English Muffins and Not Quite Eggs Benedict

Note: This is a cross post from Xander and Alana's Public House.

A few weeks ago, I made English muffins for the first time. It was pretty easy to do, and I have to say they were the best English muffins I have ever had. I highly recommend attempting your own. My recipe came from The Big Book of Bread Machine Recipes, but you can find a similar recipe online here.


We used our extra tasty English muffins and some smoked salmon that was gifted to us by a neighbor to make Not Quite Eggs Benedict. There's nothing like restaurant-quality meals at home.

How to Make Soup

I make a lot of soups in the winter. I love making soup for three reasons: 1) You can make a ton of it and eat the leftovers for days, 2) it's a great way to use up whatever edible odds and ends you have lying about, and 3) it's cheap. Cheap is good. Soups are also a great thing to serve to people who think they don't like vegetarian food, because it's something familiar that often wouldn't include meat anyway.

I'm surprised by how many people I've met who cook but have never made their own soup. If you've ever made chili, you can make your own soup. It's one of the easiest things you can do in the kitchen next to making grilled cheese. Speaking of, you know what goes great with grilled cheese? Soup!

This isn't a recipe. It's more of a loose guide.

What You Need:

• vegetable or olive oil or butter
• onion
• garlic
• broth or water (vegetable broth or canned tomatoes with juice work great)
• some vegetables
• salt
• flour (optional)
• rice or beans or barley or pasta (optional)
• herbs (optional)
• pepper (optional)

What You Do:

Heat oil or butter in large pot. Add minced garlic and/or chopped onions and sprinkle with salt. Cook until tender. Insert optional step 1 here. Chop vegetables and add to pot. Sprinkle with salt and stir. Insert optional step 2 here. Add broth or water to cover vegetables. Salt to taste if needed. Insert optional step 3 here. Cook until vegetables are tender, adding water as needed to reach desired consistency. Insert optional step 4 here. Eat.

Optional step 1: Add a couple of tablespoons of flour to the onions and mix until coated. The flour will make your soup thicker.

Optional step 2: Add pepper and/or herbs like parsley or dill or basil or whatever you like for added flavor. Celery salt (or just plain chopped celery) is a great thing to add to vegetable soups, but you'll want to cut back on the plain salt that you add a bit.

Optional step 3: Add a grain like rice or barley, beans, pasta or lentils.

Optional step 4: Use a hand blender or regular blender to blend all the ingredients together and make a creamy soup or bisque. I like using a hand blender because I can blend right in the pot without having to pour the soup into a blender and then back into the pot. You may also want to add milk or soy milk to make the soup creamier. This is a really easy way to impress people.

Some non-blended soups I make with this method:

Vegetable soup with potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, and peas or green beans
Split pea with carrots
Lentil with potatoes and carrots
Vegetable barley
White bean and kale

Some blended soups I make with this method:

Potato-leek bisque
Carrot ginger soup
Split pea
Cream of vegetable (usually with cauliflower, broccoli, and carrots)
Pumpkin
Roasted red pepper and tomato

Some other things I make with this method:

Sweet potato and black bean stew
Chili

Notes:

For soups that you'd like to have a sweet taste (say carrot or pumpkin), you may want to skip the onion and garlic or use a sweet onion like Vidalia. You can also add sugar, honey, or maple syrup to enhance the sweetness.

If you're in a hurry, don't worry about following these instructions. Chop whatever vegetables you have, add them to a pot with some salt and pepper, pour in some broth, and cook. Really, you almost can't screw it up.

If you're looking for specific recipes to start with, Food Network has a whole page devoted to soups. Start with something simple like a basic vegetable soup. Experiment and enjoy!

Caramelized Onion (or Leek) and Potato Tart with Goat Cheese

This is one of my favorite things ever. I made the Leek and Potato version for my brother and his girlfriend last weekend. It's comfort food, only fancier. This version of the recipe feeds 4, but you can easily add an extra onion and an extra potato or more to make a larger version.

What you need:

• 2-3 onions* (slightly sweet varieties work best)
• 3 medium potatoes
• 1 puff pastry
• 1 package goat cheese
• milk or soy milk
• butter
• sugar
• salt

What you do:

Cut onions in half lengthwise, then slice finely. Add a few tablespoons of butter to a pan and melt. Then add onions. Sprinkle with sugar and salt, then stir to coat. Cook the onions on low-medium heat, stirring frequently, until browned. This can take awhile, so as you take a break from stirring, start on the potatoes.

Peel (optional) and dice potatoes. Add to boiling water and boil until soft. Drain. Return potatoes to pot and turn heat on low. Stir potatoes until they begin to stick on the bottom. Mix in a few tablespoons of butter and mash with a potato masher. Add in milk about a tablespoon at a time until the potatoes reach a consistency that makes you happy and salt to taste.**

Grease and flour a small baking dish, like say one of those 8x8 ones. Roll out puff pastry and place in bottom of dish. You can have the pastry come up the sides a bit if you like, but you don't have to. Spread mashed potatoes on top of pastry. Spread onions on top of mashed potatoes. Crumble goat cheese on top.

Bake at 375 until the pastry is lightly browned at the edges, about 45 minutes.

*You can make the same tart with leeks. It takes about 1 large or 2 small leeks. Only with leeks you don't caramelize them. Just cook them until slightly tender. The leek version is faster, but the caramelized onion version is my favorite.

**In case you didn't get that, you're making mashed potatoes here. So really you can just do it however you like.

Frittata

I've posted a recipe for frittata before. But I was making one today and thought that I should post it again. If you've never made frittata, you definitely should give it a try. It's fast, cheap, stupid easy, really versatile, and can be served for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. We eat it all the time.

How do you do it? Easy.

Beat some eggs (1 1/2 to 2 eggs per serving) in a bowl with milk and salt just like you would for scrambled eggs. (You can use soy milk, but make sure it is unsweetened.)

In a frying pan, melt butter. Add onions and/or garlic and cook for about 2 minutes. Next, add whatever vegetables you think would taste great with eggs. (Some favorites include spinach, tomato, peppers, and broccoli.) Cook until just tender. Pour egg mixture on top of vegetables. Cook on medium heat until edges start to cook and center is bubbling. Sprinkle salt, herbs (like rosemary or oregano), and/or cheese (like goat cheese or grated Parmesan or cheddar) on top. Put under a broiler for a few minutes until the top turns lightly golden brown. Remove from oven, allow to cool slightly, then serve. Great with salad, fruit, and crusty toasted bread.

A frequent late-summer lunch for me is frittata with tomatoes, spinach, garlic, and onion. Yum.

Mashed Sweet Potatoes with Brown Sugar

Every year without fail, we have sweet potatoes with Thanksgiving dinner. We have them at other times, too, but they are a Thanksgiving staple at our house. I love them because they are one of the easiest things to make, don't require a lot of precision, and if you don't count all the sugar in this recipe, they're actually really good for you.

What You Need:

• 3 or 4 large sweet potatoes (or just a couple of giant ones)
• 1 egg
• salt
• brown sugar
• butter
• ground cinnamon and cloves (optional)

What You Do:

Peel and cube sweet potatoes. Boil until soft. Drain. Add potatoes back to hot saucepan and stir until the water evaporates and the potatoes begin to stick to the pot. Mash with a potato masher (or use a mixer if you want them to be really smooth). Add about 4 tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon of brown sugar, and a pinch of salt, then stir. I like to add a little ground cinnamon and cloves as well to add some holiday-type aroma. Mix in one egg, and be thorough about it. Spread potatoes into your baking dish of choice. We use a square glass one. Before you bake, melt about 4 more tablespoons of butter together with a about 4 heaping tablespoons of brown sugar. Mix together to form a brown, liquidy syrup. Drizzle this over the sweet potatoes. Bake at 350 for about 35 minutes or until awesome.

How to Make Grits

Well, it's been quite awhile since I posted anything over here, but I imagine a few recipes will make their way onto this page during the holiday period. The one on my mind lately is grits.

What are grits? Good question. They are little tiny specks of tastiness made from ground hulled corn, and they are primarily consumed south of the Mason-Dixon line. A lot of people think they don't like them, but my bet is that most of those people haven't had good ones. They certainly haven't had mine.

Grits are like the risotto of The South. You make them essentially the same way you would a risotto. You melt some butter, add a few choice ingredients, sauté, add water, then add your grits. You continue to add water and simmer until the grits reach a consistency that makes you happy. I like mine soft and flavorful, so I cook them for about an hour, sometimes more. The two rules I have are that I always use high-quality grits (no Quaker in our house) and cook them at a ratio of about three parts liquid to one part grits.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to the concept of using chipotle peppers in grits. Brilliant idea, my friends. Brilliant. Now, he added cheddar cheese to his, and they tasted amazing. But I'm lactose intolerant, so I made mine without cheese. You want cheese in yours? Be my guest. Cheese and grits are always a good combination.

What you need:

1 cup good grits (I prefer Nora Mill yellow-speckled grits)
3-4 cups water
a small can of chipotle peppers
butter (obviously)
cheddar cheese (optional)

What you do:

Melt about four (or more) tablespoons of butter in a saucepan. In the meantime, chop about three chipotle peppers from the can, scraping off the seeds. The more peppers you use, the spicier your grits will be. Add them to the butter and cook for a few minutes. Then add two cups water and bring to a low boil. Add a cup of the grits and stir. Allow to simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes to an hour. Gradually add more water throughout the cooking process until your grits reach the desired texture and consistency. Usually this will take about three cups of water and roughly an hour of cooking, but it varies. If you want cheese, add about 1/2 cup (or more) of grated cheddar cheese once the grits have finished cooking and stir. Serve for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

While I'm on the subject, another great grits idea is to make basic grits (butter, grits, water), then crumble goat cheese on top before serving. DELICIOUS.

A Week of Dinners

People are always curious about what we have for dinner as vegetarians. We used to say, "Whatever you have, minus the meat." But I'm learning that many other families' meals center around meat, so when you take that away, you're left with dinner rolls and potatoes. We definitely eat more than that.

While I have complete respect for the dedicated women I know who make amazing, gourmet meals for their families, I am of the opinion that dinner need not be complicated. There are plenty of nights when dinner for us consists of bread, cheese, fruit, and raw vegetables like sliced pepper or carrots. When I cook, I usually don't make more than a couple of things. Nutrition wise, I worry more about whether or not we are getting a good balance over the course of a day, and more importantly the week, than if I have managed to squeeze everything into one meal. I like recipes that are simple and don't have more than five or six ingredients. And most everything I cook for dinner takes half an hour, if that, and certainly not more than 45 minutes. Sure, I occasionally make special, labor-intensive meals, but you probably do as well. Like on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I cheat in one very big way: I have a bread machine. And let me tell you, that was money well spent. Most of the time I only use it on the dough setting. I make pizza dough and dough for baguettes or boules or whatever. The dough freezes well, so for pizza I make twice as much as I need and freeze half for the following week. But once or twice a week, I let the bread machine do all the work. Its basic white or wheat bread is great for sandwiches and last-minute dinner bread. You can make bread for your family for less than you can buy it at the store, and it won't have any of the preservatives and whatnot in it. I understand people who don't want to take the time to make bread completely by hand, with the rising and kneading and all that, but the bread machine makes it possible for lazy people to become bakers. Buy one. Your friends and family will love you for it.

Anyway, I present to you a week of dinners in photographic format. If you want a recipe, leave me a note in the comments section. I'll be happy to send you the details.

Artichoke risotto with sourdough rye bread


Falafel salad


Lemon spaghetti with wild asparagus and haricots jaune


Sauteed wild asparagus and carrots with garlic mashed potatoes


Steamed asparagus with bruschetta


Salad with homemade flatbread


Pizza with olives, onions, and peppers