Fabulous Quinoa Tabbouleh

Tabbouleh is a favorite salad in our home that also makes wonderful portable brown bag lunches. Made from fresh ingredients, it tastes particularly good in the summertime when there's a bounty of fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs. Tradionally made with bulgur wheat, I've lately started using quinoa, an ancient grain that is gaining more and more popularity because of its versatility, easy digestibility and high nutrient content. Quinoa cooks in 15 minutes, but can also be sprouted, which takes a little longer and requires some forethought. It can be served as a breakfast cereal, used as a side dish, or become the foundation for any number of salads. It has a slightly nutty taste that can be brought out further by toasting the seeds prior to cooking. In short: it's a real winner as far as staple items in the pantry go. I recently dished up this tasty version of a tabbouleh salad. Check it out!

Ingredients:

1 cup quinoa

2 bundles parsley, finely chopped

1 packet fresh mint (about 1 oz.), finely chopped

1 cucumber, peeled, seeded and diced

2 tomatoes, seeded and diced

2-3 scallions, chopped

1/3 cup lemon juice (approx. 2 small lemons)

5-6 Tbsp. olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

optional: crumbled feta

Preparation:

Rinse the quinoa well in a fine-meshed sieve to remove the naturally occurring saponins surrounding the grain. If this step is left out, the quinoa may taste a little soapy. When the water runs clear, the quinoa is sufficiently rinsed.

Mix quinoa with 2 cups of water in a small pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and let simmer for 15 minutes. Remove quinoa from the heat and let cool.

Meanwhile, prepare the other ingredients and mix the lemon juice and olive oil for the dressing. When the quinoa has cooled, mix all ingredients together and season with salt and pepper to taste. This salad is great stuffed in pita bread for a portable lunch or as a side dish or all on its own. My daughter and I sometimes toss a small amount of crumbled feta cheese into the mix, giving this Middle Eastern dish a bit of a Greek spin. Either way it is a really good and filling summer salad.

Conquering Collard Greens and Kale

Somehow, over the course of two and a half weeks, we've ended up with three large bundles of collard greens and Swiss chard in our fridge. It was clear that I had to overcome my apprehension about how to best cook these greens and have everyone like them. Something had to be done.

I know leafy greens cook down to nearly nothing, so I wasn't afraid by the 12-cup pile of washed and chopped greens. The bigger question was how to prepare them. In order to preserve the maximum amount of nutrients of foods I cook, I like to consult George Mateljan's book The World's Healthiest Foods or his Web site, an excellent reference for the nutritional content of all sorts of good-for-you foods and their preparation. George suggested steaming for no more than five minutes. I also used one of his suggestions for preparing collard greens and kale to make them tasty–with very good results, so good in fact, that my husband and I gobbled down the entire amount of greens all by ourselves, even though the amount I prepared could have easily been plenty for four eaters.

Ingredients:

3 large bundles collard greens or kale

1/2 to 1 cup sliced scallions

olive oil

tamari to taste

Preparation:

Wash greens, cut the thick stem out and chop the leaves into bite-size pieces. Bring enough water in a large pot to a roaring boil. Place greens in the steaming basket and place over the boiling water. Cover pot and let greens steam for 5 minutes – and no more!!

Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a pan, sauté scallions until lightly softened and add steamed greens, tossing them with the onions until everything is mixed well. Serve immediately as a side dish or as a light meal with a poached egg on top.

The Fastest Chicken Noodle Soup Ever

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It still amazes me that you can buy a rotisserie chicken for less than a raw chicken in any super market. With two members of our household sick with colds, I decided the best and most comforting dinner for a sore throat would be chicken noodle soup. I didn't have a lot of time, so a rotisserie chicken from one of our local grocery stores was a good option to speed up dinner prep time. The other ingredients I needed were chicken broth, carrots, celery, noodles, salt and pepper. Ina Garten has a recipe just like mine in one of her Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, the only difference being the addition of fresh parsley in her recipe. I thought fresh parsley sounded like a tasty change from the usual and planned on adding it to my soup. (Although I have to admit that I used twice the amount that Ina uses….) With everything on hand, here's how I proceeded to make a tasty chicken noodle soup almost from scratch in less than an hour.

Ingredients:

6–14-oz. cans low-sodium Swanson's chicken broth

1 cup diced carrots

1 cup sliced celery

2 cups dried wide egg noodles

2 cups diced, cooked chicken meat from rotisserie chicken (keep the rest of the rotisserie chicken for another dish, such as chicken salad)

1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley

salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Preparation:

Bring chicken stock to a simmer, add diced carrots, celery, and dried egg noodles and cook for about 10 minutes until the noodles are softened. Add diced chicken and chopped parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste. Heat everything through and serve immediately. Makes about 6-8 servings.

Roasted Acorn Squash Soup with Fresh Parsley

It's been a fridge-cleaning kind of day, and since I found a few more acorn squash left over from last fall's farm deliveries, I decided to try my hand at acorn squash soup. Cooking from the top of my head–without a roadmap, so-to-speak–is always a bit more challenging. Frankly, though, how hard can it be to combine a few simple ingredients and turn them into soup? It's always fun to see what the outcome of a few more-or-less educated guesses on combining ingredients might be when I don't follow a recipe. So, here are the steps I took today and, may I say, the soup ended up being very tasty.

Roasted Acorn Squash Soup with Fresh Parsley

Ingredients:

approximately 4 cups roasted acorn squash

2-3 Tbsp. olive oil

2 cups diced sweet onions

1/4 tsp. dried thyme

4 cups chicken stock (or vegetable broth for a vegetarian version)

1/2 cup fresh, minced Italian parsley

salt & pepper to taste

Preparation:

To roast the squash, preheat oven to 400˚F, cut squash in half length-wise, scrape out seeds, brush the outside with olive oil and place on a lightly oiled baking sheet, cut side down. Bake at 400˚F for about 30-45 minutes, until the squash is soft. Let cool and scrape the flesh out of the skins.

In a large deep sauté pan or Dutch oven, heat olive oil and sauté onions and thyme until the onions are translucent. Add the squash and chicken stock and mix well. Heat over medium-low heat for about 20-25 minutes. Add about 1 to 1 1/2 tsp. sea salt and pepper to taste. Turn off the heat and add the fresh parsley. Mix everything well. Take about half of the mixture and purée in a blender until smooth. Mix with the remainder of the soup and serve. Number of servings: about six.

Clean and Green Start

It's the beginning of a new month and after all the indulgences and heavier food of the last couple of months, the beginning of February has me all fired up about lighter, cleaner, greener fare. So the motto for this month's cooking will be: clean and green.

With that in mind, I started the family off with a great breakfast smoothie this morning. According to them, it was my best smoothie ever and completely dairy-free. Here's what I blended this morning:

Best-ever Breakfast Smoothie

Ingredients:

12 oz. fresh strawberries, washed and hulled

1 1/2 medium bananas (fresh or frozen)

1 large orange, peeled

1 cup water

Preparation:

Add all the ingredients to a high-speed blender and blend for 30 seconds or until smooth and creamy. Pour into glasses and enjoy. Yield: approximately 4 cups or 32 oz.

Variation:

Many times I like to add 1-2 Tbsp. of freshly ground flax seeds and 1 Tbsp. of wheat grass powder. If you add flax seeds, add a little more water, too, since flax seeds will jell the smoothie slightly.

Apple-Orange-Banana Smoothie

When I grew up, my mom's favorite fruit salad consisted of apples, oranges and bananas. I don't remember her ever dressing the salad, but just cutting up the fruit and tossing the chunks to mix them well. The orange keeps the bananas and apples from turning brown, so it's a salad that is not only healthy, but also looks lovely. After the morning walk with the buddies, I made a smoothie based on my mother's fruit salad combo. It is very tasty and quickly blended.

Apple-Orange-Banana Smoothie

Ingredients:

1 banana

2 apples

2 oranges

8 oz. orange juice (freshly squeezed is particularly nice)

1/2 cup low-fat yogurt

2 Tbsp. freshly ground flax seeds

Preparation:

Wash all fruit well and cut into large chunks. Put all ingredients into a blender and blend on high for about 30 seconds, or until everything is smooth and creamy. The recipe makes about two 16-oz. servings.

Fresh Pumpkin Pie

This fall we joined a CSA (community supported agriculture), a local farm that delivers a bushel box of organically grown produce every other week to a drop-off location nearby. With the last batch of vegetables we also received a so-called "dessert pumpkin." It's a small pumpkin, very cute, about 5 1/2 inches in diameter and weighing approximately three pounds. It has served as a great centerpiece on our kitchen counter, but now it's time to turn it into pumpkin pie.

I have to admit that pumpkin pie has never been my favorite dessert, and I usually pass it up for apple pie on Thanksgiving Day. Also, I've never made pumpkin pie before, not even with the canned variety. So at first I was a little leery. But the good thing about getting produce from a farm and not knowing what's in the box is that you learn to cook with foods you would never think of buying in the supermarket. I honestly have to say that making pumpkin pie from a fresh pumpkin has taken me to new heights in baking. I really like the taste of the pie, too. I guess you could say I had a pumpkin pie conversion experience…

Before being able to use the pumpkin flesh, I had to cook it. I settled on baking it because it is a very simple method.

Baking a Pumpkin

Ingredients:

1 pumpkin, approximately 3 pounds (makes about 2 cups of pumpkin purée)

olive oil (pure olive oil is more stable at higher temperatures, so use that!)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350˚F. Wash the pumpkin and cut in half lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds and keep them for roasting later. Brush a cookie sheet or roasting pan with oil and place pumpkin halves on it, cut side down. Cover with foil and bake at 350˚F for about 60-90 minutes or until very soft. Scrape the flesh out of the rind and purée in a food processor or food mill.

The next step involves making the actual pumpkin pie:

Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg

1/4 tsp. kosher salt

1/4 tsp. ground ginger

1/4 tsp. ground cloves

3 large eggs

2 cups fresh pumpkin purée

1 cup whole milk

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375˚F. Prepare your favorite crust (home-made or store-bought) and line a pie pan with it. Set aside. Combine sugar and spices, add the eggs and beat until mixture is creamy and light-colored. Add pumpkin purée, then milk, and mix until everything is blended well. Pour this filling into your favorite crust recipe and bake for about 35-45 minutes, until the center of the filling is set, but still quivery when nudged. Let pie cool on a rack. It can be served cold, at room temperature or slightly warm. Serve with whipped cream.

Note: The baking instructions are given for conventional oven baking. I used a convection oven, but it still took my pie 35-45 minutes at 375˚F.