Cooking Through Moosewood

Back in action

cookingthroughmoosewood — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:20:55 +0000

…with an iPad to boot! I’ve got moosewood fudge brownies, gypsy soup part deux, greens, and fresh produce to write about. More on the horizon as the weather allows me to retreat back into the kitchen.

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Nearly a month…

cookingthroughmoosewood — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:30:21 +0000

So it’s been a while, but I promise I’m still at it. The while was filled with 4:30am sunrises on Cadillac Mountain, climbing the Beehive, walking the Wonderland, and then home, yard work, planting, bonfires… In the midst of all this, Ryan’s handy card reader broke and I was pictureless. Alas! I’m back with a USB cable in hand. Before I left, I wrote of making a few things and tofu salad was one of them.Pasta with broccoli was another, and there was enough for a few days of lunches.While we were in Maine, we really splurged. We hiked somewhere around 40-50 miles, but the food still stuck to our guts and we’re still recovering. We started the trip off with Jordan’s amazing Maine blueberry pancakes with Maine syrup, sampled a few whoopie pies, and had the worst pizza we ever ate. TWICE! Never did I know how much a fan of the Georgio’s $5 fresh and ready I was until I had 2 pizzas in Bar Harbor that were nearly $20 and not very good. One was at a movie theater called Reel Pizza Cinerama (we saw Super 8), so I guess they have an excuse. Other things to note? We had some crazy good lobster rolls at the Thirsty Whale and Side Street, amazing lobster benedict and tofu scramble at Two Cats (with a cat sitting next to me), and the best anniversary dinner at Town Hill Bistro, possibly my favorite restaurant. Anywhere. No pictures of that amazingness, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.Oh yeah, that’s a pulled pork sandwich and it was out of this world, especially after climbing a couple mountains and going on a brewery tour at Atlantic Brewing Co. Did I mention that we haven’t stuck to the Vegetarianism? The fact of the matter is we’ve been eating significantly less meat and incorporating more veggies into our diets, and that’s kind of what I was going for. Whenever I say I’m not going to eat any meat, it’s all I want. That’s just how I am. So it doesn’t work.So anyway, I recently made Solyanka with Odessa Beets. Both were tasty.And time consuming. The Solyanka was essentially a mashed potato and cabbage casserole, while the beets were roasted, shredded and mixed with a marinade. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a beet before in my life. It was good, but I’m not running out all the time to get beets or anything.I’ve also discovered these little buggers through our Blue Pike Farm CSA. Garlic scapes grow out of the tops of garlic, and make a mean pesto. I just cut some up, added some lemon juice, olive oil, walnuts and parmesean cheese, blended, and added to some pasta. Voila! Delicious dinner, terrible breath. Picking up our share today again, so I’ll have new things to work with along with some more scapes, perhaps.Another Moosewood recipe I’ve made since the return are these veggie kabobs. I used Cleveland Tofu and hot peppers instead of sweet. They were pretty good, but not out of this world. Next time I’ll use the soy sauce marinade that I used for the tofu salad and these will be awesome! It will also help not to run out of propane half way through grilling.There’s my good old Cleveland Tofu, and I’m caught up to the present. Next up is the Old Country Pie, then who knows. I’ve got the rest of the summer, some budding vegetable plants and a grill that’s ready to go. As of late, the easiest thing to do is just to throw some Tofurky or Field Roast on the grill and wait 10 minutes for dinner to be ready. So if you need to find me, I’ll be in the backyard or in the garden.

Filed under: Entrees, Miscellaneous, Salads

Lazy summer days

cookingthroughmoosewood — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:09:16 +0000

It’s been awhile, but I swear I haven’t slacked off that much. Or maybe I have. Summer came like a 95 degree whirlwind out of nowhere though, am I right? With the heat came garden work. Pulling up turf, cultivating, moving dirt, spreading dirt, planting, putting up a fence, building up a compost pile… and after 6 hours of sweaty work the last thing anyone wants to do is cook over a hot stove after chopping up pounds of vegetables. But the gardening is all for the sake of vegetables, right? So soon we will have some and be forced to cook them, but until then I’ll be lazy. I may have even eaten red meat for the first time in weeks via a delicious Parkview burger, but life is good. When you’re active you deserve nice things! Heck, I even spent a few of these weeks busy and worried about finding a job and ended up getting something freakishly, fantasticly perfect. I don’t start until July though, so back to MOOSEWOOD! Maybe I’ll just go through the whole dang book in the next month… or not.

Anyway, this week I made 2 things out of Moosewood that were pretty good. Actually, I have pictures of both but I think my card reader is broken. Hopefully Ryan can figure this thing out, or else my blog is going to be text-only from now on. Eek! There go my 2 readers.

The first thing I made was pasta with broccoli sauce and there was so. much. of. it. 1 pound of broccoli, a ton of onion and garlic, 2 cups of cherry tomatoes and some other things make for a lot of food. Definitely an easy thing to play with in terms of ingredients, and a good thing to make if you have an enormous head of broccoli you need to get rid of… or any vegetable really. I’m starting to find a theme here. I realized after making this that so many of these recipes are the same. Start with a heaping mound of onions and garlic, add veggies, add to something else like pasta, eat. I’m now a gourmet cook, is what I’m trying to say. Actually, not at all.

The next thing I made was a yummy asian flavored tofu salad to take over Jocelynn’s last night. Thank God for Cleveland Tofu, which is really delicious and absorbent, too! It sucked up all the delicious marinade (soy sauce, garlic, ginger). Thank God for Cleveland bean sprouts, too! Now we just need a Cleveland mushroom farm and we have the trifecta tofu salad. Everyone enjoyed, and the rest of the food was delicious, too… not to mention the weather was perfect and the company was even better! We had a great time.

Once again, this is my last post for a little bit, but I will be returning from Maine with a (culinary) adventure to post. Yes, I plan on sitting outside, pigging out on BBQ at Mainely Meat via The Atlantic Brewing Company (while drinking their Mount Desert Island Ginger beer), and of course I plan on eating some perfectly cooked fresh, local deliciousness from Town Hill Bistro (AKA one of the only restaurants I’ve been to outside of Cleveland that could compete with Cleveland restaurants… yeah, I’m that much of a food snob). Lobster? Notsomuch. I’m still confused as to whether or not I have a shellfish allergy and I’m too nervous to try and test it out again. I guess we’ll see what happens when we get there. I might have a mix of butter and lobster nastyness all over my hands depending on where this vacay takes us. Until then…

Filed under: Miscellaneous, Salads, Sauces & Dips

Gypsy Goodness

cookingthroughmoosewood — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:56:18 +0000

Woah. If you read my depressing post yesterday, you’ve got another thing coming today. I made some soup last night and it was delicious. Better yet, it was unplanned and with a little tweaking I had just the right ingredients to make Gypsy Soup. Hey, it calls for tweaking anyway! Perfect. So I subbed potato for sweet potato and minced up the celery as finely as I could because Ryan doesn’t like either, and then I replaced the garbanzo beans and green pepper with Bob’s Vegi Soup Mix because I’ve had it sitting around forver. The end result was amazing! The spices were perfect, and along with a goat cheese/cucumber panini and spinach salad it blew me away, and cleared up my allergies momentarily! Better yet, there were leftovers. Even better, they’ll get eaten today. Gypsy soup is awesome and was perfect for this weather relapse. The alphabet bits in Bob’s made me feel good, too. And tonight I’ll be munching on some Field Roast at the Happy Dog. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Filed under: Favorites, Soups

Calzones & discouragement

cookingthroughmoosewood — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:59:16 +0000

This weather is exhausting. Just when people finally decided to come out of the woodwork, they were forced back into their cocoons of hibernation by the cold and rain. I’ve felt sleepy everyday since it’s been all gloomy and gray and I’ve been craving… I don’t know what. Meatloaf? Pizza? I’m not sure, but nothing has been satisfying. It was good to watch my veggie sprouts thrive over the brief span of sun and heat, but now they’re starting to retreat. So in the midst of all this, I made some calzones thinking they would be good and hearty chilly food, but they were just mediocre. Afterwards, Ryan and I were reflecting on what we’ve liked out of Moosewood and couldn’t think of anything. I guess we need some re-encouragement from a good recipe. We need something to blow us away. I’m going to look around online and try to find one specific recipe to make and maybe we’ll be into it again. Looks pretty good, right? Well first of all, the dough never rose so it was strange. Blame it on me for following the recipe and not waiting for the yeast to do its work at the beginning, but I was trusting. I waited an hour and it was pretty much the same but I had to go on anyway because we were hungry and I had already made the pound of fresh spinach into filling. Before: After an hour: Pretty much the same. And I just had a feeling it wasn’t going to work, so I took pictures. I was right.
About the spinach: This recipe called for a whole pound of fresh spinach, which is fine, but it tells you to stem and mince it. This is a ridiculously large amount of spinach to stem and mince. I actually didn’t even see this instruction and accidently put it in whole and it cooks down so much that it doesn’t make a difference if you ask me. I usually don’t go for frozen stuff, but I don’t think frozen spinach is a sin. I think it would have been pretty useful here. Pretty okay… but we need more. We need something crazy good. I’m going to look around for suggestions, and until next time…

Filed under: Entrees