Roasted Brussels Sprouts… & Chips

Boring and quick but really great… roasted Brussels sprouts are amazing and it’s that time of year. They’re in season and they’re everywhere. Forget about steaming them or even boiling and caramelizing, bla bla bla… just cut off the butts, cut em in half, toss in olive oil, salt, pepper and throw them in the oven. 450 for about 20 to 30 minutes. Roasted and hot but still a little bit crunchy. Perfectly cooked miniature heads of cabbage.

And then toss them with whatever you like… I like balsamic and red pepper flakes.

Now on to the fun part – every time you make brussels sprouts, when you cut them in half and toss them around you loose so many loose pieces of skin. Usually those little suckers head straight to the compost. The wheels in my tiny brain have been churning for a long time now trying to figure out what to do with them…. there has to be something! Well, finally it clicked – turn them into chips.

It’s all about utilizing the stuff you’d normally throw away and getting something that’s even better and more fun to eat from your scraps… forget about the sprouts – I’m gonna start pulling apart the entire sprouts and just making chips out of them after this revelation.

They cook at a different rate than the whole heads so you have to put them on a separate sheet and roast them on their own. I tossed them in the same bowl I used for the sprouts with a tiny bit of oil and a little more salt and pepper. Then onto a cookie sheet and roasted until the edges were turning brown.

At this point they’re totally crispy and great. Totally edible but still a little firm in the thicker parts and I wanted to see if I could really get them crispy. This is where self control comes into play – just pretend like you never had them at all. Toss them aside and forget you ever saved them.

At this point I let them cool and put em in a tupperware container until the next day. They were totally soggy by then but another five to ten minutes in the oven crisped them up to full on crispy crunchy chips. No picture of the final product but you can trust me that if I ever do have a restaurant – you’ll be eating these little crispies while you wait for your food before you ever see olives and bread or anything else…

Lentil Soup

Lentils are another amazing ingredient that I always forget about… last week I rediscovered them. This was sortof an Indian spiced lentil soup with kale and zucchini, among other things. Again – super easy…

I sweated a little bit of garlic, carrots and onion in some olive oil and after a couple minutes I tossed in a chunk of peeled ginger and some red lentils in and mixed it all together. While it was nice and oily, I added a nice little pile of garam masala and tossed it all to coat the lentils. When you’re using spices in a dish that’s got a lot of liquid, it’s best to add them to the dry ingredients before the liquid so that they can incorporate slowly – this way you won’t get big clumps of spices.

After the spices were good and mixed in, I covered the lentils with chicken stock and let it simmer for about 20 minutes or so. You could use whatever – vegetable stock, water… whatever you have.

While that was going, I chopped up my leftover kale and zucchini to bulk it up a little bit. I decided to wait to add them until close to the end so that they kept a little bit firm and added some texture. Sometimes I love my soup the consistency of baby food all the way through… and sometimes I don’t.

Because the red/orange lentils are so small and split, they cook up pretty quick. When they were getting soft… about 20 minutes (I think?) later, I added the zucchini and let it cook for a couple minutes and then mixed in the kale.

All said and done, under an hour for a great, easy meat-free dinner… booyakasha.

 
Lentil Soup
In order of appearance:

3 cloves garlic
1 small yellow onion
1 medium or 2 baby carrots
1″ chunk of fresh ginger
1 cup red lentils
2 Tbsp garam masala
2 cups stock (or water)
1 medium zucchini
1-2 cups chopped fresh kale (or other greens)
salt & black pepper to taste

Garlic, onion, carrots + olive oil. Simmer. Add lentils, coat with spices, add stock, simmer, add zucchini, simmer, add kale, season, eat.

Vegan(!!) Miso Veggie Stew

I know I know, I’m cracking up. I’ve gone bonkers over here… second day of no meat and tonight it was completely vegan! I think I might have to have a steak or some ribs tomorrow…

A lot of the time, especially when I’m just cooking for myself, I have a lot more than I need of something for a meal and lots leftover. Tonight I used some of the same stuff that went into my dinner last night and added a few other things I had around. I made sortof a vegetable stew with a miso soup base – except I didn’t add the bonito. This soup was super simple and actually really tasty and surprisingly filling.

It went a little something like this… First, I sliced sunchokes and boiled them for 15 minutes, according to the reccomendation in my Vegetable Book, by Colin Spencer. It’s a pretty nice reference about vegetables organized by species that I picked up at a thrift store years ago for like a dollar… very informative.

I wasn’t super familiar with sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) but I did know they had a flavor and texture similar to artichokes. They almost look like little balls of ginger root, but when cooked they taste like artichokes. Weird shit… Apparently they can make you pretty gassy and boiling them ahead of time can reduce that.

So I boiled the sunchokes and then set them aside. Drained the water (to avoid the fart fest) and refilled with some new water that I simmered a couple of small pieces of kombu in. Kombu, if you don’t know, is the hard, thick, dried seaweed that’s one of the main ingredients in the broth used to make miso soup. Usually that broth, called dashi, also has bonito (dried, fermented and smoked skipjack tuna) flakes in it but I opted to leave them out.

So I basically just started with a mildly seaweedy broth and added to that some diced carrots first that simmered for a bit and then a pile of chopped kale, some of which I chopped a little more finely to add some color and texture to the broth. After that simmered for a couple of minutes I turned down the heat and added some miso paste. You don’t ever want to boil after you’ve added the miso because you don’t want to kill all that good bacteria. After that I tossed in my leftover cooked quinoa from last night (which wasn’t much and I could have used more), the cooked sunchokes and some finely diced jalapeno. The result, topped with some sliced scallions, was pretty damn good…

My idea with the sunchokes was that they’d add sortof a firm-ish potato-y texture to the soup without totally starching it out and mucking up the miso. You could try potato if sunchokes aren’t around but honestly I think it would have been just as good without em… they didn’t really bring anything amazing to the soup, just helped fill it up. I think they’re probably better to just eat on their own so you can enjoy the flavor.

 
Vegan Miso Vegetable Stew
In order of appearance:

2-3″ of kombu (not the end of the world if you can’t get it, just leave it out)
6 cups water
4 carrots
4 cups chopped kale
3/4 cup miso paste* (more or less to taste – treat it like your salt seasoning for the soup…)
1 cup cooked quinoa (I’d use more if you have it… 2 cups probably would have been perfect)
6-8 cooked sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes)
1 small jalapeno pepper

Chop it however you want, stew it all together, and rest easy knowing that no animals were hurt or even consulted about this meal.**

*When you’re adding miso paste it helps a ton to thin it out with a little bit of hot water in a small bowl before pouring it in – you’ll avoid fat chunks of undissolved miso in your soup.

Vegetarians/vegans stop reading here.

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**I’m sorry I just can’t resist – this would have been awesome if it was started with bacon… I’d simmer the water with the kombu in a separate pot. While that was going on, I’d sautee some chopped bacon in the soup pot. You could leave it in to really flavor the broth or remove it to use later as a topping. I’d then sautee the carrots with the fat (and bacon if you leave it in) for a minute before adding the hot broth and continuing from there.

Vegetarian What?

I’ve been getting a lot of “even though your blog is all about meat and I don’t eat meat, I’ve been sending the link to my friends who do” comments lately… it’s not ALL about meat! So here it is. No meat. I didn’t eat a single piece of meat all day today. I’m cutting back. I don’t even eat as much as it seems like from the pictures… most of these meals last me days. But I’ve decided, after reading Food Matters, by Mark Bittman, that I’m gonna cut back a bit. Not out, just back. I don’t really want to cut anything out completely… I am a huge believer in moderation. Most of my meat-centricity on here is because it’s fun to talk about. But it’s far from the only thing I cook or eat… I have a salad with just about every meal I eat and always have some vegetables around my meat… I don’t like it to get lonely….

My philosophy on food is that the healthiest way to eat is to diversify yo bonds. Eat everything. It’s part of the reason I love Korean food so much – in just about every meal you get cooked, raw, pickled, spicy, mild, vegetables, fish, meat, broth, rice… in one meal! So a lot of the time I try to work that kind of diversity into the things I eat…

Tonight it was meat-free because I had a chance to swing by the Berkeley Bowl and couldn’t help myself with the produce. I came out with a pile of awesome fruits, vegetables and bulk grains and I decided to put some to use for my feeding.

Chanterelle mushrooms, garlic, carrot, zucchini, radicchio, kale and red quinoa. Quinoa is an amazing thing. I owe my knowledge of its existence to Andrea. Apparently it’s a “pseudocereal”. It’s like a grain, but not quite a grain… And, among other things you’d expect to find in something you treat like a grain – it’s full of protein. Which makes it pretty useful if you’re into cutting meat proteins out of your diet. The coolest thing about it though by far… is that it tastes damn good. It has a great texture – somewhere between rice and cous cous, which makes it really fun to eat. Oh yeah and it’s amazingly simple to cook. You can’t fuck it up. It’s like cooking rice except you have a zero percent chance of failure.

It also comes in a few different colors, which makes it pretty fun to use too. White, red and black, that I’ve seen. The best shot I have of it is a closeup of my half-finished plate… you can see how it sprouts little tails when it’s cooked that help the grains cling together kinda like rice.

Super simple meal. Dry sauteed the chanterelles to take out some water and then sauteed the garlic in olive oil then the carrots, then zucchini, mushrooms back in, chopped kale and radicchio just for a bit. The radicchio adds a nice bitterness and the kale adds a nice crunch and some bright color. Sometimes when I make a dish like this I’ll leave the kale raw and just chop it up and mix it in at the end.

Like I said before – baby I like it raaaaw (but not all raw). I like to have a mix of cooked and raw, but this time I just cooked everything. I got my raw non-meats in the form of pickled cauliflower that I made last week – I’ve been pickling my leftover veggies left and right so they don’t go bad when I can’t finish them all in time. It saves waste and gives me another easy flavor boost that I don’t have to do anything for but take it out of the jar. Just had that on the side.

 

The beauty of this is that you can basically use anything. I used:

1 cup red quinoa + 2 cups of water with a little bit of spicy garlicky salt in it (more on that later): boil water, pour in quinoa, cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes

2 big chanterelle mushrooms, chopped
1 small white zucchini, diced
1 carrot, diced
3 cloves of garlic
a few leaves of radicchio, chopped
a few big leaves of kale, chopped
salt + pepper
a nice splash of balsamic vinegar at the end for some good, sweet acid

Shaved some Old Amsterdam aged gouda on top.

I’m not gonna lie – it would have been better with bacon. But anything would and it was fine without it.