Gosh, it's been a long time since I did a 100 new recipes update. Doing 17 at once is a bore, and I'm sorry. Let's just try to get through this together.
Number 50: Chickpea and couscous salad - I love Ruth's blog because of the focus on entire menus, rather than singular recipes. I'm working my way through her Simple Spring to Summer Menu, but have yet to make everything together on the same night. Maybe if M'hijo takes a really long nap one day, I'll be able to do it all. This salad was very tasty.
Number 51: Cedar-plank salmon - Part of the same menu. I bought a cedar plank from Home Depot and Tobias chopped it up and grilled the salmon on it. Turned out pretty good, but I felt the smoky flavour could have been stronger.
Number 52: Thai salmon filo wraps - From Delia Smith's Summer Collection. The first time I made these I was in a big hurry and wasn't being very careful with the filo and I thought they would turn out to be a mess but they were really lovely. I made fried rice to go with and it was a hit with both of my eaters. The second time I made it, I was in a lousy mood, did an even worse job with the filo, and after taking one bite, had a little hissy fit and refused to eat it (for about five minutes). I think the reason I didn't like it was not so much the sloppy filo work as the fact that I used previously frozen salmon. It's gotta be fresh or nothing for me now, I think. I'm a princess.
Number 53: Red wine marinade - From the Joy. Okay. Not amazing. Used it on the Canada Day beef and bison steaks. Might try it again and marinade for a proper length of time (ie 24 hours instead of just two).
Number 54: Yam streusel coffee cake - Surprisingly great! Got yams in my harvest box and decided it would be M'hijo's first solid food. Boiled and mashed them all. Realized no way in hell can baby eat such a huge quantity of mashed yams before they go bad. Searched frantically for non-casseroley yam recipes. Found this one online and tried it, though skeptical. Smash hit, especially with the men who were building a fence in my backyard last week.
Number 55: Peach cobbler - My go-to recipe for peach cobbler used to be on Oprah.com. I thought I had printed it out but when it came time to make a dessert for a recent book club meeting (discussing Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities) I couldn't find the page in my recipe binder and Oprah, it appears, has removed the recipe from her site in favour of some new-fangled cobbler recipe from Patti LaBelle. I really like peach cobbler better with a buttermilk biscuit crust, rather than a pie crust, so I had to look elsewhere. I found a good recipe online but can't for the life of me find it again. I will keep looking. The book club people loved the results, but I still prefer that old Oprah recipe. Maybe I'll find it someday.
Number 56: Creamy chicken curry - Another pretty okay curry from the Step-by-Step Indian cooking book. Made by Tobias. Interesting because it contains hard-boiled eggs. Yummy. Not amazing.
Number 57: Hot&sour pickled prawns - From Delia Smith's Summer Collection. I made these to take along on our Father's Day camping trip. They turned out pretty tasty but neither as not nor as sour as I would have liked. Furthermore, the actual prawn flavour was sort of obliterated by the pickling. For someone who loves the taste of prawns (me), this is not a plus.
Number 58: Crunchy peanut-coated drumsticks (online recipe is for pistachio version)- Another camping make-ahead from Delia Smith's Summer Collection. These were okay. I think I like the idea of cold chicken more than the reality of it. There's something very appealing about individually wrapped little cooked drumsticks to munch on at a picnic, especially if they have a coating or batter of some sort. But actually chewing cold chicken off the bone -- it's a little gross. For camping, I think I'll stick to the cold sesame chicken recipe from the Joy. It's a make-ahead, but the meat is shredded and mixed with sesame seeds, peanut butter, rice vinegar, etc. and served with cucumbers.
Number 59: Swiss chard gratin - I read this recipe out of an old copy of Gourmet while sitting in a coffee shop earlier this summer and it looked very tempting. I love that Bon Appetit and Gourmet put all of their recipes online. I think you just have to wait a few months after their published for them to go up on Epicurious. The user comments for this recipe were very positive, even though most people said it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work, but oh what results. This is the best dish I've made in a long time. I think the key was adding the stalks. I always throw chard stalks away, but in this recipe you cook them up before the leaves and throw them in. I didn't have three pounds of chard, but I used a whole bunch of unidentifiable cooking greens that were included in my Spud Harvest Box, and it was delicious. I think I will make this again this week with a mix of chard, kale and spinach. But I might prepare the greens more in advance since I find that to be the most onerous part of the preparation. Try this recipe! Try it!
Number 60: Oatmeal-raisin cookies - From the Joy. Awesome.
Number 61: Chicken cacciatora (scroll down for recipe) - From Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I got a bunch of beautiful Ireland Farms chickens a couple of weeks ago and this is the first thing I made. I had planned to make Basque chicken and when I say planned, I mean "thought of" but not "procured the ingredients for and started preparations far enough in advance". So it was after five pm the day of the failed Basque chicken plan when I finally decided to make chicken cacciatora even though I'm not generally a fan of this dish. And then I didn't have any imported Italian canned tomatoes, just Hunt's. And no garlic. So I figured this would be pretty lame and tasteless. I COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG. Oh my gosh what a difference that amazing Ireland Farm chicken made. First of all, they're huge. I just cooked one breast and one leg and it was more than enough for the three of us for dinner and lunch leftovers for the next day. Second of all, the flavour is sooooo awesome. It's uberchicken flavour. It totally compensated for the lack of garlic and second-rate canned tomatoes. I can't wait to make this again.
Number 62: Blueberry pancakes - From the Joy. Made these on Saturday morning for just Sahsez and I because Tobias was out of town. The blueberries were from the Harvest box -- incidentally, there's nothing like a Harvest box for increasing one's fruit and veggie intake and forcing innovation in the kitchen -- and they were darn good. Poor Tobias. By the time he came home on Sunday night we had eaten all of the good stuff from the Harvest box.
Number 64: Chicken and broccoli casserole - From the Joy. With the second half of the chicken that I made the chicken cacciotoria from, I whipped up some creamed chicken on Saturday morning (after the pancakes but before heading out to the Moss Street Paint-in). I intended to make chicken tetrazinni for dinner that night but after getting back from the paint-in, I thought it would be better for everyone if I made chicken and broccoli casserole instead. The reasons were the following: a) broccoli better for you than spaghetti, b) Tobias less jealous of missing casserole than tetrazinni, c) eating broccoli contributes to goal of finishing all Harvest box items while they are really fresh, and d) Sahsez not keen on mushrooms, an integral part of the tetrazinni. The casserole was okay. My mom and I put Tabasco on ours. Sahsez ate hers plain and loved it.
Number 65: Pea and pea-shoot salad - From the Joy. The peas and pea-shoots were from...guess where? The Harvest box! Oh man they were tasty too. I've been wanting to try this salad for a while and since Tobias brought home some ling cod from his weekend trip, I thought it would be a good accompaniment. The dressing for the salad is really simple, you should try it: sesame oil, rice vinegar, sesame seeds toasted, s&p, soy sauce.
Number 66: Feta-walnut dip - From The Moosewood Cookbook. Pretty yummy. More of a spread than a dip. Makes a nice sandwich on a Portuguese bun with basil leaves and sliced avocado.
Number 67: Mango and blue cheese tostadas - Pretty yummy. I called them tostadas, even though the author calls them quesadillas, because they're open. I used gorgonzola, which was a bit on the mild side for this. Might try again with Danish blue. Link via Kate.
