Minestrone

I have a very delicious follow-up to my cinnamon rolls recipe coming soon, but considering three of my last four posts have involved sweets I though I should post something healthy first, lest you begin to believe that I eat nothing but sugar and butter. I do in fact eat my vegetables, even if they are scattered on top of a pizza or rolled up with butter, cheese, and breadcrumbs. More often than not, though, I eat them completely unadorned or at least in healthier ways, like in this soup.

While at Matt's parents' house in the southernmost Dakota this weekend they allowed me to take over their kitchen and fix dinner for them and Matt's grandparents. After debating between split pea soup and minestrone the consensus was minestrone. I've never made it before, so I looked up a bunch of recipes, picked out what I liked from each, and altered the plan slightly based on what looked good at the grocery store. The result was a large, steamy pot brimming with veggies, beans, pasta, broth and a bit of parmesan that warmed us up and filled us up, at least until it was time for dessert.

As with most soups you can adjust the ingredient list based on what you have and what sounds good to you. The only difficult part is figuring out when to add certain ingredients so they aren't overcooked. I put the pasta in too soon so it was on the mushy side by the time we ate it, but everything else turned out well.

Minestrone

Serves 10-12

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2-3 cloves garlic, minced

2-3 carrots, chopped

2-3 stalks celery, chopped

2 15-oz. cans diced tomatoes

8 cups low-sodium chicken broth

1 lg. russet potato, peeled or not and diced

1 15-oz. can white beans (cannellini or navy)

About 2 cups dry pasta, small shapes or broken noodles

1/2 head green cabbage, cut into 1" pieces*

Parmesan rind or about 1/3 cup grated parmesan, plus more for serving

1-2 bay leaves

Basil/thyme/parsley/whatever you feel like

Salt & pepper

Pesto for serving (optional)

*Spinach or kale would also be really good.

1. Over medium-high heat sauté the onion and garlic in a little olive oil for a few minutes, until the onions soften a bit.

2. Add the carrots, celery, tomatoes, broth, bay leaves, spices, and parmesan rind if you're using it. Let it simmer for several minutes until the carrots and celery begin to soften.

3. Add the potatoes and the pasta, and continue simmering. If you need additional liquid, add a little water or broth.

4. When the pasta and potatoes are almost cooked through, add the beans and cabbage.

5. Season with salt and pepper, grated parmesan (if using), and any other spices. When the cabbage softens, the soup is ready to eat.

Remove the bay leaves and serve with additional parmesan, pesto, and crusty bread.

Hominy Soup

When the high temperature barely breaks zero all I want to eat is soup. I've had it for three of my last four meals, and we're having it again for dinner tonight. For almost as long as I've been home for the holidays I've been craving Mexican food. There's no Chipotle around these parts, I'm saving the carnitas recipe from my new Mexican cookbook for when I get back to Minnesota and can eat the leftovers for days and days, and when my family was in Chicago and ate at a Mexican joint for lunch they chose not to tell me until their food arrived at their table. So this Mexican craving has been going on for well over a week, and the need for soup came just a few days ago when the temperatures plunged.

I was able to satisfy both cravings two days ago when I had chicken tortilla soup for lunch followed by a big bowl of hominy soup for dinner. I'm still looking forward to those carnitas, but now I can wait at least a few more days. The original soup plan was to make Red Posole from 101 Cookbooks, but things changed when some of the ingredients could not be found at the local grocery store and we opted for canned hominy instead of dried hominy that would need to be soaked overnight. We changed things around a bit, adding tomatoes, pinto beans and broth, and the result was a really tasty soup that warmed us up. I had leftovers last night and would eat more of it today were we not planning on making a batch of lentil soup tonight.

28 oz. can diced tomatoes

28 oz. can hominy

15 oz. can black or pinto beans

12 oz. bottle of lager

2 cups vegetable broth

1 medium white onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 bay leaf

1 tbsp oregano

2 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp chili powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp (more or less) cayenne

1. Sauté the onion for a few minutes in a little oil. Add the garlic and the oregano. Sauté for a couple more minutes.

2. Add the tomatoes, the beer and the rest of the spices. Cook for a few minutes.

3. Add the broth and simmer for 20 minutes or so. Add the hominy about 15 minutes before eating and the beans 5-10 minutes before eating.

4. Remove the bay leaf. Serve with some combination of diced avocado, crushed tortilla chips, Mexican cheese, cilantro, and sour cream.

Eat some soup and stay warm!

Macaroni and Cheese

As much as I love cheese, I'm not a huge macaroni and cheese person. Sure, I ate my fair share of it when I was a kid, treasured shipments of Easy Mac when I was abroad, and still occasionally buy a box to keep in the cupboard, but to give you an idea of how infrequently I eat it I will tell you that a box of macaroni and cheese is good for at least two years beyond its expiration date. Slightly disturbing, but true.

My indifference to macaroni and cheese applies to eating it in restaurants as well as eating it from a box. I've had a few bites of Matt's mac and cheese from Joe's Garage, but I would never order it for myself because I would much rather blow calories on their fries with basil aioli. The same goes for Yum - I would choose their crispy fries with red pepper aioli over their mac and cheese any day. A few weeks ago, though, my mom, Matt, and I were eating at Nick and Eddie, and it turned out to be one of those rare occasions when mac and cheese sounded really good. To be completely honest it was the lobster that was mixed in with it more than the cheesy noodles themselves that prompted me to order it, but the bottom line is I picked mac and cheese over fish and chips. So basically, fries with good dipping sauces trump macaroni and cheese, but lobster trumps fries.

Although I have no problem going long periods of time without a dose of cheesy noodles, sometimes I do eat it more often than once a year. When I was home over Thanksgiving I went through the collection of old magazines that had been accumulating in the rack next to my bed, pitching a couple old copies of Vanity Fair and W before stumbling upon an issue of Saveur. It dated back to April 2005 (vintage!) and the theme was "American Artisanal Cheese." I still can't figure out how I had the good sense to buy it back then, but then I let it sit around for four and a half years before making use of it. When I saw the recipe for macaroni and cheese I knew I had to make up for lost time. It was my call to duty.

Macaroni and Cheese

From Saveur, April 2005, based on a recipe from Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating

1 lb. tube-shaped pasta

2 tbsp. butter

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed

1 sprig fresh rosemary

1 sprig fresh thyme

1/4 cup dry white wine

2 tbsp. flour

3 1/2 cups milk

2 tbsp. dijon mustard

1 lb. aged cheddar cheese

Salt and pepper

1-2 tbsp. coarse bread crumbs

Although the recipe calls for a pound of aged cheddar, I couldn't get myself to spring for an entire pound of pricey cheese. I went with a little less than half a pound of Dubliner and supplemented that with cheaper stuff. In hindsight it would have only set me back a few more bucks to just stick with the aged variety, but the combination of the two produced a perfectly acceptable result so I guess I shouldn't worry about it.

On a side note, I heard on NPR last week that most of the cheddar you buy at the store (like the variety on the left) is only a few months old at most. It came up in a discussion of a 15-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin that's selling for $50/pound.

Start by cooking your pasta until it's not quite cooked through. The recipe suggests cooking it for 6-7 minutes, the box of rigatoni I used said 14 minutes until al dente, and I cooked this for about 8-10 minutes. After cooking the pasta, drain it, rinse it with cold water, and drain it again. Set it aside while you work on the sauce.

As far as types of pasta go you can use penne, rigatoni, macaroni or any other tube-shaped pasta you like.

While the pasta is boiling, grate the cheese. I just kind of guessed with amounts. You need about 4 1/2 cups, and I probably had a generous 4 1/2 cups.

Have your onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme ready.

Melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a large saucepan over medium heat.

Add the onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme. Cook for several minutes until the onion softens.

While that's cooking, get the remaining ingredients ready. The only white-ish wine I had was a bottle of vinho verde that had been opened in my fridge for long enough that it had lost its fizz, and I don't think it hurt the quality of the dish.

Add the wine and cook for 2-3 minutes.

Discard the herbs and the garlic, and add the flour. Cook for one minute. I'm not sure if I overestimated the amount of time the wine was cooking or not, but most of the liquid had cooked off by the time I added the flour.

Slowly add the milk and then the mustard. The recipe tells you to reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer, but I didn't have any kind of simmer to maintain after I added the milk. I guess I added it too quickly, so if you run into the same problem bring the mixture to a simmer and then reduce the heat.

Now we get to the exciting part - constantly stirring the mixture for 30 minutes! I suggest timing the cooking so this part coincides with an episode of Jeopardy. That way you can learn fun(ny) things while stirring. Did you know that another name for chewing tobacco is West Virginia coleslaw?

Go ahead and preheat your oven to 400 at some point in here.

After 30 minutes or so the mixture should be thick and creamy and will coat the back of a spoon. Here's a little tip: slippery rubber spatulas are not as good of a tester as an actual spoon.

Remove the mixture from the heat, and mix in 2/3 to 3/4 of the grated cheese. You're supposed to add a handful at a time and make sure the cheese is completely melted before adding the next handful, but I didn't read that part of the recipe until after I'd dumped a bunch of it in.

Season with salt and lots of freshly ground pepper.

Mix the cheese sauce with the pasta.

Pour the mixture into a large baking dish.

Top with the remaining cheese and the breadcrumbs.

Bake at 400 for about 25 minutes, or until the top is golden.

We ate this with pieces of roasted squash to make ourselves feel better about the extreme amounts of cheese.

The only thing I would consider doing differently next time is to bake it in a large, rimmed baking sheet instead of a deep baking dish to increase the surface area of the crusty top.

One more thing, if you want to do some of the work ahead of time you can do all of the steps through adding the noodles and sauce to the baking dish, and then stick it in the refrigerator until you're almost ready to bake it. Take it out while the oven is preheating, add the topping, and then bake it as you normally would.

Vegetable Potpies with Sweet Potato Biscuits

The night before Thanksgiving my brother made delicious vegetable potpies from a recipe in Food & Wine. They were a great way to fill up on veggies before feasting on turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes the following day, and they'd make a good meal for any cold winter night. I'm a big fan of traditional potpies (like the chicken potpie I made a year ago), but this one comes with far less guilt since it's stuffed with vegetables and topped with a sweet potato biscuit.

Click here for the recipe: Vegetable Potpies with Sweet Potato Biscuits

The original recipe called for parsnips, brussels sprouts, pearl onions, cauliflower, and celery root, but it takes well to substitutions. Instead of brussels sprouts ours had beets. My mom was really excited about purple pearl onions, so those went in instead of white ones. Being easily excitable runs in the family.

Bobby did most of the work on the filling.

And I got to make the biscuits.

These biscuits are delicious and would be great eaten on their own.

My mom kindly spiked some eggnog with whiskey for us to enjoy while we cooked. My dad doesn't drink, and I'm pretty sure he thinks that one drink makes you drunk. While this is generally not the case unless you're maybe a small child or my friend Sarah, it was certainly the case with these suckers. You could get drunk on the fumes alone. I'm not sure if it was the fact that I don't really like eggnog or that I'm still not over the last time I drank large quantities of whiskey and chased it with karaoke, but I simply could not handle this stuff.

After being tossed with olive oil and seasoned, the vegetables are roasted for 30 minutes.

Then a milk/cream/flour/butter/spice mixture gets combined with them. I guess what I said before about this being a healthy alternative to chicken potpies is not entirely true.

The mixture is divided among 8 4-inch ramekins. It should be fine in a larger dish, too, if you don't want to mess with individual servings.

Each dish is topped with a biscuit and a sage leaf or two.

Bake for about 15 minutes.

These go really well with a side of tart cranberry sauce.

Caramelized Onion Quiche

Quiche may be my new favorite thing to make. It starts with a delicious crust made of simple ingredients you always have around. It's yet anouther device for transporting cheese into my mouth. Eggs! Who doesn't love eggs? You can eat it for any meal of the day. Much like pizza, it's a great way to use up leftover odds and ends. Most of all, there are few things more rewarding in the kitchen than pulling a pretty creation out of the oven, be it a quiche, a pie, or even a whole roasted bird. Quiche is worth making for presentation alone.

The recipe for the crust comes from an awesome cookbook I got while I was in Portland a few weeks ago: Savory Baking by Mary Cech. Unlike your standard crust this one incorporates thyme, which gives the quiche a huge flavor boost. Depending on what you're using for your filling you could swap the thyme for something like dill or oregano. This cookbook has some amazing recipes in it (like White Cheddar-Zucchini Pancakes and Sweet Potato, Golden Raisin and Cranberry Strudel), and I can't wait to try more of them.

For the filling I just used things I had around: an onion, a little spinach, and Emmentaler.

Caramelized Onion Quiche

Crust recipe from Savory Baking

For the crust:

1 3/4 cups flour

1/2 cup cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/2" cubes

1 tsp dried thyme (or 2 tsps fresh)

3/4 tsp salt

1/3-2/3 cups cold water

For the filling:

4 large eggs

1 1/2 cups of a combination of cream, half & half, or milk

1 large white or yellow onion, sliced into strips

1 cup or more Emmentaler, grated

A few handfuls of spinach (optional)

Salt & pepper

Put the flour, butter, thyme, and salt in a food processor.

Pulse until the largest chunks of butter are pea-sized.

Slowly add water until the mixture forms into a ball.

Like this.

Transfer the dough to a floured surface.

Knead it a couple times, and then shape it into a disc that's about an inch thick. Making this dough was insanely easy and took maybe five minutes from the time I started measuring ingredients to the time I formed the dough into a disk. Working with any dough is pretty easy after making homemade pasta and dealing with very dry, crumbly dough.

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 15 minutes. I let it rest for over an hour while I went to pick up my awesome new toy.

When you're ready to start baking, preheat your oven to 400 with a rack in the lower third of the oven. Dust whatever surface you're going to roll the dough out on with flour.

Place the dough on the floured surface.

And roll it out until it's 12" around. My silicone mat has rulers along the edges, which makes this part very easy. I'd say that makes it worth the investment. Depending on the surface you're using, you may need to keep moving the dough around to ensure that it doesn't stick to that surface.

Fold the dough in half and transfer it to your pie pan or baking dish. I believe I used an 8" glass pan, but the actual crust recipe is for a 9" pie pan.

Unfold the dough and press it firmly into the bottom and edges of the pan. You can chop off the excess dough around the top if there's a lot. I started to even out the edges, but then changed my mind and started to reattach them. I figured I'd rather bake all of the crust that I made instead of discarding bits of it just to make it look better.

Cover the crust with a layer of aluminum foil, and fill the foil 2/3 full with dried beans or pie weights. I didn't have enough of a single kind of bean, so I made a foil boat of black beans to fill half of the crust and filled the rest with garbanzos. I saved myself from painstakingly separating bean varieties later on, and I successfully reproduced the title of a Michael Jackson song in a legume on foil medium.

Place the baking dish or pie pan on a baking sheet, and bake for about 30 minutes. Carefully lift up the foil and check the bottom of the crust; it's ready when it's beginning to brown. At that point remove the foil and the beans and continue to bake the crust until it's golden brown, probably 5-10 more minutes. Remove the baking sheet and the baking dish from the oven, place them on a cooling rack, and reduce the oven temperature to 325.

While the crust is baking, you can get the filling ready. I had a little bit of spinach sitting around that I decided to use, so I started by sautéing that.

Then I squeezed out as much moisture as I could before chopping it into smaller pieces.

Heat a little oil in a skillet over medium-high heat, and then add the onions and a little salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they soften and brown. Set aside. I guess mine are more towards the raw end of the caramelization spectrum, but they were done enough for me.

In a large bowl combine the eggs, the milk, and the cream. I am ashamed to admit this, but I used about 1 1/3 cup cream and a tiny bit of skim milk. I thought I had more milk than that and was planning on doing more of a 50/50 mix, but as I poured the milk into the measuring cup I realized I had less than 1/4 cup of it. Sorry, arteries.

Whisk the eggs and cream together as well as a little freshly grated pepper.

Add the onions and spinach to the crust, and spread them around so they're evenly distributed.

Top the onions with a layer of grated cheese. I used Emmentaler, but you can use anything you have around.

Pour the egg mixture over the onions and cheese. You could also add the other ingredients to the egg mixture and pour the filling in all at once. Layering ensures a little onion, a little cheese, and a little egg with every bite, though.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until the eggs are mostly set and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Let the quiche rest for at least 10 minutes before slicing.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Here's a nice view of the layers: onion, cheese, and egg.