Quinoa-Black Olive Cakes with Baby Greens and Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

Recipe from Fine Cooking Magazine

Looking for something healthy and delicious? Look no further.

Did you know that quinoa is considered a superfood? And it is a seed, not a grain? It packs a healthy punch - it is a complete protein (a source of protein that contains an adequate proportion of all nine of the essential amino acids necessary for the dietary needs of humans or other animals - (source: wikipedia.com), and has a good dose of B vitamins, iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium, and vitamin E (source: Fine Cooking), and it tastes good!

This was fairly easy to throw together, though it does use a bit of equipment - pot to cook the quinoa, cookie sheet to cool it, bowl to mash the beans and mix the rest of the ingredients, blender to make the sauce, skillet to cook the patties, and a bowl to toss the greens, and of course your dinnerware. But don't let that stop you from making this tasty, healthy meal.

They are even good the next day. Hubby took the leftovers to work and even the boys liked them; and he served them with greens sans any dressing - men.

These would make a great party appetizer if made smaller, and would look lovely served on a rectangular platter with the mini cakes placed in a non-symmetrical pattern over the greens, drizzled with the sauce. Make sure to serve extra sauce on the side, whether you serve this as a meal or an appetizer.

I hope you try this recipe yourself. And if you do, let me know how it turned out and what you thought of it.

Enjoy!

Prosciutto, Melon, and Arugula Salad

 

When summer gives you melons, make a delicious summer salad!

In our household during the summer months we like to buy a variety of melons to cut up and have on-hand in the fridge for easy snacking. I came upon a photo of this salad on The Peasant & The Pear's Facebook page and just had to try and re-create it.

How does one go about re-creating something they have never had before? I could see from the photo they used a balsamic glaze to drizzle on the melon balls, but I was curious as to what the arugula was dressed with. I went to the restaurants website menu to read the description - not much help. Just listed what was easily seen in their photo. So I did a Google search for melon and prosciutto salad. As you can imagine there is an abundance of recipes for this type of salad.

I ended up going with my usual salad dressing I make (walnut oil, Cabernet vinegar, sweet-hot mustard, salt and pepper), subbing balsamic vinegar in place of the Cabernet vinegar to dress the arugula. I tossed the melon balls with a little olive oil and salt (as one of the many recipes I read, had done), and topped the salad with a few shavings of Parmesan. I then made a balsamic reduction to drizzle over the salad.

This turned out to be a very tasty!

Beautiful Baby Beet Salad

From the book Celebrate! by Sheila Lukins

I recently posted a recipe for a beet salad, and as I mentioned in that post we love beets in our household, hence another beet salad recipe so soon, yet very different from the last.

Normally I like to use a mixture of red and golden beets; however, on a beautiful sunny day at the farmer's market the golden beets stood out and screamed summer to me, where the red ones made me think of winter, so golden beets only this time around. And to be fair, I used only red beets in the last salad. 

To prep your beets for roasting, trim the greens to about an inch long. The directions have you trim the root end as well, which I have never done in the past. I would not bother with trimming the root, it leaves the firm end of the root exposed and it pokes through the foil; and you don't want beet juice dripping all over the bottom of your oven.

After roasting, let the beets cool enough to handle and then simply slip the skins off.

In addition to the beets being tossed in a vinaigrette, this salad is served with an orange-mint dressing to serve on the side for dolloping on top.

Whenever a recipe calls for mayonnaise, I always use half mayo and half non-fat plain Greek yogurt. Fage brand is my favorite.

The dressing is made up of mayo, mint, orange zest and juice, salt and pepper. At first bite I liked the dressing with the beets, but the orange zest had a bitter aftertaste that I did not care for. My husband said he too preferred the beets without the dressing - it was too overpowering - you could not taste the beets themselves.

If not for the bitterness of the zest, this would have made a great appetizer.

Success meter (1-3): 2

Roasted Butternut Squash Salad with Warm Cider Vinaigrette

Recipe from Barefoot Contessa - Back to Basics
by Ina Garten




Let me start off by saying I would definitely use arugula in this salad as called for in the recipe; I used spinach that I had in the fridge that I wanted to use up. The peppery flavor of arugula would be a nice contrast to the sweet butternut squash. To me the spinach came across rather "flat" in taste and texture.

As for the dressing I did not have cider vinegar - used champagne vinegar, apple juice in place of apple cider, and I would cut the oil by half - all I could really taste is the olive oil. Not sure how much of an apple presence there would be if I had the correct vinegar and cider.

Monica of A Beautiful Mess raved about this salad; so maybe if I had the correct ingredients for the dressing it would have turned out better. This is definitely worth a second try and would look beautiful on the Thanksgiving table!

Success meter (1-3): 2

Make sure your squash is almost ready before

adding the cranberries. They turn out quite

chewy and hard if cooked too long.

The beginning of what I thought would be a great dressing.

Arugula makes for a prettier presentation. 

You can find the recipe at Barefoot Contessa and on Monica's blog.

Dinner for One (or more!)

This is a real quick and short post!

I want to share with you two tasty dishes I made for myself this past weekend while flying solo.

Both of these serve more than one, but I scaled the recipes down and still had enough for lunches as well.

Success meter (1-3): 3

Stuffed Acorn Squash

Shaved Brussels Sprouts Salad

I found the delicious squash recipe via Let's Eat!, where Ashley (our daughter) credits the recipe to Emily of The Daily Garnish. I am so proud of our daughter who is becoming quite the cook. She is the one who inspired me to start this blog and where I learned my photography skills from (I still have a long was to go). Thanks Ash! Love you!

The recipe calls for orange champagne vinegar which I do not have, so I added a bit of orange zest to regular champagne vinegar. I had a fair amount of stuffing leftover (I cooked only one squash - but the full amount of filling) and had it for lunch two days later. Still it had wonderful flavor.

The Brussels sprouts salad I found on Liz's blog at That Skinny Chick Can Bake and boy can she! If this recipe does not appeal to you, I'm sure you will find something that will.

The salad is garnished with grated hard-boiled egg (Liz omitted) and Parmesan cheese. The next time I make this I will add about 1/4 cup of cheese and a couple of grated eggs to toss in the salad itself for I thought it added a lot of character to this dish. 

As Julia Child would say - Bon Appetit!

Five Star Meal

This week's puzzle night's dinner turned out to be fantabulous!

Andy made is famous barbecue chicken in which he cooked to perfection. My sister and I both went with new recipes for the sides. She thought my green bean dish was great and I thought her salad was awesome. The funny thing is that we both used recipes from Fine Cooking magazine, different issues no less. I tell ya, you cannot go wrong with a recipe from this magazine.

I only have a few pics for this post - I had no intention of blogging last night's dinner but everything looked so beautiful on the plate and it was just too good not to share.

Success meter (1-3): 3

Bitter Greens with Cherries and Pancetta

Green Beans with Cherry Tomatoes and Niçoise Olives

We finished off our meal with the coffee

ice cream I made over the weekend.

Life is good.

Black Rice Salad with Mango and Peanuts

Recipe from Bon Appétit magazine

                   Black Rice Salad with Mango and Peanuts

This month's (June 2012) Bon Appétit magazine has six salads made with grains. I want to make them all! I won't be putting this issue on the shelf anytime soon.

I was happy to find the rice that was called for in this recipe at my higher-end grocery store. I thought I was going to have to order it on-line from amazon - I swear amazon has everything under sun. Yes, they even have the Lotus Foods Forbidden Rice called for in the recipe.

Photo courtesy of lotusfoods.com

I LOVE mango! That is what drew me to this recipe along with the beautiful photo showing the bright colors of the mango, oranges, and cilantro against the black rice.



Photo courtesy of bonappetit.com

For the dressing, the recipe asks for one tablespoon fish sauce (optional) which I did use since I have a huge bottle that I just bought for the cooking group Wok Wednesdays that I recently joined. If you do not have fish sauce I personally would not buy a bottle for one tablespoon. The dressing will be great (I love citrus dressings) without it. If you are like how I used to be and had to make a recipe exactly as written and you do buy a bottle of fish sauce (it is inexpensive) you may want to join the cooking group Wok Wednesdays where we are cooking through Grace Young's book Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge to use up that bottle of fish sauce. I also would omit the peanuts; with each bite that had a peanut, I felt the flavor of this salad dropped down a notch, though the hubby liked the addition of the peanuts. Other than the nuts I loved this salad. When I make this again I will add more mango and orange for I can never get enough fruit.

Success meter (1-3): 3

Book Seventy-Nine: Sunset Grill

by the Editors of Sunset Books


                      Hot Flank Steak Salad with
                    Chinese Black Bean Dressing

Last week we had thunder storms. This week mid 80's and absolutely beautiful - barbeque weather; until next week when showers are forecasted once again. Mother Nature certainly is being fickle this year.

It was warm to say the least. I wanted something quick and light and this was the perfect dish. Flank steak on the grill for a whole eight minutes if that and the dressing took no time at all to pull together. Chop up some lettuce, bell pepper and a few cilantro leaves and bam! dinner is on the table.

I could tell Andy did not care for this one so much though he said the meat was good. His bowl still had a fair amount of greens left in it. May have been the cilantro. This I'm sure would be even better if I had bought the right kind of beans. I could not find fermented black beans so I substituted canned black beans which are not at all the same. Fermented black beans are actually black soy beans that have been dried and fermented in salt and other spices. Still I thought this was a tasty salad.

 Grilled up some naan to go with our salad, opened up a bottle of wine, and life is good.

Success meter (1-3): 3

amazon

Hubby certainly knows how to grill.

Perfection!

You can't see the dressing, but it was there.