Yummy yogurt!

I am doing an international rotation during the month of July! I am actually leaving in like 1 hour!!
Anyways leaving for a month, leaving my non-cooking husband alone at home, puts the pressure on to use up all ingredients left in the fridge! I was doing a good job until I noticed we had milk left in the fridge which was about to go bad!
Solution.... Make yogurt! My husband eats it every morning for breakfast and it's so easy to do!
I brought the milk to a boil! After it has boiled, I took it off the heat and I let it cool. You cool it until you can comfortably leave your finger in the warm milk for a second or two!




At that point you stir in a few tablespoons of plain yogurt! Then cover the pot with a warm blanket or keep in the oven on a low setting so it keeps warm! Let it sit for most of the day. You can check on it and make sure it looks good! If you want thick yogurt, you can strain it through a cheese cloth!

Here is my yogurt in a blanket:


Hope you enjoy my last post in a while! If I eat anything amazing in Argentina I will try to blog! But I probably won't be cooking!

Farina in a Ramekin!

So recently I bought some brown rice farina!
I thought great I will make it for breakfast! So I put it in the rice cooker and made it according to package instructions! Boy it was horrible! Too salty to eat for breakfast.
So a few days later I had an idea and recreated it!





So...
I sautéed some minced mushrooms and garlic, mixed them into the farina. Then I added, some minced basil and freshly grated Parmesan! I put the farina mixture into Ramekin and baked them for 20 minutes in my toaster oven!
Delicious and healthy!

Roasted Chicken

So when I was sick, I had left some chicken out to thaw! I had to cancel with my guests, but I still had to do something with the chicken, and it had to be easy, cause I still was not feeling well.
I still had tarragon in the kitchen, and a bottle of white wine, which was actually really wonderful wine, but we had accidentally frozen the entire bottle in attempts to chill it. And needless to say wine that is frozen and then defrosted, not good for drinking, but good for cooking!

Ingredients
Chicken (drumsticks and breasts skin on)
Shallot - 1 clove
Garlic - 3 cloves
Tarragon - 1/2 a bunch
Wine - 1 glass worth
Red onion - 1 onion diced

In a ovensafe pan or sauté the diced red onions, thinly sliced garlic, and minced shallots in some good love oil. Sauté over a medium heat and let the onions cook slowly until clear. In the meanwhile salt your chicken breasts with kosher salt. Once the onions are cooked, put the chicken in the pan brown on each side, for about ten minutes on each side. Once the chicken is browned then add the wine and let the chicken cook in the wine on medium heat until the fluid is about half. While you are waiting, preheat your oven to 450. After the liquid is halve add the chopped tarragon to the pan.

Transfer the chicken to the middle rack, and roast for 15 minutes. Then use a tong to turn the chicken pieces over and roast for another 15 minutes. Roast as long as you need to get a nice brown color to the skin.

Keep checking on it until it looks good!

Voila the finished product.

My soup from when I was sick!

This is a picture of the soup I made when I was sick!

Amazing pasta and roast chicken!

Sorry for the long time no writing! But I was super sick, and I have to put a shout out to MK medicine resident superstar who covered my friday CCU call, because I was so sick! I owe him a dinner!

So now that I am back on track, I have to share an amazing pasta recipe I just made. The recipe is originally from "on top of spaghetti" which is the 2nd cookbook put out by the owners of Al Forno, and amazing restaurant in Rhode Island. According to the NY Times, the owners of Al Forno are credited with popularizing pasta as it is eaten in Italy with Americans! This is a must have book! Excellent easy recipes, and literally you can't make anything bad with this book around!

So the recipe is for spaghettini al chiattara. I made this when I was getting better, but still not up for shopping for groceries.

The recipe calls for:
4 bliss potatoes
Fresh sage 2 tablespoons
6 tablespoons butter
1 pound spaghettini
4 ounces gorgonzola cheese

So of course I had to make substitutions cause I didn't have all that stuff. I used the following:

1 big yam
Fresh sage 2 teaspoons minced
5 tablespoons butter
2.5 oz of gorgonzola
1 oz of goat cheese
1 lb of linguine

*of note if you don't have fresh sage the cookbook says don't substitute with dry sage, use dried oregano instead.

So cube your potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes. In a large serving bowl cut up your cheese an butter, and add your minced sage, mash it all together with a fork to make a paste.

Then in a nice large pasta pot, place your cubes potato, with lots of salt. Bring it to a boil, and after it has boiled for 5 minutes, add the pasta, cook until pasta is al dente! Then drain the pasta, but keep some of the cooking water. Add the pasta and potatoes to the gorgonzola sage butter and toss it. You can add a bit of fresh ground peppercorn. A little of the potato may smush and coat the pasta, that's fine and delicious. If the pasta seems too dry, you can add in the reserved cooking water 1 tablespoon at a time.

Here is a pic, doesn't look glorious, but it is absolutely delicious!

So sick today!!!!

So today, I was super sick, like thank god my albuterol inhaler still works sick. I was home all day and could not leave.  Yesterday afternoon, I was ambitious and had made a grocery list of some ingredients so that I can make a festive dinner for one of my couple friends this evening. Needless to say, I was too sick to buy groceries, and dinner was canceled.  However, I did wake up in need of some soup, and I already had thawed a bunch of chicken so that is how my morning started.

I used the following ingredients to make soup
- Thyme
- 1 onion
- Garlic
- Ginger (I only used it because I had a thumb sized piece that I was afraid would go bad)
- Chicken Drumsticks
- Frozen peas
- Some weird worm shaped pasta called Medi


I  first sauteed the onion, garlic, ginger with olive oil, salt, pepper and few sprigs of cut up fresh thyme, in the base of my soup pot.  I then added the drumsticks, so I could brown them a little, once I was done with that I added a bunch of water, 3/4 a way up the pot, and a bunch of salt and pepper.  I let the chicken cook for a good 30 minutes.  I then pulled out the 4 drumsticks, put them in the freezer for about 1 minute to cool them, while the water in the pot kept boiling.  I cut up the chicken into little pieces, and threw the chicken and the bones back into the soup water.  I let it cook for about 10 more minutes, then I added the frozen peas and a cup of pasta.  I waited about 12 minutes, and voila the soup was ready.
I ate about 3 bowls of it with lemon juice added to each individual bowl, and I do think there is some curative properties in chicken soup.

My regrets with this recipe are the following: I wish I had had other vegetables to put in the soup. I used the peas because that was the only vegetable I had besides tomatoes and sweet potatoes.  I did consider the use of sweet potato, but decided on using the peas instead.   I don't really even know why I had frozen peas in my freezer, because it is not something I usually by, so that went into the decision too, so that I could get rid of them. 
Also I wish I added the pasta first and then waited to the very last minute to add the peas.  I think they would have tasted more fresh, hard to tell as they were frozen in the first place.

I don't have any pictures to add, because I was really not up to taking pictures earlier today. I can't even believe I am up blogging now.  I do have left overs, so maybe I will take a picture, but to be honest it is not so glorious to look at, but the taste is good!

Veggie or Kosher variants of last night's dinner

I have a lot of vegetarian and kosher friends, so I was thinking about how to do the recipe differently to accommodate them.

My first idea was to make a cannellini bean purée. And use that instead of the meat and yogurt. I would food process cooked or canned cannellini beans, drain them of any water so it has similar consistency as hummus. I would add olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste. Then I would layer that first on the toasted bread, followed by cilantro, the eggplant, then tomato and I would finish it with nice cheese crumble like feta, or grated pecorino Romano.

For any kosher keepers, I would not make the recipe with meat and leave out the yogurt. The yogurt is really what cinches the whole thing together. I would also not substitute soy yogurt. One could try making a thin hummus and top it with paprika instead of cayenne. But don't just do the meat, it will be way to boring! And don't even think about substituting with mayo!
Toodles

Turkish Crostini

So this weekend we had this fantastic Crostini at Franny's in Brooklyn, which was part of the inspiration of this meal, the other inspiration was a Turkish dish made with eggplant stuffed with meat, and of course the main inspiration was the fact that I have had 1 baby eggplant in my fridge for the last two weeks, and I had three leftover hamburger patties from last night's dinner.



So I browned some onions in a skillet, broke apart the hamburger patties with my hands, added that in and then added some tomato paste, salt and pepper.
I thinly sliced some eggplant, salted it and let it sit, to let is sweat a little. (this was actually my first step, so I could let it sit for a while). After the ground meat was cooked in a different sauté pan I fried the thin slices of eggplant. While they were frying, I minced 2 garlic cloves and mixed them into 1/2 a cup of full fat yogurt, and just lightly salted the yogurt. At this point my husband called and said he was on his way home (about 15 minutes into my cooking time). I was planning to roast my tomatoes but given the new time crunch, I just seared them in the same pan as the eggplants, once the eggplants were done and I had removed them from the pan. I literally left them in there for under a minute.
Here is an action shot!


Then I heated about 1 tablespoon of butter in a small pan added in a bunch of cayenne pepper. And just let it mix together to make a pepper roux for about 30 seconds.
To put it all together, I had a nice loaf of oat honey bread from pigs don't fly, which I grilled in my panini pan. I then put down a layer of cut fresh cilantro, then a layer of eggplant, then a tomato layer, then the ground beef, then I drizzles the yogurt garlic sauce on top, followed by a little pepper roux! Beware cayenne pepper is really spicy! You only need a little.
The hubby loved it, had seconds, and there is just 1 serving left, which is going to a ccu nurse tomorrow (though I don't think it will travel well and it loses the hot and cold elements mixing together thing, but oh well!)
Toodles!

Steak Nicoise Salad

Today I used the leftover French tarragon potato salad again! I added it to some spring greens, tossed in a few olives, some fresh Roma tomatoes, and a few slices of thinly sliced steak from the family dinner on Friday night when I was working! I added a lemon juice and olive oil vinegarette and my lunch was much cheaper than anything around the hospital!

My First Post

So this is the meal that inspired this blog!  So it is appropriate that it be the first image that you all see.

My husband and I sat down to this meal and he told me that he thinks I have a special talent for making delicious meals out of leftovers and voila this blog was born.
This meal is actually mostly not leftovers, but it is the meal that inspired the blog so that's what we are starting with!
The pictured meal is a Thai cilantro hamburger, with a tarragon French potato salad, salad greens, and grilled vidalia onions and sliced tomatoes.
The leftovers part is the tarragon French potato salad.  It in fact is not a French salad at all, but I like to call it that because it makes it sound fancy, and as my friends might tell you, I like things that sound fancy!!  It is completely a made up entity by me!  My parents, my cousin and my husband all went to a steak house together while I was working 2 nights ago.  They had plenty of leftovers, which they planned to give away to a homeless person, but they didn't run into any on the way home, so they stayed in the fridge, thanks to my good fortune.
I found two baked potatoes with a little sour cream on them!  So I cut off the bit with the sour cream, cut the potatoes into cubes (leaving the skin on), and cut up a little tarragon that I had in the fridge, added some salt, lemon juice, French mustard whipped into olive oil, and voila tarragon French potato salad!
(I should note that so far the leftovers from the steak place have fed us two meals, and I am making steak Nicoise salad to take to work tomorrow!)


As for the rest of the meal. I bought the hamburger buns special for today, and I bought cilantro and tomatoes as part of my weekly grocery store trip.  At this point I am going to put in a plug for fresh herbs! I live in in Brooklyn and literally have no room for an herb garden, but I think if you want to make all your food better buy fresh herbs once a week! Cilantro and basil are kinda the worst choice, cause they go bad so fast, but tarragon (I had it from last weeks fresh herb buy) and rosemary last much longer!  I also already had Vidalia onions, ground beef, and Thai rub (the thai rub was a random thing I bought at Fairway because I have a rule that I can buy one new spice whenever I go to Fairway, I had never used it until today).  So I put some cilantro and some red onions in a food processor, drained the water, mixed it with ground beef and the Thai rub, and used my panini pan to grill the patties and the Vidalia onions, and then served the whole dish as pictured!

My husband loved it, and it was definitely cheaper than going out to eat in park slope!  We have 3 hamburger patties left... which I plan to use with an eggplant that I have left over from 2 weeks ago, which probably thanks to GMOs has not gone bad, and make up a fake Turkish dish.... more later on that!
Toodles
- Lady Leftovers