Results tagged “simplecooking”

Alright, we'll admit it - a lot of the time, we think collard greens are boiled to death. We know that some collard purists are going to get angry with us, arguing that the traditional way of cooking greens is the only way and that "pot licker" is the nectar of the gods. That's fine for them - we like our greens with a bit more bite.

            

A really excellent Caesar salad is a dish that separates the decent home cook from the great one. We've all had the bad Caesar - pre-cut lettuce from a bag, brown at the edges, drowning in a sauce with too much mayo and not enough flavor. Never again! If you can take just a few ingredients and treat them very nicely, you can make a starter that will have your friends and family glowing with happiness. Or, you can scarf it all down yourself. The instructions are in the photo captions, but a quick opening note: This salad can be customized any way you like. In the style of an authentic Caesar, we used an egg (boiled for 1 minute), rather than mayo. We did not add anchovies, as the original recipe uses Worchestershire sauce, which has anchovy paste. If you want to bulk the salad up, feel free to add some homemade croutons. Most of all, keep tossing - a great Caesar must be well blended.

As much as we love eating beets, apparently we love buying beets even more. There always seems to be some lying at the bottom of our refrigerator’s crisper drawer. Since we’re averse to wasting good produce, we had to come up with something new to do with them.

After a short hiatus, we're back in the kitchen! This week, we've cooked up a light, tasty summer supper which could serve as a main course (served alongside a salad and a big loaf of bread) or an appetizer served by itself. This is one of our favorite dishes, because it allows us to deceive our friends. It looks so fancy and tastes so fancy, but it is sinfully easy to make. The whole costs about $8, even if you buy the mussels at Whole Foods - they sell for between $4-5 a pound. It has a fancy French (or Belgian, depending on who you believe) name, which gives you an instant air of snobbery. Plus, you can use some of that dead bottle of white wine that's been sitting in your fridge for a month.

Beets have finally arrived in the farmer's markets! Beets are an under-appreciated and extremely versatile food, and while our first impulse was to turn them into pasta, we decided to try something new. Roasting beets is a classic way to prepare the sweet, burgundy lovelies, and this salad combines the earthy sweetness of the beets with a tart lemon/vinegar dressing and a light, fresh sliced pear.

Now that the farmer’s markets are filling up with tomatoes, it’s time to start finding great recipes to use them up. At this time of year, we prefer relatively simple, unadorned recipes - all the better to show off the freshness of the produce. This recipe is an adaptation of an old standard, usually made with vodka and a ton of cream. We use much less cream, to allow the flavors of the tomatoes and shallots to come through. Using grappa, instead of vodka, gives the pasta a kick AND some extra flavor. If you don’t have any grappa, we’d recommend using brandy.

    

Over the past six months, we’ve developed a love of dark, leafy greens. Kale, Collards, Chard - we like all of them, and somehow they’d never crossed our path before. This recipe uses another under-utilized leaf: Beet Greens.

After buying some beautiful Portobello mushrooms at Green City Market last weekend, we decided that this would be a great opportunity to start spring off right and break out the grill. Ok, the grill pan - sometimes, an urban cook has to improvise. But we could smell the charcoal of April in our minds.

     

We must’ve ordered this dish a hundred times at our favorite Greek restaurant, but we never thought to see if we could do it at home. This tart, garlicky spread is a great appetizer or snack; it keeps for at least a week and tastes great spread on bread, tortilla chips or vegetables. Our recipe come from the Parthenon Cookbook, which is a great buy - full of very basic recipes for Greek classics. It takes a little bit of time to drain the yogurt and marinate the flavors in the dip, but the actual work is pretty light and the result is worth the effort.

This pasta is amazing. Absolutely amazing. It’s not our recipe, so we can say that without sounding like a self-promoter. It’s from Wine Bar Food, by Tony and Cathy Mantuano (of Spiaggia) and it’s filled with some unlikely combinations (Anthony's visited recipes from Wine Bar Food for a "Simple Cooking" post before; please check out his take on the Mantuano's faux gras — Sudo.). Oranges? Raw tomatoes? Clams?

Onion soup is one of the recipes that every cook should know. It’s cheap, easy to make, hard to screw up and will make all of your guests very, very happy on a damp night. We’ve seen an infinite variety of onion soups all over the interwebs, including everything from the simplest (sauté onions for 5 minutes, dump in beef bouillon cubes) to the most complex (roasting ingredients overnight in a slow oven). We like to think our recipe is somewhere in the middle.

When we were planning our election night get-together, we decided to try out some new recipes. Rather than making the same old hummus dip (maybe with a new spice, to make it seem trendier), we were looking for something with the same universal appeal, but with a radically different flavor. On the other hand, we wanted it to stay meat-free for any vegetarian guests.

We’re always looking for interesting chicken recipes, but we find most are either incredibly bland or mouth-numbingly dry. We prefer whole roast or rotisserie chickens, but often boneless skinless chicken breasts are the only convenient option on a weekday night. This is an easy dish with a nice Thai twist and you can finish it in less than thirty minutes. It’s also got a nice spicy, citrus flavor for a summer dinner out on the balcony.