recipes – Page 9 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Wild Rice Salad with Peppers and Carrots

I spent the first 10 days of July back in Boston, the land of steamy air, unexpected thunderstorms, sticky skin, and at least for me on this vacation, no cooking. We ate nearly all of our meals in restaurants or at friends’ houses, and while it was certainly a treat (Indian food! My favorite pasta at Delfino! Pizza!) it was awfully nice to get back into my kitchen last night. It’s been pretty hot here in Walla Walla, although the lack of humidity is a vast improvement on the Northeast right now. Still, I wasn’t feeling a strong inclination to stand over a stove for too long, or eat anything too hot. And I felt a pretty desperate need for vegetables after all that pizza and pasta and grilled meat in Boston.

This Wild Rice salad is perfect for that kind of evening, and is even better the next day, straight out of the fridge cold, when all the flavors have had a chance to get better acquainted. It does involve a fair amount of vegetable chopping, and unless you think to cook the rice ahead of time, there is some stove time required, too, but it’s nice, hands-off stove time, for the most part. And the mix of cooked and uncooked ingredients is surprising and lends some good variety to this salad.
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Quinoa and Bean Salad

I must admit that quinoa and I have been slow to warm to each other. It sounded like the ideal food for a mostly vegetarian diet: It’s a grain and also a complete protein. [Updated: It’s not a grain! It’s actually a seed. Ah, research…] And it’s fast and easy to cook. But for some reason, the love just wasn’t there. This quinoa and bean salad, though, might have tipped the scales strongly in favor of quinoa. And it’s a perfect summer meal, as it involves very little actual cooking! I can’t wait to eat this again.
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Rice and Beans and Collard Greens

I believe I’ve talked about rice and beans quite a lot here on this site. It’s one of my staple dishes: filling, cheap, and easy to make enough for lunch all week. And even better: It is very versatile. Just change up the herbs and spices you throw in the mix and you have a whole different dinner on your hands. Last week I got a bunch of collard greens in my CSA share, and as I thought about what to do with them, I realized a Cajun-style rice and beans dish might be in order. I originally thought of making some kind of jambalaya, but I’m not sure it’s quite right to call a dish jambalaya unless it contains shrimp and/or andouille sausage. I used beans instead of meat, and whether or not it’s properly jambalaya, it is pretty darn good.
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Spicy Barley with Snow Peas and Feta

When I pulled something non-leafy out of my CSA box last week, I must admit I got very excited. They sent some lovely, delicate, golden snow peas (and a bigger bag this week!) and I immediately started plotting how they might end up on my plate. A few cursory searches revealed a lot of recipes for basic side dishes and beef-based stir fries. And although I am currently blessed with a freezer full of beef, I wanted something vegetarian. And something that could stand up as an actual meal, not an afterthought, which vegetable recipes so often seem to be. I couldn’t find anything that appealed, so when it came time to cook the snow peas, I winged it. And what I came up with wasn’t half bad.
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Soba Noodles with Bok Choy and Tahini

When I got my first bundle of bok choy from my CSA, I started searching around for new ways to prepare this Asian green. I must admit, I’ve been getting a wee bit tired of garlic-sauteed greens and rice, so I wanted something unique. Unfortunately, the Great Google turned up many, many of the same recipe: bok choy sauteed or steamed, and seasoned with toasted sesame oil and soy sauce, with some ginger thrown in for extra flavor. Of course, that sounds delicious, and I made it once or twice, but when I wanted to branch out, it took me awhile to find something different.

I’m glad I searched so diligently, because this Tahini sauce has become one of my new favorites. It’s reminiscent of a peanut sauce, but a little more bitter. It’s easy as heck, but could probably be fancied up, too. And it is filling and delicious.
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Grains and Greens

[Updated: I added some mini-recipes to Flickr. If you click on the photos, it will take you to my Flickr page, where you can see some very basic instructions and ingredients for each of these very, very tasty dinners. Enjoy!]

The radio silence over here was unintentional, but I’ll be honest, it’s proving challenging to talk about (and photograph) my endless meals of grains and greens. So far, my CSA has been almost entirely made up of greens, with some lovely little radishes, and this week, baby beets, thrown in for variety. And I do love the greens, but the thought of continually typing out “saute spinach in a tablespoon of oil” every other day wasn’t that appealing. And, well, these meals all look the same. Namely, not that interesting. They are delicious and filling and lovely, but they don’t photograph well.
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Mushroom and Broccoli Lentils

This might not look all that exciting, but assure you, it was. It was very exciting. And do you know what makes a big bowl of lentils exciting? Well, I’ll tell you: It’s Worcestershire sauce and aged farmhouse cheddar. These two simple ingredients make a big bowl of lentils positively mind-blowing. When I cooked up this little dinner I didn’t think much of it. I certainly didn’t think it would be worth sharing here. This was a simple weeknight dinner, to be consumed while catching up with my DVR or reading some dorky librarian’s magazine. But then I tasted it and knew it deserved so much better than that.
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From the farm: Pea Shoot Pesto

I got my first box from West End Farm this week, which was very exciting. It was full of green things, many of them unknown to me, but thanks to the handy dandy newsletter, they were quickly identified. Tis the season, apparently, for pea shoots and baby greens and spinach and lettuce and teeny, tiny radishes, not to mention wonderful smelling mint and green onions. And all of it looked so unbelievably fresh and lovely. And green. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with all of those greens, but the newsletter recommended making pesto with the tiny, delicate pea shoots, and I figured it was high time I get over my fear of making pesto and give it a shot.
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Mediterranean Braised Chard with Farro

The last half of April ended up slipping by in a blur of airplane travel and hot barbecue: I spent a good portion of the end of the month in South Dakota, where my family gathered to mourn the loss of both my Grandma and Grandpa within six days of each other. It was an exceedingly difficult time for all of us, but it was tempered by the joy we found in being together. Having grown up in California, far away from my mother’s side of the family, this was the first time I’d seen some of my cousins in many, many years, and being together, remembering our childhoods visiting Grandma’s house and laughing about our parents’ stories of their wayward youths made the sadness we all felt a little lighter.

One thing that didn’t make anyone feel a little lighter, however, were the dozens and dozens of hot dishes, meat platters, dips and chips and beans and cookies and bars that I think every single person in my Grandparents’ small town brought to the house. It was amazing to see the outpouring of care that came from neighbors, church members, and old high school friends, and they all came with comfort in the form of food. And what was a little challenging for me was that almost all of that food had meat in it! The pinnacle of meat-laden hilarity came when I opened up a tray of raw vegetables with a dish of vegetable dip in the center, after a week of craving something green, and discovered that the dip was full of bacon. I mean, it was delicious, don’t get me wrong, but I would not want to attempt to be vegan in Madison, South Dakota.
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Spicy Citrus Shrimp and Spinach

I don’t use a lot of citrus in the kitchen, though I have been eating clementines nearly every day this winter. I don’t actually use a lot of fruit in my cooking at all. Fruit is sweet and therefore my savory-loving self has a hard time intuitively understanding how it fits into dinner. But when I saw this recipe for Grilled Shrimp with Citrus-Sambal-Oelek dressing in April’s Food & Wine, I was intrigued. The idea of something bright and spicy is very appealing this time of year, when summer taunts at every turn. What I ended up with was slightly different from the original recipe, based on what I had in the kitchen, but holy moly, it was so good I think I’m going to try introducing citrus to my pots and pans more often.
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