It's so easy being green

When I saw a recipe for green minestrone recently, my first thought was "Why didn't I think of that?" Because I really hadn't, ever. And if there's anything I appreciate, it's green! I get routinely teased for green shoes, coats, toenails... but I can handle it. What good is a favorite color if you can't take a little teasing?

So I tucked away the basic idea behind the various green soups I saw online, gathered every green vegetable in the house and went to town.

Green vegetable soup 
Makes 12 cups
1 Tbsp olive oil
3 stalks of leeks, halved lengthwise and sliced thinly
6 green onions, chopped finely
2 large garlic cloves, minced
2 Anaheim peppers, seeded and chopped semi-finely
3 cups kale leaves, destemmed and chopped finely
1.5 cups edamame, shelled
4 baby zucchini, halved lengthwise and sliced
1 bunch asparagus, cleaned and chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
8 cups vegetable broth
Salt and pepper

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat and add the leeks, onions and garlic. Saute until tender and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the kale and edamame and broth, and bring to a simmer for 10-12 minutes, add the zucchini and asparagus and cook for 5-7 minutes more. Taste the soup for desired vegetable tenderness, and add salt and pepper to taste.

Tip: this soup is a great one to make one evening and eat the following. The flavor is, as with most soups, really better the next day.

This is a really healthy soup! Maybe a little too healthy for some of us (me)... so I trotted out a bit of ricotta and whipped up a quick batch of ricotta gnocchi to go along with the healthy goodness. Lovely. Just the right bit of cheese to counteract the rolicking good health of the soup, and fabulous flavor, to boot.

The variations on this could be somewhat endless... is it green? Toss it in! And if one wanted to make it a true minestrone, little pasta shapes could help toward that end, as well as maybe some cannellini beans...

Enjoy!

Seasonal squash obsession

e had a fabulous squash harvest this year... not our largest, by any means, but definitely the most diverse. Usually we just sow a few butternut squash seeds and let the earth and sun and water do their magic (one year I counted 65 squash from two plants). This year I sowed a few seeds of many different kinds--gourds and mini pumpkins, butternut and Crown Prince. Again with the water and sun magic, and voila! Harvest!

Since harvest, roasted squash has become a part of our daily diet, quite happily. Such color! Such nutrients! I roast up one or two at the start of the week, and away we go. Sometimes I will eat a bowl fairly plain; and by "plain," I mean with butter and parmesan. But at other times, it's fun to mix it up a bit. Here are two recent variations.

Roasted squash tacos just seemed like a good idea one night. I made them up as I went along--they were amazingly simple and one of my favorite squash dishes so far this season.

Roasted squash tacos
Makes 4 tacos
4 corn tortillas
1 cup roasted squash, roughly mashed
1/2 cup sweet onion, chopped
1/2 cup peppers, chopped
1 tsp olive oil
1 cup coleslaw, lightly dressed

Sautee the sweet onion and peppers with the olive oil in a medium hot saute pan for a few minutes, stirring and tossing occasionally. When they are limp and al dente, transfer to a bowl. Warm the squash--either in the same saute pan, or the microwave, as well as the soft tortilla shells.

Assemble the tacos: shells first, roasted squash, peppers and onion mixture and coleslaw. Salt and pepper to taste, and enjoy.

Another time, the squash morphed into lovely morsels of ricotta squash gnocchi, based off a pumpkin gnocchi recipe I found on Pinterest. Heavenly!

Roasted squash gnocchi
Makes about 48 little 1-inch dumplings
2 cups roasted squash
1 cup flour
1 cup ricotta
1 cup parmesan
Salt and pepper

Put the squash, flour, ricotta and parmesan in a food processor and pulse a few times to pull all the ingredients together. Once they are roughly mixed, turn the food processor on and process for 30 seconds, until smooth.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil, then turn the burner down to a simmer. Drop the ricotta-squash mixture into the water in small spoonfuls, about a dozen at a time. Let them simmer for a couple of minutes, until all the dumplings have risen to the top. Take them out of the water with a slotted spoon, and do another batch of a dozen, until the dough has been used up.

My best treatment of the squash gnocchi was a couple of days after I'd made the dumplings:
Double squash gnocchi
Serves 1
1 cup of roasted squash
10 squash gnocchi
1 garlic clove, sauteed
1 Tbsp olive oil
8 sage leaves, minced
1/3 cup parmesan

Saute the garlic and sage leaves in the olive oil, over medium heat. Add the squash and the gnocchi and toss together with the garlic and sage. When the gnocchi and squash are heated through, add the parmesan, toss quickly and plate!

And of course, there have been a couple of variations on the squash salad a la Ina... and then there's this other salad too... I seem to have a thing for squash. And what a lovely thing it is!

Do you like squash? What's your favorite way to eat it? I am always looking for new ideas!

Ricotta gnocchi

icotta gnocchi is one of those dishes, where, if I remembered how easy and versatile (and yummy) it is, I'd make it all the time! So, it's probably good that my memory fades... But when I remember all over again, pull out the ricotta and enjoy making and eating these little dumplings, it is always a pleasant "oh, yes, these!" moment.

Ricotta gnocchi
Makes about 50 1-inch dumplings
1 15 oz container ricotta
3 eggs
1 cup flour
Salt and pepper

Drain the container of ricotta in a colander lined with paper towels, for a couple of hours or overnight. (The original instructions on epicurious don't call for draining the ricotta, but I like to (and plenty of other recipes point that direction). The dough is pretty soft as it is, so getting rid of some of the excess moisture--even if it's just onto the paper towels, or tea towel if you prefer--helps stiffen it up a bit and makes for easier handling.)

Place the ricotta and eggs in a medium bowl and beat with an electric mixer until very smooth. Add the flour gradually and mix thoroughly. Salt and pepper a bit, maybe a teaspoon of salt and a couple of grinds of the peppermill.

Meanwhile, have a pot of water on a low boil, nothing too rolicking. Take two teaspoons and fill one about half full and use the second to push the dumpling off and into the water. Depending on the size of your pot, fill it with about 12-15 dumplings. Let them cook until they float to the surface, about 3-4 minutes. Collect them from the boiling water with a slotted spoon or long handled strainer. Place into a bowl or on a tray until you're ready to use, and continue cooking the gnocchi until all the dough has been used up.

Now, what to do with these little bundles of cheesy goodness? Pretty much anything your heart desires! I treat them like pasta and combine them with tomatoes and basil and garlic and parmesan  (pictured above). I've also put them with marinara sauce, or a mushroom sauce. They are also very delicious pan-fried and tossed with parmesan and pinenuts (and kale, see below)... the options do seem to be endless, really.

I arrived at the world of gnocchi via the potato, but I have to say after making the ricotta gnocchi a number of times, I really do prefer the lightness (and cheesiness, of course) of this recipe. I first made them to accompany my very favorite beef recipe for dear friend Kate's bachelorette weekend, and topped them with a creamy basil and fresh corn sauce.

Since then I've tried these gnocchi in a variety of settings, and have to say a) it's a hard dish to ruin, and b) I do much prefer them warm. I toyed with the cool-to-room-temperature idea, extrapolating that they, like pasta, would work well as either a hot or cool dish. I was less than impressed with the cooler version--heavier feeling in your mouth, and less flavorful, in my opinion.

I hope you give these a try soon. So easy, and so good!

Baked ricotta salad with pesto

ummer eating just keeps on rolling... the tomatoes are finally ON, daily, and the corn is minutes away from being truly harvestable (which didn't stop me from harvesting some today anyway!). The basil keeps churning out new and even bigger leaves, and I can't help but whiz up pesto with alarming frequency. Well, I'm not alarmed, but I'm pretty sure you would be if you saw the big dallops I put on just about everything but my granola. Ah well, tis the season, right?

Here's my current favorite salad, combining all these flavors and another new yum discovery: baked ricotta.

First with the ricotta:

Baked ricotta
1 small container part-skim ricotta
2 eggs
1/2 cup shredded parmesan
1/4 cup flour

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Either with a hand-held or stand mixed, beat ricotta very well, until fluffy. Add the eggs and cheese, beat again. Add the flour and mix well, until incorporate.

Spread the cheese mixture into a non-stick-sprayed 8x8 baking pan, and put into the hot oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the cheese sets up and is golden.

Remove from the oven and cool to room temperature.

Baked ricotta salad
Serves 6 as side dish
One recipe baked ricotta (see above), cubed to 1/2 inch squares
4 medium tomatoes, cubed
1 cup fresh pesto
2 cups fresh corn, cooked, cut off the cob (about 4 ears) (totally optional, I made it one day with, one day without... both were lovely)
Salt and pepper to taste

Toss all ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl. That's it. Enjoy!

Tips: If you prebake the ricotta and it's refrigerator cold, take it out in advance and bring it back to room temperature before making the salad. You can also microwave it briefly to bring some warmth back to the cheese. The flavor is much better when not ice cold.

Valentine's dinner for two: Manicotti

alentine's Day, and what to make for dinner?

Not that long ago I posted a Thursday 13 of recipes I have on my to-do list. And of course, I then got distracted and haven't looked back at the list much in the past couple of weeks, other than the salad dressing recipes and a few ebelskiver omelettes I foisted on Seth last weekend... but when I was pondering what to make my love for Valentine's Day dinner, I knew the homemade manicotti I found on food52 would be a good option.

I culled pieces of the dish from various places. I knew I wanted more than just ricotta in my filling, so I found a spinach ricotta filling at epicurious.com to go along with the crepe recipe from food52. I relied on a jarred marinara and the whole dish came together quite quickly.

The first time I tasted manicotti with a crepe in place of a pasta tube was in 1988 in Sydney, Australia. I was on my own in the city, a squeak of a 19-year-old (well, was I ever a squeak? Maybe not...). I had just landed a studio apartment close to the city center and was gearing up to look for a job waiting tables when I happened upon an Italian restaurant on one of the main thoroughfares downtown. I sat down for dinner and did it up proper--manicotti for my main course and a blueberry ricotta cheesecake for dessert (is it any surprise that I remember this meal more than 20 years later? No, not if you know me.). Apparently I was already a cheese freak, and no one argued with me at the restaurant, of course. In fact, when I inquired about possible employment as I was paying my bill, the manager on duty told me to come back in the morning. I was hired on the spot by what turned out to be an exremely neurotic showgirl-turned-restauranteur's wife and so began a six-month adventure at Cafe Giovanni's.

Oh, but the crepe, the crepe. It made an impression. I didn't even know that a crepe was an option to wrap around the filling--Giovanni's also had a beef cannelloni as well--but I loved it the minute I tasted it. It was so fresh and seemed like the perfect vehicle for the ricotta--no thick, chewy pasta standing between me and my cheese!

Spinach-ricotta manicotti
Crepes
1 large egg
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cups whole milk, plus more as needed to thin the batter

Filling
1 pound fresh or whole-milk ricotta cheese
1 cup grated Asiago cheese (about 3 ounces)
3/4 cup chopped frozen baby spinach, thawed and drained, excess moisture pressed out
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 large egg

1 jar (28 oz) marinara sauce
Extra Asiago to sprinkle on top of pan prior to baking

Add the pasta ingredients to the bowl of a blender. Blend, adding more milk a bit at a time, until batter is a pourable consistency. Heat a nonstick 8-inch skillet over medium-low heat. Brush pan lightly with oil, if needed. Hold pan at an angle, and swirl pan as you pour in enough batter to coat bottom of skillet. Cook 30 to 45 seconds, flip and cook for 15 more seconds. And don’t forget, the first one or two might end up being sacrificial until you get the hang of swirling the pan.Transfer to a flat dish or tray. Repeat with remaining batter. You should have 8 to 10 crepes by the end.

For the filling, mix all the ingredients together until well blended. Once the crepes are cooked and cooled, spread a large spoonful of the filling mixture across the surface of each shell and spread it out before rolling each up into a long tube.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Spread a thin layer of marinara sauce on the bottom of a 9x13 baking pan. Place each rolled up crepe in the pan as you finish with them. Once the pan is filled with rolled up crepes, pour the remainer of the marinara on the crepes and sprinkle a half-cup of grated Asiago on top.

Bake in the oven until warmed through and bubbly, about 35-45 minutes, depending on your oven.

We ate our manicotti with a tossed green salad and breadsticks! Very amore!

Oh and this? This is what happens when chocolate cupcakes won't come out of their cute little heart molds. I'm posting this so you're not under any false impressions that everything turns out pretty in this kitchen. Not so. But it WAS still yummy. Chocolate cake and vanilla bean ice cream and strawberry freezer jam from a dear friend (thanks, Sara!). Layered and delish.

Pesto makes everything better!

This morning the frost was definitely getting a little too close for comfort--some really white patches in the garden prompted my turning into Garden Destructo Gremlin. Time to take it down to the ground!

I went out with my picking containers and was amazed to find that many things have continued to ripen, even with the steeply declining temperatures of the past few days. I picked about 30 butternut squashes, a couple of large containers of tomatoes, a few cucumbers, and of course there were still a few zucchini and summer squash.

There were also a number of lovely squash blossoms, and I decided that lunch needed to include one last foray into the stuffed blossom world... but this time with a twist. Pesto! Plenty of pesto still in the fridge, and so I mixed a generous scoop of that in with my usual ricotta mix; because of the pesto, I didn't add the herb mix as I do with the plain cheese mixture. It was quite delicious... pesto DOES make everything better.
Ricotta mixture pre-stuffing.

Blossoms, all fried up and ready to eat. Heaven.
I just love those little squashes still attached to the blooms. I'm already looking forward to the garden again next summer... sort of. I am also looking forward to a few months of gazing at the garden patch without the guilt of thinking about what I should be doing out there...

Ricotta ravioli with fresh corn cream sauce

Heaven! I'm practically live-blogging this little slice of paradise as I eat... (Side note: I've decided that the shorter the window between cooking and posting, the higher the likelihood that posting actually takes place... I don't know exactly why, but my interest in sharing wanes fairly quickly.) (Quiet on the ADHD comments, Kim. :))

Back to heaven. On a plate. I mentioned the ricotta gnocchi with fresh corn cream sauce I enjoyed while dining out last week, and so wanted to replicate it as closely as possible. This did the trick for me, sauce wise, and since I already had the ricotta filling on hand, it was very easy just to make a few quick ravioli.

Easy ravioli
Serves one
Ricotta filling
Six square wonton wraps

Lay out wonton wraps. Place a tablespoon of ricotta filling in the middle of each wonton wrapper. Dip your finger in a small glass of water and run it around the outside edge of the wonton, and fold over into a triangle, pressing the edges together to seal. Set aside. Repeat with remaining five wontons.


Bring a small saucepan of water to a boil, turn down so it's barely simmering. Gently place the ravioli in the water and simmer for 3-4 minutes, until they rise to the surface. Don't boil too long or they will tear apart. Drain ravioli in a colander and then place on a plate, waiting for the perfect sauce.

Fresh corn cream sauce
Serves one
1 shallot, minced
1/2 cup fresh corn, cut off the cob (I suppose you could use frozen, but it will be a far cry from this farm-fresh delight)
2 tsp butter
1/3 cup cream
1/4 cup grated parmesan
1 egg, whisked
Basil and cherry tomatoes for garnish

Melt butter in a saute pan over medium heat. Add shallot and cook until softened. Add corn and saute until cooked through, about 4 minutes. Turn heat down to low. In a small bowl, crack the egg and whisk. Add the cream and grated parmesan and stir well. Pour cream mixture into the saute pan and stir until the cream is warmed and parmesan has melted. Gently ladle over the ravioli. Garnish with chopped basil and halved cherry tomatoes and enjoy.


The last bite is gone and I'm sad. That was really an end-of-summer treasure. Joyous. Now off to pluck the basil leaves off two garbage bags of basil I harvested tonight... green thumbs (literally!), anyone?!

Italy-inspired stuffed squash blossoms

A friend of mine is touring around Italy right now. She's also a local photographer, and an amazing one; every day she posts new photos on Facebook of her latest adventures, and over the weekend she posted some absolutely amazing photos of a street-side produce stand, replete with lots of little zucchini with their blossoms still attached. So beautiful, and inspiring.

I have enjoyed stuffing squash blossoms for many years, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so this season! I was a tad disappointed at the blossom size in our garden currently, but I was able to find a number of good size ones--enough for a lovely Sunday afternoon lunch!

Ricotta stuffing for squash blossoms (or ravioli, too, fyi)

1 cup ricotta

1/2 cup grated parmesan

1 Tbsp. chopped basil

1 Tbsp. chopped parsely

1 Tbsp. chopped chives

Mix all ingredients together thoroughly.

Clean the blossoms by running them under cool water--leave blossoms attached to a few small squash if possible. Gently open the blossoms and stuff with a teaspoon of the ricotta filling. Fill with as much in as you can comfortably fit and still close the petals around the filling.

Warm a skillet over medium-high heat. Coat with a dash of olive oil or nonstick spray.

Crack an egg into a small dish and whisk briefly--add a dash of milk, about 2 tablespoons. Fill another small bowl with flour.

Dip squash blossoms briefly but thoroughly in the egg wash, then roll in flour. Fry in skillet, flipping sides, until browned all around the blossom.

Serve with warmed marinara sauce for dipping. Yum.

There was about half the filling left, so next up is ravioli. Maybe with a fresh corn and basil cream sauce. Oh yes.