Quick Tip: How To Use Broccoli Stems

photo by Flickr user: Trazy

Of course, the best part of the Broccoli plant are the florets, which make for a great quick side dish, cut off the stems and steamed with butter and salt.  But what do you do with the stems? Throw them away?  No way!  Here at Forkable, we like to use every part of the pig.  Underneath their woody skin, which can easily be removed using a potato peeler, lurks a soft and yummy interior.  To save time, I keep a bag in the freezer where I can throw the stems after I cut the florets off.  When I’ve collected enough stems, I then use them to make a big batch of cream of broccoli soup.  Yum!

Cream of Broccoli (Stem) Soup

• broccoli stems,
• equal amount potatoes
• 1-2 large onions, chopped
• chicken (or vegetable) stock
• milk to taste
• salt and pepper to taste

Prepare broccoli stems: Using a potato peeler, remove stringy fibrous skin of stems.  I defrost my stems by leaving in the fridge over night, but I think it would work having them be frozen as well.  Chop stems up into approx. inch long sections.

Start Soup: Saute onions in 1-2 Tbs of olive oil until clear.  If you have  a lot of stems (3-5 lbs) you can use two onions, otherwise, one medium sized one is fine.   Skin potatoes (if you want, the skin is pretty healthy so I usually leave on), and chop into large chunks: quarters or sixths.  Add potatoes and broccoli to pot.  Add stock until all ingredients are just covered.  Bring to a boil and then down to a simmer.  Simmer for 20-30 minutes until veggies are falling apart.

Mix soup:  Once all ingredients are super soft, blend either using an immersion blender or in a food processor until your desired consistency.  If you want it to be chunky, just a few light pulses will do.  Add a bit of milk to up the creamy-ness and season using salt and pepper.  You can start with just 1/2 c. milk and 1 tsp salt and add more from there to meet your needs.  Keep adding salt until you get the right flavor.  Remember, its easier to add more then to take away too much.

Eat your soup: Yum.  Feel good you just made a delicious soup from parts of the plant you might not otherwise have eaten.  Great job!  Its fun to feel good about being thrifty while you eat a delicious meal.  Enjoy.

Freezing Food For After Baby Comes: 4 Dishes to Make Life Easier

I’ve got less then one week before my due date, and still so much yet undone.  One of my main to-do items is preparing a few dishes in bulk I can freeze in single serving portions for a quick dinner after baby comes.  Everyone has been warning me that after the baby arrives, I won’t be up for cooking much.  I’m sort of feeling that way already and the baby isn’t even here yet!  I’ve been working all year on cleaning out my freezer to make room.  Now I’ve got to fill it up again.  I’m trying to keep things simple, so I’m only going to prepare 3-4 things which don’t take a lot of energy.  Its a time for comfort food, so I’ve selected a few of my favorite easy to make dishes.

1.  Lamb Chili.

Lamb Chili is one of my favorite dishes, as I’ve posted in the past.  It’s easy to make in a large batch, requires very little energy to whip together and freezes like a dream.  I’m making a triple batch as we speak and will spoon out into large yogurt containers to freeze.

2.  Lasagna

Who doesn’t love lasagna?  Although a bit putzy to make, I can easily make two trays at once and then freeze them in individual containers to easy reheat.  Any dish with melted cheese is a comfort food for me!

3.  Roasted Chicken in a Skillet Dinner

This dinner is pretty fast and easy on its own, but to speed up time, I’m going to pre-saute the onion/celery mixture used for the stuffing base and freeze it.  This will allow me to just throw all the ingredients into a pan and bake when I’m ready.

4. Broccoli Soup

Photo Courtesy of Flickr User: Musicpb

I can’t believe I’ve never posted a Broccoli soup recipe before!  I love it.  Its easy and delicious.  I’ve been eating tons of broccoli during my pregnancy (it is a superfood!).  I’ve been cutting off the florets and steaming them for a quick side dish, and just throwing the stems into the freezer.  Now, I have TONS of broccoli stems.  Time to make them into soup!  I plan on using a simple recipe.  When heating up, I can add a bit of blue cheese to add some pizzazz!

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So I warn you, I’m due any minute.  I’ve got a few blog posts lined up immediately  following the birth, but I may not be as good at updating over the next month or two, with a new baby.  However, keep checking in.  I don’t plan on giving up on this blog!

Faux “Sun Dried” Tomatoes

Oven dried tomatoes with rosemary and thyme.

I can hear you asking what the hell are Faux “sun dried” Tomatoes.  No, the tomato is not a fake, its just the “sun dried” process which we’re going to expedite.  I LOVE LOVE LOVE sun dried tomatoes!  The drying process intensifies the depth and sweetness of the tomato flavor as it removes the extra water weight.  My love for these dried treats does not extend to their expensive price.  My default when confronted with expensive food items is to think how I can make it myself.  The rub is, I am also too lazy to actually sun dry anything!  I’m generally a bit too unorganized to think days in advance.  However, there is an answer.  We can speed up this process by using modern technology! Lets make “oven dried” tomatoes!

Oven Roasted Tomatoes

• 2 pounds ripe plum tomatoes, cored and cut in half lengthwise
• 1½ tsp. kosher salt
• Extra virgin olive oil (optional)
• Fresh herb sprigs (thyme, rosemary or sage) optional

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Arrange the tomatoes cut side up in a single layer on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt. Dry in oven until slightly shriveled but still plump. About 2-5 hours depending on the amount of time you have as well as the level of dried-ness you want. If not using immediately, store the tomatoes in a sealed container with the herbs, cover with olive oil, and store, covered in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Flag of Italy pasta dinner: sauteed broccoli rabe, broiled chicken breast and oven dried tomatoes on fresh pasta with pesto.

Ok, so its not necessarily super fast, but a few hours is quicker then a few days!  Even if you’re really on a time pinch,  an hour will yield a nice result.  Last week, being short on time, I quickly oven dried a few tomatoes for only an hour  for a pasta dinner.  It was very delish!

Quick Tip: How To Toast Tortillas

A warm, supple, steamy tortilla is so much more delicious then a tough, cold lifeless one. So why ever serve them cold.  Toasting your tortillas is quicker then heating them in the oven and healthier then deep frying.  If you have a gas range oven, here’s a quick way to heat a hand-full of tortillas in seconds!

Turn your gas burner on.  Place a tortilla directly onto each burner.  Allow to sit until they begin to puff up with steam and are lightly charred, about 15-30 seconds.

Flip tortillas onto opposite side, until also charred.  Remove from burner and serve immediatly. For maximum results, get all four burners going at once!

5 Tips For Tearless Onions

Those damned onions!  Love to eat them, hate to chop ‘em.  I always get so damned weepy.  After posting my family’s recipe for our Thanksgiving Onion Casserole last year, the comments have been flooded with great ideas on how to stem the tide (or flood) of ocular moisture.  Since this info is so great, I’ve compiled it in one post so this holiday season,  you can keep the tears out of the kitchen and save them for those awkward family table conversations.

1) Put onions in the freezer for 20 minutes before you cut ‘em. Not only has this worked time and time again for me, but friends who love to cook have tested the theory as well…it has yet to fail. Good luck!
-Laurie

2) DON’T cut off the root end of the onion or through it! I peal the onion, cut off a small slice from the side (so there’s a level sitting area). Then make a horizontal cut down the center toward the root end – set on flat side and cut away – tear free half circle onion slices! It’s all in the root!
-Audra

3) I light a candle near my cutting board. I think I read that in a Martha Stewart column. It seems to work.
-Mom

4) Swimming googles make working with onions a tear-free experience. It also entertains any witnesses.
-Diane

5) Slice them underwater, but that’s a bit of a pain. I just cry and let it happen.
-Regis

Thanks guys for the great ideas. Feel free to add any more you all might know of.

3 Tips to Make Perfectly Mashed Yucca

I’ve always thought of yucca as being a very exotic thing. Not only is it not part of the average American diet but it also has some very strange textural characteristics which make it very weird. Yucca, similar to a potato, is often eaten boiled and mashed. Because it is VERY high in starch, if you give the yucca mash a good mix, it becomes very sticky and gooey. This paste can be very good for various things, but I’ve found, I often end up with this sticky paste, when all I wanted was mashed yucca.

Here are 3 quick tips for getting a good mashed yucca.

1. Peel completely. Remove the hard outer skin as well as the pinky underskin. The delicate white inside will be less fibrous then the outer layers.

2. Boil the shit out of it. Cut the yucca into disks or chunks and boil in water. I always boil potatoes until you can put a knife into it, but I’ve found, you have to boil yucca longer. It starts to break up in the water, but it will still be hard inside. Keep boiling it until it falls apart easily to the touch. This means the fiber has broken down a bit.

Potato Ricer: image courtesy of Exlibris

3. Use a potato ricer to mash the yucca. A ricer helps separate the hard fiber from the softer mash, leaving you with a perfectly fluffy pile of mashed yucca. I know you may not have a potato ricer, its sort of an unnecessary kitchen item. However, once every decade, it comes in handy, and this is one of those occasions.

Precious in Pink: Pickled Quail’s Egg in Beet Juice

Pickled eggs seem so nice and ol’ timey. I imagine some turn-of-the-century saloons where they were available at almost every bar. They’re so easy to make. Its just a matter of hard boiling and then soaking them in a brine. My brother-in-law, Jason, always has a jar of them in the fridge, and they do make a great snack; all that protein can really fill you up!

Pickled quails eggs, as garnish for the appetizer course from our Polynesian Meal.

Tiny things are always so precious. You could fit 3 or 4 quails egg inside the shell of an average chicken’s so of course, its hard not to adore them. Don’t judge them by their size though, although small, once cooked, these eggs are surprisingly tough. Their egg whites are not as soft as their larger counterparts which gives for a surprising texture when bursting into the center and finding a soft, delicate yolk. They are a bit exotic in our culture, but quite common in various Asian cuisines, so are not impossible to find pickled if not fresh in Chinese, Korean or Thai grocery stores.

So lets pull out our cauldron, and with a little of toil, toil, boil and bubble, we’ll mix together 1 part exotic, to two parts precious, a pinch of ol’ timey, and a bit of beet blood for pizzaz and we’ll concoct the perfect pickled quails eggs!

(oh come on, I don’t mean blood- its beet juice. Sheesh!)

PICKLED QUAIL EGGS

• 3 dozen fresh Quail eggs, or 2 cans of preserved eggs*
• 4-5 medium sized beets, washed and quartered
• 2 c. vinegar (white wine, cider, rice, or any mixture of these)
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 1 tsp. salt
• bay leaves
• black peppercorn
• whole cloves
• fresh mint
• 1 clean quart jar with lid

* I suggest getting fresh, as the canned eggs are a bit rubbery. However, the longer fresh eggs sit in a brine, the more they will become a bit rubbery as well. They are best eaten within two weeks. However if you plan to store yours for a while, it doesn’t matter if you start out with canned or fresh.

Make beet juice. We’ll add beet juice to the brine to give added flavor but most importantly a nice purple color. Clean and wash your beets. You don’t have to skin them if you don’t want just get all the yuck off. Quarter and place in a pot with water covering about 1″ above beets. Cover, bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer. Allow to cook for about 30 minutes, until you see dark red liquid. Drain and reserve 2 c. of juice for your brine.

While beets are cooking, we’ll prepare the eggs. If you’re using canned eggs, you can skip to step 4. If using fresh eggs, we’ll need to hard boil them. Place a cloth napkin or towel at the bottom of a pot, place the fresh eggs on the cloth and fill the pot with water. Place the pot on a the stove. Cover and bring to a rolling boil. Once boiling, remove the pot from heat. Let sit for 5 minutes with pot still covered. While its sitting, prepare a bowl of ice water. Take eggs from hot water, and place into the ice water until they cool. This will make peeling them easier. Because they are so small, its easy to damage them while peeling. Peel eggs and set aside.

Create your brine. In your cualdron, I mean in a pot, mix all ingredients, including the beet blood, ahem…juice, but excluding the eye of newt. Ok, joke taken too far now! Excluding the eggs, put everying into a pot and bring to a boil. If you have a pickling spice mix, feel free to use that instead of the whole spices I listed above. Once the brine is boiling, remove from heat.

Assemble your jar of pickles. Place your eggs in your quart jar. Pour the hot brine over the eggs, whole spices and all. Fill jar with as much of the brine as possible, place lid on jar and allow to sit. Once cool, you can add in some fresh mint if you want and place in the refridgerator.

Your pickled eggs will be at full potency in about a week and will remain good indefinitely if kept chilled.

Don’t Do The Dishes: Banana Bread in Pork Roaster

Waste not, want not. I believe that. Also, I can be lazy. These are the pillars of this post.

I’ve been testing recipes for our Polynesian supper club coming up next weekend. As part of our soup course, I need to prepare a roast pork shoulder with a papaya seed rub. This past Monday, I was experimenting with my recipe. And I was left over with a glass baking dish with some delicious drippings and grease. I swear, although its horrible for you, there is almost nothing which smells and tastes as delicious as pork fat. You think there is…prove it!

Pork shoulder roast with papaya and sea salt rub. Soooo good!

Anyway, I also had two bananas going bad which I needed to use up. I decided to make banana bread. But…I only have one loaf sized pan and it was currently being used with the small test pork roast. Hmmm….

Yes, I had two bananas, but I already smashed one before I thought to take their pictures. Oh well.

To be lazy, I don’t like doing dishes. (WHO DOES??) To waste not, I wanted to use both the delicious pork flavor on the glass dish and the bananas which were going bad. Why not put them together!! I decided to make a banana bread and just put the batter right into the glass dish once the pork roast was done!

A detail of the caramelized pork drippings on the glass dish (left) and the batter in the pork fat (right).

I left some of the pork grease in the bottom and put my banana bread batter right into the dish to bake and fuse with the caramelized porky yum.

The result: banana bread with a slight hint of the savory salty sweet flavor of pork. I also added a lemon glaze. Delish!

Here’s the basic banana bread I used:

Basic Banana Bread

• 2 brown bananas
• 1/2 c. butter
• 1 c. flour
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp salt*
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp allspice
• 1/4 tsp cloves
• 3/4 c. sour cream
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp whiskey

Lemon Glaze

• 1 c. confectioners sugar
• 2-3 tbs lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Mash bananas in a bowl.
3. Cream butter and sugar together with a stand or hand mixer until light and fluffy.
4. Add eggs 1 at a time to butter and sugar and mix.
5. Mix dry ingredients together.
6. Add to butter/sugar/eggs and mix together.
7. Add bananas, sour cream, vanilla and whiskey.
8. Pour into your pan greased loaf pan (the pork fat is not manditory).
9. Bake until tests clean with knife or skewer test. About 45 – 60 minutes.
10. Prepare glaze by mixing together two ingredients.
11. Spread glaze over cooled loaf.
12. Eat it, obviously!

Questions From the Readers: Can You Save Chicken Drippings?

Breakfast fried in chicken drippings.

Andrea, I just roasted my first chicken and I have a pan full of drippings. Can I save them for future use? What can I use them for? Can I freeze them? -Katie

Awesome! I love chicken grease! Its almost the best part of the chicken. Your question was well timed in that, although I didn’t roast a chicken this weekend, I did need to finish up some chicken thighs we were BBQing in the oven when it started to rain on us friday night. Boo hoo about the rain, but we ended up with a small pan of chicken drippings which I used Saturday morning to make us a decadent and delicious breakfast!

Using the chicken grease in my cast iron pan, I first fried up a pan of potatoes to golden crispy deliciousness. Then I threw in some eggs and fried them up in the same grease. This grease puts the chicken back in the egg. (hmm that sounds sort of weird, but its true!) The whole house smelled deliciously chickeny and we had a breakfast which will definitely put meat on your bones.

Now in answer to your question, if you don’t plan on using the drippings to make a gravy, I would still save them for sure. This stuff looks and tastes like liquid gold. Besides using the grease for frying up deliciousness, its also a great way to punch up a quick soup or sauce if you don’t have time to make a chicken stock. Depending on the amount of grease, you may want to separate the two so you don’t make your soup or sauce too fatty.

In terms of saving it, you can definitely freeze the drippings in a jar or Tupperware container until you need to use it. I prefer glass since I can easily throw it into the microwave to quickly defrost it when I want to use it. Some people like to separate the grease from the drippings when freezing, but again, depending on what you want to use it for, you may not need to.

Delicious pan fried breakfast in chicken drippings

In short, Chicken drippings are great to use in soups, sauces, stocks or for pan frying and can be frozen to keep for future use.

• separate the grease from the juice if you plan to use the juice in a quick soup or sauce.
• don’t waste time separating the grease for stocks because you’ll have to skim grease from your bones off the surface anyway.
• use separated chicken grease for pan frying or deep frying (if you collect enough!)

“Healthy” Camp Cobbler With Double Acting Alka Seltzer

Imagine this: While vacationing with a bunch of friends, you’ve snagged a bunch of cherries from a ripe cherry tree. You really want to show-off by whipping up an awesome cherry cobbler on the fly. You’ve got just the recipe in mind, but you soon realize your friend’s cabin does not stock baking powder? Is this the end of your grandstanding dreams?

If you say yes, turn to page 5, where you will die a gruesome death.

If you say no, continue to read on.
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Congratulations, you said “no”, this isn’t the end to your grandstanding dreams. You will live on to be the obnoxious braggart that you are. But first, you need to put your money where your mouth is and figure out a way of this no-baking-powder-pickle. Think about what you can use instead. What does baking powder do for the recipe and what else might create the same effect.

Okay, you know baking powder reacts while baking, creating bubbles which lighten baked goods and make then fluffy. Baking soda can be mixed with vinegar (similar to the volcano science fair project) for the same results.

Sorry, you don’t have baking soda either, but thinking on this reminded you of the packets of alka seltzer you always carry in your bag to counteract your nightly binge drinking.

Cobbler with alka seltzer? This is brilliant you think! What a way to cure all your aches and pains. What a tasty treatment. Practice your swagger; its time to self medicate while baking!

crushed alka seltzer to substitute for baking powder.

Here’s the recipe I came up with when faced with the exact same situation last weekend at my friend’s cabin. We all ate it, and many people burped to show their appreciation and gratitude!

Cherry Camp Cobbler
in a 9″ x 12″ pan, 16 – 20 servings

• 2-3 c. bing cherries, pitted
• 1 c. butter, melted
• 2 c. flour
• 3 c. sugar
• 2 c. milk
• 3 packets of alka selter (6 tablets)
• 9″ x 12″ baking dish

pitting the cherries by pulling the stems.

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Rinse cherries and pit them. To pit these, fresh from the orchard, I was able to extract the pit by pulling the stem while squeezing the cherry. The pit stayed attached to the stem and I could basically pull the cherry off the pit.
3. In a sauce pan, place the cherrys with 1 cup of sugar and bring to a boil. Boil for a couple of minutes and then remove from heat. Drain cherries and reserve Bing cherries are very tart so we need to precook them with a bit of sugar to infuse some sweetness into the fruit. This will also help cook some of the juice out of the fruit so the cobbler won’t be too soupy.
4. Drain cherries, reserving 1/4 c. of juice. Set aside cherries and 1/4 c. juice. Use the rest of the juice to make a kick-ass old fashioned. (although it may appear to be, this drink is not optional.)
5. Melt the butter on the stove top or in a microwave if you have one. Pour melted butter into the bottom of your 9″x12″ baking dish or pan.
6. Crush alka seltzer tablets in a bowl or cup until they are a fine powder, set aside.
   
   
7. Measure all your dry ingredients: Mix dry ingredients together including the crushed alka seltzer. Mix your milk and reserved 1/4 c. cherry juice. Have your cherries in a bowl along with all your other mixed ingredients ready to go along with your baking dish with the melted butter. Because we’re using alka seltzer instead of baking powder, its going to react immediately so we want to mix it at the last possible minute and pop it into the stove as soon as possible.
8. Quickly assemble your cobbler: Mix the dry and wet ingredients and pour them into the pan with the butter. Spoon the cherries into the batter. Try to distrubute evenly.
9. Bake for 30-45 minutes or until toothpic/knife can be poked into cobbler and come out clean.

A delicioulsy fluffy cobbler ready to eat.

This cobbler recipe is always delicious but the addition of the alka seltzer only makes it better! I would say this qualifies as a healthy snack. Though its definitely not low-fat, it does make you feel way better after eating (it has aspirin in it)!

**Sorry the pictures are not as good as usual, they were taken by Ira’s iPhone while we were on vacation.