CityMama™

Cream of Zucchini and Broccoli Soup with White Truffle Oil

Yes, it's another soup recipe, but what can I say? We're a family that loves its soup! This is one that I usually start as I'm cooking breakfast in the morning and it's done by the time the kids are off to school.

 

CREAM OF ZUCCHINI AND BROCCOLI SOUP WITH WHITE TRUFFLE OIL

White truffle oil is found pretty easily now. Check your local "gourmet" grocer, cheese shop, or places like Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table. In a pinch, you can mail order. My favorite comes my local olive oil shop and, according to the owner, it's the same kind that is used at the French Laundry. (Take that with a grain of truffle salt!)

Ingredients:

• olive oil
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 5 zucchini, scubbed and sliced
• the stems of a bunch of broccoli (I used the florets for a salad), peeled and chopped
• 1 box of low-sodium chicken broth
• 3/4-1 cup of heavy cream (or half-and-half, but not milk), amount depends on how liquidy the soup is and your personal preference.
• sea salt and pepper to taste
• white truffle oil

In a soup pot, saute onion, zucchini, and broccoli in a couple glugs of olive oil over medium heat until tender, about 10 minutes. Pour in chicken broth and simmer on medium-low until broccoli is very soft and zucchini is falling apart, about 10 minutes more. Remove from heat and whiz the pot with a stick blender until pureed. While whizzing, slowly pour in the cream. Add salt and pepper to taste. Ladle into bowl and add a few drops (a drizzle would be overpowering) of white truffle oil.

Ridiculously Easy Pumpkin Soup

This tastes way fancier than it is. It would be a lovely Thanksgiving starter, too.

CITYMAMA'S PUMPKIN SOUP

• 1 28 oz can of pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie filling, check the label cuz I've made that mistake!)
• 1 box of organic low-sodium chicken broth
• 1 pint of heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon each: onion powder, garlic powder, sweet/Madras curry powder (I use Penzey's spices because I like the quality)
• sea salt and pepper to taste

Combine, gently heat through (without boiling), and serve. It's ridiculously easy, and ridiculously delish! Perfect for a chilly fall evening or packed into a lunchbox for a warm surprise.

 

Braised Chicken with Rosemary, White Wine, Golden Raisins, and Mushrooms

This is a very easy week night dinner that is a take-off on the Pollo alla Cacciatora recipe that mu mother learned how to make when she was married to my (Italian) dad and living in Rome. According to my mom, real "Chicken Cacciatore" doesn't have tomatoes and/or peppers in it, just chicken, garlic, and rosemary; and some vinegar and wine to deglaze the pan. Who knows if she's correct, I just know that the Pollo alla Cacciatora I grew up eating was a very simple dish. That was my inspiration for this braise.

BRAISED CHICKEN WITH ROSEMARY, WHITE WINE, GOLDEN RAISINS, AND MUSHROOMS

This is even better the next day, so if you can swing that, I highly recommend cooking it ahead of time.

• olive oil
• 3 lbs of cut up chicken parts, I used thighs because I love them!
• 1 onion
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• 1/2 cup or so dry white wine
• 2-3 glugs (tbsps) white wine or white balsamic vinegar (very important!)
• 3 sprigs of fresh rosemary
• 1/2 cup of golden raisins
• 1 basket of white mushrooms trimmed and sliced in half
• sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

In a Dutch oven or covered braising pan, heat olive oil (as much as you like) over med heat. Season chicken with salt and pepper and add to pan. When chicken is browned, toss in garlic and onion and continue cooking until onions are soft. Turn up heat slightly and deglaze the pan with wine and vinegar, scraping up all the yummy bits. Add rosemary sprigs, raisins, and mushrooms. Stir gently, cover, lower heat to medium low, and continue cooking about 15 minutes until chicken is done. Salt and pepper to taste. Remove rosemary before serving. This is great with roasted potoes or over rice, pilaf, pasta or with bread to soak up the yummy juices!

Picadillo with Ground Turkey

I love any kind of hash—corned beef, Chinese pork (especially with salt fish!), potato—and this sweet, sour, and fragrantly spiced Cuban-style hash called Picadillo.

It's traditionally made with ground or shredded beef, but I used ground turkey with delicious results. (I use ground turkey in place of ground beef in just about every recipe that calls for it.)

Serve over white rice or with tortillas. You can also scoop it up with tortilla chips. This dish got a thumbs up from the kids, too!

Picadillo with Ground Turkey

adapted from Cooking Light'

• 3-4 glugs of olive oil
• 2-2.5 lbs (2 packages) of ground turkey
• one finely chopped onion
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 28 oz can diced tomatoes and juice
• 2 jalapeños en escabeche (pickled), chopped (or you can use milder roasted green chiles)
• 6 green olives, pitted and diced
• 3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds, slightly crushed
• 1/2 cup tablespoons golden raisins
• 4 tablespoons capers
• 3 tablespoons cider vinegar
• a big splash of red wine or sherry

Preparation

• Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and garlic; cook 2 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the ground turkey and saute until no longer pink. Add tomatoes, chiles, olives; cook 1 minute, stirring frequently. Stir in brown sugar, cinnamon sticks, cumin seeds, and salt and pepper to taste.
• Reduce heat to low. Stir in raisins, capers, vinegar, and sherry; simmer about 10-15 minutes more. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Serve over white rice or with tortillas with black beans and a green salad on the side if you like.

Caldo Verde

I don't know what it is about this simple soup, but there's something magical in it. Something about the combination of kale, potatoes, and linguica (what I grew up calling Portuguese sausage in Hawaii) work together to create an addictively light soup that is perfect for a fall weekend lunch or simple mid-week dinner.

I gather my caldo verde ingredients at my local farmer's market where we are lucky enough to have a sausage vendor who makes sausages that are out of this world. If you can't find linguica near you, you can order it online. Just Google it.  (Linguisa is also great fried and served with eggs so get two packages!)

There are a million variations of how to make this soup.  My sister does it one way, I do it another, but in the end, the kale, potatoes, and linguica remain constants. If you like potatoes, add more. If you like a meatier soup, add more linguica. Portions of the three main ingredients are flexible, but simplicity is the key. Here's one delicious way to do it.

 

Caldo Verde ingredients waiting to go into the pot.

CALDO VERDE

In a soup pot, saute:

3 cloves of minced garlic

1 large yellow onion, diced

in a little olive oil (maybe 3-4 tbsps) over medium heat until the onions are translucent.

Add in:

2-3 russet potatoes, peeled and diced into 1-inch cubes (or 6-8 smallish Yukon Golds, peeled and diced into 1-inch cubes).

1 package of linguica, sliced (the kind with 2-3 sticks to a package, about 10-12 ounces)

1 bunch of lacinato kale, sliced into thin, noodle-like threads

1.5 quarts of water

Bring to a boil. Simmer until potatoes are very tender. Season with sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste. Serve.

Note:  Some people like to take a potato masher to the soup when it's finished cooking to smash up some of the potatoes.  That's yummy, too.

Penne with Sweet Onion Sauce

 

I found this gorgeous pic at fun food blog Definitely Not Martha. Please visit her--her recipes look amazing!

When I first tasted this sauce (at my aunt's house in Rome), it literally blew me away. The sauce was made from one, ordinary, and economical ingredient, and I was hooked at first bite.  When you think about how delicious caramelized onions are, it's not a far stretch to imagine that slow cooked sweet onions combined with pasta and a generous sprinkling of Pecorino Romano (or Parmiggiano) would be a delicious thing.  Now that it's fall, this pasta sauce is back to being a staple in our dinner repertoire.  I hope it makes its way onto your fall menus, too.

PENNE WITH SWEET ONIONS

You can use any short pasta with sauce--penne, rigatoni, farfalle, etc. My Roman aunt always adds a bouillion cube to her vegetable pasta sauces.  It's the secret ingredient to deliciousness. Trust me on this.

This is also a great do-ahead sauce. You can start it in the morning and just let it hang out on the stove all day until you are ready to reheat and serve.

You know what else is good in this? Pancetta or guanciale.  For a non-vegetable version, you can saute 5 ounces of diced pancetta or guanciale with the onions and garlic.

• 4 extra-large Texas Sweet or Vidalia onions (or 8 normal/med-sized yellow onions), peeled, halved, and sliced thinly--they will cook down a lot
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, chopped
• olive oil
• 1 Knorr chicken (or veggie if you prefer) bouillion cube
• 1/2-3/4 cup dry white wine
• water (if needed)
• a teaspoon of fresh marjoram
• sea salt (my preference these days is Maldon) and freshly ground pepper to taste
• Pecorino Romano, grated
• 1 lb of penne or other short pasta

In a large heavy bottomed pot or Dutch over, heat 5-6 generous glugs of olive oil over medium heat. (Italians use WAY more olive oil that we do in pasta sauces so don't be afraid to really coat your pot and then some.) Add the garlic and onions and bouillion cube and cook stirring often until onions are very wilted and soft.  This should take about 30 minutes. Don't let the onions burn.  If they start to stick, splash in some wine a little at a time until they no longer stick. Then reduce heat to medium-low and let the onions really cook down. They should be golden brown, not deeply caramelized. If they start to get too much color, lower heat. Again, if they start to stick, add a splash or two of water as often as needed, and give them a good stir.  Keep an eye on them--adding water and stirring as needed--for about two hours, then cover and remove from heat.  

Put the pasta on to cook, and while you are doing that, bring the onions to a simmer and add the fresh marjoram. Taste for salt and pepper.  If the sauce needs loosening you can add a little more water or wait until the pasta is boiling and add a ladle of the pasta water.  The recipe isn't meant to make a really saucy-sauce, but you definitely want the onions to be loose, not clumped together.

Combine the drained pasta with the sauce and pass the grated Pecorino Romano.  It's a rich sauce so this pasta makes a nice first course for a fall dinner where everyone can have a little taste.  Serves 4-8 depending on course.

New Year's Dinner: CityMama's Slow-Baked Brisket

I just posted a lamb recipe for another New year's dinner idea, but if beef is more your thing, read on!

We always eat black eyed peas for New Year's and this year, since we'll be keeping it mellow and I can cook anything I want, I settled on brisket to go with the creamy peas.  I perused some recipes from around the interwebs and all of them seem to have the same idea in common: bake it slow and low for hours and hours in some kind of marinade, then devour when it's fork-tender.

A lot of recipes also have liquid smoke in common. I am not a fan of the flavor of liquid smoke (and I'm not even sure what it is), I just know that I didn't want those chemicals on my brisket so I opted for a more natural alternative that I hoped would give the same smoky results: alderwood smoked salt. (Hickory smoked salt would also work.)

New Year's Dinner: Butterflied leg of lamb with feta and olives

For Christmas, my sister gifted me a boneless leg of lamb (yes, we're that kind of family) and instead of my usual rosemary-garlic treatment, I decided to Greek it up with olives and feta. If you are looking for an easy and elegant New Year Eve or Day dinner, this is just the thing, and best of all, you don't need a lot of fancy ingredients.

Walnut, Blue Cheese, and Cranberry Tart [NaBloPoMo Day 19]

As promised, here is a recipe for a savory tart that can be served as a first course along with a simple green salad or with your Thanksgiving meal. I first came across the recipe about 10 years ago in an ad for Diamond walnuts.  As is to be expected, it is heavy on the walnuts.  I like nuts, but I found the tart a little too walnuty for my taste. This time when I make it, I will decrease the amount of nuts.  I am also going to adapt it slightly this year and use caramelized onions instead of regular sauteed onions. I'm going to use 4-6 onions depending on the size and caramelize/reduce those down to one cup.

If you don't like cranberries you can substitute firm pears or figs.

Also, the quality of the tart depends on the kind of blue cheese you use.  My family (especially Bunny and Wallie) are blue cheese freaks so I am going to increase the amount of cheese by about 2 ounces.  One of my issues last time around was that it wasn't cheesy enough. For best results, I highly recommend you use one of the following of my favorite blue cheeses:

• Italian Gorgonzola
• Italian Gorgonzola Dolce which has a creamier, sweeter flavor
• Pt. Reyes blue cheese (eat local California!)
• Australian Roaring 40's (one of my all time faves)
• Irish Cashel blue cheese
• an artisinal blue cheese from Wisconsin like Hook's (eat local Mid-west!)
  

So without further ado, here is the recipe for the tart. Ground walnuts can be found in the baking aisle if you don't want to grind them yourself.

And if tarts aren't your thing, just try not to drool while looking at the photo and recipe of this Blue Cheese Cheesecake. I might have to make both!

How to: Improvise when you don't have a Crock-Pot [NaBloPoMo Day 12]

Throughout my cooking life, I have had a love/hate relationship with slow cookers. Even with the help of two slow cooker cookbooks, I have never been bowled over by anything that comes out of a slow cooker. It seems to me that they are best used for keeping soups, stews, and chilis hot on a buffet.

I think my biggest problem with Crock-Pots (and I use that term to mean all plug-in slow cookers) is that when cooking meats, to get the best results, you have to brown it in a separate pan first then transfer it to the Crock-Pot and add the remaining ingredients. Those looking for a mess-free short cut to cooking (me) now have to deal with a crusted pan and a splattered stove, and that totally defeats the purpose for me.

Two recipes that I do think work really well in a slow cooker are chicken breasts that are cooked with a little water and then shredded to use in tacos or enchiladas (they do stay moist this way), and chile verde also made with chicken.

I have owned slow-cookers and always ended up giving them away. Here's what I do instead.