The Gastronomic

This was so delicious that I have been counting the hours until we can eat the leftovers for our next meal.

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Gastronomike and I both really love hummus, and so we made a huge double-batch to have in the house for the next week or so.

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This is one of our old reliable, go-to recipes for when we’re busy, lazy, or just really want some good red lentil soup.  All three of those reasons were in play tonight.  This soup cooks for a while, but requires very little effort to make.

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Last week we made these unusual little pizzas.  They were among the most delicious pizzas I have ever eaten.

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R. has wanted to make a risotto for a long time and when we finally saw this recipe in Vegetarian Planet we decided to go for it.  (R. is also a big fan of barley).  When we realized it was going to take about an hour to make, though, we decided to have a steak salad as a first course. The timing (and both dishes) wound up working out perfectly.  I wouldn’t say  the risotto was a particularly “summer” dish, but in Syracuse it’s often difficult to say what season it is, anyway. (more…)

A while back R. picked up a vegetarian cookbook called Super Natural Cooking.  We picked this recipe out a while ago, and I think it could be a real go-to meal over the summer.  If you make the asparagus puree (which was very close to an asparagus pesto) ahead of time it would be something you could literally throw together in five minutes, and it’s really good.  I only wish we would have had the pine nuts that the recipe called for!  This could probably also be easily adapted productively.  You could add sausage, or capers,  or even sun dried tomatoes.

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In the summertime when our farm share is in full swing, we eat a lot of dinner salads.  The CSA hasn’t started yet but we didn’t feel like waiting, so this was an easy and really satisfying dinner salad. I only wish we would have had some carrots, red pepper or tomatoes to add a little color.  Oh well…plenty to look forward to once the veggies start rolling in.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 head lettuce (don’t use iceberg, it’s gross.)
• handful baby arugala (que sustantivo!)
• 1/2 green pepper
• 1 small onion
• 1-2 green onions
• 3-4 stalks celery
• 1/3 lb chicken breast, dusted with black pepper  and grilled
• 1/2 cup shredded cheddar
• sprinkle of parmesan

Procedure

• It’s a salad.

No recipe on this one, either.  Catfish was dusted with a cajun spice rub we had on hand (if you want to make your own it’s garlic powder, salt, paprika, onion powder, cayenne, and a little bit of cumin & black pepper) then baked at 375 for about 20 minutes.  Vegetables were potatoes, roasted red peppers and sugar snap peas steamed with a bit of oil and some oregano.  Rice was boring ol’ white rice.  Easy, but quite good.

You can tell we drastically cut back on the rub since the tilapia last time.  Far fewer tears were shed over this meal.

This is nothing special, just simple, fresh food that tasted great.

Truly, there are no real recipes here tonight.

Tilapia: rolled in cajun seasoning and baked at 400 for 15 minutes.

Green beans: lightly steamed until crisp-tender.

Wild rice: dumped into rice maker for 20 minutes with a pat of butter.

Voila. We’ve been having some trouble in the kitchen lately. We just don’t ever seem to have anything in the refrigerator, which means that doing any cooking at all seems like a huge pain in the neck. Cooking has been painful lately because we’re just not prepared with supplies. We’re trying to get back into the swing of things now that the semester is over and we feel like we can catch our breath. As usual, the blog will probably become more active over the summer. We want to experiment with some new grains– we’ve got quinoa in the kitchen right now that I’d like to do something with soon. So stay tuned.