Roasted Tomatillo Salsa

One of my fave, go-to party side dishes is a salsa bar. It is so easy, inexpensive and flavorful to buy a couple bags of tortilla chips and let my friends dip to their hearts' content. I normally like to have at least a tomato based salsa and a fruit based salsa to satisfy my love for all things savory-sweet! For years, my go-tos were a simple homemade pico de gallo and my Mom's kick-butt mango nectarine salsa [http://vickisawyer.com/recipes.php#mango]. My salsa bar needed another component. It was craving a sour foil to the savory and sweet. Enter tomatillos!

I had tried a few different salsa verdes while out to eat. It wasn't until I tried one that was packed with cumin and was the perfect balance of spicy, sweet and sour that I realized that I HAD to figure out how to make this awesome dish. I had never cooked with tomatillos before but was very willing to experiment if it meant eating this salsa on a regular basis.


Tomatillo Salsa
1 jalapeno pepper
15 tomatillos, husks removed and rinsed
1 T olive oil
1/4 c. chopped onion
1 T cumin, as per usual, I love mashing cumin seeds in my mortar and pestle
1/4 t salt
1/4 t black pepper
1/4 c. chopped cilantro
Juice of one lime, approximately 1 1/2 tablespoons
1 t sugar

Turn your broiler on. Add the whole tomatillos and jalapeno to a baking dish. Sprinkle with olive oil. Broil until skins on tomatillos have begun to turn black and the jalapeno has begun to blister. You will have keep an eye on these. I am convinced that I have a really slow-working broiler, I can let things sit under my broiler forever. Alas, this means that I can’t give you an estimated broil time.  

Once tomatillos and jalapeno have blackened a bit, remove from oven and let cool to room temperature. I have made this salsa by immediately putting the blackened tomatillos in with my fresh ingredients, it still tastes great but the fresh flavor in the other ingredients gets lost a bit. Also, you don’t get as pretty of a color because the cilantro turns brown from the heat.

Place your onion, cumin, salt, pepper, cilantro, lime juice and sugar into a blender or food processor and pulse a few times to incorporate and reduce the size of the chopped onion and cilantro.

Add the cooled tomatillos, pepper and pan juices into your blender or food processor and pulse several more times until there are no large chunks of tomatillo and all of the ingredients are thoroughly combined.

This is awesome with chips. You could also use it as an enchilada sauce by smothering your stuffed and rolled tortillas with the salsa, then covering with cheese and baking at 375 for 15 minutes until gloopy and bubbly.

Oven Dried Tomato Panzanella

A few years ago, my friend served me panzanella for the first time. How could I not have known this existed? How could I not want to eat a "salad" made of bread that tastes like delicious tomato bruschetta and crostini?

Panzanella is super simple and so delicious. In essence, you make tomato bruschetta and rather than slathering it on top of toast, you toss it in a giant bowl with homemade croutons. 

Panzanella is also a great pantry buster. You can add anything into it. Replace your tomatos with a mixture of roasted zucchinis or mushrooms. Chuck in some pancetta or bacon. Use olive tapenade instead. Add in some fresh mozzarella. Basically, whatever you would want to eat on top of toasted bread, throw in!

 I have made panzanella for quite a few gatherings but this time, as a side for Sam's bacon-wrapped birthday party [I was looking for excuses to use up my year's supply of bacon], I think I perfected it.

My only contention with panzanella is that it can get  mushy. In the past I have chopped up a bunch of tomatoes and mixed them with fresh basil and garlic and tossed them with the bread. The tomatoes contain a lot of liquid and so the "salad" albeit delicious, can get pretty mushy, pretty quickly.

Enter my beloved oven dried tomatoes [http://sauceonthewall.blogspot.com/2012/04/oven-dried-tomatoes-veggie-sandwiches.html]! Uggghh, these made it! The oven drying removed most of the excess liquid and amplified the tomato flavor! To die for!

Before we begin, know that you can absolutely still use fresh tomatoes in your panzanella if you don't feel like taking a couple hours to oven dry tomatoes. It is still delicious!

Oven Dried Tomato Panzanella
1 pan of oven dried tomatoes, approximately 8 tomatoes 
*For the panzanella, I cut my roma tomatoes into eighths rather than quarters to better fit into the salad
1 loaf of crusty bread
3 T olive oil
3 cloves garlic, chopped
3 T balsamic vinegar
1 large handful of basil, chopped
1 T chopped fresh oregano or 1 t dried oregano
Salt and pepper to taste 

Preheat oven to 350. Slice the loaf of bread into approximately 1 inch cubes. Toss the bread with 2 T of olive oil and spread over a baking sheet. Bake until cubes have toasted slightly, approximately 15-20 minutes.


*Since I was oven drying my tomatoes anyway at 300 degrees, I added my bread cubes to the oven for the last 30 minutes of the tomatoes cooking time.

Once your tomatoes have roasted, toss them with your basil, garlic, tablespoon of olive oil, vinegar, oregano, salt and pepper. Stir to combine and let sit and marinate for a little bit, a half hour is fine.

Once your tomato bruschetta flavors have melded, toss in your delicious toasted bread until the bread looks evenly coated by the bruschetta mixture.

Enjoy!

*I got caught up in birthday party planning and forgot to take a picture of the final product, but, believe me, it is sooo good!

Uh-mazing Roasted Corn with Feta and Cumin

Please forgive the two week hiatus...we have been living it up in Montana. Yes, there was much celebration [we did have to frolic around our beloved Emily and Doug for their wedding day] and much food but I was on vacation and wasn't feeling very motivated to document my cooking. 

In case you were wondering, I did "have" to make homemade ricotta for all of the ladies at the bachelorette, I was "forced" to make my take on steak au poivre for my in-laws' 32nd wedding anniversary and I "choked down" the piggy pumpkin lasagna made for wedding guests. It was hard to eat such delicious food and spend time with such amazing people, but I did it!

We drove back to Denver and, lo and behold, summer was waiting for us with 90+ degree heat. We assembled the kiddy pool and quickly made some awesome summer food.

My fave summer dishes take full advantage of the fresh veggies available, are quick to make and use minimal oven times [I swear my kitchen stays hot for hours after I bake something].

I could eat this roasted corn dish everyday and never tire of it.

Roasted Corn with Feta and Toasted Cumin
1 t ground cumin
1/2 t pepper
1 T  olive oil
4 ears of corn, shucked
1/4 t salt
1/3 c. crumbled feta cheese
2 T chopped chives or green onion

Pre- heat a frying pan over medium heat for about a minute. Add your ground cumin and pepper and toast for another minute. [I am slightly addicted to freshly smashed cumin seeds in my mortar and pestle but feel free to use ground cumin].

Once cumin has toasted, add the olive oil to the pan. Add the shucked corn and salt to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, until the corn starts to get a little translucent and some kernels have some toasted edges. Roughly 15-20 minutes.

Once corn has cooked, remove from heat and stir in the chives and feta cheese.

We had our with the cumin yogurt sauce and quinoa couscous from a few posts ago and with fresh chopped tomatoes tossed with a little salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar. 

Sooooo delicious!

 

Quick and Delicious Chicken Pot Pie

Last Friday, my besty Ashley and I did our grocery shopping together and followed up our shopping trip by making a laid-back dinner for our boys.

We wanted something satisfying that didn't require a lot of hassle. Enter the amazing $5 rotisserie chicken. I snagged the rotisserie chicken because I knew that the possibilities for a quick dinner would be endless with it in hand. After talking with Ashley we realized that, between the two of us, we had a bunch of assorted veggies and a can of biscuits. Voila...dinner for 4 and a half including a few scraps for a cute boxer for the cost of a rotisserie chicken and some pantry-bustin!

Quick and Delicious Chicken Pot Pie
2 T olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
2 potatoes, chopped
2 ears of corn, shucked and "de-corned" [you can use frozen corn, 3/4 of a cup, but wait to add until you add your chicken]
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
*Whatever other veggies you feel like pantry-busting
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
8 leaves of fresh sage, chopped or 1 1/2 T dried sage
Salt and Pepper to taste 
3 T flour
3 T whole milk or half and half
4 cups of chicken broth
Chicken pulled from one rotisserie chicken 
1 can of biscuits [feel free to substitute with your own biscuits or a batch of Bisquick]

*This could also be a great, hearty vegetarian meal. Omit the chicken. Replace the chicken broth with veggie broth. Substitute the bulk of the chicken with a couple extra starchy veggies, like potatoes and carrots...oooo or sweet potatoes, turnips or parsnips.

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a dutch oven or stock pot.

Add onions, celery, potatoes, carrots, corn, sage, garlic, salt and pepper.

When veggies are starting to look translucent, sprinkle the flour over the vegetable mixture and stir to combine. Let floured vegetables cook for about a minute to cook out the "flour-y" taste.

Pour your chicken broth over your vegetable mixture. The broth should just barely cover your vegetables. Feel free to adjust the broth level to whatever suits your "veggie level."

While veggies are cooking, preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Simmer until veggies are fork tender, approximately 20-25 minutes.

When vegetables are tender, add the chicken and milk to the pot. 

*At this point, your pot pie mixture should look like a really thick sauce/stew. In the above picture, I still needed to reduce/thicken up the broth a bit more. If you are in this bind, feel free to continue to simmer to reduce the broth or you can add a slurry of corn starch and broth or water, about 1 1/2 T of corn starch to 1 1/2 T of liquid.


Pour or ladle, whatever is easiest, your mixture into a baking dish. I used a 9 x 13 roasting pan but feel free to dole yours out however you want, you could even divide between 8 little baking dishes, so cute.


Space your biscuits evenly across the top of your pot pie mixture. If using biscuit dough or Bisquick, evenly dollop over your mixture. *Ashley wanted to get rid of 5 leftover mushrooms she had, so we sliced and chucked them on top before we added the biscuits.

Bake until the biscuits have turned golden-brown, approximately 20 minutes.


Enjoy!

P.S. Your recipes will always come out better, if you have a watchful toddler examining your every move.

Pizza Party and Awesome Vinaigrette

Last week was one of those crazy weeks where I barely saw my husband because we were hanging out with people almost every night. It was a great week full of food and friends but we probably need a date night to recuperate. 

On one of the nights, I had plans to visit a friend for dinner with instructions to bring a salad. Sam made last minute plans to have some of his fellow teachers over. Not wanting a handful of "end-of-the-year/ why hasn't summer break started yet" friends to go hungry in my absence, i decided to make fixins for a make your own, grilled pizza party.

This type of party is so good! It is an easy and great solution to the "I want BBQ, but I am tired/or out of meat to grill" blues. Plus, for my fellow pizza-adorers, grilled pizza is the closest, homemade thing I have found to amazing thin crust, slightly charred brick oven pizza.

I'll start with the food for my evening with friends. I was asked to bring a salad. I had romaine and feta and was about to make a standard greek-ish salad when I remembered that I had a can of beets. Ughhh, the joy of salty-sweet in a salad! 

I tossed together a head of chopped romaine, a 1/2 cup of crumbled feta and the drained can of beets.

I then made a small container of my go-to vinaigrette. I always have the ingredients for this on hand and never buy salad dressing because nothing compares to the perfectly balanced flavors of this dressing. It is salty, sweet and acidic! Mmmm!

Awesome Vinaigrette
1/2 tsp each salt and pepper
1 tsp brown sugar 
1 tsp mustard [I prefer dijon or brown mustard]
3 tbsps balsamic vinegar
3 tbsps olive oil
*1 clove of finely chopped garlic is also awesome in this but I didn't feel like chopping.

Throw all ingredients into a sealable container. I used an empty baby food jar but you can also use any small tupperware container.

Shake vigorously and serve.

One of my big pet peeves is wilted salad so, since I had to travel with the salad, I put the salad in a to-go bowl and brought the jar of dressing to use at dinner.

Meanwhile, in pizza paradise...

I made my go to pizza/pita dough [see my earlier post on tzatziki and homemade pitas], let it rise for an hour, pinched off balls of dough, roughly large enough to fit in the palm of your hand, rolled them out and lightly cooked them. I like to use my big ole griddle pan for this.

 

This is hands-down the most important part of grilling pizzas....make sure that you par-bake the crust. I once made the mistake of putting the dough directly onto the grill and it glooped through all of the grates and burned. You can always experiment with sturdier pizza doughs but the par-baking method works well for me.

Another sidenote...if you don't feel like making dough or manipulating store-bought dough, you can buy pitas. They are easy and the perfect size for individual pizzas.

Once you have individual crusts made, enter pantry/refrigerator buster paradise. Fill bowls with anything you have that might taste good on a pizza. My kitchen-busting yielded: a little bowl of feta, spinach, sliced onions, peppers and tomatoes, a medley of all the meltable cheeses that I had in my fridge, tomato sauce, some salami, and, of course, oregano, parm, garlic powder and chili flakes. Sam's buddies graciously picked up some marinated olives and roasted garlic. Yum!

 

 When Sam came home he fired up the coals and waited for the hungry teachers!

 Everyone had a blast picking their own ingredients and making their perfect pizzas!

 

Look how delish!

When you try this, cook long enough for the cheese to melt. By that point, your crust should be a little charred underneath. If using a gas grill, cook over medium heat. 

My Mother's Day

I came home from a women's retreat this past Sunday morning to find my boys scurrying to get mother's day breakfast ready for me. By scurrying, I mean that Sam was making breakfast while Emm hung out at his feet asking for snacks.

I feel so blessed because my husband really knows me! He helped Emmett do some drawings for me, made me food, took pictures of said food so that I could post on my blog and got me fresh herbs in pots because he knew that I would like plants that I could eat and reuse more than flowers that would wilt in a few days.

Check it out!

The fruity drinks were San Pellegrino Blood Orange sodas with strawberry slices.

What is that bacon-y egg-y plate in the middle? Glad you asked...

Sam's Mother's Day Bacon Bake Up
2 tbsps chopped onion
2 tbsps chopped red pepper
1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh sage
5 eggs
4 slices of bacon
1 tbsp chopped green onion 

Preheat oven to 375.
 
Grease a small baking dish. Lay bacon slices width-wise across the dish so that the ends of the slices hang over the sides of the dish.

Whisk the 5 eggs together. Add your onion, pepper and sage. Whisk to combine.

Pour the egg mixture over the bacon slices.

Wrap the ends of the bacon up over the egg mixture so that it looks like a delicious bacon pile up.

Bake until eggs no longer jiggle and bacon pile up looks crisped. Approximately 20 minutes.

Sprinkle top with chopped green onions.

Serve to your loving wife!

 

Sesame Peanut Noodles

When I first moved to Denver, my sister came to visit. We decided to frolic in the mountains but were too cheap and unskilled to ski or snowboard so we took sleds up to the continental divide. Well, needless to say you can't just sled down a mountain that butts up against a major road, but we did hike up [took 10-15 steps at a time then fell in the snow gasping for air] the mountain and were ravenous afterwards. Being such an amazing big sister, I had made sesame peanut noodles and served them cold in the back of the car after our "sledding" adventure. It may just have been the altitude and the hunger pains from our "hike" but those noodles were God's gift to our mouths!

A couple of weeks ago, my sister, Susie, politely requested/demanded that I make and post my recipe for those noodles since she still craves them, seven years later. Again, because I am such a stellar and devoted big sister/I had a hankering for those noodles, I made sesame peanut noodles for dinner last week. They were uh-mazing, even at a lowly 5280 ft and after an afternoon of playing trucks and trains with a toddler as opposed to "strenuous hiking."

If you try nothing else, please make this sauce and try not to ladle it into your mouth. In my opinion it is the perfect balance of savory, sweet, spicy and acidic. You could marinate meat in it, use it as a dipping sauce for egg or spring rolls or bathe in it. For you spicy people, you might want to add sriracha into it or that awesome vietnamese garlic chili paste. Mine was dinner for a one year old, so I omitted. 

Sesame Peanut Noodles
Yields 4 servings
Sauce
1 tsp cumin seeds, crushed or 1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp sesame seeds
1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 cup of peanut butter [I prefer a natural, crunchy variety like Smucker's]
2 tbsps chopped cilantro
3 green onions, chopped
Juice of 1/2 a lime
1 tbsp agave nectar or honey or brown sugar

*If you are missing any of the fancier ingredients in your pantry, don't be alarmed, this sauce would be great if it were just the soy sauce, peanut butter and sweetener...the rest of the ingredients are the icing on the cake.

Noodles
1/2 pack/8 oz. of spaghetti/linguine noodles [I used whole wheat for the health and nutty quality]

1 tbsp cooking oil
1 small onion, sliced
1 cup quartered lengthwise baby carrots [I was out of normal carrots, feel free to substitute]
2 small bunches of broccoli, sliced into small florets
1 tsp ground ginger

1 tbsp each of chopped green onion and cilantro to garnish
 
*This is another great pantry/veggie drawer buster. Use whatever veggies you have on hand. I have used asparagus and even al dente green beans. You truly can't mess it up if it mixed in with this sauce. 


Add cumin and sesame seeds to a dry saucepan and toast on medium heat for about a minute to bring out the flavors. 

Add the soy sauce, sesame oil, ground ginger and peanut butter. Stir until the peanut butter is totally mixed into the liquid.


Remove from heat to keep the following ingredients tasting fresh. Add the green onion, cilantro, lime juice and sweetener. Stir to combine. Set aside.

Begin preparing your pasta by bringing water to a boil in a large pot. Prepare pasta as directed on pasta package. Cook noodles until al dente.


While pasta is cooking, stir-fry the veggies. I use a wok, but feel free to use a large frying pan. Heat the cooking oil on medium high heat and then toss in your carrots, onions, broccoli and ginger. 

Saute until broccoli spears are tender [10 minutes-ish]. This process can be expedited by putting a lid or piece of aluminum foil over your pan. If pasta is ready and your veggies are still looking raw, you can also "cheat" by adding a 1/2 cup of your pasta water into your veggies to help cook them quickly.


Add the al dente noodles to the pan with the vegetables and toss until combined.

Add the sesame peanut sauce and toss to equally coat the vegetables and noodles.


Garnish with cilantro and green onion and serve.

*Sidenote: Noodles taste way better when you eat them while watching a cute someone.