Pita Pizza

So this was delightful. Check it out. Spinach Pita Pizzas with a tomato salad.

It took not even half an hour to prepare.

It started out with us cranking up the oven to 450 degree Fahrenheit an cutting open 3 whole wheat pitas and placing them cut face down on oven trays. We baked them for 6 minutes.

In the meantime we halved a couple of hands full of colorful tomatoes.

We also washed and sliced up roughly 5 ounces of baby spinach. 

Then we cut up one quarter of an onion and minced two clove of garlic. We sautéed the onion, a few pepper flakes, and salt and pepper for a few minutes and then added the garlic for another minute. About a spoonful of this warm mixture, we tossed with the tomatoes.

To the rest we added the spinach and melted it down half way.

We turned the pitas with the cut side up and spread the spinach mixture. Then we crumbled feta cheese all over them and rounded it out with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

We shoved them back into the oven for another 5 minutes.

To the tomatoes we added fresh parsley from our yard and a little salt and pepper to taste.

That was it. Yummy crunchy pita pizzas with spinach and a tomato salad. A total winner! No left overs.

Slow Cooker - Spinach, Parmesan, and Bean Soup

We forgot to take a picture or the end result. But it doesn't matter. Essentially the bean soup is an excuse to shovel in an obscene load of fresh baby spinach and Parmesan cheese.

First we sautéed half a big chopped onion for a few minutes.  Then we added a couple of garlic cloves and continued to sauté them for another 30 seconds or so.

In the meantime, we chopped up two handfuls of cherry tomatoes (alternatively a big can of chopped tomatoes will do the trick).

We added the tomatoes, 3 cans of cannellini beans, the onions and garlic,

1 quart of vegetable broth, a can worth of water, and a little salt and pepper to the slow cooker and set it on 4 hours high (or 8 hours low).

Then we harvested our herb garden for a couple handfuls of fresh herbs (in our case basil, thyme, and oregano) and added them to the soup.

We washed a good 5 handfuls of fresh baby spinach and looked for the Parmesan. When we were ready to eat, we filled our bowls with soup, loaded them up with spinach to each of our delight, sprinkled the whole goodness with cheese, and dug in. YUM!

Slow Cooker - Veggie Chili

Here is another slow cooker chili recipe that worked for us. All veggie. All easy. All yum!

All we had to do was to throw the following into the pot, turn it on low and wait 8 hours: 1 onion, 3 cloves of garlic, 2 stalks of celery, 2 bell peppers, 1 small can of diced tomatoes, the same can worth of water, 1 quart of vegetable broth, 1 cup of lentils, 1 cup of quinoa, 1 can of pinto beans, cumin, oregano, salt, and pepper.

To get all fancy we offered some Tabasco sauce and cheeses to serve. (This is about as easy at it gets, right?!)

Slow Cooker - Saucy Meatballs

As our days become decidedly more messy we are pushed to try out more slow cooker meals. This one comes courtesy of Emily Green and her fun blog Emily Bites. Though it requires cooking a fresh pot of pasta as you come home it still made life easier. She also suggests serving the meatballs and marinara sauce on buns.

We couldn't get around tweaking this a little to fit our pantry. First we shredded dried bread into 2 handfuls of bread crumbs. We added it into a bowl with 1 lb of ground beef, 2 eggs, a handful of freshly shredded Parmesan, a quarter cup of milk, a bit of garlic powder, dried oregano, dried basil, salt, and pepper. We mixed it all up with our hands, adding a few breadcrumbs when it felt too mushy, and formed about 16 meatballs.

We fried them up on the outside only and tossed them into the slow cooker.

For the sauce we diced up half a big onion, 2 cloves of garlic, and a handful of fresh leaves of basil.

Check out the basil plant by-the-by. It has grown like crazy within 6 weeks or so.

In the same pan loosening the fried beef bits we melted the onions for a few minutes in olive oil, added the garlic for another, and then 1 big can of crushed tomatoes, 1 small can of tomato sauce, a little tomato paste, the basil, salt, and 1 bay leaf. All that got transferred right away into the slow cooker.

We let it simmer on low for 8 hours.

It was so scrumptious that we forgot to take a picture of the final result. It was an excellent end-of-the-week-just-feed-me dish. Thank you Emily!

Broccoli Stir Fry

A shout out to Melissa and Marcus of My Whole Food Life! We tried their Easy Broccoli Stir Fry recipe and chalked it down as a winner. Here is how we managed to screw it up.

For starters we prepared a pot of rice and chopped up 3 carrots, 2 heads of broccoli, 2 handfuls of snow peas, 2 garlic cloves, 4 green onions, and searched in the cupboards for a couple handfuls of edamame beans and sesame oil.

Next we prepared a peanut sauce by combining roughly 1/2 cup of natural peanut butter (just peanuts), a knob of ginger which we grated, 1 Tbsp of soy sauce, and the juice of 1 orange and 1 lime.

About 10 minutes prior to the rice being done we heated some of the sesame oil in a pan and then gently fried up the veggies all at once, shy of the green onions. By continuously nibbling we decided on a extraction point of perfect crunchy softness, added the sauce, served it on rice and garnished it all with the green onions.

Hmmmmm ... belly-tickling goodness!!

Weekend Chili

On a moody weekend day this chili hit our table with a hungry thud. For 3 1/2 hours it had been slow cooking to perfection in the oven.

We gave us a lazy 30 minutes to prepare. First we turned the oven to 350F and roughly chopped up 3 onions, 3 carrots, 4 celery sticks, and 4 garlic cloves.

We stuffed it all into a food processor.

Next we chopped up 4 peppers and a chunk of brisket, a bit heavier than 1 lb.

With some olive oil we first fried up the peppers in a casserole dish over high heat and then added the meat and cooked until it was browned.

We added 3 small cans of whole tomatoes, 3 cans of kidney beans, and a tablespoon of each ground cumin, ground coriander, and smoked paprika. With a  little salt and pepper we brought it all to a boil, including the chopped veggies, and ...

shoved it into the oven for 3 1/2 hours.

About 45 minutes before dinner time we prepared a pot of brown rice, wedges of 1 lime, a chopped up chili pepper, and parsley.

Oh my. We were supposed to keep about half for left overs. But we dug in so deep that we got dangerously close to licking the pot clean.

Slow Cooker - Split Pea Soup

"If you say one more time - ohh, it tastes just like it would back in Germany - we'll skip right to the ice cream!!"

But for real for real; this thing was off the shizzle. We put real ham hocks into it. For taste. Beat that!

Okay. But first we chopped up a whole bunch of stuff: 4 carrots (they don't have to be that colorful), half a red pepper, 2 sticks of celery, 1 whole big onion, 4 cloves of garlic, 2 bay leaves, and about 1 tablespoon of fresh thyme leaves. All that and 2 ham hocks (1 is plenty) we placed into a slow cooker. 

We added 1 pound of split peas, salt, and pepper. We covered it with 2 quarts of vegetable broth and turned the slow cooker on low for 8+ hours.

Before we left for bigger and better things we chopped up a few beef franks and tossed them into a scolding hot cast iron pan for a short while. (If we can get our hands on good quality Vienna sausages, we'll use those.) Discarding the greasy juices we popped them into the fridge to add them later upon our return.

Check it out! Everybody dug in and fought for the best pieces. Perfect fall fodder for the masses.

We did remove the hog's ham hocks prior to eating. We might try it sometime with big chunks of bacon instead. Just to see how it might turn out.

Pasta, Beans, and Tomatoes

While visiting Opa in Hamburg, Germany, we tried out a new recipe.

To start we got a pot of salted water going for some pasta. In addition we got 2 shallots, a handful of sage, a couple of handfuls tomatoes, 3 cloves of garlic, and the juice of 1 lemon.

Which we all chopped up.

Then we tossed 1 pound of pasta into the boiling water.

Next we sauteed the onion, garlic, and

the sage.

After a few minutes Lucy and Opa added the tomatoes and 1 can of white beans.

After everything was warm and tasty we pressed the lemon juice, drained the pasta and tossed it all together.

A little salt and pepper. Voila! Oh, we shredded Parmesan cheese to serve. Yummy. And please - do notice the heart-shaped pasta!

Ravioli Bolognese Home Made

Jamie Oliver's latest cookbook, Comfort Food, came in the mail with the suggestion for us to try out a few recipes.

 

While the recipes and descriptions gave us goosebumps ("... it's about smells, sounds, and tastes. It's about recipes that really hit the spot at a certain time and have the capacity to pull out explicit feelings and old memories, as well as creating new ones and passing that joy on to the next generation."), the introduction was rather discomforting: "Most of the recipes aren't super-fast, nor are they for everyday cooking ..."! Great. "I want to bring you to the next level now, to the nth degree." Jeez. It looked like we were in for a steep learning curve and a bumpy ride - but at the very least for some yummy food.

To ease ourselves into this madness we chose to start with homemade ravioli. At least we had an idea of what we were shooting for and we’ve always wanted to learn how to make our own pasta. So this is how it went:

We went to the butcher to get the real deal no-antibiotics grass-fed happy meat for this one. 1 lb of ground beef and 1 lb of ground pork.

We fried it all up in some olive oil and salt, and pepper and gave it about 20 minutes.

In the meantime we cut up 2 sticks of celery, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 huge onion, and 2 carrots.

Lily figured out how to get some see-saw action going with her knife to get all the veggies into tiny pieces and was so excited that she exclaimed in German "I am a real cook! (Ich bin eine echte Köchin)"

We added the veggies to the meat for another ten minutes.

Next we added a 3/4 cup of Chianti , 24 oz of canned plum tomatoes, and a quarter of a big tomato can worth of water,

brought it to a boil, and let it simmer for a whole hour.

To round it off, when sauce had turned super-thick and had cooled down, we added 3 3/4 oz of Parmesan.

While the sauce was simmering and not needing our attention we turned to the pasta dough: 3 cups of  Tipo 00 flour (we couldn't find any and used super fine flour instead; in the meantime we heard that we might find the real deal at Whole Foods), 1/2 cup of fine semolina,

12 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and 4 tablespoons of cold water.

With a fork Lily mixed up all the goodies, slowly adding flour from the sides.

When the fork finally got stuck she went in with her bare hands.

And when that got to hard Papa had to finish it up, kneading the dough for about four minutes. We added just about another tablespoon of water to get a consistency that felt right - not too wet, nor too dry.

We were so proud of the final product that we decided to recreate Jamie's picture in the book. We wrapped the dough in plastic wrap for half an hour. Somewhere else it said that those 30 minutes allows the flour to fully absorb all the moisture.

When the wait was over we separated the dough into four balls and

placed them into a damp kitchen towel, concentrating on one at a time.

For ease we halved each ball as we retrieved it from the towel and rolled it out with a rolling pin.

Then we guided the dough through a pasta machine, starting at the thickest setting and repeating the process going thinner a couple of notches.

Then we folded the strip over and started from the beginning, getting down to about 1/16th of an inch.

After a couple of times of re-folding and thinning the strip down, it had filled out the width of the machine, creating a nice and straight band that we thinned at the final step to about a 1/32nd thickness.

Next we placed heaping teaspoons worth of our our thick Bolognse sauce on the strip, about 2 1/2 inch on center.

Then we folded the strip length-wise and pushed it down around the dollops of meat, wetting our fingers in a glass of water.

We cut the strip into 2 1/2 inch pieces,

pressing down the edges. In the book you can see Jamie using this cool jaggedy rolling knife to create  postage-stamp-type edges.

 

We kept repeating this until all the pasta dough was used up. Getting the pasta machine to spit out picture perfect strips took some trial and error. Another thing we learned was not to stack the raviolis on a pile as we are showing in the picture. Instead we should have kept them apart and lightly floured with the semolina. We ended up having a bunch of them stick together. 

Now came the easiest, most light-hearted part. The sauce.

 

We cut up 4 cloves of garlic and just a little of a chili pepper, so as not to upset the girls' developing palettes.
 

We gently fried them up for a few minutes in olive oil and then

 

added  42 oz of canned plum tomatoes. All this we brought to a boil and let it simmer for ten minutes before we whizzed it up with an immersion blender.

In the meantime we started a big pot of salted water and got it to boil.

We cooked our raviolis for only three minutes. A couple of them were left in the water for too long and decide to fall apart. A few minutes is all they needed.

We transferred the raviolis to the sauce and then served them with fresh basil leaves and freshly grated Parmesan. Voila! Not bad, huh? We learned a few new swear words along the way but came out super proud. Our first home made pasta and real Raviolis at that.

While we couldn't quite match the good looks from the master chef's creation, we were absolutely stunned at the taste. We all decided that it was the best pasta we ever ate. Both dough and sauce. The book says it serves 8 - 10, but we got quite close to licking the pot clean. Nobody knew how to stop.

 

Needless to say, promises were not broken. Memories were made and some real comfort food enjoyed.