Pomegranate Vinaigrette

I'm trying to get in the spirit of fall.  Truth be told, I do like pomegranates and all they labor they entail.  That being said, the cold weather is already dragging me down.  We've already seen snow in these parts.

Look at the reds and greens in that salad.  It just looks Christmasy.  I'm not sure I'm ready for this.  Let's add some hot chicken to throw off that wintery feeling.

Start by juicing one pomegranate.  I would suggest using a blender or food processor on the seeds, aka arils (avoid the bitter pith).  I had had a long day at work and took some sort of perverse pleasure in the tedium of juicing each aril by hand. 

I ended up with about a third of a cup of juice, which I topped off to a half cup with some red wine vinegar (about 3 tbs).

I then added a half cup of extra virgin olive oil.

A dash of salt, some fresh cracked peppercorns, and a tsp of dried mustard finished this vinaigrette.

Put it in a small bottle and shake to mix (the oil will naturally separate out if left sitting, just give it a good shake before serving).

Pour this over a light salad garnished with pomegranate seeds.  For a little heavier salad, add some chicken.

Pomegranate Vinaigrette
Ingredients:

• 1 pomegranate (plus 1 more to garnish salad, if desired)
• 3 tbs red wine vinegar
• 1/2 c. extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp fresh pepper
• 1 tsp ground dried mustard

Instructions:
1.  Separate the seeds from the pith of a pomegranate.  Discard the pith, put the seeds in a food processor.  Strain out the juice and discard the remaining solids.
2.  Add the rest of the ingredients to the juice.
3.  Shake before serving.

October

A mere seven posts from the last time I posted about monthly goals...time passes so quickly!

The problem with September is that I failed to review my goals mid-month, which means I forgot what most of them were :)

• Start and finish a book.  Actually I started three books at once, but I did finish one of them.
• Take a bath.  Ha!  Yeah right.
• Let someone else cook.  For a full week, Kyle was in charge of food.  It was great, and by the end of the week, I actually felt like cooking again.
• Can homegrown tomatoes – spaghetti sauce AND pizza sauce. It's a nice feeling to know that all those garden tomatoes are preserved for winter and aren't taking up fridge or freezer space.
• Bachelorette party for one of my good friends.  Wow, was that a lot of fun!  It was a great weekend, and I think we gave the bachelorette a nice send-off to the married life.
• Wedding. So much wedding!  A fabulous fall day, some lovely new people, and a night that went on to the wee hours of the morning. 
• Make a soufflé. This has still been on my mind.  It will definitely happen.  Maybe even in October.

 I might even be able to scrounge up some photos of the wedding, once I get them off my camera...

In the meantime, I've been seriously thwarted in my attempt to do some deep cleaning of the house.  I finally got some free time and a cold has knocked me on my butt.  Now that I'm starting to feel human again, hopefully I'll be able to make some progress.

Oh, and no ArtPrize this year.  Sadly, tomorrow is the only time I can go, and it's forecasted to be in the 40s and rainy, which doesn't sound like much fun.  Here are some things that I think I will actually be able to do, though:

• Maintain the garden.  There isn't much left growing, but those last few tomatoes and peppers are still worth covering before a frost.
• Go through all my papers and file everything.  Go through closets and bring clothes to Goodwill.  Dump all the crap I don't need.  Pare down my belongings.
• Rack the blueberry wine.  It's been sitting in those lees for long enough.
• Rearrange the book shelf.
• Stay warm.  Stupid winter...grrrr.
• Try a new food.  Not just a new dish, but a dish that uses an ingredient I've never had before.

Okay, I know that's a pretty wimpy list, but between work and extracurricular meetings and any social life that exists in cold weather, I think it will suffice.

Happy Fall!

Instant Pickles

[Edit:  I later made this recipe again when dill was in season and put new photos in.]

This is my mom's tried and true recipe.  It tastes like the best parts of summer with the cool crunch of cucumber.  Kyle calls them Quickles.  I think that sounds like a bad clown's name.

That being said, they are pretty quick and easy.  Start with 1 cup of vinegar, 1 cup of sugar (you can easily go with a little less sugar) and 1 cup of water.  Put those on the stove to simmer.  Add 1 tsp of sea salt.

And 1 tsp of ground mustard.

While waiting for that to come to a boil, slice up the cucumbers.  To make dill pickles, add a couple dill heads to the bottom of the jar.  Also optional is adding a couple cloves of garlic. 

Alternately pack dill and sliced cucumber, packing tightly until the jar is full.

Boil the liquids until the sugar is dissolved.

When dissolved, pour the hot liquid over the cucumber slices until the jars are full.

Refrigerate until cool.  Voila!  Pickles.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup vinegar
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp ground mustard
• [optional] fresh dill
• [optional] garlic cloves

Instructions
1.  Add the vinegar, sugar, water, sea salt and mustard to a medium saucepan.  Bring to a boil.
2.  While waiting for the pot to boil, slice the cucumbers and pack tightly into two quart jars (if using dill or garlic, put in jar prior to packing in the cucumbers).
3.  When the sugar has dissolved in the boiling mixture, pour over the cucumbers until the jars are full.
4.  Refrigerate until cool.

Paleo Canned Salmon Salad

I try to eat fish at least once a week, favoring anything wild-caught.  And on top of that, salmon is my favorite fish.

This adventure started the way any culinary adventure does for me - I bought something I had never tried before, and had to figure out a way to use it.

I was a little unnerved to see so many bones when I emptied these cans, but after picking out the vertebra, I realized everything else was pretty easily disintegrated.

So the salmon was lightly shredded into my mixing bowl.

To that I added cucumbers, chopped into large pieces.

 Some avocado.

A diced tomato and some red onion.

The flavors are held gloriously together with some evoo and lime juice, and seasoned with some fresh dill.

Canned Salmon Salad (loosely based on a recipe here):
Ingredients:

• 2 cans (14 oz) wild salmon
• 2 diced cucumbers
• 1 chopped red onion
• 1 large diced tomato
• 1 diced avocado
• 1/2 c. extra virgin olive oil
• Juice of 2 limes
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh dill

Instructions:
1.  Drain the salmon and lightly shred into a bowl, discarding any bones that aren't soft.
2.  Add the cucumber, onion, tomato and avocado.  Give it a light toss.
3.  Add the remaining ingredients and stir to evenly coat.

The flavors in this salad intensify overnight.  This can be used on sandwiches or wraps if desired.

This is my favorite kind of recipe - so many flavors packed into one recipe, yet working together to create something delicious.

Lime Cheesecake with Toasted Coconut

The ability to make a good cheesecake should be in any budding cook's repertoire. 

This is a fairly simple cheesecake with a graham cracker crust.  It is topped with lime curd and toasted coconut.

The graham cracker crust is an easy mix of crushed graham crackers, sugar, butter and shredded coconut.  Bake for five minutes to set the crust.

The filling is a little more complicated.  I think a mixer would have helped, but my recipe told me that I could stir up three softened packages of cream cheese and sugar "until creamy."  I am going to tell you straight up that that did not happen.  And I'm fairly confident that my cream cheese met the "softened" parameter.  But after I started adding eggs, it smoothed right out.  I think a mixer would have helped with those last few chunks.  Oh, and rather than place it IN a pan of water while baking, I placed a pan of water underneath it in the oven.

Things might have gone slightly awry at the baking.  The recipe says to bake until the center is set and the edges are just beginning to brown.  Those things did not happen simultaneously for me.  The whole top was very brown by the time the center set.

Oh, and there was a big bubble in it.  I planned on adding topping anyway, so the bubble got cut out and that wasn't a problem at all.  I really do like how the green cheesecake is peeking out from under the browned top.

Topping!  I made lime curd to top my cheesecake.  I was worried about it being over-limey, but in the end, the cheesecake had only a hint of lime so the lime curd was perfect.

Oh, and I must mention this spring-form pan - I found it for a dollar at a thrift store the morning I made this cheesecake.  I was planning on making it in a pie plate, because that's how fancy I am.  But then this spring-form pan practically jumped into my arms!

Okay, so then the toasted shaved coconut.  True story, this is how I toast coconut:  I turn on the broiler and then place the pan of shaved coconut under it.  As soon as I can smell the coconut, it comes out and there are a few burnt pieces I have to pick out.  It toasts pretty quickly, probably under 5 minutes.  I've never timed it.  If you don't want to burn any, then just keep an eye on it.

The crust was nicely browned and curled inward.

Overall, this cheesecake got great reviews (including someone questioning if it was store-bought).  So I'm going to go ahead and call this one a success!

Recipes:

Crust

Cheese filling - I added three drops of green food coloring for visual effect.

Lime curd - I halved the recipe and used all of what I made for the cheesecake.  I would not have minded making the whole recipe and using the excess lime curd for other things, as previously mentioned.

Toasted shaved coconut - toast under a broiler for under five minutes, keeping a close eye on it.

Weekend Happenings

Summer was so busy.  I was almost looking forward to the weather cooling off so that that things might calm down just a smidge.  Yeah, right.

My aunt - the same one who gave me tomatillos for the Grilled Salsa Verde post - gifted me with a bag full of tomatillos (about 2 gallons of them).  And since I really can't let a good tomatillo go to waste, I canned a little salsa.

I roasted five pans of tomatillos, one pan of onions/garlic, and two pans of peppers for this recipe.  I canned 22 pints of salsa.  I was up until 11pm canning on a school night!  I mean work.  That's what adults do.  Work.  All the time.

22 sealed pints!  And some very spicy, tasty salsa.  Kyle needed a haircut and Mom needed some wine bottled, so we brought a pint over to test out the post-canning flavor.  Fantastic.

The rhubarb wine with a hint of strawberry was pretty delicious, too.  And speaking of delicious things, look forward to a recipe for this fantastic lime cheesecake, topped with lime curd and roasted coconut shavings.

The lime curd was totally my favorite!  I would love to use it between cake layers, or to mix with a fruit salad, or even over pudding.  Or...let's not lie...I could eat it with a spoon.  Expect to see the recipe this Friday :)

Steak Sauce

Smitten kitchen sucked me in.  Again.  I couldn't resist making this steak sauce for our last camping trip.  Since we had bought a bunch of steaks to feed everyone...it just seemed like the perfect match.

Deb waxed poetic about the merits of this steak sauce:

"You cook this mixture for 15 minutes, you pour it on steak and then after that, you throw away every bottled condiment in your fridge because they had a good run. You appreciate their years of service. You hope they’ll find their new digs suitable and understand that it wasn’t them and it wasn’t you either. It was this punchy rust-colored jar of unparalleled steak awesomeness that put them out of business, and it’s really not sorry."

You know me...I'm such a sucka for anything roasted or broiled.  That blackened skin just lets me know that there are layers upon layers of flavor in this sauce.  And when you add in some home-grown tomatoes...well, things get kicked up a notch.  And that's my kind of recipe.

The other ingredients are equally intriguing.  Orange juice?  Molasses?  Ginger?  Allspice?  Yes.

Everything gets thrown in the food processor, and then simmered for fifteen minutes.

But the real key is to put it through the food processor again after simmering.  That's where you really get some smoothness to this sauce.

Absolutely tasty.  I highly recommend using a real plate for steak - paper just doesn't work.

Recipe from smitten kitchen.

Ingredients

• 1 large red bell pepper
• 2/3 cup fresh chopped tomato
• 1/4 cup orange juice
• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 1 tablespoon molasses
• 3/4 teaspoon table salt or more to taste
• 1 teaspoon ground mustard
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/8 teaspoon ground allspice

Instructions
1.  Cut the pepper in half and put it in the broiler, skin side up, for 6-8 minutes until the skin starts getting black.
2.  Put the pepper and the rest of the ingredients in the food processor.
3.  Transfer to a small sauce pan and simmer for 15 minutes.  I was watching TV so I'm sure I simmered it for longer.  Really you're just trying to thicken it to your desired sauce consistency.
4.  Return mixture to the food processor and process until smooth.