Summer Squash and Sweet Potatoes

Remember in Prince Caspian (umm... I think not the movie, but I've only seen it once-- but definitely it is in the book) when it says that Trumpkin has "marvelous ideas about cookery," and they take their apples and wrap bear meat around them and spear them on sticks and then roast the whole kebab over the fire? Right. I just knew you did.

So, I told a couple of different people about how I cooked the summer squash we were getting from our produce co-op, and both of them immediately said, "I should do that!" This is when I thought that perhaps I should blog the recipe-- if it could even be called a recipe. It's a little too simple to feel like a proper recipe to me. It is, you could say, an idea.

• summer squash
• oil (I always use olive oil)
• salt

Slice the summer squash thin. Mix it with, like, half a cup of oil for every summer squash? And then spread it out over a large, heavy pan (I used the large pyrex pan we still have left after I exploded that one last summer), sprinkle it with salt, and put it in the oven for, like, an hour, at 350 degrees F.

Notes:
A lighter-weight pan will produce more uneven results (found this out by testing it). I find that it doesn't take that long to arrange my slices in a sort of French-looking way-- you know, all overlapping and even-- and that this helps it to bake more evenly. Of course, you CAN use less oil, but of course that will make it harder for the natural sugars of the squash to come out and caramelize and get all delicious-like. Also, the slices reduce in size considerably while they're cooking, so it's OK to really pack them in there, side-to-side-wise.

Also. This can be done with sweet potatoes, which we did last night and they really are pretty good. I must admit that our household is having a bit of a craze for thin-sliced vegetables at the moment, since Mom got a food processor for me herself for Mother's day; if you don't have one available, the sweet potatoes are still pretty good when they are more thickly sliced.

Three Delicious (or at least highly edible) things to do with frozen Spinach

You know how whenever there's a new report about whatever essential nutrient you really, really need, they always say it's found in "blah, blah, blah, and leafy greens like broccoli and spinach"?

I really don't like spinach, but in the name of trying to get myself to eat healthier, I keep experimenting, trying to find ways to get myself to eat more. Spinach salad is pretty good, but I will save writing about that for later. For now, I will focus on Our Friend the Package of Frozen Spinach, which avoids some of the problems associated with fresh spinach and is highly store-able, to boot (as long as your freezer is working).

Spinach and Cheese
If your frozen spinach is loose, in a plastic package (this is slightly more expensive but easier to work with, especially if you need to use only some of the spinach at a time), then just dump it into a baking pan which is big enough for it to spread out a little. Something smaller than 9x13 works well for the size of package I usually get.

If you get the cheaper, more compact, more recycle-able cardboard box of spinach, defrost it first, so that you can spread it out without having to use an ice pick to pry the pieces apart. I normally do this in the microwave, but if I have enough forethought, I will move the spinach from the freezer to the fridge the night before. Once it is defrosted, then spread it all over a pan.

Slice some cheese. Now that I think about it, you could also grate it, if you wanted. I have never tried this, but have no reason to believe that it would not turn out well. You could use mozzerella, cheddar, colby jack, gouda, brie, or anything else your heart desires. If you use American Processed Cheese (how the name of my beloved country got permanently associated with that product is something I would like to make someone answer for) then do not tell me.

How much cheese? As much as you want. I would probably use a third of a half-pound brick of cheese to cover one pan of spinach, but it's up to you.

Cook the dish. You can cook it in the microwave, but then the cheese wouldn't brown; you can also cook it in the oven (my preferred method; this also decreases sogginess) for maybe five minutes. At 350 or 400 degrees. I just go until the cheese is melted.

pizza
Take an unbaked pizza crust. Add tomato sauce and whatever spices you want (or, use store-bought pizza sauce). Put on some (defrosted, if it came in a box) spinach. Add whatever other toppings you want (I particularly love artichoke hearts, which are dreadfully expensive but go far when chopped small.) Cover the whole thing with (grated) cheese. Bake it according to the directions which came with the pizza crust, or, if you are using bread dough, bake it at 350 C for ten to fifteen minutes (more for a bigger pizza, less for smaller).

Incidentally, I like to use Semolina, Farina, Germade, Cream-of-Wheat, or whatever you want to call it, to dust the bottom of my pizza crust. The traditional stuff for the bottoms of crusts is cornmeal, but I don't keep cornmeal around my house because for some reason it's prohibitively expensive around here. The wheat-based uncooked hot cereal product works fine for me.

Spaghetti Sauce
I was skeptical when my sister first told me that this tasted good. I mean, Papa Murphy's puts spinach on their super-delicious Vegetarian Deluxe Pizzas, so that makes sense, but putting spinach in spaghetti sauce just seems like it is one of those "hiding" jobs, where if you put in too much of the "secret" ingredient, everyone will take one bite and then refuse to touch the food in question.

I was wrong.

In the case of spaghetti sauce, spinach is the ingredient which insures that there are no leftovers. I am serious. Even just plain frozen spinach in canned tomato sauce makes a darn good red sauce, and if you add just a couple of spices (I usually use basil and nothing else, but you can look up other stuff in a real recipe book) and some fried onions and mushrooms, and a can of drained olive pieces, it becomes so good that people start asking you for the recipe.

A couple of notes on spaghetti sauce:

• I really do think that the organic canned tomatoes really do taste better. They are more expensive, so it's your call to make, but in this case I feel that you receive value for your money, and where I live, they are only twenty cents a can or so more expensive.
  
• Also, wateriness is death to a good sauce, so either drain your spinach and your olives, or else give yourself some time for the sauce to simmer (just start dinner earlier, if it is humanly possible, and read a novel while the "low" setting on the stove does the hard work for you-- umm, but be sure to stir it occasionally).

The Glories of Oatmeal: First Installment

Finally, the post I know you've all been waiting for: the best way to fix regular oatmeal.

First off, the best way is to eat it the way you feel like eating it, which may be not at all. Which is fine. But do give my methods a try, if you haven't already.

OK. I never cook my oatmeal in a pot. I always cook it in a bowl. When I am at home, I flavor it with salt and brown sugar; when I am at school, I use the over-flavored instant oatmeal to do the job, and fill in the rest with the good stuff. Of course you remember from my Food Snob blog that "the good stuff" is organic, non-instant rolled oats.

The best way to fix oatmeal as oatmeal is to boil water, then pour it over the oatmeal and let it sit for a couple of minutes. I wish that I could give you exact measurements, but I have been doing this by eye for so long that I'm afraid that if I guessed, I would lead all of you astray. I will say that I put in a "handful" of oatmeal (sometimes literally), then pour in enough water that the water line falls between half and a whole centimeter (between a quarter and a half inch, for imperial-ites) above the oatmeal line. As it were.

If I cook it in the microwave, I do add the water before boiling it, and then cook it for one or two minutes (depending on the microwave-- the one I usually use at school is pretty efficient, so one minute works just fine these days).

If I really want to get fancy, I can add cream and/or fruit. My prepackaged flavoring mixes at school add just that, but at home, I'm usually too lazy.

That's it for now. You are just going to have to sit on your hands until I can get around to telling you about dry-fried and wet-fried oatmeal (plus, in the latter case, a side note about fried mush); granola; and oatmeal pancakes.

A few good tomato recipes (for one hungry or two not as hungry people)

Garlic toast [time: 5 minutes, sometimes including eating]

Bread
1 clove garlic
olive oil
yummiferous tomato

Toast your bread, in the skillet if you want something really yummy. Rub it with a piece of cut garlic. Dribble on some olive oil. Put on slices of the yummiest tomato you can find.


Pasta Salad [time: 20 minutes, including pasta boiling time, and then half an hour for chilling]

(All measurements are approximate, since I never measure for this recipe anymore, and I don't remember where I got the original. Please comment with corrections, if you find that different proportions work better.)

2 c. cooked pasta
1 T olive oil
1 clove of garlic, minced
1/8 t. salt
1 or 2 as-delicious-as-you-can-find ripe tomatoes, diced in to 1/4-inch pieces (approximately)
1 1/2 T snipped parsley
juice from half a lime

Combine the ingredients and chill. It is important to use fresh lime, fresh garlic, and fresh parsley. Adjust seasonings to taste. (In particular, you might want more salt and/or lime juice; I didn't want to over-guess on those.)

Notes on the ingredients:

These days I use spaghetti for the pasta, but the original recipe called for shell. I also use whole wheat pasta, these days, to make it more healthy.

I snip the parsley with scissors. Books always say to use kitchen scissors (which are specially made for use in the kitchen) but I don't have any, so I use regular scissors and call them kitchen scissors because I use them in the kitchen. Remember that the stems have more flavor, and snip accordingly. I think that I snip it off about a quarter of an inch at a time. I have also substituted cilantro for parsley in this recipe, with success.

Of course you can use a lemon instead of a lime, but limes are always a little cheaper, and sometimes a lot cheapter than lemons, so I have taken to using limes. I also find that if I let them sit on the counter and get a bit hard before I squeeze them, the juice comes right out, which is most handy. If you can't get decent tomatoes and you are really craving this salad, you can add extra salt and extra lime juice to make up for the cardboard-type taste of bad tomatoes.


Stuffed Tomatoes

[time: five minutes, then two hours (or overnight), then 10 minutes]

The excuse for this recipe's lack of exactness is that the cookbook is in a storage unit at the moment, but I must admit that I had stopped measuring for this recipe before I sent the book off to boarding school, anyway.

some ripe, delicious tomatoes, big enough to hold stuffing
salt
good bread (a little stale is OK) (maybe a slice, wonderbread-size, for every two tomatoes, which is of course four tomato halves)
garlic
herbs, like parsley or basil or dill or rosemary (1 t of dried or 1 T of fresh, cut up, per slice of bread)

Cut the tomatoes in half. Score each cut side with a knife (i.e. make little teeny cuts, like paper cuts, on them). Salt them and then put them in a colander with the cut side down, then leave them to drain for at least a couple of hours.

Also, put some garlic and olive oil on the bread and leave it to-- er-- marinate, while the tomatoes are draining. It's fine if the bread somewhat dries out during this process. (Use the instructions for the garlic bread up at the top, to figure out how to put the olive oil and garlic on the bread.)

When the tomatoes are all drained, scrape their guts out with a spoon (a-la Halloween pumpkins). Save the guts to use in Ratatoullie (recipe below).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, cut the bread in to small cubes-- small enough to be spooned in to the tomatoes at the proper time. I think that 1/4 inch is pretty good, but if you are in need of something finer-- like, you decided to try this with cherry tomatoes or something-- then make sure your bread is nice and dry and toasty (this can be accomplished with a skillet) and then grate it on a cheese grater. If the bread isn't toast when you try to grate it, then you will get some crumbs, but you will also get larger, rolled-up bits of bread that aren't good for much, so remember to toast them first. Not that I know this from experience.

Mix the olive-oil-and-garlicky bread bits with a teaspoon of dried herb or tablespoon of fresh, per slice of bread. Add a little more olive oil to make it nice and shiny, and then spoon it in to the tomatoes.

Broil the tomatoes for a slightly shorter period of time than I always do. Try a minute and a half with a preheated broiler. I always forget them and have to take off the burned bits on the top.

I suspect that this recipe would be pretty good with cheese on top, but I have yet to confirm this suspicion.


Ratatoullie [time: 20 minutes. I think.]

Just for the record, I loved this and was in the habit of making it some time before the movie was made. I'm just thankful that the movie made everyone aware of at least the name of this delicious food. I never had a recipe for this. I just made it after my sister did.

tomatoes (sure, let's say two of them), diced or sliced
zucchini (one medium. Meaning less than 8 inches long.), sliced to maybe 1/8 inch thick
olive oil
salt

Other potential ingredients:
onions
minced garlic (bottled is fine)
yellow squash
eggplant
mushrooms (button, rehydrated shiitake, whatever)
spinach
lima beans
other summer vegetables that look promising
mediterranean stir fry mix (frozen. Yes, I know it's a travesty, but it does taste OK, and it brings vegetables in to my diet.)

Preheat the olive oil. Oh, yeah, you want amounts. Cover half of the bottom of your skillet, and don't add more than a layer of vegetables at a time. Add zucchini slices, and depending on how meticulous you are feeling that day, brown them to perfection, or else just take the edge off that summer-squashy taste. Remove them to a plate. Heat a little more oil. Start frying the tomatoes. It is important that the oil be hot before the tomatoes go in, or they won't brown properly and it won't taste half as good. Once the tomatoes are a bit brown (you do have to look closely to ascertain this-- it isn't very obvious), add back the zucchini and whatever else you want (I definitely recommend separate cooking of mushrooms, if you want to add them) and cook until-- mm-- done. I mean, until the zuchhini isn't crunchy whatsoever, and the tomatoes are most delicious. If you were feeling meticulous at the beginning of this recipe, the combining stage will take anywhere from ten to thirty seconds, depending on how fast you are at scraping zucchini from a plate in to a skillet and then stirring things together.

When the ratatoullie is on your plate, add some salt. I recommend eating this with the best bread you can muster.