Returning To The Pantry

I've spent the last day with my nose in a book. (Much to the dismay of my dirty home.) After seeing several blogs this past week discuss a photo-essay published by Time Magazine, I decided I needed to read the book. Hungry Planet:What The World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio is nothing short of amazing. I will likely be devoting a post or two to it over the next few weeks, because it really has been thought provoking to me. Most notably so far is all the families who are conscious of waste. The Peruvian family who sells two sheep at the market and receives $35 which has to buy groceries for their large family for two weeks. They buy little to no meat, focusing on the staples like potatoes, beans, and rice, then they buy fruits and veggies, with nothing special or extra. The Darfur refugees who eat the same thing three meals a day, and worry about the cost of one tiny handful of dried vegetables to flavor their soup.

After a successful winter of stretching my food dollar and utilizing as much as possible out of a scrap of food, it hasn't taken long to return to some of my more wasteful methods. Truly not as bad as it once was, but I do have several containers of leftovers in my fridge that are going to need to be tossed. And I find myself at my local grocery store looking for something for dinner at the last minute all-too-often. So last night I decided to raid the pantry for dinner. I began in the freezer where I discovered a package of frozen cheese ravioli and a partial package of bacon. In the pantry I found several cans of beans, selecting the Great Northern variety, as well as a small onion and some cloves of garlic. A trip through the fridge found a small handful of cherry tomatoes that I wasn't likely going to use. After a second thought, I also grabbed a cucumber well past its prime, some blueberries, and a balsamic salad dressing that I keep wanting to like.

I made one final trip through the garden, snipping off a few beet greens and a few leaves of romaine, as well as a few tiny sprigs of my newly potted basil. Dinner was on it's way. I set some water to boiling for the ravioli, and cut off a tiny portion of the bacon, returning the rest to the freezer for another time. The bacon went into the saute pan, followed by the onion, tomatoes, and garlic, and then later on the white beans, some seasoning, and the basil. A little pasta cooking water loosened up my white bean sauce a bit, and while that simmered away I cobbled together a quick salad. My greens were washed and tossed with thinly sliced cucumber, a handful of blueberries, and that balsamic dressing- whisked with a tablespoon of honey to enrich it a bit.

30 Minute Meals indeed! The whole dinner, including the walk through the garden, pantry, and fridge took less than 30 minutes. And the pasta was fantastic! The sauce worked really well to lightly coat the ravioli, and topped with a scattering of Parmesan, it compares to pasta I've had out. The smoky sauce was balanced out nicely by the sweet/sour green salad, and the only thing I would potentially change about this dinner is the bacon. I would use it, but I would render it down and remove the bacon, crisped, from the saute pan and add it to the salad, leaving the bacon fat to flavor the sauce. Nevertheless, dinner was fantastic, and I felt really good about the pantry meal. I wrote down the recipe for White Bean Sauce with Bacon and popped that into the recipe trove. An excellent dinner on the fly, and packed with vegetables as well. No doubt, the white bean sauce would be equally good in a vegetarian version, subbing in some earthy mushrooms for the bacon, and using a little more olive oil to saute the onions and garlic.

I'm not sure I'll have much of a chance to post tomorrow. The strawberry patch is open, and that means it's time for some jam-making, so I will try if I get the chance.

B Is For Broccoli

And you can read all about the new way to eat broccoli today over at Kids Cuisine, rather than repeat myself here. :-)

In other veggie news this morning, my garden is doing great! Last year my garden really limped along, but this year we added some compost from some very generous friends and it's really taken off. So far we've been enjoying radishes, and the romaine is just starting to be pickable, so there will be many lettuce salads in the near future. Last night we had tostadas for dinner, and Abigail was so excited to top hers with "delicious lettuce from the garden." Gotta love that. The cucumbers, melons, and zucchini plants all look amazing as well! I just hope we have enough critters in the area to do the pollinating. I'm also thrilled that it's June 6th- just 10 days away from the opening of the Farmer's Market!

When I cut the first tops off my radishes, I looked at those useless tops and thought it was a shame to put them in the garbage. So I grabbed a small bucket and a plastic bag and tucked them under my kitchen sink for produce scraps. I've been talking and talking about composting, and thought I should at least give it a try. I wanted to know how long I could put scraps in this bucket before it started really stinking up the kitchen. Well, it's been about 10 days now, and my bucket is full, and there is still no odor. I was told this would be the case, but didn't really believe it. This weekend Andy will be building a small bin for the backyard as I've started working on my second compost bucket and the stuff needs a place to go. What I've put in the compost has strictly been veggie and fruit scraps and coffee grounds. It's rather exciting to watch the compost bucket fill up rather than dump the scraps down the disposal or into the garbage.

Today begins the madness that is Abigail's dance recital week. It's a pretty big deal for us as it's her first, and we have pictures and dress rehearsals and my crazy husband has volunteered to do quite a bit of set up, so we'll see how the rest of the week goes. The last day of school is Friday, and I'm hoping to celebrate with a really good whole grain M&M cookie here, so stay tuned!

R is for Radish-Vegetable Wednesday

I've decided that going in order alphabetically doesn't make much sense for us. I'm working on a page where we can keep track and make sure that we hit every letter, and I'll be sure and link to it when it's ready. See, if I waited for R until we were there, it could be late July or August or even later and the radishes would not be what they are today. And that is sweet and wonderful. Yesterday I plucked the first handful of radishes out of my garden. There is something radically special about the first gleanings from the veggie patch. When I walked in the house with these gorgeous treasures, the kids got quite excited, and Abigail headed out to her garden and dutifully plucked one of her radishes.

The first words out of her mouth were "can I eat it?" Aha! She wants to eat a radish! Having not tried one yet myself, I did feel it fair to warn her that sometimes radishes can be "bitey", but then she cleaned it up, took a bite and declared it delicious. She savored that radish. We've had the perfect radish weather, as it's not been terribly hot, and these French Breakfast radishes have the tiniest bite, but mostly they are just sweet and crunchy. They're wonderful! And of course, needed to be used for dinner somehow. I turned to the current issue of Vegetarian Times which has several recipes I want to try and found a recipe for Couscous with Asparagus, Snow Peas, and Radishes. My Mom has an asparagus patch that is growing like crazy, so we headed over there for the daily picking, and the only thing I lacked was the snow peas. Chiding myself for not planting peas, we picked some up at the store and were in business.

This salad is light, refreshing and perfect for a hot summer day. As is, it is completely vegan, although a carnivore probably could add some diced chicken or shrimp to the salad for a more substantial meal. But it was excellent as is. Andy ate two helpings, and I really considered it. Abigail enjoyed it and said I could pack some in her lunch. The only abstainer was Zander who has a touch of a cold or something and didn't really eat anyways. Abigail also liked the asparagus in this salad, even though it was blanched, I told her it was raw and she ate it up. Do try this salad- it's the perfect declaration of spring. The only changes I made to this salad was to eliminate the mint (not a fan) and I added a drizzle of olive oil. You could certainly leave that off, but I really think it added something. The fresh herbs are key though- so don't be clever and try to use dried, the fresh herbs combined with the lemon juice really sparkle.

I also should mention that my friend Joe at Culinary in The Country also made a couscous salad yesterday and his looks fabulous as well- so check that out if you have a chance.

A Simple Veggie Salad

Last night as I was grilling a few simple burgers for dinner, I went on a hunt into the depths of the fridge to see what kind of salad I could cobble together. I really had no idea what I would find, but managed to pull out a seedless cucumber and one each of a red and green bell pepper. With no greens turning up, I started thinking along the lines of a pasta salad of sorts, which progressed even further when I spied the pint of grape tomatoes hiding behind the stand mixer. I started chopping my vegetables into bite size chunks, and as I did so I spied a hunk of day old bread.

I was sad about the bread. I'd made it fresh yesterday to accompany a simple tortellini soup. Andy's been working very late, so he arrived home several hours after we'd finished eating, and I'd just assumed he'd wrap it up when he was finished with it. Not so. This morning I found the bread still sitting on the counter, not wrapped. And it was humid, so I knew the bread suffered. Rather than throw it out, I thought I'd salvage what I could for toast for breakfast and then torment myself staring at it all day. But as I chopped those vegetables and glared at that bread, inspiration struck. There was plenty of bread there, forget the pasta, I was making panzanella.

Panzanella is a simple salad created by Italians as a way to use up day-old bread. They would cube the bread and toss it with the vegetables of the day and a simple vinagrette. Anyone can make a panzanella! I cubed up my bread and tossed it with some olive oil, garlic powder and herbes de provence and toasted them up. The cubes went into the vegetables and we had ourselves a great salad with our burgers.