Risotto Primavera

Making this risotto does involve a certain amount of patience. You can’t just dump everything in and leave it, as you can for this recipe or this one. This risotto is just so tasty and comforting, though, and has so many not-mushy vegetables in it (except the spinach, I suppose, which might be described as mushy). Plus, if you use a big pot, you can double the quantities and freeze some risotto for later.

Risotto Primavera | makes 10 cups

Ingredients

  • 2 Tbs olive oil
  • 1 1/2 cups chopped onions
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
  • 2 cups Arborio rice
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • 6-7 cups defatted chicken stock or canned chicken or vegetable broth
  • 12 oz. fresh baby spinach
  • 1 small yellow summer squash, quartered lengthwise and cut into 1/4 – inch slices
  • 2 oz. snow peas, trimmed and halved
  • 1 pound asparagus, tough ends snapped off, cut into bite-size lengths
  • 2 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced
  • 2 Tbs chopped parsley
  • 1/2 cup grated parmesan (or more to taste)
  • 2 Tbs butter
  • 1 tsp salt
  • freshly ground pepper
  • 1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

Instructions

Bring the stock to a boil in a medium saucepan.  Reduce the heat and simmer.

Heat the oil in a dutch oven over medium heat.  Add the onions and sauté until soft, 4 minutes. Add the garlic, stir, and cook until fragrant, 1 minute.  Add the rice and cook, stirring, until the grains are translucent at edges but still opaque in the center, about another 3 minutes.  Add the wine and simmer until absorbed, 1 minute.

Slowly add 1 cup of the hot stock to the rice.  Stir and allow it to simmer. When liquid has been absorbed, add ½ cup stock.  Continue to add stock to rice, ½ cup at a time, stirring constantly until almost all the stock has been added, 15 minutes.

Add the spinach and stir.  When it has wilted, add the snow peas, squash, asparagus and tomatoes.  Continue cooking, adding the remaining stock in ¼ cup amounts, until rice is slightly creamy and just tender, 3-5 minutes.  Remove from heat and stir in parmesan, butter, parsley, and salt. Taste and season further with salt and pepper. Garnish with pine nuts.

Honey Balsamic Chicken Breasts and Veggies

Whatever your preferred plural second person is: Y’all, you guys, youse, yins: this meal is so easy and so delicious. The only think-ahead element is the marinade, but you’ll be happy to think ahead after you become familiar with how not-dry the chicken breast is and how very tasty the marinade-that-becomes-sauce is. Meanwhile, the cooking of everything except the sauce takes place in one oven, so you can do all kinds of things during the 25-minute cooktime.

In our house, for example, we’ve been spending time every single day for the last 16 days listening to my friend L read the first Harry Potter book chapter by chapter. L and I have known each other since 1989. The daily readings are via Zoom, but he is able to record them, so if we miss a day, we can catch up.

I’m old friends with Harry and the gang, but M, age 6, has never met them before, and finds herself totally drawn into the story despite her substantial fear of the scary parts. Tonight will be the final chapter of book 1 (HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone aka HP and the Philosopher’s Stone). We’ll see how M handles the big reveal and whether she wants to continue with book 2.

Honey Balsamic Chicken Breasts and Veggies | serves 6-8

Ingredients

  • 3/8 cup balsamic vinegar
  • 3 Tbs honey
  • 2 Tb Dijon mustard
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
  • 2 tsp dried oregano
  • 1 tsp dried basil
  • 2 tsp table salt, divided
  • 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 5 pounds chicken breasts
  • 16 ounces baby potatoes, quartered
  • 2 cups cherry tomatoes
  • 2 Tbs olive oil
  • 1 pound asparagus, tough ends snapped off
  • 1/2 cup chicken broth
  • 2 tsp corn starch

Instructions

In a medium bowl, whisk together balsamic vinegar, honey, Dijon, garlic, oregano, basil, 1 tsp salt, and pepper.

Place chicken in gallon size Ziploc bag and pour in the balsamic mixture. Refrigerate and allow to marinate for 30 minutes to 8 hours. Turn the bag over occasionally.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with aluminum foil and coat with cooking spray. In a large bowl, toss the potatoes and tomatoes with the olive oil and 1 tsp salt. Place mixture on baking sheets in a single layer. Remove chicken from the marinade and place on the baking sheet among the veggies, still in one layer.

Place the baking sheets in the oven and roast until the chicken is cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees F, about 25-30 minutes. Add the asparagus during the last 10 minutes of cooking time.

While chicken and veggies are roasting, empty the marinade into a small saucepan and add the chicken broth. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Boil until reduced by half. In a small bowl, mix the corn starch with 1/4 cup water and stir. Add the corn starch slurry to the saucepan. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste.

Remove the baking sheets from the oven. Move the chicken to a cutting board and slice it across the grain. Plate the veggies and add slices of chicken. Top with the sauce.

Instant Pot Southwest Chicken Stew

I made this up tonight, and it was good enough that I want to save the recipe — where better than here?

Instant Pot Southwest Chicken Stew | serves 10-ish 

Ingredients

  • 1 onion, chopped (The Chop Wizard can help, as always)
  • 1 red bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 green bell pepper, chopped
  • six ears’ worth of fresh corn removed from the cobs (or 2 cups frozen corn)
  • 10 oz. baby spinach
  • 1 14.5-oz. can (fire roasted) diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 28-oz. can (fire roasted) diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 Tablespoon chili powder
  • 1 Tablespoon cumin
  • 2.5-3 pounds skinless, boneless chicken thighs

Instructions

Add all the ingredients except the chicken to the Instant Pot and stir.   Lay the chicken on top in one layer.  Close the instant pot.

Cook on high pressure for 7 minutes; then release the pressure.  With pressure build and release, cooking time ends up being over half an hour.  Open the lid and break up the chicken with a wooden spoon or a couple of forks.  Taste and add salt and/or hot sauce if you like.

Serve with toppings, if so inclined.  Put them all in bowls and pass them around the dinner (or lunch) table.  Possibilities:

  • sour cream
  • shredded cheddar
  • chopped cilantro
  • diced avocado
  • tortilla chips or strips
  • lime wedges for squeezing

 

Mason Jar Salad(s)

I love a good salad with lots of “stuff,” but the last thing I feel like doing when I’m hungry is pulling out all the many ingredients and slicing and chopping to make one salad for me, myself, and I.  Making multiple single-serving salads at once and storing them in quart-size wide-mouth mason jars is a great solution here.  I bought my jars at Target, and chose the blue ones so they would be a bit distinctive — when I see them in the cabinet, I know it’s time to make more salads.

Here’s a before photo of all the ingredients I used this time:

The eggs are hard-cooked in the Instant Pot, then peeled and chopped.  The asparagus I roasted in the Breville mini-oven at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes with a little olive oil and salt.  I used the mandoline for the carrots, toasted the sliced almonds on the stove, chopped the (precooked) beets and the cucumbers, and broke up the chicken strips a bit.

Now, I know that a lot of people like to put their salad dressing right in the bottom of the mason jar.  I elected not to do that, because I like to choose the dressing I want at the time I’m eating the salad.  (Hmm . . . am I in a balsamic-ish or a honey-mustard-like kind of mood?)  But if you are prepping these to eat them in a location where you don’t have that kind of flexibility, go ahead and put a couple of tablespoons of dressing in the jar before you load up on salady goodness.

So, below is a gif of the salad assembly.  Having checked around a bit on other websites about the proper order of ingredients, I decided on this one, but without the dressing to consider, I don’t think it matters a whole lot.  Feel free to experiment.

  1. carrots
  2. cucumbers
  3. beets
  4. asparagus
  5. eggs
  6. almonds
  7. feta (not pictured below)
  8. chicken
  9. baby spinach

Note: Before adding the greens, I pressed down on the chicken layer a bit to pack everything down

via GIPHY

Next, I vacuum sealed the jars, using our new Food Saver and a wide-mouth jar sealing attachment.

This is the first time I’ve done the vacuum sealing step with these salads, but I am hopeful that vacuum sealing will help everything stay as fresh as possible.  Plus, it is hard to overstate the satisfaction I get when I remove the top of one of these jars and it pops.

 

Instant Pot Pork Chops with Mushroom Gravy

M, age 4, has been refusing a higher percentage of dinners lately than I would like, so I’ve been trying something: she and I made a list of dinners that we agree that all the solid-food-eaters in the house like.  Then, I plotted the dinners out over the course of a couple of weeks — I used a blank calendar that I’d been given.  This means that I’ve got her buy-in, as we say in business jargon, for those meals, and then I can schedule new recipes as well, and she knows we’ll get back to something familiar the next night.

We’ve been following this new system for a couple of weeks now, and as it turns out, I’m enjoying it quite a bit, myself.  Due to last weekend’s days-long, storm-induced power outage, I had to throw out almost everything in the fridge.  (D and I agreed that I should err on the side of caution.  After all, eating, like, ketchup that had gone bad would be a particularly silly way to die.)  It was a cathartic, if wasteful, process that left us with this amazing situation:

Since then, I’ve gone to Stop & Shop and BJ’s once each, and have had groceries delivered (a spendy indulgence that we are embracing while the twins are so little) from Wegman’s once.  Thanks to the dinner planning, the groceries we’ve bought are much more directed.  I get specific ingredients for specific meals, plus stuff for M’s and D’s lunches, plus assorted breakfast items.  And a few staple-type snacks.  Our fridge now looks as close as it ever will to the kind of fridge that might belong to someone who is professionally healthy:

Look at the salad dressings in the middle of the left door!  Only three, and all brand-new!  Nothing is falling out of anywhere!  The celery is not rubbery and is destined for one of our favorite recipes (that D will make) this weekend.  I’m sure we’re not following any of the rules about where you should keep which produce in order to maximize freshness, etc., but one step at a time, folks.

Anyhoo, on the calendar for tonight was pork, but I wanted to try something more savory than sweet.  I settled on This Old Gal’s Pressure Cooker Pork Chops in Homemade Mushroom Gravy.  Here’s a before photo:

I didn’t think we had any sherry and didn’t feel like looking, so I substituted white cooking wine.  I also opted for cornstarch because it’s what I had.  For the seasoned salt, I used Jane’s Crazy Mixed-Up Salt because, say it with me now, it’s what I had.

Here’s a sort of mise-en-place stage, with two of the pork chops obscured by the head of the mysterious mustachioed man who showed up at our house tonight.

For sides, I did some sweet potato mash (trim tough ends off three sweet potatoes and prick them with a fork before microwaving them for 8 minutes.  Cut in half and scoop out the flesh with a spoon.  Mash with a masher or fork and a little (1 Tb?) butter and salt to taste).

Sweet potato carcasses and mash

I also roasted some cauliflower, which I bought in floret form from BJs.  I lined a pan with aluminum foil, sprayed on a little olive oil, laid out the florets in one layer, sprayed with a little more olive oil, salted, and roasted in our Breville mini oven thing at 425 degrees with convection for 11 minutes, or until a little brown at the edges.

Here’s a sample plate:

And here’s the one for M, who says she doesn’t like mushrooms, but who did end up asking to add some gravy — without mushrooms — to her pork:

We all liked the meal enough to add it to our regular rotation.  D thought the pork was a bit tough, but that might have been due somewhat to my impatience — I released the pressure directly after cooking instead of waiting for 10 minutes of natural pressure release.  Next time, I might try decreasing the pressure cook time from 8 to 7 minutes.

Carrot and Beet Salad

Sometimes you make up a dish with whatever you have on hand and it turns out more attractive and tastier than you had any reason to expect.  My sister C is visiting from Florida, and she, her three kids, and my mom came over last night for pizza.  It was Auntie C’s first time meeting the twins.

Auntie C is a little bit happy to meet her niece and nephew.  Photo credit: my mom, S.

I wanted to throw together a salad, but the baby spinach I was counting on was well past its prime.

I used one of my favorite kitchen tools, the mandoline, to slice up some carrots and (precooked and vacuum-packed) beets, drizzled with a balsamic glaze I’d forgotten was in the cupboard, and sprinkled some crumbled goat cheese and sunflower seeds on top. Look how pretty!

I realized when cleaning up dinner that I had some fresh thyme hanging out in the fridge, which would have been a nice addition to this dish.  If balsamic isn’t your jam (or, in this case, glaze), you could use lemon juice instead.  A lot of nuts could work in place of the sunflower seeds.  I think if I ever actually planned to make this, I might choose pistachios.  Yum.

You might notice, in the second photo above, that the bottle of balsamic glaze is sharpied with yesterday’s date.  I try to remember to date containers of things — spices, salsa, pretty much anything that comes in a jar — when I open them.  That way, D and I can make informed judgments about whether to dispose of stuff weeks or months (or, ahem, years) later.

Christmas Eve Eve Dinner Party

A & H ready to party

We had a few folks over for dinner last night (nine people around the table, plus twins in various arms), and, as usual, I was so busy hosting and enjoying that I neglected to snap any photos.  Luckily, I did take a few minutes before the shenanigans got under way to catch the twins (age 6.5 weeks) in their dinner party outfits.

Here are some spiced candied pecans that I put out with the appetizers and then again with dessert.  They are that good.  Recipe is from Smitten Kitchen.

And today is the first time ever that the twins are wearing shoes.

Instant Pot Black Bean and Cauliflower Soup

I gave my husband, D, an Instant Pot Ultra for his birthday last month, and for a short but real time, I was scared of it.  Pressure cookers are dangerous, right?  Steam could just pour out and scald me any time, right?  Wrong.

Now that I’ve actually read some of the documentation and used the thing a little, I know that the gadget that Kevin Roose of the New York Times called “this holiday season’s must-have gift — a Furby for foodies” is perfectly safe and eminently predictable.  Our four-year-old daughter is way more volatile than the Instant Pot.  (Then again, maybe that’s not that high a bar.  Or low a bar?  Not totally sure this expression makes sense in this case, but, you know, just go with me here.)

And now, I am riding the Instant Pot wave to deliciousness.

Today, I tried making black bean soup in the Instant Pot.  I incorporated a bag of “Cauliflower Crumbles” (aka “riced” cauliflower) that I had bought on impulse this week.  Cauliflower is, as the whole trend to “rice” it, implies, relatively neutral in flavor.  D and I have used it before as (1) the base for creamy mash, (2) in potato soup, and (3) roasted in steak or florets form with salt and cumin.  I figured it would take on the strong flavor profile of the black beans well and would add a little bulk to the soup.

I knew the resulting soup would be healthy — or, perhaps more correctly, healthful.  It was also pretty darn tasty.  M, the four-year-old, ate it (although she needed me to spoon it for her, a request that has become more frequent since six weeks ago, when twin siblings A and H were born.  Fair enough, don’t you think?).  After tasting this soup, husband D wondered out loud whether he could bring it in for the lunch he has signed up to provide for 8-10 coworkers next month.  (Answer: sure.  It’ll be easy to bring the Instant Pot along to work if D wants.  Note that he drives there; he has no public transportation to negotiate.  This is key.  My friend H has been given an Instant Pot by her boss, but it’s at work — two subway rides and one commuter rail ride away from her Brooklyn home.  Meanwhile, she was inspired/compelled/possessed to open the box by CUTTING OFF THE PLASTIC CARRYING HANDLE.  That appliance is never going to see Brooklyn.)

Returning to my point: three out of my five family members (including me, naturally.  Is it still cool to say “natch?”  No?  Asking for a friend.) gave this recipe a thumbs up.  The twins did not express an opinion.

 

Instant Pot Black Bean and Cauliflower Soup | serves 10 | about 1 1/2 cups per serving | WW FSP 1 per serving (according to the in-app recipe builder; I tend to count this as a zero point food)

Ingredients

  • 1 medium onion, chopped (The Chop Wizard can help, as always)
  • 1 red bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 green bell pepper, chopped
  • 3 stalks celery, chopped small
  • 1 large carrot, chopped small
  • 1 14.5-oz. can diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 pound dry black beans, rinsed
  • 16 oz. cauliflower crumbles (cauliflower, diced or riced)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon hot sauce
  • 1 Tablespoon paprika
  • 2 Tablespoons chili powder
  • 2 Tablespoons cumin
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 6 cups chicken broth (for vegan version, substitute vegetable broth)

Instructions

Add all the ingredients to the Instant Pot and close.  Stir it if you are so moved.  Seriously.  That’s all the prep there is here.

Cook on high pressure for 40 minutes; then use natural pressure release.  With pressure build and release, cooking time ends up being over an hour.  Open the lid and hunt down and remove the bay leaves.  Taste and add salt and/or hot sauce if you like.

Serve with toppings.  Put them all in bowls and pass them around the dinner (or lunch) table.  Possibilities:

  • sour cream
  • shredded cheddar
  • chopped cilantro
  • diced avocado
  • tortilla chips or strips
  • lime wedges for squeezing