Vegetarian Swedish Meatballs

I was bringing Swedish meatballs to the potluck at work, and wanted to bring a vegetarian version as well. I really couldn't find a good one online, so as usual, I made one up.

I had a lot of trouble getting the flavor of the meatball the way I wanted it, I accidentally used twice as much black pepper than I intended, and I couldn't get a veggie brown sauce that didn't taste like bitter onion soup - so I almost scrapped the whole thing. However, after a few additions to the meatballs and an herb sauce in place of the brown sauce, they turned out great! I am planning to make bunches to freeze, and make Italian versions for spaghetti as well.


meatballs:

• 8 oz cooked black eyed peas, drained and mashed
• 1/2 onion, minced (can saute or leave raw)
• 3 TBS olive oil or melted butter
• 1/3 cup bulghur wheat, soaked overnight, drained
• 1/3 cup oatmeal, cooked or soaked overnight in water, milk, yogurt, or sour cream
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp allspice
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 2 TBS soy sauce (Kikoman works very well for this)
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1 tsp garlic salt or adobo
• 2 eggs

gravy:

• 1 cup milk or cream
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 tsp thyme, ground
• 1 TBS parmesan/romano or Jarlsberg, shredded
• 1 tsp garlic salt or adobo

Heat oven to 300F with a small pan of water on the lower rack.

Mix meatball ingredients together.
Form into 1" balls and place on a well oiled cookie sheet. (They are easier to roll if you cool the mix).
Drizzle or brush olive oil on the balls.
Bake for 30 mins. Make sure to keep the water pan filled as they bake.

Mix gravy ingredients in a medium sauce pan and bring to simmer.
Simmer until it thickens to the desired consistency.
If you are having trouble getting it thick enough, add a little more flour mixed in milk to the mixture, and simmer some more.

Serve the meatballs with just the sauce or over noodles.

Nacho Bake

I had some stale tortilla chips to use up, so I just whipped up a nacho bake! It was so good that my son joked that he is eagerly awaiting for more tortilla chips to go stale. You don't have to wait for stale chips to enjoy this easy bake dinner. 

• 1 lb ground meat (vegetarian option below*)
• 1 can Fire Roasted Rotel
• 1/8 cup water
• taco seasoning (whichever one you like)
• 1 can black beans
• 1 TBS olive oil
•  4-6 cups tortilla chips (these can be somewhat stale, it'll taste the same)
• 3-4 cups shredded Mexican mix cheese (I used one with Monterey jack, medium cheddar, queso quesadilla, and asadero)
• 1/8 - 1/4 cup Mezzetta Hot Cherry Peppers, chopped into small pieces
• 1/8 cup liquid from the jar of peppers

Heat a skillet over medium heat. Add the ground turkey, water, the whole can of Rotel (liquids and all), liquids from the can of beans, and the  taco seasoning. Cook until browned. This should be a little saucy, so add additional water if necessary as it cooks.

Spread the olive oil in the bottom of a 7x11 (2 quart) baking dish. Fill the dish about half way with tortilla chips. Sprikle cheese over the chips just enough to lightly cover them. Spread the meat mixture over the cheese. Spread the beans and peppers over the meat. Sprinkle more cheese over the top (I use enough to completely cover all other ingredients). Pour the pepper liquid over the top.

Bake at 300F for about 20 mins. It's ok if the cheese browns or doesn't brown; it is good both ways.

Serve as is; or with sour cream, taco sauce, avocados/guacamole, or more chips!
*This can be easily turned into a vegetarian dish by using 2 cans of black beans, mashed, in place of the ground meat, and omit the layer of whole beans.

Enchiladas Verdes

I had a bunch of left over roast turkey from another recipe I was making for a friend so I decided to try my hand at enchiladas verdes!

Here is the recipe I came up with after reading through several recipes I found on the internet (as mentioned previously on this blog, I tend to Frankenstein recipes together to get the exact recipe I want -- or I just make one up myself!)

 

Sauce:

• 3 cups tomatillos remove husk, rinse, cut them in half or quarters
• 2 TBS minced garlic
• 1” slice of onion optional (or you can remove before blending if someone doesn’t like onions)
• Water or soup stock enough to just cover the tomatillos (I use either stock from the meat or Better Than Bouillon)
• 3-5 serrano peppers discard stems, seeds, and pith (the amount you use depends on pepper size and how spicy you want it)

Throw the first four ingredients into a saucepan. Cook until the tomatillos dull and become somewhat translucent. Add the serranos and blend. Cook a couple minutes more and remove from heat or turn the heat to warm if you will be serving right away.

Filling:

• 4 cups shredded roast meat - chicken, turkey, or pork
• 3-4 TBS olive oil
• 3 TBS minced garlic
• 3-4 bay leaves
• 1 cup water or soup stock  (I use the stock from the meat, or Better Than Bouillon)
• 1 TBS chipotle pepper ground
• I use 3-4 TBS of Badia fajita seasoning, but you can add your own spices. Try this mix:

                1-2 tsp red pepper flakes (depending on how hot you want it)

                1 tsp paprika (can use smoked)

                1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (leave out if you don't want it very spicy)

                2 tsp chili pepper powder

                1/2 tsp cumin

                1/2 tsp onion powder or 1 tsp onion flakes

                1/2 tsp garlic powder or 1 tsp granulated garlic

                1 tsp salt

                *Add more of any of these spices until the meat tastes the way that you want it to!
                  You can add a variety of peppers (eg. poblano/ancho) for a richer flavor.

Add meat to a large, hot skillet. Stir until heated. Add oil. Once oil is heated, add garlic and seasoning (except bay leaves). Cook for a couple minutes stirring to keep from burning. Add stock and bay leaves. Turn down heat to a simmer. Add more water if needed. Simmer on low for 10-15 minutes to set in the flavors.

Assembly:

• White corn tortillas
• Filling
• Sauce
• Chopped cilantro

Heat a pan (preferably cast iron) on high. Put a tortilla on the dry pan for 30 seconds, turn over and cook another 30 seconds. There should be some browning, and even a little scorching is good. They should lose some of their translucence but still be flexible. Remove from heat and throw another tortilla on. Repeat process with all the tortillas you will need.

On one end of the cooked tortilla, spread about 1/8 cup hot filling. Roll. Put on a plate and pour the heated sauce on top. Sprinkle chopped cilantro over the enchilada.

Eat!

Titania Pasta Maker

I have been putting off getting a pasta maker for years. The ones that I have found were big, bulky and expensive. And pasta is cheap, so why bother?

Well, I tried homemade noodles a couple of months ago. I have pledged to reduce my purchases of corporate products and non-corporate pasta is expensive! -- but tastes SO GOOD!! So instead of paying $6 for a bag of egg noodles, I just made them myself. My family declared that only homemade noodles would suffice from that day on.

Which is great except for the fact that they are really time consuming when you are cutting all the pasta into strips with a knife.

So a couple of weeks ago, I was in a store looking for a smaller stock pot for canning just a few jars at a time, and instead found a compact pasta maker for $35. It impressed me enough that I bought it without even researching it first. It ended up being probably the most perfect pasta maker I could have gotten.

It is Titania from Imperia. The reviews I eventually read indicated that it was an authentic Italian pasta maker - the one that an Italian household would most likely be using.The pasta is easy to make. It is just flour, eggs, a little salt, and oil. I don't even measure. The consistency should be like bread dough when it is all mixed and kneaded thoroughly.
Now a lot of the reviews complained that the maker took more than two hands to operate. I was able to work the machine without clamping it to anything and while holding the video camera under my chin. And all the while I had three dogs dancing around my feet looking for fallen pasta scraps. I think those facts illustrate the actual ease of use of this pasta maker. I did not let the dough rest. I just rolled a ball of the dough in a little flour before trying to roll it through. You do have to start on a wide setting and work your way down to a thinner setting or your dough will shred and it is much harder to get it through the rollers if you skip too many widths.

I used the noodles I made in the video in this vegetable and chicken broth soup. Celery, carrots, kohlrabi, sweet onion, sauteed with olive oil, and seasoned with a little ginger. A couple chicken bouillon cubes, water and the cooked noodles. It was delicious!

And the noodles from start to finish probably took less time to make and cook than it would have taken store-bought dried noodles to cook. With homemade noodles this fast and easy, I don't think it will be hard at all meeting my family's declaration!

Morel Cream Sauce

I had my best morel year ever. My son and I usually just saute the mushrooms and eat them as a treat, but I actually had enough to make some kind of a dish with the morels that I found. I wanted to keep it simple and mild, since this was the first time that I was actually cooking them into a dish and wanted to be sure they would hold their own.

So, although I was going to do a stroganoff or an Alfredo, I opted for a simple cream sauce. I basically went out to my garden and pulled what was available.

• 1 TBS olive oil
• 1-2 TBS garlic chives, chopped - whites and greens
• 1-2 TBS chives, chopped
• Small leek, chopped - whites and tender greens
• A few rosemary leaves, chopped (or a pinch of ground rosemary)
• 1/3 cup (or more) morel mushrooms, chopped
• 1-2 TBS flour
• 1/2-1 cup cream or half-n-half - enough to get consistency you want
• Sea salt
• Pepper

Saute the chives and leeks.	Add mushrooms and saute until the mushrooms are fully cooked.
Sprinkle in the flour and mix well.	Pour in cream/half-n-half a little at a time and mix well. You want to dissolve all the flour into the liquids.

Add the salt and pepper and cook until thickened.

I used this over egg noodles. It was delicious!!

The sauce was mild enough that the three mushrooms I used easily held their own. If you want to add a little more spice, like thyme or convert it to a stroganoff by adding sour cream, or an Alfredo by adding some Parmesan; I would add more morels. Heck, if I had had them, I would have added more anyway :)

Tunisian Brik

I wanted to add some more appetizers to my repertoire, so when I found a recipe for Tunisian Brik in my appetizer cookbook ("Appetizers, Finger Food, Buffet & Parties", by Bridget Jones) I had to try making it. I did make a few small changes - of course. The following is what I came up with.

• 3 TBS butter, melted
• 1 small red onion, finely chopped
• 1 lb ground turkey
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 TBS lemon juice
• 2 TBS finely chopped cilantro
• 1-2 eggs, scrambled
• phyllo dough
  

Start by mixing everything but the egg and phyllo dough in a frying pan and cook until meat is thoroughly cooked. Then it is on to phyllo dough!

Let me start by saying that phyllo dough is a mother to work with! It is very thin, tears easily, dries out quickly, and then crumbles. I kept a mister handy to keep the dough moist; but be careful! If you get the dough too moist, it sticks to everything!

	I laid out two sheets. the recipe called for brushing with melted butter, but due to the delicacy of these sheets, I sprayed them with Pam instead.
	The sheets were rather large, so I cut them into sixths.
	Then I folded each of the pieces until they made 3"x3" squares. They don't need to be perfectly even. As you can see, some parts have more layers than others.
	Place a tablespoon of the meat filling in the center of each square and a teaspoon of egg over that. Fold the phyllo corner to corner and seal with a little water. Place the triangles on a greased/oiled baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil.
	Bake at 425F for 8-10 minutes. They should be golden brown.

These were AWESOME! And once you get the hang of handling the phyllo dough, they are amazingly easy to make!

Tomato Lentil Soup/Casserole

I needed to make a quick meal and had been remembering a wonderful minestrone that I had whipped up once, so I decided to try that again. Except I couldn't exactly remember how I had made it, so what I ended up with was different, but equally as wonderful.

I call this a "soup/casserole" since it could really be either. When it was first done cooking it still had a soup consistency, but as it sat, the noodles soaked up most of the remaining liquid and it became a casserole. Either way was very good.

• 3 cloves garlic minced (I used the garlic I grew this year)
  
• 1/2 medium onion, chopped or diced
  
• 3 TBS olive oil
• 1 pint tomato sauce (I used the sauce I canned this fall - YUM!)
• 3 TBS ground Italian seasoning (basil, oregano, thyme, and rosemary mix)
• 1 TSP sea salt
• 2 cups reconstituted lentils (about 1 cup dried - I used two lentils: French and brown)
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 3 medium carrots, sliced (you can leave the skins on)
• 2 handfuls of uncooked pasta (your choice - used egg noodles)
  

The first thing that you want to do is start the lentils reconstituting by placing them in a bowl and pouring near boiling water over them.

Heat the olive oil on medium in a soup pan while you mince the garlic and chop/dice the onion. Saute the garlic and onions in the olive oil while you dice the celery. Saute the celery while you slice the carrots. If you like your carrots firm, hold off placing them in the pot until later.


Dump the tomato sauce into the pot. Add a pint of water and mix in the Italian seasoning. Rinse the lentils and add to pot. Simmer for ten minutes. Add the pasta (and carrots if you didn't do that earlier) and simmer until the pasta is cooked. You may need to add extra water during this process (but make sure that the liquids remain bubbly hot or the pasta will cook pasty - Yuck!)

Salt to taste.

This was quick and easy to make. I really liked this and so did my husband (who isn't a big shelled bean fan). It will make great leftovers for lunch tomorrow as well :)

Moroccan Stuffed Acorn Squash

I had two acorn squash that I had to use up soon since I accidentally tore the stem off while harvesting - Oops! Oh well, my loss is my gain as I found some great recipes for this particular squash, and not your run of the mill "drizzle it in honey" recipes. In fact, I found two really interesting ones and couldn't decide, so I made them both!

The recipe base came from elizadomestica.com. Just like Eliza, I had to make a few changes. The original recipe came from the October 2009 edition Martha Stewart Living magazine if you are interested.

The following is my version of this recipe...

Ingredients

• One medium acorn squash, cut in half and seeded
• 3 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 scallion, separate the green and white parts and chop
• 1 slice sweet onion, chopped
  
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 cup chicken bouillon
• 4 cups water
• 1 cups of veggie burger mix
• 1/2 cup barley
• 1/8 cup raisins, minced
• 3 tablespoons chopped ripe sweet pepper
• 2 tablespoons chopped apple
  
• 2 tablespoons of toasted pine nuts
• 1 tablespoons cilantro, minced

Directions

Cut acorn squash lengthwise and remove the seeds. Bake at 350F face down in an oiled baking dish for 30 minutes.

While squash is baking, saute in a medium frying pan white scallion, onion, and garlic in 1 TBS olive oil. Add chicken bouillon and sprinkle in cinnamon and nutmeg. Once the bouillon and seasoning are thoroughly mixed in, add water, veggie burger mix and barley. Simmer for 20 minutes or until the barley is cooked. Add more water during the cooking if necessary to keep it moist.

Near the end of the cooking process, add the raisins, pepper and apple.

Turn the heat up a little, add 1TBS olive oil and allow the mix to dry out so that it holds a form. Add the pine nuts and cilantro and mound into squash halves. Bake for 15 - 30 minutes until squash is soft.

The following are pictures of the squash before and after cooking.












The dark is the Moroccan (the light is the other recipe I tried: Corn Chowder Acorn Squash). This was definitely a great recipe, and, it was even better as leftovers!

Corn Chowder Acorn Squash

I had two acorn squash that I had to use up soon since I accidentally tore the stem off while harvesting - Oops! Oh well, my loss is my gain as I found some great recipes for this particular squash, and not your run of the mill "drizzle it in honey" recipes. In fact, I found two really interesting ones and couldn't decide, so I made them both!

The base recipe came from fredlet.

• 1 acorn squash, cut in half lengthwise and seeded
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 cup half & half
• 1 egg
• 1 can sweet corn, drained
• 1/3 cup grated Italian cheese (I used Romano and Asiago)
• 2 shallots, minced
• 1 sweet pepper, ripe (orange or red are great) chopped
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic, minced
• 1/4 teaspoon fine grain sea salt

1. Turn on your oven to 350F
2. Cut the acorn squash in half and scoop out the seeds with a spoon
3. Cook acorn squash cut side down in an oiled baking pan for 30 minutes.
5. Put the corn, shallots, garlic and sweet pepper in a frying pan (I used cast iron) over medium heat. You want to roast these ingredients. A little charring is ideal, just don't burn them.

Mix egg, half & half, cheese in a saucepan. Warm over low heat to melt the cheese.

Add the roasted mix and continue heating until the chowder thickens. Stuff the squash halves with as much of the chowder as they will hold. Bake at 325F for 40-45 minutes.

The following are pictures of the squash before and after cooking.


The light one is the corn chowder squash (the dark is the other recipe I tried: Moroccan Stuffed Acorn Squash). This was definitely a great recipe. My son ate a half of one clean and I froze the other for a quick dinner later.

Grilled Portabella & Pastrami Sandwich

• Pastrami (I used turkey pastrami)
• Portabella mushroom cap
• Mozzarella cheese (I used shredded, you could also use very thin slices)
• 2 slices of bread
• Butter
• 1/2 TBS Olive oil
  
• Fresh rosemary

Fry the pastrami and portabello in olive oil and rosemary. Butter one side of each slice of bread. Sprinkle a little cheese on one unbuttered side, lay on the fried pastrami, sprinkle a little more cheese, lay on the portabello, sprinkle little more cheese, add the second piece of bread buttered side out. Set the sandwich in the hot pan to grill both sides.

My son was so excited about this sandwich he had almost half of it gone before I could even take a picture! Two thumbs up from my teen. He reluctantly gave me a taste as well, and I agree it is a keeper.