Southwestern Black Bean Salad

Last week it was too hot to cook anything, so Carolyn and I put our culinary minds to the test and developed a great dinner that didn't require heat of any kind. Just kidding--as usual, we ripped off somebody else's recipe and are now passing it off as our own creation. Today's dinner (or rather, last week's dinner, because I'm too lazy to post anything on time) is brought to you once again by the Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks.

As you probably surmised from the title, we had Southwestern Black Bean Salad. Being the lover of black beans that she is, Carolyn wasn't content to only have it once a week in tacos. And now that it's so hot outside, soup is out of the question. Naturally, then, she found a way to combine them with lettuce. The following is a fairly simple salad recipe, but what made it special was the Cilantro Lime Dressing (also found in the Moosewood) that topped it off.

Cilantro Lime Dressing:
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
2 entire scallions, chopped
1/4 cup lime juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 cup oil

Blend all ingredients except oil until smooth. Mix in oil slowly by blending on low speed.

The Salad:
1 can of black beans, rinsed and drained
1 & 1/2 cups cooked corn
2 avocados
8 cups of your favorite leafy green vegetable (we used romaine today)
tortilla chips

-Toss corn and beans together with cilantro lime dressing in a bowl.
-On your plates, place your greens, then crush tortilla chips over top.
-Mound your corn/black bean/dressing in the center.
-Add cubed avocado to the mix.
-Grind a touch of black pepper over the whole business, along with a little salt focused at the avocado.

And that's all it takes. This salad was really tasty, and aside from a little blending, actually faster and easier than the chef-style salad that I typically make. The only reason not to make it weekly, on a whim, is that it requires two fairly time-sensitive ingredients, avocado and cilantro.

We actually cut this recipe in half, and I'd say it was almost enough food for 2 people on it's own. Of course, we'd eaten lunch late and were planning on milkshakes for dessert. If you want to round out the meal, I'd suggest a simple cheese quesadilla. Carolyn's recommendation, if you're making this salad in spring or early summer, is spicy tomato soup.

A note on additions: tomato and grated cheese would not be out of place at all in this salad, but I'd leave out the cheese if you're planning to pair with a quesadilla, to preserve contrast. The Moosewood suggests chopped green olives, which sounds gross to me.

Jammie Dodgers

Yes! I'd love some tea! What biscuits do you have there? Jammie Dodgers?! My favorite.

The after-dinner adventure tonight was baking Jammie Dodgers in honor of the last new Doctor Who episode for a long time. I found this recipe for "clones" of the British package cookie. I halved the recipe that was on the website and ended up a little short of 2 dozen sandwich cookies.

Combine:
1 cup butter (2 sticks) softened
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup, packed brown sugar
1 egg

In a separate bowl (or the same bowl, on top of the wet ingredients if you are lazy like me) combine:
3 3/4 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Add dry ingredients to the wet, one cup at a time, alternating with:
1/8 cup milk and
1 TABLESPOON vanilla extract


Chill in the refrigerator for at least a couple hours before you try to roll out the dough. Because my kitchen was so warm, I had to take out only small hunks of dough at a time so that it wouldn't all warm up too fast. Rolling out warm dough is a messy and frustrating task.


Roll dough on a floured surface-- about 1/8 inch thick. Cut out circles that are about 2 inches in diameter (I used a drinking glass to do this). Place cookies on a greased baking sheet. Make cute cut-outs in half of the cookies (these will be the tops of the sandwich cookies). I used a knife to make my cut-outs, but if you have tiny cookie cutters it would be easier. I incorporated the discarded bits from the center of the cut-out cookies back into my rolled out dough to be economical.


Bake at 350 for 8 minutes.


Cool.

Spread jam (I used seedless blackberry jam) on a plain cookie and top with a cut-out cookie. Repeat. I estimate I used about half a jar of jam.

Ben and I thought these cookies were great (worth the effort). That opinion was later verified by two people who are not authors on this blog-- so you can trust us on this one.

Falafel

My brother passed along this recipe for falafel. The recipe is copied from his e-mail (because I'm super lazy) with a few notes added.

1 15 oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 cloves garlic
1/2 chopped onion (we used red onion)
1/2 cup parsley
2 t olive oil
2 t hot sauce
3 T flour
1 t cumin
1 t coriander
1/2 t paprika
1/2 t baking powder
1/4 t salt, to taste

The recipe calls for baking these things. I ("I" meaning my brother, but we did this too. It's much too hot to be using the oven.) pan fry them on low heat until they're browned on both sides and heated through, you can try whichever. If you bake them, preheat to 400.

Pulse chickpeas and garlic in blender (If you have a food processor please use it! The chickpeas mush into a thick cement paste at the bottom of the blender. Ben added water to get things moving around in the blender, but that meant that our falafel was wetter and didn't form into very ball-like balls.)  Add onion, parsley, olive oil, and hot sauce, and blend until relatively smooth.

Transfer to mixing bowl. Mix in flour, cumin, coriander, paprika, baking powder, salt and pepper. The mixture should be mushy but firm enough to shape into balls. You can add some flour to firm up if necessary (we added at least twice as much flour because we had to add water while blending).

Pan fry in some oil. I've been using peanut because it's what we have. Presumably canola would work the same. Olive was a little less good the one time I used it. I do this on pretty low heat and they tend not to stick too much. I'll leave that to you. (We used canola oil.)

The recipe says this makes 12 falafels -- I obviously make them larger, because I only get about half that. Make them whatever size you find convenient. (We ended up with 8 falafel patties.)

If you bake, it says to form them into walnut size balls and flatten. Spray a baking sheet with some cooking spray and bake for 16-18 minutes, spray the top, flip, and bake for 8-10 more. 

These are so good (thanks, Brother!). Ben thought that he would like more hot sauce next time, but I thought the spices were perfect as they were; the cumin/hot sauce combo makes these slightly hot with a smokey flavor. We ate our falafel wrapped up in pita bread with cucumber, tomato, and ranch dressing. We used ranch because I had some vague idea that there was a white sauce that people used with falafel-- turned out to be a pretty good addition. I mentioned above that our falafel was wetter than typical, but in my opinion this was an improvement over other falafel I've had in the past; I think most restaurant falafel is too dry.

Stromboli

This week's entry is brought to you by the Bloomington, IN visitors' bureau.

Welcome to dinner-and-a-movie night. Tonight's feature is Breaking Away accompanied by home-made stromboli in the style of Nick's English Hut in Bloomington.

As far as I can tell (by searching the internet and reading the Wikipedia article linked above) in most places stromboli is a delicate-looking Italian turnover sandwich. If you are in Bloomington, stromboli is a giant pizza sandwich on a hoagie roll whose only ambition is to drip tomato sauce on your pants (see above photo). We went with the second definition.

Preheat oven to 350

Slice rolls in half. We used hoagie sandwich bread, but anything in the Italian bread family should be fine. Slather on a thick coat of pizza sauce to the bottom half of your bread. Top with whatever pizza toppings you prefer; we used green pepper, tomato, and mushroom but in future I would like to add in onion (if you are non-vegetarian, Italian meats are more traditional). On the top half of your bread, pile as much cheese as you dare-- mozzarella is good.

Bake on a cookie sheet until cheese is bubbly and browning-- I think our sandwiches took in the area of 10 minutes. 

I think we'll be eating stromboli again in the near future. It's super easy and fast and we almost always have leftover pizza sauce and toppings after we make pizza. Stromboli is best paired with jelly donuts from Square Donuts on Walnut St. in Bloomington.

Black Bean Tacos and Mexican Rice

Hello Internet, it's good to see you again. Carolyn and I have been away, but not idle these past two weeks. Well, we've been mostly idle, but not completely idle. As proof, I'm here to tell you, Internet, about the wonderful taco night we had earlier this week. Before I get involved in explaining the new recipes, I should mention that "black bean tacos" just means a can of black beans instead of beef. So next time you're craving tacos but you have a vegetarian to please, just toss a can of black bean into the skillet instead of a pound of ground beef.

We tried out 2 new recipes for our dinner on Thursday. The first was a new method for seasoning the beans (or beef, if you like). Prior to this recipe, we just used the 50 cent packaged stuff you find at the grocery store. It works fine but is a little high in sodium and easy to forget when you're at the store, and we just felt like trying something new. So the following list is just a mixture of dry spices to be used in lieu of a purchased taco seasoning packet:


1 tablespoon chili powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper


Carolyn and I both agree, this is an fine alternative for seasoning your beef (or beans), and an excellent starting point for further experimentation. On the whole, it tastes very close to what you'd buy at the store, perhaps a touch spicier. In the future, we'll use this as a base, then add other seasonings for varied flavors (for instance chipotle taco seasoning or lime taco seasoning).

Carolyn ate the gorgeous tacos pictured at the top of this post. I went for a taco salad:

Honestly though, taco night was just an excuse to try our hand at Mexican rice. The following recipe is very delicious, though it was by far too oily. Next time, we'll use 1/3 the oil, but keep basically everything else the same:

Blend together 12 oz can diced tomatoes and about 1/2 a diced onion. You'll only use 2 cups of this mixture, so have something in mind to do with the left-overs. We added our left-over tomato and onion in pizza sauce the next night.

Meanwhile heat up 1/3 cup canola oil (Carolyn eye-balled this and estimates she used a little less than 1/3 cup ((but still toooooo oily)))

Rinse 2 cups uncooked rice thoroughly in running water. Our recipe (which I think came from America's Test Kitchen originally, so I trust their advice) claims that this step is vital because it removes excess starch and makes the resulting rice fluffy.

Fry uncooked rice in oil for about 6 minutes (or until "translucent"). Reduce heat to medium and add 4 cloves diced garlic and 2 diced jalapeno peppers (remove seeds if you don't like your food too spicy). Cook a couple minutes. Add two cups vegetable broth and your two cups of pureed tomato and onion. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

Next, transfer to an oven-safe pan (we used a glass baking dish, although the recipe recommends a dutch oven) and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Remove from oven. Stir in as much cilantro as you can stand and liberally apply lime juice. Enjoy!

This was great. As I said above, much too oily, but even that didn't detract from the flavor. The only change I would consider is to add more cilantro, but I tend to go overboard with it. Today, we reheated the rice in a frying pan with a bunch of spinach, and that was fantastic too. Definitely making this recipe again soon.

Soup and Stew Sunday #6: Another Black Bean Soup

Seems like we keep doing soups in twos for our Soup and Stew Sundays. I guess it has something to do with our love of comparing things. Anyway, this week, we made a black bean soup adapted from this smitten kitchen recipe.

Future Ben and Carolyn, make this soup again. It was good, required few ingredients, and really easy to make. I know we usually save the review for after the recipe, so I'll leave it at that for now:

one large red onion, chopped
4 bell peppers, green, red, yellow, and orange, chopped
a tablespoon of oil

Saute for 5-8 minutes, until the vegetables are tender but well before onions begin to caramelize.

4 teaspoons of cumin
4 cloves of garlic

Add these and continue sauteing for 2-3 more minutes.

4 (15oz) cans of black beans
1 tablespoon of chipotle peppers in adobe sauce
1/2 teaspoon red pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
2 teaspoons of salt
2-3 cups of water

Chuck it all in there and stir it up a bit. Let it simmer on medium for at least 30 minutes. The longer you let it simmer, the thicker it will get (which is good).

Remove 2-3 cups to a blender and puree, then return and stir.

juice from 1/2 lime

squeeze this in at the end and give it a good stir. Taste, and adjust salt levels accordingly.

We ate this soup with tortilla chips on Sunday and a quesadilla today. It could go with just about any bread product. So there you have the recipe. We used a little too much water so the soup was a bit thin yesterday. It thickened up nicely overnight though. The lime juice was noticeable on Sunday, but it didn't come through tonight; Carolyn and I both agreed that we could add more next time. Other than that, it was a perfect black bean soup. The variety of bell peppers is necessary, I think, and their presence adds a little bit of refreshment that breaks up the black bean flavor.

Give this soup a try and let us know how it turns out.

Soup and Stew Sunday #5: Quinoa and Black Bean Chili

Quinoa? Don't worry, I didn't know what it was either. And, by the way, you're saying it wrong. It's not "qwin-noah," it's pronounced "keen-wha." My roommate, among her many other virtues, happens to be the sort of person who knows the sort of person who purchases quinoa in bulk from the co-op. Thus, this week for soup-or-stew-Sunday we were introduced to this delicious grain.

But enough preliminaries. I know you came here for the recipe. We adapted a chili recipe we found on allrecipes.com.

1 cup uncooked quinoa, rinsed
2 cups water

Bring water and quinoa to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until quinoa has absorbed the water.

1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin

Cook onion in oil. Add garlic and spices, cook a little more, about a minute (or until people walk into the room and say "sure smells good").

1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
2 (19 ounce) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 green bell pepper, chopped (we also added another 1/2 pepper that happened to be in the fridge)
1 zucchini, chopped
2 tablespoons minced chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (Roommate bravely used a knife and fork to cut the slimy, scary peppers)
1 teaspoon dried oregano


Simmer, covered, for 20 minutes (or until vegetables are soft). Add tomato juice or water if you think the stew looks too thick--we did.

salt and black pepper to taste
1 cup frozen corn 

Cook about 5 more minutes, or until corn is hot.
Serve with chopped fresh cilantro and shredded cheese on top.

Quinoa is really great! Ben thought that the small grain made the broth of the stew seem thick, reminiscent of a meat chili. I like the quinoa because when they are cooked and hanging out in the both they look like teeny-tiny shiny eyes. Sorry to get all creepy on you.