OMG a Recipe: O-M-Greens - Lost in the Antioxidant Jungle

You look in the fridge and realize you have a ton of produce, specifically leafy greens, and it's like a ticking time bomb. Except that instead of a terrible explosion, you're simply left with a sludgy pile of green goo and wasted food. NEVER AGAIN. The final installment of Oxbow Box Project: Part Deux, focuses on all those random veggies and greens you wind up with, whether you've gotten behind on eating your CSA goods or you went overboard at the farmers market and are in need of a Kale Intervention. However you got to this place, I feel your pain. Come and have a hug, and let's have a grown-up talk about Eating Your Greens. 

O..M...Greens - what to do with this antioxidant land of plenty? - Photo by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: Cooked Green Food Looks Terrible, But It Tastes Amazing

Salads look refreshing! A verdant pesto made with garden herbs looks great! But fully-cooked green food...? Not so much. Split pea soup? Baby poop. And green enchiladas? Don't even get me started. Which is why it's ironic that the one dish that tasted great looked so horrible. So, with that in mind, here, look at some fresh garden-grown tomatoes!

Food blogging subterfuge -- look at this thing, right now, and not the other thing! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

The last, gasping handfuls of our vegetable garden aren't a total blog-beard -- they were pivotal in my Green Food Frustration post. As with every year, I always wind up with a lot of green tomatoes. Our growing season in the Pacific Northwest is annoyingly short, and my patience for babying tomato plants wears thin. Cherry tomatoes are my favorite, as even the greenest little underripe buggers manage to ripen in a bowl on the counter if I let them sit long enough. But I always get optimistic and get a few large-fruiting tomato plants like Romas or Sweet 100s, which supposedly grow fast. I wind up with maybe a couple fully-ripened tomatoes and way more green ones, but like they say, when life gives you green tomatoes -- make green food.

Green (and yellow) food -- looks great when it's freshly picked! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I actually like green tomatoes, and not just for an excuse to watch that charming, yet surprisingly disturbing movie, Fried Green Tomatoes. Green tomatoes are tart and have a unique flavor all their own, so I like roasting them with an onion and blending it all into a sauce, usually salsa. I combine this with other green foods like cilantro, lime zest and juice, and season it with a lot of cumin and chili powder. Everything goes into the blender, I love it -- no fuss, no muss, and there's enough liquid from the roasted vegetables and a lime or two, to get everything blended to a smooth consistency. Shazam.

I did this with ripe tomatoes as well, which I have to say, the studies about certain colors like red, yellow or orange being more enticing to the appetite is totally right. It's basically the same salsa ingredients, just red tomatoes versus green ones, but the red salsa looks exponentially better. I made this with ripe tomatoes kindly given from another person's garden, one who is not as blessed/cursed with green tomatoes as myself. I added some of my own ripe tomatoes to the great vegetable roasting, as well as some tomatillos for tartness, as I didn't have fresh lime. A very tasty salsa, enjoyed warm or cold, I pretty much ate one jar's worth all on my own before eventually sharing the other jar with friends.

Let's face it, red salsa just looks better - Photos by Wasabi prime

I found myself with a couple of pounds' worth of green tomatoes towards the end of the season, so I repeated the salsa recipe and wound up with a pretty pesto-like mixture. I even threw in some roasted/peeled hatch chiles. But I didn't want to push myself along that same dark alleyway of me on the couch with a bag of tortilla chips and a big bowl of salsa for dinner the next few nights, so I thought: Green Enchiladas. In my mind, I envisioned enchiladas filled with chicken, the last of our garden's yellow squash and ricotta, to give it an extra creamy texture. I enriched the salsa verde with some Mexican crema, and that gave it a smooth, velvety texture to coat all the filled tortillas before baking. I covered everything with crumbled cotija cheese and into the oven these enchiladas went.

From green... to baby poop, but damn, it tasted good! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

And... baby poop. Heat just kills the fresh colors of food, especially green things, there's not a lot you can do about it. I remember buying crazy multi-colored bell peppers, and making the mistake of putting them into a stir fry and they turned dirty brown, even though they tasted fine. Not even a sprinkling of fresh cilantro or extra cheese was going to save these enchiladas. So why even bother posting? Aside from the fact that I love the idea of cooking stuff grown in our garden, and as super-grody as these enchiladas looked on the plate -- they were probably the best enchiladas I'd ever made! Doesn't that just kill you when that happens? What resembles little Junior's explosive diaper accident, was freakin' delicious. But the photos will never do it justice. Mixing ricotta with cooked chicken and vegetables, spicing it with some cayenne and cumin, makes for a wonderfully smooth enchilada filling. Think of a hybrid between Italian stuffed pasta and a typical enchilada. The ricotta and a light seasoning keeps it mild, which makes me think a typical red enchilada sauce would be overwhelming. The baby poop green sauce was citrusy, fresh, but rich from the combining of the crema. The night I made this, I had double servings, I loved it so much. I probably ate it so fast, I barely noticed the fact that it looked like hell.

I'm in love! But the object of my affection is ugly as sin and likely something you'd courtesy-flush before eating. So therein lies my food-quandary. I will definitely make this again, but it's a "Just Us," dinner, as the Mister had no qualms about eating Salsa Verde Turdy Enchiladas -- he pretty much bypassed all other leftovers for this green monstrosity. But take my Beauty and the Feast advice: even the ugliest of meals can still make your tummy very happy, even if your food blogger aesthetic is like, what-the-what?! 

OMG a Recipe: You Put Your Sweet in My Savory (and vice-versa)

I remember when Reese's Peanut Butter Cups first came out (yes, I'm old enough to remember a world without peanut butter cups). The commercial had two kids, one with a chocolate bar, one with a jar of peanut butter. The kid with the chocolate bar drops the candy into the peanut butter and the famous synchronized lines, "You put your chocolate in my peanut butter/you put your peanut butter on my chocolate" was born. What, you don't remember that? My age must be showing. It got me thinking about sweet and savory, and how they can do a switcheroo in dishes without fear of cats-and-dogs-living-together mass hysteria breaking out.

Don't hate on the beets in this chocolate brownie - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Chocolate in enchiladas? Beets in brownies? Yes We Can. It's not only possible, but it's tasty. It's easy to get lulled into the traditional use of ingredients, where chocolate lives in candy bars and beets get roasted and made into soups or salads. If we looked at ingredients without the context of our own flavor preferences and just saw them for what they were -- sweet, smoky, bitter, sour, etc -- we would start to re-envision the ingredients in seemingly unlikely things. Beets are a root vegetable with a high sugar content, probably one of the highest. I remember reading somewhere how the high sugar acts as a natural form of antifreeze, preventing the vegetables from getting icy in the cold months when they're still below the ground. The same way we use carrots, another sweet root vegetable, in cakes, beets can be used as well. If we can ignore all those plates of boiled beets or bowls of borscht and just see beets as another source for sweetness, why not use them for dessert?

Of course I had our CSA to thank for this one -- we were delivered several red beets, and along with the produce, Full Circle Farms kindly includes a newsletter that has suggestions and recipes. The week's recipes included a beet chocolate cake, which I modified to become a brownie. Why? A lack of patience, mostly. I didn't want to wait for the butter to soften and the original cake recipe was more like a chocolate-beet chiffon cake, with the eggs separated and the whites whipped to help lighten the cake. I appreciate the earthy heartiness of beets, and I think it pairs nicely with bittersweet chocolate, so why not have it in a rich, dense brownie? I also went the extra mile, adding dollops of partially-frozen sweet goat cheese icing on top of the brownies, then swirling it when the oven softened it after a few minutes. This is an extra step that's nice, but not necessary. And honestly, how many people are random enough to have a little container of frozen goat cheese frosting in the freezer? If you do have this in your freezer, I doff my hat to you, fellow chevre freaks.

If you're like me and want to mess with the Mister's mind and convince them beets are not all that bad, give this beet brownie recipe a try. It's modified from Full Circle Farms' original Moist Chocolate-Beet Cake recipe.

I Can't Believe It's Beet Brownies!
2 large beets, roughly chopped (to prep, roast and peel, or boil until soft and peel)
7 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1/4 cup hot coffee
7 oz butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
3 tbsp unsweetened dark cocoa powder
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line a square baking dish with parchment paper to prepare for the batter. Place a medium sized pot on a burner set to medium-lo and add butter, coffee, sugar and chocolate. Melt and combine ingredients until they are fully combined and set aside to cool slightly. Place cooked and peeled beets into a blender or food processor and puree with chocolate and butter mixture until smooth.

Sift flour, cocoa powder and baking powder together into a bowl. Fold in the chocolate-beet mixture and add the eggs. Mix everything until incorporated and pour into the prepared baking dish. Place the dish into the oven and bake until just-set, 20-25 minutes, depending on your oven. Use a toothpick to check the doneness of the center of the pan; it should come out slightly moist, not coated with batter. Allow the cake to cool before cutting the brownies down.

Chocolate enchiladas for... dinner? Dessert...? - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I had beets in brownies, so how about chocolate in enchiladas? Call it reverse dessert. Using cocoa in flavor-complex mole sauces isn't unusual; a combination of dried chiles and spices, simmered in a vegetable and tomato-based sauce -- pure deliciousness. Cacao doesn't naturally taste like a chocolate bar, it's bitter and the processing of the pods is similar to coffee -- there's roasting, developing a smoky flavor, and then it's ground to release its oils and flavors. So it would make sense that unsweetened chocolate is added to rich, slow-cooked sauces to impart that deep flavor. I usually make my own enchilada sauce. Not because I'm trying to be fancy-schmancy, and I would never call the recipe traditional (it's actually a pretty quickie sauce), I just prefer building the sauce myself because I'm never totally sure what the heck is in those canned sauces.

Admittedly, when I made this batch of enchiladas, they were Cheater Enchiladas. I didn't roll the tortillas, I layered tortillas with sauce and shredded beef the way you would make a lasagne. The finished dish was more like a layered casserole. I was more interested in getting the flavor of that sauce into my hungry tummy as quickly as possible, hence the shortcut. The thing to remember when making this is don't swap the unsweetened baking chocolate with sweetened baking chips. You want the bitter, almost coffee-like quality of the chocolate to add earthy flavor to the sauce, not taste like you threw in a Hershey bar.

Adding chocolate to enchiladas? Don't judge, it's delicious - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Chocolate Mole Enchilada Sauce
1.5 pounds chopped tomatoes or 2 15 oz cans of chopped tomatoes
1 onion, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
5 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
2 ounces of unsweetened baker's chocolate (usually comes in 1 oz squares)
2 tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder
3 tablespoons chile powder
1 tablespoon ancho chile powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon sugar (or more, to taste)
salt and pepper
vegetable oil for cooking

In a large pot, set to medium high, drizzle with oil. Add chopped onion, bell pepper and garlic and sautee until softened and slightly browned. Add the tomatoes, chocolate and dry spices. Mix to combine and drop heat to low. Let simmer for an hour, letting the vegetables soften. Add salt and pepper to taste. Use a stick blender to puree final sauce.

UnRecipe: The Heat is ON - a Tale of Two Spicy Dishes

Baby, when it's cold outside, all I want to do is eat something warm, cozy and spicy-hot. I recently went through a spicy food craving, but it's funny how "spicy food" isn't a catch-all when it comes to different cuisines. There's specific combinations of foods and heat that enhance the flavor of foods in different ways. Bring on the spice, because it's oh-so-nice!

Who says tofu can't have attitude? - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Mapo tofu is like making chicken noodle soup or meat loaf -- everyone's got a different recipe or method of making it, and there's no absolute correct way of doing it. It's basically ground pork, finely-chopped vegetables that could include onions, mushrooms, carrots or whatever you've got, little cubes of tofu, and a spicy hellfire broth of garlic, ginger, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, dried peppers or chile paste, simmered in a bit of stock. Sprinkle with green onions to garnish and prepare to sweat it out, baby. It's an easy one-pot meal and it's usually served over rice. My version tends to use ground turkey, just to give my arteries a break, and I go heavy on the vinegar because I like that tangy sourness. I've also done version of this that has chopped up kimchee. You really can put anything in this, as it's a very forgiving dish -- the hearty stews often are. I'm used to having it bright orange, due to the heavy hand of "rooster sauce" sriracha. My latest batch didn't quite turn the alarming orange I'm used to, but a few dashes of extra chili sauce makes it all better and I can always cry in the bathroom later.

Rich and spicy enchiladas - Photo by Wasabi Prime

My other favorite heat is from chipotle in adobo sauce. I don't make these from scratch, I just buy them from the store, and I just love, love, love them. There's usually a can at the ready in my pantry because they're like the spicy little red Swiss Army knife that always saves MacGyver's bacon -- they're great for (almost) everything, yo! The stewed, saucy peppers provide so much rich, deep, smoky heat -- almost sweet at times. They make spicy dishes less knock-your-socks-off hot and more of that satisfying roundness of flavor sensation, like something's been slowly simmered to perfection.

I made enchiladas with the help of the slow cooker, throwing a big, sinewy hunk of pork shoulder into a mix of canned tomatoes and the chipotle peppers and sauce. The pork was covered in a dry spice rub before wading into the slow cooker hot tub time machine and Shazam - when it got to Futuretown, it was shreddable-tender and seasoned in the saucy flavors. The pork was set aside while the tomato/chile sauce was buzzed down in the blender until smooth. I tossed the shredded pork with some cooked down onions and black beans and this was the filling for enchiladas.

When the weather turns cold, these are definitely the things that helps keep me warm from the inside-out. What's your favorite spicy food?