Stir fried noodles with shrimp, green beans, and carrots

I am so excited about this recipe. This is the first time that I've been able to make a stir fry that actually tasted like something from our favorite Thai spot. Now, I have no idea if our local Thai place makes authentic food or not - I just know that it is tasty. My favorite thing to order from there is the drunken noodles - spicy stir fried noodles with veggies and shrimp. Contrary to what you might expect, there's no alcohol in drunken noodles - one theory about the name is that the noodles are so spicy that you need to drink beer to cool down. Anyway, a couple weeks ago I was craving drunken noodles and decided to see if I could make a decent version at home. I did some recipe research, and used this one as a starting point. The result wasn't quite what I wanted so I made some modifications and came up with the version that I'm sharing here, which is the perfect blend of sweet, salty, and spicy. It came out just as I had hoped and I love that I can make a homemade version of my favorite takeout dish. Now I just have to figure out how to make Andrew's favorite fried rice...

Grilled vegetables with Malaysian vinaigrette

My cast iron grill pan has been getting a lot of use this summer. We don't own a real grill, so we have to make do with the grill pan until we move somewhere with outdoor space. Luckily, the grill pan makes nice grill marks and actually imparts a pretty decent smoky flavor. It's perfect for recipes like this (although of course, if you have a real grill, you can definitely use it!). Here, eggplant, corn, and green beans get grilled to perfection and tossed with handfuls of herbs and a zingy Malaysian vinaigrette. The dish is simple and super flavorful, and takes advantage of summer's wonderful fresh veggies and herbs.

p.s. My blog turns two years old tomorrow! Unfortunately, I don't have my act together enough to plan and write a special post for my blog's birthday. So I'll just say yay! Happy birthday to Four Seasons of Food! Thank you to everyone who has stopped by, commented, or tried one of my recipes. You keep me motivated to continue posting, and I hugely appreciate your support.

Pasta with green beans and sausage gravy

I got some beautiful green beans at the market last week. They were slender and delicate and I couldn't wait to eat them. The only problem was that I couldn't decide what to make...green beans tend to always be a side dish in my house and I really wanted to make a main dish. Curry or stir fry? Nah, as usual I didn't want to rely on an old standby - I wanted to try something new! I poked around at recipes online for a while and starting thinking about combining the beans with pasta and a creamy sauce. I remembered that I had some sausage in the fridge, and then suddenly I had the perfect idea...sausage gravy! For those of you that are unfamiliar, sausage gravy is basically just a standard white sauce using fat from sausage instead of butter. The great thing about it is that the sausage adds so much flavor that you don't really have to worry about additional spices, cheese, or anything like that. Sausage gravy is usually served with biscuits, but I had a feeling that it would make a great pasta sauce, and it certainly did! I was pretty thrilled with how this came out - the green beans and a sprinkling of parsley added nice freshness and color, and it was a simple, flavorful, and filling dinner. If you're on the east coast and are looking for some comfort food to eat when hurricane Irene hits, you should definitely give this a try!

Green beans with crisp onions, chile, and mint

We love green beans in this house and eat them with dinner at least once or twice a week during the summer. We usually eat them cooked with just olive oil, salt, and pepper, but that gets boring after a while so I'm always keeping an eye out for more unique preparations to try. I found this recipe in Gourmet Today. It has an interesting combination of ingredients that I wouldn't have thought to combine with green beans, but the result is really good. I like the combination of the hot chiles with mint, which I think of as a cooling herb. And it is pretty hard to go wrong with fried onions!

Green beans with crisp onions, chile, and mint
Adapted from Gourmet Today
Serves 4

1 1/4 pounds green beans, trimmed
Salt
2/3 cup vegetable oil
6 ounces small onions or shallots, very thinly sliced and separated into rings
1 fresh hot chile, such as Thai or serrano, thinly sliced (remove seeds if you are sensitive to heat)
1/2 cup chopped fresh mint

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add beans and cook until just tender, about 5 minutes. Drain and run under cold water until beans are no longer warm.

Heat oil in a small saucepan over medium heat until hot but not smoking. Fry onions or shallots in 3 batches, stirring often, until golden brown, about 3-6 minutes per batch. Working quickly, remove onions/shallots from the oil with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. They will get crisp as they cool.

Transfer 1 tbs of frying oil to a large skillet and heat over medium heat. Add chile and cook until softened, about 2 minutes. Add the beans and toss until beans are warmed through. Remove pan from heat, toss with mint, and add salt to taste. Top with fried onions/shallots and serve. This dish is best served immediately so that the onions/shallots stay crisp.

Toasted farro, green bean, and shiitake salad with tofu

 
For some reason, all my Magazine Mondays recipes have been coming from Cooking Light. I'm not sure why that is, since I flag lots of recipes in Bon Appetit and Food & Wine as well, but I'm really glad I stuck with Cooking Light for this one! This recipe is super tasty. The only thing I didn't like in this dish was the lack of heat in the dressing - I ended up adding a little Sriracha sauce to my bowl, which made it perfect.

Although this is called a salad, it really is a balanced main dish. The tofu preparation is rather time-consuming, but it is worth it - I loved the dense, firm texture of the pressed tofu. I made a few changes to this recipe: the original one calls for pearled barley, but I used pearled farro instead. Farro is a grain in the wheat family that I have been wanting to try for a while - my grocery store recently started carrying it, so I took the opportunity to give it a try. It cooks pretty quickly, and I liked it a whole lot in this dish. Wheat berries or brown rice would probably work well too. I also sauteed the beans instead of blanching them, and tweaked the amounts of some of the ingredients based on what I had available.

Green beans with mustard crema

When I was looking through all the Summer Fest recipes last week, I came across a mention of another blog event called Magazine Mondays, organized by Ivonne at Cream Puffs in Venice (a very drool-inducing blog). It's simple - basically, every Monday, Ivonne compiles a list of blog posts featuring magazine recipes. I was really excited to find out about this - I subscribe to Food & Wine, Cooking Light, and Bon Appetit, and while I love reading through the magazines every month and always flag interesting recipes, I rarely end up using them. Magazine Mondays might be just the motivation I need!

My entry this week is from the August 2010 issue of Cooking Light. This issue has a feature on recipes inspired by farmers' markets, which is right up my alley. This recipe was created by a chef in Boulder, CO, but it is perfect for the gorgeous green beans that I have been buying here in MA. It's simple, quick, and tasty, with subtle flavors that don't mask the fresh taste of the beans. I think this dish would be a nice accompaniment to almost anything.

I used sour cream instead of creme fraiche here, just based on what I could get at the store. I also increased the amounts of the thyme and almonds because I really like how they taste with beans. Next time, I might increase the amount of mustard as well - I would have liked the flavor to come out a bit more. I'd recommend tasting the dressing and adjusting to your preference.

Beans with citrus and chives

It's fun getting reacquainted with my cookbook collection as I look for new and interesting ways to prepare the many vegetables I buy each week. I came across this recipe in Super Natural Cooking, a book by Heidi Swanson, who also writes the blog 101 Cookbooks. Heidi focuses on cooking with natural, whole foods, and her recipes are always creative and inspiring. This one ended up being a nice, quick way to cook the three (three!) different colors of string beans that I had bought at the market. The beans are sliced into tiny rings and subtly flavored with lemon, lime, and chives. It's simple, bright, and tasty - Andrew even declared this to be his new favorite bean preparation!

If you've got the patience, you could certainly cut the beans with a knife, but I used my food processor. I used green, yellow, and purple string beans here - sadly, the purple ones turned green after they were cooked (I guess I should probably stop buying vegetables just because they're purple...)



Beans with citrus and chives
Adapted from Super Natural Cooking
Serves 4

3/4 pound string beans, trimmed
2 tbs extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbs water
Grated zest from 1 lemon
Grated zest from 1 lime
3-4 tbs chopped fresh chives
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cut the beans into approximately 1/8-inch slices. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat, and add the beans. Stir to coat beans with oil and then add water and cover the skillet. Cook for 2-3 minutes, tossing once or twice, until the beans are bright and tender. Remove skillet from heat and stir in zests and chives. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Thai red curry with tofu

This is a fairly quick, and very adaptable recipe. I made it vegetarian (except for the fish sauce - see substitution below if you want it totally vegetarian), using tofu for the protein, but it would work well with shrimp or chicken. I used green and yellow string beans and potatoes for the vegetables - other good ones would be carrots, bell peppers, peas, maybe eggplant...lots of possible variations. If you make this, let me know what you used!

We used a prepared curry paste that we bought at Whole Foods, (or a similar store - can't quite remember). I would like to make my own at some point, but haven't tried it yet.

Some cooking notes: I like to pan fry the tofu so that it develops a nice crust and retains some texture when it is mixed with the coconut milk. Make sure to pat it dry before this step. For the potatoes, there isn't enough liquid to submerge them to simmer in the coconut milk mixture, so I like to pre-cook them, either by steaming or microwaving.


Thai red curry with tofu
Serves 4

1/2 lb. green and/or yellow string beans, trimmed and cut into 2 inch segments
2/3 lb. (about 2 medium) Yukon gold or red potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes (or you could use little new potatoes, like I did)
1 14 oz. can coconut milk
1 tbsp Thai red curry paste (I used Thai Kitchen brand)
7 oz. extra-firm tofu (this is half of a standard tofu package), cut into 3/4 inch cubes and patted dry with a paper towel
1 inch-long piece of ginger, peeled
1.5 tbsp Thai fish sauce (or soy sauce)
2 tbsp brown sugar
Vegetable oil
Basil and cilantro, chopped

In a heavy skillet (cast iron works great), heat vegetable oil (enough to coat bottom of skillet) over medium-high heat until very hot but not smoking. Add tofu and cook, tossing frequently, until tofu develops a golden-brown crust.

Meanwhile, steam potatoes until just barely tender. If you are cooking rice, it works nicely to do the steaming at the same time.

In a large saucepan, simmer coconut milk, ginger, and red curry paste over medium heat for 5 minutes. Add fish sauce, brown sugar, and 1/3 cup water and simmer for 5 minutes. Add beans and simmer for 5 more minutes. Add potatoes and tofu and cook until heated through (make sure potatoes are fully tender at this point). Remove ginger, and top with basil and cilantro. Serve hot with rice.

Quinoa and lentil salad

This salad came together in an effort to use up some red quinoa* and lentils that had been in the pantry for a while, as well as some green beans and corn that were still in the fridge at the end of the week. Andrew made the dressing, which was inspired by Mexican flavors. This is definitely a nutritionally balanced meal in itself, and the leftovers make great lunches.

Unfortunately, since we created this dish ourselves, I can't write out a detailed recipe - neither of us is in the habit of measuring ingredients as we cook. So this will be a general description of the dish, with only very approximate amounts listed for the ingredients - sorry about that. I'll try to do this better in the future!

*Quinoa is a grain-like seed that offers more protein than most other grains. Great for vegetarians who struggle with getting enough protein in their diets.


Quinoa and lentil salad
All amounts listed here are very approximate. Because the quinoa and lentils expand quite a bit when cooked, we got dinner and several lunch portions out of this.

For salad:
1.5 cups quinoa (I used red because that's what I had on hand, but the regular ivory one would be fine)
1 cup lentils
Green beans, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2 inch segments
3 ears of corn, husks removed (frozen would also be fine)
1 small onion, chopped
Cilantro, chopped

For dressing:
Lemon juice (lime would probably be better, but we didn't have any)
2 cloves garlic, minced
Lime zest
Hot smoked paprika
Cumin
Salt
Extra virgin olive oil

Neither of us can really estimate the amounts of the dressing ingredients. I'd say about a 1:1 ratio of oil to lemon/lime juice is a good start. Spices and salt can be done to your taste - we went pretty heavy with the paprika, so that was the dominant flavor. You want enough dressing to lightly coat, not soak, the salad.

Fill two pots (3 quart size or so) with water and bring to a boil. Place quinoa in a fine-mesh strainer and run water through it until water runs clear. When water is boiling, add quinoa to one pot and cook uncovered until quinoa is tender. The germ (white curled sproutlike thing) will come out of most of the seeds when they are close to done. When quinoa is finished, drain well and allow the grains to sit in strainer for 5 minutes before spreading onto a plate to cool. In the other pot, boil lentils until tender. Drain and cool.

While quinoa and lentils are cooking, bring another large pot of water (sorry about the many pots involved here) to a boil. Add ears of corn and boil for 5 minutes. Remove corn (don't drain water), and run under cold water until cool enough to handle. While corn is cooling, add beans to boiling water in the same pot used to cook corn, cook for 5 minutes or until crisp-tender, drain and run under cold water to stop the cooking. Cut kernels off of corn.

In a large bowl, mix together quinoa, lentils, corn, green beans and onions. Whisk dressing ingredients together until well mixed and then toss with salad. Top with cilantro and salt to taste.

Tuna nicoise salad

(My hand looks freakish in that photo...sorry)

This recipe is perfect for late July, when the market is full of fresh green beans, potatoes, and tomatoes. This version is adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook -- I took out the lettuce because I think the salad is great (maybe even better) without it, and also took out the green pepper. I added the olives, but not capers, because the two of those together is a bit too strongly flavored for my taste. I also changed the cooking process a bit to cut down on the number of dirty dishes, and a number of smaller adaptations are noted in the recipe...this isn't the quickest salad to put together, but it makes a filling, complete meal.

Tuna nicoise salad
Adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook

I don't measure my ingredients for recipes like this -- I just use what we have on hand and estimate the amounts needed to make the dish balanced. Its hard to go wrong with this one.

Dressing:
3 tbs chopped shallots (I used onions instead)
1 1/2 tbs fresh lemon juice
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper
5 tbs good quality extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbs coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley

Salad:
1 pound fingerling potatoes or small boiling potatoes
1/2 pound green beans, trimmed (I cut these into approximately 2 inch segments)
Salt
3 hard-boiled large eggs*, cut into wedges
2 (6-ounce) cans tuna in oil, drained and broken into chunks (I only used 1 can, Genova brand)
1/4 cup Nicoise olives (I used Kalamata)
2 tbs chopped flat-leaf parsley

Dressing: Blend shallots with lemon juice, mustard, salt, and pepper in a blender. With motor running, add oil in a slow stream, scraping down sides of blender as necessary, and blend until well combined. Add parsley and blend until finely chopped. (I used my mini chopped for all of this, and added the oil all at once. Everything came out fine)

Salad: Combine potatoes and cold well-salted water to cover by 2 inches in a heavy saucepan and bring to a simmer. Simmer, uncovered, until just tender, 15-20 mins. Remove potatoes with a slotted spoon and drain in a colander.

Add beans to the same saucepan and boil until crisp-tender, about 5 minutes. Drain in a colander, rinse under cold water to stop the cooking, drain and pat dry.

When cool enough to handle, peel potatoes (if you want, I never do) and halve or quarter them, depending on their size. Toss potatoes with beans and 2 tbs dressing in a large bowl, and salt to taste. Top with eggs, tomatoes, and tuna chunks. Drizzle more dressing (as much as you want, you don't necessarily have to use all of it) over salad, and top with olives and parsley.

This is best served immediately, but makes a decent cold lunch the next day.

* To make the perfect hard-boiled egg, according to Gourmet, and tested by me with success, put the eggs in a large heavy pot and cover with 1 1/2 inches of cold tap water. Partially cover the pot and bring water to a rolling boil. Reduce heat to low, cover pot completely, and cook eggs for 30 seconds. Remove from the heat and let eggs stand in the hot water, still covered, for 15 minutes. Then run the eggs under cold water for about 5 minutes to stop cooking and prevent yolk discoloration.