Snappy Shrimp Dinner & Korean Soba Noodles

Weeknights are hard. Considering the fact my refrigerator is now too small to hold more than a few days' worth of food, planning meals a week in advance isn't so much an option any more. So, while that cuts down on food waste, it also means I find myself stopping at the grocery store on my way home from work quite a bit.


It's nice to have a few meals that are quick and easy to prepare, making the after-work grocery trek not such a big deal time-wise. This shrimp dish is one of those meals. It includes some of my favorite quick-cooking ingredients (most notably, shrimp), with a few things you see me combine all the time: peppers, tomatoes, onions, white wine, and lemon. I love a sauce with a nice, acidic bite ladled over simple white rice. A healthy heap of spinach rounds it out nutritionally.

SNAPPY SHRIMP DINNER

INGREDIENTS

2 T. olive oil
1 small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, put though a press or minced
1/2 lb. raw peeled, deveined shrimp
1 red bell pepper
1 orange bell pepper
1 red chile pepper
1 can whole peeled tomatoes and all juices
handful fresh parsley, chopped
1/2 c. white wine
juice of one lemon
salt and pepper to taste
several big handfuls raw baby spinach leaves
cooked white or brown rice

STEP 1: Place the rice in a rice cooker or cook according to package directions. While it's cooking, heat olive oil in pan over medium heat and cook onions and peppers (including hot chile pepper) until tender. Add garlic and cook another minute.


STEP 2: Add lemon juice, wine, about 3/4 of the parsley, and tomatoes. Break up tomatoes with a wooden spoon and stir until well-mixed. Season with salt and pepper. Bring heat up to medium-high and cook, covered, for about 5 minutes.



STEP 3: Add spinach to the pan and stir. Recover and cook for about 2 minutes, until spinach is slightly wilted.


STEP 4: Add shrimp, stir, and recover, and cook until shrimp is pink and cooked through, about 4-5 minutes. Remove from heat. Taste and adjust seasonings. Spoon shrimp and veggie sauce over rice. Top with remaining chopped parsley. Enjoy!


I got the idea for this easy noodle dish when browsing thekitchn.com, an offshoot of Apartment Therapy, one of my favorite blogs. The original recipe (found here), was actually for Naengmyun, a Korean noodle dish served in cold broth. I thought the combination of pear, cucumber, and typically Asian flavors was interesting, and I thought it could be nicely adapted into a cold noodle dish - sans the broth, making it more portable as a workday lunch. I strayed from the original recipe, pumping it up with crisp green beans for a greater veggie-to-noodle ratio, but I tried to keep the spirit the same.

KOREAN SOBA NOODLES

INGREDIENTS

3 bundles buckwheat soba noodles
1.5 lbs fresh green beans, trimmed and halved
1/4 c. rice vinegar
1/4 c. soy sauce
3 T. toasted sesame oil
1 one-inch piece ginger, thinly sliced and cut into small pieces
3 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
1 T. Sriracha hot sauce
3-4 T. finely chopped green onions
1 ripe Bartlett pear, thinly sliced and cut into small pieces
handful cilantro, roughly chopped
1 fried egg (for serving), optional
thinly sliced cucumber, for serving, optional

STEP 1: Boil soba noodles and green beans together in a large pot of salted water. Drain.


STEP 2: Meanwhile, prepare the sauce. Combine rice vinegar and next 6 ingredients in a bowl and whisk to combine. Pour over noodles. Add pear and cilantro to pot and toss to combine. Thinly slice cucumber and place on top before serving. Just before serving, fry an egg and place it on top of the noodles. Serve and enjoy!


These noodles are so light and refreshing - perfect for a lunch that won't weigh you down or send you into a midday food coma when you should be pounding out headlines.

Thanks for reading! More soon...

Sick Day Soup(s) & The Rollover Elvis

Wow, it's been much too long, my friends!


I spent the August-to-September transition moving from my smallish apartment to my tinyish apartment (because, you see, it was just going to be little ol' me), and then my better half unexpectedly moved back from his stint in our nation's capital.

So it's me, Ross, and Sascha - and as they say, three's a crowd. And in our Boystown studio, three's verging on an unruly mob.

The good news? Well, yes, that we're happily reunited, but also - I now have a dining room! Behold:


OK, it's technically a "breakfast nook" (or as the previous tenant and my good friend Emily had it, a bedroom), but it is a room with a table that between one to four individuals can dine in - thus, a dining room. That was one thing my old place lacked that I always had a jones for. But now I can eat breakfast - or any meal I darn well please - in my sunny, yellow, Seventies-throwback dining room - er...nook.



The bad news is...well, there's no real bad news, although I'd love to return to the blog with some triumphant culinary masterpiece, and instead I have...a grilled cheese sandwich.

I call it: The Rollover Elvis.

It's a known fact that The King enjoyed fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches (a man of impeccable taste if ever there were one). And in a pinch the other night, I found myself with Swiss cheese, some gala apples, whole wheat Challah bread (found at Treasure Island - a treasure indeed) and some natural peanut butter. I was inspired by an amazing sandwich I had once at the excellent gastropub Hopleaf in Andersonville - it was cashew butter, sharp Irish cheddar, and some sort of fruit chutney (fig?) nestled between buttery, crisp-fried Challah bread.

I figured if Elvis were alive to shimmy anywhere near my kitchen, he'd gyrate in sheer horror at the bastardization of his deliciously gooey southern treat - so he's probably rolling over in his grave. Well, Elvis be damned - the sandwich was downright tasty! (Fit for a King?)

It took about 10 minutes to make, start to finish, and was surprisingly hearty. It's protein-packed, buttery, and it's a so-simple-it's-stupid meal solution for a quick dinner when you're just too tired to make anything.

THE ROLLOVER ELVIS

2 slices whole wheat (or regular) Challah bread
2 thin slices Swiss cheese
several thin slices apple
natural peanut butter
pat of butter for the pan


Melt the butter over medium-low heat. Spread the peanut butter on one slice of bread. Lay the cheese on the other. Arrange the apple slices on top of the peanut butter and lay that piece of bread in the pan. Top with the cheese and other slice of bread. Fry until browned and crisp, then flip. Fry on other side until desired doneness. Slice in half and enjoy!

Because Nature must always laugh in the face of human bliss, Ross and I have spent this last week under the weather. I got a beast of a cold, then promptly passed it on to him, despite his best efforts to ward it off. Luckily, I'm one mean soup-making machine.

I made a veggies version for me, first, then a chicken version for him, later.

CHICKENLESS NOODLE SOUP

1 and 1/2 qts. vegetable stock
1 large carrot, peeled and thinly sliced
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic
juice of one large lemon
2 T. olive oil
big handful baby spinach leaves
big handful egg noodles
2 eggs, whisked
salt and pepper
Sriracha sauce (optional)



Heat olive oil in large pot. Add onion and carrots and cook until beginning to soften. Add garlic (press through a garlic press or mince), and cook for about a minute. Add lemon juice and some salt and pepper. Cook for another minute. Add stock and bring to a boil. Cook for about 5 minutes, then add the noodles. Cook for about 5 more minutes, then add the spinach. Cook for about 3 more minutes, then add the whisked eggs and stir quickly so they cook and scramble, like egg drop soup. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve and enjoy!


SICK DAY CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP

6 chicken thighs, cut into bite-size pieces
3 T. olive oil
2 celery ribs, diced
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, peeled and sliced thinly
2 T. white wine vinegar
salt and pepper
2 qt. chicken stock
fusilli pasta
dash Worchestershire sauce
poultry seasoning
all-purpose seasoning



In a large pot, heat olive oil. Saute carrot, celery and onion, seasoning with salt and pepper, until softened. Stir in vinegar and cook for a couple minutes. Add stock and chicken. Bring to a low boil. Add the rest of the ingredients. Cover and cook until chicken is cooked through. Add the pasta about 8 minutes before you want to serve the soup. Reduce heat and simmer until ready to serve, tasting to adjust seasoning. Enjoy!



Here's hoping this long-overdue post finds you all healthy and happy. More soon...

Lusciously Legumelicious Soba Noodles

I love soba noodles.

Apparently, they're extremely difficult to make from scratch. The buckwheat flour is tricky to work with, and it takes years of practice and training to make excellent soba noodles. I like to think that eating lots and lots of soba noodles is my way of showing my appreciation for all the hard work these soba masters put into their craft.


After stumbling across them at World Market (finally), I was excited to make a dish bursting with Asian flavors and seasonal goodness. I happened to make the noodles on a day when my fridge was less-then-ideally stocked, and I ended up resorting to padding my basic peanut sauce recipe with some jarred Satay sauce form Trader Joe's that I bought months ago - I'm not dead, so I guess it was fine. The recipe I've provided below, however, is the real deal.


Soba noodles are tastier than plain old spaghetti (although this recipe would be fine with whole wheat pasta subbed in), and there's something about their texture that makes them the perfect complement to hearty, leafy greens and stubbornly crisp summer beans. The peanut sauce is so refreshing, and only requires a few ingredients. The noodles simply swathed in the sauce would make an excellent lunch, served cold with a fresh green salad on the side.

INGREDIENTS

9 oz. dry soba noodles
1 bunch red kale (or other variety kale or leafy green)
1/2 c. shelled, ready-to-eat edamame
3/4 lb. (approx.) mixed green and yellow wax beans
1/2 large white onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 T. olive oil
a few slices extra-firm tofu (optional), squeezed dry and lightly pan-fried

sauce:

2 T. natural (no sugar added) peanut butter
a couple good dashes rice wine vinegar
2 T. honey
squirt of Sriracha (to taste)
2 T. soy sauce
juice of 1/2 a lemon


STEP ONE:

Boil the soba noodles in salted boiling water until al dente. About 3 minutes before the noodles are done, add the kale to the water. Drain the kale and noodles.


STEP TWO:

Make the peanut sauce by whisking all the ingredients under "sauce" together. Set aside.

STEP THREE:

Heat the olive oil in a nonstick skillet and saute the onion until translucent. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant. Add the wax beans and cook until slightly tender. Add the edamame and stir in the sauce, stirring around until all the veggies are hot and coated with the sauce.

STEP FOUR:

Place the kale/noodle combo on a serving dish or in individual bowls and top with some of the bean/peanut sauce mixture. Enjoy!


Thanks for reading! More soon...

Salade Nicoise a la Green City Market

It absolutely kills me to disagree with Julia. But when it comes to using canned tuna versus fresh, I simply cannot abide her near-holy directives.


After all, Julia cooked during wartime, when canned tuna was all a gal could come by. I live in a world where fresh fish is abundant - and in the case of my one little $4 tuna steak at Jewel - inexpensive.

Julia's Salade Nicoise calls for canned tuna - that's just how it's traditionally made. Not only did I use a fresh tuna steak, I didn't use Nicoise olives, ostensibly rendering this salad not a Nicoise salad at all! My friend and host Emily, into whose apartment I'll be moving in 12 days (she's moving out), had never had tuna that wasn't from a can, and isn't much of a fish lover at all. I wanted to take this opportunity to school her (pun intended) about the glories of tuna steaks, which in my opinion are a lot more like steak than tuna.


I got really excited to make this salad when I realized that almost everything in it is in season (aaah...late summer!) - the green beans from the market were exquisite, the salad greens were fresh, and even the little thin-skinned new potatoes had an uncharacteristically sweet, creamy taste.

When combined with the eggs I had, and the black olives Emily had, I knew that bringing the salad together would be a snap.

SALADE NICOISE A LA GREEN CITY MARKET

INGREDIENTS

2 big handfuls mixed salad greens
2 hard-boiled eggs, halved
big handful fresh green beans, cut into pieces and blanched
~12 black (or nicoise) olives
1/2 c. halved grape tomatoes, any variety (we used orange ones)
4 small thin-skinned baby potatoes, boiled until tender, then sliced
1 medium tuna steak, fresh
a few spoonfuls capers
1/3 c. cucumbers, sliced into half-moons
1 T. olive oil
salt and pepper

Dressing:

1 T. mayo
1 T. grainy brown mustard
juice of one Meyer lemon
1 T. honey
1 small shallot, minced
1 clove garlic, minced
salt and pepper to taste



STEP ONE:

Heat the olive oil in a grill pan or a nonstick skillet until hot. Cook the tuna on one side, seasoning the side facing up, until it's nice and browned. Flip and cook the other side until it matches, or until the tuna is cooked to your liking. Slice and set aside.

STEP TWO:

Arrange all the elements of the salad in little side-by-side piles and place the tuna on top.

STEP THREE:

Whisk together the dressing ingredients and drizzle over the salad. Serve and enjoy!

Emily also relished learning how to make a quick dressing out of just a few staple ingredients - this is truly the only salad dressing I ever eat anymore.

The salad came out great, and I think Emily may be inching closer and closer to becoming a fish-eater - here's what she had to say:

"Considering I don't like fish and had never had tuna not from a can, I thought it was really good. I couldn't finish all my tuna though - baby steps. It was really good - a lovely mix of flavors in my mouth."

Not too shabby! We spent the rest of the evening sipping wine and using her measuring tape to figure out how in the world I'm going to fit all my worldly possessions into the new place - check back in a couple weeks for pics of the new kitchen and dining area!



Thanks for reading! And thanks to my lovely host Em - more soon...

Meyer-Lemon Poached Halibut with Tuscan Bean Salad & Chard

I'm on a little bit of a chard kick right now. It's in season, and it's just divine everywhere I go looking for it. The bunches at the farmer's market yesterday were so lusciously green and leafy, I bought two different varieties. In this dish, I chose to use the classic Swiss variety.


My good friend Colleen, who "doesn't eat quadripeds," challenged me to make a meal with fish. Since I've really been dialing back the bipedal and quadripedal animals myself lately, I was all too excited to make it work. I decided on halibut, which is a notoriously not-overly-fishy fish. Only after I bought a gorgeous filet did Colleen tell me that apparently, halibut is also one of the most difficult fishes to cook.

Undaunted, I decided that cooking the halibut in a sauce on low heat would keep it moist and prevent it from overcooking. My instincts were correct, and we found ourselves with a couple of delicious, quadriped-free dinners.


MEYER-LEMON POACHED HALBUT WITH TUSCAN BEAN SALAD & CHARD

INGREDIENTS

Tuscan Bean Salad:

~1 c. cooked chickpeas (canned is fine)
~1/2 c. cooked cannellini beans (canned is fine)
~ 1 c. cooked wheatberries
glug of good olive oil
zest and juice of 1 Meyer lemon
chopped fresh rosemary
chopped fresh oregano
chopped fresh dill (or you could use parsley)
salt and pepper
red pepper flakes

Chard:

1 large bunch fresh Swiss chard, tough stems removed, chopped into pieces
a little olive oil
salt and pepper

Halibut and sauce:

1 shallot, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 T. olive oil
3 T. butter
Two fresh halibut filets
1/2 c. dry white wine
Juice of 1 Meyer lemon
Juice of 3 on-the-vine tomatoes (use a sieve to prevent any seeds from getting through)

STEP ONE:

In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients for the Tuscan Bean Salad. Toss to combine. Allow to sit in the refrigerator for a few hours, covered. Bring to room temperature before serving.


STEP TWO:

Blanch the chard (dunk for about a minute into boiling water, then drain and rinse with cold water). Set aside.

STEP TWO:

Heat the olive oil and butter and in large, semi-deep skillet that has a tight-fitting lid. Cook the shallots until translucent. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant.

STEP THREE:

Add the white wine, lemon juice, and tomato juice and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to medium-low. Season the broth with a little salt and pepper and add the fish fillets to the broth. Cover and cook until halibut is just cooked through, about 5-6 minutes. Do not overcook. Remove halibut and set aside. Cook the sauce on high heat for another few minutes until it reduces a bit.


STEP FOUR:

While the fish is cooking, in another skillet, heat a little olive oil for the chard. Saute the chard quickly until it is hot and just a tad more tender than it was from blanching. Season with salt and pepper.

STEP FIVE:

On two plates, spoon some Tuscan Bean Salad. Place some sauteed chard on top of the salad. Top off each with a halibut filet, then pour the poaching liquid over everything. Serve and enjoy!


If you wanted to make this salad more quickly, using canned beans would be fine. I really liked the texture of the beans I cooked myself, although I came perilously close to oversalting the bean salad - I just dialed back the salt elsewhere and the overall dish came out fine...whew!

The bitterness of the chard was a nice astringent complement to the creaminess of the beans and the succulent, tender fish. I thought the sauce was pretty strongly lemony, but being a lover of all things lemon, it certainly wasn't too lemony for me!

Overall, I thought the meal felt really indulgent when it was actually really light and healthy. Here's what Colleen thought:

"Basically this is my ideal summer meal - light lemony fish, a bed of greens, and magic chickpea melangé. I'm still not quite sure what makes Meyer lemons so amazing, but I swear I could taste a difference in the sauce. Next time I would not brine the beans (though I enjoyed the salt a great deal) - I think it's easy to just add seasoning later on. Maybe we (you) could try an iteration of this dish again for the wintertime and create a more hearty, brothy sauce and winter greens? Mmmm, broth."

Not too shabby! (And I totally agree about brining the beans - a very salty oops. I had no idea the beans would soak up the salt from the water the way they did.)

It was a successful, laid back dinner at home followed by a tour de Ukie-village bars - deliciousness followed by friends and chatter! Saturday night, perfected.

Thanks for reading! More soon...

Quick Bi Bim Bop Bowl

Ross and I used to live in Uptown, and some days when we'd ride the train home together, we'd get off at the Sheridan red line stop (our stop) and have a quick, healthy Korean dinner at BBop, which is practically underneath the train tracks.


I never quite understood the name BBop until I began to look into making my own Korean food - namely, Bi Bim Bop, a simple rice, egg, meat, and veggie concoction. Then one day it hit me - BBop is a cutesy abbrevation of Bi Bim Bop, one of Korea's most famous and most popular dishes.

I was always struck by how simple the dish is - it's rice, marinated meat (chicken or steak), sprouts, cucumbers, carrots, and spinach, simply placed into a bowl - not mixed up, just placed side-by-side, Salade Nicoise style. You douse it with hot sauce or top it with kimchi, and there you have it: a Korean dinner.


The idea to create my own version of Bi Bim Bop struck me last night, when I found myself with not much more than a few eggs, a couple carrots, and some leftover brown rice in the fridge. Eggs and rice topped with Sriracha is one of my favorite quick-and-lazy meals, but I wanted to punch up the nutritional content. And it hit me - I was only a few veggies away from Bi Bim Bop.

I did change a few things (what did you expect?). I opted for fresh broccolini over spinach; I kept it meatless but added some protein with some shelled, ready-to-eat edamame (sticking with the Asian theme); I left out the sprouts because I'm not a sprouts fan; and I improvised an Asian-flavored sauce that tasted remarkably like the Korean sauce from BBop - a lucky coincidence, believe me.

QUICK BI BIM BOP BOWL

INGREDIENTS

~1 cup cooked brown rice (or you could use white)
1 medium carrot, shredded
1/2 c. cucumber, sliced into half moons
handful cooked, ready-eat, shelled edamame
1 bunch broccolini, quickly boiled or steamed until crisp-tender, tough stems removed
1 egg
butter for frying the egg, or oil or pan spray

sauce:

1 T. Sriracha (if you don't like things spicy, start with about a tsp.)
2 T. low-sodium soy sauce
a couple dashes rice wine vinegar
drizzle of honey
1 clove garlic, minced


STEP ONE:

Arrange the rice and all the veggies on a plate or in a bowl (traditionally, they are placed side-by-side in little piles, not mixed together). Heat a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat and melt the butter. Fry the egg until the whites are cooked and the yolk is still runny.

STEP TWO:

Meanwhile, whisk together the ingredients for the sauce. Place the egg on top of the rice and drizzle the sauce over the rice, egg, and veggies. Enjoy!


Bi Bim Bop is great with chicken; if you wanted to add chicken to this dish, I'd marinate diced chicken breast in the sauce, then just quickly saute it until it's cooked through.

The Bi Bim Bop came out great! I absolutely love how the sauce came out, and I will definitely be making it again for future Asian cooking needs (beware: if you've never used Sriracha, it is very spicy. My mouth was on fire for 10 minutes after I was finished eating). It's so great to be able to cook something in your very own kitchen that people on the other side of the world love to cook in theirs.

Thanks for reading! More soon...

Cauliflower & Green Bean Linguine

Do these ingredients look familiar?

They should. Because they're the same basic ingredients I used in last night's curry, only put together very differently. This, my friends, is how you cook for one person without wasting food. You commit to a couple of key ingredients, then make them do new tricks with each meal.

To get everything I needed at Whole Foods for the curry (plus a couple other staples and random items), I spent $30. Sounds expensive for what basically amounted to one meal. But it was so much more than one meal, my friends! The curry made three servings (that means dinner, lunch the next day, then another dinner), and this pasta made three servings (same math, same meals). So that's 6 meals for $30, which comes out to $5 a meal.

Granted, both meals were meatless, which helps save money, but if you were to throw in a three-pack of fresh chicken breasts, you'd only be up to about $6.50 a meal - not too shabby, especially considering a healthy, fresh, organic lunch at Hannah's Bretzel will set you back about $12 once it's all said and done. I also keep several ingredients on hand at all times (lemons, cans of diced tomatoes, and pasta, to name a few), but I hope you see my point: you can cook fresh, healthy, and yes - even organic - meals for less than you think.

CAULIFLOWER & GREEN BEAN LINGUINE

INGREDIENTS

1 T. olive oil
2 T. butter
1 small yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 c. white wine
1/2 head orange cauliflower
1/3 lb. fresh green beans, trimmed and cut into pieces
1 can diced tomato with juice
1 red chile pepper, seeded and minced
salt and pepper
6 oz. whole wheat linguine
~a dozen kalamata olives, chopped
freshly grated cheese (any gratable kind you have on hand)


STEP ONE:

Heat the butter and oil in a large skillet. Cook the onions until translucent, then add the garlic and cook until fragrant. Add the white wine, cauliflower, tomatoes and juice, green beans, chile pepper, and some salt and pepper. Cover and cook over medium-high heat.

STEP TWO:

Meanwhile, cook the linguine until al dente. Drain and set aside.

STEP THREE:

Uncover the sauce and let it cook until the liquid reduces a bit. Stir in the olives, then the cooked linguine. Toss, then transfer to a serving dish or bowls. Top with the grated cheese. Enjoy!


This pasta came out great! It was well-seasoned, light yet satisfying (love that), and super-easy. I'm sure you're probably wondering about the orange cauliflower; basically, it was between that and the purple variety, and I just couldn't bring myself to buy a purple veggie that wasn't an eggplant.

As it happened, I also bought this month's Real Simple, which had an article about the nutritional differences between different colors (different strains) of vegetables, citing specifically that orange cauliflower has roughly 25 times the amount of Vitamin A than regular cauliflower. Sweet! And it just looks so darn bright and gorgeous in a tomato sauce - win/win! (By the way, taste-wise, there is no difference.)



I hope these couple of cauliflower-centric meals have inspired you to create healthy, veggie-packed meals for the same price as a Super Value Meal. Thanks for reading! More soon...