Category Archives: Recipes

Indian Curry Sweet Potato Fries & Purple Carrot Fries

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One of my cooking joys is turning someone who claims to not like a particular food.  Shannon is probably the most frequent victim/beneficiary of this pleasure.  I won out against her resistance to dark greens like kale and mustards, and I have recently joined the campaign for the honor of the sweet potato.

The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a member of the botanical family Convolvulaceae that is, I was kinda surprised to learn, commonly known as the Morning Glory Family.  Yep, sweet potatoes are close cousins of Morning Glory flowers.  They’re the only commonly eaten plant of the 1,000 Convolvulaceae species.

And they’re worth eating.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a D.C. non-prof that advocates for nutritional awareness, found in its ’92 study of vegetables that the sweet potato is the most nutritious vegetable.  Ever.  I know, that seems crazy, it reminds us of a pumpkin or the third substitution option after curly fries, but it’s true.  Given its fiber, complex carbs, beta-carotene, protein, vitamins C and A, potassium, iron, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, et al, it scored in the Center’s test a numeric value of 184.  The second most healthy vegetable, the humble regular potato, scored only 100 points.

So we’re going to be eating some sweet potatoes in the Leahey home.

And you know I had to come up with some novel ways to prepare them.

First Move: The Peel & The Cut  –  Keep the skins.  A lot of the nutritional value is stored Continue reading →

Carrot Cake Breakfast Porridge

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carrot cake for breakfastThere are some food textures that I cannot abide. Enormous hunks of sun-dried tomato make me gag; the mealy, fibrous feel of some kinds of squash turns my stomach. The soggy consistency of overcooked, waterlogged rice might top both of these, however, on my personally calibrated grossness scale. Last week, when Jason got distracted with multiple other components of an ambitious dinner and let the brown rice go too long, I just couldn’t eat it. But since both of us hate wasting food, the conundrum became what to do with a giant pot of leftover rice.

Thus began my scheming for a grand resurrection of the watery grains. In the past, I’ve enjoyed both a Moosewood recipe for stovetop rice pudding and a slow cooker recipe for oatmeal that tastes like pumpkin pie, so I thought I might be able to combine them into a yummy weekend breakfast. Also, we had an abundance of carrots in the fridge after Jason found a mother lode of root vegetables at the farmers market, and when I recalled that I do now have a modicum of carrot cake experience, a plan began to take shape.

Below is the recipe that I came up with. When the rice was cooked with almond milk until it had the consistency of oatmeal, I no longer found it repulsive. And despite having the word “cake” in the name, most of the ingredients are terrifically healthy. You deserve a merit badge, however, if you manage to leave off the cream cheese (cheese of wonder!) and honey glaze that I added at the end for a boost of carrot cake flavor and a touch of decadence. Continue reading →

Hidden Valley Shakin in its Pleather Boots: Jay’s Garlic-Dill 5 Minute Salad Dressing Recipe

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I’ve never been much for creamy salad dressings.  As revelator(ily) awesome as Cool Ranch Doritos were upon their debut in middle school, the taste of their dressing counterpart has always seemed to me merely gloppy, as if the gloop factor is the primary taste as well as texture.  Blue cheese dressing is yummy because blue cheese is yummy, but as an adult I’ve generally stayed away because of the fat and the general feeling that Hidden Valley and its mega cousins merely dump some cheese chunks in a vat of mayo and call it a day.  I’d rather gnaw on a hunk of good blue cheese when I’m in the kitchen alone.

But my creamy salad dressing, now that’s the cat’s pajamas.

I’ll see your cream factor and raise it a fistful of taste complexity and a hint of heat.

My dressing will erase your student debt, enliven your sex life, and talk your way out of a speeding ticket.

It’ll clock Wayne LaPierre in the kisser and cause Eric Cantor to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

It will also, on a regular night when you’re wiped from work, provide in 5-minutes prep time a vastly superior alternative to the bottled dressing you’ve got in the fridge and a nice change of pace from the oil-&-balsamic routine. Continue reading →

Potato Weather

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potato head

Hark! I have come to save Europe!

It was around the same time that the wind turned nastily sharp that Jason and I decided that there weren’t enough baked potatoes in our lives. Surely, the main reason that potatoes are a central component in cold-weather cuisines is that they grow best in places with relatively cool springs and summers. But it seems to me that potatoes warm the eater, too, their starchiness bolstering us through harsh winters. I once had a history professor, an elderly, tweed-jacket-and-leather-elbow-patches sort of fellow, who passionately preached the glory of potatoes, claiming they were “the crop that saved Europe.” (His point, as I recall, had to do with the fact that all those fiefs could survive a long time on potatoes alone because of their carbohydrates and abundant vitamins, far longer than if they were eating only, say, barley.) Anyway, if they’re good enough to save Europe, they’re good enough for me.

They’re also a breeze to make: a little oil, a little salt and pepper, a couple jabs with a fork and they’re ready to go in the oven. While they bake for about an hour, you can dream up fun things to put on top, like broccoli or chili or leftover Indian takeout.

But if you want to mix it up a little, here’s a potato recipe that I always begin to crave at around this time of year. We call them Brad’s Potatoes because…well, because my cousin Brad likes them. (This is standard naming procedure in my family. We also have Bobbie Kay’s Pasta Salad, Marilyn’s Cookies, Louise’s Potato Candy, and on and on.) Believe me, they’re far tastier than French fries and maybe even a little better for you. Continue reading →

Nogging in the New Year

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egg nog

Never mind the taste; few words are so pleasing as "nog."

After days of consuming rich holiday treats, Jason and I were pretty sure we didn’t need to add to the load. Yet there was one recipe that we hadn’t gotten a chance to try over Christmas, and we couldn’t resist giving it a whirl on New Year’s Day. The New York Times had run a recipe for Nog, the Hard Way in December, and we have a known weakness for things that are a) alcoholic and b) more difficult than they really should be. And so we put the black-eyed peas on to boil and got down to the business of nogging.

The NYT recipe is broken, rather arbitrarily, into five steps, but let me assure you, there are more than five steps. In fact, reading the thing beforehand made Jason (a wee bit hungover) threaten to wave the white flag. But once we got going, it wasn’t so hard after all, and despite a small disagreement over how fast a whisk should be moving before the action can be considered whisking, it made for an excellent tag-team cooking experience. For instance, Jason could stir in the heavy cream while I was preoccupied with cursing the fact that we only had three ice cubes left in the freezer with which to create an ice-water bath for the pan. (We ended up improvising by using an ice pack.)

ice water

Sometimes, you just have to improvise.

Jason was a tad skeptical of the raw egg factor, and we’d splurged on the freshest, most pristine eggs we could find. But regardless, it was amazing to witness how thorough of a transformation the eggs go through. After all of that whisking and beating, it seemed a chemical impossibility that they would be at all slimy or unpalatable.

Would all this intrepid nog determination turn out to be worth it? Continue reading →

ABCs of Baking: Cheese of Wonder, Cheese of Light

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cream cheese frostingNothing sounds more relaxed and delightful than a potluck (just listen to the word roll off your tongue—a combo of steaming, cozy kitchen and good fortune), but as the holiday potluck at the literacy center approached, I admit that I was feeling anxious. Looking at the list of suggested dishes, I began to suspect that I didn’t really have the same taste in food as many of the other people attending—half of the list was meat, which I don’t eat, and I wasn’t even sure what mauby was. (It’s a drink, in case you’re interested, though I still haven’t had the chance to try it.) So I took a deep breath, thought of my winter baking initiative and volunteered to bring a cake.

I have, in fact, made cakes before, but only of the packaged cake mix variety, so this seemed the perfect opportunity to expand my horizons. Because it is the season of root vegetables, I decided to dwell in the C section of the alphabet a touch longer and make a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. The recipe in Better Homes and Gardens seemed a little work intensive (three cups of finely grated carrot = almost certain thumb abrasions) but rather simple, and I had a pleasant reunion with an electric hand mixer that had been tucked away on a shelf in our kitchen for many moons. It wasn’t until the cake was in the oven that I realized I’d only put in about half of the baking powder and baking soda that the recipe called for. Here is a good baking lesson: you really should read the lettering on those measuring spoons, no matter how strongly your intuition tells you which one is a full teaspoon.

As it cooled, the cake was looking a little dense. Had it risen enough to be edible? It actually didn’t matter much, because here, dear reader, is an even more important lesson: Continue reading →

The Spruce Goose (and Other, Less Risky Infusions)

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tiny bottlesA few years ago, when Jason and I were trying to think of a fun theme for a holiday party, our friend Ethan told us of a longtime dream of his: to bust open a piñata full of tiny bottles of booze rather than candy. And how often, really, do you get to make someone’s dream come true? Realizing Ethan’s vision, however, put us up against a few obstacles.

The first was that the only bottles we could find that were plastic rather than glass contained vodka, and we worried that having only a single kind of alcohol would dampen the fun of the enterprise. We solved this by infusing the vodka with whole a range of ingredients (ginger, chili pepper, rosemary, etc) to give them more variety. It worked like a charm, because such a tiny amount of liquid infused very quickly. The second stumbling block was that a piñata full of bottles is very heavy indeed, and the poor thing strained and sagged under the weight so much that I was certain it was going to burst onto some unsuspecting partygoer’s head at any moment. Thankfully, it didn’t, though unleashing a piñata full of candy-colored booze on a roomful of people who’ve already been drinking for hours did its own kind of damage.

Though the piñata may have been a one-time only affair, some of the infusions were so good that we’ve made them many times since. Cinnamon is a personal favorite: a beautiful red color and, mixed with tonic, it tastes pleasantly like Big Red gum. Give it a try. This year I decided to experiment with a few other wintery flavors as well, and when I read a recent snippet in the Atlantic about someone making a cocktail syrup out of pine resin, I knew I had to try making a spruce-flavored vodka. Continue reading →

Salty Sweet Winter Squash & Apples

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I love winter squash.  Summer squashes like zucchini wear me out pretty quick, but winter squashes have stamina.  They’re nutty, buttery, have heft.  They’re full of all the B vitamins and omega 3s and fiber.  They’re a good source of folate.  I don’t know what folate does, but I trust that it’s good, and I’m okay with just eating winter squash and trusting it’ll hold down the folate fort for me.

I found a winter squash recipe at the Union Square farmers market last week.  As best as I can tell, the Natural Gourmet Institute next to the Flatiron Building is laying claim to it.  It rocks.  You should eat it.

You need squash, apples, thyme (fresh, if possible), honey, salt & pepper, butter.

First, get your squashes, let’s say 6 cups-worth or so.  That worked out to be 2 medium-to-small specimens for me.  You can use Acorn, Butternut, whatever is on hand, but you want them hard and you want them colorful.  Unless you are John Ford or Dorothea Lange, color is always good. Continue reading →

Brussels Sandwiches in a Pinch

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During the past few months, I’ve not gotten home from work until 9:00 on Mondays through Thursdays.  Shannon has been getting home at 8:00 Mondays and Wednesdays.

This has made cooking dinner a drag.

But in a pinch last week, Shannon hit on the idea of using left over Brussels Sprouts, which she’d cooked the night before with Dijon mustard, in a sandwich.

Genius.

Ours used the mustard Brussels, cherry tomatoes, and cheddar cheese melted and pressed between slices of farmers market bread.

I get the feeling you could stick these on any kind of bread with any kind of melted cheese and be good to go.

ABCs of Baking: Cornbread (and Stuffing, Too?)

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corn mealHardly could one find a more emblematic Thanksgiving food than cornbread. It is a “New World” food, a staple of the natives of this continent for centuries, unleavened and cooked over a fire. (I believe that the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook called this form corn pone—an unfortunate name, but still more palatable sounding to me as a child than the recipes for hardtack and headcheese.) But the Europeans couldn’t keep from meddling with the pone any more than they could its cooks, and their eggs and baking powders brought it closer to the cornbread we know today. Long after we’d solidly colonized the cornbread, however, controversy continued to rage, with Southerners preferring a more dense and savory variety, Yankees adding sugar to give it a more muffin-y taste and Midwesterners being too polite to definitively vote either way.

With Thanksgiving close at hand, I could hardly ignore this most complicated and divisive of foods, and I decided to try my hand at my first batch of cornbread stuffing from scratch. First, of course, I needed to bake some cornbread. But with which regional version to cast my lot? Savory seemed right for a stuffing, so I sought out Paula Dean to guide me. I’ll be honest—I’ve never made anything by the Food Network queen of Southern cooking, but I had recently heard an old NPR interview in which she explained how to deep fry an ottoman (“Oh, it’s easy, honey, you just dip it in egg first.”) and it had thoroughly charmed me.

cornbread

Does the color of this batter make me look Irish?

So I dutifully scribbled down the ingredients for her cornbread and stuffing recipes and headed to the grocery store. The store, however, had already been ravaged by pre-Thanksgiving shoppers, and the only variety of self-rising cornmeal they had left was made with white corn. I hemmed and hawed over this. I had had in mind the deep golden color of waves of grain, and I didn’t want my stuffing to look pallid. I was loath to walk to another grocery store, though, and besides, I’m used to being one of the whiter things in this neighborhood, so I grabbed it and headed to the checkout. Continue reading →