Keen for Quinoa and Unruly for Tabouli

 

Time for another weird ingredient!  This tabouli recipe from Bon Appetit uses quinoa.

Key Noah?

Dr. Quin, Oh a medicine woman?

No, say it with me:  KEEN-WAH.

Quinoa is a type of seed, but it’s generally used like a grain.  Today we are making a quinoa tabouli salad.  Now…what is tabouli?  It has many different variations (as well as spellings), but it’s a Middle Eastern salad typically made with bulgur, tomatoes, parsley, and mint.  We’re using quinoa instead of bulgur and also adding some cucumber, onion, and radish (to make it extra crunchy).

Here’s a close up of the red quinoa seeds.  There are many different types of quinoa, but the most common ones are red, white, and black.  We actually ended up doing a mix of red and white quinoa because we didn’t have enough of the red stuff.

First step is to cook the quinoa in boiling water until softened (about 15 minutes).

Here is a lemon vinaigrette to dress the salad.  It’s simply lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. 

   

Some fresh herbs from our garden:  mint and parsley.

Some lovely cherry tomatoes.

   

Crunchy stuff:  cucumber and scallions

   

Red stuff for color:  radishes and onion

Let’s get this party started!

Everything gets mixed together.  You can eat it immediately, but it’s better if you let it sit in the fridge for at least 30 minutes so that the flavors can meld together.  It’s a delightfully refreshing summer salad!

Chilled Red Tomatoes

 

About as far from Fried Green Tomatoes as you can get… while still using tomatoes.

Recently a neighbor of ours who has a large garden plot has started selling fresh produce out of his front yard a couple days a week.  He has cucumbers, peppers, onions, but mostly, he has lots of fresh tomatoes.  They aren’t grocery store pretty, but they are super tasty.  How can you resist buying a whole bag of tomatoes like that?  Trick is… using that many tomatoes.  Here is a a tasty, chilled tomato soup we made!

Now, chilled soups aren’t something we’ve had often, but during the summer… well, lets just say it sounds better than hot soup!

The first step is to core and halve about half of the tomatoes (try saying halve about half several times fast).  Coring just means you take a knife and carve out the stem bit at the top.

 

Along with some unpeeled cloves of garlic and sliced shallot, it all gets roasted for about 15 minutes.  Look at how red those ‘maters are on the inside. 

I forgot to spray the foil with the non-stick cooking spray and as a result the shallots got… a bit too crispy.  Take the shallot and onion off of the pan and continue cooking the tomatoes another 15 minutes.

The other, uncooked half of the tomatoes get sliced up and put into the blender along with some tomato paste, salt, roasted garlic, shallot, and smoked paprika.   Once the cooked tomatoes are done, they go in there too. 

This dish is as easy as making margaritas!  While the whole messing is getting pureed, you drizzle about 3/8 cup of olive oil in.  As it turns out, our blender was barely big enough to accommodate this much soup!

Then you strain out whatever solids remain, stir in some fancy sherry vinegar, and chill! 

Yo.  Seriously.  Chill.

After at least two hours of chilling, serve in cold bowls with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and freshly cracked pepper.  The result is cool, bright, and velvety!

Naner Naner Boo Boo!

 

It’s time to make an All-American Classic:  Banana Pudding!  But of course, we’ll make it all fancified and complicated in our classic Chez Venza way!

Today’s recipe is a mash up of two different recipes.  It’s really a lesson in reading the whole recipe all the way through before you begin.  I admit that I am bad at this.  HOWEVER (before you get all high on your horses), I did read the entire recipe before going to the store.  The problem was that when I got home, I realized I had a SECOND recipe that might be better.  So….I started making the second version only to realize I didn’t have all of the ingredients.  But I put all my creative skills together and managed to pull it off without anyone knowing (except, of course, for the full confession printed here).

First recipe is from Southern Living and purports to “lighten things up.”  The second recipe is from Cook’s Country and intends to impart banana flavor in every bite.  I figured….why not take the best of both:  make it super banana-y and also somewhat healthy.

What happens when you roast bananas in the oven??

This is what happens.  Roasting the bananas is supposed to soften them up and intensify the flavor.  Don’t worry, they’re not burned!

This is basically homemade vanilla pudding (we’ll add the roasted bananas later to make it banana pudding).  Cook’s Country wanted me to use half and half, but Southern Living wanted 1% milk and non-fat sweetened condensed milk.  I had to go with SL on this one because I didn’t have any cream or half and half on hand.  Basically you heat up the milk and condensed milk, then you add egg yolks and cornstarch and cook it until it starts to thicken up.  Then you stir in some vanilla.

What does a roasted banana look like when you take the skin off?  Uhh….it looks like a banana.  Here we mixed the pudding with the bananas in order to make:  banana pudding.

After the pudding has a chance to cool off, then comes the fun part…assembling! 

Cook’s Country wanted us to top them off with whipped cream, but Southern Living was all about the meringue. Meringue’s healthy, right?   We’re a sucker for a good meringue, so we went that route.  Plus, we had leftover egg whites because the pudding only called for yolks.  Wouldn’t want those to go to waste now would we?

My favorite part of a merengue is seeing it brown up in the oven.  Isn’t it pretty?

When life gives you two different banana pudding recipes and a creative mind, do the mash (the banana mash) and create your own version!

Attack of the Scones!

For those of you that know my love of biscuits, it will not be much of a stretch to extol the joys of scones. So buttery, so delicious, and surprisingly, so easy.  We’ve tried recipes before that seemed overly complicated, and the dough was frustrating to work with.  But here comes Southern Living with a pretty good, (almost) fool-proof recipe.  It even comes with 8 (eight!) variations.  Alas, it didn’t come with what seems like the most basic iteration:  blueberry scones.  Never fear, we’ll figure it out!



The ingredients are pretty simple:  flour, sugar, baking powder, butter, and cream.  Plus whatever extra flavor you want to put in (we added blueberries, natch).  The cream is probably the only thing that we don’t typically have on hand all the time.  But I guess if we could make them all the time, then they wouldn’t be special!



Here we mix up the flour, sugar, baking powder, and butter with a pastry cutter.  You don’t have to have one of these….a fork would work just as well.  Then it goes in the freezer for a couple of minutes.  The secret to great scones is to keep everything cold.  Cold butter, cold cream, cold hands, cold heart (just kidding).  Keeping the butter cold gives the scones their flaky, buttery awesomeness.



Next you mix in the blueberries (blueberries, attack!!).  Then add the cream until it forms a dough.  The critical part is getting the right amount of liquid in the dough.  I generally err on the side of too little, because you can always add more.  Another secret is to not knead the dough to much.  Just form it into a circle and then cut it into triangles with a knife.  Nothing more to it!  I only made a half-recipe in this case, so I cut it into 4 scones (a full recipe would be eight). 



I put the scones back in the fridge at this point for a few more minutes to make sure everything is nice and cold.  It also gave the oven some time to heat up.  I then brushed the tops with a little bit more cream so that they would brown up nicely.



Yumm….time to invite the queen over for some tea!

Delicious on their own, or eat it with a little jam.  We’ve also tried making cranberry scones with a little bit of orange zest as a way to mix thinks up.  Check out the Southern Living link for more ideas on flavor combinations.

I say gov'ner....I'll have another!

Shiny Hoppy People

Let’s take a break from all this eating…. and do some drinking!  Occasionally, Chez Venza likes to participate in a little blind taste test action to see if preconceived notions or opinions hold up.   This time, we did a two-man blind tasting of five India Pale Ales.

For those of you somehow not familiar with IPAs, they are a high-hop, higher-alcohol brew.  They have a refreshing bitterness and almost a floral taste from the hops.  As the story goes, IPAs were created with more hops and alcohol in order to preserve the beer longer so that it could last through the long trip from Britain to India.


The esteemed panel and their corresponding alcohol by volume:

Beer	Alcohol  by Volume
Hercules Double IPA	10%
Stone IPA	6.9%
Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA	7.2%
Ranger IPA	6.5%
St. Arnold’s Elissa IPA	6.6%

Now, the tricky part.  How to do a blind tasting when only two people are participating?  We took paper cups, labeled them on the bottom.  One filled the cups with the appropriate beer, while the other wasn’t present.  Then the other came in, and randomly carried the two sets of cups to the tasting arena.  Worked great!



Blind samples 1-5.  We thought we’d try to ID certain metrics while we tasted: best, worst, hoppiest, and highest alcohol content (as the Hercules had far more alcohol, this was just a challenge to ID this beer.)

Results?  A taste test that was surprisingly difficult and with shockingly consistent results.  In our previous tastings of light beers, Mexican beers, malt liquors, Octoberfest beers, etc., there has been a greater variety of tastes between the competitors.  Here, the similarity in flavor was incredible.  I had to finish all of the samples before I had any real clues… and even then I was scratching my head a bit.

However, my compatriot and I reached the same results on all our metrics:

Highest Alcohol -  We were both able to detect the Hercules and its 10%.
Best – Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA
Hoppiest – Stone IPA
Worst Least Favorite– St. Arnold’s Elissa IPA.

This last result kind of broke my heart.  I am a big fan of the St. Arnold's brews.  As a result, I renamed the metric.  (Preconceived notion shattered.)