It’s easy to assume your scallops are burning because they stick to the pan almost immediately, but the salt and heat will bring out the scallop’s natural sugars and it will un-stick itself from the pan once it creates a nice, golden crust.

The swiss chard was simple - garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil - but if you’re looking for a spicy twist on a simple recipe, try this. After putting the lentils to simmer, start peeling and chopping the potatoes. Since the scallops take only 3 minutes and sauteing veggies takes about 5 minutes, you can do those at the end and everything will be finished around the same time. No reheating necessary!

This dish serves 3.

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Okay, full disclosure: the BF and I don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day, but we’re that rare sort of cynical couple that pisses everyone off when we claim that V-Day is kind of silly… so I feel like a Valentine’s Day recipe is still appropriate for the romantics out there.

There’s so much more to beer than the drinking (and poor decision) aid it’s known for. Cooking with beer lends a nice flavor to meats, and reduced beer is a great additive to baked goods. In this case, I reduced Young’s Double Chocolate Stout into a sweet syrup and added it to a creamy, semisweet ganache that made the perfect filling for a fun candy shell.

The best part about truffles is that once you make the basic ganache filling, you can coat them with whatever you want. As you can see in the picture, I tried a bunch of different combinations: (clockwise from top left) dark chocolate shell with gogi berries, dark chocolate/white chocolate swirl, white chocolate and ground espresso, white chocolate and crushed graham cracker, and dark chocolate/white chocolate with chopped walnuts.

These truffles are best started in the morning so that they have time to set - for perfect consistency, they’re best left in the fridge for a day or so. And you don’t have to make them for romantic holidays only - sometimes you just want to sit on your couch and drown your sorrows/happiness/apathy in chocolate, Peggy Bundy style. I’m not judging.

This recipe makes about 20 medium-sized truffles.

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There are three things that are guaranteed to remain, in excess, in supermarkets directly after the winter holidays: pumpkin, broth and turkeys. And since I wasn’t particularly interested in roasting a whole turkey anytime soon, I stocked up on cans of pumpkin puree - they were like $1 each! Pumpkin’s not just for fall: it’s low-carb, full of fiber and rich in Vitamin A and cancer-fighting beta-carotene.

Because you can never go wrong with extra fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, and shiny hair, I try to add ground flaxseed into most of the foods I eat. It’s tasteless in cereal, adds thickness to smoothies, and can replace eggs in vegan baked goods. I only replaced 1/4c. of flour for flaxseed in this recipe, but you can up the ante to a 1/2 c. substitution and it won’t make much of a difference.

For this muffin, butter/vegetable oil was replaced with coconut oil, an amazing, underappreciated ingredient that can help control cholesterol levels, high blood pressure and blood sugar; improves digestion; fights bacteria and infection; and promotes weight loss. As an added benefit, coconut oil can also be used externally as a hair care oil, skin moisturizer and rash treatment.

The leftover canned pumpkin can be transformed into a one-person soup, creamy pancake additive, or smoothie booster. If you have a dog, they’d be happy to take care of it for you - they love that stuff, and it improves their stool in adequate doses. Try mixing it into their food or baking little dog treats, if you’re feeling ambitious.

This recipe makes 24 mini muffins, 12 large muffins, or pour it into a metal pan. Just adjust the cooking time to accommodate your baking vessel.

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After the turkey coma I slipped into almost immediately after Thanksgiving dinner, and the one I found myself indulging in after the next day’s leftover turkey sandwich, I decided I could stand to go meat free for the next few days.

However, with just the right spices and a little finesse, you can make tofu taste almost as good as any fried meat you’ve had recently. To make this a vegan dish, I added corn starch to the marinade - it serves as a thickener, which allows the breadcrumbs to stick to the marinated tofu without the aid of eggs. To cut down on grease, I chose to bake the tofu instead of frying it directly in oil - you get the same satisfying crunch with way less calories!

This warm tomato compote is something I like to whip together when I have a bunch of leftover items in the vegetable crisper and need something to go over fish, chicken, or anything else that tastes better with a light, tomato-y sauce. I managed to catch mini heirloom tomatoes at the very, very end of their season (actually, it’s past heirloom tomato season, but these were still good), and this sauce is a wonderful salute to the end of the year!

This dish serves 2.

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For the record, my grandma isn’t one of those old ladies that shuffles around her kitchen in her nightgown at 2pm, baking endless amounts of cookies and pies and only referring to you and your friends as “baby.” Rather, my grandma is a casino enthusiast who always has a fresh supply of store-bought cookies and doesn’t cook… but when she does, the few recipes she’s mastered are unlike no other.

These recipes can also kill you if consumed more than infrequently.

One dish I favor is her fried corn, which has so much buttery goodness that too much of it simply can’t be good for you. I also hate eating corn on the cob (the feeling in my teeth is too much for me), so this is a perfect form of consumption. So I grabbed a few things at the store to figure out how to make a lighter, healthier version of my classic fave.

Okay vegans, ignore that huge piece of fish atop that colorful, tasty salad. Beans are called the musical fruit for good reason: they’re crazy full of fiber and have double the iron found in beef. They also lower cholesterol and help stabilize blood sugar, so they’re great for diabetics and those trying to watch their weight. Sure they’re best with bacon (as is anything ever made, ever), but they’re also a delicious additive to any salad or soup. Instead of boiling them for the 970 years it takes to make kidney beans (and I don’t have a pressure cooker to shorten the time), I simply used a can. Canned beans are perfectly fine, especially when they don’t contain any additives. You’re not really doing yourself any huge favor by not using them, so why not save yourself the time?

The fish was simple - sprinkle with salt and pepper, sear on both sides until done. Don’t like fish? Try chicken or beef or tofu or…whatever! This dish serves 4.

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