I hope it’s true what they say about a colorful plate being a sign of a healthy diet.
Pressed Cuban sandwich, glowing orange Cheetos, and kale chips
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Broccoli-Basil Mac and Cheese
Sometimes you need something cheesy and gooey to satisfy your mac and cheese craving. Sometimes, as evidenced by our garbage can last week, you need a cardboard box of the stuff that you ate as a kid to fill the void when your girlfriend isn’t in town to cook for you. Sometimes you need to add some vegetables to your mac and cheese to convince yourself that the dish in front of you isn’t all that unhealthy. Usually the act of adding vegetables to a wholly unhealthy dish rubs me the wrong way (why not just indulge in a bit of the good stuff and eat better come the next meal?), but this is one time when it works and it works well. Squash, tomatoes, and broccoli make appearances in this mac and cheese, each in a different capacity, and they add layers of flavor to it instead of seeming like a hasty addition to fend off cheese overload guilt.
{ Recipe: Broccoli-Basil Mac and Cheese from 101 Cookbooks}
I made a few minor changes to the recipe. I prefer as much crunchy topping as I can get, so I used slightly more than double the amount of broccoli and combined that with about a cup of homemade breadcrumbs instead of starting with whole slices of bread. I also used red grape tomatoes because they were in much better shape than the cherry tomatoes that I found, and instead of macaroni I used cavatappi because it’s Matt’s favorite pasta for mac and cheese.
I never thought that I’d find a mac and cheese that would rival the pimiento version, but this is it. This also reminded me that I need to splurge on gruyère more often, and speaking of gruyère, how much more exciting would hockey playoffs be if this guy’s name was Gruyère?
Iowa Weekend – Birthdays and Burns
I’m back from a long weekend in Iowa where we celebrated my nephew’s first birthday, celebrated my brother’s thirty-third birthday, and burned dozens of acres of prairie on our farm. My parents bought our farm twenty-plus years ago, which at the time was an actual farm with fields of corn and soybeans but was quickly replanted and restored to its native habitat of trees and prairie grass. Every third spring the prairie gets burned in order to kill off invasive weeds and encourage new growth, and it’s always an impressive sight, with some years being wilder than others. Thankfully (for someone who always has a fear in the back of her mind of the house burning down) this was one of the more tame burns. In years past extended family and friends have come to watch or do some of the lighting, fire trucks have paraded down the lane because barge captains on the Mississippi were alarmed by the huge plumes of smoke, and swift leaf-raking has occurred to prevent a forest fire. This year the only guests were my sister-in-law’s parents, the ground was wet enough to keep the flames on the smaller side, and the only tense moment came when we decided to evacuate the house for about an hour because it was completely engulfed in a cloud of smoke due to the direction of the wind and the proximity of the house to one of the fields. That’s really the best that one could hope for when acres upon acres of fire are being contained by nothing more than a ten-foot border of green grass.
In addition to burning and birthday cake-eating, we cooked nice dinners every night, ate plenty of good cheese from the bottomless cheese drawer, sipped our fair share of wine and whiskey, and listened to Elmo sing the alphabet over and over and over again. I took about a thousand pictures over the course of the weekend, and it took a while to sort through them all, but they’re finally ready to share. Enjoy!
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- Magnus drooling over his great-grandma’s cane
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- Discovered in my grandma’s spice cabinet
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- Birthday breakfast for the birthday boy
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- Caryn made party hats and I made an attempt at a cat cake.
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- Birthday boy and Grandpa
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- Four generations
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- Cake!
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- Efficient eating
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- Decompressing with grandparents
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- Crossword time
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- My homemade bagels + Kyle’s homemade kumquat preserves + more edibles
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- Oink
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- Gnawing on a carrot
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- Posing before burning
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- So it begins
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- Spectators
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- The first field to burn
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- Don’t take my stick, Mom!
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- Change of scenery
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- Watching the flames
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- The first of many four-wheeler rides for Magnus
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- Burning the opposite end of the field
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- The same spot a few minutes later
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- And a few more minutes later
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- The aftermath
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- Almost as fun as a four-wheeler ride
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- Evacuating the smoke-engulfed house for cleaner air
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- After observing for many years, I finally did some lighting
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- Posing before the smoke shifted
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- Searching for souvenirs
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- The burn line
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- Late afternoon sun
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- Getting ready to drop some beets
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- Steamed buns in the making
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- My first homemade steamed bun!
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- Bobby’s birthday dinner: korean short ribs, curried slaw, potatoes, steamed buns
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- Owl birthday cake for the bird guy
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- Running down the lane
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- The day after the burn
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- Almost like Napa…
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- Except my glass was resting on a propane tank overlooking a burnt prarie
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- Self-portrait in a field of ash
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- Let’s go, Dad!
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- Magnus spies either a tractor or four-wheeler. Vroom vroom!
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- Red wine and mushroom risotto, grilled NY strip, steamed bun, kale and avocado salad
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- Does champagne qualify as a digestif?
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- Bonfire in the woods
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- Steak and eggs
Slow-Roasted Pork and Chicken with Green Sauce and Arepas
We had a great weekend food-wise at our house, and it’s all thanks to Adam Richman. We each ate a meter-long bratwurst and a kitchen sink ice cream sundae. Just kidding!
The latest issue of Food & Wine arrived in our mailbox last week, and in an article about favorite dishes of TV food personalities, Adam Richman declared Brasa, home of slow-roasted meats and fantastic side dishes, to be his favorite restaurant in the US. Brasa is one of my favorite restaurants, too, and their green sauce (kind of a cilantro and lime aioli) is easily one of my top five favorite foods in the Twin Cities. The fact that it usually shows up on our table alongside a plate of fried yuca certainly boosts its appeal, but the sauce itself is so good that I could drink it. You want to slather it on anything and everything (I am not alone in this), but they ration it out so carefully that you only have exactly what you need and not a drop more. After every visit I say that I’m going to try to recreate it at home, but I inevitably get distracted by all of the other things that I want to make and forget about my quest until we end up at Brasa again.
The quest is finally over! Thanks to Food & Wine I can now make green sauce any day of the week, and I can eat (or drink) as much as I please. It took a couple of days for an opportunity to present itself, but everything, green sauce included, came together on Saturday night when we had a couple of (newly engaged!) friends over for a Brasa-like feast.
We started with chips, guacamole, and cocktails before moving on to the good stuff.
I attempted to make Brasa’s romaine and mozzarella salad (this picture is before I added the tortilla strips), and it was alright, but the dressing that I concocted was a huge flop. I had considered just ordering a salad to go from Brasa, and next time I’ll probably take that route, but when all else fails, add green sauce.
The pork was fantastic – tender on the inside, crispy on the outside, and full of flavor. It was marinated overnight in a citrusy mojo sauce and then coated with a dry rub and cooked low and slow in the oven. There was reserved mojo sauce to add to the cooked pork, but I think we were all too excited about the green sauce to pay much attention to it (at least I was).
{click HERE for the recipes}
I wanted to make yuca fries as another vehicle for consuming green sauce, but after going to three grocery stores and coming up empty-handed, I settled on a batch of sweet potato fries. While they weren’t quite as delicious as fried yuca would have been, they tasted great with the sauce, and they saved me the hassle of dealing with a pot of hot oil.
We somehow polished off all but a couple bites of the pork on Saturday night, but there was more green sauce to be used, so I did the only reasonable thing and roasted a chicken on Sunday. I used Thomas Keller’s roasted chicken recipe from Ad Hoc at Home, changing a few ingredients but using his basic technique, and it was the best roasted chicken that I’ve ever made. I skipped all of the root vegetables except for the onion (I’d already gone to the store when I started flipping through cookbooks for chicken recipes, and we didn’t have most of the vegetables, nor did we need more things to eat on the side), I didn’t use any thyme, and I added half of a lemon to the cavity before trussing the bird. I also used about two tablespoons of cold butter instead of four tablespoons of room temperature butter, and I used olive oil instead of canola oil, thanks to my tendency to just glaze over the recipe that’s sitting right in front of me. Even with all of my modifications, the meat was juicy, flavorful and slid right off the bone. It would have been just fine eaten on its own, but as those who are in the know are aware, everything is better with green sauce.
Boom! Roasted.
A last minute addition to our meal was a batch of corn and cheese arepas. I had briefly considered making cornbread, but I’m not that into it and quickly decided against it. I am, however, into pancakes and pancake-like things, and I found a simple recipe for arepas in How to Cook Everything, so I opted for those instead. Cornmeal pancakes with corn and sharp cheddar cheese? Yes, yes, and yes. They took about fifteen minutes to make from start to finish, and while the green sauce was still the highlight of the meal, these were a very close second. Plus, as you might have guessed, arepas can be enhanced with a drizzle of green sauce – magic!
To make the arepas:
- 3/4 cup finely ground cornmeal
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup milk
- 1 large egg
- 2 cups corn (fresh/frozen then thawed/canned/whatever)
- 1 cup grated cheese (I used cheddar)
- Salt & pepper
In a large bowl, mix the cornmeal and flour with a little salt (1/2 tsp or so) and pepper. In a separate bowl, whisk the milk and egg. Add the milk/egg and the cheese to the bowl of flour; stir to combine. Add the corn, and mix well. Heat a griddle or pan over medium to medium-high heat. Brush it with a little oil, ladle on some of the batter, and cook it like you would cook a pancake, browning it on both sides and adjusting the heat as necessary. Yield: about 8 4-inch arepas.
Roasted chicken with green sauce, arepa with guacamole and sour cream, romaine salad, and corn relish. I’m not sure how next weekend can possibly live up to this. Maybe Oasis falafel, Motley Cow brunch and birthday cake for a one-year-old?
