Pesto is the answer

I am revealing to you my trump card for every potluck or backyard bbq. Roasted russet potatoes and haricots verts with pesto. Usually I would put this over watercress. Sometimes I add capers but the pesto was a little salty this time. Why I am making it in the middle of the week on a school night when I have 42309324 pages of reading to do for tomorrow I am not sure except that it is difficult to concentrate with basil aging in the vegetable bin.

Zucchini Challange - Zuch and Peach Roulade

This zucchini and peach roulade was made with a cheddar souffle spread with a zucchini pesto with saturn peach slices layered on top, rolled up and chilled, then served with a soy-ginger orange sauce. yum!

Lauren tried it and said "um, i'm not hungry. but this is ok. i'd eat it again" - soooo yeah. but i liked it. and matt liked it! it was light and delicious and tasted like summer.

the roulade was basically a white roux which was salted, peppered, and with cheddar cheese melted in which was then folded into egg whites which had been beaten to smooth, stiff peaks. the mixture was then baked.

the zucchini pesto was created by cutting the skin of the zucchini off and some of the white and puree-ing it with a few leaves of basil.

the orange sauce was created by puree-ing a mandarine orange with some orange juice, flour, ginger, and soy sauce and reducing that until the consistancy was as you see here.

then we ate it! and we're going to eat it again for dinner tonight. YUM.

guiness and melon

mmmm. what you're looking at here is a (semi blurry) photo of some half eaten dinner. so good.

what we did: we took some peanut sauce and pan-fried tofu and threw that on some noodles. ate it with really ripe canteloup from the farm stand up rt. 31 and some guiness. did you know that melon and guiness are really quite very tasty together?

peanut sauce:
so you might be thinking, 'man matt and vanessa, that peanut sauce looks mighty green!' and for truth, it is. that's cause we put cilantro in it! yum!
1/2 cup crunchy organic peanut butter
1 tbps soy sauce
pinch garlic powder
couple shakes dried red pepper flakes
couple shakes spicy chili sesame oil
heat it all in a pan until it's creamy. puree some cilantro into a pesto and throw that in too. add some water to thin it out and throw on the nooooooooooodles. CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP.

Whole Wheat Pizza with Rapini Pesto and Roasted Garlic/Tomato/Red Pepper Puree

This is the pizza I made. It was amazing. AMAZING. I had tentative plans to make pizza this week anyway because of this new recipe I saw for whole wheat crust. I have made whole wheat crust before just by subbing out half of the white flour for whole wheat, but having an actual recipe in front of me lit the fire. I probably could have let thing slide, but Ryan got in touch and said that HE was interested in pizza-making this week as well.

So, I got up early and got the dough going. Dough advice: do not bother with the food processor. There is no reason that I can see to dirty the most annoying appliance in the world to wash, just to do something that is easily executed with a large mixing bowl and a spatula. While the dough was rising, I started preparation for the topping elements. My original concept for the pizza was the standard vegan white sauce (ie nutritional yeast, flour, soy milk, mustard, etc) with some veggies on top. On the way to the store though, I started thinking about Two Boots pizza with its sauce layers and varied crusts and I got the idea for a pizza with side-by-side purees and sparse cheese.

I already had some pesto made earlier in the week, so I decided to do a rapini (broccoli rabe) puree with the pesto worked in (which I have done before as a pasta sauce with great success) and a roasted red pepper and tomato puree alongside. To do the tomato-pepper business, I first blanched a tomato to remove the skin. I cored it and cut it lattitudinally (poles being on the stem ends), then removed the guts so that all was left was the tomato meat. I put the halves on some parchment paper, drizzled them with olive oil and sprinkled on some basil, bay leaves, salt, and pepper (terragon also works but I was out), then put them in a hot oven. I don't have a gas oven (arrggghh) so I let the red pepper char in the oven along with the tomates. When the skin of the pepper was blackened most of the way, I put it in a paper bag for a few minutes to steam the skin off, then wiped off the charred skin, cut off the top, and cleaned out the seeds and membranes. I had also roasted some garlic with the other guys, which involves taking a few cloves and wrapping them in foil, still with the husks on. When the cloves are soft, they can be de-husked. All of this got tossed into the food processor with some olive oil and a dot of tomato paste. The rabe puree was just a matter of lightly sauteeing the rabe and then food-processing with the pesto and many squeezes of lemon juice; salt and pepper to taste.




By this time, Ryan had gotten here and we rolled out the dough. I usually do the pat out from the middle with the fingertips style, but Ryan recommended a rolling pin, which ended up giving a more even thickness to the crust. I spread out the green element and piped on the red using the plastic bag with the corner snipped off method.

I call it Green Pie with Red Suspenders:



Disaster was narrowly avoided when we made the decision not to corn meal the underside of the dough before sliding it onto the pizza stone. We tried all kinds of pulling and coaxing with multiple spatulas. The solution was pivoting and nudging with spatulas a little at a time to sneak bits of cornmeal underneath, until shimmying the board got the pie sliding around on the meal.

You can see how much less adorable it was by the time we got it into the oven.



What's that you say? It looks equally adorable as before its near miss? Oh, alright.

Note the pizza stone. This is essential to a delicious crust. We let the pizza hang out until the underneath of the crust was the color of a crust of a pizza that you would want to eat. Then we put Ryan's pizza in. It gets honorable mention, hence fewer pictures:




Ryan went the extra cheese, sliced tomato, and scallions route. Not bad actually.

So, I made a pretty ok sandwich.

I opened the fridge around lunch time. Opening the fridge reminds me most of the time of cooking plans that didn't materialize. Like that basil that was on its way out because I wasn't getting stoked on the pesto I was supposed to make this week. So I told myself to get off my ass and make good.

Whole wheat bread from the fridge had to do. No time to bake my own, though it's easy enough. I like the No Knead recipe because who has time to really do the whole bread baking thing? It's surprisingly good for how little effort is involved.

I made a pretty standard pesto: basil, pine nuts, salt, pepper, olive oil, garlic.

The day before, I tried a new seitan recipe that requires baking rather than boiling. I really love this concept. I altered the seasoning a little (it is reminiscent of pepperoni) and maybe in the future it would be fun to do a stuffed version. I think there is also potential there for a veggie dog that is not just a bunch of extruded soy paste. (Another shortcut confession: I used vital wheat gluten flour rather than forcing the gluten out of wheat dough which takes 8796984 hours.)

Ugh boiled seitan. Talk about disaster stories. I challenge anyone to tell me that their boiled seitan was anywhere near baked in quality. Or even approached store-bought.
Anyway. Sauteed the seitan with some spinach that was turning in the fridge as well.

Bang. Sandwich. Stacked on some carrot matchsticks and sliced avocado. Then I ate it. It was fine.

In conclusion: Sammich challenge? Stuff turning in the fridge challenge?