carrot soup

i am very impressed with this stupidly easy soup, which is basically just a love poem to carrots. i think i get confused about soups and rarely make them because they are going to take forever or i am going to have to go out and buy cream, neither of which is the case. anyway, (this) soup is just perfect for fall, or for san diego days when you get too excited about the sunshine and wear shorts but then it gets cold and you have to walk home and you are FREEZING even though the walk is only 20 minutes and-- let's face it-- its 65 degrees.



carrot soup

+a bag of carrots
+a half-inch or so of ginger, grated. what i like particularly about this soup is that it is not like BAM carrot ginger soup, just slightly interesting and really carrot-y.
+stock or its equivalent
+some rice or grains. i used spelt grains. probably buckwheat or wheat berries would also be good. nutty! texture!

-- peel and chop your carrots, throw them in a pot with some olive oil. dump in a few handfuls (a cup?) of rice or grains. i was kind of weirded out by this idea at first but i think it makes the soup way more interesting without a laborious "onion-chopping-and-browning" phase.

--cover with stock and about extra two inches. if you are using can/box stock you might want to dilute it so your soup doesn't get too salty.

--cook for about half an hour until the carrots are soft and the grains are done. cool.

--then blend/puree. if it is too thick, add more stock. if it is too bland, add some salt and pepper. if it is too delicious to be such a bootleg crisper-drawer-reject dinner, then yeah: i hear you.

white lasagna for fall

If you know me in real life, you have probably heard me speak in hushed, wondrous tones about my undergraduate advisor. For brilliant-school-reasons, of course,



but mostly because she has this kind of magical aura of peaceful wisdom. The cardinal example in my mind: one time she made this a lasagna based on carrot puree and it was so good and strange and new and she was like "oh, yes, I learned how to make this on a fellowship in Rome" and I knew right then that I wanted to be an academic. Not for the international travel, but in order to have the free time and gentle disposition to cook mysterious dishes like lasagnas based on bechamel. After years of fantasizing about this carrot lasagna, I decided to copy it with the sweet potatoes that were kicking around my house. If you make your own ricotta, this is incredibly cheap and delicious.

SWEET POTATO LASAGNA


+ 3/4 lasagne noodles (not no-boil)
+ ricotta cheese (a tub, or however much a half-gallon of milk makes)
+ 2 sweet potatoes
+ 4 cups of milk
+ cracked black pepper
+ parmesan cheese, grated (1/2 a cup? As much as you have or want)
+ a clove of garlic, minced
+ 5 T butter
+ 4 T flour

-- Boil the lasagna noodles until al dente then fish them out and try to lay them on paper towels so they don't stick to each other. YEAH RIGHT.

-- Microwave or bake your sweet potatoes until they are done, then take the skins off and mash them.

-- Preheat the oven to 375.

-- Now start making a bechamel sauce. Yes! Maybe this is old-hat to "real cooks" but to me they are just kind of magical, kind of like the carrot lasagna itself. One time my friend Adam's mom made us Hollandaise sauce in a hotel suite and my heart just melted. Strong, brilliant women cooking elegant food with love makes me so happy to be alive.

-- Anyway it's totally not hard, even though it does seem kind of mysterious. Heat up the milk with garlic in the microwave or another saucepan. Melt the butter in a pot on the stove and add the flour a little bit at a time, whisking until it's smooth. Let it get kind of toasty and brown, about 6 minutes. Then add the hot milk a little at a time, again making sure everything is smooth and not doughy or gross. Once you have added about half the milk you can just dump in the rest, but keep whisking (or stirring. I don't have a whisk actually. Bootleg) Let it simmer/cook for 10 minutes, stirring & making sure that the milk doesn't get cruddy on the bottom. It should look really thick and creamy, which is also kind of awesome given that you can make this with skim milk. Then remove from heat and season with salt & pepper & nutmeg. I think a lot of black pepper really makes it. Foux de fa fa, you made a classic white sauce!



-- Now layer the lasanga noodles, the mashed sweet potatoes, the cheeses, and the bechamel sauce in a pyrex or whatever. Bake for about 45 minutes until the top is bubbly and your house smells like melted cheese in the best possible way.

bread pudding

did you know that in french they call bread pudding "unemployment pudding"?!

such is the spirit of a grad school dinner party. but it was great-- i feel really proud of myself for taking initiative. i spent a lot of last year just kind of waiting for the kind of community that i felt in new york to spring up around me.

HENCEFORTH I ASK NOT GOOD FORTUNE. I MYSELF AM GOOD FORTUNE
-uncle walt.



and there has been a lot of it: laughter, hilarious shortie overalls and the antics they lead to, books and ideas, researching south africa and armchair travel, meeting like minds at conferences, not getting a cold that i thought i was going to get. being both very busy and very quiet and still. om!



so pick up the phone and invite some people over! it's as easy as making this dessert.

BREAD PUDDING (via bittman)

+ 8 slices of whatever bread that you have lying around. I used whole wheat thus making this totally "breakfast food"-- basically the same as toast, eggs and milk AMIRITE?
+ 3 cups milk, skim is just fine if that's what you drink normally. Again-- breakfast!
+ 1/2 a stick of butter (4 T)
+ 3 eggs
+ 1/2 cup sugar
+ 1 1/2 t cinnamon
+ a pinch of salt

-- Oven to 350. Grease your baking pan (I used two loaf pans because I was ALSO making lasagne, so groove as your soul sings) and tear the bread into little bits in the pan.

-- Melt the butter with the sugar and cinnamon and salt and add the milk until it gets hottish.

-- Pour this mix over the bread and let it get soggy for a little bit. Push down the bread that doesn't cooperate. Discipline!

-- Beat the eggs and then stir them into this gloppy mess... you could ALSO break up a chocolate bar and add some chocolate chunks at this point. It would probably be a good idea. I would encourage that. You could also dust some cinnamon-sugar over the top. I didn't do this, actually, but it sounds really good right? I think so.

--Bake for 45 minutes or so. It can be kind of wobbly but should be mostly set. Bread pudding keeps for quite a while (if you aren't eating it for breakfast) too, which makes it even more clutch in the "use of leftovers" department. Which is key if you are basically kind of unemployed.

tomato tart

This time last year, I had a real job. Hard to believe, I know, but I actually held down steady employment, learned how to make the most beautiful spreadsheets, and kept my shoes on for basically a whole day. It was a great job, and driving by the office on my way to get ice cream by the sound makes me crazy nostalgic for those days. The best, of course, were when I would set up the catering from the Sono Baking Company and hide the tomato tartlets in the back, hoping that there would be one left over for my lunch. These little buttery monsters inspired larceny in my soul, so you know they're good. And now the cookbook is mine all mine... thanks, Mom!... so my east-coast send-off has been filled with the treats I have grown to love (to steal).

Tomato tart

+Pate brisee (otherwise known as pie crust)

*So the recipe in the cookbook is basically the same as Martha's, probably because the author was the mastermind behind her baking cookbooks/shows/etc before moving to scenic south norwalk. You could also cruise smittenkitchen for more highly favored, bendy brisees, although frankly as far as pie crust is concerned I am more concerned with the easy flakey buttery quotient than the picture-perfection-despite-a-thousand-instructions quotient. BASICALLY. End up with ONE PIE CRUST.

+a tomato

+1/2 cup of fontina cheese

+a head of garlic

-Preheat the oven to 425, and toss in the whole head of garlic to roast. If you are pressed for time (because it will take like 45 minutes) you can always boil the garlic, a little trick I learned from my dad that makes me feel like a domestic goddess of roasty garlicy goodness every time I use it.

-Make a pie crust, if you zoned out during that informational stage and neglected to do so. Press it into a pie tin, and let it chill out while the garlic cooks. People think that pie crusts are mega-fussy, but I can personally attest that this wabisabi chef whipped this tart up in an hour so don't worry about the "chill for an hour blah blah" thing.

-Go harvest the sexiest tomato from your container garden and core and slice it pretty thinly. Also grate that fontina.

-Denude the garlic and smash it up with some olive oil, then rub that stinky goodness all over the bottom of the tart crust. Now half the cheese, the tomatoes in an attractive pattern, more cheese, salt, and pepper.

-Bake for half an hour to 45 minutes

Lily's first cookbook book jacket photo, right? I love it.

(green bean and "roasted" garlic) quiche!

I like to be out of the house, but if I am in the house, I would really like to be cooking and eating then cooking some more. So the last couple days, in the face of literally thousands of pages of reading for this summer, I have been cooking up a storm. First the curry, then the tortillas (too dry), then those snack cookies again, then THIS QUICHE. My goodness! I was worried about the green beans since I bought them the last week of class up at a farmstand in Irvine and those long days are now a distant memory. But they are still delicious! Then on Monday some buddies and I drove to the mountains-- it was beautiful and California is strange and at its best when not paved. Anyway, I bought some eggs from a sweet old lady just like in Wendell Berry's fantasy and got home and realized I already had a dozen eggs in the fridge. Oops.



I am not Gaston, I mean this time two years ago I wouldn't even EAT eggs. But I made a quiche and even though it used up less eggs than I thought it would, it was a much better way to pass the time of day than reading Diderot... More importantly, though, it was really, really, very good.

GREEN BEAN AND GARLIC QUICHE

+ A good couple handfuls of green beans, enough to make like 2 cups chopped
+ A whole head of garlic
+ 5 eggs (3 whole, 2 egg whites)
+ 1/3 cup milk/half&half/cream
+ Some cheese, 1/2 cup? I used some frozen cream cheese from a smoked salmon binge that I had been hoping would thaw okay and it worked fine. If I were you, though... gruyere!
+ A pie crust that you will make while the veggies are cooking (see below), or one from the store

- Oven to 425

- Steam those green beans until they are bright green and done to your liking. My liking is overcooked, so I'll just assume you know how to cook vegetables to your liking, right? I mean what is this. Sometimes these vegan blogs assume you don't know how to do ANYTHING RIGHT, and just because I don't doesn't mean you need to tell me how to cook a goddamn green bean I can google it ON MY OWN thanks.

- Now is a good time to make that pie crust (see below)

- OK now put those aside and refill your little pot and boil some more water while you separate the garlic cloves, you don't need to chop them or take the skins off. Just free them.

- Now boil the garlic cloves for like 10 until they are squishy. Squish them out of their skins by holding the bottom part.

- Meanwhile beat the eggs with the milk and cheese. Add the mashed roasted garlic and bite-sized chopped green beans. Salt and pepper that baby up right.

- Roll out that nice & cold pie crust and just kind of press it as best you can into a cake pan or a pie pan or a quiche pan or what have you. It can be a kind of Frankencrust, I am not going to call the crust police and no one will see it. Or if you went out and bought a pie crust, you know, that's cool too. Or if you are still doing Atkins and are SO EXCITED about crustless quiches like the rest of the internet... that's not so cool but also fine.

- Bake for 25 minutes until the crust is browned and it smells good and everything. Cool for a bit before eating it.

PIE CRUST
1/2 cups whole wheat flour
3 T ice water
1/3 cup butter/shortening

Cut in the fat, mix in the water, roll into a ball (add more water if you need to), chill (in the fridge).

vegan jambalaya

Veganomicon is amazing because they lump food into groups that make sense to me, like "eat something else with this or you will be cranky and malnourished" or "food that you can put in a bowl and eat for dinner". Lately I have been crushing on the latter category, trying to make mostly casseroles and one pot suppers and all that, saving precious time for watching TV or zoning out, apparently my top two pastimes. Otherwise "forgetting to eat then gorging on buffalo-chicken flavored pretzels" gets added to the list, which is fun sometimes but mostly not. I guess moms figured out this principle a long time ago with that whole casserole thing but I am just catching on, so bear with me. It also makes not eating meat take way less planning, which is a bonus if you are trying, you know, to go that route.

This recipe makes a lot of food, enough to eat until you get bored of it and some to freeze, too, which is awesome because instead of getting in the car and picking up a b-r-c burrito you can be like, wait, there are some rice & beans in the freezer. Cajun style.

OH P.S. 30 rock fans who got that reference who also love NPR... how weird was Alec Baldwin's Studio 360 guest hosting? I thought it would be so right, but it was so wrong.

Vegan Jambalaya
adapted from Veganomicon, I had to return the cookbook from Inter-library Loan (HA!) so I winged it and it turned out just fine.

+an onion, minced
+some seitan, cut into little pieces and browned in a pan
+a can each of red & white kidney beans
+a 28 oz can of peeled seeded blah blah tomatoes
+a couple cloves of garlic, minced
+2 cups rice, white or brown doesn't matter
+veggie broth
+a red pepper, if you like peppers. also celery, if you are willing to buy a whole mess of celery just to use one stalk in this recipe.
+"cajun seasoning" for tourists of the spice aisle, otherwise we are talkin thyme, marjoram, paprika, celery seed and cayenne, heavy on the thyme and paprika. About 3 T total.

-Fry up your onion, garlic, and optional pepper and celery. Keep stirring until everything is fragrant and translucent and soft.

-Throw a little veggie stock or wine in there to unstick whatever might be sticking, then add the rice, let it get oily/toasty. Rinse the beans in the meantime.

-Yeah, now add the tomatoes, the browned seitan, the beans, about 3 tablespoons of that cajun spice mix, and about 2 cups of broth.

-Stir it up, set the dial to simmer, and let the good times roll for about half an hour. Think about how gross crayfish are for a little bit, then about the glory that was muffuletta/mac and cheese for lunch day in high school, then about beignets, then about christmas beignets, then about vacation. See what I mean about the zoning out? Where were we?

-Check back in about 15 minutes, give it a stir to make sure the bottom isn't scorching. Then in another 15. Brown rice might take another 15 more, so don't let it burn.

-One-pot dinner success! Feel like the chair of the PTA but without all those kids involved.

Quinoa with sweet potatoes, kale and mushrooms

It's tough to the be the queen of the nerds. Sometimes I get so carried away thinking about pedagogy or writing one page response papers that they take all night and all I want to eat are Trader Joes's tamales and I am convinced I don't have 10 minutes to throw some veggies in a pan. Sad, right? But whenever I actually make myself a balanced meal I feel like a million bucks. And my In N Out burger self hates to say it, but especially a balanced vegan meal. Especially since the best laid plans of yoga, surf, and cycle classes all went down the tubes this week and I think my body is letting me know if that if I am really going to be a sedentary nerd queen, I best not be eating three tamales in a sitting.

You may be thinking...quinoa?! But actually I was informed that the secret to non-horrible quinoa is cooking it in veggie broth. So I guess my trademark secret for cooking polenta is out. Yes folks, I may be dead before I'm 40, but I'll be damned if salt isn't the most amazing thing in this whole world. Anyway, here's the first real meal I've had in about a week: it was delicious and really, not that hard. And it makes enough for crazy leftovers, so get ready.

Here we go:

1 cup quinoa
two sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
a tub of white mushrooms, cut into slices
a bunch of kale, with the gnarly stems removed and cut into smallish pieces
red pepper flakes to taste
some minced garlic, salt, and pepper

Put the quinoa in a small pot with two cups of broth or a mix of broth and water. Turn the heat on medium and let it cook.

Meanwhile toss some oil in a pan and start cooking the mushrooms and sweet potatoes. After about 10 minutes (potatoes are getting tender and mushrooms are darker), add the minced garlic, salt, pepper, red pepper, and kale. At this point, my pan was at pretty much total capacity. I threw about a cup of water in (you could use wine) and put the lid on and hoped for the best. Check on it from time to time: my quinoa and veggies were done at about the same time.

Also a piece of kale got caught outside the lid and it made me want to make kale chips; maybe more on that later.

In other moderately culinary news, we started composting! And it's totally not working! Does anyone have under-the-sink-in-an-ikea-bin vermicomposting tips? The hot hipster on youtube made it look so easy.

palak paneer

Having just read bell hooks for the last few hours, I worry that cooking all these fake-o versions of international food is just "privileged acting out for anti-racist while folks." Am I over-worrying this? Oh dear. So take this recipe with this hyper-self-conscious grad student's apologies and a grain of salt. I didn't use the right spices, and I got the basic idea from my new internet friend, Manjula. Anyway, it was delicious and you should try it; imagine the sheer joy of using homemade cheese.

A bag of frozen spinach, thawed
Frozen peas, if you have them (thawed)
Half an onion, minced
A cup or two of paneer cheese, cut into cubes and fried in oil
A small container of Greek yogurt
About 3 tsp garam masala + more cumin, if you want
Pinch of salt
Chile powder or red pepper flakes to taste
2 cloves garlic, minced
About an inch of ginger, minced

--Fry your cheese and set aside.
--Now cook the onion until it is translucent, and add the spinach and spices and garlic and ginger. Cook until dark green and wilted. Taste to make sure the spices seem ok.
--Add the paneer and at the last minute, stir in the yogurt.

Chow down.

faux-roccan couscous

Well, RealSimple called this a one-pot lamb tagine, and it does have speed and balanced-meal-ness and one-pot-ness going for it. But apparently out here in la holla meat is crazy expensive and fish is cheap cheap cheap. It makes sense, but I was scandalized and cowtowed to the little voice within that says, "NO MORE MEAT." So I made this with seitan, and while I think that made it way less juicy, it also made it easier to freeze and transport to work, both good things. It probably does require a special trip to the grocery store to get some stuff, but again, knowing what you are going to eat in advance instead of eating SEVERAL CUPS OF HALF FROZEN COOKIE DOUGH is worth its weight in... uh, body fat. What have I done?!?!?

FAUX-ROCCAN COUSCOUS
adapted from RealSimple Magazine

* 3 cups of so of bite-size-chopped seitan bits (pre-sauteed until browned) OR 2 1/2 pounds of browned lamb cut into chunks, your choice
* 1 teaspoon paprika
* 1/2 teaspoon curry powder
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
* 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
(I didn't have paprika and used "red curry powder" instead of cayenne, don't sweat the spices if you don't have them but the cinnamon and ginger are key)
* a glug of olive oil
* an onion, sliced
* 4 carrots, peel and cut into little pieces
* 2 cloves garlic, minced
* about an inch of finely chopped fresh ginger
* zest of 1/2 lemon, grated and the juice of that lemon
* 1 32-ounce container low-sodium veg broth (or chicken, I guess)
* 1 10-ounce box couscous (Trader Joe's whole wheat couscous, will you marry me?)
* 3/4 cup black olives, cut into pieces
* 1/4 cup chopped dried fruit: I used cranberries and apricots


1. Fry up your onions with some salt and pepper and olive oil in a big ole' pan (seriously, BIG) or a pot until they are translucent and oniony, then add the carrots and cook until mostly tender, 15 minutes, let's say.
3. Throw the seitan bits in there, then add the spices, garlic, ginger, zest and lemon juice (just squeeze it right in there) and stir. Smells good, right?
4. Add the whole thing of broth and bring to a boil. Stir in the couscous. Take your pot off the stove and let the couscous cook for about 10 minutes. Stir in the olives and fruit bits and serve!

Strata

Delicious! Remember when I got all excited about frittatas and the possibilty of party sized eggs for dinner? This is like that in heaven. I'm trying to make all my own bread here to avoid sesame scares, save money and structure my seemingly endless "down time" -- I'm two for two weeks, more on that later, but the last loaf got stale before I could eat infinity smoked salmon sandwiches from impossibly cheap trader joes salmon. Damn, and now I want more. Anyway, strata! They use up stale bread and are also so filling and delicious, I am now convinced they will become a fixture of my new Californian cookery. Also that you can throw some "what do i do with these veggies?" veggies in the mix, or a not so healthy version with cream and sausage, if you want to go the heart attack be damned church social type route. The NYTimes first gave me the idea here- and this is basically the recipe I used. Lemme break it down for ya.

1 lb fresh (by the way, the la jolla farmers market was described to me as small and it's basically the size of union sq, I guess there's some farmland in between
those strip malls after all) tomatoes
Half a loaf of stale bread or a stale baguette
4 eggs
2 cups milk (skim worked fine)
Molto thyme and basil and garlic
Whatever cheese you have kicking around- I had mozzarella, times guru recommends gruyere

Slice the bread- if it's too hard to get a knife through, soak it in water and wring it out. Holy great recession, batman! Wringing bread??? It works, near with me.

Now toast the bread and rub both sides with a raw clove of garlic. Slice the tomatoes into, uh, slices.
Preheat the oven to 350.
Layer bread and tomatoes in a bakin sheet of pan or what have you, throwing some cheese and the leftover garlic in there, also salt and pepper, naturally.

Beat up the milk and eggs and herbs in a bowl, then pour that on top. Make sure it's all covered and kind of dense, especially if you are weird about eggs. Get all artistic with the top layer of tomatoes, while youre at it.

Pop that baby in the oven for 40-50 minutes, when it's done, it should be custardy and much more than the sum of its parts. My computer is in the shop so photo evidence forthcoming, but I've been chowing down in this for the past 4 meals and I'm ready to go back for a midnight snack... Now.

lentil soup

Ahoy! It's a frog-strangler out there and has been for the last few days. Kind of fitting, actually, that I get some fear-of-God New England weather as a sendoff, so that I can spend my ersatz "fall" drinking tea and eating soup. Up in NH, I made some lentil soup... loosely based on a Better Homes and Gardens recipe Miles' grandmother had clipped and stashed in a pile many, many moons ago. Side note: his grandmother also clipped all the newspaper articles about Scrabbles' invention in in the 50s and has them stashed in the Scrabble set. Grandparents' houses are the best, whether they are yours or not. Side note to the side note: Inventor of Scrabbles was Mr. Butts. Haha, Butts!

Anyway, this soup is pretty tasty; probably the best lentil soup I have ever made. To be fair, though, the last time I tried to make lentil soup half the container of chipotle chile powder spilled and despite my best attempts to salvage it, the soup was inedible. The time before that I think I got bored and made Shira G. finish it. I am such a good roommate. But this soup got pretty high acclaim so try it out.


2 cups lentils
6 cups water
a bunch of carrots, chopped
a few stalks of celery, chopped
1/2 an onion
a large can (1 lb) of crushed/diced tomatoes (or just crush them yourself, whatevs)
salt, pepper, plenty of rosemary


--Cook the lentils with the celery, onion and carrots in the water. First boil, then simmer for about 35 minutes.
--Once the lentils are close to done, add the rosemary, salt and pepper to your liking. Don't skimp on the rosemary!
--Now add the tomatoes, let them cook for about 15 minutes; simmer until the soup is a consistency that makes you happy.

NB: Like the pasta, this makes a bumload of soup... 6 bowls or so. So halve it if you don't want leftovers for lunch.

ratatouille

A special request!

Roasted vegetables that you can eat with couscous and bring to work the next day. Sounds like ratatouille... which for whatever reason I have never eaten. What? Didn't I even get a little hungry for it after watching the adorable movie? Don't I eat more zucchini than anyone else I know? Can't everyone cook?



Yeah, but it always seemed like kind of a hassle.

Well, here's the scoop. Ratatouille is a hassle. Start cooking this bastard yesterday. Ratatouille is not a 30 minute meal, or even a 1 hour meal. BUT if you've got time on your hands or want to practice your knife skills (???) or you just got the movie again on netflix and it made you feel culinary or want to feed yourself for like a week on a few dollars worth of veggies, hell yeah.I should note that this is a fake-o version, which my mother says in no way resembles Julia Child's ratatouille. But it is delicious and does look like the one in the movie. Disney knows what's up.



ratatouille!

1 zucchini
1 yellow squash
1 eggplant
1 red pepper, if you're not red pepper averse like me
4 tomatoes (canned or not, whatever, even tomato sauce will work)
a head of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled
1/2 cup olive oil
herbes de provence (what? you don't know what herbes de provence are, you philistine? ok. rosemary, fennel, savory, thyme, basil, tarragon, dill weed, oregano, lavender, chervil and marjoram. or a mix from the grocery store, obviously.)

Preheat the oven to 400

Get married and put a classy Williams Sonoma mandoline on your registry. Or chop the eggplant into "paper-thin" slices. If you hate eggplant like me, you should salt it: rub the slices with lots of salt and let it hang out in a colander until you need them. They will release a lot of water and taste less nasty.

Now chop the squashes. Paper-thin, right? Hahahaha.

If you are using whole tomatoes, cut them into slices. Otherwise, put a sturdy layer of tomato at the bottom of an oven-proof dish. Scatter the garlic cloves in there. Throw in some olive oil and herbes de provence.

Then wash the salt off the eggplant and wring out (hands-on!) and make a nice arrangement of all your rondeles. Pour a serious glug of olive oil on top and sprinkle some more herbes de provence.



Pop that baby in the oven and set a timer for ONE FULL HOUR.

Microwave yourself some fake chicken patties to tide yourself over. Quorn! Soy-free!

Serve with some kind of grain/ cheese. Polenta + mozzarella = not French, but delicious. Recipe for polenta to follow!

Over at the real cooking blog smittenkitchen, Deb has some good ideas for what to do with the leftovers (uh, besides eating them).

pasta with zucchini and goat cheese

Ah, pasta with zucchini and some kind of melty cheese. For awhile there in college I ate nothing but pasta with zucchini. I thought that was just what mostly vegetarian adults were supposed to live on (right?) but then I saw a whole RECIPE for the stupid thing in my guilty pleasure to end all guilty pleasures real simple magazine and I realized that maybe this is novel to some people. So I tried their version... and the addition of pasta water to cheese is gross: why bother?!


weeknight pasta

1 box pasta
2 zucchini
1 box boursin
1 clove minced garlic

Chop up the zucchini into sturdy semicircles. Fry it up over pretty high heat in olive oil, add garlic when the zucchini is getting a little brown (shouldn't be mushy, though).

Cook the pasta. I like a toothsome style like rigatoni.

While the pasta is still hot and a little wet, mix it up with most of the (goat) cheese (although something about boursin is just so goddamn delicious). If you want to get all real simple magazine about it, throw in some of the reserved pasta water.

Throw in the zucchini and crumble some more cheese on top......

Canned-pasta-sauce-phobe heaven, plus you can live off the leftovers all week.