Curried Cauliflower and Potato Soup

Prep time: Easy

Source: My own brain!

When we first got married, the list of vegetables Mahon really liked was pretty short. In the five years since then I've found ways to prepare a lot of veggies so that he shares my love for them, but broccoli and cauliflower are still—at best—tolerated. Several years ago when I mentioned that they were known as "cruciferous vegetables," he misheard me, and ever since then he refers to them as "Lucifer's vegetables"! Since cauliflower is one of my favorite veggies of all time, I decided that I was going to do my best to come up with a cauliflower soup recipe that he liked. I also wanted to make a creamy, comforting soup that was dairy-free, since I am dairy sensitive.

1 head cauliflower, chopped

4 russets, peeled & diced

1/2 medium onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 t kosher salt

1/8 t chili powder (optional—my curry powder was VERY mild

1/8 t black pepper

1 t curry powder

EVOO for sauéeing

6 cups broth

Sautee all veggies together 5-10 minutes until starting to brown/tender. Add spices and broth and bring to boil. Simmer at least 30-40 minutes until potatoes and cauliflower are soft (you can leave simmering longer if desired). Puree with immersion blender (or puree in batches through a regular blender), reserving a few veggies for chunks if desired. Serve with crusty bread.

Honey-Peach Pie With Streusel Topping

Prep time: Easy-medium (typical for a pie)

Source: My own brain, with crust inspiration from the Southern Living cookbook

You guys, there is a reason that this post doesn't have a picture (yet). THIS PIE IS SO DELICIOUS that Mahon and I just single-handedly consumed it in about 28 hours. Not only that, but I'm seriously tempted to march out this afternoon and buy another bag of peaches so that we can make it again, stat. It's the perfect blend of flavors with just enough sweetness to make it killer good, but not so much sweetness that it makes you want to keel over—and because it only uses 1/4 cup sugar and a bit of honey to sweeten the whole pie, it's relatively "healthy" as far as pies go. It. Is. So. Good. Go take that bag of overripe peaches that is breeding fruit flies and make it now!

For crust:
(A quick note on the crust—you CAN do a white-flour crust with shortening instead of butter for this recipe. You can. But using mostly whole-wheat flour and butter last night I seriously got one of the flakiest, crispiest, most deliciously flavorful pie crusts I have ever created. So really, I recommend doing it just as it's written.)

1 1/2 cups flour (I did 1 cup whole wheat, 1/2 cup white)

3/4 t salt

1/2 cup cold butter, sliced (unsalted if you have it)

4-5 T ice water
(If you really need an extra tablespoon or two of water, go ahead. I don't know if it's because I live in a desert or what, but I always seem to end up on the high end of pie crust water ratios, or exceed them a little.)

Mix together flour and salt and cut in butter until the mixture is crumbly and the pieces of butter are small. Sprinkle water over mixture one teaspoon at a time, stirring gently with a fork in between, until dry ingredients are moistened and there is just enough moisture in the dough for it to loosely hold together. Shape into a ball (it won't hold together very well, and that's OK) and cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate until ready to use, or for at least 20-30 minutes.

For Filling:
4-5 cups of fresh ripe (or overripe) peaches, peeled and sliced
Honey (I didn't measure, but probably used about 1/8-1/4 cup)

For Streusel Topping:
3 T flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 T cinnamon
1/4 cup oats
1/8 t salt
4 T cold or room-temperature butter

Slice peaches into a medium-sized bowl and drizzle with honey. Cover and refrigerate. Assemble streusel in a small bowl by mixing dry ingredients together and then cutting in butter until mixture is crumbly; set aside.

Preheat oven to 425. Lightly dust a countertop or table with flour and use a floured rolling pin to gently roll out the pie crust. When it's evenly thin and large enough to fit your pie plate, fold (gently) into quarters and place in your pie plate, then unfold. Trim excess pastry along edges and shape them as desired.

Pour or spoon peaches into pastry shell. Sprinkle streusel topping evenly over top of filling. Bake pie at 425 for 10 minutes and then reduce heat to 375; bake for 20-30 minutes, or until crust and streusel are browned, and pie is bubbling a bit around the edges. Allow pie to cool before serving.

Quinoa Patties

Prep time: Easy-medium

Source: Mel's Kitchen Cafe

I'm always on the lookout for interesting new recipes, but especially right now—the last trimester of pregnancy has brought with it some pretty severe food intolerances to meat and dairy, so we've had to get pretty creative in the kitchen! This is a recipe I pinned to try a few weeks ago. I was initially skeptical—I like quinoa, but would it really be able to hold its own in such an unadorned main dish? Mahon wasn't so sure how he was going to feel about this dinner, either, so both of us approached it with a little hesitation. However, it didn't disappoint! We both loved it and mutually decided it should join our rotation. Mahon tried various toppings on his patties (I think maybe his favorite was BBQ sauce?) but decided he might like them best with gravy, so that the flavor of the patties could shine through a little more. I guess we'll have to try that next time! I halved the original recipe for the two of us, but ended up wishing I hadn't, as it only yielded 1 serving of leftovers and not 2.

In the future, I'd also like to play around with switching up the spices in these to create different flavors.

(Yield: About a dozen patties)

2 1/2 cups quinoa cooked in broth, cool enough to touch*

4 large eggs, lightly beaten

3/4 t salt

1/4 t black pepper

1/4 c chopped fresh parsley (or about 1 T dried)

1/2 cup fresh parmesan cheese

2 cloves minced garlic

1 cup crushed crackers (Ritz or saltine), bread crumbs, or oatmeal

1 T extra-virgin olive oil

Combine eggs, salt, pepper, and quiona in a bowl. Stir in parsley, parmesan, garlic, and bread crumbs. (Go ahead and add a little more crumbs, or a teaspoon or two of water, if your mix seems too wet or dry.) Let stand five minutes. 

Heat olive oil over medium heat in large skillet. Form mixture into patties with hands (about 1" thick) and cook until the bottoms are browned (between 5-10 minutes, depending on how hot your stove is). Flip and cook about 5 minutes on second side. Remove from pan and continue until all the mix is used up (you may need to add more EVOO to your pan in between batches—I did).

Freezer instructions: Flash freeze uncooked patties on cookie sheet; place in ziploc bag when frozen. Cook from frozen (will need to increase cooking time a few minutes).

*Everything I read online says that quinoa quadruples when cooking, but I think that's crazy... mine never expands to that degree. I would say it tends to triple. After experimenting with several different ratios, I typically cook my quinoa with one cup grain to 1 1/4-1 1/2 cups broth.

Pao de Queijo (Brazilian Cheese Rolls) (Gluten-Free)

Prep time: Very easy

Source: Adapted from Our Best Bites

Two or three years ago, I made this recipe as the original instructions indicated—using cheddar and parmesan cheese. Neither Mahon nor I were especially blown away by them, and I never made it again. Last summer, we went for the first time to Tucano's, a local restaurant chain that serves Brazilian churrascuro (grilled meats & veggies) and fell in love with their pao de queijo. In trying to figure out why we'd loved the Tucano's rolls so much more than the ones I'd made a few years before, I did a bunch of research and found that most of the recipes online call for only parmesan, rather than parmesan and cheddar. Although I was skeptical that parmesan could be the cheese in the Tucano's rolls, which are very mild-tasting, we decided to give it a try and adapted the recipe from Our Best Bites to use only parmesan. To our surprise and TOTAL delight, we had hit on exactly the right cheese! Our rolls were even better than the ones at Tucano's, since we ate them straight out of the oven and they were incredibly fresh and light. I'm embarrassed to say that between the two of us, we downed the whole batch in one night!

1 large egg

1/2 c milk

1/4 c canola oil

1 cup tapioca flour (also called tapioca starch)—don't substitute this! Every recipe I read agreed that the tapioca flour is what makes these rolls unique and authentic.

1/2 t kosher salt

1/2 cup grated (fresh) parmesan cheese
Any other desired spices for topping

Preheat oven to 400. Grease two mini muffin tins and set aside. In a blender, add all ingredients except cheese and blend until smooth. Add cheese and pulse 2-3 times. Immediately pour into your prepared muffin tins. (We found that filling them 1/2-2/3 of the way worked the best, though the batter is thin and tends to pour faster than you expect!) You can top with a sprinkle of extra cheese, a bit of kosher salt, or any other herb or spice you'd like! (Rosemary is also DELICIOUS.)

Bake 15-20 minutes or until the rolls have puffed up (they will puff quite a bit!) and are just barely golden on top. Ours took exactly 15 minutes. According to the original recipe, the yield varies depending on how full you fill your muffin cups; we ended up with about 20.

Serve immediately. These made a great companion to a meal of Black Bean Soup (also a Brazilian recipe originally from OBB!).

Healthy No-Bake Cookie Bites

Okay, okay... these definitely won't win any awards for looks.
But they are SO, SO YUMMY!

Prep time: Easy

Source: Adapted from GimmeSomeOven.com

I pinned this recipe on Pinterest a long time ago and decided that it would be a perfect little post-baby snack to add to my freezer collection. I made some modifications based on what I had on hand, and what I thought would taste good. You might even call these my version of "lactation cookies," since oats, flax seed, and coconut oil are all supposed to help a new mom's milk come in... but in all honesty, I just think they taste good! ;) These work really well both as a snack (since they're a decent source of both protein and fiber) and a pretty guilt-free treat. They remind me a lot of no-bake cookies, although less gooey and with a more complex flavor. The variations on this recipe are endless, so don't hesitate to make substitutions of your own! If my baby ends up (HEAVEN FORBID) being sensitive to chocolate, I think I'll end up making these again and skipping the cocoa powder. As much as I adore them the way they are, I suspect they'd be pretty good as peanut-butter-bites too!

1 1/2 cup old-fashioned oats

1/2 cup crisp rice cereal

1/2 cup ground flaxseed or whole-wheat flour (I used 1/4 cup each)

1 T cocoa powder

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter

2 T coconut oil

1/4 cup honey

Combine oats, cereal, flaxseed/flour, and cocoa in a medium mixing bowl. In a smaller bowl, melt coconut oil in the microwave and then stir in peanut butter and honey. Add this to the dry mixture and mix with a spoon until everything is integrated and just moist enough to hold together fairly well (this takes some patience). Refrigerate for about half an hour to firm up the mix, and then use your hands to press into small balls. Store, covered, in the fridge.

(To freeze mine, I laid all of my cookie bites out on a cookie sheet and flash-froze them, then transferred them to a plastic freezer bag. When I'm ready to eat them, I'll probably either pull a few at a time out and let them thaw for half an hour or an hour, or else I'll take the whole bag out and store them in the fridge instead.) Post update: Actually, it turns out these are fantastic straight out of the freezer. And, um, I'm just sayin'... they may not make it to be postpartum snacks, after all! Maybe we can consider this batch "end-of-pregnancy sanity savers"???

Pupusas

Prep time: Medium

Source: Inspired by my friend Sacha, who introduced me to them, but the recipe is really my own

For as many recipes as I have on this blog, there is one whole category of meals which we make frequently that is conspicuously missing! My dad served his LDS mission in Mexico, and fell in love with authentic Mexican food while he was there. Because of that, I grew up with him frequently making dishes (like fresh tostados—still one of my absolute favorite meals!) from masa harina, or Mexican corn flour. When I got older, he taught me how to make a good masa dough to be used in recipes like corn tortillas, tostados, and gorditas. However, my dad's method—and now mine—of cooking with masa is very much "a little bit of this, then just enough of that to get the right consistency," so since none of my recipes use actual proportions, I've never typed them up! However, I'm determined to get my favorite masa recipes on this blog.

Because pupusas are El Salvedorean and not Mexican, I'd never heard of them until my friend Sacha asked me to teach her how to work with masa so that she could make some pupusas for her husband. Soon after that, I started making them as well, and Mahon and I were hooked! We now make these frequently, and I've never met anyone who doesn't love them. Since they're an all-in-one kind of dish, they also make exceptionally good picnic or traveling food! In El Salvador, they're often topped with curtido, which is a type of fermented cabbage salad, but if we don't have that we just top them with sour cream.

Like tamales, you can fill these pupusas with just about anything you like—meat, beans, cheese, or a combination of all three! I usually use whatever we happen to have on hand, and will often make them meatless. The recipe I'm including here is one of our favorites.

A note on the yield with this recipe: As I said above, I really don't usually measure any of this! These are all rough guesstimations, so feel free to play around with any of the proportions if they don't feel right to you. I am guessing this recipe, followed closely, would yield 12-16 pupusas, which is normally about how many I try to make (enough for the two of us to have for dinner and lunch the next day—so it essentially serves four).

4 cups masa (you can find this is the Latin aisle of any grocery store)

1/2 t salt (I like using kosher salt—it's a little more of a zing!)

2-3 cups warm water

1 chicken breast, boiled and shredded

1 cup pinto or black beans

1 cup grated mozzarella cheese

1 t salt

A dash of chili powder

1/4 t cumin

Preheat a griddle or ungreased skillet to about 375 degrees. In medium mixing bowl, combine masa and salt. Add warm water and mix with a wooden spoon or your finger (my preference) until the masa dough is roughly the consistency of wet sand. In separate bowl, mix together shredded chicken, beans, cheese, and spices.

There are a few different ways to assemble your pupusas. I actually made a video demonstrating these different ways a few months ago, but for some reason I can't get it to do anything, so I'll have to hope I can describe each method adequately!

The first way is to separate your masa into balls a little smaller than golf balls and roll them out (or smash them with a tortilla press) into small tortillas. Take two of your tortillas and layer them on top of each other, with a generous scoop of filling in between. Pinch the edges of the tortillas together to seal in the filling and cook for a few minutes on each side until done. 

The second way is to take a ball of masa about half the size of your fist and gently flatten it out with your hand until it fills your palm. Cup your hand a little to create a little bowl shape, and then press a spoonful of filling into the crater and gently work the edges of the masa dough up around the filling until the edges meet and you end up with a ball of masa dough with filling encased inside. Gently roll this ball out or smash with a tortilla press (you will be able to see filling through the sides—that's just fine), and then cook on both sides til done.

The third (and most authentic) way, which is actually our favorite way of doing it because it produces by far the best texture (and is kind of fun, too!) is to follow the first few steps of method #2 until you  have your ball of masa with filling encased inside. Then, instead of rolling it out like you would a tortilla, gently "slap" the ball back and forth between your palms, rotating it around as you go to keep it circular. This can take a little practice, but it's really pretty fun once you get the hang of it! (And don't worry—ugly pupusas still taste fantastic!) After a few slaps back and forth, your pupusa should be a disk about 1/4" thick. Press this gently onto your pan or griddle and cook on both sides til done. (This method will take a little longer to cook than others, since it produces thicker pupusas—I let it cook on the first side until the edges of the pupusa start to look dry, and then flip it and cook 3-5 minutes on the second side as well.)

Serve hot with sour cream and salsa or contido.

Berry Chocolate Coffee Cake

Prep time: Medium

Source: Mostly from my own head; the cake base is adapted from a few other recipes

Yesterday morning I decided that we needed a Valentine's-appropriate dessert to follow our dinner of heart-shaped pupusas. Because I've really been in the mood for a rich, delicious coffee cake this week, that's what came into my mind! What could be more perfect for Valentine's than a coffee cake laced with just-barely-sweetened berries and studded with dark chocolate? After tasting our creation last night, Mahon and I decided: Pretty much nothing! This is definitely a recipe we'll be keeping and making again.

For Berry Ribbon:

1 cup frozen mixed berries

1/2 T honey

For Cake:

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

3/4 cup sugar

2 large eggs

2 cups flour

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

3/4 t salt

1 cup plain Greek yogurt or sour cream

1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

For Streusel Topping:

1/4 cup butter (cold and sliced, or room temperature)

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup flour

2 t cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour an 8" or 9" pan (I used a round springform pan). In small saucepan on stove, heat berries and honey together and simmer for a few minutes, or until they have made a syrup. If desired, roughly blend berry syrup using an immersion blender or regular blender (our mix had large whole strawberries, so this kept the chunks to a manageable size!). Set syrup aside.

To prepare the streusel topping, combine all ingredients in small bowl and cut together with a fork or pastry blender until crumbly. Set aside.

In small bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. In large mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer with beater attachment, cream butter and sugar together until smooth. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add the flour mixture alternately with the yogurt/sour cream and blend batter until smooth. Fold in chocolate chips.

Fold half of the cake batter into your prepared pan. Pour berry syrup evenly over batter. Add remaining batter on top of syrup; using a rubber spatula, swirl the batter and syrup together to create a berry ribbon. Top with streusel topping and bake 45-55 minutes, or until edges are beginning to brown and a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool at least a few minutes before eating—the cake is much easier to cut when it's completely cooled, but if you're like us, you won't be able to wait that long!