Spinach Recipe No. 1: Strata

If you follow my blog on Facebook, you know I recently received a ton of spinach from the last two CSA boxes. I went back and forth with recipes and ideas, trying to figure out what to do with all of it. I finally settled on separate dishes. Here's the first of the two.

Spinach, Mushroom and Green Onion Strata with Swiss Cheese

I originally thought of doing a quiche, then wanted to go with a lighter dish with a frittata. But then, remembering to the leftover Italian bread from Sciortino's bakery. So I settled on a strata, which is similar to a frittata, but on top of and soaked into bread. What's great about a strata is that you can pretty much put in it whatever you want and make it up as you go -- which is exactly what I did.

I apologize for my lack of exact measurements, but it'd be hard to screw up this dish, no matter what you do!

• Enough slices of French or Italian bread to cover the bottom of your baking dish (I used a 9x9 dish)
• about 2 cups packed spinach and arugula, chopped 
• about 1.5 cups mushrooms, chopped
• bunch of green onions, sliced
• 5 eggs
• 1 cup milk (I used 2% to make it a little creamier) 
• about 2 Tbs. sundried tomato spread (not all that necessary, but if you have a bit in the fridge like I did, it's a good way to use it up!)
• about 1 cup shredded Swiss cheese
• about 1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
• spices: salt, pepper, seasoned salt, garlic powder, smoked paprika
• a dollop of olive oil

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Coat bottom of 9x9 pan with cooking spray. Line bottom of dish with bread and top bread with sundried tomato spread.

Saute spinach and arugula until it wilts with a bit of water and a few shakes of salt, pepper and garlic powder. Add mushrooms and green onions with a bit of olive oil, cooking until soft.

In a large bowl, beat eggs, milk and a few shakes of all spices.

Spread the vegetable mixture on top of the bread. Cover with Swiss cheese. Pour egg mixture on top. Finally, top with Parmesan cheese.

Bake uncovered for about 45 minutes, or until knife inserted into middle comes out clean.

Like most of the food we eat, we topped the strata with a bit of hot sauce. Delicious! 

Baked Tofu Stir Fry

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know I love a good homemade stir fry. You probably also know I love tofu. And, luckily, Nate is a good sport when it comes to eating tofu. He may not seek it out, but he'll always finish a plateful of tofu veggie stir fry.

We hadn't made stir fry in a long time, so we whipped up some for Sunday night's dinner. I loaded up on some good stir fry veggies at Outpost, getting a big handful of each kind. I also used some veggies we already had on hand: button mushrooms, sugar snap peas, green beans, red onion and red bell pepper.

I chopped up the veggies and stir fried them in the wok in peanut oil and jalapeno grapeseed oil until softened but still crisp.

For the tofu, I did something I've never done before, but have always wanted to try -- rather than pan frying the tofu like I usually do, I marinated it for a while and then baked it. I took a block of extra firm tofu, pressed it between two towels with books to take some of the water out and then cut it into cubes. I mixed up a marinade of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, garlic, cayenne pepper, ground black pepper and Sriracha and poured it over the tofu. I marinated it in the fridge for about an hour and then I baked it at 350 for about 45 minutes. Yum! The flavors were fantastic. I'll definitely do it again that way.

For the sauce, I got inspiration from one of my favorite food blogs, Iowa Girl Eats. Searching Kristin's recipes, I found a sweet and spicy peanut sauce. The sauce was simple and delicious, and forced me to buy a jar of chili garlic sauce. Yum!

For the sauce:

• 3 Tbs chicken broth (I'd usually use veggie broth for a veggie meal, but we just happened to have ice cube-sized amounts of chicken broth)
• 3 Tbs soy sauce
• 1.5 Tbs chili garlic sauce
• 1 Tbs peanut butter
• 1 Tbs rice vinegar
• dash of garlic powder, ground ginger, onion powder
• 4 shakes of sesame oil

Microwave broth, soy sauce, peanut butter and chili garlic sauce for about 20 seconds. Whisk until peanut butter is smooth, then add in the rest of the ingredients. Whisk to combine.

When the veggies were ready and the tofu done, we mixed everything in the wok and poured the sauce on top and mixed well. I took Kristin's idea here, too, and added an egg, with a few drops of sesame oil, to the stir fry to make it into like a fried rice dish.

It was good, but I have to say, with all those flavors, you really couldn't even taste the egg.

We served the veggies, tofu and sauce on top of steamed brown rice. All in all, it was a great meal, and I would definitely make that sauce again.

Step Aside, Mashed Potatoes

There's a new kid in town. New to us, anyway.

I'm talking about root vegetable mash. I've had it a few times before (the side dish they serve at The Eatery stands out as one of the best I've had), but never attempted to make it. Last weekend's pre-Thanksgiving feast with foodie friends turned out to be the perfect opportunity for making it.

I looked up some recipes online, but ultimately just bought whatever root veggies I could find at the farmers market and added anything else that sounded good and made sense.

The recipe was super easy and very delicious -- the worst and most tedious part was peeling and chopping all of the vegetables. Here's what I used and what I did:

• 3 big sweet potatoes
• 4 potatoes (Yukon gold, red potatoes -- anything works)
• 6 medium-sized parsnips
• 2 celery roots
• a small carton of heavy whipping cream
• about half a stick of butter, cut into pieces
• garlic powder, salt and pepper to taste

Peel and cut all vegetables into small cubes Fill a pot (I had so many vegetables that I need to big pots) with salted water, place cut vegetables inside and bring to a boil. Simmer (don't turn the stove too low -- you'll wnat some bubbles) for about 20-25 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender.

Drain, and place back in pot. Mash vegetables with a masher. Pour in cream and butter, and shakes of garlic, pepper and salt, and beat with an electric mixer. It should be ready to eat then, or, if serving it later, just put back on the stovetop to heat up. This made about 10 servings.

That's all there is to it! I can't wait to try making this again. I think it would be good with any sort of vegetable you can find -- rutabagas, turnips, carrots included. If I made it again, I might tone down the cream (and use skim or 2% milk) and butter. But it's probably tastier the way I made it!

Squashy Mac & Cheese

Upon receiving the September 2011 issue of Cooking Light, I just knew I had to make the cover recipe: Creamy, Light Mac and Cheese (oh, how I love mac and cheese!).

The recipe comes from the magazine's "recipe makeover" section. In this section each month, the Cooking Light staff recreates a classic-but-not-healthy recipe, and cuts down on fat and calories. The classic mac and cheese recipe went from 908 calories and 36 grams of saturated fat in one serving to 390 calories and 6.1 grams of saturated fat.

I really love two things about this recipe: it uses cheese I might not normally use and think of for mac and cheese, and it incorporates butternut squash, which I LOVE.

I followed the recipe very closely, except for a couple of things:

• I used vegetable broth, rather than chicken broth (I don't quite understand why vegetarian recipes often call for chicken broth when you can easily use vegetable broth ...). 
• I found a type of Gruyere to use (Compte) from the West Allis Cheese and Sausage Shoppe at the Milwaukee Public Market, but I couldn't find the other two cheeses the recipe calls for. At the cheese shoppe, I asked what would be comparable to pecorino Romano cheese, and they suggested a type of cheese called lamb chop. We had some shredded Romano cheese that I used in place of the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. (I put all the cheeses in the food processor so that I didn't have to grate everything. It worked really well!)

I think the recipe turned out really well, and was filling without being heavy. I would definitely make it again, and might try different cheeses--a smoky Gouda would definitely be tasty.

After reading through some comments people left at the bottom of the recipe page, I might take some advice and eat the mac and cheese without baking it. I think it would be even creamier this way.

Veggie Tacos

Last Sunday, I was craving two things: something vegetarian and something Mexican. Veggie tacos sounded like a good idea, so I did some Googling, and came across a recipe from Eat, Live, Run, a blog I've been following for a while now.

This recipe for Vegetable Soft Tacos with Chipotle Sour Cream provided the foundation for our veggie tacos. We didn't quite do everything the recipes calls for, and used some things we already had instead of buying new.

The second half of the ingredients list is where we went in a different direction. We followed the recipe to bake the veggies and beans, and then for toppings, we used used some romaine lettuce and sliced tomatoes we had leftover. We added some avocado slices and some shredded pepper Jack cheese (next time, I'd opt for a salty Mexican cheese--by the time everything was piled on, you couldn't even taste the pepper Jack).

I think next time I'd try the chipotle sauce, but would probably use plain Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, because I always have some on hand and I'm not much of a sour cream person.

Our version of these tacos turned out really good--there was a lot of good flavor, and despite there being no meat or protein, the tacos were really filling. Also, the recipe says it makes 3-4 servings, but our meal provided 5-6 servings!

Beer-Baked French Fries

As many of you know, Nate is a home brewer. He often tweets (@NathanAlesBrew, if you're interested) about beer trends, new beers and meals involving beer. It was one of these posts that caught my eye.

He posted this recipe for Garlic and Salted Beer-Baked French Fries, and I thought they would pair nicely with some buffalo burgers. The fries were really easy to make. The recipe suggests using New Belgium's Somersault beer, but anything is fine. We used a random bottle we had in the fridge: Scrimshaw, a pilsner, from North Coast Brewing.

The only thing I might do different next time is use garlic powder and/or garlic salt, rather than minced garlic. Many of the bits of garlic fell off the potatoes and burned.

If I remember correctly, we baked our fries for about 40 minutes. Unless they're really thick-cut, I don't think you'd want to bake them for an hour.

Vegan Burgers ... With Cheese

I love any kind of burger--beef, turkey, chicken, pork, black bean, veggie, etc. I often order veggie burgers in restaurants when I know they make them in house (I hate it when a restaurant just serves a warmed up Boca or Moringstar burger. Come on! I can do that at home). So I've eaten a lot of veggie burgers in my day.

I stumbled across these veggie burgers on food blogs I enjoy reading. I'm pretty sure I first saw the blogger from Iowa Girl Eats (I love her blog!) mention she had these burgers from the blog Oh She Glows.

The gal from Oh She Glows blogs only about vegan recipes. She came up with this recipe after experimenting with lots of different ingredients and ways of making them. I thought they sounded interesting, and I convinced Nate to give them a try.

It took a little effort to make--there are lots of little steps and things to prep--but they were definitely worth it. They were so tasty and incredibly healthy. Plus, the recipe makes a lot, so we had (and still have, in the freezer) plenty of leftovers.

I followed the recipe pretty closely, but did a few things differently or have some words of advice:

• I was skeptical about the "flax eggs" (I didn't think it would actually bind everything together, but it ended up working really well. You could certainly use eggs, too, if you didn't need the burgers to be vegan.


• I thought I could find oat flour at Outpost, but I couldn't. I ended up just putting regular oats in the food processor and making the flour that way. It worked great!


• Instead of processing my own bread crumbs, I used 1.5 cups of regular bread crumbs mixed with some Panko breadcrumbs.


• I highly recommend throwing carrots in the food processor to cut them up--grating carrots is a pain in the butt!


• Surprisingly, the burgers formed pretty well. I thought they would fall apart like a lot of veggie/black bean burgers do, but these stayed in tact pretty well.


• The recipe author suggests a few ways for cooking the burgers. We ended up pan frying ours, and it worked just fine.


• The recipe authors says they make 8 burgers. I think I ended up forming 6 or 7 patties, and I think 8 would have been better. They don't look that big, but, man, are they filling!

Of course, we had to add cheese to our burgers, making them non-vegan burgers, but that's OK. I think they would be just as good without the cheese, too.

They were really, really good. I would definitely make them again.

Nate, Mr. Meat Eater himself, gave them two thumbs up, too!

Roasted Corn Salad

I'm not quite sure how I ended up there, but I can tell you it started while I was perusing the JSOnline's food page. The picture of the black bean tacos/burritos with rice caught my eye, and before I knew it, I was deciding to make the roasted corn salad that's on this page for a cookout last week.

The recipe was really easy, and I followed it exactly--everything sounded good to me! You could do a lot of different things with it--make it more spicy, add some chipotle flavor, use fresh corn rather than frozen--which is nice.

The dressing was nice and light--I'd make that again for regular dinner salads.

It was a hit at the cookout, and tasted great even leftover. I call that a success!

Potato & Pasta-less Side Salad

I love potato and pasta salads for cookouts or tailgates, but I was looking forward to trying this Cucumber, Tomato and Feta Salad. I thought it would nice to have something a little lighter.

We went to the Brewers game last Saturday with my parents, and I happened to come across the Epicurious salad recipe on Facebook (I believe it was). I thought it would be great with the chicken sandwiches we made for our dinner.

The recipe was super easy and straightforward. I didn't do anything differently other than halve the recipe, as I wasn't sure it would be too good leftover for too long.

The salad was very good, and I'll definitely be making it again. I threw a can of tuna in the last bit of leftovers for lunch tomorrow--we'll see how that goes, but I'm sure it will be good.

Spicy Southwestern Tabbouleh

While flipping through the July 2010 issue of Cooking Light, I found this recipe for Spicy Southwestern Tabbouleh. I thought the dish would work well as a side for a pork dish we would be making later in the week and also as a pre-workout snack (more bulgur!).

The ingredients list is very long--25 things go into it! And it takes a lot of chopping and prep work, but I think it's well worth it. The dish was delicious, and worked well as both a side dish and pre-workout snack.

If one of the ingredients isn't appealing or if you don't have it on hand (I forgot to buy queso fresco, so I used the feta I had), just sub in something else. You can also make it as spicy or not spicy as you want.

I had this in the fridge for about a week, and I would say that's just a little too long--by the end, it was pretty watery, but still pretty tasty.