Blue Cheese Mac with Walnuts

31 May

I am a cheese lover… I guess this has been established and proven by the posts on this blog already.  However, blue cheese is a relatively recent acquired taste for me. I always found it too salty and pungent for my taste.  However, I few years ago I went to a really nice restaurant in Ponce, Mark’s at the Meliá, that featured a Boston lettuce salad with crumbled Maytag blue cheese and vinaigrette.  I was a convert after that dish.

Now I do not shy away from blue cheeses anymore.  I love it in desserts, in salads, and lately, in pastas.  That’s how this Mac & Cheese came about.  Kind of like a grown-up version of a mac and cheese. 

I did this dish the first time improvising at my aunt’s house in Miami.  She wanted macaroni with a white sauce.  So I decided to give it a twist to make it interesting.  She loved it and my cousin, whose daughter is a chef, loved it too.  She had never tasted my cooking and she was nicely impressed.

I hope when you make this, you’ll also impress the ones you love and cook for.

 

 Blue Cheese Mac with Walnuts

BLUE CHEESE MAC WITH WALNUTS

1 tbs sofrito
1 tbs olive oil
½ cup milk
4 oz cream cheese
1 handful of grated Italian-blend cheeses
6 oz of blue cheese – your favorite blue cheese will do here
½ cup of walnuts, toasted
½ package of your favorite whole-grain tubular pasta – penne, macaroni or rigatoni will all do

 

  1. In a large pot, bring water to a boil. Salt the water and add the pasta.  Cook for about 10 minutes, until almost cooked thru.  Try not to cook them too long, so they do not break when you stir the sauce in.
  2. Meanwhile, in a medium sauce pan over medium heat add the olive oil and sofrito.  Cook for a few minutes and add the milk.  Let it warm through, but be careful it does not boil.
  3. When the milk has heated up add the cheeses.  I leave the blue cheese for the end.  Stir a few times to make sure all the cheeses melt well.  They melt faster and better if they’ve been out of the fridge for a few minutes.  Not necessarily room temp, but not out of the fridge either.
  4. When the pasta is done, drain it and return to the pot.  Pour the sauce over the pasta and stir to combine.  Add the walnuts.

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Mamey Milkshake

30 May

My best friend is Angie is in Miami right now… and as soon as she told me she was going there I said: “Please, drink a Mamey Milkshake in my name…”  Because God knows I crave one every time Miami is mentioned.

mamey_sapote

Mamey is a super sweet fruit reminiscing to a papaya.  It’s brown and kind of hard looking on the outside yet is super red and sweet on the inside.  The seed in the middle resembles a mussel.  It’s a very pretty seed indeed.    Some people in Puerto Rico call it sapote.  I call it simply mamey because that’s how it’s known in Cuba and how I was taught to call this fruit.  If you say just mamey in Puerto Rico you might often get another fruit that is similar yet not the same.  Here you need to specify mamey sapote.

In Miami you can get frozen mamey pulp to make milkshakes, which makes them very accessible year-round.  Fortunately and unfortunately, here in Puerto Rico you need to make them from the fresh fruit.  And it’s an expensive fruit here… sometimes I have paid up to $6 for one mamey.  So sometimes when I visit my family in Miami I bring a few frozen bags of pulp to indulge my mamey milkshake cravings.

 

 Batido de Mamey

MAMEY MILKSHAKE

¼ of the pulp of a mamey, about 1 cup of cut fruit
About 1 ¼ cup of milk – I always eye-ball this, never measure
2 tbs of brown sugar
A pinch of sea salt
¼ tsp vanilla powder
3 -4 ice cubes

 

  1. Place all ingredients in a blender and blend until frothy.

 

A mamey milkshake is one of the ideal accompaniments to a Cuban sandwich, or course now my preferred version is the Veggie Cuban.   Other appropriate accompaniments might be: a Frutabomba Milkshake or a Malta…

Salud!!

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Kraft In-Season Produce Widget

18 May

I saw this and found it very interesting… 

Salade des Haricots Verts

13 May

Last week, the Serious Eats site released the challenge of making a great weekend meal by cleaning out your pantry.  I was so inspired by the idea I made two… well, it was really a whole meal composed of the main course, Spinach Puffed Empanadas, and this side salad with French green beans and lettuce, directly from by CSA basket.

  Salade Haricots Verts

SALADE DES HARICOTS VERTS

a handful of French green beans or haricots verts, trimmed of the stem end
5-6 leaves of lettuce, I used a local “del país” lettuce, but any buttery lettuce will do
½ tomato, chopped
½ cucumber, peeled if it’s not organic and chopped
The juice of ½ a lemon
Extra-virgin olive oil                                                                                                                    
Salt and pepper to taste

 

  1. In a small to medium covered sauce pan, bring about ½ inch of water to a boil.  Salt the water with about ½ tsp of salt and place the green beans.  Cover the saucepan again and wait about 1 minute.  Turn the heat off and let the green beans steam for about 4-5 minutes.
  2. Mix together in a salad bowl the lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and cooked green beans.  Pour over it the lemon juice and olive oil. Sprinkle salt and pepper to taste and toss to combine.

 

 Spinach Empanada 5

Serve alongside a Spinach Puffed Empanada or the main course of your choice…

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Spinach Puffed Empanada

9 May

I visit the Serious Eats website almost daily… I love it as a source of news and inspiration in regards to food. 

They just recently launched this series of Weekend Cook and Tell where they scour the various food sections of national newspapers to find an article or recipe to inspire a weekend cooking project.  This weekend’s project is to make a great weekend meal by cleaning out your pantry.  They were inspired by an article in the Chicago Sun-Times  about making meals out of whatever you have on hand.

I am pretty anal-retentive about having a tidy fridge and lately I have not been able to keep it as organized and tidy as I would like.  So I am on a rampage of using up everything in my fridge and to liberate it as much as possible.  So you would think why I was so drawn to this project…  I actually went to the market today and I did not use up anything that entered the house today… all of the ingredients have been in the house for at least a week.

I actually used a bunch of stuff I had mostly in my fridge and freezer… and not new things I had; I used up stuff I had bit and pieces, like:

  • ¼ bag of frozen cut-leaf spinach – I don’t know how long this was in there because I was using another bag and moving thing around this morning I found this other bag…
  • 1 2-inch piece of leftover gruyere cheese – left over from making Popeye Pita Pizzas and the Cauliflower and Cheese Mac
  • 1 sheet of puff pastry – left over from a get-together I had last Saturday where I made Spinach Pinwheels that got too soft and fused together and re-froze because I did not know what to do with it at the time…
  • ½ onion – left over from making a batch of my Veggie Dip
  • 1 scallion – left from making a Green Goddess dressing for a friend
  • toasted pepitas – leftover from my Mexican Lasagna recipe
  • breadcrumbs I made a few months ago from bread that got too hard for a sandwich

 The results were spectacular…  I was inspired by a recipe from Ina Garten in her Barefoot in Paris book.  When I read the recipe I realized I had all the most important ingredients in my pantry to recreate it. 

 

 Spinach Empanada 4

SPINACH PUFFED EMPANADA

1 sheet of puff pastry, defrosted for only 30 minutes or overnight in the fridge
About 1 ½ cups of frozen cut-leaf spinach, thawed and as much water squeezed our as possible
About ½ cup gruyere cheese, grated
About ¼ cup Parmesan cheese
½ medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves
2 tbs olive oil
1 scallion, sliced thin
About ¼ cup pepitas (pumpkin seeds), toasted
About 2 tbs whole-wheat breadcrumbs
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tbs butter, melted
Whole-wheat flour – to work with the puff pastry

 

My apologies in regards to the amount of ingredients in this recipe… because my intention was to CLEAN THE FRIDGE, I really didn’t measure them when I was putting it together.  I just took what was left of the spinach, what was left of the gruyere, a few finger-fulls of breadcrumbs… and “played it by ear”/improvised.  I include a few photos so you can see how the mixture looked when put together…

 

  1. Pre-heat oven to 375 F.
  2. In a small skillet over medium heat, add olive oil, onions and garlic.  Sauté for a few minutes until the onions start to soften and become a bit translucent.
  3. In a medium sized bowl, mix together the spinach, scallions, onion mixture, gruyere and parmesan cheeses, breadcrumbs, pepitas.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Spinach Filling

The puffed pastry usually comes folded in thirds, but I defrosted it at room temperature for over 40 minutes and it basically fused together and I was not able to open it up as you usually can.  So what I did was to dust it with a little bit of whole-wheat flour, cut it into two pieces and roll it out.  What’s puff pastry than layers and layers of pastry rolled together… so ours will have 3 extra layers than what the manufacturers intended… 

  1. I rolled the two halves of puff pastry one a bit larger than the other… you’ll see why later on.  I rolled it enough to fit the baking tray of my toaster oven.  I cover the baking sheet using a layer of aluminum foil and then parchment to ease up on the cleaning.
  2. Place the larger pastry half onto the baking sheet lined with parchment. 
  3. Transfer the spinach mixture carefully onto the puff pastry leaving about a ½ inch border all the way around.  Try to flatten the mixture a bit to make it an even layer. 
  4. SPinach Empanada 1
  5. Place the smaller layer on top of the spinach.  Bring the edges of the puff pastry together folding one onto the other and securing by pinching with the tines of a fork.
  6. Spinach Empanada 2
  7. Brush the top layer of pastry with the melted butter.  Make 3 slits on the top for the steam to escape.
  8. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown and smells delicious.
  9. Take it out of the oven carefully and out of the baking sheet to cool off a bit into a cutting board.

Spinach Empanada 6 

Spinach Hole

I was so thrilled to make a large spinach “pastelillo”… served with a nice Salade des Haricots Verts, this made for a great light dinner. 

Spinach Empanada 5

And thanks to it… my freezer and fridge have a few less clutter than before.  This challenge came in with great timing…  I created a delicious meal I have never done before with ingredients I already had in my fridge.

I am sure I can come-up with a few extra of these; I’ll definitely keep you posted…

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