Category — Recipes

We have gotten in the habit of marking years by their culinary discoveries. 2004, for example, was the year of the Black Raspberry Daiquiri. Another year, we claimed marinated grilled chicken breasts as the dish of the year; all summer long, we marinated and grilled chicken often enough that we could tweak the recipe until we achieved perfection. In the summer of 2006, I believe, we learned how to make a darn good sangria.

2010 will be remembered in our history as the Year of the Serviceberry.

Last summer, the landscaper our neighbor hired to make her stone patio mentioned in passing that she had a serviceberry tree in her front yard. When that elicited no response from us, he continued telling us that serviceberries were in fact edible.

I don’t know about anyone else, but the thought of something called a serviceberry does not trigger a mouth-watering reflex for me. Nor a yum-response. More of a shrug. The name leaves one cold.

This summer, however, I stumbled upon a couple articles in our local (?) online newspaper that sang the praises of serviceberries and furthermore asserted that they were indeed edible. Linda Diane Feldt wrote about learning to identify and appreciate serviceberries. Edward Vielmetti’s article included information about where serviceberry trees are planted around town. His article also referenced the various names of the Amelanchier, including juneberry, sugarplum, shadberry, or saskatoon.

And I knew what a saskatoon was! When we lived in the big city of Toronto, our best friends were rather pleased and proud to have a saskatoon bush in the front yard of their apartment house. I remember Jan picking them and, I’m pretty sure, making a pie.

So armed with history, information and encouragement, I picked enough serviceberries to make a pie. When I gave a piece to our neighbor– the owner of the tree– she asked if I was sure it wouldn’t kill her. And it didn’t. In fact, she liked it a lot, maybe even better than blueberrypie. And we liked it too.

Three serviceberry pies later, I’m sharing my recipe. Next June, you can bet we won’t hesitate to pick and eat and bake with serviceberries.

Serviceberry Pie

Pastry for a 2 crust pie (my recipe is here)

3/4 cup of sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg (I like fresh ground)
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 cups serviceberries
1 tablespoon butter

1. Prepare pastry. Roll out half of pastry and line a 9-inch pie pan. Preheat oven to 425F.

2. For filling, toss together, sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice and salt. Mix in and thoroughly coat serviceberries. Place berries in piecrust; dot with butter.

3. Roll out remaining pastry for top crust. Cut a few slashes and cover filling with slashed top crust.

Trim and tuck under to make a decorative edge.

Bake 45-50 minutes or until the piecrust is golden brown.

The mint that escaped its pot is thriving indeed. It has plans, perhaps, of taking over the whole bed, and possibly the whole garden. We must somehow manage to tame or control or harvest it into submission, but meanwhile, it’s rather lovely.

And delicious too.

Summer and mint make me long for tabbouleh, which I learned to love while teaching and eating lunch at the Armenian school 24 years ago. There are lots of ways to make tabbouleh, as well as lots of ways to spell it: tabouleh, tabbouli, tabouli… My usual recipe comes from the More with Less Cookbook, the book that taught me how to cook, and the key ingredients are fresh mint and fresh parsley. If you haven’t tried tabbouleh, may I suggest that it’s a really fantastic salad or side dish for any meal, and especially refreshing on summer days. If you are already a fan, this recipe will get you headed in the right direction. Note that you can also add a can of drained beans or chickpeas to your tabbouleh for added protein. I usually don’t do that because we will usually have our tabbouleh for a middle eastern meal, including hummos and pita bread and occasionally shish kebobs are well– and that’s enough food.

Depending on where you live and shop, finding bulgur in the grocery store might be a challenge. I buy it in bulk at the food co-op. I couldn’t find bulgur in the big grocery store; you might need to ask. Stores that carry produces from Bob’s Red Mill may stock it in packages. Bulgar can also be purchased from the online store of Bob’s Red Mill or from Amazon.com

Tabbouleh

Pour 4 c. boiling water over
1-1/4 c. bulgur
Let stand 2 hours, or until wheat is fluffy. Drain well.

Bulgar before draining

Mix with:
1-1/4 c. fresh minced parsley
3/4 c. fresh minced mint
1 onion, finely chopped
3 tomatoes, chopped

And add:
3/4 c. fresh lemon juice
1/3 c. olive oil
1 t. salt

Chill at least an hour.

Prepare to be refreshed. Serve and enjoy.

The Spice Rack– or spice shelf– in our kitchen is among the one-of-a-kind items around our house that I love most. Visitors often notice and remark on how cool and unique and handy it is. I take their compliments as such, although 20MinuteJim tends to interpret their remarks as comments on our home’s eccentricities. Once a friend summed up our home’s “style” as comfortable and lived-in. Later when I mentioned the conversation to Jim, I emphasized the comfortable part: what higher compliment that than someone should feel completely comfortable in my home? Jim thought the lived-in part was most telling, noting that our home is slightly worn about the edges.

On to the spice rack: when we lived in the top two floors in a flat in a house in the Big City, Jim decided we needed to have a spice rack to hang on the wall of our little kitchen and that he could make one to meet our specs. We were city-dwellers back then in our dinky apartment with two small children and one (seriously, one) closet. Did we even have a toolbox? I don’t know. Maybe we had a shoebox with a hammer, a screwdriver, a little saw, and a box of nails. And a piece of sandpaper. When our landlady had some repairs done to our third-floor deck, Jim saw his opportunity to scavenge some free wood for his project.

I should note that the wood was not in good shape by the time it fell into Jim’s hands. It was old, faded deck wood — some with cracks, it was being taken down as unsafe, remember — long ago stained a outdoorsy red. With imagination and initiative, Jim cut and assembled a pleasing three shelf spice rack with 3-4-5 proportions. He painted it with odds and ends from around the apartment, and it turned out great, in my opinion. The spice rack has been hanging in our kitchens — wherever we have been — for the last 22+ years, and it’s likely going to be one of the things the kids will fight over after we die.

Our spice rack is populated mostly with recycled glass jam jars in a slender style. There’s some variation of manufacturer reflected over the years so all the jars aren’t the same size and shape, but they are close. For many years, our herb and spice jars sported taped-on hand-lettered labels, which tended to fade or stain over time. Then we picked up a label maker in the midst of getting-things-done; within the last year, our spice labels have been upgraded to clear and legible, as well as wipe-able.

We buy most of our spices in bulk, usually from the People’s Food Co-op, of which we have been proud member-owners since 1982! The prices are good, we can buy however much we need, and the variety and freshness of herbs and spices is wonderful.

I love our spice rack. I love looking at the spices and herbs displayed on the shelves. I love grabbing a jar or two whilst I’m cooking and making the kitchen smell good. Jim tends to look at the spice rack and, even while admiring its ingenuity and proportions, he ponders the ways it could have been better. Those are also things I love about Jim: his ability to create wonderful things and at the same time maintain his critical edge.

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Today I used a lot of spices from the spice rack because I wanted to make this recipe for Curried Rhubarb Chicken the minute I read the headline on annarbor.com. I’m excited about the possibilities for using rhubarb in more recipes, especially savory ones. Because I’m a hands-on, mess-with-the-recipe, spice-loving cook, my version follows below. For a milder version, reduce the spices or view the original recipe.

Curried Rhubarb Chicken

2 tablespoons oil
1/2 teaspoon + 1 teaspoon kosher salt, divided
1 teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 cayenne pepper
1 small onion, halved, sliced thin
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound rhubarb, trimmed, cut into 1/2” pieces
juice of 1 orange or 1/4 cup orange juice
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup water
1 lb boneless chicken breasts, cut into strips
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 325F.

In a medium saucepan, heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium heat. Stir in 1/2 teaspoon salt, coriander, turmeric, cumin, ginger, curry powder and cayenne; sauté 1 minute. Add onion and garlic and cook 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until onion and garlic softens. Add rhubarb, orange juice, brown sugar and 1/2 cup water; cover and cook 10 minutes. Stir, then re-cover and cook 10 more minutes until rhubarb has broken down into a sauce.

Meanwhile, season the chicken strips and place on a baking sheet. Bake until no longer pink while the sauce is cooking, about 15 minutes. Place chicken into a greased 9”x13” baking dish, and pour rhubarb sauce over it.

Place baking dish into the oven and bake chicken for 25-30 minutes.

Serve over rice. We used brown rice.

Place the rice onto a serving platter and place the chicken on top. Pour the sauce over, and serve immediately.

Curried Rhubarb Chicken was a really good dinner, if I do say so myself. I’m planning to make 3 or 4 batches of the curried rhubarb sauce to freeze for future meals.

(20 Minute Jim) Following my new mantra, I got up this morning and harvested a paper bag full of mint before coffee and even before the dew was off the lawn. Yes, yes, yes – technically this is a case of “do what I say, don’t do what I do” because it’s best to wait until the dew dries before touching plants. It’s just too easy to transmit soil-borne diseases to the leaves where the dew can help them stick and help them grow. In the cool of the morning, feel free to take walks through the garden, to appreciate the new wonders and perhaps to map out the work you’ll accomplish later. Just don’t get dirty until things dry off.

Unless you’re deliberately trying to kill off something, say, like a rogue patch of mint. A few roots of mint and another few of lemon balm escaped when I “transplanted” the major planting a year or two back to make room for more asparagus. I say “transplanted” because I’d kept the mint growing in a bucket that I cleverly submerged in the soil with the intent to KEEP it from spreading. Silly human. Now there’s a luxurious patch of mint and lemon balm underneath the asparagus right near the rhubarb.

I’m almost ready to play along with this spontaneous grouping, at least for a bit. This trio of the tall ferns of the asparagus, the broad elephant-ear leaves of the rhubarb and the wily opportunistic shoots of the mints seems like a good match of height, leaf and growth habit. After these three are done sucking up the sunlight, I bet there will be very little left for any weeds to grow. But at the moment, there are lots of weeds mixed in and to get at the weeds, I had to harvest some mint.

I used normal kitchen scissors – don’t let 20Mintue Jan know, OK? – and I dropped the sprigs cut end down in a standard paper grocery bag. The kind of bag I used had handles which will be handy to hang for drying. Paper bags are best because they’re porous and will allow the leaves to dry without molding and they’re also opaque. A weird thing I learned about mint is that it must be dried in the dark or the leaves will turn black. They’ll still taste and smell like mint but they’ll be black instead of green. I snipped for 20 minutes and then retired back inside for coffee.

Looking at that bag of fresh mint reminds me of my mother. She was always so eager to make everything into a celebration. I remember growing up she’d take a deep breath of air on a particularly beautiful day and say, “We should be sipping mint juleps on a porch somewhere.” So after Jan and I were married, one day when my Mom and Dad had helped us all day painting and working around the house, we told them to have a seat out on the porch, that we’d be out in a minute. Jan and I had researched the recipe for authentic mint juleps – which are basically sugar, mint… and bourbon! – and we made some for Mom and Dad. One sip and Mom’s eyes nearly popped from her head. She was a life-long teetotaler and had NO idea what actually went into a mint julep. They appreciated the gesture, I think, but Mom never spoke about mint juleps again.

Mint Julep
for each serving…

4 sprigs of mint
1 teaspoon
finely crushed ice
1-1/2 jiggers

1. In a 12-ounce highball glass or tankard (perferably silver or aluminum), place 3 sprigs of mint and sugar. Crush mint with muddler or handle of wooden spoon until sugar is dissolved, about 5 minutes.
2. Fill glass to brim with ice; pour in bourbon; don’t stir. Add more ice to fill glass. Set in freezer.
3. Just before serving: Garnish with mint sprig. Serve with long straw.

Last Saturday when Jim returned around 10:00 a.m. from a morning errand, he predicted a warm and sunny day would follow. It would be a day, he declared, worth getting out the solar cookers. In 2008, we experimented with solar-cooking on fairly regular basis; last summer, we didn’t make nearly as many solar-cooked dishes. Lately, we’ve been talking about our plans for the garden and the summer, and we both agreed that we should further explore solar cookery. So there we had it: the dare had been made. I’m sporting. I’m game. I foraged around in the kitchen to see if I could come up with a meal’s worth of solar-cooked food.

I decided on making three dishes for dinner: a baked spinach, savory grains, and an apple dessert. Here are the recipes I followed.

Spinach Bake 2

10 ounces frozen spinach, defrosted and drained
2 Tablespoons Flax seed
2 Tablespoons Blue cheese, crumbled
1 whole egg
1/3 cup of egg whites
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 white pepper

Mix together. Lightly spray a cooking pan and place mixture in it.

Savory Grains

1 cup kamut
3 cups homemade broth

Stirred together in a pot.

Apple Crisp

3 Apples, peeled, cored and sliced
1 Tablespoon Sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix together and place in the bottom of a pre-cooking sprayed pan

1 cup Oatmeal
1/2 plain yogurt, homemade
1/4 cup Brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 freshly grated nutmeg

Mix together. Gently drop on top of apple mixture and spread to form an even layer.

The apple crisp and the spinach bake went into the solar box cooker. I placed the grains on the easily assembled solar windshield cooker. Out of curiosity, I placed a thermometer in the box cooker as well. Then I went about my business for the next 5 hours. I peeked in the solar box cooker occasionally and enjoyed reporting the temperature to Jim while we worked in the yard. It reached temperatures above 150 degrees F for a couple hours.

As we readied for dinner around 4pm, we decided that the grains just hadn’t had long enough to cook. It may have been that I used an unnecessarily large pot to cook a grain that I actually haven’t had a lot of experience with. No big deal– we refrigerated those to finish and enjoy with another meal. (Updated note: For Tuesday’s supper, I simmered them for half an hour more, and they were very good with our meal.)

Two out of three dishes turned out quite well. We enjoyed them with some salmon patties. The spinach bake was creamy and delicious. The apple crisp was yummy and fragrant. I appreciated how the apples were tender and thoroughly cooked, but not mushy.

It’s only March so we have many more sunny months to get reacquainted with the solar cookers. Jim has plans to make a detailed post about the construction of the box solar cooker since we realized recently that it is not something we’ve blogged about here. All summer long, we’ll be posting recipes, suggestions, and encouragement to give solar cooking a try. Solar cooking is a winner in terms of energy conservation, both in using the free energy of the sun to cook and also not heating up the house in the summer. Solar cooking is also an easy, low fuss and quite fun adventure.