Archive | April, 2009

Fresh Strawberry Sauce

30 Apr

This is another of the recipes related to my Foodbuzz’s 24,24,24 April event…  A Very Veggie Experiment.

 

Recently, my goddaughter Kamila told me she loved strawberry ice cream. So when this idea of making dinner for her and her siblings started, I decided to make strawberry ice cream from scratch for her.  Unfortunately, I live this crazy life that I did not have time to fix it.  So I decided to do the next best thing I knew… prepare a fresh strawberry sauce to top vanilla ice cream.

This is great with any berry, in fact, the original recipe I learned from Ina Garten in her Barefoot in Paris book.  I had made it with raspberries, but strawberries are cheaper and more readily available.

 

 strawberry-sauce

 

VANILLA ICE CREAM WITH FRESH STRAWBERRY SAUCE

1 pint of fresh strawberries, hulled and cut in quarters  
½ cup brown sugar
¼ cup water
½ cup strawberry preserves
  1.  In a small saucepan over medium heat, place strawberries, sugar and water and cook them for about 5 minutes, until the sugar dissolves and the fruit starts to breakdown a bit.
  2. When the fruit has cooled down a bit, add them to the bowl of a food processor.  Add the preserves and pulse a few times to combine.
  3. salsa-strawberry-prep1
  4. Transfer to a small bowl and refrigerate for a few hours until ready to serve.

 

Surprisingly, the little ones loved this strawberry sauce, not so much the older ones.  Kamila even wanted hers with a fresh strawberry as a garnish.  Her older brothers exchanged theirs for plain ice cream.

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Thousand Island Dressing

30 Apr

This is another of the recipes related to my Foodbuzz’s 24,24,24 April event – A Very Veggie Experiment…  where I fixed dinner to my finicky friend Mariví and her 4 oldest kids – Ignacio, Diego, Kamila and Daniel.  The littlest one, Sergio, who’s just 3 months old, was spared of our experiment this time… 

I knew giving a side salad as part of dinner to Mariví’s kids was going to be the most difficult one to “sell”.  They are just not used to eating salad. But I had to give it a try…  I remember reading in the book Deceptively Delicious that even when you “sneak in” vegetables and other goodies into kid’s meals, it is important for them to learn that eating salads is key to good nutrition. 

I used organic romaine lettuce and organic cucumbers.  I bought mini cherry tomatoes and told them these were tomatoes specially made for kids.

                                                        c2ad6ae1c305402c1             1007288_cherry_tomatoes

I made them a Thousand Island Dressing to go along with the salad.  That used to be the only dressing I liked when I was a kid, so I figured they might prefer that to any vinaigrette I could make.  I started with a Mayo Ketchup base and added some sweet pickles.

 

 thousand-island-dressing

THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING

½ cup eggless mayonnaise
¼ cup ketchup
4-5 sweet pickles or sweet pickle relish
About ¼ tsp Garlic Salt

 

  1. In a small bowl whisk together the mayonnaise, ketchup and garlic salt.  Add the pickle relish and if using larger slices of pickles, just chop them up as small as you can.
  2. Serve on top of your favorite salad… iceberg lettuce seems to work very well with this creamy dressing.

 

Some of the kids tried the tomatoes only but they were not impressed.  I can’t believe it because in my household, a sliced tomato was considered enough salad for a typical weekday meal when I was growing up.

It was so sad to see all the salads left almost intact…  I was the only one who really ate the salad.  Everyone else, including the mom, left salad on their plates. 

This was the real challenge… but I will not give up.  I will make them eat salad if it’s the last thing I do for that family…

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Breadfruit Tostones

29 Apr

This is another of the recipes related to my Foodbuzz’s 24,24,24 April event… A Very Veggie Experiment.

 

Tostones in Puerto Rico are typically made from plantains… but you can make tostones also out of Breadfruits.  We call them PANA in Spanish. 

Breadfruits are very polarizing – people either love them or they hate them.  For example, my dad does not eat them at all because in Cuba, breadfruit was given as food to the pigs.  And in his mind, he could not bring himself to eat pig’s food.  However, my grandpa on my mom’s side LOVED them.  He would always make a big deal when one of the breadfruits would fall from the tree behind the house.

It’s very typical to eat breadfruit boiled in salted water, just like you would boil potatoes.  But it’s not a root vegetable… it’s a fruit that grows on a tree.  It’s weird because you treat them in the culinary sense just like you would other VIANDAS or root vegetables- potatoes, sweet potatoes, yucca, malangas, etc.  I guess it’s the same way as eating green bananas boiled too.  It is very traditional to eat them with codfish in a dish called serenata.  Now that we’re vegetarians, we enjoy them with some Tuno Antipasto on top, amongst many other preparations.

 

                                          pana-tree         pana

This time around we’re making them fried.  With the breadfruit tree behind my grandma’s house in full bloom and splendor,  I decided to expose Mariví’s kids to breadfruit.               

 tostones-pana

BREADFRUIT TOSTONES

½ breadfruit
2 garlic cloves
Kosher Salt to taste
Canola Oil for frying

 

You make breadfruit tostones the same way you make regular tostones…

  1. First you cut the breadfruit in half and then into wedges.  Peel it and remove the center where the spongy part and seeds are.  Wash the wedges well under running water to take away any “mancha” or stickiness it may have.  Because the best breadfruits for tostones are still pretty “green” or unripe.
  2. pelando-panas-3        pelar-panas-1   pelando-panas-2
  3. Cut them into smaller pieces and fry them in canola oil under medium heat until they’re cooked inside, but not really golden.
  4. friendo-panas
  5. Flatten the breadfruit pieces using a tostonera or two plates like I use here.
  6. If you’re making them to eat right away, fry them again in the same canola oil until they’re crispy and golden brown.
  7. Sprinkle them with garlic salt and enjoy right away.

 

If you want to make a whole batch to freeze and save for a later time,

  1. Fry them only once, smash them and wait until they cool off a bit.  Store them in a Ziploc bag in your freezer. 
  2. tostones-de-pana This is how they look fried only once and flattened…  a bit pale, no??
  3. When you’re ready to fry them the second time,  defrost them in salted garlicky water and fry them again right before eating them.  Make sure you pat the dry a bit before frying so the oil does not splatter.

 tostones-pana-y-platano  These are breadfruit and regular plantain tostones side by side so you can notice the differences…

These breadfruit tostones were a complete hit!!!  Everyone wanted to be in the kitchen with me when I fried them and everyone gobbled them up.  Even the little ones went for the tostones first before they started on the fixed-up mac and cheese.

diego-eating

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Cauliflower and Cheese Mac

28 Apr

This is another one of the recipes described in my Foodbuzz 24,24,24 – A Very Veggie Experiment post…

 

A few weeks ago I tested my Undercover Carrot Mac and Cheese as a way to “sneak in” some added veggies into my niece’s, Mariana, dinner.  A reader suggested me to try it too with cauliflower.  So this is my version of mac and cheese with added cauliflower.  I also used Jerusalem artichoke pasta to add to the nutrition and unknown vegetables used.

                                                          cauliflower      jerusalem-artichokes-2

I usually make mac and cheese with a white cheese sauce. I thought it would be something different the kids would enjoy – steering away from the orangy sauces they’re so used too. 

 

 couliflower-and-cheese-mac

CAULIFLOWER AND CHEESE MAC

½ a head of cauliflower, chopped into small pieces
½ a box of macaroni pasta, I used De Boles Jerusalem Artichoke pasta
1 tsp olive oil
1 tbs sofrito
1 ½ cups of soy milk
4 oz of cream cheese
¼ cup gruyere cheese, shredded
¼ cup pecorino romano cheese, shredded
2 handfuls of Italian-blend grated cheeses
¼ cup parmesan cheese, grated or shredded
Kosher salt and Black pepper to taste
 
  1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Salt the water as if if were sea water.  Add the cauliflower pieces and cover for about 10 minutes. 

coliflor

Meanwhile, we need to prepare the cheese sauce…

  1. In a medium pot over medium high heat, add the olive oil and sofrito.  Cook for about 2 minutes until the sofrito doesn’t look raw anymore.  Add the soy milk and heat up. 
  2. When the 10 minutes of cooking the cauliflower had passed, add the macaroni pasta to this same water.  Move all well so the pasta does not stick and boil all contents for about 8 minutes more.
  3. When the soy milk is heated start adding the cheeses – I use this order cream cheese, gruyere, pecorino romano.  Whisk them all to make sure they melt well into the milk.  Finally I add the Italian blend of cheeses and I take it off the heat. 
  4. Strain the pasta and cauliflower and return to the pot.  Add the cheese sauce and mix it all together.
  5. macaroni-coliflor
  6. Transfer to a baking dish and top with parmesan cheese.
  7. Place in a 350F oven and bake until the top is golden brown about 30 minutes.

 

Mariví was amazed that this has cauliflower and was so good.  Ignacio felt there was something more in there than just mac and cheese and kept asking me how I made it…  Diego just didn’t care and started shoveling it in.  The two little ones did not understand how a mac and cheese was white instead of orange.  So I convinced them to try it again after I mixed in a few slices of American cheese into their portions – bringing to the cheese total to 6 – the cheesiest I have ever made a mac and cheese before.   

                                        kamila-eating     diego-eating-2

 

The learning…   you make mac and cheese from scratch for the little ones, make it ORANGE with regular orange-color cheddar cheese.  They’ll find it more familiar and will not look at it as funny as Kamila and Daniel did.

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Asparagus Party Sandwiches

27 Apr

Yesterday, I participated in the Foodbuzz 24,24,24 event for April…  I cooked a dinner for my friend Mariví and her 4 oldest kids to get them to inadvertently try new foods and new flavors.   I titled it A Very Veggie Experiment…

The first dish of the night was these asparagus sandwiches…  I still can remember the first time I ate an asparagus sandwich at a birthday party.  I just ate it thinking it was a regular “sandwichito de mezcla” just rolled into a different shape and loved it.  It was not after I had eaten about 10 of these little sandwiches that someone told me it was asparagus.  I was hooked for life… 

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I knew Mariví and her kids would be surprised about liking them too… 

 

 sand-esparragos-3

 ASPARAGUS PARTY SANDWICHES

1 jar of asparagus spears
¼ cup of egg-less mayonnaise
Garlic salt to season to taste
1 packet of whole-wheat sandwich bread

 

  1. In the bowl of a food processor combine the asparagus, egg-less mayonnaise and the garlic salt.  Pulse until it becomes a loose paste.  Set aside.
  2. mezcla-esparragos
  3. To make these rolled sandwiches, we need to flatten the bread slices with a rolling pin.  Just take off the crusts of the bread slices and flatten them one by one.
  4. sand-esparragos-2
  5. Spread the asparagus mixture on top of each flattened slice of bread.   I leave the farthest edge without asparagus mixture because it will spread onto the edge when you roll the bread.
  6. sand-esparragos-1
  7. Starting on the straighter edge of the bread, roll the bread carefully onto itself until you create a little roll of bread.  Place the rolls seam side down so they will not unravel.
  8. I place them in a pyrex lined with moistened paper towels and place them in the fridge to finish setting.  Refrigerate about 1 hour to 1 day before serving. 

Sometimes people place a whole asparagus spear in the center and then roll the bread around it, but because I knew these guys are finicky, I just made a puree out of the ingredients to avoid any apprehension before they tasted them.

 

Both Ignacio and Diego, Mariví’s oldest kids, smelled the rolls before putting them in their mouths… so typical of a finicky kid!!!  Ignacio, Diego, Kamila and Mariví all loved them.  They were all trying to figure out what was in them.  Ignacio and Diego had about 4 each and even told me they would love to have them again…

This was Ignacio’s face when he learned these were made from asparagus… HUH?!?!?

ignacio-esparragos

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