Baba Ganoush, Miranda Style

Baba Ganoush is a Mediterranean dish, like humus that can be served as a dip or topping or sauce. It has fewer calories than hummus because it's made mainly from eggplant, versus chickpeas. It also has less protein, but is nevertheless delicious. I spruced the normal 'eggplant, tahini, garlic, herb' recipe to include some roasted peppers and some kaffir lime leaves instead of parsley, which i do not like.

Roasting the eggplants and peppers makes for a smokey yum flavor, plus it makes getting the skins off easier. Just scoop the eggplant flesh out, wipe the pepper skin off and toss in a blender with your favorite other ingredients. I also roasted some garlic, and added salt, pepper, cumin, smoked paprika and kaffir leaves to the mix. I served the B.G. on the side with some pita and some delicious "tabouli" - bulghar wheat mixed with sauteed romanesque cauliflower, onions, and more pepper with lots of turmeric and other seasonings (to be honest i'm not sure what they were as they were unlabelled in the kitchen where i'm house sitting.) It was delicious though!

Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

It's high pepper season here in the Willamette Valley. Red, orange, yellow and purple: there's a bounty of peppers, and they are sweet and delicious! I usually just chop them into my salads, but i felt the need for stuffing some last night. We probably only needed 2 each, quinoa is very filling, but i splurged with 3 each and we ate ever last lick.

For the filling:
Sautee seasonal veggies in a bit of olive oil with salt, pepper and the herbs/seasonings of your choice. My saute included chard, the pepper tops, garlic, onion, smoked paprika, kaffir salt and fresh basil.

Meanwhile, cook the quinoa as you would rice: one cup grain, 2 cups water and some salt. Bring to a boil and simmer 15 minutes. Preheat oven to 400.

While each are cooking, cut the tops off some peppers and place in a baking dish.

When veggies are soft to your liking and quinoa is cooked, mix together plus a spoonful of mayo. I also added some turkey gelatin that i had from a previous night's meal. Spoon the mixture into the pepper cavities and top with an optional slice of cheese. Carefully place the baking dish into the oven and bake the peppers for 10-15 minutes, until the pepper walls are softening and the cheese is melted.

Serve as a meal or as a side, with knives and try to save the cheesey bites for last. Delish! Quinoa is a complete protein, so no need for meat in this wholesome vegetarian recipe.

Vegetarian Spaghetti

Who says you need ground meat to make scrumptious spaghetti? Not me! With the husband bringing home as much fresh produce as I could want, i decided to stir up some spaghetti for dinner. No, the sauce is not home canned and the pasta not home pressed.... but i'm dealing with a new kitchen and a fraction of my kitchen tools, okay! The reason i even had store bought spaghetti sauce in my cupboard at all stems around my desire to avoid BPAs. Canned tomatoes are packaged in cans that are lined with the nasty plastic stuff, so if i want store bought preserved tomatoes, i go with those that are packaged in glass. That leaves me most often with prepared pasta sauce. There are some decent options out there, just be sure and read the ingredient labels: there's a lot of sugar and corn syrup hiding out there!

Veggie Spaghettie

• 2-3 small zucchini, quartered and sliced
• 2-3 small/young Asian eggplants, halved and sliced. (You could use larger Italian eggplants as well, but if you want to skip peeling them choose very young specimens with thin skin)
• Mushrooms, about a cup diced
• 1 large or 2 small sweet onions, diced
• Several cloves garlic, diced
• We like it spicy: 5-6 diced serranos or jalapenos or cayenne peppers
• Fresh and dried herbs: basil, rosemary, thyme, tarragon etc
• Splash red wine
• Tomato Sauce, preferably home canned or organic

Note to self and others: eggplants and mushrooms cook at about the same speed! I made this batch of sauce with the zucchini and eggplant going in at the same time. Mushy eggplant. That's fine and everything, but i would have liked a little more oomf left in those little purple friends. This is how i'd recommend cooking it:

Drizzle a pan with some olive oil and throw in the onions, zucchini, dried herbs and some salt on med/high heat. It's nice to get a little brown on the zucchini for flavor and texture. Stir it about so it doesn't get overly burned, and throw in the rest of the veggies once the zucchini is getting a bit soft.  Once the shrooms are getting soft, cover the whole pan in the pasta sauce, red wine and fresh herbs. Stir and cover on med, med/low until the sauce is bubbling nicely. Let the flavors amalgamate for at least 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally to keep the tomato from sticking, at which point you can turn it down to low and let the sauce hang out until you're ready for it.


I served ours over some (store bought) angel hair pasta and shredded some parm on top. Delish! Very filling, packed with nutrients, and much lower in fat than sauce filled with sausage or ground beef. Feel free to toss in any veggies you like and keep it seasonal. Butternuts in Fall, garlic scapes in Spring.... nom nom nom.


This post can be found at Simple Lives Thursday!

Pancit Recipe *Guest Post

I met Marigold in Savannah while her husband and I studied illustration at SCAD. We often hosted  potlucks for us illustration grad students and their spouses/friends, participating in rousing games of Twister and Charades. Marigold was always sure to bring something delicious to eat too much of and is gracious enough to share one of her recipes for my readers here at An Austin Homestead. Be sure to check her blog out, too: it's a doozy with tons of crafts, tutorials, kid friendly fare and fantastic ideas and projects of all sorts! Thanks, Marigold!

Hello! My name is Marigold and I am visiting here from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky! Today I would like to share one of my mom's recipes. For those of you who can't tell from looking at my typing, my mom was Filipino. Making me half-Filipino! I lost my mom to breast cancer a little over five years ago. Since then I have found myself having lots of moments where I really, really wish I had collected all of the recipes that she stored in her head. Because she could cook! And OH! how I miss her cooking! What I do now is basically call my sister and ask if she has Mom's recipe for such-and-such, then hunt the Internet for similar recipes, then do trial-and-error runs in my kitchen until I get something that's not quite as good as Mom used to make.
One of the recipes that I was lucky enough to get from her was for Pancit. This is a pretty basic Filipino noodle and vegetable dish that probably has a thousand variations. This one, though, is the best because it was my mom's!

Mom's Best Pancit Ever, Fool!
1 pkg. rice noodles
2 Tbs. vegetable oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
1 cup water
1 handful (about a dozen or so) snow peas, ends trimmed
1 carrot
3-4 leaves bok choy
1 green onion
1/3 head of broccoli (approx. 1 heaping cup chopped)
1 tsp. sugar
salt & pepper to taste

for serving:
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/2 lime
1 clove crushed garlic

Combine the broth and water and warm in the microwave or stovetop until steaming hot (not quite boiling). In a bowl, soak the rice noodles in the hot broth for 10 minutes until they soften, stirring occasionally to ensure all noodles get soaked and softened.

Meanwhile, chop all of your vegetables into bite-sized pieces. The carrots should be cut thinly an at an angle, the bok choy into strips, the green onion should be finely chopped, etc.

Make your serving sauce: in a small (non-metal) bowl, combine soy sauce and crushed garlic and the juice of half a lime. Set aside.

Drain the noodles, reserving some of the broth. Don't rinse the noodles. Using clean kitchen scissors, cut the noodles up so that they are a few inches long. No need to be precise here, just make them short enough to be manageable enough to eat.

Heat oil in a wok or large frying pan over a medium high heat. Saute garlic until soft, about a minute, then add all of the vegetables. Cook for 2-3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add noodles. Sprinkle over with sugar, salt and pepper and a few teaspoons of your soy sauce mixture. Cook and toss together until heated through, about 3 minutes more.

Remove to a bowl. If some of the noodles have stuck to the bottom of the pan, deglaze with the pan with some of your reserved broth (about 1/4 cup should do). Scrape up any browned bits and stuck noodles with a wooden spoon. Pour over your bowl of cooked pancit and toss together.

Serve warm with a wedge of lime and sprinkle over with with soy sauce mixture.


That's it! You can also add shredded chicken, pork or shrimp to this dish to make it a little heartier for a main dish, but I have always loved it with just the noodles and veggies.
Thanks for having me over today, Miranda!

Pizza From Scratch

Thank you, Heather for sending me this recipe from the Bread Bible! This crust was easy, fit into my day's schedule, and DELICIOUS!!!!!!!!!! I'm serious. I wanted to save leftovers. This was not possible due to the level of delicious. Had to be eaten. All of it. Right away.

Anyhoo, i got up around 9 (yay for weekends with puppies who sleep through the night with no accidents!) and put together this dough (into which i added about 20% whole wheat flour and some dried herbs), leaving it out for half an hour, then popping it into the fridge. About an hour before cooking time i took it out of the fridge and stuck it on a pan that i should have greased more as i had a hard time dislodging the pizza for serving later. Every single ingredient i used was from my garden or a friend's who i made mozzarella with that morning. Not my best batch of mozz, but we were highly distracted by puppy playtime and neighborhood gossip.
For this batch of pizza i used the following toppings:

• Roasted garlic cloves
• Roasted thai eggplants with olive oil, smoked paprika and salt
• Multiplying onions
• Fresh diced tomatoes
• Fresh diced bell pepper
• Fresh diced red ripe serrano pepper
• Salt and pepper
• Pesto sauce
• Bunch genovese basil, few leaves lemon basil, pinch walnuts, pinch romano cheese, salt, generous drizzle garlic infused olive oil

I remembered that my stick blender had this handy dandy food processor attachment - worked great for this small batch of pesto without having to dig out the big food processor. I baked the crust for 5 minutes, popped a huge air bubble, slathered with pesto, topped with toppings, baked another 5 minutes and voila! Deliciosa! Paired with the very odd but cool film "Something Wicked This Way Comes" we had a most excellent Sunday night.  Once i have a more active life filled with fence building and other laborious chores we'll have to make this a Sunday tradition! For now, my mostly sedentary self will only indulge in this recipe on special occasions. I hope to increase my 'bread' repertoire more, and this was a good start to help me build my self confidence.

The bottom got nice and crispy but not burnt, the dough complimented the toppings perfectly, a little bit of spinkled cheese and salt tied it all together: groans of satisfaction filled the room.

Do you have a favorite pizza crust recipe?

Warm Chickpeas and Cool Cucumbers - Vegetarian Recipe

The cucumbers keep on giving, and i keep on eating them. Tonight i paired some warm chickpeas (garbanzo beans) with some cool cucumbers and fresh herbs to create a delightful juxtaposition.

Warm:

• Garbanzo beans, soaked for a few hours, about 1 cup or so
• Fresh kaffir lime leaf, crushed
• 1-2 garlic cloves
• Chilly powder
• Salt (added near end)
• Handful of Matt's Wild cherry tomatoes (or one small regular tomato diced)
• Drizzle olive oil

Bring beans to a boil with rest of the ingredients, covering and simmering until beans are soft. Once soft, uncover and CAREFULLY cook off the water. It's nice to get a little toasting at the bottom of the pan, but you don't want to accidentally char them into burnt crisps. (yes, i've done that) Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt.


Cool:

• Several cucumbers, diced
• Bunch lemon basil
• Drizzle balsamic and red wine vinegar
• Salt

Mix the chopped veg and herb with vinegars and salt. Refrigerate until serving.

Serve with the cool on the bottom and the warm on the top/side. Such a great flavor combination of warm and rich and earthy, plus cool and tangy and bright.  I tried to get a good review quote from the husband, but he says i'm putting him on the spot. Needless to say, he really liked it :)
And with all the fiber in both the cukes and the chickpeas - we were pleasantly satisfied. (Until i busted out the popcorn air popper during Saturday Night Live).