A Quick Weeknight Supper

Eggs are always a good choice for a quick weeknight supper, or at least they would be if I had lower LDL levels. But, as they say in France, tant pis.  I am always game to whip up a frittata, but I really prefer an omelette.  If I am cooking for the two of us, I generally make one big one and then divide it, so that we can both have hot eggs.  (One of my pet peeves is cold food that should be hot.)

Tonight I made an omelette with pepper jack cheese, mushrooms, a fresh Walla Walla onion, and beet greens, all of which I sauteed together.  My beets have great looking greens this year, so I picked a nice handful.  The beets themselves are still pretty small; it will probably be a few weeks before they can be harvested.  In addition to the omelette, we had a salad with some fresh lettuce, grape tomatoes, and nasturtium flowers.  I went a bit wild with the nasturtiums this year, so we are going to have oodles of them.  Unfortunately, I only planted one variety, so I should start some more if I want to broaden the palette.

One Down, 659 To Go

I had vowed to start cooking more Asian foods, and then I have been too lazy the last couple of weeks.  Maybe I will make up for lost time over the next couple of weeks.  Tonight I made a fish curry from Raghavan Iyer's book, 660 Curries.  The fish (tilapia) was very simple and delicious, seasoned with turmeric, tamarind, garlic, some chili peppers, and cilantro, all in a coconut milk broth.  We had it with rice and an eggplant dish called bhangan bharta, which a long-ago friend from India taught me to make.  And to top it off, I have made some vanilla pudding using the leftover coconut milk to replace half of the milk.  We'll see how that is a little later.

But here is the recipe for the eggplant.

Ingredients:

1 large onion, sliced

1 1/2 c diced tomatoes (canned or fresh)

2 T canola oil

1 t sugar

salt

2 - 3 T finely minced, peeled fresh ginger root, to taste

1/2 cup cilantro leaves and tender stems, chopped

1 good-sized eggplant

1.  Preheat oven to 375.  Roast eggplant until quite soft and wrinkly, about 50 minutes or so.  Set aside to cool.

2.  In the meantime, heat canola oil over medium heat in skillet or saute pan.  Add onion and saute until slightly soft.  Add tomatoes, sugar, and salt to taste, and cook over medium low heat, stirring frequently, until tomotoes and onions are cooked down nicely, to a jam-like consistency.

3.  Cut eggplant in half and scoop inside out.  Add eggplant to the tomato-onion mixture, and stir to combine.  Add ginger and cilantro, stir well, and correct seasonings.

For the fish curry recipe, well, buy the book!

The chicken with tarragon-cream sauce was pretty tasty, and it paired really well with the mashed potatoes.  We had that and then a small lettuce salad with radishes and nasturtium flowers afterward.  Here is the recipe for the chicken:

Ingredients (for two servings plus a lunch for a lucky person:

Three boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Salt

Pepper

Flour

1 T butter

1 T olive oil

1 medium sweet onion or two small ones (I pulled a couple of early Walla Wallas)

4 oz. mushrooms, sliced

1/3 cup white wine

1/2 cup cream

2 T tarragon leaves

1.  Lightly pound chicken breasts between waxed paper sheets.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge lightly in flour.

2.  Melt butter in heavy saute pan or skillet over medium heat, and add olive oil.  Cook the chicken until just done but still juicy, about 6 minutes per side.  Remove chicken to a plate.

3.  Add onions and mushrooms, and saute until onions soften and mushrooms are cooked.  Deglaze the pan with the wine, taking care to stir up the browned bits.  Add cream and bring to a boil.  After sauce is slightly thickened, turn heat down to low, add tarragon, and return chicken and any juices to pan.  Turn chicken in the sauce to coat both sides.

We drank a white Burgundy with it; any unoaked Chardonnay would pair well.

June 13, 2009

I braved the weeds today for about an hour and a half, and to reward myself for my toils I jumped the gun and dug a hill of potatoes.  It is a little early, but I found some beautiful starchy gems.  The hill I dug is a bit of an outlaw anyway; it's parent was a potato that sprouted in the pantry, and I decided to go ahead and plant it.

I think I will make some chicken with a tarragon-cream sauce to go with the potatoes, and maybe we will have a little salad with the very last of the radishes.  I'm a little worried that they are going to be super sharp, but a soak in ice water usually cuts that a bit.

We have had unbelievable amounts of rain, and not very much sun, over the last week to ten days.  Some things look great in the garden, especially the potatoes and beans.  A lot of other things are very pokey.  The eggplant look terrible, and I wonder if I should just start over with new plants.  It was a little too cold when I planted them (like my father, I am a little impatient about getting things in the ground), and I am afraid that they may just never thrive.   The squash and cucumber plants look pretty healthy, but they are just small.  Hopefully they will have their growth spurt soon.  In the meantime, it looks like we will have green beans in the next week, which is unbelievably early.  I guess I am lucky; the beans are arriving before the bean beetles.