Black Beans with Everything

Time is short. Food is delicious. What to do? A simple pot of home-cooked beans can form a delectable base for every meal from breakfast to dinner and back again. And once you make the basics, your fridge is stocked for the week, or even an impromptu dinner party.

 
Ingredients

For the black beans:
1 1/2 cups dried black beans
3 cloves garlic, peeled
1 bay leaf
Salt

For the rest:
1 1/2 cups volcano rice or other brown rice
Pepper jack cheese, grated or thinly sliced
Handful or two cherry tomatoes, cut into halves or quarters
Handful or two fresh cilantro, chopped
1-2 avocados, diced as needed just before serving
Good quality tortillas
Olive oil
Any or all of the following:
1 clove of garlic, smashed
2 small or 1 large zucchini, cut crosswise into thirds and then lengthwise into sticks
1 red, orange, or yellow bell pepper, cut lengthwise into strips
1 shallot or red spring onion, halved and sliced into half rings
Several handfuls spinach or baby kale
Pastured eggs
Greek yogurt or sour cream
Lime wedges

Rinse the black beans. Place in a pot, cover with 1-2 inches of water, throw in 3 cloves of garlic and the bayleaf, cover, and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to low and simmer gently for 45-60 minutes or until tender but not mushy. Remove from the heat, salt to taste, and set aside.

Cook rice according to package instructions.

Meanwhile, sauté the veggies: Heat a generous glug of olive oil in a wide pan over medium heat. Toss in the garlic, stir for a minute, then add the zucchini and cook until golden here and there. Add the peppers and continue cooking until soft, covering if the pan starts to dry out. Sprinkle with salt and serve hot. And/or, heat a pan, drizzle with olive oil, sauté onion or shallot until softened, and then toss in some greens and cook until tender.

Toss together the tomato and cilantro. Scramble a few eggs if you're headed for breakfast burritos. At the last minute, dice the avocado.

Serve as a bowl: Rice, a sprinkling of pepper jack, beans, and then veggies, avocado, tomatoes mixed with cilantro, avocado, whatever else. Or serve ingredients separately and hand guests tortillas to make fajitas with whatever they would like. Or arrange your rice and beans alongside egg, veggies, cilantro, and a dollop of yogurt for a divine breakfast burrito. The possibilities are infinite. Or at least varied enough for a week of easy eating.

Roasted Broccoli with Gruyere

You know that song, about Romeo and Juliet and broccoli and Gruyère?

You know the one: "Never know how much I love you, never know how much I care, when you put your arms around me, you're like the broccoli to my Gruyère." At least, I'm pretty sure that's how it goes.

Clearly, some pairings are just meant to be. (Don't question it. Just eat.)

Ingredients

2 heads broccoli, tops divided into florets, tender part of stem sliced

1/2 head cauliflower, divided into florets

1 medium red onion, quartered lengthwise and thinly sliced

Olive oil

3 oz Gruyère, grated

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

Preheat oven to 425°.

Toss broccoli, cauliflower, and onion with olive oil in a roasting pan (the veggies should be a couple layers deep). Roast for 40 minutes, turning every 15 or so, until tender. Top with Gruyère, then broil 3-4 minutes.

Sprinkle with salt and white pepper, and serve hot.

Serves 2-4. Best the first day, rather than reheated, so why save any for tomorrow?

Conquering the Cauliflower, Phase III: Leftovers

Lunch in less than ten minutes. Or rather, a gourmet, local, whole foods lunch in less than ten minutes. Can't really beat that.

Step 1: Make this recipe, alongside some fish or chicken or whatever over wild rice (if you make about a cup of wild rice, you can use two-thirds of it for a two-person dinner and save the last third for this recipe).

Step 2: Gleefully remove leftovers from fridge the next day, and make this:

Ingredients
About 2 cups leftover roasted cauliflower
Three big handfuls spinach leaves
1 cup leftover cooked wild rice
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sherry vinegar
1 tbsp whole grain mustard
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Throw the spinach into a pot, cover, set over medium heat, and cook until the leaves just start to wilt from the steam (or zap in the microwave for about 30 seconds).

Whisk the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper together to form an emulsion. Toss with the wilted spinach till the leaves are evenly coated, then add the wild rice and mix well.

Reheat the cauliflower in the microwave for about 1 1/2 minutes on high or until warm but not scalding. Serve over a bed of the spinach-wild rice mixture.

Serves two for a quick and easy and amazingly delicious lunch.

Conquering the Cauliflower, Phase II: Roasted

Cauliflower 2.0. How does it compare to the previous version? Doubtless only time...and repeated sampling...can tell.

This is getting to be an old hat but...you remember that thing I said I wasn't sure if I really liked last week? Well I love it now. Totally mesmerized. Deliciously addicted. Can't possibly stop eating it ever even in a million years ooh wait look what's that?

Ingredients

Olive oil

1 to 1 1/2 heads cauliflower, divided into florets

1 small to medium red onion, quartered lengthwise and sliced into quarter rings

1 slice whole grain bread, coarsely chopped

2 tsp capers, soaked in water for 1/2 hour and rinsed

Kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Drizzle cauliflower and onions with olive oil and toss till lightly coated. Pour into a nonstick baking pan, a couple layers deep, and roast for 45 minutes or until browned and tender, stirring every 15 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a pan over medium heat. When hot, add the bread and capers and fry, stirring, until golden brown.

When the cauliflower is done, drizzle with just a little more olive oil if it's a bit dry. Sprinkle with salt, add the toasted bread and capers, stir, and serve hot.

Serves 4, or two for dinner (pairs well with sablefish over wild rice) and two for lunch the next day (recipe coming soon to a blog near you).

Leftover Roasted Chicken Panini with Peppers and Caramelized Onion

Thanksgiving always raises a multitude of deep and important questions. Should the turkey be stuffed or unstuffed? Six side dishes or seven? Pumpkin pie or pecan? Why are the neighbors putting up Christmas lights before Thursday, and if they're planning that far ahead, where are their Valentine's day decorations? And is there any way to gracefully uninvite your cousin's sister's nephew's socially awkward girlfriend from coming to dinner, or at least to misdirect her GPS so she ends up at someone else's house?

But perhaps the most pressing question tends to emerge unexpectedly the day after Thanksgiving, just when we have been lulled into a false sense of tryptophan-imbued security. It's the question of leftovers. In particular, it is the question of what on earth to DO with all the leftovers. Especially after the fourth helping of leftovers shows no sign of diminishing the vast store left in the fridge.

Obviously, the best answer is the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich. Until you consider that this sandwich could be grilled, and then you realize the Thanksgiving leftover PANINI is the best answer. (Paninis, incidentally, are the answer to 83.4% of the world's leftover problems, according to recent numbers I made up in my head while eating one.)* The other answer is not to make a turkey in the first place, but this is considered weird and unpatriotic if you're not a vegetarian and you might not want to admit to it outright on, for example, a blog. Despite the fact that a discerning reader might notice the lack of turkey in the recipe that follows. But you could totally make this with a turkey. If you had one. Which many people do.

Ingredients (per sandwich)
2 slices good-quality whole grain bread
Olive oil
Leftover roasted chicken, sliced or pulled into pieces
Freshly ground black pepper
A little pepper jack or Monterey jack cheese, grated (optional)
1/4 red onion and 1/4 red bell pepper, sliced into thin half rings and sauteed in olive oil until very sweet
A few baby mustard greens (or sub mustard frisee, arugula, or spinach)

Preheat your panini grill to medium-high. Lightly brush one side of the each bread slice with olive oil (these will become the outside of your panini). Layer your ingredients on the dry side of one of the bread slices: A light scattering of jack cheese first against the bread, then chicken seasoned with black pepper to taste, then sauteed onion and peppers, then a few greens, then the second piece of bread (olive oil side up).

Sandwich your sandwich inside your panini grill and press down lightly until the grill is fully against the bread. Grill until golden brown on both sides. Serve hot.

*You might reply: "Oh, but I don't have a panini grill." To which I would helpfully suggest: "You should totally get a panini grill." To which you might respond: "Oh, but I don't know if I would use it." Which is when I would say: "You know, I think I read somewhere recently that you could solve 83.4% of your leftover problems if you invested in a panini grill, and paninis are just regular old sandwiches that you would make anyway thrown on a grill for a couple minutes, which transmogrifies them into an infinitely more delicious, warm, grilled, succulent, wonderful, amazing, fantastically ambrosial meal." To which you would respond: "Oh, really? I'm completely convinced! What panini grill do you have?" And I would say "I'm thrilled that you're convinced! Our panini grill is a De'Longhi, which is hard to spell and I'm not sure if I have done so correctly, but it makes good paninis regardless." And then we would probably stop conversing because we'd notice that we were only hypothetical and get distracted by whether a panini imagined by imaginary people would taste the same as a real panini, which is one of those Buddhist koans you don't hear as frequently as the hand-clapping thing.

Grilled Veggies and Chicken over Quinoa

Hey guess what? It's summer. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it's clearly high time we put things on skewers and grilled them.

Also, just in case you've been pining for new ways to express your support for the blog, voila: Visit this website, and click "Like" near the top of the page. And as always, you can Follow the blog by clicking the button to the right, either to actually follow via Google or as just a virtual wave to say hi and that you enjoy it here.

Incidentally, I'm completely delighted by the wave of new readers (hello!) as well as by those of you who have been regulars for awhile now and keep coming back. I kept thinking, when I started this, that either nobody was ever going to read it, or that to get readers, I'd have to do one of those advertising thingies (so that someone somewhere would put up a link to my blog in exchange for me advertising Rice-A-Roni or whatever at the top of the page...which struck me as slightly ridiculous for a blog that's purportedly about whole foods). So, let me just take a moment and thank you all so much for reading and cooking along with me. Without you, I would've gone back to easy microwave dinners sometime last October and thought back nostalgically from time to time to the few months I actually did what I wanted to do with food and cooking.

But that wasn't the point. The point was skewers. This combination is delicious, and I like that the meat ends up being a complement to the meal rather than the main focus.

 
Ingredients
Chicken
2 pastured chicken breasts, cut into 1 1/2" cubes
Zest and juice of 1/2 Eureka lemon
1 tbsp chopped green garlic (or sub 1-2 cloves garlic, pressed)
1-2 sprigs rosemary, chopped
Ñora pepper (if you have it)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 red onion, sliced in half again lengthwise and then quartered into wedges (you want squares that are about as big as the chicken pieces)
1 bell pepper, cut into squares (same as above)
Olive oil



Veggies
Olive oil
1 tbsp chopped green garlic (or sub 1-2 cloves garlic, pressed)
2-3 sprigs fresh thyme, chopped
Ñora pepper
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2-3 portobello mushrooms, brushed clean and stems cut off
Summer squash (.25 lbs or a bit less), thickly sliced (about 1/2" thick -- cut pattypans crosswise into circles; zucchinis lengthwise into long strips)



Quinoa
1/2 cup red quinoa
1/2 cup white quinoa
1 cup veggie or chicken broth
A little less than 1/2 cup water
4-6 sorrel leaves, thinly sliced crosswise into ribbons (optional)



Whisk together a glug or two of olive oil with the lemon juice, and then stir in the zest, garlic, rosemary, ñora, salt, and black pepper. Pour over the chicken, toss to coat evenly, and let marinate for an hour or two in the fridge.

About half an hour before you want to take the chicken out, rinse the quinoa and then soak in room temperature water for about ten minutes. Next, whisk together the ingredients for the veggie marinade, and brush over the vegetables (including the onion and pepper). Make sure to let a little marinade soak down into the gills of the portobellos.

Take a couple pieces of the onion and pepper and chop them (I use any pieces that ended up too small or weirdly shaped for the skewers). Rinse and drain the quinoa. Heat a smallish pot over medium heat, and add a glug of olive oil, followed by the onion and pepper. Saute until soft. Stir in the quinoa, saute for another minute, and then add the broth and water. Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce the heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat the grill on high. Push the chicken onto skewers, separating each piece with a pepper on one side and an onion on the other. Grill the skewers, mushrooms, and squash slices, turning to let all sides cook evenly.

Just before serving, stir the sorrel into the quinoa. Use as a bed for the chicken and veggies.

Serves 3.