Mixed Plate: Disorganized Kitchen Chaos - I Ain't Lazy, Just Crazy

Meals sometimes get a little crazy at Casa de Wasabi, so I apologize for the lack of ooh-la-lah foods. You know what I'm talking about -- there are weeks where meals get planned out on time, groceries purchased, and everything runs like clockwork. And then there are some weeks where you just have leftover stuff from previous meals and you just want to clean everything out before you buy anything new. The solution for those weeks look like this: Kitchen Sink Frittata, Bag o' Broccoli Soup, and for dessert, Beefcake 4000 Oatmeal Cookies.

Everything but the kitchen sink... wait, is that a spigot over there? Photo by Wasabi Prime

I get zero credit on the name, Kitchen Sink Frittata -- gotta give it up to my homeskillet, Radish and Rose, who would tell me about her Kitchen Sink Omelettes, wherein the refrigerator would be scoured of all random scraps of leftover vegetables and made into a large, hearty omelette. I made something similar with the frittata, throwing in spinach, leftover chicken and random bits of cheese, placed in a baking pan with a custard of eggs and milk, and then baked. Slices served up on a bed of greens for dinner and packed away for lunches at the office, it takes care of several meals for part of the week.

Soup is the answer, because no one knows what went in it - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Paired with the frittata or fine on its own was literally the Bag o' Broccoli soup. As in, I found a random bag of broccoli sitting in our box freezer from some forlorn Costco trip where I thought a frozen bag of broccoli would be a nifty idea. This logic is flawed! Don't ever buy frozen broccoli thinking it won't defrost into a giant pile of mush. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Plus it was a giant bag that's so intimidating, you never want to open it in fear of trying to somehow wrestle it into a meal. It spent a night defrosting in the fridge and then I spread the entire contents of the bag across two baking sheets and roasted them with a bit of oil to help remove some of the water and concentrate the flavor down. The broccoli was transferred to a pot of simmering chicken stock and the stick blender made quick work of the florets, turning it into a murky, green stew that looked like I cooked Oscar the Grouch. However, with the help of a bit of seasoning and milk to both loosen and make the texture more creamy, the broccoli soup came together nicely. Garnished with crumbled feta and extra pepper, it would be totally fine to serve guests, and they probably wouldn't think to assume the ingredients came frozen, out of a bag. From Costco, no less. Broccoli de Ghetto Soup, anyone?

Spring Cleaning the fridge and freezer - Photos by Wasabi Prime

As for the Beefcake 4000 Oatmeal Cookie, yep, you guessed it, by the power of Eric Cartman, I used protein powder in a cookie recipe. Beefcake! BEEFCAKE!! This was less of a pantry-clearing exercise and more of a "what would happen if I did this..." experiment. I took a chewy oatmeal cookie recipe and substituted half the flour for whey-based protein powder. This is a good idea: Y/N? Well... it wasn't awful, and they actually were a pleasant enough treat to have around with the lie hanging in the back of my brain saying, "it's protein powder, so it's healthy, right??" How does it feel be going down the River of Denial, Wasabi?

Beefcake 4000 Oatmeal Cookies, better than Cheezy-Poofs. Photo by Wasabi Prime

The protein powder we use has a flavoring added to it, so it made the cookies a little on the malty side, which I think is mostly to tone down the fact that it's protein powder. Any hopes of making it healthy were quickly dashed when I added some white chocolate chips to it, plus the original recipe called for quite a bit of sugar. If I were to remake it with energy bar intentions, I would probably nix the sugar and use just a little honey as the sweetener, and add more nuts and dried unsweetened fruit. The protein powder seemed to hold up in the baking process, so I could probably replace the flour completely with it, were I to attempt this bizarre baked good again. I know it sounds like a weird thing to make, since protein bars are never something wonderful to eat. Chalk this one up to too much time and too much weird crap in the pantry.
Fine, so meal options aren't always pretty when you're home-cookin' it most of the time. But it can't be all champagne wishes and caviar dreams -- life happens, you can't always go out for meals, and sometimes you just have to get a little crazy.

No whey?  Whey. Photos by Wasabi Prime

Mixed Plate: Radishes and Gettin' My Root Down

You may have seen the latest report on Wasabi Gardenwatch 2010, with the epic harvest of radishes I'm getting. Well, more like a handful here and there, so I still picked up a little bouquet of purple radishes when I was at the Bellevue Farmers Market, along with a couple of leeks. I've developed a fascination with radishes lately, mostly because they're growing in our garden and I'm trying to find different ways to use them beyond the obvious salad. Especially since the totally cracked-out weather we've been having is forcing a lot of my rooty veggies to bolt and turn into just greens and no roots. Umbrage! As the Beastie Boys would say, I wanna get my root down, yo.

Roasted radish and leek frittata - the cure for all troubles and lack of meal ideas - Photo by Wasabi Prime

When in doubt, make a frittata. I think that could be the title of my cookbook, if I were ever to write a cookbook. Book publishers out there, if you're listening, this would be a great recipe book for the kitchen-challenged. Refrigerator crisper drawer full of random crap on the stage of wilting into a dirty, brown sludge? Make a frittata. Or the opposite -- bare fridge save for a few eggs and maybe some random sticks of string cheese? Make a frittata. It's the perfect answer for everything. Socio-economic troubles amongst the nations? Meteor hurtling towards the planet? Make a frittata. It's better than what the Magic 8 Ball would say, that's for sure.

But back to my umbrage with my radishes bolting. Can you not tell I'm unhealthily fixated on this? So the crazy weather that's been happening, which includes ten minutes of sun, then ten minutes of rain, is clearly giving my vegetable garden a case of the Whatchoo Talkin' Bout Willis?! We're beyond winter's frost, which is good, but we're on that weird cusp of chilly spring and somewhat warm early summer. I put in radishes early and was able to get a few nice ones, but lately I've been using them more for greens -- which are totally edible, even if they're a bit fuzzy and pokey. Again, the cure for the world's problems come in and I chop up the greens and cook them down in a frittata.

Roasted radishes - crazy? Possibly.  - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I wanted to see how the radishes would do being roasted down, wondering if they would develop sweetness or anything interesting. I cleaned and halved the radishes, tossed with melted butter and salt, and put them into the oven, along with two split leeks to get roasty-toasty. They looked great when added to the final cook-off stage of the frittata when I let the broiler add a final bit of char to the top. As for taste, it was very subtle, even with the roasting which I know is supposed to heighten flavor. Brock mentioned it was more about texture than anything else, but they do well with the eggs, since both the greens and the radishes themselves provide an overall peppery flavor.

In general, I'm looking forward to a dual effort on the part of whatever our garden does produce this year, as well as being more of an active participant in shopping our local farmers markets. We've done CSAs in the past, and while they were great ways to get one's greens every week, I always felt this crazy pressure on delivery days, a little afraid over what was in the box (random obscure Dune moment: what's in the box? Answer: pain!). I always felt this pressure to use every little bit, which for the most part, we were successful, but due largely to the power of frittata-making. And meatloaf-making. There were many a green or purple-colored meatloaf, heavily doped with chopped greens or an excess of red cabbage.

Farmers market goodies -- all good with eggs! - Photos by Wasabi Prime