French lentil salad and a leftover falafel remix

French lentils, or lentilles de puy are my favorite lentils.  Which sounds like kind of a snotty thing to say, probably because they're French and, let's face it, having a favorite lentil is kind of ridiculous.  Anyway, French lentils stay firmer once they're cooked and tend to stay more intact than some of the other lentil varieties so they're great for salads. I can't always get French lentils, but I found these at Target and immediately envisioned a citrusy, salty lentil salad. 

Here's what you'll need:

• 3 cups of stock 
• 1 1/2 cups of French lentils
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 cup parsley, chopped
• 1 lb. asparagus, ends trimmed and chopped into pieces
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 1/2 - 1 cup crumbled feta
• juice of 1 lemon
• 1/4 cup of olive oil
• salt, pepper and cayenne to taste

Put your stock on the stove with the bay leaf, cover and bring to a boil.  Add your lentils, garlic and onion, recover and let simmer for about 20 minutes (these lentils take a little longer than your standard green lentils and they take a little more liquid).  When your lentils are just a touch short of done, toss the asparagus in the top of the pan to steam for about 3-5 minutes, until the asparagus is bright green and warm all the way through.

When the lentils are tender, remove from heat, drain through a mesh strainer if any residual liquid remains and remove the bay leaf.  Let the lentils cool (or put them in the freezer for a few minutes if you're impatient like me). Add your parsley, lemon, olive oil, feta and spices, tasting as you go.  It would be delicious to add grapefruit supremes to this salad as well (though they might not be delicious in the leftover remix that comes next, so just add them to the top of the salad).

So, lentil salad is great, but it's not really a meal. So a couple days after I made the salad, I pulled the leftovers out of the fridge and decided to make lentil falafel.

What you'll need:

• Oven pre-heated to 350 degrees
• an oven-safe frying pan 
• a food processor or blender
• olive oil 4 Tbs. separated
• 1/4 cup bread crumbs (use gluten free bread crumbs, if you have an allergy)
• 1 egg
• greek yogurt
• leftover chimichurri

Put about 2 cups of your lentil salad into the food processor.  Add the breadcrumbs, egg and 2 Tbs. olive oil.  Pulse until you have a chunky paste.  Form the paste into 1/4 cup-sized patties (I just used a spoon and my hands) and then put them in the fridge for 15-30 minutes to set.  Meanwhile, heat the remaining 2 Tbs. of olive oil in the pan on the stove.  Once the oil is hot, place the patties in the pan, taking care not to overcrowd.  You want to get them nice and crispy brown on both sides, then pop them in the oven for about 10 minutes to make sure they've heated and set all the way through.

Once your patties are done in the oven, mix up about 1/4 cup Greek yogurt with 2 Tbs of leftover chimichurri.  I served my sauce on a bed of arugula with lemon, olive oil and salt and pepper.

It was definitely a meal, not a side and the leftover patties made for a great lunch the next day!

Glamorous Chicken Salad

 

When I was a kid (and now too), I loved the Anne of Green Gables books and movies.  So much so that my mom, oldest friend and I took a trip to Prince Edward Island last summer to see her haunts, explore the beaches, visit the potato museum and eat as much seafood as possible. 

The Potato Museum, a truly hilarious experience.

It was completely beautiful on the island, I definitely recommend a visit!

Here is the house that inspired Green Gables

They have gorgeous red sand beaches, this one is on the north shore.

 In the movie, Anne's friend Diana dreams of living at a hotel on the beach for the summer:

Diana Barry: I wish I were rich, and I could spend the whole summer at a hotel, eating ice cream and chicken salad.

Anne Shirley: You know something, Diana? We are rich. We have sixteen years to our credit, and we both have wonderful imaginations. We should be as happy as queens.

[gestures to the setting sun]

Anne Shirley: Look at that. You couldn't enjoy its loveliness more if you had ropes of diamonds.

Diana Barry: I don't know about that.

And that's when chicken salad became a glamorous thing for me.  As a kid, I ate a lot of tuna salad and a lot of egg salad, but not really much chicken salad, so maybe that's another part of it too. 

One of my favorite quick meals is to buy a rotisserie chicken on the way home from work.  I typically roast some veggies, or throw the dark meat on top of a green salad and voila!  Dinner is served. But, living alone, a rotisserie chicken is good for several meals.  After pulling all the meat from the chicken carcass to make chicken stock, I decided to make a fancy chicken salad, something I thought Diana would appreciate on the beach of a Prince Edward Island hotel. 

 Here's what you'll need:

2 cups cooked chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces.
1 stalk of celery
1/4 cup diced onion
1/2 cup dried cranberries (or grapes or raisins or dried apricots, whatever your heart desires)
1/2 apple, diced
1/2 cup chopped parsley (could also add fresh tarragon or dill)
1/2 cup sliced almonds (or something crunchy, like sunflower seeds, walnuts, pepitas, etc.)
1/2 lemon
1/2-3/4 cup Greek yogurt
Salt, pepper and cayenne to taste.

Chop everything up and put it in a big bowl, then squeeze the juice from half a lemon over the whole thing, add your yogurt and spices then mix.  Feel free to adjust the quantity of yogurt if you want a "wetter" chicken salad, you could even add a tablespoon or two of mayonnaise if you so choose. 

When it was mixed, I had mine on a bed of spring greens with tomato and cucumber, but you could make a wrap, fill a pita, stuff a tomato, serve with crackers, or even smack some between two pieces of bread for a sandwich.  But no matter what, you should think about how fancy your meal would have been 100 years ago, for Diana's sake.

Making stock of the situation.

So, I have a hard time throwing things away. Especially food. I don't like for things to go to waste.  That's why keeping a stock bag in my freezer has been an amazing thing!  I can make stock out of items I would normally throw away!  It's so easy and the results are delicious!

In this batch of stock, I have a leftover rotisserie chicken. I'm going to take all the meat off the carcass and put just the skin and bones into the crock pot. It's not critical that you use bones, I just have some and eat meat.  If you're a vegetarian, go crazy with everything else!

In my stock bag from my freezer you'll find:

• mushroom stems
• onion skins (they make the stock really dark and flavorful)
• old parsley
• asparagus ends (use sparingly, they're strong, I only saved one bundle's worth)
• carrot peels and ends ( I also added some old baby carrots)
• green onion ends
• celery leaves and ends
• old bones

You can also put potato peels, sweet potato peels, zucchini, eggplant, cilantro stems, cheese rinds, kale stems, truly anything that's not too strong in the stock pot. It'll turn out fine and if for some bizarre reason it doesn't, you're not wasting money on brand new ingredients.

Throw everything into the crock pot, cover with water and add spice to taste.  For me that was:

• 1T salt
• 1/2 T pepper
• 1 t thyme
• 1 t rosemary
• 1/2 t sage

I set the crock pot on low for 9 1/2 hours, but truly, as long as there's water you can leave the stock in there for upwards of 12 hours. 

When it's done, you have rich, flavorful, homemade stock that you can use right away, or put in the freezer. 

This batch yielded about 12 cups of stock.  After sitting in the fridge while I went to work,  I came home and strained it first through a colander and next through a fine mesh strainer, to be sure to get all the little pieces out. 

 Then I divided the stock up into quart-sized containers and put them into the freezer. 

Now the next time I'd like to make soup, or rice or beans or pasta sauce or whatever else my weird brain can concoct, I'll have delicious homemade stock to get me off on the right foot.  I've also already started my next stock bag to do it all over again!

What a crock of beans!

I hate wasting food.  I can't help it, when something is going to be thrown out, I want to try and figure out a way to use it.  That's why I save my veggie trimmings in a bag in my freezer to make stock (which you should do too, because it's awesome).  

 

All this to say, when my office catered Chipotle a few weeks ago, I ended up taking home beans.  Lots and lots of beans, both black and pinto.  I divided them up into quart-sized freezer bags and waited for inspiration to strike.  

And strike it did, in the form of a bag butternut squash languishing in the back of my freezer.  I thought it would make a really nice addition to a black bean chili.  Turns out, I was right!

Side note:  I also brought home leftover rice and was able to freeze it as well.  It reheated beautifully (which I wasn't sure would work, so there you go). 

What you'll need:

2 cans of black beans, drained and rinsed ( or a quart-sized bag of free beans from work)

1 can of diced tomatoes

1 can of diced green chilies, or 1/2 cup frozen green chilies if you want more of a kick.

1 cup frozen corn

1 package of frozen butternut squash (10 oz.) or feel free to use fresh if you prefer!

1 red onion, diced

(If I were a fan of bell pepper, dicing one up with the onion would be nice, but I'm not, so I didn't)

1 T. olive oil 

4 cups chicken stock (I used vegetarian Better than Bouillon) 

1 bay leaf

Salt and pepper to taste

Cilantro and Greek yogurt as garnish. 

So, saute your onion in the bottom of a stock pot with the olive oil on medium high heat (this is where you throw in your bell pepper, if you want) until it's translucent.  Add your stock, tomatoes, beans, chilies, corn, squash, bay leaf and salt and pepper, cover, reduce heat and simmer until squash is tender and it has made your house smell awesome.  In my case, about 45 minutes. 

Ladle into your favorite bowl, top with Greek yogurt (I like Fage, because it's the most sour-creamy of the Greek yogurts) and cilantro.  Feel free to add some cotija cheese or hot sauce as well.

If you can, set the chili in the fridge overnight and eat it the next day.  Trust me, it's worth the wait. I know you know that I think leftovers are the best.

Bon Appetit!

An ode to leftovers. Also, what the heck is umami?

You'll be happy to know I've been enjoying corned beef hash for breakfast the last couple days and I may like it even more than the original dinner...well, maybe.  I'm actually a big fan of a big bowl of everything mixed together, rather than the more traditional dining plate with entree and sides.  That bowl of leftover Thanksgiving, with everything piled in at once?  Divine.

That got me thinking, why are so many dishes better on the second day?  What happens in the fridge to make my food even more delicious?  I found some of the answers in this article from Forbes.  It seems that your taste buds are better able to experience a dish as a whole, once their flavors have intermingled for a longer period of time. So, rather than tasting, tomato, onion and cilantro in pico de gallo, I taste a new flavor when they've had a chance to sit for a day or two.  A flavor greater than the sum of its parts.

Additionally, giving a dish time to sit around and mingle, means we are better able to experience the umami flavor. What's umami you ask?  Well, it's something you can talk about with foodies to sound snooty. Additionally, it means 'yummy' in Japanese.  Thirdly, it's the fifth taste: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.

Chefs, scientists and foodies alike have a hard time defining umami, but they know it's the experience of tasting glutamate.  Mono sodium glutamate (MSG) is a man-made form.  In nature, mushrooms, soy sauce, meat, Parmesan,etc. all have glutamate that our taste-buds experience differently than the other 4 tastes. I like to think of it as flavorful, savory and delicious.  In a word, great!

So, this is all happening in your fridge with your leftovers.  Who knew?

That means when I pulled my corned beef, cabbage and potatoes out to make a hash, it couldn't help but be delicious.

On day 1, I cooked my hash with a little paprika and black pepper and topped it off with a perfectly soft-boiled egg (please ignore the one in the photograph, I accidentally cracked that one when I put it in the water and it got a little close to hard-boiled for my taste).   Day 2, I was in a hurry, so I chopped up my bits and pieces and threw them in a pan with a tablespoon of whole grain mustard and a dash of cayenne.  My stars, was it good (Yep, I said "My stars"). 

And then, tonight, I made a cabbage soup from the remaining odds and ends. I chopped up an onion, and a cup of baby carrots and sauteed them in a Tbs. of olive oil until the onions were translucent. I put in a tsp of black pepper, a dash of cayenne and a bay leaf.

 Then I added 1/4 head of cabbage, chopped (leftover from corned beef and cabbage), the remaining corned beef, chopped ( I had about 1/2 a cup) and a 28 oz. can of diced tomatoes and 2 c. water.  I then simmered until the carrots were tender (about 30 min)

It ended up tasting like a deconstructed cabbage roll, it was delish!

St. Paddy's recipe roundup!

I'm not usually one to cook a giant roast, I think it's because I live alone and that much meat feels very much like overkill (ha!).  But I did cook a corned beef in my crock pot overnight to enjoy this evening for St. Patrick's Day.  I mean, it's not every day we celebrate a man who was not Irish for driving nonexistent snakes from Ireland.  I'm practically required to eat corned beef and cabbage.

I used Martha Stewart's recipe to make my corned beef, and when I get home I will cook the cabbage to her instruction...or I may go rogue. This recipe for roasted cabbage with lemon from Kalyn's Kitchen looks amazing and might bring a smokiness to the meal (and some much needed acidity).

If you're wondering what to do with your leftovers, this corned beef scalloped potato recipe from the San Francisco gate looks positively decadent, or you could go with the more traditional corned beef hash, a nice Reuben, corned beef cabbage rolls or even a corned beef eggs benedict.  I've also personally enjoyed a delicious Irish egg roll.  Or, just heat it up and eat corned beef and cabbage all over again.  It's hard to go wrong with a classic!

Éirinn go Brách!