Lentils and Rice with Salad

As summer turns our kitchen into a 95F sweat-box I will be cooking less, and you will see a lot more recipes based around not turning on the stove.

This is my attempt to re-create a dish I had at Aladdin's Eatery in Squirrel Hill.
The dish is a mix of rice, lentils and fried onions, topped with a salad of cucumbers and tomatoes.  The base makes enough for leftovers, but I assembled the salad fresh each time.

Part one, the base: (4-6 servings)

• Put 2 cups of brown rice in a rice cooker along with 2 chicken bouillon cubes, the juice of one lemon and 2 tbspns of olive oil (plus the recommended water for your cooker)
• Open and rinse a packages of Trader Joe's precooked lentils.
• Mix all these together, along with ~ 1 cup fried onions-- we bought ours at a middle eastern grocer, but I think you could also substitute sauteed onions made at home

Part two, the salad (2 servings)

• Take 1/2 a package of cherry tomatoes (1.5 cups)
• Add 3 Persian cucumbers, sliced
• Mix with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and olive oil to taste

Then you just put everything together like in this picture:

Without the bouillon this is a vegetarian dish (replace the water with vegetable stock for the rice).  I found it very tasty and filling.

Bruschetta

I made this as a quick lunch this weekend and wanted to note it down.  I am calling it bruschetta, but I think this may be a lie or an unforgivable abuse of grammar/the Italian language.  With the summer heat approaching I need a library of quick, cold, but satisfying meals.

Step One:  Toast 2 slices bread (optionally brush with olive oil first)
Step Two: make bruschetta by mixing these ingredients with salt and pepper to taste:

• Two tomatoes, chopped
• 1/4 cup sweet onion finely diced
• 1/4 cup fresh basil, cut as fine as you can

Step 3: Layer sliced ovaline mozzarella and generous portions of bruschetta on the toast.  The above amount does well for 2 people, with the toasts cut in half for 2 bruschetta each.

Caesar Salad

A recipe for salad!  Ok, really a recipe for dressing, with a serving suggestion, but caesar salad is one of my favorite summer foods.

This dressing recipe is cobbled together from a few sources, and simplified down for speed:

1. Croutons:  I made mine with old bread set in the oven at 350 for 30min and then lightly fried in olive oil ala Alton Brown's suggestion
2. Dressing:  Put all the following together and hit with an immersion blender
1. 2 eggs well washed.  They can also be boiled for 1min (aka coddled) if you are really worried about salmonella.  This will leave most of the egg raw, but sterilize the shells at the expense of losing some whites.
2. 1 lemon's worth of juice
3. 1/4 cup olive oil
4. 1 small tin of anchovies
5. some pepper (to taste)
3. Lettuce: whole hearts of romaine
4. Cheese: Parmesan (I used my endless supply of Costco Romano)

To assemble I drizzled some dressing on the leaves (the consensus was that <1tbspn covered a LOT of lettuce-- this stuff is strongly flavored).  I then sprinkled 1-2tbpns cheese and 4-5 coutons on top.

I will definitely be making this again, I just wish it kept.

Blueberry IceMilk

Another post sans-picture (thought I will add one the next time I make this)

This is one of the simpler of my attempts at healthy ice creams; which I haven't been wanting to put up until I am satisfied with them.  It is the lower calorie version of my Blueberry Ice Cream.

• 1 cup 2% milk
• 1 cup frozen wild blueberries
• 3 TBSPN powdered milk
• 2 TBSPN sugar

Hit everything with an immersion blender (or normal blender) to mix, I woudl recommend keeping at this for quite a while until it is smooth.  AT that point you have a passable smoothie/soft serve crossover, but you can throw it in an ice cream maker for a thicker product.

This makes 3-4 cups of ice milk and has ~400 calories, and is mostly fruit and milk.

Honey Part-Wheat Bread

I think I have hit upon a good sandwich bread that takes my bread machine can be trusted to make on its own.
The goal was to create something soft and spongey, since my husband does not like dense/cakey whole wheat bread.  I think using 1/3 whole wheat gives a good taste without compromising texture.

A lot of the ratios are basically ripped off from On Food and Cooking, but with honey replacing sugar, and the yeast dialed back because in my bread machine it kept over-rising and collapsing.

1. 300ml warm (37C) water
2. 300g bread flour
3. 150g whole wheat flour
4. 1.5tspn salt (9g)
5. 2 and 1/8 tspn yeast
6. 1 tbspn honey 
7. 1 tbspn veg. oil

Throw everything into a bread machine and bake it on WHITE/BASIC (it will over-rise and the collapse on a wheat/extended rise setting).  This is a 1.5lb/750g loaf.  Also, it is imperative to check the dough ball after 10min which you want to have a smooth and moist texture that is only slightly tacky and holds shape.  The second time I made this I needed to add almost 1/4 cup extra flour due to humidity.

Random Calorie note:  This loaf has something like 1900 calories in it (mostly all from flour) which makes me wonder how store bread can be like 90cal/slice.

Slow Cooker Sous Vide NY Strip

As you may remember from my Ribs post, I have been experimenting with using my slow cooker as a high-maintenance sous vide device.  My previous experiments have focused on long cooks that take advantage of the probe feature on my Hamilton Beach model (it will switch from low or high to warm when the probe hits a temp you enter between 140 and 190F) and the fact that when switched to "warm" with the lid on, the cooker maintains a temp right around 170F.

This time I tried to cook a strip steak to exactly medium rare (130F to 135F) over a period of just an hour, and without using the probe (since it doesn't kick in until 140).  It worked very well, and here are the steps to try at home:

1. I pre-seared the refrigerator cold steaks in a tiny bit of butter for ~30sec a side.  This gives them the malliard-reaction flavor, and On Food and Cooking suggests it can help with killing bacteria, since most bacteria are on meat's surface
1. This is a good point to mention that a lot of people worry about low-temp cooking and bacterial growth.  130F is enough to kill bacteria, but the time required is debatable.  I ignored this issue because my theory was that a medium rare steak cooked on high heat is at 130F in the middle for something like 1minute, but this may not be correct.\
2. Put the steaks in a quart zip lock bag and got out most but not all of the air (because I am not very good at that part)
3. Then I filled my slow cooker 1/2 way with tepid water and put it on "high", with a thermometer in the water, before slowly pouring in boiling water.  Basically I mixed boiling and tepid water until i got a temperature of ~120F
4. At this point I added the bagged steaks to the bath, put on the lid, and set my thermometer to alarm at 133F.
5. When the alarm went off (which took ~20min) I switched the slow cooker to warm, removed the lid, and set a timer for 30min.
6. Checking in 5 minutes, I saw the temp had fallen to 128F, so I put it on high and replaced the lid.
7. In 2 more minutes it was at 131 and climbing, so I just took the lid off, but left it on high.
8. This seemed to stabilize, though I continued to check.
9. After the 30min was up, I took out the bad and let it rest 10min before slicing

The steak was a perfect medium rare (author's note:  After re-reading OF&C, I believe my steak only reached rare, as the red juices had been expelled from the meat, but it was still somewhat translucent.) across the entire width and very juicy.  I liked this, but to my husband it tasted "raw" (most trad. cooked steaks have a gradient of doneness that effects texture)

This procedure was much more time consuming than the ribs which had a wide temperature window, but if you're in the kitchen prepping other food anyway, it isn't too bad.  I would certainly recommend it as a way to taste a sous vide steak without shelling out a lot of money.  For fun, you can also do a version where you hold it at 130-135F for 2+ hours, which dries it out more but breaks down the muscle fibers.  This is I think the more classic method (maybe someone can comment on this) but I find it a bit textureless and dry.

Sadly, I do not have a good photo, but I will update the post with one next time I do this.  :-(

Healthy Banana Ice Cream

This is the first in a series of forays into developing some easy recipes for ice-cream that is not actively unhealthy. . . .

• 1 cup milk ( My intention was to use 2%, but I accidentally grabbed skim from the fridge)
• 2 medium frozen bananas (the liquid level rose to 1.75cups)
• 2tspn vanilla
• 2tbspn sugar

I blended everything with an immersion blender and the volume went from 1.75C to 2.25C, meaning there was a lot of aeration.  I then poured the mix right into my ice cream maker, and it further almost doubled in volume during churning.  

So I ended up with 4 cups of ice cream, that is maybe 50% air.  With minimal sugar, low (or in this case, no) fat, and a serving of fruit.  My rough count of the calories is 400cal for the whole thing assuming I had used 2%.

Taste:

Very light and fluffy

Strong banana flavor

Some ice crystals noticeable

Good with cocoa nibs on top

For next time:

Use 2% milk for some fat content

Add cocoa for a chocolate-banana flavor and to further disrupt ice formation.

Upcoming flavors:

Strawberry

Peanut Butter