A soup made with ingredients on hand; this hearty lentil stew is a warm and filling meal perfect in the cold months of Chicago’s winter. The recipe can easily be modified to fit whatever the ingredients you have and is designed with leftovers in mind.  Made for two tonight with plenty for tomorrow’s lunch.

Recipe :
1 1/2 cup lentils soaked for at least an hour
8 cups vegetable stock
2 large carrots chopped
1 stalk celery chopped
5 cups kale (bite sized pieces)
1 tablespoon chopped jalapeño
1 1/2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1/4 teaspoon asafoetida
1 teaspoon turmeric

Sort through the lentils making sure that there are no foreign objects  in the mix (stones or anything else you wouldn’t want in your soup), rinse thoroughly. Pre-soak the lentils for about an hour or more, this will allow them to soak up some water and soften up a bit before you add them to the soup.

Prepare your ingredients; chop the carrots, celery, and mince the jalapeños. Remove the stems from the kale and tear the leaves into bite size pieces.

Warm your soup pot over medium heat with a splash of olive oil, add jalapeños and fry for a moment. Toss in black mustard seeds and cook until they begin to pop, add cumin, turmeric, & asafoetida. Once cumin seeds begin to brown, add vegetable broth. Be careful, as the pot is hot; it will steam and hiss as the stock pours in.

Add lentils and bring to a boil for 5-10 minutes. Include carrots and celery and return to a boil. Add kale and simmer until all ingredients are cooked to the desired tenderness. Salt to taste and enjoy.

Radishes are not something I often buy, not because I dislike them rather I’m not always sure what to do with them. Sure you could always dip them in something or just eat them, what else do people use them for? On a quick search I found a popular use was as simple as sliced radishes on bread with butter and a dash of salt. Hmmmm, ok I can do that! So, I tried it out and this is how it went…

Ingredients : sliced radishes, bread, butter, salt, and radish sprouts.

The day before we had this snack we made the bread, it was a french bread recipe found on The Thrifty Gourmet.  I’m not going to elaborate on our experience making this bread yet, I think we need another try for ultimate success — it didn’t rise properly for us this time.  But, for a first attempt at french bread, it turned out pretty good and was great for this snack. Check out their site for instructions and a great how to video demonstration if you want to give it a try.  I think most fresh breads would be great for this treat.

To make this snack, simply start off by preparing your ingredients. Slice your radishes and bread, pick your radish sprouts.  If you haven’t tried radish sprouts before keep an eye out for them; they’re quite tasty.  They would be great on sandwiches or in salads for an extra kick.

Toast and butter your bread.
Lay radish slices and sprinkle salt.
Top with radish sprouts and snack!

I also made radish chips! Still on a search for other ways to use them… any ideas?

One item in last week’s produce box was a beet- not so pretty on the outside but brilliant on the inside and super nutritional as well.  Just so happened that I was given an additional bag of beets a couple of days later.  I was excited to have them but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them. I’ve made a lot of beet soup in the past few years but haven’t really explored much more with them.  I’ve always been a fan of beets though, and it was time to branch out.

I was thinking about all of this while sitting in our garden and noticed that the mint was growing wild and needed to be used.  So when looking for beet inspiration I Googled beets & mint and landed on this site with this Roasted Beets with Mint recipe.

This recipe was found here : Roasted Beets with Mint. We made it according to their recipe except doubled the portions- it was delicious!

Roasted Beets with Mint-

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
1½ tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1¼ pounds beets – total without greens, trimmed, leaving 1 inch of stems attached
1/3 cup fresh mint, coarsely chopped

Stir together lemon juice, cumin seeds, salt, and pepper in a medium bowl. Stir in oil and let stand while roasting beets. — We dry toasted the cumin seeds in a pan and lightly crushed them with a mortar and pestle.

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 425°F.

Tightly wrap beets in a double layer of foil and roast on a baking sheet until tender, 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Cool to warm in foil package, about 20 minutes. — This is the first time I have ever roasted beets so I wasn’t certain how tender they would get or how quickly they would roast.  I did know that I did not want them to be mushy at all, I would rather they be undercooked than overcooked.  Because all of the beets were completely different sizes I decided to only roast them for an hour and let them cool for 20 minutes or longer. Turned out to be a good choice because they were cooked perfectly!

When beets are cool enough to handle, peel them, discarding stems and root ends, then cut into 1/2-inch-wide wedges.

Toss warm beets with dressing. Stir in mint just before serving.

This dish was super easy to make.  Fresh mint paired with beets makes a stunning combination not only in taste but visually as well! So vibrant- it even looks healthy!

Week 4 of our organic produce delivery was delivered on September 2, 2009.  The contents of the box included – 1 head of broccoli, 1 large local beet, 2 local cucumbers, 3 local nectarines, grapes, 3 local apples, 5 carrots, 2 bananas, 1 local green pepper, green leaf lettuce, and local kale.

That night we decide to make a simple improv meal with a main course using mung beans, carrots from our box, and serrano peppers from our garden.

Ingredients used : 1 cup whole mung beans, 3 cups of sliced carrots, 2 serrano peppers, 2 teaspoons black mustard seeds, 2 teaspoons cumin seeds, 1/8 teaspoon asafetida, kosher salt to taste.

Begin with cooking the mung beans; cooking time will vary if you are using split mung beans.  We used whole mung beans.  Bring 1 cup of mung beans in 3 cups of water with a dash of salt to a boil, covered and simmer for 45 minutes to an hour until the water is absorbed and the mung beans are tender.

In the meantime prepare the rest of your ingredients.  Peel and slice your carrots into thin rounds, seed and slice your serrano peppers and have your spices ready.  We used 2 serrano peppers from our garden; they were extremely spicy and I was not sure if adding both would be give much heat, but combined with the rest of the ingredients it was not very spicy at all. I would consider adding more next time.

Once your mung beans are ready start cooking your vegetables.  In a large wok over medium heat add a splash of olive oil, add one serrano pepper and 2 teaspoons of black mustard seeds. Once the mustard seeds begin to pop add cumin seeds, asafetida, and 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt.  Stir in carrots and the other serrano and cook slightly until desired tenderness.  Add cooked mung beans, salt to taste and eat.

This meal was made on the fly; it was tasty and very filling.  Mung beans are a hearty addition to any meal, they can take the place of rice or be used in addition.

Fall is slowly moving in on us and with it comes the urge to bake more bread! Joe and I love making bread. We don’t have much experience or a stand mixer, but we love to try out new bread recipes. While searching for ideas on how to use our fresh sage from the garden I stumbled across this Cheddar Sage Bread recipe.  Cheese, bread, & herbs… Yep- sounds good to me!

We have been growing sage all summer and haven’t done anything special with it (until now). I love the flavor of sage but just don’t know much about using it. I was excited to find this recipe because I have never tasted a sage bread before but it sounded delicious to me. We changed a few small things in the recipe and it turned out great! It wasn’t too much work and the rising time was only a couple of hours.  Sometimes when we make bread it feels like the rising time takes twice as long as it says it should. With this recipe I felt like everything went according to plan.

Cheddar Sage Bread
This recipe was found on thathomesite.com
(we slightly modified it in order to use ingredients on hand)

½ teaspoon dry mustard or 1½ teaspoons yellow mustard
3 tablespoons fresh sage, minced
3-3½ cups flour (we used bread flour, but all purpose will work just fine)
1½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon coarse black pepper
1 cup milk
3 oz shredded sharp cheddar or 3oz of other cheese
1 package active dry yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon oil
1 egg
2 tablespoons butter

Dissolve mustard in 1 teaspoon warm water – we didn’t have any dry mustard so we substituted it with 3 times as much yellow mustard (this recipe calls for ½ teaspoon dry mustard, we used 1½ teaspoons of yellow mustard instead).

Combine 3 cups flour with salt, pepper, and sage. Warm the milk.

In a large mixing bowl combine the milk, yeast, sugar, and oil. Stir or process to combine. Add the egg and mix well. Add mustard and flour mixtures, adding more flour as necessary so mixture forms a stiff dough and comes together in a ball.

Incorporate cheese into the dough — This recipe called for 3oz shredded sharp cheddar cheese; we used what we had on hand instead- which turned out to be about 4oz of a Gruyere & Colby cheese mix.

Turn dough out onto floured work surface and knead until smooth and elastic, add more flour as necessary, about 10 minutes.

Put dough in a lightly buttered bowl and turn to coat top. Cover and let rise until doubled, about an hour. Punch down, shape in a loaf, put in buttered loaf pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, another hour.

Heat oven to 375°. Melt butter. Brush loaf with melted butter and bake until loaf is golden brown, about 50 minutes  — 50 minutes was just right for us. The bread seemed to turn a golden brown rather quickly and looked like it could be done after about 25 minutes, but we waited until it baked for the suggested amount of time and it turned out perfect. Cool on a rack before cutting into it.

While it was baking the whole house smelled amazing! It tasted just as nice!  We used it all week to eat as a simple toast and for a few breakfast sandwiches as well.

Week 3 of our organic produce delivery, received on August 25, 2009.  Last week the household was unable to make our weekly produce box meal together.  It seems as though scheduling may get in the way of our weekly meal so I may not post about it every week going forward. I thought I’d still share what was in the box anyway…

Contents : 2 local peaches, romaine lettuce, 1 banana, celery, 2 local apples, 2 ears of corn, 5 fingerling potatoes, mustard greens, and 6 local plums.

The evening after the box arrived we noticed that the plums should be used right away so we made banana plum muffins.  After we made the muffin mix we found out that we didn’t have enough cupcake cups so we moved to a new plan and made one giant muffin instead.  It turned out excellent- we lowered the cooking temperature and baked it for almost an hour.

Last week Joe and I went on a little vacation to Minnesota with some friends (Todd, Gage, Robert, & Joshua), Todd and Joshua are brothers who have a family house set on beautiful Lake Ossawinnamakee, where the water is clear! We spent most of our time on the pontoon boat floating around playing games and enjoying treats; when we were off the boat you would most likely find us cooking around the fire or up in the cabin kitchen.  All of us happen to really enjoy cooking, so there was no shortage of good ideas for tasty meals.

One of my favorite parts of the whole trip was cooking with the “camp cooker” over the fire.  The camp cooker is essentially and iron sandwich press that is suitable for cooking in a camp fire.  Before going up there, Todd mentioned that we would be using this device to cook little apple pies, one of his favorite ways to use it- and that we did! It was our first item cooked on the fire.  In the cabin we cooked up some spiced apples and pears and with bread & butter headed down to the fire to crisp up our pies. Sadly there are no photos of these delicious apple pockets. Luckily this cooking method was so much fun that we used it a few more times in varying ways.

A couple mornings later it was time for our next Camp Cooker treat- breakfast style.  To make our breakfast sandwich we used a dozen eggs, 2 Field Roast grain meat sausage links (Mexican chipotle flavor), mushrooms, red and green peppers in between a mix of wheat and white bread for each sandwich (because that’s what we had). I have to say it was definitely one of the most satisfying breakfast sandwiches I have ever had- and there’s a lot to compare to! Here is how we did it:

Here in Chicago there’s no problem finding fake meat products.  There’s a good chance the corner store carries tofu dogs or something related.  But in central Minnesota where the population of all near towns just barely top 200… even the large grocers don’t have many options in the way of imitation meat. They all seem to carry Morning Star but it was quite challenging to find tofu dogs or anything that we might be able to put on a stick to roast just like the carnivores do. The reason I mention any of this is because if we had not been on such a quest to find Smart Dogs, we would have never come across this fake sausage which we used in our Camp Cooker breakfast sandwiches.  Just as we were about to head back to the cabin, after a long drive and several stops in search of meatless dogs, we spotted a store called Crow Wing Food Co-Op.  It was a great little shop full of all things natural and organic, we found more than enough options here. Definitely somewhere I’d go more often if it wasn’t a ten hour drive away!

Preparing the filling was easy and straight forward.  We first chopped up our peppers and mushrooms, then unwrapped the soy sausage links from their plastic casing and crumbled them into a cast iron skillet. Fry until peppers are cooked they way you like it and the soy pieces are warm enough. Scramble the eggs. Keep covered and head towards the fire with the filling, butter, and bread.

Heat your camp cooker up, this will help clean it and will warm it up so the butter will melt and evenly coat the two sides. Once you remove it from the heat allow it just a moment to cool so your butter doesn’t immediately burn. It’ll still be very hot so use caution as you add the butter.  Place it on an appropriate surface (not plastic or dirt) and put one slice of bread on each side. Get ready to fill!

It doesn’t really matter the order of which you add your filling, but we decided to put the sausage pepper mixture on first and then we added our eggs. The second time we made these we combined all of the ingredients into one mixture.

To complete the filling we topped it with some sliced Swiss cheese and closed up the camp cooker.  It’s now ready to cook!

The cooking time will vary depending on how hot your fire is and how close you hold it to the heat.  We found the best results by holding it just above the coals turning it from side to side often in order to avoid burning the bread. The faster you cook it the better your chances are of having a burnt sandwich. Take an extra moment to hold it over the heat, with constant flipping you’ll end up with a nice golden crispy sandwich with a steamy filling. You can check the progress as it’s cooking by carefully peeking at it.

With a small amount of preparation we were able to make several breakfast sandwiches that were most excellent. It was amazing to be able to cook them in the sun on a fire within feet from such a clear lake. It’s not often that we allow ourselves time like this- something so simple and so necessary really reminds me how important it is to take a break from the usual!

Gourstada, as in gourmet tostada.

Tostadas have to be one of the easiest and quickest meal or snack to make.  We make some sort of variation of a tostada meal at the very least once a week. Whether it’s our huevos rancheros, a simple bean and cheese, or loaded with random delicious it always proves to satisfy.

On this tostada we used almost all home grown vegetables! Starting from the top- straight from the garden, 3 anchos, a handful of cherry tomatoes, and fresh basil were combined with balsamic vinegar and salt to make a fresh Italian inspired salad. Just beneath baby bella mushrooms sauteed in plum sauce with home grown kale. Below that are black beans warmed with fresh jalapeno from… you guessed it, our garden!  And of course at the base of it all are El Ranchero’s tostadas.

Ingredients : cherry tomatoes, basil, ancho, balsamic vinegar, kosher salt, baby bellas, kale, plum sauce, black beans, jalapenos, El Ranchero tostadas, mozzarella, and cheddar cheese.

At the base of most our our tostadas we use some sort of bean, in this one we used black beans- no, we did not grow them. However the jalapenos were fresh cut from the pot, our first actual harvest of peppers all year! We may have picked these jalapenos a little soon, but they have been growing for quite a while & we just wanted to try them. There are plenty more where they came from; our jalapeno & “red” chili pepper pot is growing like crazy. So many peppers to go. Now, if only these supposed red chilis would turn red. Back to the black beans and jalapenos- drain black beans and simmer on low heat with diced jalapenos while you prepare the rest of the meal.

Next prepare your salad for the top.  We used all the red cherry tomatoes from our garden, which was about ten and an additional handful from our organic produce delivery. They were chopped in quarters from the top making small wedges, a perfect bite size for this dish.

3 anchos were hollowed out, sliced in thin rings and then halved. They were the largest of our peppers so far, although they probably would have grown a little bigger; we felt it was time to cut them down as the slender stems could barely hold them up anymore and were not producing any more flowers. They were perfect for this meal though, very crisp and had a nice mild spice to them.  The basil was sliced into thin strips as well. All ingredients were combined and tossed with some balsamic vinegar and kosher salt to taste.  Set aside and refrigerate until serving time.

The last step in preparation for this meal is the mushroom kale layer.  First chop kale into small pieces.  Remove the stem from the center and slice or tear the leaf into small bits.  Set aside and slice the mushrooms, in a large frying pan heat up a 2-3 tablespoons of plum sauce and a splash of olive oil, sautee mushrooms coating them with the plum sauce flavoring.  Toss in kale and saute a bit more. Once they are done cooking it’s time to plate your tostada.  Remove from heat and get ready to assemble your meal.

Joe and I made 4 tostadas, 2 each and it was the absolute perfect amount.  We were both completely full but not even a little bit over stuffed!

To assemble : lay El Ranchero tostadas on the plate, add beans and jalapenos, sprinkle with cheese if desired- we used a mixture of shredded cheddar and mozzarella because that’s what we had. Next make a layer of the mushroom and kale with plum sauce and top it off with your fresh ancho, basil, and tomato salad.

Generally we think of tostadas as being a mexican flavored dish, we still used a lot of the same traditional ingedients (beans, corn tostada, tomatoes, and jalapenos) but introduced some completely different flavors to the dish as well. I really enjoyed this combination because the bottom layer of beans was a bit spicy and totally cooked, the middle layer was cooked a bit but still somewhat fresh with sweetness of the plum sauce, and the top layer of salad was also a bit spicy and flavored with basil but very fresh. It’s an odd mix of flavors but they all add something interesting to the dish and complement each other quite nicely.