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I am going to share something that may or may not shock the cooks out there in the blogosphere: I don’t like to follow recipes.

I know… it’s kind of weird for someone who loves food and food blogs as much as I do. I have good intentions… really I do. I have a huge list of recipes that I want to try that just gets bigger the more blogs I read, but my problem is this: every time I start something, I realize that there’s an ingredient in it that I hate (like raisins). Or room to make it closer to my tastes (I like everything spicy). Or a way to make it lower in fat or calories. Or a way to make it HIGHER in fat or calories. Sometimes I realize I just made a mistake and didn’t buy what I was supposed to, or I bought too much of something. Sometimes, I just say, “well I don’t FEEL like doing it your way.”

Some recipes were built for improvising, like Jaden’s Slow-Cooked Salmon and most recipes for soup and chili. Ree’s recipe for Asian Noodle Salad was like that, and I love her for it. I didn’t have the spinach, I didn’t FEEL like using Napa cabbage (mostly because what the heck is a single girl going to do with two heads of cabbage?). I had just run out of olive oil, but I had some of that other mysterious “vegetable” oil (what kind of vegetable, I ask you?). I also felt like having something hot, so I didn’t rinse and cool the noodles… I just threw them in with the rest of the veggies, along with a touch of pasta cooking water. And I wanted to use more veggies than pasta… so I did. And you know what? It was still amazing. Some recipes just can’t be made badly, no matter what you do to them.

I saved some of the veggie mix and ate it with extra dressing for lunch the next day. Also amazing.

I’ve been on a simple food kick lately… I think it’s the weather. In summertime, I can’t really be bothered to do anything besides combine a few ingredients. These tomatoes are a perfect example: I had bought some tomatoes for a salad, but I waited just a bit too long to eat them. Instead, I combined them with salt, pepper, herbes de provence and olive oil, and roasted them on high heat until they were charred and blistered on the outside. The juice in the pan was delicious with some fresh baguette, but most of this got served over plain spaghetti: it doesn’t get much better than that.

In other news, I’m off to Mallorca in a few days for a month. I’m excited to let you all know a bit about Spanish food… and to take some lessons from the master we’re going to be staying with, the Canadian’s friend, the Englishman. I had his roast lamb a few months ago, and I still think about it.

Sometimes, I get really wacky ideas. I’m not even all that sure where this one came from. One minute, I’m nosing around my pantry trying to find something I can call dinner, and the next I’m at the grocery store buying peaches: a girl with a plan.

For some reason, I decided that peaches and polenta would go really well together. I don’t eat polenta too, too often. As my brother says, “We’re not mangioni di polenta.” (Mangioni di polenta just means polenta eaters, but as far as my bro, and most Southern Italians are concerned, it’s an insult directed towards Northerners.)

However, I almost always have a bag of cornmeal in my pantry for cornbread and the like, and as I’m cleaning out my kitchen to head off on my summer adventures (Cannes, Mallorca, and Paziols), I decided to pull a few dishes together with polenta. Last week, I was eating it plain with sugar on top, like my mother used to make Cream of Wheat and Cream of Rice in the morning, but yesterday, I decided to have some for dinner.

This isn’t a sweet dish by any means: you could certainly sweeten the polenta itself to make it an adequate dessert, but for me it was dinner, so the only sugar was the natural sweetness of the fresh peaches (by the way, am I the only one who prefers yellow peaches substantially to white ones? I bought some white peaches by accident this morning, and while I ate them, I was horribly disappointed.)

I can’t wait to start eating all this fresh produce that’s out in stores now. Try this for a breakfast treat (or if you’re strange, like me, for your dinner.)

Peaches and Cream Polenta

1 cup 2% milk
1/4 cup yellow cornmeal
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, grated
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 4 oz. container plain, lowfat yogurt
1 peach, cut into sections

Heat the milk over low heat and add the cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Slowly add the cornmeal, stirring all the time. If you find that the cornmeal soaks up the milk too quickly, you can add a little bit of water. When the polenta is cooked all the way through, turn off the stove and spoon about 3/4 of the yogurt container into the pot and stir. Place in a bowl and top with peach segments and the remaining yogurt. Serve hot with extra cinnamon if desired.

I’m about to head out to Cannes for the film festival, and then to Mallorca with the Canadian for a month before I start my job in Paziols again, so I’ve been trying to save money. Food-wise, this means living out of my pantry: in the fridge, I have a bunch of potatoes, a lot of plain yogurt, some milk and some eggs. It was time to get creative.

I invented two different baked potato recipes last week, and both were amazing. I hadn’t had a baked potato in a very long time, so I was surprised at how easy they are and how different they taste from boiled or steamed potatoes.

Here are the two recipes… more stories to come shortly!

P.S. Sorry I’ve been so M.I.A. lately… I’m really working hard at starting up my other two blogs. Come by and check them out if you’re interested! Links further down the page…

Baked Potato with Spinach and Yogurt

1 potato
1/2 cup frozen spinach, heated and drained
3 cloves of garlic
1 tsp. olive oil
1 4 oz. container of plain yogurt
1 tsp. chives
salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the yogurt in a cheesecloth over a bowl to strain. Pierce the potato on all sides with a fork. Place the garlic cloves in a ball of tinfoil with some salt and olive oil. Place both the garlic and the potato in the oven on the middle rack. After half an hour, rotate the potato.

When the potato is fully cooked, after about an hour, remove it and the garlic from the oven. Remove the potato flesh from the skin, keeping the skins whole and about a centimeter of potato in the shells. In a bowl, mash the potato with half of the strained yogurt, the spinach, the roasted garlic, and the salt and pepper. Transfer the mashed potato back to the potato shells. Mix the rest of the yogurt with the chives and top the potatoes with the yogurt.

Curry Baked Potato

1 potato

1 tbsp. prepared red curry paste

1 4 oz. container yogurt

1/2 cup frozen spinach, thawed and strained

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the yogurt in a cheesecloth over a bowl to strain. After one hour, removie the potato from the oven. Remove the potato flesh from the shells. In a frying pan, combine the curry paste, the spinach and the potato. Heat through. Remove from the heat and stir in the strained yogurt. Return mixture to shells.

I found this picture lurking from when the Daring Bakers baked baguette back in the winter. This is what I did with mine, besides just eat it plain: slathered with mustard, some good roquefort cheese and slices of hard-boiled egg, this sandwich reigns supreme over most other sandwiches I’ve ever made… could be the homemade baguette, but I’m thinking it has more to do with the quality of the ingredients available here in France: spicy mustard, good flavorful blue cheese and fresh eggs.

Egg and Cheese Sandwich

1/2 baguette
1 hard-boiled egg, sliced
2 tsp. good, spicy mustard
2 oz. good blue cheese like roquefort or gorgonzola

Slice the baguette down the middle and spread both sides with mustard. Add the egg and cheese, and season with a grinding of black pepper if you like. Close sandwich and consume. Smile.

This post has been hanging around on my computer for awhile, and I was getting awfully tired of seeing my last post, so I decided to come by and give you all something new!

As I previously mentioned, the Canadian is a big tuna fan. I had made him tuna once before, but it turned out too salty for my taste, so when he begged for tuna a second time, I obliged, but with a different recipe.

This was a second recipe I found on epicurious, here. I don’t like teriyaki sauce, so I subbed a mix of sesame oil and honey. I got nervous about the over-saltiness of the marinade from last time, so I didn’t marinate these for as long… I wish I had, because the tuna itself didn’t take in a lot of the flavor, but my God the mayonnaise was good! I wanted to put it on everything! I used half fromage frais (plain yogurt works) and half mayonnaise, and it was divine. The whole thing was served over wasabi-scallion mashed potatoes. I preferred this by far… much less salty. But it wasn’t quite enough for the Canadian.

He requested tuna dinner a third time, and I asked him which of the two he had preferred, and the answer was the first. I knew that it had been too salty for me, so I mixed it up a little and came up with my own recipe, an amalgamation of the two. As he didn’t love the mayonnaise, I left it out, and I didn’t have time to make the potatoes. The tuna on its own, however, was by far the best of the three: we both agreed.

Seared Tuna

3 tuna steaks
2-3 tablespoons white sesame seeds
2 teaspoons wasabi paste
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon white or cider vinegar
2 cups frozen green beans, thawed
1 tablespoon vegetable oil 

Combine wasabi, sesame oil, honey, soy sauce and vinegar in a large glass dish. Set the tuna in the marinade and allow to sit for 30-40 minutes, turning occasionally. Heat a skillet over medium-high heat and heat the vegetable oil. Coat one edge of each tuna steak in seeds and sear, 1-2 minutes per side. Remove tuna and keep warm. Add green beans to skillet, adding remaining marinade. Cook until heated and serve green beans on the side. (Note: if you have time to make wasabi-scallion mashed potatoes, you should DEFINITELY do that as well, and make more sauce/mayonnaise.)

I got Bill Granger’s coconut bread recipe care of Luisa at the Wednesday Chef, and I have to say, it’s incredible. I’ve had these photos lying around for a really long time… I kind of forgot to post about this, and now that it’s been so long, I don’t really remember the circumstances of it, except that this was amazing and the Canadian and I fought over the last little bit.

All I remember is that I subbed white sugar for superfine, and that I used the same shredded, unsweetened coconut that Luisa did. The way I made it, it’s not terribly coconutty… kind of in the way that zucchini bread doesn’t really taste like zucchini. In my opinion, the dominant taste was the cinnamon (that could be because I added a bit more than I was supposed to… I also added nutmeg and cloves, but I’m into improvising like that.) This would be a good bread to make even for someone who thinks they don’t really like coconut… the only problem being that you sometimes get a strand or two in the bread. I don’t really know where I’m going with this, so I’m going to stop. Coconut bread=good. End of story. Go make it.

Oh, also, if you’re feeling very, very bad, toast a slice of this bread and spread it with some really good, unsalted European butter. It’s divine.

I once got in trouble for using hyperbole with the Canadian. It’s a long story that ends with me going from two cheese graters to none and my mother sending us an industrial-grade steel grater through the Post, but I learned my lesson. No more hyperbole.

Except now. Because I have to tell you: this may be the best soup ever. Which will shock all of you when you realize how simple and cheap it is. But first, a sidebar.
A long, long time ago, I used to live in California. San Francisco, to be exact. When I was in the sixth grade, my parents sat us down in our New York apartment and told us we were moving.

I adored San Francisco. I wanted to stay there for my whole life. In retrospect, I believe I would have been very happy there: I dig the whole Birkenstock thing. Although I would probably be a very different person today. For one, I believe the vegetarian thing would have stuck. But that is another story for another day.

This story involves the fact that, although I loved San Francisco, my parents are New Yorkers, through and through, and somewhere in their minds, I think they always knew that the move to California was temporary. And so, we took advantage of our short time there and really saw San Francisco. We went below Mission Street, we went to Angel Island, to Ghirardelli Square… and to Napa.

Napa was my parents’ favorite place of all. At twelve, I was less than thrilled with the prospect of spending the whole afternoon in the car (my brother was going through a period where he experienced extreme motion sickness. Curvy back roads in Napa? Enough said.) But it was all worth it if I knew we would be going to Tra Vigne.

I may have only been to Tra Vigne two or three times, but it is one of the most vivid meals (or combination of meals, I suppose) in my memory. There was the famous “Tra Vigne Chicken,” which my mother has almost replicated 100% with its distinct blend of spices (the secret is cinnamon, by the way). There was the cheese plate that came on a marble slab at the end of the meal with real honeycomb to go with your cheeses. And then there was my favorite: lentil soup.

I have always had odd tastes, I suppose, but from the moment I tasted that soup, I was hooked. Goat cheese was sprinkled on top and it melted in to mix with the lentils, which had retained the perfect texture. I loved that soup.

I had long since forgotten about it, but as I was going through my pantry, trying to find something to make for dinner, I stumbled upon a can of lentils, and the whole thing came rushing back. I called my mother, who had bought the cookbook years ago, but it was to no avail.

“Michael Chiarello? It’s not even worth it. He leaves out all the key ingredients. The recipe for that chicken? It doesn’t even mention the spice rub.”

Damn. Well… onto the experimentation. Onions, for sure. And potato, I think, for the texture. Lentils… wine (everything’s better with wine… and it is a vineyard recipe.) And then I had a strange thought. Cinnamon had been the secret ingredient in the chicken… was it possible? No. That’s crazy. And yet, I still did it.

I don’t know if I was right. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten that soup… I remember the experience more than the taste. I do know that what I created was astounding. I slurped it up for dinner last night, and even though I was stuffed, I couldn’t help scooping a few last spoonfuls off of the serving I had portioned for tonight.

I am not Michael Chiarello. I am going to share. But you will not believe that it could ever be this simple.

Best Ever Lentil Soup

1 onion, chopped
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 glass red wine
2 new potatoes, diced small
1 can lentils, not drained
1/4-1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 oz. goat cheese
Sweat the onions in oil with a bit of salt until they color slightly. Add the wine and scrape all the yummy bits off the bottom of the saucepan. Add the potatoes, lentils, chicken broth and cinnamon. Cook until the potatoes are cooked through and the flavors have melded, about 20 minutes. Turn off the heat and blend slightly with an immersion blender, leaving about half the lentils whole. Stir in more chicken broth if necessary. Serve with goat cheese crumbled on top.

Dear Reader,

I’m sorry for abandoning you. I have no excuse. I could cite the fact that the Canadian has left, once again, this time for Cannes, which has left me with just little ol’ me to cook for. I could say that my aunt was here all last week, discovering Paris for the first time, but every time I look at the list of posts just waiting to be written up and posted, I know: I’m lazy.

But, dear reader, today I had the fortune of creating a recipe so delicious, I had to sit right down and share it with you. Isn’t that exciting?

While my aunt was here, I had roasted a few chickens for an Easter dinner, and so I had a new vat of homemade chicken stock just waiting to be used. So I went through my list of recipes to try and found this recipe for Chickpea, Ginger and Coriander Soup. This soup may have changed my life. Not only is it astoundingly delicious, but I realized how easy it is to make soup for one. Soup had always been a daunting task, one I never attempted for fear that I would never finish it. But this soup makes two neat servings, perfect for lunch for two, or, as I did, dinner two nights in a row with a green salad.

But that doesn’t tell you what’s up with the pink stuff in the bowl, does it? Basically, this soup reminded me of how much I love my immersion blender. I used to use it all the time for tomato sauce, until I realized I liked the chunks of tomato and onion, and so it was abandoned. After using it to make this soup though, I realized I was in love with it. My immersion blender is magical, taking chunks of odd ingredients and bringing them together in harmony in a bowl. (Wow… snap out of it, Emily.)

This soup created itself. I had bought a pre-boiled beet at the farmer’s market, but had yet to use it for a salad. I’m leaving for the weekend, and so I didn’t want to buy other salad ingredients. I also had some new potatoes left over from Easter. What to do… soup? OK, immersion blender, if you say so.

I boiled the potatoes in some chicken stock from my vat, and when they were cooked through, I chunked and added the beet to warm. I seasoned with salt and pepper, and then the immersion blender took the stage.

What appeared was so perfect and pink that I almost didn’t want to add anything else, but I had planned to throw in a pot of yogurt for some calcium, and I’m so glad I did. Some dried chives (use fresh if you have them) and a roquefort garnish finished it off… and I was free to enjoy my perfectly portioned bowl of soup, one for now, and one for later.

So thank you, dear reader, for not losing faith. This soup has given me the will to delve back into my list of posts to write, and very soon, you shall be hearing from me (and my immersion blender) again.

Love,

Emily

Beet-Potato Soup with Roquefort

1 cup chicken broth
5 new potatoes
1 large beet, boiled and peeled
1 4 oz container plain yogurt
1 tbsp. dried chives (or two fresh)
crumbled roquefort
Bring the broth to a boil and add the potatoes, chunking them to help them cook more quickly. Cook until soft. Add the beet, chunked, and cook until heated through. Remove from heat and blend with immersion blender. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add yogurt and chives. Serve in bowls with roquefort crumbled on top.

I haven’t always been as big a fan of eggs as I am now. I remember being forced to eat scrambled eggs as a child and hating them. I liked hard-boiled eggs, but only because my grandmother had one of those fancy hard-boiled egg slicer things, and I liked seeing the egg split into perfectly even slices.

I watched with awe as my father poked the yolks of his poached eggs, but I had no desire to eat the semi-cooked yellow ooze myself. How strange… now it’s my favorite way to eat eggs, fried over potatoes or sometimes some cooked spinach.

I really started liking eggs in high school, when my best friends and I would traipse down to the diner in the town where our boarding school was for the lunch special: five dollars for eggs, potatoes, toast, juice and coffee. I always got mine fried, very soft, so that I could mop up the yolk with the potatoes.

Since then, I have come to terms with the fact that eggs are the only thing that most college students can afford to eat in abundance, and since the Canadian loves fried eggs (he’ll eat five for breakfast), I’ve started buying the flat of thirty eggs at my local market. We even bought some goose eggs once, although they don’t scramble very well: the texture is very different from that of a chicken egg.

After awhile, even the Canadian got a little tired of fried eggs, and so I began inventing things. Omelettes, scrambles… anything to mix up our regular fare. I’ve been meaning to post these for awhile, but now that I’ve waited so long, I may as well give you all the recipes at once. Enjoy!

I don’t really work from recipes as far as eggs are concerned… mostly I use omelettes as a way to get rid of extras in my fridge. I scramble the eggs with milk, plain yogurt, fromage frais, crème fraîche or sour cream (or a combination) depending on what’s in the fridge, and then I move to the ad-ins. I’ll give you some outlines here though…

Mexican Scramble
The first picture is a Mexican scramble. it has salsa, thawed frozen spinach, and a bit of shredded cheese. I seasoned it with salt, pepper, hot chili pepper, coriander and cumin, and I had some Tabasco sauce on the side. I usually don’t make scrambles, but the amount of salsa in this one really makes it difficult to flip… so voila! A scramble.

Chorizo Omelette
The second picture is an omelette with Spanish-style chorizo (that’s the cooked kind), and some cheese… I think I used provolone. Any mild cheese will do… the Sausage packs a kick!

Gorgonzola and Mushroom Omelette
The last picture is an omelette with Gorgonzola cheese and cooked mushrooms. I fried the mushrooms first and then added the eggs and cheese, seasoning with a lot of black pepper.

The goose egg.

Check out other egg-related posts at the Art You Can Eat roundup on Eggs.