Holiday Traditions, New and Old

Inspired by the Great British Bake Off and a partially used canister of whipped cream in the refrigerator left over from an ice cream social, I went looking for a recipe for soft gingerbread to make for breakfasts this week. We don't keep molasses in the house (do you?), so I substituted maple syrup. It was a nice dark variety, and since I'm not such a big fan of hard gingerbread, I thought it was an inspired choice.

Later on, we happened to pass by the famous life-sized creche in downtown Pittsburgh. I had known it existed but nothing else about it. While discussing the Christmas stories in the Gospels the next morning at Sunday School, I learned about its interesting history. You see, there had been a creche on the grand staircase in the Allegheny Courthouse, and a Christmas tree, menorah, and "liberty" sign in the portico of the City-County Building. The ACLU objected over the Establishment Clause, and the Supreme Court eventually ruled in 1989 that the tree and menorah cancelled each other out, but the creche had to go.

Despite all that, the Christian Leaders Fellowship put up a creche--on what was officially city land--in 1996. In 1998, city leaders sensibly decided it couldn't be displayed there. Eventually they found a sponsor in a businessman who had traveled to Rome a few years earlier and was so inspired by the nativity scene at St. Peter's Basilica, that he got permission to duplicate the 64-foot-wife, 42-foot-high, 36-foot-long stable and its figures (there are 20 people, animals, and angels). It is erected in the plaza at the foot of the U.S. Steel Tower (the one that has UPMC in big letters at the top) in time for Light-Up Night in mid-November and taken down after Epiphany. 

What the lady in Bible study told us is that at one point the magis' robes were torn from the weather, and there weren't enough funds to repair or replace them, but the local Jewish community stepped in with money to help continue this display "for the glory of God," even though it is not their tradition.

I probably should have set the butter out sooner, as the batter was kind of lumpy, and the final product had butter spots. Surprisingly, it was not very sweet at all, and in fact I thought it needed the whipped cream. I asked Dear Husband to do his best Paul Hollywood impression and tell me whether the cake was "moist" or "underdone." He thought it could have used another 5 minutes in the oven, which means the recipe was 10-15 minutes shorter than I needed--perhaps the oven in our new house runs cool.  It had already caramelized the edges the way some people like their brownies, so this cake must be done when the top is evenly browned. I look forward to trying this recipe again. In which case, we'll have to start keeping the fridge stocked with whipped cream...

Move over clam chowder: it's seafood bisque!

A Facebook friend shared that she had just made this seafood bisque, and since I was casting about for easy meals to cook this weekend that would add variety to our menus, we stopped by the grocery store after church to pick up the ingredients.

Ingredients:
1 cup shrimp (the recipe called for baby shrimp, but we couldn't find any, so I just took the tails off and chopped up some small cocktail shrimp)
1 cup crab/ lobster/ scallop meat (an 8 oz packet of the imitation stuff was a rounded cup)
1/2 cup of chopped celery and carrot all together (it gets blended so you/your partner won't notice)
butter, flour, and garlic to make a roux (I skipped the green onion, because we never use it before it goes bad)
2.5 cups whole milk (save the rest of the quart for hot chocolate or cream of wheat) 
1 cup heavy whipping cream (thankfully there is no whipping involved)
1 tbsp of tomato paste (as tiny as those little cans are, you will have a lot left over)
Old Bay, bay leaf, salt and pepper to taste

I found that this recipe required constant hands-on activity, chopping or measuring one thing while something else cooked. However, the 30-minute preparation time was accurate for producing 4 servings of this slightly off-white bisque, which I served with green salad and oyster crackers (remember those?).

Now, you may be asking yourself, What is the difference between a bisque and a chowder? I had the same question! This MasterClass article taught me that a bisque is a blended, creamier soup, while chowder tends to be thinner and chunkier. This one calls for a hand blender (I used a stand blender), then adding in the seafood, so in terms of consistency, it seems to land somewhere in the middle. And it's easier to prepare than a traditional bisque, because it uses spices rather than having to cook down the seafood shells. Either way, we enjoyed it very much and look forward to making it again before the weather warms up for good.

Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this recipe, you might want to try other seafood adventures, including seafood casserole, salmon patties, or shrimp couscous (a staple in our rotation).

Cooking with Frau Doktor Doctor: Christmas Edition

Him: "You? Freelanced? In the kitchen?"

Me: "I plead the fifth."

You see, Dear Reader, I wanted to make Creamy potato broccoli soup for our Christmas Eve dinner. Because Dear Husband is a church musician, he works on Christmas Eve, so we can't leave town to celebrate with family until at least Christmas Day (sometimes later depending on our respective work schedules). When we lived in Champaign, DH would be gone for most of Christmas Eve either rehearsing or playing for one of several church services, so I asked him to come home in between, usually for a steak dinner by the light of the unity candle we had lit at our wedding.

This year he suggested thawing the Montgomery Inn ribs his parents had sent for his birthday. Usually I would make his favorite side dish--mashed potatoes--but I came upon this plant-based recipe and decided to give it a go. Let's just say, I should have re-read the directions before starting. Here's how to prepare it, Frau Doktor Doctor style:

1. Once you've located the recipe on your phone after much fruitless searching on your laptop, put on a nice holiday movie like Love Actually, Die Hard, or ... The Beguiled (the recent Sophia Coppola version). In my defense, I thought it was a ghost story based on the trailer a couple years ago. (Ghost stories are too appropriate for the holidays; Exhibit A: A Christmas Carol.) Spoiler alert: The Beguiled is not a ghost story. It is a whole movie with a singular plot line that, when it is over, makes you wonder, Was that all? (Reader: it was.)

2. Assemble ingredients: 2 pounds Yukon gold potatoes (or whatever fingerlings are leftover in the fridge, since we were imminently leaving town), 3 garlic cloves (for the first time in my life, I actually used fewer than the recipe suggested, because the head I currently have offers enormous cloves), 1 large yellow onion (eh, I had a half leftover from something or other), 3 tbsp extra virgin oil (now this I had), 1 quart vegetable broth (oops, the carton in the pantry was chicken broth), 1/2 raw unsalted cashews (all we had were honey roasted), 1 pound frozen broccoli florets or 4 cups steamed fresh (I opted for the latter), 1 large carrot (check), 1 tsp dried thyme (ground or flaked?), 3/4 tsp dried dill (yes), 2 tsp white wine vinegar (located at the back of the cupboard), 1 tsp Dijon mustard (oui).

3. Figure that the potatoes will take the longest to cook, so chop them into a pot of boiling water.

4. Since the broccoli was supposed to be well cooked, chop that next and start to steam it.

5. Dice the onion, mince the garlic, and skip the step about stripping the potatoes of their most nutritious part (aka the peel). Sauté in olive oil.

6. Add cashews and a pinch salt. Note that you were supposed to cook the potatoes in the broth in this pot. Too late now.

7. All of the potatoes are supposed to fit into a blender?? You're making a generous batch, so figure it will have to be done in parts. Blend several spoonfuls of potatoes with a generous splash of broth and a spoonful of broccoli. 

8. Pour this into the pan with the onion and garlic. Re-read the directions again and finally comprehend that only the potatoes were supposed to be blended, not the broccoli. Whoops.

9. Jiggle the blender, plug and unplug it, and hope that the smell of burning motor doesn't mean it's dead.

10. Blend the rest of the potatoes. With the rest of the broth (works better that way).

11. Heat everything in the pot with the rest of the seasonings and "julienned" carrot strips. Decide you had selected an extra large carrot and eventually eat what's left as a cook's tax because you have plenty of carrot ribbons, and you know DH doesn't particularly them.

12. Serve hot with some crusty bread! This was the first course for our Christmas Eve dinner of ribs, homemade orange-cranberry sauce with walnuts on a bed of spinach, and rosemary roasted carrots. It was okay, definitely not as life changing as the online recipe promised. It probably could have used a little more salt and to have cooked down some. Looks like it will freeze well to have in January on a night when we don't feel like cooking.

To drink: leftover Orange Crush soda from the hospital. To watch: Downton Abbey.

We actually had a second dinner with friends after the Christmas Eve service: butternut squash soup, homemade wheat loaf, lasagna, and the green salad pictured above with red pepper, spicy pepitas, bakery-bought baguette. I had contemplated making some whipped rosemary butter but gave up for lack of time. However, I did improvise a salad dressing from this recipe, swapping a rest of a packet of sriracha sauce for the freshly grated ginger. It had just enough kick to be interesting! The special treat of course were the pomegranate seeds, which I will only spend the half hour of picky labor on for this particular hostess.

For Christmas morning brunch, I baked cinnamon waffles and made this pear compote topping. I used half as much brown sugar, included the special rum vanilla from cousin EH, and punched up the plating with cinnamon, walnut halves, and pomegranate seeds. Not only was it delicious, but it sustained us through noontime mass at the Catholic cathedral.

Here you can see what we did for Advent already. We still have to travel to Ohio to celebrate with that part of the family. New Year's will be a balancing act between work, travel, and small celebrations. With 55 degrees and rain, it could hardly be more different than Christmas 2020. This is last year's post, although what we remember most is a snowy walk late on Christmas Eve to look at lights on the houses, and a snowy walk on Christmas Day through Frick Park. I'm finishing this blog after a nice long, rather damp walk around the neighborhood to look at lights. It's time to go to bed with my new book (Atul Gawande's Being Mortal from DH), with the lights on the tree shining through the doorway. Merry Christmas!

To the victor

 There were GAMES!

Foosball, which I'd never really played before but enjoyed immensely;

best for the ambidextrous.

Somebody just made either a very good or a very bad move at Mexican train dominoes.

The whole family played one night.

Settlers of Catan, original edition,

plus who says mimosas are only for weekend brunch?

Ticket to Ride, Junior USA edition.

...go the spoils:

To the left is what was going on in the background of the last game picture: creating honest-to-goodness-the-best-enchiladas-any-of-us-had-ever-tasted.

To the right, I try to recreate the success of veggie pizza pizza before we introduced Dear Husband to the original Jurassic Park while enjoying Pittsburgh Popcorn.

Next: [Click-bait goes here]

Bread pudding in the microwave

While I am "on service" at the hospital, I get up so early that I am rarely hungry. Looking for a healthy, hearty breakfast that I could prepare in the staff kitchenette, I came across this breakfast in a mug. The single serving is slight, so I doubled the recipe for all-morning staying power.

2 slices of bread, cubed into a reusable glass dish

2 eggs whisked with 3-4 tbsp milk, salt, pepper, and herbs*
Chopped grape tomatoes, bell pepper, asparagus, etc. (4 tbsp)

Some diced onion

Optional: crumbled sausage, bacon bits, cubed ham, etc.

Topped with 4 tbsp grated cheese

*Many different seasonings would do, such as basil and oregano, or sage and marjoram, or rosemary, but I've recently discovered how much I love thyme on eggs, potatoes, etc.

The beauty of this recipe is that it can/should be prepared the night before and left to soak over night. Heat on high in the microwave for 1 minute. Let stand for 10 seconds. Microwave for another 1 minute. Let cool slightly and enjoy! Goes well with earthy teas like rooibos, dandelion, or chicory.

Here I can be seen enjoying my "breakfast in a mug" [sic] while reading "Alcohol and the Hypothalamic Pituitary-Adrenal Axis" to try to understand a patient's presentation and laboratory abnormalities.

Editor's Note: Check out these other bread pudding recipes, including savory bread pudding, sweet bread pudding, seafood bread pudding, vegetarian bread pudding, and South African bobotie.

Carob Chip Cookies

Another weekend, another failed bid on a house, another baked good. What else is new? This Saturday we looked at a cute little house in Mount Washington. Then we picked up paninis from the local cafe to eat in a park while watching an adorable toddler playing with a stick. Next we walked through the neighborhood, enjoying the 74-degree sunshine and the vistas all along Grandview Avenue overlooking the Monongahela River, the Point, downtown Pittsburgh, and the Ohio River. We even got to experience a classic set of Pittsburgh steps (left); this is "Well Street." Below is the mural at the cafe of a stork delivering baskets of coffee beans from different countries.

In the late afternoon, I pulled up David Attenborough's A Life on This Planet while baking carob chip cookies. Funnily enough, just that morning I had read an article shared by a friend on Facebook about "how carob traumatized a generation" of children in the 1970s, when their parents jumped on the health-food bandwagon: "Poor carob ... [i]t never wanted to be chocolate in the first place." Dear Husband had purchased the imitation chips because he gets migraine headaches with even a little exposure to caffeine, so this was an experiment to let him enjoy a classic treat without suffering for it later. 

I decided to use the recipe on bag instead of the usual Toll House one. Interestingly, although it claimed to be "allergy friendly," it still called for milk and an egg. I substituted an equivalent amount of applesauce for the milk but left in the egg and used brown sugar instead of date sugar. After saving a couple spoonfuls of dough for DH so he could have the privilege of risking Salmonella poisoning, I chilled the dough balls on the cookie sheets for a few minutes in the freezer. Maybe I should have pulled the cookies out a few minutes sooner so the edges didn't get a crispy, but all in all, a passable substitute for chocolate chip cookies.

May Your Home Smell As Good As...

...a scented candle in the bathroom after a nice long soak in the tub with a book and bath salts from a friend.

Or as good as this cinnamon apple pecan walnut sweetbread I made. Here is the recipe. It almost wasn't sweet, as just before combining the wet and dry ingredients together, I realized I had nearly forgotten to add any sugar, because I was distracted by a comedy sketch by Australian actor Hannah Gadsby. I didn't remember opening the sugar container, and a wet fingertip of mixed dry ingredients only tasted like flour. Therefore, I deduced that I had skipped a step, added the sugar, and proceeded. 

The house smelled SO GOOD while this baked. It was nice to come in from picking up a plastic bag's worth of trash from along the major road that runs in front of our current rental to the wafting scents of cinnamon, Granny Smith apples, and sugar. However, I did find the batter dry. The apple chunks largely fell to the bottom, and much of the nut crust fell off the top. Next time I would cut those back from 1 cup each to 3/4 cup.

Cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cake

I recently craved cinnamon streusel coffee cake. I don't drink coffee, of course, but we had received a postcard in the mail from a local realtor that had a recipe for it. I tossed the card into the recycling and was very shortly sorry. So I googled around for an easy-enough recipe that would produce the fluffy breakfast baked good. I decided on the King Arthur Flour recipe, and I even purchased a 5-pound bag of their product, since I was going to need ~5 cups of the stuff!

I prepared the batter on Friday night so that we would only have to wait a little over 1 hour Saturday morning for the oven to warm up and the coffee cake to bake. The preparations took about an hour and used up almost every measuring spoon and cup plus multiple bowls (wet ingredients, dry ingredients, filling, topping). I have never made a marble cake, so the instruction to swirl the batter and filling with a knife was hard to follow. Streusel topping was also new to me, and I think I broke it up too finely. 

Final critique: I'm not sure I successfully balanced getting the center "done" while not over-baking the outer portions. A 9"x13" pan makes a LOT of coffee cake! We will probably eat half over the next week, and then I'll freeze the other half for a month or so. What a treat to get it back out of the freezer to eat on some more. Despite almost 4 cups of white and brown sugar, Dear Husband declared it delicious and not too sweet. I'm so lucky he lets me "experiment" in the kitchen like this and know what I'll make the next time I host/attend a brunch.

Pittsburgh "Black and Gold" Soup

This is another Cooking with Frau Doktor Doctor post. Just follow these simple directions, and by the time you are done, you may have something to eat...eventually. Learn from my mistakes!

1. On Monday while apprising the store of foodstuffs relative to the projected length of the stay-at-home order, discover a Tupperware canister of dried black beans. Decide to make the Black Bean and Corn Soup from your Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook on Tuesday night, right before the cheesy tuna pasta runs out.

2. When Dear Husband waits to venture out to the co-op to acquire a few key ingredients until after a care package with homemade masks arrives, finish the pasta on Tuesday after all.

3. The awaited packaged arrives on Wednesday! After DH returns from the the store that afternoon, pull out the cookbook and ingredients. Learn that not only do the beans need to be blanched, but the recommended crock pot time is 8-10 hours. Oops.

4. Rinse 2 1/4 cups black beans, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Cover and let stand for 1 hour. Clean purple-black splatter from the stovetop.

5. Meanwhile, chop 1/2 a large onion and the rest of a desiccated head of garlic. Sure, we can call it 4 cloves. Add to the crock pot with 1 tbsp ground cumin, 1 tsp ground coriander, 1 tsp salt, and a 14 1/2-ounce can of stewed, halved tomatoes that you chop by hand.

6. Substitute an 8-ounce can of drained corn for the 10 ounces of frozen corn in the recipe. Omit the bottled hot pepper sauce and cilantro pepper salsa that your household would never eat.

7. Contemplate trying to recreate the "Mexican spices" that would have been in a "Mexican-style" can of stewed tomatoes. Feel reassured that the soup will be spicy enough when you see that the salsa DH purchased is HOT.

8. Rinse the black beans and add to crock pot. Cook for 4 hours on half heat. Fix tilapia filets, roasted asparagus, and bouillon-cooked quinoa for dinner. Stow crock pot in fridge before bed.

9. After lunch, return crock pot to heating element on high, stirring hourly. Realize too late that, being pre-stewed, the tomatoes were supposed to have been added last. Shortly before serving, mash some of the beans to thicken. Try to ignore that the beans are really rather mealy instead of soft and smushable.

10. Spoon this "Black and Gold" mixture into bowls, top with salsa, and serve with red hot blue corn tortilla chips. Vegetarian serving suggestions include sour cream and Greek salad (tomatoes, cucumber, feta cheese); leave these off to keep it vegan.

This was pretty good, even though it was thinner than I had anticipated, and decidedly more red than "black and gold," especially after I had added a tablespoon of HOT salsa to it. Still, it fit the bill, and DH drained the dregs from his bowl. Finally, it thickened considerably after being left in the fridge in the crock pot instead of being stored in Tupperware (::ahem::). Bon appetit, n'at!

Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this recipe, you might like this one for Stuffed Shell Casserole, my experiment with succotash, or a yummy fall-themed breakfast casserole.

Palm Sunday under Quarantine

This Palm Sunday Dear Husband and I celebrated Palm Sunday with Third Presbyterian Church via Zoom. Despite the occasional technical difficulties (we got kicked off twice!), it was really nice to see our church family. You can see our Communion set up here: tea in appropriately Pittsburgh-themed black and yellow mugs, and Lenten pretzels on a ceramic sand dollar paten from my parents. The Miracles of Jesus in Galilee place mats are from DH's parents' trip to the Holy Land. It was a beautiful service with plenty of time for meditation. I hope we can have singing next week; at the very least, I suppose DH and I could sing together at the piano here.

I have spent the last two weeks basically home, and I expect the same for another week before taking my turn at the hospital for a week. Being off clinical rotations has let me cook more than usual. So far I have made scones from a mix, an old favorite, Bean and Potato Casserole with roasted Brussels Sprouts, and a new recipe, Creamy Tuna Pasta. DH complained that the sprouts with olive oil, salt, and rosemary were too bland, so I spiced up the leftovers with red pepper flakes and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked them that way. This week he will bake a pie out of mixed frozen fruit, and I want to make chocolate chip cookies.

On the left, I am pleased with how well my spider plants are doing. There is another little group on the mantel in the front room, and the "giants" are now out on the front porch. On the right, snuggling up together on the couch to stream a movie on my laptop. We have been holding a disaster-themed film series every Friday evening. So far we have watched Contagion (2011), War Games (1983), and Cast Away (2000). Also Dial M for Murder (1954), split up over two other nights, if you want to count that. DH gets to choose next week; he is thrilled(!) to finally get to show me The Shining (1980).

Lentils: They're what's for dinner!

"I know you want takeout, but we have lentils at home"

Good friend JGD. shared this recipe on Facebook, and it sounded so good that I went out of my way to pick up coconut milk to have on hand to make it. There is little active cook time over the stove, but the chopping and measuring took almost as long as the simmering. Although I usually take recipe directions with a grain of salt--i.e. as suggestions rather than instructions--I was able to follow this recipe to the letter (except for the garam masala), because the author cooks more or less like I do!

This is 2 cups of lentils and 1/2 can of coconut milk, with 1 can of diced tomatoes and 1 package of frozen spinach. Too bad the soup used up some of the spices (ginger, cloves) and all of frozen spinach. Now I have to figure out what to do with the other 1/2 can of coconut milk--maybe freelance some more. After all, we've got all kinds of beans in the cupboard, and plenty of other spices.

Next stop: Soggy Bottom

Here's a recipe I wanted to like that didn't quite turn out like the picture in the co-op mailer.

1. Preheat oven to 375F.

2. Grease an 8x8" baking dish with an old butter paper.

3. Mix 2 cups rolled oats and 1/2 cup chopped walnuts in a large bowl.

4. Blend 1 large chopped banana, 2 cups almond (I used cow) milk, 1/2 cup maple syrup, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt. 

5. Add 2 tbsp ground flax seeds, if you have them. (I did not.) 

6. Pour over oat-nut mixture and stir thoroughly.

7. Fold in 1/2 cup fresh or frozen blueberries.

8. Spread in pan and bake for 30-35 minutes. 

9. When the bottom is still soggy, bake for another 10 minutes.

10. Give up and just nuke each piece, upside down, before you eat it.

I don't know if almond milk has a lower evaporation point than cow's milk, or if the flax seeds would have significantly soaked up some of the liquid, but this was not as crumbly as I had anticipated. Next time I would use maybe 1 1/2 cups of milk, and maybe a little more maple syrup. The frozen berries had thawed slightly, giving the finished dish a slightly purplish hue.

Editor's note: If you liked this recipe, you might enjoy this other co-op breakfast casserole with apples and maple syrup, or this old German recipe for pearled barley with blueberry compote.

Veggie Pizza Pizza

I always admired this dish when it was served at events at our old church in Illinois, so when the pastor's wife posted about it on Facebook recently, I decided it was time to figure out how to make it myself. It's pretty easy! I combined Pillsbury's Easy Crescent Veggie Pizza with the Reduced-Fat Crescent Veggie Pizza based on the ingredients I could find. Because the recipe(s) supposedly produce 30 servings, I made us only half of the recipe at a time, which for us was 4 dinner-sized servings or enough for 2 meals with sides, typically carrot sticks, green salad, or fruit salad.

1. Heat oven to 375F.

2. Lay one canister of 90-calorie Pillsbury crescent rolls out flat on an (un)greased pan. I pressed down the seams, as instructed, and tried to make something of a crust on a flat sheet. That part was marginally successful.

3. Pop crust in oven for ~15 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, chop vegetables. You can use whatever you like: broccoli, tomato, bell peppers, onions, cucumber or zucchini, radishes, asparagus, etc. Shave 1 small or 1/2 a large carrot.

5. Remove crust from oven and place on oven mitts or trivets in the fridge to cool. (I didn't want to have to wait half an hour, as it was already nearing 7 o'clock.)

6. Mix 4oz (reduced fat) cream cheese with 4oz (reduced fat) sour cream, 1/2 tsp dill weed, and 1/8 tsp minced garlic (the recipe called for garlic powder). You might have to soften the cream cheese in the microwave briefly. The low-fat version called for cottage cheese, which I thought would be too lumpy.

7. Spread cream cheese on crust. Sprinkle carrot on top, then gently press the rest of the vegetables into the cream cheese.

8. Cut into quarters and enjoy about 45 minutes after starting prep.


N.B.--If you enjoyed this vegetarian recipe, you might like the following (in increasing order of difficulty): chickpea saga spinach as a side dish, these kohlrabi fritters for an entree, and/or a green grain gourd salad best for for a holiday dinner.

Happy Easter 2019 + bonus recipe

 Happy Easter! Dear Husband and I celebrated with a lovely service at church with music that was much nicer than the weather outside. Then I spent a second day in the kitchen, this time preparing to host small dinner for work colleagues. The menu included a McCormick & Company shrimp and dill pot pie, pineapple angel food cake, fruit salad, and a delicious white German wine. We ended the night with a game of Settlers of Catan.

Frau Doktor Doctor's Easter Dinner

1. Saturday morning, go grocery shopping with half the neighborhood. Sunday afternoon, realize you're still short the shrimp, half-and-half, sugar snap peas, and angel food cake mix. Send DH.

2. Begin to prepare the pineapple angel food cake by messing up the crucial step of substituting 20 oz of crushed pineapple for the water.

3. Strain the cake mix over the sink, add the pineapple, and bake as directed at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, saute 1/4 of an enormous yellow onion, chopped, and 1/2 of a 3-pound bag of shrimp in butter.

5. Realize the sauce won't fit and divide the mixture into two pans.

6. Take the cake out after 30 minutes. Should have left it in another 10 minutes so the top wasn't so tacky. Increase oven temp to 400 degrees.

7. Whisk 1 1/2 cups of half and half, 1/4 cup dry white wine, 1/4 cup flour, 1 tsp dill weed, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/4 tsp thyme. Divide between the pans and bring to a boil while stirring continuously.

8. After sauce thickens, pour into a 2 qt dish. Stir in a package of sugar snap peas. Cut a roll of pizza dough into slices and arrange like shingles on top.

9.  Put into the oven 20 minutes before your guests are due. 10 minutes later, turn off the oven but leave the dish inside. 10 minutes after that, decide the top isn't baked enough, so turn the oven back on to 400 until you smell the juices overflowing onto the bottom of the oven and burning.

10. Dig in! Too late you realize the shrimp still have their tail shells on. Good thing it's so delicious!

N.B.--While I was writing this post, I looked back for the last time I used dill weed--only to discover that I had made this very same recipe 3 years ago. I asked why DH hadn't reminded me, and he said it was because afterwards I had become violently ill! Thankfully no guests were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Recipe for Dirtying Every Pot aka Milos's Lentil Soup

I got this recipe for lentil soup from one of my graduate-school colleagues many years ago. Milos was from Eastern Europe and studied urban history; we've unfortunately lost touch after he left Facebook. The recipe has been sitting in my hand-copied cookbook just waiting for me to remember how much I like the idea of lentil soup. One of my New Year's Resolutions the last two years has been to cook more from my recipe collection than from the internet, so I decided to seize the opportunity to make a delicious cold-weather dish that was can eat from for the next week. According to Milos, you can make this with browned beef, but I decided to go vegetarian and leave that out. It's really creamy and delicious! The process left something to be desired, however...

1. Figure out how to buy 1.5-2 cups of split yellow lentils (labeled mung dal at the co-op). Also pick up 0.5 pounds fresh green beans, a couple of plum tomatoes, 3 large carrots, and a medium white onion. Assume you have tomato sauce at home.

2. Listen to the radio while chopping the carrots into thick rounds, the onion into little dices, and the green beans into ~1-inch sections. Soak the lentils in a pan, then drain. Put it all in the fridge for later. Discover the tomato sauce has become a fungus farm.

3. Two hours before dinner, turn on the radio again. Decide 8 cups of water aren't going to fit; transfer lentils to large pot. Add 3 bay leaves, the rest of a jar of sweet paprika (just over 1 tsp), a little black pepper, and some salt.

4. Realize you need to saute the veggies before combining with the lentils. Start heating olive oil and garlic in a small pan. Change to large saute pan. Cover veggies and some salt with a lid until onion is translucent, then add to lentils.

5. Improvise 0.5 cups tomato sauce with last week's cherry tomatoes, the dregs of a watery jar of salsa, some olive oil, a pinch of sugar, and a little water. Add to lentils once cooked down.

6. After an hour, turn the heat on the lentils way down. Ask Dear Husband to put the green beans in and stir. He will do this with a clean spoon instead of the ladle on the stove. Cook another 40-60 minutes. Add a bunch of basil shortly before serving.

7. Burn some bread in the broiler.

8. Spoon soup into bowls, add a spoonful of yogurt, sprinkle with parsley, and serve with a nice Greek salad.

What I'm Eating These Days: Breakfast Edition

Remember when I told you I was trying to branch out more for breakfast? Well my new favorite savory* oatmeal is plain oats nuked for 1 minute x2, a sunny-side-up egg, sweet pickle relish (hiding under the egg), shredded white cheese (like mozarella, gouda, or parmesan), Old Bay spice, and pepitas. It's a creamy-spicy way to start the morning that goes well with a strong tea like dandelion root or Irish breakfast. Do you ever cook savory oatmeal--how?

*My favorite sweet oatmeal is still cinnamon, brown sugar, raisins, and walnuts!

Brunch Bunch

A good friend invited us to a brunch today, so I took the opportunity to try a new recipe that I knew wouldn't play well at home, namely Sweet Potato Casserole. The dish was mentioned in our November-December co-op newsletter, just in time for the holidays. Which may explain why it was difficult to find fresh or frozen cranberries in January. Nevertheless, it turned out well and appeals to a variety of eaters. The coconut milk just comes across as creamy in the final version (I didn't use shredded coconut), and the dried cranberries and walnuts were crunchy compared to the soft tubers. Originally marketed as "paleo," it is also vegan and gluten free. While the nuts and coconut may limit its appeal to those with allergies or aversions, it does make a pretty and tasty savory dish to go with all the meats and sweets you typically encounter at a potluck brunch.

Ingredients
3 lbs sweet potatoes
1 1/2 cups fresh/frozen cranberries OR 1/2 cup dried sweetened cranberries
1 can full-fat coconut milk (13-15 oz)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (almonds or pecans would work too)
1-3 tbsp maple syrup
1-2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp nutmeg
+/- 2 tbsp shredded coconut
+/- 1 tsp coconut oil

Directions
Heat oven to 400F. Bake sweet potatoes ~30 minutes. Meanwhile, mix coconut milk, spices, and maple syrup for the sauce. For the topping, mix the cranberries, nuts, +/- shredded coconut and oil. When the tubers are cool enough to handle, peel, slice thickly, and layer in a 9"x13" baking dish. Pour the sauce over them and strew the topping. Pop back in the oven, uncovered 20-25 minutes until bubbling and golden brown. Best served warm.

Cooking with Frau Doktor Doctor

When Dear Husband and Frau Doktor Doctor tied the knot more than a decade ago, they agreed to share the cooking duties 50/50. Neither having the energy to create a new meal from scratch every night, they developed the habit of cooking one large batch per week each and then enjoying the leftovers. Then cancer and intern year happened, and one or the other of them took over 100% of the kitchen duties. This weekend FrDrDr decided to (re)apply herself in the kitchen preparing one old dish and one new one: lentil loaf and carrot souffle, with a side of fresh spinach. What followed was predictably unpredictable, a comedy of errors. (See also Halloween 2017 and, especially, Canadian meat pie.) You can follow along in ten eleven easy steps!


1. While writing your shopping list, discover that you can no longer find the blog post with your lentil loaf recipe. Search the internet for it in vain. Discover another copy in your college cookbook.

2. Back from the grocery store, pull up a movie to watch. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and butter a 2-quart dish.

3. Wash, peel, and chop the 2lbs of carrots narrower than the recipe suggests. Boil for three times as long as recommended to finally soften them. Realize the oven doesn't need to be on yet; turn it off.

4. Meanwhile, pour 1 cup milk, grate 3/4 cup cheese, mince 1/3 cup onion, and measure 1 cup of bread crumbs instead of saltine crackers, which you haven't kept in the house since the time you had gastroenteritis and discovered an entire box infested with stored product pests.

5. Also in the meanwhile, realize you should start boiling 1 cup of lentils so that the dishes will come out of the oven at the same time. Turn on oven again.

6. Strain the carrots and puree in a little food processor a little at a time. Add 1 tablespoon butter to the mixture. Laugh when the recipe reminds you to "whisk" the milk into the puree. Realize belatedly that if you had included even a tablespoon of the boiling water, the carrots might have at least started out smooth.

7. Add cheese, onion, some salt, 1/4 teaspoon mixed Turkish spice (no cayenne), and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Give up on the whisk entirely when you get to the part about whisking three frothy eggs into the batch. A spoon does the trick nicely. Pop in oven to bake for 45 minutes until it just starts to pull away from the sides of the dish.

8. Meanwhile, dish out some of the lentils to be mashed. Mix with 1 cup oats, 1 egg, 1/3 cup ketchup, 1/3 cup BBQ sauce, and some onion. Forget the celery in the jar of water in the fridge that you promised yourself you would use up.

9. Pat into buttered loaf pan and top with a stripe of ketchup. Wonder that the loaf looks so small. Pop into oven. Only 30 minutes until dinner!

10. While cleaning up the kitchen, discover the rest of the lentils still in the pot on the stove. Mash them, pull out the pan so you can mix them in with the rest of the as-yet unset loaf, and apply another stripe of ketchup.

11. Two hours and one feature-length movie later, remove both dishes from the oven and enjoy!

Despite increasing the sauce, the lentil loaf is STILL too dry to stick together; I may start pureeing some of the beans to encourage more cohesion. Both DH and I liked the carrot souffle, although it could have used a little kick--maybe I'll add red pepper flakes to the next batch. When the directions say one hour cook time, they must mean AFTER everything has been chopped and measured. Nevertheless, we decided this recipe is a keeper to pull out every once in a while--or when romaine lettuce has been exiled for yet another health scare.


Editor's Note: If you liked these recipes, you might also enjoy this easy party recipe or this versatile main dish. 

Stuffed Shell Casserole

Now that my schedule is lighter, and I am back to cooking, I am  simultaneously alleviating and adding to Dear Husband's shopping and cooking burdens by diversifying our menu. Feeling in the mood for pasta, I dug up a Better Homes & Gardens recipe that I had attempted--and cryptically annotated--once before. We enjoyed the results, but in true Frau Doktor Doctor fashion I only sort of followed the book, so for posterity I have tried to recreate what I ended up doing here.

1. The recipe calls for 8 large manicotti shells. DH was able to find a box of 36 "jumbo" shells that are "jumbo" only in an advertising sense. (Apparently there were 25 the last time I made this dish.) Boil however many of them there are for ~10 minutes. When you are delicately trying to peel them apart later, wish you had rinsed them in cold water.

2. Meanwhile, steam 1/2 small box of baby spinach and press out any extra liquid. The recipe calls for a 10oz bag of frozen, but I wrote "1.5 lbs fresh spinach" in my cookbook the last time. Halfway through filling the shells realize you need to double the recipe. Steam the other 1/2 of the box.

3. Beat 2 eggs with 2/3 cup broth, ~1 1/2 cups ricotta cheese (something more than 1 tub; we happened to have extra in the fridge), 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese, and the spinach. I gave up on the lemon zest when I couldn't grate the lemon with my grater.

4. Spoon the mixture into the shells, and layer them in a 2-quart baking dish. The recipe calls for a white sauce, but it's a lot easier to just empty a jar of your favorite red tomato sauce over them.

5. Bake, covered, at 300F for 30-35 minutes. Let stand ~10 minutes while you prepare a vegetable or salad. Top with extra Parmesan and enjoy while re-watching a favorite movie--might I suggest Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?


Editor's Note: If you're interested in more FrDrDr recipes, check these recipes for 4-bean salad, gumbolaya, or maybe chickpea-saga spinach.

Recipe: Sufferin' succotash

Lent starts this week, which means food-themed holidays (or should that be "holiday-themed foods"?), such as pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and King Cake for Mardi Gras. Dear Husband and I were invited to a Louisiana-style shin dig this weekend that was unfortunately cancelled due to the death of one of the hostesses' grandmothers. Based on a positive experience with succotash at Rooster's Uptown in Charlotte, NC (my Yelp review), I had planned to bring succotash to share and ended up re-purposing it as a side dish to some grilled veggie wraps inspired by this crepe meal (click for FrDrDr recipe). Not knowing who all would attend, I had chosen to make a vegan version that everyone could enjoy.

Main dish: zucchini and squash sauteed with oil and salt,

then served on tortillas with ricotta and mixed Turkish spices.

Over at Idiomation, Elyse Bruce explains that "succotash" is a portmanteau of the Narragansett words for the ingredients of the dish: manusqussedash (beans) + misickquatash (ear of corn) + asquutasquash (squash). Its first known use is in a New England diary in 1751. The mixture didn't suffer for another century, until Victorian sensibilities turned religious curses like "Christ" into "crikey" and "Suffering Savior" into "suffering succotash."

Herbed Corn & Edamame Succotash Cook by: Kathy Farrell-Kingsley (Eating Well)

Ingredients;
1½ cups frozen edamame
1 tablespoon canola oil
½ cup chopped red bell pepper
¼ cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups corn kernels
3 tablespoons dry white wine or water
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon dried basil
½ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Cook edamame in a large saucepan of lightly salted water until tender, about 4 minutes or according to package directions. Drain well.
2. Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add bell pepper, onion and garlic; cook, stirring frequently, until vegetables start to soften, about 2 minutes. Stir in corn, wine (or water) and the edamame; cook, stirring frequently, for 4 minutes. Remove from the heat. Stir in vinegar, parsley, basil, salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

Make Ahead Tip: Cover and refrigerate for up to 2 days. Ingredient Note: Edamame are easy to digest and are exceptionally high in protein ( ½ cup has 16 grams). There are several kinds available today—frozen and fresh, in the pod and shelled—in large supermarkets, natural-foods stores or Asian markets.

Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed by the finished product. My biggest complaint was that it was too watery. If I were to make this again, I would skip the white wine/water and splurge for the red bell pepper instead of the cheaper green that didn't stand out as well against the edamame. Perhaps if I had had some onion it would have punched up the flavor. As some commenters had remarked on the original online recipe, this dish is better cold.