Category: Recipe

Pesto Pasta Salad for Holiday Travel

by Maria

Pesto Pasta Salad 1

I know every magazine, website, and TV show has been sharing endless recipes for holidays meals…but what do we eat to get us there? I know I’ll be spending the next month and a half on a series of buses, trains, planes, and cars to get home for Thanksgiving and the holidays. And it is not fun to spend $12 on a mediocre burger at the T.G.I. Friday’s at the airport.

Pesto Pasta Salad 2

So why not make my own veggie-packed, just-as-yummy lunch to go? That’s what this recipe is all about.

Pesto Pasta Salad

Pesto Pasta Salad 3

This has all the components of an awesome meal: ready in 15 minutes; easily adaptable to whatever veggies you have on hand; healthy; well-rounded; oh-so- delicious; and easily packed up for your next long trip! By making the pesto without pine nuts you also save quite a bit of money, and you won’t have to worry about eating it near anyone who has nut allergies.

1 serving

Nut-Free Pesto
½ cup basil leaves
1 small garlic clove
¼ cup Parmigiano Reggiano
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
¼ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Pasta Salad
½ cup short whole wheat pasta (I used strozzapreti from Severino.)
½ cup baby spinach
¼ cup cherry tomatoes
5-6 kalamata olives
1/8 of a medium cucumber

Fill a medium pot with water and place it over high heat to boil. While it heats up, you can start the pesto. Place all the pesto ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth.

Pesto Pasta Salad 4

If the water is boiling, go ahead and add the pasta and 1 tablespoon salt.

Quarter the cherry tomatoes and chop the cucumber to be about the same size. Slice the olives and roughly chop the spinach, then place all the veggies directly into your Tupperware or other to-go container.

If the pasta is ready, strain it, stir a bit of olive oil onto it so it doesn’t stick, then place it in the refrigerator to cool for a few minutes.

Once the pasta is cool, add it to the container with the veggies, spoon in the pesto, and toss everything until it’s coated in the pesto. Enjoy on your next trip!

Pesto Pasta Salad 5

Note: I highly recommend using an extra rubber band around your to-go container. Unless you’re cool with having a purse full of pesto.

Chicken Sausage Pot Pie

by Maria

Chicken Sausage Pot Pie 1

This weekend we pulled out Meat: A Kitchen Education by James Peterson and decided to tackle the pot pies. Because what are weekends for other than taking on big project recipes? And sleeping until 11, of course.

Meat is such a great cookbook for the carnivore in your life who wants to experiment with new meats like quail, venison, or pheasant. Honestly, I don’t adore the photos inside, but it’s an amazingly well-researched and thorough book and we cook from it a lot. Also, it’s called Meat, and there’s a beautiful picture of a giant hunk of steak on the cover. So I was kind of forced to buy it for Jarrett a few Christmases ago.

This recipe was one of those should’ve-been-easy-but-things-got-complicated recipes. You know what I’m talking about. It seemed almost too easy for a weekend recipe—just toss some chicken, veggies, cream, and stock in a cute baking dish, throw a crust on it, and bake! So easy. Not.

It was mostly my fault: I decided to make my own pie crust instead of using store-bought puff pastry like James Peterson recommended. My pie crust tore, but Jarrett swooped in and unexpectedly saved the day. He’s now officially The Crust Whisperer.

Chicken Sausage Pot Pie

And then I realized I didn’t actually have chicken stock. So I threw some chicken bones, mushrooms stems, onion skins, celery, salt, and peppercorns in a saucepan and improvised myself some stock.

After all that, it turned out delicious and flavorful and fragrant, and Jarrett near died from food happiness. He always loves my food, but I swear he was absolutely losing his mind over this pie.

Chicken Sausage Pot PieChicken Sausage Pot Pie 2

This pot pie only has a top crust, so you never have to worry about a soggy, goopy bottom crust. The duo of chicken thighs and chicken sausage elevates it to a whole other level. Double meat = dude approved meal!

Serves 4

Crust
Homemade pie crust [great recipe here]
–or–
One 1-pound package of puff pastry (all-butter, if possible), thawed overnight in the refrigerator if frozen

Filling
2 stalks of celery
1 large carrot
½ medium onion
5 medium mushrooms
3 chicken thighs, bones removed
1 very large (or 2 medium) mild Italian chicken sausage
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
Butter, for greasing the pan
Leaves from 3 bunches sage
½ cup chicken broth
½ cup heavy cream
1 egg, beaten with 1 teaspoon salt

1. Thinly slice the celery, and peel and thinly slice the carrot. Chop each mushroom in half then thinly slice it. Roughly chop the onion to be more or less the same size as the other vegetables.

2. Chop the chicken into about ¾ inch cubes. Remove the casing from the sausage and roughly chop it so that it is in small, crumbly pieces.

3. Butter an 8-inch pie plate then add the chicken thigh, chicken sausage, and top with the mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper, then top with the celery, carrots, onion, and sage. Pour the broth and cream over everything, then season with salt and pepper again.

4. Smoosh everything down so it’s below the rim of the pie plate. (If the filling touches the crust, it will get soggy and not rise.) Roll out your puff pastry or pie crust to be about 2 inches larger than the diameter of the pie plate, then trim it into a circle, place it over the pie, and press it firmly against the sides of the dish so it sticks. With a sharp paring knife, score whatever design you like on the dough, but be careful not to pierce through the dough. Brush the dough with the egg.

5. Slide the pie into the oven and bake for about 35 minutes or until the crust is golden brown and puffy. Serve while still piping hot!

Note: You can also make this in individual ramekins or any other cute baking dish you have. Just make sure each container is filled ¾ of the way with ingredients and that you have enough pie crust to cover it.

Recipe adapted from Meat: A Kitchen Education by James Peterson.

Let’s pretend it’s still spring…

by Maria

[This is reposted from back in the spring.]

Something really amazing happened a few days ago. It was magical and beautiful and even kind of sexy.

It was asparagus.

ImageOhhhh YEAH.

See, I’ve been fantasizing about asparagus for months, ever since I finished up Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and was forever ruined on supermarket asparagus. So now spring equals asparagus in my head. But, the real mood killer on my budding affair with this flower—other than my unfunny botany jokes, which could kill any mood—is that the farmer’s market here hasn’t had any asparagus at all. Nada. Not a stalk in the whole damn shebang.

I don’t know if it’s that Rhode Island is still too cold, or that the farmers don’t focus on asparagus, but it is not okay.

Luckily, I have another love in my life, Jarrett, and I can usually wheedle him into doing my bidding. He was in Ann Arbor, so off he went with his farmer neighbor Brian (who is my food idol for a trillion reasons) to stalk some wild asparagus. He was basically a modern-day Euell Gibbons.

Anyway, Jarrett and Brian hustled off into the fields and clipped off dozens and dozens of bunches of asparagus, which apparently grows right from the ground, wild and maintenance-free, just like grass. Jarrett said it was a bit like morel hunting in that you have to train your eyes to differentiate the asparagus stalks from the grass blades, and that he’d spent his whole life walking his farm and had never noticed all the asparagus growing right under his nose.

He wrapped them up and drove them all the way from Michigan to Rhode Island for me. I was not more excited to see the asparagus than to see him, but it was really, really (REALLY!) close. So what did I do with 30 stalks of fresh, wild asparagus that traveled 2 days in a Jeep to get to me? Nothing but a sauté.

Sautéing the Wild Asparagus

Wild asparagus is so amazingly tender, fresh and snappy that you can eat it raw. But a quick sauté and a creamy dressing makes it even yummier. If asparagus isn’t in season, look for stalks at the supermarket that aren’t dried out and cracked at the bottom, since this usually means they’ve been sitting there too long.

2 side dish servings
10 stalks of asparagus, washed and dried
1 tablespoon of olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
½ pepper

Heat the olive oil in a nonstick pan over medium heat. Up the heat to medium-high and add the asparagus, then season with the salt and pepper. Sauté for 3-5 minutes or until there is a slight char in spots but the spear is still rigid. Serve hot.

Creamy Chickpea Dressing

I love this dressing because it gives you all the satisfaction of a sinfully creamy dressing like ranch, but it’s healthy and even vegan. You could make a similar dressing with store-bought hummus by just adding olive oil until it thins out to a liquid.

1 can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed (or the same amount of home-cooked chickpeas)
1 garlic clove
2 lemons, juiced and zested
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon Tabasco
¼ teaspoon Dijon mustard
olive oil

Put all ingredients except the olive oil in a food processor and pulse quickly. With the food processor running, start to stream in more olive oil until the dressing is like a paste. If you stopped here, you’d have some pretty darn good hummus. But keep adding olive oil, until the dressing is smooth and liquid-y.

Drizzle over the asparagus, or for little hands, chop up the asparagus into fry-sized pieces and let kids dip them into the dressing.