Category: Food & Cooking

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Enchiladas with a difference

We’ve been attempting to reduce the amount of carbohydrates in meals and to this end have started working from meal plans. Most of these menus started with material pulled off “eatingwell.com.“ In the process a lot of great recipes are getting discovered. The most recent is a different kind of enchilada.

The key to a good pan of enchiladas is sauce and for this we don’t use EatingWell. Recipe is attached and it is best if you use Gebhardt’s Chile Powder which isn’t easy to find, but worth the search.

Now the part that is different is … these enchiladas are wrapped in thin strips of zucchini. A mandolin or even a nice sharp vegetable peeler works. The long slices need to be 0.5mm or an ⅛ of an inch thick. Test by wrapping a slice around a couple of fingers if it doesn’t break it will work.

Our take on the original EatingWell recipe is attached and it makes 16 enchiladas with 4 being a serving size. These are actually about half or two-thirds the size you’d get from regular tortillas so you can plan accordingly.

 

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Zucchini Enchiladas

Ingredients

  • 2 T olive oil
  • 1 medium onion - chopped
  • 1 Poblano pepper seeded and chopped
  • ¼ t salt
  • 12 oz cooked chicken breast canned chicken works great
  • 2 cups shredded cheese
  • 1 ½ cups enchilada sauce *Southwest Enchilada Sauce"
  • 3 medium zucchini
  • 2 cups shredded romaine lettuce
  • ½ cup cilantro chopped (optional)

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to 425. Heat oil in large skillet over medium high heat. Add onion and Poblano with a dash of salt. Cook until it starts to brown, about 5 minutes. Transfer to large bowl.
  • Mix in chicken, ¾ cup cheese, and ½ cup enchilada sauce.
  • With mandolin or peeler slice zucchini lengthwise into thin strips. You need 48 unbroken pieces.
  • Spread ½ cup sauce on the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch baking dish. Lay out groups of 3 strips on a clean work surface overlapping the edges by about ¼ inch. Place 2 tablespoons measure of filling on the end of a group of strips, roll up and place seam side down in the baking dish. Repeat until you have 16 enchiladas. Top the zucchini rolls with the remaining 1 cup of sauce and sprinkle the remaining cheese.
  • Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the cheese is melted and sauce is bubbling.
  • Serve on a bed of lettuce and garnish with cilantro.

 

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Southwest Enchilada Sauce

Ingredients

  • 2 cloves garlic smashed and chopped fine
  • 1 oz butter ¼ stick
  • 6 T Gebhardt's chile powder *note
  • 5 fresh ripe tomatoes or a can of diced plum tomatoes
  • 1 T tomato paste
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 1 cup water
  • salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  • In 2 quart sauce pan saute the garlic in butter over medium heat for 1 to 2 minutes. Reduce heat and stir in the chile powder. Cook, stirring constantly for 2 to 3 minutes to remove the raw chile taste. Watch carefully because chile burns easily. Pull off heat.
  • Stir tomatoes (diced), tomato paste, chicken stock, water, salt and pepper into the chile powder and return to medium heat. Bring to a simmer, stirring frequently, for 10 minutes.
  • Take off heat. Mix, with hand blender, to a smooth consistancy. Sauce is ready to be used, can be refrigerated for 3-4 days or frozen for longer storage.

Notes

Ground Chile powder can be subbed to increase or decrease "heat" of sauce. You can also add cumin and/or dried chile pods to alter the flavor.
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Roasted vegetables with vinegar

In attempting to eat better, we’ve made an effort to get more whole foods onto the plate. Busy schedules make cooking a challenge, which often means we just skip the vegetable serving. We’ve started doing “meal prep,” making multiples of the dish for a week’s worth of eating. To this scheme came oven roasted veggies and a nice solution to the “eating healthy” problem.

There is a bit more upfront work, cleaning, peeling, and chopping when cooking a sheet pan full of vegetables. The upside is that you do the work when you have time and eat better when you don’t.

These premeasured meal additions can be tossed into a morning scramble or microwaved while the evening’s entree is cooking. We even toss a ½ cup of veggies on a lunch salad. Keeping the seasoning simple makes it  possible to match any evening’s meal by just adding an herb or spice blend.

So start by lining a baking sheet with foil, spray it lightly with cooking oil and preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Then gather up a mix of vegetables. Keep in mind its a multi-meal prep, so figure about 4 to 6 ounces a serving. The mix is your choice. For us it’s usually an onion, 3 or 4 carrots, 2 stems of broccoli, and a couple of ribs of celery. During wintertime I’ll add root veggies to that mix. In all, I’m chopping up about 3 lbs of veggies to get 5 meals.

Take your time chopping so that you get a consistent size on all the pieces. One inch cubes work well. The time spent getting even chunks will make it easier to get an even roast.

All that chopped up goodness gets put in a large mixing bowl.  Drizzle a bit of oil, a pinch of salt and pepper and then toss to combine. It works to add oil, salt and pepper in a couple of stages to get an even coating on all the pieces.

Spread the veg mix in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet. If you have an extra large batch you can use two sheets and stagger the racks in your oven. Keeping it to a single layer makes all the vegetables cook at the same rate.

Roasting generally takes about 20 minutes, but check and turn at the ten minute mark.  The exception would be when you have a lot of hard root vegetables. Here you just keep turning at ten minute intervals, until done.  Done is a personal preference.  We like to have some browning, but not get too soft. Keep in mind that portions of the roasted mix will be reheated to serve later.

From the oven you return the mixture to that large mixing bowl in which you’ve put a tablespoon of red wine vinegar and one to two tablespoons of some finely chopped fresh herb.  Tarragon and thyme get used a lot in our house, but I’ve also minced garlic or ginger.  More complex flavoring, say a touch of harissa spice for some heat is usually done on smaller portions rather than the main batch. 

Toss the mix to get an even coating and then let it sit a bit. At this point we portion it out into 16 ounce deli cups and when cooled place in the fridge until needed.

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Hot Cast Iron Steak

I’ve noticed that food or more to the point, the cooking of a meal is wrapped in a story. Taste and smell inevitably evoke memories, and this is that kind of recipe post. Please bear with us on this.

Twenty years ago we spent summers exploring all parts of the Pacific Northwest in a 1982 Westie with a pack of border collies. During one of these jaunts, I discovered a 10-inch lodge cast iron skillet in a secondhand store and added it to the camping kit. There it stayed until getting pushed to the back of a cupboard. All but forgotten.

In retirement we found a local butcher shop and discovered beef doesn’t have to be buried in a sauce, ground up, or cooked for hours to be edible. Yes, it was a bit more per pound, but we’re not eating 24 ounce t-bones.

The initial method I thought to employ was fire … coals to be more precise. This proved less than ideal. With some research it became clear that steak needs to be seared on a hot griddle, and by hot, I mean five hundred degrees fahrenheit. This ‘research’ also pointed out how hot the cast iron skillet had become in culinary circles, the holy grail of steak cookware.

A cast iron skillet is critical.  You really should own one. You can find designer models for hundreds of dollars, or you can pick up the classic Lodge brand for about forty bucks. I had that five dollar thrift store find sitting under a dutch oven in my kitchen. Sorry, I don’t think you can even find them at Goodwill anymore. Amazon has Lodge but so will your local sporting goods or Ace Hardware.

Cooking a great steak will require something more than just a cast iron surface. There is the steak itself and here you need to spend a bit more. Fred Meyer’s shrink wrapped family pack may seem like a bargain, it’s not. Regardless of what method you employ, it’ll hit the plate tasting like the material it was sitting on.

Find a meat market, talk to the butcher and ask for a rib eye about an inch and a half thick in the 10 to 12 ounce range (for two people). This is not the time to look for lean. Rather, you need to have lots of whitish flakes running through the meat.

  1. Next, grab a pack of fresh thyme, some garlic, two or three shallots and a couple of handfuls of mushrooms. A red wine would be nice something in the Pinot Noir or Cabernet family.
  2. Unwrap that piece of beef set it on a plate and sprinkle both sides with salt and pepper. It is all right that it sits on the counter while you complete the prep.
  3. De-stem and slice the mushrooms, about ¼ inch thick and transfer to a bowl. Peel the shallot and slice it about half that thick. Mince up three cloves of garlic. Drop the garlic and shallot into another small bowl, and cut a two tablespoon cube of butter on top then add a half dozen springs of fresh thyme.
  4. A surface read thermometer is handy, but you can do this by eye if you’re careful and have a good range hood fan. Set an empty skillet on the burner, turned to high. After about 30 seconds, pour in two or three tablespoons of olive oil. Just enough to coat the bottom of the pan. When the oil starts to shimmer, set the steak on its surface, reduce the heat slightly and start a five minute timer.  With a surface read thermometer you are looking for a temp of about 470.
  5. After 5 minutes, add the bowl of shallots, garlic, butter and thyme to the pan, turn the steak and restart the timer. You might turn the heat down a bit here as well. You can also use a spoon to baste the steak with the herb/butter juices you’ve just created.
  6. At the end of the second 5 minutes, turn the burner to low, pull out the thyme sprigs, move the steak to a plate and cover it with foil. Add the mushrooms to the pan, and if necessary another tablespoon of butter. At this point you can deglaze the pan with a nice red wine and a dash or two of Worcestershire Sauce. Continue to sauté the mushrooms until cooked.
  7. Uncover the steak and pour the juices over the mushrooms to add to the sauce and turn off the stove. Move the steak to a cutting board and cutting across the grain make ¼ inch slices. Divide the mushrooms between two plates and spread the slices over the mushrooms and enjoy.

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Bolognese With a Twist

How do you make a healthy bolognese sauce? Use lean ground turkey.

This recipe is quick and easy, We consider it a healthy twist on the traditional bolognese sauce, which features beef, pork, pancetta and butter.

Classic bolognese can take hours to prepare and can be quite heavy tasting. This recipe is lighter, but still comforting. Despite using a leaner meat, the results are a thick, rich sauce which is healthy and delicious. Fewer calories, less fat and great flavor…tastes like a winner to me.

In our household we pair the sauce with fresh zucchini noodles. The recipe is large enough to freeze portions for future quick, last minute meals.  So good!

One trick we use to create a more intense flavor is to use tomato paste. We make ours from Freeze Dried Tomato Powder. And boy, is it packed with tomato flavor. It is a great item to keep in your kitchen pantry. It can add that extra oomph to any recipe your might add it to.

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Quick Turkey Bolognese sauce

Lean bolognese is made with ground turkey instead of beef, and the result is just as delicious. Plus, finely chopped mushrooms are incorporated into the sauce for a earthy flavor. This is served over pasta, zucchini noodles or polenta, then sprinkled with parmesan cheese.
Course: Main Course
Servings: 12

Ingredients

  • 1 Tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 large onion chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic minced
  • 1 tablespoon italian seasoning
  • 1 lb lean ground turkey
  • 1 cup mushrooms finely chopped
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 28 oz tomatoes crushed
  • 1 ½ tablespoon tomato paste
  • ½ cup fresh basil chopped

Instructions

  • Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and cook, stirring, until softened, about 5 minutes.  Stir in garlic and itallian seasoning. Cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add turkey, mushrooms and salt. Cook, crumbling the turkey with a wooden spoon. Stir until the turkey is no longer pink and the mushrooms are cooked, about 10 minutes.
  • Increase heat to medium high. Stir in tomatoes, tomato paste, basil, and cook. Stir occasionally, until thickened, about 5 minutes.
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Better Than Pasta

The Internet is overflowing with food and diet advice. The problem is sifting through all that clutter. In the past few months we’ve been using EatingWell to build meal plans and make our daily lives better.

However, this post isn’t about diet but rather a discovery we made through that search. Zucchini noodles are a great replacement for pasta and with a few simple steps very easy to prepare.

I have an excellent mandoline and can julienne like a pro, but these babies can be finger shorteners. Luckily, there is a much safer and cheaper solution … the spiral slicer.

Again the Internet is packed with a variety of these. But our advice is to avoid the small handheld tubes and go with a horizontal crank type, The above link is the one we use, but you can find similar models … on-line.

The 2mm noodle blade works best for most pasta dishes. Keep in mind that the stream of veg coming out the cutter blade can get unruly. Making use of kitchen shears when moving raw noodles to the cooking vessel works well.

Cut zucchini in half and place the cut side next to the blade. This does two things. First, it makes it easier to cut, and finally it moves the waste to the end you would have trimmed anyway.

Once cut, we typically give them a quick ‘wilt’ in a skillet over medium high heat with a teaspoon of oil (or quick spray). Not looking to do much more than pull the moisture out, but then we like a bit of crunch so you can cook them down to personal taste. A steam basket in the microwave works just about as good and again, the idea is to draw out water.

They don’t keep well, so you do need to make them fresh. Pair them with any sauce you choose. They are especially good with basic pesto stirred in at the end of the sauté. Just be sure to drain any excess liquid first.