Ratatouille - enjoying summer's vegetables

The finished Ratatouille after it's baked in the oven for a little over an hour.

To say that I love ratatouille...well, I made the huge pot you see in the picture and although I did share two small containers with some friends, what remained has been feeding me all week. Ratatouille is a wonderful way to highlight the beautiful vegetables of summer - zucchini, eggplant, colorful bell peppers, tomatoes - and it can be eaten as a side dish with any protein. Or if you're a vegetarian, completely on it's own. It is also delicious for breakfast topped with a fried egg, sunny-side-up, and a little grated parmesan cheese.

Ratatouille is very simple to make with the only time consuming part of preparation being the chopping of the vegetables. Once that's completed, it comes together quickly on the stove top and then finishes cooking in the oven.


Ratatouille

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 large red onion
5 medium-large garlic cloves, minced
1/2 can tomato paste
3 bell peppers (I use one each of red, yellow & orange)
2 medium zucchini 
2 small or 1 large eggplant
6 roma tomatoes or small on-the-vine tomatoes
1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper
More salt & pepper to taste


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.


Chop all vegetables into 1-2 inch cubes and keep them separated in their own bowls. In a large pot or dutch oven, heat the olive oil over medium high heat. Add the red onion and cook until it begins to soften. Add the garlic and stir until fragrant. Add the tomato paste and stir until it coats the onion and garlic. Add the remaining vegetables in order listed and the 1/4 teaspoons of salt and pepper, stirring well after each addition to coat vegetables with the tomato paste.

Once all the veggies are in the pot and have been stirred and coated well with tomato paste, put the lid on the pot and place in the oven.  Cook the Ratatouille with the lid on for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, cook uncovered for another 30-45 minutes, until all the vegetables are very tender. At this stage, I am stirring the vegetables every 15 minutes. Finally, add salt and pepper to your preference. All of the natural moisture from the vegetables create a wonderful natural sauce from cooking.

Let the Ratatouille cool completely in the pot before saving in storage containers. Of course you can enjoy a bowl before you do that! It's also great with feta cheese crumbled on top!

Even though the heat has caused the trees and grass to lack vibrancy, summer vegetables still show off their splashy colors

All the veggies in the pot! Mixed well to ensure the tomato paste is coating all the pieces - then into the oven!

Yum.

Curried Tuna Salad sandwich on toasted homemade oatmeal wheat bread

Wow, it is officially too hot to turn on the oven unless absolutely necessary. The baker part of me is sad but I guess I should blog about recipes other than just baked goods. So since I have to eat lunch, I thought I'd share my recipe for Curried Tuna Salad. I actually enjoyed a similar sandwich at a local restaurant called Shade and loved it so much I had to attempt to recreate it at home. The curry combined with the sweetness of the red grapes and the nutty toasted goodness of the walnuts is a divine way to elevate your standard tuna salad.

Before I get to the recipe, there is a funny side of tuna salad for me. I cannot make, eat, order, or even think of tuna salad without remembering (and laughing) about a very humorous childhood incident that involved tuna salad...and my oldest sister. I am hoping she'll get a kick out of me sharing this story.

Growing up, we lived in Valrico, Florida, just a little east of Brandon. My paternal grandmother (mi abuela) and my aunt Patty (my dad's sister) lived in Tampa. We would often visit both of them at my aunt's house because my grandmother would often stay with her. And we would often eat tuna salad for lunch. At the time of this incident, I was 7 or 8 which means my oldest sister was 11 or 12 and I was not particularly fond of anyone's rendition of tuna salad. Specifically because chopped pickles always seemed to end up in the mix and I had not yet acquired that taste. My sister however, had already graduated to liking pickles.

On this particular day, my grandmother made my sisters and I tuna salad sandwiches for lunch. We always sat on bar stools at the little bar area that was part of the kitchen counter (which of course kids love to do) to eat our lunch. Because I didn't like the pickles, I picked their little chopped selves one by one out of my sandwich and continued to eat. I stacked their tiny shriveled pickle bodies in a pile on a napkin next to my plate. After I had collected quite a pile, my sister asked me if I was going to eat them and I said "no" so she asked if she could have them. Of course I said yes, I sure wasn't going to eat them, and she proceeded to eat them. It wasn't until she was almost finished with the entire pile of pickles that I remembered, suddenly, with my hand clamped over my open, horrified mouth, and confessed that I had sucked each little chopped pickle to remove the tuna and mayonnaise that coated them. I do not remember if she was mad at me then (probably!) because all I can do is laugh when I think of that story now. Hopefully it brought you (and my sister - love you!) a laugh as well.

Now on to the Curried Tuna Salad recipe which low and behold, does not contain pickles (although I do like them). Recipes like these of course are not an exact science so feel free to increase or decrease the mayo, add chopped red onions, more or less curry, grapes and walnuts. The sandwich pictured was delicious.

Curried Tuna Salad with Red Grapes & Toasted Walnuts

adapted from Shade Restaurant in the Heights

2 5-ounce cans of white albacore tuna

2 tablespoons olive oil mayo (I use Hellmann's)

1 teaspoon of curry powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup red grapes, sliced in half

1/3 cup chopped toasted walnuts (I had some leftover from another recipe - I always toast extra - so I didn't have to use my oven today!)

2 slices of your favorite wheat bread, toasted

mixed greens

2 slices of tomato 

To toast walnuts, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a sheet pan with aluminum foil and spread 1/2 cup of walnuts in a single layer on pan. Place pan on the middle shelf and toast walnuts for 10-12 minutes until fragrant and color has deepened slightly.

Drain tuna and empty cans into a bowl large enough to contain all ingredients. Break up the tuna chunks with a fork. Add the mayo, curry powder, and salt and mix well. Gently stir in the grapes and toasted walnuts. Cover and chill for at least one hour (because tuna salad tastes better chilled).

Toast your favorite bread and add a thin layer of mayo. Add tuna salad, mixed greens and sliced tomato. And enjoy!!

Maple Oatmeal Sandwich Bread

Toasted Maple Oatmeal Sandwich Bread with fig jam

 I think I’ve gotten a little bread crazed of late.  Although this is another sandwich bread recipe, I’ve actually been baking all sorts of bread deliciousness  - from crusty artisan bread to homemade buttermilk dinner rolls… I really cannot overstate the goodness and comfort of homemade bread. Because you cannot get any fresher bread than the bread that comes from your own oven. I’ve made this particular bread on Sunday for the last three weeks (make that four weeks since I had to make another loaf to photograph for the blog) and now I cannot bring myself to buy a loaf of sandwich bread at the store. Yes, this bread is that good and that easy.  And the maple smell that will waft through your house as it’s baking will make you a believer too…

This bread is fantastically delicious toasted, with butter as it’s only adornment. However, I have been known to enjoy it with peanut butter, or goat cheese that’s been softened and then topped with fig jam. It elevates a simple ham and cheese to greatness. And I can only imagine how ridiculous bread pudding would be made with a loaf of this bread. How about some French toast…well, let’s not even go there…

Finding this recipe was more a stroke of luck than anything else – lucky, because I didn’t throw the recipe away before giving it a try! In addition to the 40 plus cookbooks I have, I also keep a notebook for other recipes that are shared with me or those that I have torn from a magazine and promised myself I’ll try at some point. In the notebook I've used tabs to divide the recipes into categories and every now and then I sit down and flip through what I've saved and discard the recipes that have been hanging around for too long that I have never attempted to make. This bread recipe was one that was heading for the discard pile because I’m pretty sure it’s been in that notebook for close to three years…just waiting.  So with my current obsession for homemade bread in full force and the fact that it has maple syrup in it…well, I couldn’t let the opportunity to try a new sandwich bread recipe pass me by. This bread is worth making for your family on a weekly basis...I think I've officially decided to stop buying sandwich bread at the store because of this recipe. I hope you'll give it a try. 

Maple Oatmeal Sandwich Bread
from Bon Appetit Magazine

** If you don’t have maple syrup or maple extract on hand, omit both of those ingredients and sub in ¼ cup of honey – this substitution also makes a great bread**

You will need:

A stand mixer

9x5 bread pan

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of water (heated to 105-115 degrees)
1 egg
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

¼ cup maple syrup (grade B) - I have used regular Grade A, the maple flavor is a little lighter

1/2 teaspoon maple extract

2 cups all purpose flour

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup old fashioned oats (I use Quaker Oats – not the Instant)

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons active yeast

In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a dough hook, add all of the ingredients in the order they are listed.  Mix on low until the ingredients begin to come together and then knead on medium for 8 minutes.

Remove the dough from the dough hook and leave dough in the bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and then a towel. Allow to rise at warm room temperature about 2 hours or until doubled in size.

Butter the 9x5 bread pan all the way up the sides and set aside. Turn dough out on a floured surface and knead for 1-2 minutes.  Shape the dough, with any seam side down, into an 8 x 3 inch loaf – so that the ends almost touch the inside ends of the bread pan. Place loaf in buttered bread pan and cover with plastic wrap that has been buttered to prevent it sticking to the bread.

Allow bread to rise for approximately 45 minutes or until it has risen 1 1/2 inches above the top lip of the pan.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place a rack in the bottom third of the oven. Bake for 30 minutes, until the top is golden brown and the temperature is 180 degrees.

All ingredients in mixing bowl, added to bowl in order listed

After being mixed/kneaded on medium speed for 8 minutes

Dough, after first rise

Dough ready to be kneaded by hand for 1 minute

Stretch dough enough to be able to fold in half

Dough folded in half...

Use heal of hand to apply pressure and push away from you

Turn dough 1/4 turn, seam will be on the right, stretch dough again enough to fold in half

Repeat this process, folding, then using heal of hand to apply pressure and push dough away from you, 1/4 turn, etc., for 1-2 minutes

Dough is ready to shape for pan

Use both hands to squeeze the dough into a loaf shape, long enough for ends to touch inside ends of pan

Bread shaped to fit in 9x5 bread pan

Bread dough in pan for 2nd rise (approx. 45 minutes to an hour)

2nd rise complete, ready for baking

Baked bread cooling, after 15 minutes initial cooling in pan

Ice Cream!! Make some! Because it's hot outside! (and it's really easy)

 

An ice cream machine is one of those kitchen appliances I thought I'd never buy because I thought I wouldn't use it enough to justify the purchase. Not that they are overly expensive, but it would still be wasted money if I bought it and then only used it once or twice. Well, a few summers ago, I don't know if it was the Houston heat or the savvy Williams-Sonoma marketing, but I gave in and I'm glad I did. I don't use it all year round but I do use it regularly during the sticky and steamy summer months here, which are more than just the calendar months of summer. If you have kids, I think this is something fun you could do during the summer months using different kinds of mix-ins when making vanilla ice cream, like crushed Oreos, caramel, brownie chunks - I'm sure the kiddos will dream up all sorts of stuff to swirl into the ice cream in it's final minutes of churning!

The recipe for the ice cream pictured is a simple non-custard based recipe, which means there are no egg yolks to be whisked and then tempered with the cream mixture. Custard based recipes are very good but sometimes you just don't want to go through all that trouble. This recipe is very simple and super yummy. It's like eating a strawberry milkshake but with lovely chunks of strawberries throughout. 

I've read in several different magazines and books that non-custard based recipes tend to get icy once you freeze the finished product completely - that has not been my experience. The only thing I have found is that once you have the fully frozen product, you'll need to allow five to ten minutes for it to soften a bit for scooping, so just take it out a little ahead of when you want to eat it. (I am including a recipe for Vanilla Ice Cream at the bottom of this post).

**I did not eat the entire bowl of strawberry ice cream pictured...in one sitting...**

Strawberry Ice Cream

from Gourmet Magazine

1 pound strawberries, trimmed of stems and quartered

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups (16 ounces) heavy cream (or carton will be labeled heavy whipping cream)

**Important note: make sure you have frozen the insert to your ice cream machine for 24 hours.**

Place strawberries in a bowl with the sugar, lemon juice and salt. Mix well and mash strawberries. Let the strawberries sit for 10 minutes, occasionally mashing a little more.

Put half of the mashed strawberries mixture in a blender with the 2 cups of cream. Blend until smooth. Pour the pureed mixture back into the bowl with the remaining strawberries and mix well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill for 3-6 hours. (this batch chilled for 3 hours and it was fine but the chillier the better).

Put the strawberries and cream mixture in the insert of the ice cream machine and churn for 20 minutes, may be a little longer or shorter depending on your machine. Enjoy immediately as a soft-serve style ice cream or put in a freezer safe container to become a little more solid. Ice cream keeps for 1 week.

Beautiful fresh strawberries

Stawberries with sugar, lemon juice and salt

Strawberries, after being mashed/mixed with sugar, lemon juice and salt

Final strawberries and cream mixture, ready to be chilled and then churned

 

Vanilla Ice Cream

3 cups heavy cream

2/3 cups sugar

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

seeds scraped from 1 vanilla bean

Heat the cream, sugar, vanilla, and vanilla seeds in a small saucepan only until the sugar is dissolved. Make sure all the sugar is dissolved so there is no longer in grittiness from the sugar. Strain into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and chill overnight. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream machine for approximately 20 minutes. May be a little shorter or longer depending on your machine and how chilled your cream mixture is. Enjoy as a soft-serve style ice cream immediately, or spoon into a freezer container for more firm ice cream. Once completely frozen, allow to soften before serving.

Homemade Light Wheat Sandwich Bread

This bread was not supposed to be the next recipe I shared but it sort of happened out of necessity. When I stopped for groceries on my way home from work on Wednesday, the new fancy smanshy Whole Foods that is 2.7 miles from my house, did not have the wheat bread I normally buy for Bobby. They had about 10 different varieties of the brand but somehow not the one that I buy. And he doesn’t like a lot of “stuff” in/on his bread like oats, seeds, too many grains, so that pretty much eliminates 95 percent of the breads sold by Whole Foods. Just some simple wheat bread (or light wheat in the case of this homemade bread) and he’s good.

So, I decided that I’d make some homemade sandwich bread – a recipe I’ve already made several times and it is very simple and very good. One of the coolest things about this recipe is there are only 8 ingredients and that’s counting the water AND I can pronounce everyone of them. This is also another great use for a Kitchenaid stand mixer (I should be getting some sort of kick-back from them with as often as I mention that mixer). The dough comes together remarkably simply – most of the time for this recipe is just waiting for it to rise. So if you have 20 minutes this weekend, you can make this bread.

I've included quite a few pictures because I want to show all the steps and what the dough should look like. It's not difficult at all and goes very quickly - except for the waiting for the dough to proof part... but you can be doing other things so this is a great recipe for the multi-tasker, which I of course know nothing about...

*I weigh the ingredients when making bread recipes. I have a Taylor digital scale I think I bought at Tarjay that I use all of the time - so it's well worth having a scale for baking. I've put the weights in parentheses. * 

Light Wheat Sandwich Bread

from The Bread Baker's Apprentice

2 ½ cups (11.25 oz.) bread flour

1 ½ cups (6.75 oz.) whole-wheat flour

1 ½ tablespoons (.75 oz.) granulated sugar or honey (I used sugar this time)

1 ½ teaspoons (.38 oz.) salt

3 tablespoons (1 oz.) powdered milk (I actually used goat milk powder because it’s what I had on hand)

1 ½ teaspoons (.17 oz.) instant yeast

2 tablespoons (1 oz.) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 ¼ cups (10 oz.) water, at room temperature

1. Weigh and/or measure all dry ingredients and place in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on low speed until ingredients are well combined. Add the butter, water and honey (if you are using instead of sugar) and mix on low until the ingredients form a rough ball and all the bits of flour have come together. If needed, add a few dribbles of additional water to make sure all of the flour has come up off the bottom of the bowl.

2. Switch out the paddle attachment for the dough hook and mix/knead on medium for 6 minutes. The dough should become firm, supple and smooth – slightly tacky but not sticky. Add more flour, a little at time, if needed. Lightly oil a large bowl and transfer the dough to the bowl, rolling it around to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Allow the bread to rise at room temperature for 1 ½ to 2 hours or until the dough doubles in size. 

3. Remove the dough from the bowl and press it by hand into a rectangle 3/4 inch thick, 6 inches wide, and 8 to 10 inches long. Roll it into a loaf by working from the short side of the dough, rolling up the length of the dough one section at a time, pinching the inside crease with each rotation. Pinch the final seam closed and place the loaf, seam side down, in a lightly oiled 8 ½ x 4 ½ inch bread pan. The ends of the loaf should touch the end of the pan to ensure an even rise. Mist the top with spray oil and loosely cover with plastic wrap.

4. Proof (let rise) at room temperature for approximately 60 to 90 minutes or until the dough crests above the lip of the pan. Mine proofed in 60 minutes...

5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F with the oven rack in the middle shelf.

6. Place the bread pan on a sheet pan and bake for 30 minutes. Rotate the pan 180 degrees and continue baking for 15 to 30 minutes, depending on your oven. The finished loaf should register 190 degrees in the center, be golden brown on the top and sides, and sound hollow when thumped on the top.

7. When the bread is finished baking, remove it immediately from the loaf pan and cool it on a rack for at least 1 hour, preferably 2 hours (that's actually funny - you'll never make it to 2 hours), before slicing and serving.

Dry ingredients

Mixing of all the ingredients

Kneading with dough hook, 6 minutes

Ready for first rise

First rise complete, ready for shaping

Flatten to 3/4 inch thick, 6 inches by 8-10 inches long

Begin rolling and pinching inside seam of dough

Bread dough ready for pan, seam side down

Ready for second rise

Second rise complete, ready for baking

Baked bread - immediately remove from pan to cool.

Always kiss me goodnight...and buttery and tender Buttermilk Scones

We have a wooden sign hanging over the doorway as you exit our master bathroom that reads, “always kiss me goodnight” that makes me smile every time I notice it because it makes me think of the wonderful life I share with my sweet husband. It was several years ago that I purchased the sign at a holiday market and loved it - because three kisses goodnight right before bed is something Bobby and I do every night unless one of us is out of town. I also love that sign because I tend to over think life at times and "always kiss me goodnight" is a sweet and simple reminder of what is important…

Sweet and simple is what these Buttermilk Scones are as well.  I got on a scone baking kick late last year when I tried a delicious one from a small local bakery named Angela's Oven (love that the bakery name is that of my oldest sister). Up until the day I tried my first scone from this bakery, I was not a scone fan because every one I have ever tried has been hard as a rock or dry and crumbly. But not so with the Angela’s Oven scone.  It was a perfect combination of tender, flaky and buttery. The one I tried was a cranberry scone and I savored it with a cup of hot black coffee and a new determination to have scones as good as theirs come from my own oven.

The very next day I began combing through my cookbooks for a scone recipe. To my utter delight, my Williams-Sonoma Baking cookbook had a recipe for Cream Scones. The very first batch were near perfection. Many, many batches later I’ve used different mix-ins other than dried cranberries like dried mission figs and chocolate chips and I have changed the cream to buttermilk, which I think makes them even more tender. I have even branched out to a savory scone with cheddar cheese, scallions and bacon – don’t get me started on those…they were a fine accompaniment to homemade shrimp and grits that I also topped with chopped pieces of house made kielbasa from a local store called Revival Market...whoa, hold on a minute, back to the Buttermilk Scones…

So please trust me when I say these are wonderful scones. And they are very easy to make, just read the tips I’ve provided and look at the pictures as well so you have an idea about how the dough should look. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments section below. The main tip is to work quickly. But enjoy them slowly….

Recipe after the jump...

Summertime is pesto time!

Yes, I know it is not yet officially summer until June 21^st but if you were experiencing the above normal temperatures and lack of rain like we are here in Houston, Texas, you’d agree that it is completely acceptable to say that it is indeed summertime. Every year at this time poses a challenge for me when it comes to cooking. Because I am in sales and in and out of my car all day, by the time I get home from work, I am pretty well drained from the heat. And even I, who loves to cook, get to feeling too lazy to get in the kitchen. Just thinking about turning on stove burners or the oven makes me feel like I need to have a nap. So I am always looking for quick and simple dinners that are of course still very tasty. And this is where homemade pesto comes in handy. 

Years ago when I used to buy pesto in the grocery store, it was very expensive for a very small amount. I rarely purchased it and when I did, I'm not sure why but I only used it in pasta dishes. Looking back, I’ll chalk that up to my inexperience in the kitchen because now I’ll try pesto on just about anything. And more importantly, now, I make my own. One of the best things about making homemade pesto is that one decent sized basil plant when full grown will make a boat load of pesto. And if you are pretty good about watering the basil plant, once you’ve harvested the full grown plant, it will grow again and again for many batches of pesto. Seriously, I have two planters of basil and just one of them will make two full cups of pesto. A big garden pot, a $5.00 basil plant, regular watering and just a little shade, yield quite a bounty of pesto…

Pesto is incredibly easy to make and it always tastes better than the store bought variety. It is a bit time consuming because you have to thoroughly wash the basil and dry it well before processing everything together. But what is a little labor intensive on the front end in terms of time, is repaid ten-fold in how quickly and easily pesto can spruce up so many things!

Here are some ideas of foods I've enjoyed with homemade pesto...

   Grilled chicken

   Grilled fish

   Smeared on homemade pizza as the "sauce", top with thinly sliced tomatoes &

        crumbled goat cheese

   Grilled Portobello mushrooms, put pesto on after grilling

   Grilled new potatoes, put pesto on after grilling

   Mixed into brown rice

   With sliced tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella cheese

   And of course, it’s great on pasta!

A quick note on storage: I buy cute little jars at Sur la Table for $2.00 per jar and store the pesto. This pesto will also freeze well. Just add about 1/4 inch of olive oil to the top of the filled pesto jar before freezing.

And now the recipe…