Autumn Vegetable Kugel

First of all, I'd like to thank the extremely talented Tom Tian for the beautiful new banner.  Everyone should check out his blog for more of his great designs.

It's finally starting to feel like fall, which means that I want to eat only root vegetables (more or less).  I adapted this recipe for carrot, leek, and zucchini kugel from a few different recipes in Marlena Spieler's Jewish Cooking, which is beautifully illustrated and one of my all-time favorite cookbooks.

Apple-Cranberry Chicken Salad

On Fridays, if I've been a fiscally-responsible young professional the rest of the week, I'll bop out to one of the many Union Square eateries and buy my lunch.  Two weeks ago, I went to Pret, a sandwich shop chain imported from the U.K. They have an amazing chicken salad sandwich (see my last post on chicken salad for more on my life-changing conversion to the cold-meat-salad camp), but it's over $3 for half a sandwich.  And since I really wanted to eat several, the only solution was to make it myself at home.

After a pilgrimage to Ditmas Park to secure a roast chicken last Sunday, I wound up with more chicken salad then I could ever possibly consume.  Word to the wise: Using an entire chicken for chicken salad will result in something like a dozen servings.  Suffice it to say that I ate chicken salad for almost every meal last week. It was delicious, but I'd definitely recommend inviting some friends for a picnic or something with this giant recipe.

You'll need:

1 roasted chicken
1 tart apple, like Granny Smith, peeled and sliced thinly
Juice of one-half lemon
3 ribs celery, chopped
1 bag Craisins or other dried cranberries
3 tbsp. mayonnaise

Dissect your chicken and chop roughly.  The yield will look something like this:

Slice the apple very thinly, squeezing the lemon juice over the sliced pieces (this will keep them from turning brown and mushy).  Mix together the chicken, celery, apples, and cranberries in a large bowl.  Then mix in the mayo (just enough to make it all stick together).

Your final product:

You have many options for what to do with this: Eat it plain, eat it with crackers (my preferred lunch mode), make a sandwich:

Go crazy.  And share with friends—I'm not kidding.  So much chicken salad.

Vegetarian Fried Rice

One of the best things about living in Brooklyn is the constant availability of cheap, greasy, and delicious Chinese food.  Since I have very little self-control in this area, I've been eating more than my fair share of egg rolls, sesame chicken, and the like.  For better or worse, this leaves me with plenty of leftover rice, which just isn't that good when reheated.  As a semi-broke denizen of the publishing world, the thought of wasting all that (already paid for) food is alarming, so repurposing the rice is crucial.  Here's my answer to that problem, which also stretches one leftover carton of white rice into three or four meals.

You'll need:

1 carton leftover steamed rice (cold)
2 tbsp. vegetable oil
1 bag frozen vegetables (I used peas and carrots)
1 can water chestnuts, sliced
3 eggs
1/2 cup soy sauce
Black pepper, to taste
Salt, to taste

Heat vegetable oil in a large pan.  Once the oil is warm, add the frozen vegetables, stirring until thawed.  Add water chestnuts and stir-fry for 1–2 minutes.

Meanwhile, crack your eggs into a small bowl and whisk them with a fork, folding in air.  This makes for nice and fluffy scrambled eggs.  Add salt and pepper to the raw eggs.

Scoot your veggies over to one half of the pan, making sure the other, empty half is still well-oiled.  Pour eggs into the empty half and proceed to scramble.  After the eggs are cooked, the veggies and eggs can be mixed, but keep them separated until the risk of salmonella has passed.

Add rice and soy sauce to the mixture, stirring well.  Cook for two to three more minutes, stirring constantly.

Delicious!  It looks even nicer when you put it in a bowl:

Protein, vegetables, and carbs: This is a pretty good all-in-one meal, which is not typically something I'm talented at making.  Plus, Rizi Bizi loves her some scrambled eggs (I put some aside before I added the soy sauce, don't worry), so everyone's happy.

The epitome of a happy, spoiled, well-fed feline sous chef.

Nectarine Cake

My dad always tells me how important it is to "eat to live, not live to eat."  Consequently, there are very few foods that I allow to fall into my "worth-living-for" foods category.  Stone fruits, for better or worse, comprise a goodly chunk of that list.  Peaches, plums, apricots: I love them all.  So when I went to the farmer's market last week and found myself surrounded by stacks and stacks of lovely fruit, I couldn't help myself.  I had enough self-control to buy the least expensive type of fruit, but I still wound up carting three pounds of nectarines back to the office and then home on the subway.  Now, I can eat a lot of nectarines, but three pounds of perfectly ripe, rapidly spoiling fruit is too much even for me.  So what to do?  Bake a delicate dessert highlighting the fruit, of course.

This recipe comes from the now sadly defunct Gourmet.  I changed very little, as baking tends to be much more unforgiving of improvisation than other types of cooking.

Homemade Applesauce

Fall is almost here: The days are getting shorter and cooler, students have returned to Brooklyn College, and apples have started making a major appearance in the Union Square farmer's market.  Even I, a person who professes to not even like apples, can't resist a deal like 3 pounds of apples for $1.  So what to do with these apples that I sure as heck am not eating raw?  I always return to my old fall staple: Homemade applesauce, which disguises all the things I don't enjoy about apples (texture, mainly).  Whether or not you're an apple fan, this is a pretty delicious way to get in your daily doctor-prescribed apple.

You'll need:

3 pounds of tart apples, peeled and cored

1/2 cup sugar

4 cups water

1 tsp. lemon juice

1/4 tsp. grated lemon rind

1 whole cinnamon stick

A dash of salt

Roughly chop your apples into quarters or eighths.  Place in a large saucepan and add water.  Bring the mixture up to a simmer and let it bubble away until the apples are tender, about 15 minutes. You should be able to easily break up the apples with a wooden spoon.

This is what your pot full o' apples should look like at the beginning.

Add the remaining ingredients to the mixture and let simmer for an additional minute.  Remove from heat and mush up the mixture with your wooden spoon.  It should look like this:

Mmm.  Chunky and delicious.

I like my applesauce cold, so I stick in the fridge for a while before eating it.  This recipe makes about 6 generous servings of applesauce—Just be sure not to eat the cinnamon stick!

Made in season, this an extremely budget-friendly dessert.  With my $1 apples, a large jar of cinnamon sticks for $2.50, and a typical grocery store lemon (69 cents), this whole things comes to about $2 and change.

Even non-apple enthusiasts like me and Rizi Bizi enjoy this applesauce.  Seriously, she keeps trying to get in my bowl.

Caponata

There are certain recipes that, when I cook them, make me feel like wherever I'm cooking is home.  Caponata, an Italian eggplant dish that my grandmother used to cook all the time, falls into that category.  Though my grandmother was from Northern Italy (Trieste, to be exact), she loved to cook this Sicilian vegetable stew.  I guess she was ahead of the curve on pan-Italian cooking.  Served hot with pan-fried polenta or cold with a crusty piece of bread, caponata is one of my feel-good standbys, so today I'm going to share my grandmother's recipe with you all.  Now, being of the old school, my grandmother wasn't big on writing down recipes or measuring things, so it evolves a little bit every time I make it.  You should feel free to make it your own too.

You'll need:

Black Beans and Rice

So I've been sitting on this recipe for a long while now, but since I started my new job today, I am once again inspired to cook/blog!  While I haven't actually made this since I left Chicago, I'm excited to cook it here and bring the delicious leftovers along with me for lunch.  Because, for me, this dish is all about the leftovers.  The flavors actually get better as they soak together in the fridge, so it's perfect for a week's worth of protein-rich lunches.  I adapted this recipe from the Whole Foods website—my version's a little less fancy, but you've probably figured out by now that I don't like to use tons of ingredients.