07.12.08
Posted in Cuisines, Dinner, Dips & Spreads, Greek, Leftovers, Seafood, Shrimp at 2:39 pm by julie
I’ve never been too enamored with cooking magazines, other than perhaps Cooking Light, but I was offered a free subscription to Bon Appetit from Amazon.com a few months back, so I said what the heck. It’s alright so far, but I’m not overly impressed, and I haven’t gone out of my way to make any of the recipes.
The other night we tried a recipe for shrimp skewers with tzatziki and spinach from the most recent issue. As I had hoped, it was a fast, tasty meal—hard to go wrong with those flavors, and most of the ingredients are ones I always have on hand. Not only that, but it made a lovely and fairly healthy plate of food. The problem came when we sat down to actually eat, though: it was impossible for us to eat this neatly. Of course Jeremy was eating over WoW, and Nolan was awake at the time, so I had to hold him with one arm and eat with the other. But there were the skewers and tails to deal with, and the tzatziki, while delicious, was too thick to scoop up easily either with a bite of shrimp or a forkful of spinach.
I found myself wishing I had just removed the tails from the shrimp up front and sauteed them in a little oil and garlic, then tucked them in a pita with the spinach, feta and tzatziki. The portability and one-handed operation of a pocket sandwich would have been more than worth an extra trip to the grocery store or a few hours spent waiting for pita dough to rise. Considering all the other pluses to this recipe, it may happen yet.
Incidentally, I couldn’t bear to toss out the leftover tzatziki, but had nothing to eat it with. So for lunch the next day, I mixed a can of tuna with a few tablespoons of strained tzatziki, a bit of mayo and some feta cheese. It made one of the best tuna sandwiches I’ve had in quite a while.
Shrimp Skewers with Tzatziki, Spinach and Feta
1 C Greek yogurt
1 C 1/4″-cubes English hothouse cucumber
3 T chopped fresh dill
2 T fresh lemon juice
2 T chopped shallots
1 tsp chopped garlic
Olive oil
1 lb uncooked large shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 C baby spinach
3/4 C crumbled feta cheese
Mix yogurt, cucumber, dill, lemon juice, garlic and shallot in small bowl; season generously with salt and pepper and chill until ready to serve.
Prepare grill with oil. Thread shrimp equally onto 4 skewers and brush with olive oil; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Grill just until shrimp are opaque in the center, about 3 minutes per side. Divide spinach between 4 plates, and drizzle lightly with lemon juice and olive oil. Top each with one shrimp skewer, a dollop of tzatziki, and a sprinkle of feta.
Source: Slightly adapted from Bon Appetit, August 2008 (p. 45)—and will be more firmly adapted next time.
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06.18.07
Posted in Cuisines, Dinner, Dips & Spreads, Greek, Italian, Veggies at 6:51 pm by julie
For those Salemites who have an interest in unusual or organic foodstuffs and mourn the lack of a nearby Whole Foods, Wild Oats, or Trader Joe’s, LifeSource is a great resource. Of course, we may have been about the last people in town to figure that out, but now that we have a car, we’re trying hard to make up for the neglect. This last week we were fortunate enough to find a pile of fresh fava beans in the produce section, which for me was a big deal, because I’ve never found them for sale before, despite hopeful scouring of the farmer’s markets in May. I decided to use them to make up a bit of fava bean ‘hummus’ from Sunday Suppers at Lucques
.
I’d heard an awful lot about what a pain fava beans are to shell, so I decided to document the process, just for fun. The pods are big and velvety, containing just 5 or 6 beans if you’re lucky. Many of them were lined with cottony fluff, as if to cushion the precious contents. I had a heck of a time getting the beans out of the pods, though; most of them refused to split open along their seams and just tore willy-nilly instead.
When I was done shelling, I had a sad little pile of bean left, just enough to cover the bottom of my bowl. I got some water boiling and blanched the beans for 2 minutes, then chilled them off until they were cool enough to touch.
At this point, the outer skins needed to be removed from the beans, the extra step that is the source of so much complaint. It actually didn’t bother me at all, though, and I got a pretty good rhythm going. All they needed was a bit of a tear in one spot with my fingernail, and a gentle squeeze would pop them right out of their skins, very much like slipping the skins off of Concord grapes.
Of course, removing the skins reduced the volume of bean remaining pretty considerably, and I barely had a handful of beans left for my recipe. Since the two of us only needed a little bit of spread to go with our dinners, that still worked in my favor.
The spread itself was very easy to make: a quick simmer in some rosemary-garlic infused olive oil and then pureed and sprinkled with more oil and feta cheese. We had it with garlic-rubbed sourdough crostini.
Oh yeah, and there was also some delicious lamb souvlaki and garlicky tzatziki from The Food and Wine of Greece. Details… 
I’ve never eaten fava beans before, and I liked them enough that we will certainly seek them out again, even if we’ll now have to wait a year for another opportunity. They had a very pleasant earthiness that was nicely complemented by the other flavors in the spread: olive oil, rosemary, garlic, and salty feta. I know favas are much more classically Italian than Greek, but I figured the olive oil and feta would bridge the gap nicely, and everything did taste good together.
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03.27.07
Posted in Dips & Spreads, Nuts, Grains & Legumes, Veggies at 10:16 am by julie
I was planning on making soup for dinner last night, but when I walked in the door, red pepper-bean dip with carrot sticks was what sounded good. So I cracked open a can of cannellini beans and thawed a few peppers, and whipped myself up some dip in no time flat. I was planning on having that for a snack, and the soup for dinner later, but I ended up just eating more dip. Think I worked my way through about 4 carrots. Super yummy, but I need my husband/taste tester back now please.
I thought I had made this recipe before, but it turned out what I had been thinking of was something similar with sundried tomatoes. That was good too, and I bet you could sub some sundried tomatoes into this recipe. I used peppers that I roasted myself; I keep them in the freezer, individually wrapped, and thaw them very briefly in the microwave as I need them. For speed and convenience, I used jarred garlic and bottled lemon juice; and I was heavy-handed with the salt, garlic and olive oil. Store leftovers under a thin layer of olive oil to keep it from drying out; the flavors with further develop with a rest. I like this dip both straight from the fridge or at room temp. For me, the carrots have to be as cold as possible, though; I slice them into sticks and store them under water in the fridge.
White Bean and Roasted Red Pepper Dip
1-2 tsp balsamic vinegar or lemon juice
1 (15-ounce) can cannellini beans (or navy or Great Northern), rinsed and drained
2 roasted red bell peppers
1-2 large garlic cloves
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2-4 T extravirgin olive oil
Place all ingredients except olive oil in food processor and blend until very smooth. Add olive oil in a thin stream until desired texture has been achieved. Sample and adjust seasonings to your tastes. Serve drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with fleur de sel, alongside raw veggies (carrot sticks are my favorite) and crostini or pita.
Source: Adapted from Cooking Light.
Update 8/17/07: Last night I made a batch of this dip to snack on, and it turned out great. I think I had better peppers this time, organic ones from LifeSource that were a lot more flavorful after roasting. I used balsamic this time also, and it really enhanced the natural sweetness of the peppers. Yum!
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