It's a Salad Bonanza!!!

My last two vegetarian meals have been salads. The first one was a parsley salad in a pita bowl. The recipe came from the June 2011 issue of Cuisine at Home. I had a lot of lettuce left over from my farm share so I used that instead of parsley. I think it worked better with lettuce.

Anyways, the salad was delicious! It called for fried chick peas. I am a big fan of chick peas in general, but it had never dawned on me to fry them before. They are super fantastic. Go and fry some now. I'll wait. I'll help you eat them. In addition to the lettuce and fried peas, the salad also had kalamata olives and feta cheese. All of this was dumped on a piece of pita bread. But not just any old piece of pita bread - FRIED pita bread. When the chick peas come out you simply put once piece in at a time for about two minutes each. Fried pita bread as a salad bowl is also an awesome idea. It looked like this:

I then added a homemade cucumber-yogurt vinaigrette to it. The whole thing was simply amazing.

Our next salad was from Martha Stewart's Everyday Food and was called, "Greek Salad with Chickpeas." Yes, more chickpeas. However, I had leftover olives and feta cheese from my pita salad and this seemed like a good way to use them up.

This salad was great. However, while it was billed as a main course I think it is better off as a side dish. In addition to the chickpeas, feta cheese, and olives it also had red onion, cucumber, parsley, and grap tomatoes. This time I did use the parsley. Lettuce in this salad would have been weird. There was no dressing for this. It was all tossed with olive oil and lemon juice with some salt and pepper mixed in. Great salad and easy to make. It would be perfect with a burger:

Civil War Mac & Cheese

I'll admit to not being the best at blogging on a regular basis. However, I have been keeping my promise of preparing one vegetarian meal a week. I'm a bit behind, so I'll start where I left off: Civil War Macaroni and Cheese.


I stumbled upon the recipe for Civil War Mac & Cheese by accident. It can be found on Simply Recipes: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/civil_war_macaroni_and_cheese/



I was intrigued because I had never made a recipe from the Civil War before. Frankly, it didn't seem that difficult (and it wasn't). The dish is very simple to make. I normally cook macaroni in water. It's a lot better if you cook it in milk.



However, I was stunned when it came time to make the cheese sauce. I followed the directions exactly and discovered that my cheese to macaroni ratio was waaaay off. Based on the directions, there just isn't enough cheese sauce given the amount of macaroni. I did my best and made more, but it still wasn't enough. In the end, my macaroni looked like this:







Ok....so it doesn't look like the picture that goes with the recipe. But really, it didn't look THAT bad in person. The problem is it's not very creamy. This is a personal preference I think. So, at the end of the day I've learned to cook my macaroni in milk from here on out and that I adore creamy, gooey mac and cheese.

Spaghetti with Green Garlic & Olive Oil

We had a second vegetarian dinner this week - spaghetti with green garlic and olive oil. The recipe came from fine cooking. You can get it here: http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/spaghetti-green-garlic-olive-oil.aspx I was excited to have a recipe for green garlic. My farm share (Brinkley Farms: http://www.brinkleyfarms.com/) just started up again and they had green garlic available. As you might guess, this recipe was simple to do. It took 30 minutes from start to finish. You begin by making the pasta

As it's cooking you saute the green garlic in olive oil

Then mix it all together!

I mixed some parmesean in there too. I was worried when I took my first bite. The dish did not look as pretty as it does in Fine Cooking. I thought it looked rather bland, but I was wrong. The dish was very flavorful. The garlic gave it just the right bite. My only criticism is that it was a very rich dish. There is a decent amount of olive oil used and it resulted in the dish feeling a bit heavy. Overall, it was good. If you have access to green garlic (espicially from a farmer) try it out.

Salad & Focaccia

We had some computer problems last week which led to me getting behind in my blogging. However, I did keep up with my vegetarian cooking! In the last two weeks we had creamy tomato soup and risotto. I'm not going to write about them now. I eat those two things a lot so I'll catch'em when they come back around. This week we're having at least two vegetarian dishes. The first one we had today was a salad. Very simple. It had chick peas, red onions, and hard-boiled eggs on it.

But something was missing from this salad. Something very, very important. Yes - baked goat cheese.

I don't know if you can see the cheese or not, but I've got three little rounds of it in the center of my plate. Baked goat cheese is simple. Take a log, and cut it into rounds. The goat cheese will crumble so just pick it up and mush it together into a circle. Brush olive oil on it, add salt and pepper, and then any herbs you want. I used chives. I then tossed the left over chives into the salad. It bakes at 350 for 8-10 minutes (I got this from Everything Vegetarian by Mark Brittman). When it comes out, let it cool for a couple of minutes and the toss it onto your salad. Sooooo very yummy.

As you can also tell we had bread. Mark made focaccia. I thought to take a picture to it after we had eaten some of it. It was fantastic.

Overall this was a great meal. Very simple to put together and not overly filling.

Swiss Chard and Cheddar Quiche

On Thursday I made a swiss chard and cheddar quiche. The recipe came from the April 2011 issue of Real Simple. This was a very simple dish to make. All I had to do was chop an onion and the swiss chard and then soften them in a pan. I then dumped that into a bowl with some eggs, salt and pepper, and cheddar cheese. Toss all of that into a pie crust and bake for 45 minutes. Viola! Here's what I got:

I forgot to take a picture of it until we were sitting at the table eating it!

It came out of the oven looking awesome. Mark said it was perfect, and he loved it. He even saved some for lunch on Friday. However, I hated it. I hated it so much that I dug a beef burrito out of the freezer and had that for dinner. Is it cheating if I make a vegetarian meal but end up eating a beef burrito? I tried it so I think that counts.

Mark said the quiche was perfect and delicious and that the problem was with me and not the recipe. I had a problem with the texture of it. I found it to be entirely too squishy yet Mark assured me it was well cooked. His theory is I don't like baked eggs. There were three eggs baked into the quiche so I'm going with what he said.

If your into quiches then I think you will like this. Next week I'm falling back on tomato soup since it will still be cold outside. However, I dug up a new recipe for the soup, and I am looking forward to testing it out.

Spaghettit Puttanesca & Crostini

This weeks' vegetarian meal featured goat cheese and carmelized onion crostini and spaghetti puttanesca. Let's start with the crostini. The recipe for it came from the April/May 2011 issue of Fine Cooking. It looked like this:

I toasted the bread, smeared some goat cheese across it, and then topped it off with carmelized red onions. This is the easiest and yummiest appetizer ever! I could eat it all day long. Go make it now.

For dinner I decided to make Spaghetti Puttanesca. Now, in terms of learning more about vegetarian cooking, spaghettit seems like a cop out to me. But, I had a lot of the ingredients sitting around my house so it seemed like a good way to use them up. The recipe was from an issue of Martha Stewart's Everyday Food. It called for anchovies which I left out. Everything else was included. It's not an exciting picture. How exciting can spaghettit be? Capers, olives, and pieces of garlic are hidden down in there.



Overall, I never care to eat this dish again. While it did call for me to make my own pasta sauce (and I LOVE making pasta sauce from scratch), the sauce just didn't work for me. It used a tomato puree as its base. While I added salt, pepper, etc...to the puree it just didn't sit well with me. Maybe if I made this from scratch with tomatoes I had grown or pureed myself I would like it better.

I have no idea what I'll try next week. I will continue eating the goat cheese and bread. What's your favorite vegetarian dish?

Tabbouleh & Samosas

The vegetarian meal for the week was tabbouleh and samosas:

Mark did most of the work for this. He makes an excellent tabbouleh. All I had to do was go to Whole Foods and fry the samosas. Samosas can be filled with a variety of things including meats and beans. We typically fill ours with potatoes. There's also some jalapeno in there plus whatever Mark felt like tossing in. The samosas had a nice amount of spice to them.

None of this stuff is hard to make. I highly recommend getting a recipe for either of these things and giving it a whirl. We always make enough tabbouleh to have leftovers. The stuff is always better on day two when it's had time to hang out and marinate.