Michael's birthday

Happy birthday!!!! Michael wanted a home-cooked meal for his birthday, and I was happy to comply. He decided on stuffed shells, a vegetable side dish (I made Martha's lemon roasted broccoli and cauliflower), and, of course, his family classic, Wacky Cake.
I made the recipe based on this stuffed shells recipe, but modified it slightly. It ended up being something more like this:

1 package of pasta shells (cook for the time recommended for stuffing and baking, so they'll still be pretty firm as you stuff them)

Mix in a bowl:
1 package of low-fat ricotta (it's either 12 or 16 oz, can't remember)
~2 cups of fat-free cottage cheese
6-8 oz grated mozzarella
1/4 cup parmesan
2 eggs
1 tsp each: garlic powder, oregano, dried parsley, basil

Using a big ziploc bag with one corner snipped off (size of a dime), fill the shells and pack them into a 9x13 pan. Mine didn't all fit, so I put about 15 into a separate pie pan and froze them for later.

Top with 1 big jar spaghetti sauce (don't skimp--I needed 1.5 cans to cover the big pan and the pie pan), and another 1/4 cup parmesan. Bake, covered, for 25-35 minutes, at 350. You can remove the foil during the last few minutes to brown the cheese, but be careful, or the pasta will get dry, crunchy spots in it. Let it sit for a few minutes before serving.



I also made Martha Stewart's lemon roasted broccoli and cauliflower. I first made this for Michael over a year ago, on our second date. Awwww....

It's a really yummy recipe. Roasting is seriously the best thing you can do to cauliflower or broccoli, period. It takes away all the bitterness and brings out all the sweetness and savoriness. Mmm. The lemon is a really nice touch, too. Having whole slices of it gives smoky, intense, bright spots to the dish—you don't actually eat the lemon, but having it roasted right on top of the broccoli and cauliflower is a totally different experience from just using lemon juice to dress the veggies.
One thing I always forget with this recipe is that 475 is WAY too hot. It should be at 400 or 425, and still watched carefully. If you do it at 475, you will for sure lose some delicious bites of vegetables to burning, and that's no good.



And finally, I made Michael's childhood favorite, the Wacky Cake. His mom made this for him and his siblings during all of their birthdays growing up. I kept asking Michael if there was any way I could make it a little more exciting or fancy—if it's his special birthday treat, it should be more special than the same thing he and all his siblings got for years, right? So I asked, do you want a different frosting this year? Maybe cream cheese or something? Do you want a raspberry (or other fruit) filling in between the layers, and then chocolate frosting on the outside? Do you want a pastry cream filling? Cut the cake layers in half to fit in even more frosting/filling? How about a "crumb coat" layer of peanut butter frosting, and then the chocolate frosting on top of that? A ganache? Chocolate chips? Sprinkles? He said no to all of them! I was surprised he let me put birthday candles on top, for goodness' sake. :) I guess there's no messing with childhood memories!

Happy birthday, Michael! This was a fun meal to make!

Kraft Macaroni, done fancy-style

Look at me, trying to make boxed macaroni into something fancy and grown-up. I'll be honest, I'm writing this up a month late and I'm trying to remember what I even put into this, but I'll do my best. Clearly I added a box of frozen spinach. I also recall adding liberal amounts of garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and chili powder. I also seem to recall adding in maybe half a brick of cream cheese—that went a long way toward making this taste of something besides the orange powder (which I did actually add, and it turned out to be much yummier when it was balanced by lots of other flavors).

I pretty much winged this, but it was pretty good. Would I serve this to company? Of course not. But it's nice knowing that those trashy boxes in my pantry can become slightly more interesting, and slightly more nutritious with those greens in there.

Lemon Cake-Pie

Recipe here.
Yes, CLEARLY I am no food stylist, but this dessert was really flipping awesome. And the picture actually does kind of show you what the layers are like. The recipe fits perfectly in a square pan, with NO crust (the original recipe called for one, but I really think a crust would have been bad for this). It turns into a light, angel-food cake layer on top with a layer of luscious lemon curd on the bottom. It's delicious hot but AWESOME cold. I think Michael had like one serving when I made it and then I finished off the rest of it over the next two days. SO good. A+.

Crock Pot Butter Beans

So clearly I am not cut out to be a food stylist. But this was really tasty, and crock pot meals are just a blast to come home to. I got big ol' dried butter beans from the store—love the way they plump and get HUGE!—and tossed them in the crock pot with vegetable broth, a bay leaf, some garlic powder, an onion (halved, but removed before serving), and a can of stewed tomatoes. And lots of salt. Then we ate it over toast and it was pretty dang good. Seriously, giant butter beans are just the best. You can really appreciate how creamy and smooth they get in the crock pot!

I'd probably serve this over rice, and with a green salad to make it a more official-seeming dinner.

BUTTER!!!

Wondering what I did with all that leftover whipped cream from last night? Well, I knew it wouldn't last much longer. In fact, it would probably mostly deflate just from being in the fridge overnight. So I decided to leave the leftover whipped cream in the Kitchenaid, rev it up, and let it whip that cream into butter.



BUTTER, Y'ALL!!!

Yup. So I kept it going on high speed for...maybe 5-10 minutes? After a while, it started looking curdly and I was worried that something had gone wrong, but a few minutes after that, it just...turned into butter! Seriously, it was churning away, and I left the kitchen to go tell Michael something, and suddenly I heard a loud thwack-thwack-thwack from the kitchen. I of course assumed that my dear darling Kitchenaid had exploded (have I mentioned it's from 1965? yeah...), but it turned out that the butter had just...suddenly coalesced into a big lump. Which I retrieved from the mixer, and which I now display proudly. (It also left a bunch of buttermilk sitting at the bottom of the mixer, which I also retrieved, but never ended up using in anything. This kind of buttermilk is not the same as buttermilk from the store, which is fermented and slightly sour.)

Anyway, unfortunately, this butter was not as good as store-bought butter. I wasn't surprised that it was so pale, but the flavor was pretty weak, too. Bummer. It was still a fun experiment, and not a bad way to use up whipped cream that you know you won't eat.

Cauliflower Puttanesca and Spicy Carrot Potato Salad

Valentine's Day Dinner: Cauliflower Puttanesca (We liked it easy on the olives and no capers) and a spicy carrot-potato warm salad, from The Book of Jewish Food. Both were very tasty. Cauliflower just goes really well with pasta, I think. But the carrot-potato salad was to die for. So cheap and easy, and yet SO flavorful! Awesome.

For dessert:

That used to be a heart-shaped brownie, but it got all mushed up coming out of the heart molds. Oh well! Also, that's legit whipped cream, whipped by yours truly (and yours truly's Kitchenaid).

Barley and Spinach Salad (with feta, white beans, and cranberries)

I love me a warm grain salad. Especially in the depths of winter, when you're getting over Thai food-induced indigestion, and your apartment is chilly, and you just want something that will warm you up without making you feel terrible about your diet.


(Sorry for the quality--took it on my ipod instead of my camera, and also apparently blogger rotated the picture when it uploaded. Oh well.)

I was inspired by a similar recipe I saw for a quinoa salad with sauteed kale. But I didn't have enough quinoa on hand, and I didn't feel like chopping or sauteeing, so I improvised a little. I ended up making it with barley instead (but any other whole grain like bulgur wheat or brown rice would also be great), and I just defrosted a 10-oz package of frozen spinach. I also added a can of white beans to add to the healthy heartiness. It turned out great!

Here are the amounts I used, for reference:

1 cup dried barley
1 10-oz package frozen spinach
1/3 cup dried cranberries
1 can white/great Northern/cannellini beans, rinsed (chickpeas would also be good)
pinch red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon olive oil
2-3 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4-1/2 cup crumbled feta
salt to taste

Cook the barley according to package directions. Add the cranberries in with the barley for the last few minutes of cooking so they'll soften up. Defrost the spinach in the microwave and stir it in, along with all the other ingredients. Salt to taste.

I just love all the ingredients in this salad, and I love the way they play together so nicely. I've made things similar to this before, but I've never thought to add cranberries. Getting a cranberry in with the other ingredients just adds a really nice, sweet zip to the bite! Love it.

I'm also thinking about possible variations: use a different grain (quinoa, barley, bulgur wheat, brown rice, farro, etc), a different green (some freshly-sauteed kale might have a nice flavor, although that's one extra pan to get dirty...), use tomatoes in the summer instead of the cranberries (and toss in a handful of basil to go with them, yum), parmesan instead of feta, chickpeas instead of white beans...this is a really great base recipe, and I look forward to thinking up riffs on it.

Would I make this again? Oh, definitely! I'm actually already considering just keeping a dish of this (or some variation of this) always made in the fridge so I can have a healthy lunch whenever I want. This is my favorite recipe that I've documented on here so far!

Light baked rigatoni and roasted root vegetables

I wasn't feeling particularly ambitious, so I wanted to make something that didn't need to be "inspired" by something, for which I could make a recipe off the top of my head, and, perhaps most importantly, would use up all the slowly-softening root vegetables we had laying around.

Voila! Roasted things and casseroles are not usually very photogenic, but they were both very good.

We had roasted root vegetables. Michael was kind enough to chop up very large quantities of sweet potatoes, redskin potatoes, carrots, and red onions (and I mean very large quantities--we have two quarts of the chopped vegetables that we didn't have space for in the oven sitting in the freezer still).
And then all we did was drizzle on a little bit of oil, generously salt and pepper, and bake at around 425 until they were soft and fork-tender. One of my secret tricks for roasting vegetables is to add some vegetable broth halfway through the cooking--it keeps them moist and adds a whole new dimension of flavor. Halfway through roasting (so maybe after twenty minutes or so), I stirred the veggies around and poured about a cup of vegetable broth over the two pans. It also deglazed the pans, getting all the yummy browned bits, and that's another bonus of doing it that way.

The light baked rigatoni was even easier--a pound of pasta, a pound of fat-free cottage cheese, a pound of defrosted frozen spinach, a big can of tomato sauce, and enough grated mozzarella and parmesan to top. Bake it up until it's hot and bubbly.

Would I make these again? Oh, definitely. Both of these recipes are sort of standards for me when I'm feeling uncreative, but they're both very delicious, very easy to make healthy (yeah, you could take out the spinach and triple the cheese for the rigatoni, but then you only get to eat half as much!), and dead easy to toss together when you're tired. Especially if your darling husband will do all the chopping for you!