Vegetablog

Potluck potato salad recipe - easy and budget-friendly

"Please come to our potluck wedding," said our friends. "It's on Easter Sunday." Hmm. All right. My mission: find a suitable potluck dish that was...

1. easy to make
2. easy to double or triple
3. easy to serve
4. affordable
5. possible to make & refrigerate the night before
6. free of weird ingredients (we were asked to provide a list of ingredients for the safety of guests observing certain diets or avoiding certain allergens)

I was this close to making Bruce's grandmother's delicious potato salad, but it's seasoned with a Knorr product called Aromat, which is primarily salt, MSG, lactose, wheat starch, partially hydrogenated peanut oils... in short, an anaphylactic shock waiting to happen. So I opened up How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman and used his "Classic American Potato Salad" recipe with a small tweak (the sour cream).

Here's what I did to serve 12.

• One five-pound bag red-skinned potatoes
• 1-1/2 cups minced fresh parsley (I used curly)
• 3/4 cup minced white onion
• 3/4 cup reduced-fat mayonnaise
• 3/4 cup lowfat sour cream
• Salt & freshly ground white pepper to taste

Bring a big pot of water to a boil. Salt it. Wash and scrub those potatoes (because who wants to peel five pounds of potatoes?), then cut into bite-sized pieces. Add potatoes to boiling water and cook them until tender but firm - not mushy - for 15 minutes. Drain, rinse in cold water, drain again.

Return the potatoes to whatever large vessel you have (say, that cooking pot), add parsley and onion, and toss. Add mayonnaise and sour cream and combine. Season with S&P, refrigerate until serving time.

Bittman says you can refrigerate it for up to a day before serving, but you want to bring it to room temperature to serve.

Pros: it's delicious, universally liked, easy to serve. Cons: you absolutely must take away and discard the leftovers, no sneaking "one more bite." After a couple of hours on a potluck buffet spread, nobody should eat anything with mayonnaise in it. But then, frankly, nothing that's sat out that long should go into your mouth, mayo or no mayo.

(Revoke my B.A. in English if you want to. But I'm leaving that misplaced modifier in the previous paragraph right where I wrote it. The image it conjures up makes me laugh.)

Our all-time favorite guacamole recipe

I don't want to see mayonnaise in a guacamole recipe. No cayenne. Nothing that comes out the consistency of frosting. I want a nice, chunky guac with a little lime bite and a little earthy-green cilantro note. When I want guacamole... this is the guacamole I want. Recipe from Cantina by Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken (also the authors of Mexican Cooking for Dummies).

• 3 ripe avocados
• 1 fresh jalapeno, stemmed, seeded, and finely chopped <-- take your contact lenses out BEFORE attempting this step
• 1/2 white onion, diced
• 1/4 c. coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
• Juice of 1 lime
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• Freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 1 ripe tomato, seeded and diced (optional, but a delicious option)
• Lettuce leaf for serving (optional - use it and you get to eat it after the guac is gone)
• Corn tortilla chips

Use your favorite method to get all the avocado pulp out of the avocados and into a mixing bowl. Mash it lightly with a potato masher, a spoon, or your hand. Add the jalapeno, onion, cilantro, lime juice, salt, pepper to taste, and tomato. Mix just until combined. You're going for chunky, not puree.
Serve it in a bowl or plate lined with the lettuce leaf. Provide lots of tortilla chips alongside. I'm not sure it helps to bury the avocado pits in the guacamole to keep it from discoloring, but if I'm not going to eat this right away, I do spread plastic wrap across its surface and refrigerate (maximum 4 hours).
I made a two-avocado recipe the other night. We polished it off with a bag of pita chips and called it dinner. Bliss.

Heirloom tomato pizza & other delights

This summer and fall, we've been tending to three pots of heirloom tomatoes growing on our sunny balcony. The yield has been sparse but tasty, and one evening this past week we had enough yellow tomatoes for me to concoct a quick pizza. Not wholly from scratch - I had a pound of grocery store pizza dough in the fridge - but still tasty. I added fresh herbs from my window boxes and was proud of my mostly-homegrown pie.

Heirloom tomato pizza

• 1 lb. pizza dough
• 3 home-grown tomatoes
• the best olive oil you have
• the best Parmigiano-Reggiano you have
• cornmeal for the pizza peel
• fresh herbs ad lib: basil, oregano, thyme...

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Let your pizza stone preheat for a good 15 minutes. While it preheats, liberally dust your peel with cornmeal. Stretch/roll out your dough and place it on the peel. Brush with good olive oil, then slice the tomatoes and arrange them artfully on the dough. Sprinkle with fresh herbs as desired, then grate liberal amounts of Parmigiano-Reggiano all over the top. Slide the pizza onto the hot pizza stone and bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove to a cutting board, slice, serve.

This is not your typically cheesy-gooey pizza, but feel free to add mozzarella as desired.

Vegetables for breakfast?

The grocery stores still sell plenty of vegetables in frigid winter - so what's my excuse for not getting my 3 to 5 servings? This morning I decided to mix up my breakfast routine and enjoy vegetables for breakfast. Nothing earth-shattering here - just some trimmed broccoli segmented into florets, splashed with water and microwaved for a few minutes until brilliant green. I stuffed them into a low-calorie, high-fiber pita and enjoyed that with a glass of skim milk and wedges of Braeburn apple.

How else might an intrepid veggie fan get some green (or orange or red or yellow) into the morning meal? How about...

mushrooms & onions in an omelet
a side of kimchee - wake up!
tomatoes grilled alongside your eggs & bacon
a piping hot bowl of garden veggie soup
chunks of steamed butternut squash with a little brown sugar on top
vegetable juice or tomato juice next to your cup of coffee
last night's leftover bean & veggie chili

Christopher Kimball: "Stop buying food by the numbers"

In an op-ed piece in today's Boston Globe, Christopher Kimball of Cook's Illustrated provides a healthy reminder that shopping for convenient processed foods, and basing food choices on nutrition labels alone, don't always work in our long-term self-interest. As he says,

One 1.3-ounce Nutri-Grain bar , for example, does not appear particularly unhealthy. The box states that each bar provides 140 calories, 3 grams of fat, and half a gram of saturated fat. Yet a 12-ounce serving of chicken soup -- a vastly superior food choice -- has roughly the same calories and fat. The lesson? Stop buying food by the numbers.

Just launched: Yahoo! Food

For your dining pleasure at food.yahoo.com. First impressions - a lot of design, a lot going on, some celebrities to make users feel safe (I guess), but a little difficult to decide what to look at first. Sprinkled with foodie quotations to make it look robust.

I'm testing the RECIPES tab. A search for "leek potato" came up empty. So did a search for "vichyssoise" (and, since I'm not confident I spelled that right, "vichysoisse"). Other searches ("chocolate chip cookie," "grilled cheese") are turning up recipe results imported from Food & Wine and Allrecipes.com. Hmm.

On the EVERYDAY tab, do they really need a photo AND an illustration of Rachael Ray? We'd know that grin from a mile away, even if rendered in ASCII.

Okay, now they've let me filter the "grilled cheese" recipe search results by "vegetables," and shown me a recipe for a "California grilled veggie sandwich" that includes feta cheese. Interesting. But there's still SO MUCH going on per page.

Go have a look. I don't see this replacing my cookbook shelf. But then I'm hardly what you'd call an early adopter.

All-time favorite leek and potato soup recipe

I've been using Craig Claiborne's recipe for leek and potato soup since 1990. It is so easy, so good. You must try it.

Leek & Potato Soup from Craig Claiborne's Kitchen Primer

• 2 leeks, trimmed of the roots & dark green parts, washed thoroughly, and chopped
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3 tablespoons butter (I cut this way back... counting calories, you know)
• 2 cups diced/cubed potatoes
• 3 cups chicken broth

So easy: cook the chopped leeks and onion in butter in a saucepan for five minutes. Don't let 'em brown. Add the cubed potatoes and the broth, bring to a boil, simmer 15 minutes or until potatoes are nice and tender. That. Is. It! You may spin it in the blender, you may add some cream or milk or some chopped chives on top or what you will. But I could eat this every day. Serves four, or two if it's all you're having for supper with some deliciously hearty bread and maybe some cheese on the side.

Last days of the farmers' market this season

Stopped by the farmers' market downtown and here's what I found:

a greeny-red heirloom tomato
two simple red tomatoes
a long white leek
a big knobbly white potato (mm, leek & potato soup in my future)
a greenish, heavy turnip

Plus some non-vegetables:
farm-made Concord grape jelly
a fennel-raisin breadstick (that was my lunch, mmm)
four Macouns, my favorite apple of all time
a dozen eggs laid just yesterday

In other veggie news, an email at work today announced that veggies & dip were available to all & sundry in our kitchenettes today! Hooray, healthy snacking at the office, for once!

Curried sweet potato wedges

If you have a couple of minutes to slice sweet potatoes and toss them with some seasonings, and some more time to hang out while they bake, this easy Weight Watchers recipe makes a great appetizer or side dish. Though, personally, I could eat them all.

Curried sweet potato wedges

• 2 lbs. scrubbed sweet potatoes
• 1 Tbsp. canola or other veg. oil
• 2 tsp. curry powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt (or less if you like)
• a pinch of cayenne

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Slice your sweet potatoes into eight wedges each. Mix up the oil, salt, and seasonings in a big bowl, add the sweet potatoes, and toss to combine. Spread them out on a nonstick baking sheet, if you have such a thing, or on a baking sheet lined with foil you've sprayed with cooking spray. Bake for 20 minutes, turn each wedge over, bake for another 20 minutes. Serve!

It's a challenge to get my 3 to 5 servings...

What is so hard about eating my vegetables? When they're so pretty and so healthy... what's my excuse? No point dwelling on the difficulties, let's think of 10 ways to eat my veggies this week.
1. Toss a salad together! Even lettuce with some tomato, grated carrot, and a bit of vinaigrette would do.
2. Steam some kale! Or saute it with garlic, chop it up and devour.
3. Make swiss chard tart! The crust has healthy olive oil in it; the inside is chard with yummy parmesan cheese and a simple custard base.
4. Grate up some carrots for carrot-raisin salad! So tangy with a red wine vinaigrette.
5. Crudites! Cut up broccoli, cauliflower, red peppers, carrots, and make a yogurt & dill dip to go with them.
6. Soup soup soup! Any veggie can go into soup, as I lately remembered.
7. Drink your vegetables! Maybe it's time to get a low-sodium veggie blend drink to keep on hand.
8. Succotash! What is succotash, anyway? Corn & lima beans, right? Good with a little butter, mmm.
9. Ooh, baked squash! Acorn squash with just a little maple syrup, now we're talking. So good.
10. Curried sweet potato "fries!" Toss wedges of sweet potato with salt, pepper, curry powder and a little olive oil, then bake for a good 40 minutes in a rather hot oven, turning halfway through cooking time. Absolutely addictive.
Okay, time to go into the kitchen and see if I can get that salad together...