Vegetables + Salads – Page 4 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Pasta with Peppers and Balsamic Vinegar

It’s officially autumn in New York City! Even though bell peppers seem to be a summer vegetable, I used them in this pasta dish with balsamic vinegar to bring out a different flavor. I chose red, yellow, and orange and skipped the more raw green kind. With the vinegar, their colors seem more muted and fall-like rather than bright and summery.

I used penne here because it’s what I have handy, but feel free to use rigatoni so that the ridges hold the vinegar in for a more dramatic presentation. Parmesan cheese is the way to go, but again, I used what I had and that was a beautiful truffled cheese. I used it minimally because I didn’t want the truffle smell to overwhelm the fragrant peppers and vinegar.

Ingredients:
3 bell peppers, seeded and sliced
oil
salt, pepper
1 red onion, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
a handful of parsley, finely chopped
2 tbsps balsamic vinegar
a handful of grated truffled cheese
about 2 cups of penne

1. Put all the peppers in a large frying pan over medium heat with a little olive oil and a pinch of salt and pepper. Cover and cook slowly for 15 minutes until softened.
2. In the meantime, cook the penne al dente and drain. Set aside until ready to assemble the dish.
3. Add the onion to the peppers and cook for another 10 minutes. Add the garlic and parsley and cook while tossing for about 3 minutes. Add the balsamic vinegar and let it sizzle away.
4. Add the cooked pasta and toss with the cheese and more parsley. Drizzle with a little bit more olive oil before serving.

Watermelon Salad with Farro

I’m not going to take credit for this easy summer watermelon recipe. Thanks Mark Bittman, I now prefer ricotta salata over feta cheese!

Ingredients:
3 cups watermelon, deseeded, cubed
2 cups of farro
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
ricotta salata cheese, crumbled
a handful of parsley, roughly chopped
olive oil
lemon juice
salt, pepper

1. Cook farro in boiling water for about 15 minutes, or until farro is chewy. Drain and let sit to cool. Fluff with a fork.
2. In a large bowl combine all the solid ingredients and toss gently. Drizzle with olive oil and lemon juice, sprinkle with salt and pepper, toss and serve.

Fennel, Chickpea and Almond Salad

Talk about an easy salad. My friend Stacie of OneHungryMama turned me on to this salad via Instagram. She adapted it from Homemade with Love by Jennifer Perillo.

Ingredients:
1 tbsp sherry vinegar
2 tbsps olive oil
juice of half a lemon
salt
pepper
1/2 bulb fennel, thinly sliced
1 can of chickpeas, washed and drained
1/4 cup parsley, torn into pieces
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
a handful blanched almonds, coarsely chopped

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, oil, and lemon juice until well mixed. Season the dressing with salt and pepper to taste. Add the fennel, chickpeas, parsley, and cheese to the bowl. Toss together to combine. To serve, spoon the salad onto a large platter, and sprinkle the almonds on top.

Related post/s:
Buy Homemade with Love: Simple Scratch Cooking from In Jennie’s Kitchen from Amazon.com
Check out OneHungryMama whose recipes are as friendly to children as they are to adults

Four-Chile Chili

I tried this four-chile chili over the weekend when almost everyone I know was either watching sports on TV or playing poker online because of the blustery weather outside. This dish was the right one to coddle and sit on the couch with under a soft throw with the TV on. My sports fan guest loved it so much, he asked to pack the leftovers for lunch the next day.

I already had dried ancho chile at home, but feel free to use the powdered kind. If you still find bigger chunks of chiles and tomatoes during the hour that you’re simmering, take the opportunity to press them against the inside of the pot with the back of a wooden spoon to make sure that they are incorporated well. Feel free to add some more beef stock as well to make sure your chili is not clumpy and dry.

If you double up this recipe, you can freeze them in small batches for up to 2 months and survive the winter.

Ingredients:
olive oil
2 lbs sirloin or chuck, grounded
salt, pepper
1 white onion, coarsely chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 large jalapeño chiles, seeded, minced
1 dried ancho chile, coarsely chopped
1 tbsp paprika
half a small can of tomato paste
1 28-ounce can peeled Italian tomatoes, coarsely chopped and juices reserved
1 32-oz beef stock or broth
1 19-ounce can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, seeded and minced
1 tbsp dried oregano
a handful cilantro, finely chopped
sour cream

1. Heat the olive oil in a large Dutch oven. Add the ground beef and season with salt and pepper. Stir and cook over moderately high heat until brown. Transfer to a plate and repeat with the remaining meat.
2. Pour off all but a scant of the fat from the pot. Add the onion, garlic and jalapeños and cook over medium-low heat until softened. Add the ancho pepper and paprika and cook over low heat until fragrant. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring, until the paste starts to brown. Stir in the tomatoes and their juices, the beef stock and the cooked beef plus any accumulated juices. Bring to a simmer over moderately high heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
3. Add the kidney beans, chipotles and oregano and simmer for 30 minutes more. Serve the chili in bowls, topped with a sprinkling of cilantro. Pass the sour cream at the table.

Baked Eggplant with Minced Beef

After stopping by her family’s house in Westchester unannounced, Lucy’s father was forced to gather some tomatoes and eggplants from his incredible garden to send me home with some bounty. It’s the kind of garden that I can only dream of. There are rows and rows of different shapes and colors of tomatoes, all happily dangling from pipes meticulously tied together. All shades of aubergines peek from stems covered in fuzz and peppers of all sizes dot the compact landscape. When I was invited to their upstate cabin during Memorial Day weekend, I tasted the vegetables they picked from their garden and all I’ve been wanting to do was see it for myself. How can a small plot of land yield so much love?

Back in my apartment where the second batch of mixed greens I planted are not even making any more effort to grow past an inch, I thought of what to do with all the eggplants. If my father was in town, he would tell me to grill the slender Japanese kinds over the stove and mix with scrambled egg for a Filipino breakfast. But there was one large eggplant that looked good enough to be stuffed, and so I went through my Mediterranean cookbooks to find a recipe that did just that. The original Turkish recipe called for the beef to be baked with the eggplant. I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to dry out the beef and just opted to brown it separately. It all goes down when you serve: the eggplant flesh will be soft enough to scoop up and you top each serving off with the ground beef.

Ingredients:
a large knob of butter
2 lbs ground beef
1 red onion, thinly sliced
1 tomato, sliced
a handful of parsley, roughly chopped
salt
pepper
red chile flakes
1 large eggplant
olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 350º. Cut the eggplant in half and score the insides with multiple slits, both crosswise and lengthwise. Pour and brush some olive oil on the eggplant. Bake for 25 minutes.
2. In the meantime, melt butter and brown ground beef for about 10 minutes in a frying pan. Add the onion, tomato and parsley and cook. Season with salt, pepper and chile.
3. Remove eggplant to a serving plate and soften the cooked insides with a spoon so that you can stuff it with the beef.