Cooking with Salsa

Ok, I know that's not such a pretty picture, but the dish itself was verrry tasty. And so easy!

I'm back in the office 3x per week after a summer of only having to be in on Mondays. Working from home allows me to make a nice dinner most days, and I've been trying to cook more vegetarian food because we eat too much meat. For whatever reason, meat dishes seem far less complicated to make, so with my now-limited time, we'll be back to eating animal protein a couple times a week. If I'm lucky, I'll have some goodies stockpiled in the freezer, but once in a while I'm gonna make something from scratch, and it will need to be quick.

Introducing Salsa del Rio Chicken. 

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned how much I love Desert Pepper Trading Company salsas. Their Salsa del Rio, a thin green salsa made with green chiles and tomatillos makes a mighty fine white chili with the addition of meat and beans. It also works as a flavorful sauce for chicken thighs. It honestly doesn't need anything to zhuzh it up, but we had half a yellow bell pepper in the fridge, and I had just bought a bunch of fresh poblanos at the farmers' market. A quick sauté of peppers and onion, a jar of salsa, and skin-on chicken thighs tasted ridiculously good for being so easy. 

Salsa del Rio Chicken

I would use bone-in thighs, but boneless would be fine. However, the chicken skin is non-negotiable, as it adds so much flavor to the dish. If you don't want to eat it, take it off after cooking. I suppose, if you're one of those people who are afraid of fat and flavor, that you can use chicken breasts, but I cannot be held accountable if you overcook the things. 

Extra virgin olive oil

4 skin-on chicken thighs

Kosher salt

1 cup diced peppers, your choice between ripe bell peppers and poblanos (we used both)

1 cup diced onion 

1 jar Desert Pepper Salsa del Rio

Put a tablespoon-ish of oil in a large skillet and turn the heat on medium-high. Add the chicken skin-side-down, generously sprinkle it with salt, and cover the pan. Cook for 4-5 minutes and check to see if the skin is browning. You can turn the heat up to high if you hang around and pay attention to the pan. If it starts smoking, turn down the heat. Once the chicken skin is a nice golden brown, remove from the pan and put the veg in. Add another sprinkle of salt and stir the veg to coat with the hot fat. Cover the pan and cook 5-6 minutes over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the onion is turning translucent and the peppers are beginning to soften. Add the chicken back to the pan, skin-side-up and dump in about 2/3 of the jar of salsa. Cover the pan and bring the salsa to a boil, then turn down to a perky simmer. Cook about 30 minutes, or until a quick read thermometer registers at least 165F when inserted into the chicken. (Personally, I like my chicken thighs really cooked, so I'll go to 185-190F.) 

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Sayso Cocktails

Last Summer's Fancy Food Show in NYC introduced me to several new favorites, one of which is Sayso Cocktails.

I am a big fan of mixed drinks but I'm usually too lazy to make one at home. I'll toss stuff together without measuring--various liqueurs that are on hand, some juice, seltzer--and end up with something quaffable, but not worth remaking. (I will never claim to have any mixology talents.) Sayso lured me immediately with the ease of making a tasty cocktail with only three ingredients: a Sayso "tea bag" (which I prefer to call a "sachet,"), water, and alcohol. The sachet contains all-natural flavorings and a blend of no-aftertaste low-calorie sweeteners that turn water into the cocktail mixer of your choice. You can stop right there, adding a bit more water and ice to your glass and enjoy it a mocktail, or you can add your favorite hooch. Sayso comes in four flavors so far: rosemary honey moscow mule, old fashioned, skinny cardamom paloma, and skinny spicy margarita.

Cocktails can be super sweet, but Sayso drinks are not. If you like sugar, you can certainly add some simple syrup to taste! You can also use Sayso as a starting point and create variations on a theme. For instance, when I remembered we had a container of Talenti Mango Sorbetto in the freezer, I realized I could make a spicy mango margarita. 

Spicy Mango Margarita

1 sachet Sayso skinny spicy margarita

4 ounces warm water

2 ounces blanco tequila

1/4 cup Talenti mango sorbetto

Ice

Seltzer (I used a tropical fruit-flavored one)

Fresh Mint

In a highball glass, steep the sachet in the water for 5 minutes. Wring all the goodness out of the sachet and discard. Add the tequila and sorbetto and give it a stir. Add a few ice cubes and top with a splash or two of seltzer. Garnish with fresh mint.

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I prefer the old fashioned and Moscow mule flavors in the colder months, when I'm more likely to drink brown liquor like bourbon and dark rum. But all four flavors are great any time of the year.

Order Sayso directly from the company, or from Amazon. I received samples of all four varieties from the company, but I will definitely be purchasing these again, particularly the spicy marg version. 

* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!

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What's Your Beef?

What’s Your Beef in the kitchen?! Throughout May, in celebration of National Beef Month, join our friends at Keystone Meats as they invite fans from all over the U.S. to vote daily on their biggest kitchen problem. Keystone is ready and willing to solve it with recipe-ready, all-natural beef. When you vote, you will be entered to win a year’s supply of Keystone Meats!

If you’ve got a beef in the kitchen, tell us about it! After years of headaches, vote on your biggest kitchen beef and you could win! https://keystonemeats.com/whats-your-beef-in-the-kitchen/

My personal beef: cooking in the summertime. I want to eat flavorful meals that come from my own kitchen, but don't require a lot of cooking. This means we default to cold things, like salads, sandwiches, and gazpacho. But with Keystone products, all of the heavy lifting has been done for us--we just need to embellish the meat. (No, that's not a euphemism.) Take this relatively lazy bibimbap. It involved making a sauce, warming the meat in said sauce, and serving it over rice with some veg. We have a rice cooker, so that part was a no-brainer, but if you don't, I won't tell if you buy pre-cooked microwave rice, or use leftovers from Chinese carry-out. In any case, none of it heated up the kitchen, and we had a super tasty dish that was both hearty and light in not a lot of time.

Easy Bibimbap
The sauce can be made a couple of days in advance. If you are only feeding 2 people, you can make half the sauce, or make the whole recipe and use it on something else, like roasted cauliflower or broccoli.

For the sauce:
1/2 cup gochujang (Korean hot pepper bean paste)
3 cloves of garlic, crushed or finely minced
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
3 green onions, both white and green parts chopped

To serve:
2 14.5-ounce cans Keystone All Natural Beef
Cooked rice
Sliced cucumber
Shredded carrot
Baby spinach
More chopped scallions for garnish
Sesame seeds for garnish

Combine sauce ingredients in a bowl and stir. If you're making it in advance, keep it in a lidded container in the fridge until ready to use.

Put the beef (with juices) in a saucepan with the sauce. Bring to a boil. Turn down the heat until about half the liquid has evaporated and is looking somewhat glossy. Remove from the heat.

Place a mound of rice in the bottom of a bowl (drizzle on some sesame oil, if you like). Top with a portion of the warm beef, and add piles of the cucumber, carrot, and spinach. Sprinkle on some scallions and sesame seeds and serve immediately.

To eat, mix everything up with your chopstick (or fork) and enjoy.

Makes 4-5 servings.

* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!

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Clementine Cake

I love oranges, particularly sweet navals, but so often they have more pith than flesh. What really irritates me is when the orange flesh is dried out. Those babies are expensive, and I hate feeling like I wasted my money. So when those small crates of sweet, easy-to-peel, clementines started appearing in supermarkets, I was happy that I could get my citrus fix consistently and at a somewhat more reasonable price. At least I could back in the 90s and early 00s. Nowadays, the little fruits, while still easy to peel, are often tart and have a few pips. The only routinely sweet ones I've found are the "Cuties" brand, which are more expensive than the rest. I'm guessing that when the demand for these little guys increased, producers started cutting corners or obtaining fruit from countries with less-than-optimal growing conditions or practices. The only consistency now seems to be in my disappointment.

But clementines aren't completely useless. They make a pretty great little cake, one that is super moist, keeps fairly well, and is absolutely gluten-free, though you would never know that from the flavor and texture.

I've made this cake many times over the years, using a recipe from Nigella Lawson's How to Eat. The recipe below has the same proportions as the one in her book, but the photos are from a cake half the size. Why? Because I only had 3 eggs available to me, and the recipe calls for 6. I also was pretty sure that while I seemed to have quite a lot of almond flour, it was surely not 2 1/3 cups. It was entirely reasonable to me to cut the recipe in half, or half-ish. And you know what? Four small clementines, 3 eggs, 1 cup almond flour, 1/2 cup sugar, and 1 heaping teaspoon of baking powder made a fine cake in a 7" round springform pan.

Nigella's Clementine Cake

4 to 5 clementines (about 1 lb total)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
6 eggs
2 1/3 cups ground almonds
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder

Put clementines in a pot with enough water to cover and bring to a boil. Turn temperature down so the water is at a hearty simmer and cook for 2 hours, adding more water if the pot looks like it's running dry. Drain and allow fruit to cool. Once the fruit is cool, tear them open, remove the stem bit from the end and any seeds.

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Place the clementines--skin, pith, and all--into the bowl of a food processor fitted with the blade. Add the sugar and puree. Add the eggs and pulse to combine. Add the almonds and baking powder and pulse until completely incorporated.

Line an 8-inch springform pan with a circle of parchment and coat bottom and sides of pan with butter or release spray. Pour the batter into the pan and smooth the top. Bake for 40-45 minutes then check doneness with a toothpick. If the pick comes out with moist crumbs, it's done. If it comes out with batter on it, add more time. At this point, the cake will start to get very brown, so cover the top with a piece of foil for any remaining time in the oven.

Remove the pan from the oven and cool completely on a rack. Sprinkle with powdered sugar or not. I used Trader Joe's dried and sugared lemon slices as a garnish.



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Peach Upside-Down Cake

One of Baltimore's old-fashioned bakery specialties is a yeast-raised cake topped with sliced peaches. My Mom would buy slabs of peach cake often in the summer months; she and Grandma seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. I, on the other hand, was not a fan. The cake was too bread-like and the moist peaches created a slime-like ooze that coated the top of the bread. Bleh. But I had extra peaches and Mr Minx wasn't interested in peach pie. I briefly considered making a peach tart tatin when I recalled an image I had seen on Instagram earlier in the week. Peach upside-down cake.

I used a no-fuss recipe for pineapple upside-down cake that I had made a few times in the past, I just swapped peaches for the pineapples, skipped the maraschinos, and used brown sugar in place of the toffee chips. A little cinnamon sprinkled over the peaches added a little sweet spice.

It's terrific for dessert, or with coffee for breakfast or a snack.

Peach Upside-Down Cake (adapted from Tate's Bake Shop: Baking for Friends)

3 large or 4 medium peaches
1 1/2 sticks salted butter, 4 tablespoons sliced, 8 at room temperature
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
Cinnamon
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
2 large eggs at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup plain nonfat or low-fat Greek yogurt

Position an oven rack in the center of the oven and preheat it to 350°F.

Peel the peaches, cut in half, and remove the pit. Cut each half into thin slices and set aside.

Melt the 4 tablespoons of sliced butter and pour into in a 9" square pan. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the butter evenly. Overlap the peach slices in straight rows (three should fit nicely) and sprinkle with a bit of cinnamon. If there is any peach left over, chop it up and set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a large bowl, beat the sugar and 8 tablespoons of room temperature butter with an electric mixer set to high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. One at a time, beat in the eggs, followed by the vanilla, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture in thirds, alternating with the yogurt in 2 equal additions, mixing until just smooth after each addition and scraping down the bowl as needed. Do not overmix. Stir in the chopped peach, if there is any. Spread the batter evenly over the peaches in the pan.

Bake until the top is golden brown and a wooden toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, about 40 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Run a dinner knife around the inside of the skillet to loosen the cake. Place a serving plate over the skillet, and, using pot holders, invert the skillet and plate together to unmold the cake. Serve at room temperature.



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Cookies and Pudding

When I get food products to sample and review, I don't really like to talk about the product straight up because I feel like it reads too much like a commercial. And unless the Super Bowl is on, most people don't like commercials. What I prefer to do is concoct some sort of recipe with the product in question and then post that. I feel like I have accomplished something by developing a new recipe, and I can talk about the product, too. But sometimes the products do speak for themselves, especially when they're cookies. Good cookies, that is.

I had this grandiose idea of inventing some sort of new banana pudding, only not using bananas, and with a different flavor of pudding. The La Mere Poulard cookies I was sampling would be the base of the not-banana-pudding, the vanilla wafer replacement. Only they were so tasty, I didn't want to cover them up with other flavors. All three types of cookie I received--sables, shortbread, and caramel biscuits--are buttery and crispy and smell simply wonderful, particularly the caramel ones. Two or three with a cup of tea is a perfect midday pick-me-up.

The cookies come from France--Mont Saint-Michel, to be precise. The story is that Annette Poulard, the local baker's wife, opened an inn on Mont Saint-Michel in 1888. Tourists flocked there for Poulard's cooking and especially her butter biscuits, which she baked for more than 50 years. Today, they're available in the US at stores like Whole Foods (and on the Internet).

Although I no longer wanted to use the cookies in a recipe, I still wanted to make something to go with them. Since I had pudding stuck in my head, I went with it. This recipe is based on the classic Hershey's chocolate pudding recipe, and is so fast and easy I don't know why anyone would ever buy instant pudding. I added peanut butter and rum, just to be different. The result was rich and chocolaty, with a distinct peanut flavor. Eating it with a couple of crispy cookies (the ones in the top photo are the sables) adds a bit of extra texture. You could, if you'd like, crumble some cookies on top of the pudding and pretend you've invented a new dish. Or just skip the pudding and have some of the cookies with a cup of tea.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pudding

2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
2 1/4 cup 2% milk
3 tablespoons peanut butter
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Splash dark rum
Handful dry roasted unsalted peanuts
Sea salt
La Mere Poulard cookies

Combine sugar, cocoa, cornstarch, and kosher salt in a saucepan. Slowly whisk in the milk, first making a paste of the milk + dry ingredients, then adding the rest of the milk. Cook over medium high heat until it comes to a boil, stirring regularly. Boil for 1 minute, until thickened.

Turn off the heat and stir in the peanut butter and butter until combined. Add the vanilla and a healthy splash of dark rum (a few tablespoons worth) and stir until combined. If the mixture seems too thick while it's still warm, thin out with a few tablespoons of milk. Stir in the peanuts, leaving a few for garnish.

Store in the fridge in a covered container until ready to eat. If you're not a fan of pudding skin, then press a piece of plastic wrap directly onto the pudding.

Spoon into bowls and garnish with peanuts and a sprinkle of sea salt. Serve with cookies.

4-6 servings.

* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!



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Oven-roasted Asparagus

My new favorite way to cook asparagus - oven roasting.

I do the same thing with broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts.

Preheat the oven to 450F.

Trim and rinse asparagus. Pat dry. Place asparagus on a foil-lined baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and a healthy pinch of salt. Slice a couple of garlic cloves thinly and scatter the slices on the asparagus. Toss with your hands so everything gets a nice coating of the olive oil.

Roast for 5-6 minutes, turn spears with tongs, and roast another 5-6 minutes. Serve as is, or with a drizzle of lemon mayonnaise or hollandaise.

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Refrigerator Pie

When I saw the recipe for 10-Minute Lime Cracker Pie posted on Serious Eats, I decided it would be the perfect thing to serve on the Fourth of July. And I was right. A big ol' slab of lime-flavored heavy cream and sweetened condensed milk was just thing to have after indulging in hamburgers and bratwurst. <g> Ok, not really. But a couple of tablespoons of the tangy stuff hit the spot.

The name is a bit of a misnomer. The dish took a little more than 10 minutes to make, maybe 15, and it needs to hang out in the fridge for at least 2-3 hours (or even better, overnight) in order for the crackers to absorb the liquid. But the result is much like key lime pie, but with layers of "crust" within rather than just one on the bottom. So like key lime pie, in fact, that I think this would be much much better if made with plain graham crackers rather than Ritz. The Ritz (we used the low-sodium variety) tasted sorta, well, Ritz-y.

I think an orange or lemon version with chocolate cookies might be fun to try.

10-Minute Lime Cracker Pie (from Serious Eats)

2 (14-ounce) cans sweetened condensed milk
1 pint heavy cream
1/2 cup lime juice (about 4-5 limes)
10 ounces (about 2 1/2 sleeves) Ritz crackers
zest from 2 limes

Combine milk and heavy cream in a large bowl. Add lime juice and whisk until thickened, about 1 minute. Spread 1 cup filling on bottom of 8" square baking pan. Top with single layer of Ritz crackers. Repeat, alternating layers of filling and crackers until pie plate is full (finish with a layer of filling). Sprinkle with grated lime zest. Refrigerate at least 2 hours or up to overnight. Serves 8-10.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.