Potatoes, Beans and Corn: The Southwestern Trinity (2011 Food Recap, Part 2)

As Robert and tried to recall some of our more savory successes, these three were the ones that came to mind. I quickly noticed some themes. I guess it is fitting since we live in the Southwest. Although, I would like to note that it is sometimes difficult to find good fresh corn here.

Potato and Sweet Corn Hash was a summer find. It was so darn good. We made this one a couple of times. I bet it would be tasty with a fried egg on top. It is pretty self-explanatory and easy. I haven’t tried it with frozen corn, but I suspect it would still be pretty tasty!

Our CSA share provided us with an almost weekly bag of roasted chilies. Now, I am not complaining, but I find you have to start getting creative and researching ways to use them. As a result, we end up with quite a few bags in the freezer. When seeking inspiration for a recent potluck, I found these bookmarked recipes for a Spicy Corn Dip and a Creamy Bean Dip. I was torn between the two, and Robert pretty much read my mind (we spend way too much time together) when he said, why not do half and half? Brilliant, I say. I was pleased that we seemed to have one of the crowd pleasers of the night and it was one of the first dishes to disappear! We basically nestled them side by side in a baking dish.

Modifications? We cut the bean dip recipe in half. Robert said that next time, he would just make the same base for both of them (combining all the dairy and flavorings) then divide it in half to stir in the beans and corn into the two separate dips. P.S. – These would be excellent Super Bowl party dips. You can thank me later for the idea.

I am always a little more inspired to cook when I have time on my hands, so I pulled out all the stops for some bean burritos recently since I was on Winter Break. I bought the fresh tortillas you cook yourself. Look for them in the refrigerated section of your grocery. They are a little pricier than the ones you grab on the shelf, but they taste so much better! I cooked some black beans in our slow cooker to make refried beans. I highly recommend this if you eat a lot of beans because it is so much cheaper than canned beans and so easy – all you have to do is plan ahead by about half a day. We don’t even soak them overnight. We just throw them in the slow cooker and let them cook until soft. I put some of our bountiful green chilies into the refried beans. We also had shredded cheese and added more green chilies to Greek yogurt (or sour cream) for a creamy sauce. The real highlights of the burritos were these Chipotle Caramelized Onions and the roasted potatoes and sweet potatoes. I just peeled and diced them up and threw them in the oven at about 400 degrees until nice and crispy.

Pickled Pink and Other CSA Food Adventures

I had to share these beauties with you.

Ironically, BEETS have actually been a rare root vegetable in our weekly share. I am truly not a big beet fan. I like to pickle them, like these, or we will grate them and turn them into a rosti (giant hash brown). On the other hand, we have received a ton of turnips and several rounds of rutabaga. These two definitely have a place on my list of foods I just really never enjoy eating. I can’t explain it really, the best I can come up with is that their flavor reminds me of how body odor smells. Clearly, that is not pleasant. Robert has snuck them into a couple of things, and I have tolerated them. Most have been given away to others whose palate preferences differ from my own.

We have also received a ridiculous amount of RADISHES. I have realized that there are just not a lot of options for radishes besides salads…. We did experiment one night with sautéed radishes and peas. They weren’t bad, but the leftovers were not great. It was an unusual way to eat them, but unfortunately, not something we wanted to repeat on a regular basis. I also pickled a large batch of them (our other pickled pink). These turned out pretty well, but again, you can only eat so many pickled radishes. I think we are done with radishes for the time being, and ironically, I just came across a recipe use for them that sounded quite intriguing: Radish Butter. You dice them up super fine and mix them with butter and some seasoning. You then serve it as a spread and/or dip. So, if I get more radishes, you know what I am doing!

Here is the sauteed radishes with peas.

We have also made some interesting PIZZAS with some unconventional toppings like butternut squash and assorted greens. It is actually pretty fun to come up with creative and tasty combinations to put on pizza. We have also put beets, carrots and broccolini on our pizzas at different times. We recently did one with spinach, caramelized onions, carrots, and fennel, and broccolini along with some chicken sausage, blue cheese and mozzarella. It was quite tasty, but I think I concluded that I just don’t like roasted broccoli that much.

Beets on a pizza? Sure, why not!

Speaking of GREENS, those continue to keep arriving week after week. I think I have enough frozen greens to last until next winter at this point! The nice thing is that I have found that you can substitute quite a few different greens for spinach. In addition to pizza, it has made its way into a veggie lasagna and a tasty tortellini vegetable soup. They have slowly grown on me as the winter has progressed. I have also found that some olive oil, vinegar, garlic and salt will work quite well with the flavor of most leafy greens

Next up is tackling all of our CITRUS. Although we both like oranges, tangelos, and tangerines, we just don’t snack on them nearly enough. I am planning to experiment with some baked goods. For some reason, although I like lemon cake, I have always thought an orange cake sounds weird. However, I am not really sure I have actually tried one. So, that is my next culinary experiment. I have read about a Portuguese Olive Oil Orange Cake that I find intriguing to try. For our first round of citrus baking, however, we ended up making these Citrus-Currant Sunshine Muffins. They were tasty, but we didn’t exactly follow the recipe, so we may need to try it again! We forgot the citrus from the orange and the lemon juice, and we didn’t have any currants. I think some dried cranberries would be tasty next time.

I was excited to get FENNEL a couple of different times. As mentioned, it made its way into a pizza. Along with our citrus, it also allowed us to make one of our all time favorite couscous salads. I highly recommend this one, and grilling fennel gives it a wonderful flavor. It is super simple and filling. Here is the link for Grilled Fennel Couscous Salad.

Other cooking adventures included this Roasted Green Chile and Corn Chowder. Although not all CSA ingredients, it did contain some red potatoes and some of the green chilies that are still hanging out in our freezer. It was quite tasty, and R made the bread bowls for it.

Finally, we have received several bags of DRIED BEANS. We have discovered the joy and ease of using our slow cooker for them. You don’t even need to soak them! Just give them a rinse, cover them with hot water and let them simmer all day long. I will usually throw some chopped onion and garlic in there, but that is about it until the last half hour or so of cooking. At that point, you add some salt and pepper along with any other seasonings you might want. I like to put some Smoked Spanish Paprika in there to keep it vegetarian but still give it that hint of smokiness that would come from cooking some sort of smoked pork product along with it. With some corn bread, it makes an amazingly simple but satisfying meal. I think I will use up the last of my canned beans, and then completely convert to cooking my own in the future. It is healthier, cheaper, and better for the environment (less processed and packaged foods means less trash).

Cleaning Out the Fridge for Holiday Travel

As I started writing this, I realized that I am becoming one of the THOSE cooks who share a recipe they threw together with lots of vagueness about what to do. However, I am not a particularly adventuresome and creative cook when it comes to making stuff up. I tend to look at cookbooks and food blogs for inspiration, so I really do keep it simple if it is something I put together without a recipe. And since this is not really meant to be a cooking blog, I don’t feel too bad. So, this week’s cooking adventure was intended to clear as much out of our fridge as possible before starting holiday travels and not do too much grocery shopping before we left. We had lots of lovely CSA goodies to use up. It also helps that I am pretty much at loose ends. I am much more motivated to cook when I haven’t been on the go all day.

Day 1: Spinach Enchiladas

I modeled this off a chicken and spinach enchilada recipe I have used as a repeated standby through the years. We have cut back our meat intake back quite a bit, so I decided to see how it was with just spinach. It was a pretty good team effort by R and I. We always forget how much we really like working together in the kitchen when we both have the time and energy. We are slowly figuring out a rhythm and pattern that works in our teeny kitchen.

Note: I realized how used to pre-cleaned produce we get. Man, that spinach was DIRTY! Had to do the whole submerge in water thing.

The filling:

I used two bags of fresh spinach. Guess I could have weighed it, but I didn’t.

Chopped and cooked down an onion till soft and brown. Added about 4 cloves of chopped garlic and the spinach. Let it all cook down.

The Sauce:

It called for 8 oz of sour cream, but I only had about half that, so I added extra yogurt and didn’t notice a difference

Original recipe called for ¼ c. plain non-fat yogurt. Clearly used more than that (see above).

About 1 ½ cups of low fat milk.

1 tbsp cumin

4 oz can of chopped chilies (we used a package of our frozen CSA chilies)

2 tbsp of flour

Mix it all up. I added several big spoonfuls to the spinach mixture to make it a little creamy.

Making the Enchiladas:

We used flour tortillas, but it would be yummy with corn tortillas, too.

Put some filling in, and roll. Yep, that simple. Biggest challenge is eyeballing it to make it stretch evenly for amount of enchiladas you are making. I can’t really help you with that one. Just use your common sense!

I recommend greasing your pan. I used cooking spray. We filled a 9 x 13 baking dish.

Dump the rest of the sauce over the enchiladas and spread it out to cover. Sprinkle with cheese.

Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 – 40 minutes until browned and bubbly.

We served ours with rice as a side. Enjoy!

Day 2: Beans, Greens and Cornbread

My inspiration came from this recipe, although honestly, it didn’t taste particularly “mexicany” to me.

Have I mentioned how much we love our slow cooker? We used to do “Slow Cooker Sundays” all

the time before moving. We are slowly getting back into the groove. I have found it is absolutely amazing for cooking a big old pot of beans all day long. I do love the simplicity of a bowl of beans. This also worked out well because we had one of my classmate friends, L, and her fellow, D, over for dinner since we had been chatting about getting together before we went our separate ways for the break. They had been packing all day as they are moving to a new place, so it was nice to treat them to a hot meal. We all know how tiring packing can be!

Note: A lot of our spices comes from Penzey’s. I guess this is a bit of a free plug for them. LOVE them. In many cases, they will be the same price or cheaper than what you can get at your local grocery, especially if you buy the bigger bulk bags.

Crockpot Bean Soup

1 lb of dried pintos (no need to soak!) Just rinse and look for rocks and junk that shouldn’t be there.

1 chopped onion

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

Seasonings: 1 ½ tbsp of cumin, Adobo seasoning, Chicago Steak Seasoning, Smoked Spanish Paprika, 2 spoonfuls of brown sugar, Trinidad Seasoning. All of this was to taste throughout the cooking process.

Fill the cooker about 2/3 of the way with water and cook on low for at least 8 hours. I added some more water along the way to keep the beans barely covered so they would not get dry and crusty.

Greens

This was an attempt to use up random bags of mystery greens we had received from the CSA. I used half a bag of something of which I had no clue what it is, but knew it had tasted good last week! The other bag was little baby kale. This was pretty simple. I pulled all the stems off (hate stems), and gave it a good rinse. Threw it in a big skillet with a drizzle of olive oil and 2 Tbps of butter. For spices, I used an Herbed Season Salt, Trinidad seasoning, red pepper flakes, and some ground pepper. After they wilted down, I drizzled them with some red wine vinegar. That’s it, people! You wanna know what else? Greens are kinda starting to grow on me, especially when I season them the way I like it. I think that is the key: Use seasonings you like to accent the flavor of the greens.

Cornbread

As I mentioned, this was an effort to get rid of stuff in our refrigerator. Well, we were out of eggs, so I went in quest of an eggless cornbread recipe on the internet. This is the one I picked, and I followed it as is (Well, we were out of wheat pastry flour, so I used a mix of all purpose and wheat flour). It got pretty good reviews from all of us, and I would make it again. I typically rely on good old Jiffy mix, but as I threw together this one bowl wonder, I realized how EASY it is to make cornbread from scratch. Why on earth I have not figured that out before now… who knows?

Day 3: Couscous Salad with Butternut Squash and Sauteed Radishes and Peas

Again, we were trying to work our way through as many vegetables as possible before travelling, so that was the primary goal with this menu. The added bonus is that both recipes called for citrus and we have gotten a ton of oranges through the CSA. I had been eyeing this salad for a while after reading about it on two different blogs. I found it pretty yummy, but I think I would cut it in half next time. The leftovers were okay but not great, and actually, we left some behind that we just could not get through before travelling. I went light on the cinnamon because R is not a big fan of it in savory dishes and I subbed allspice for nutmeg as we didn’t have any. I also added more oil to the dressing as I thought the proportions were a little high on the acidic side. The radish dish was an experiment. I have always been curious about what cooked radishes would be like. I did make a few minor changes from the original recipe. I used frozen peas instead of sugar snaps. We are not fans of dill, so I subbed dried tarragon. Overall, it wasn’t bad and not nearly as weird as you might think it could be. It mellowed out the sharpness of the radishes but left the crunch. I don’t think I would make it regularly, but it is an unusual way to fix radishes if you are looking for something different. It also looks really pretty. I wasn’t crazy with how it reheated, so I would only make enough for one meal or make sure you are fixing it for more than two people.

Here is the link to the Couscous Salad with Butternut Squash

Here is the link to the Sauteed Radishes with Peas