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- I Was Just Trying to Be Fancy with Those Cute Red Jalapenos
- Announcing My Legume Love Affair #20
- From Wolfberries to Gigantes Beans: Weekend Herb Blogging #218 Roundup
- Cupcakes and Green Chiles
- A Spicy Kale Soup Recipe from a Centenarian Azorean
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Getting ready for a Superbowl party with friends when you dine gluten-free takes a bit of advance planning. The usual Superbowl fare at our friends' house where we indulge in this annual ritual of football and food is bit wheaty, so I always try to bring several things for Dan to eat, drink and share so he does not get glutened. While others are slinging down beer, pizza slices and breaded wings, I want to bring some alternatives. My hubby hates to impose on our hosts with his dietary restrictions, though they are always thoughtful in making sure he does have several tasty GF snacks.
I will be making a batch of hummus, another yet-to-be-determined GF snack from this list of lovelies and I wanted to bring some kind of hot finger food to pop in the oven when we arrived. Something cheesy and spicy, like a Southwestern twist on the ever popular mini quiche. I was inspired by my El Paso green chiles prize package, (which a lucky Crispy Cook reader will win after the Feb. 15 deadline), and a can of festive red jalapeno slices that lured me from my pantry.
I used Gluten-Free Kay's Hot Mamas recipe and this recipe for Mini Chile Rellenos for inspiration, assembled my ingredients and had a lovely several hours of kitchen fun. Here's my recipe:
Cooking oil spray
1 (4 oz.) can chopped green chiles, drained
1 (7.75 oz.) can red jalapeno slices, drained (I used Chi Chi's brand with lots left over for nachos and other future foodie experiments)
1 cup frozen corn kernels, thawed and blotted dry
1/4 cup snipped chives (I used garden chives from my freezer)
1 cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
5 eggs, beaten lightly
1 cup milk
1 tsp. cumin
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup white rice flour
Spray 12 count muffin or cupcake pan with cooking oil. My pans are 1/4 cup so they make smaller-than-desired muffins and cupcakes, but wonderful mini-quiches. Mini-muffin pans would probably work well too, but one would need to adjust the baking time downward.
Distribute corn kernels, chives, green chiles and cheese equally among the muffin cups.
Mix eggs, milk, cumin, salt and flour. Blend well. Pour over mounded ingredients in the muffin cups. Garnish each mound with a red jalapeno wheel or two.
Bake in preheated 400 degrees F. oven for 30 minutes or until tops are browned and bubbling. Let cool in muffin pans for 10 minutes, then remove from pans and let cool until they are warm. Serve immediately. They are a little too moist to serve as finger food, so I served them on a plate with a little tomato salsa on the side to my taste tester.
Makes 12.
Now, you may have noticed that this recipe bears no title. I proudly bore my creations in to my Gluten Free Superbowl Taste Tester for his review. Dan looked at my cheesy offering and grinned.
"What should I call them?", I asked innocently.
Dan merely chuckled and continued to look bemused at his plate.
"Go ahead and eat it", I urged.
Dan shook his head.
"What? It's good, I already ate one. You'll like it."
Dan looked at me again fixedly. "You're kidding me, right?"
"What is wrong with this? It's good."
"Rachel, it's a boob."
I gasped. And looked. And realized I had cooked up a perky, little edible breast.
"Oh man! I can't bring these guys to the party. I'll never live it down."
"No, they'll be perfect. You can say they're in honor of Janet Jackson's peek-a-boob."
Ay, caramba! That was one surreal Superbowl moment in 2004 when Jackson bared her breast during her half-time dance number. I was trying to collect my kids to start our drive home (they were younger and it is a school night, after all) and had stopped to watch the musical interlude on a couch in my friends' basement rumpus room. When the breast escaped I thought perhaps my eyes had deceived me, and turned to my compatriots on the sofa, but both young lads were aged ten and under and it didn't seem appropriate to converse with them on the subject of perhaps-imagined nipple slip. The television announcers didn't mention anything and so I went upstairs to chat with some adults about the subject.
Nobody else had paid attention to the half-time show! I was astounded and perhaps thinking that I had indulged in one too many beers. Dan drove us home and it wasn't until later when I hopped on the Internet that I found out that I wasn't delusional but had indeed witnessed celebrity nudity during America's holiest football holiday.
Back to my culinary creations. I'm of two minds about whipping up another batch of these snacks to bring to our party. Part of me is a prude: I am the Crispy Cook, not the Lascivious Chef. The other part of me would like to offer them to my (adults only) friends with a scampish wink. Dan and I certainly got a kick out of imagining many other mammalian monikers for these offerings: Boob Jobs, JJ Peekaboobs, Wardrobe Malfunctions, Tex-Mex A Cups, Cheesy Chesties, Bosom Bites, Whatever. They certainly are Hot Mamas too.
There are other edible homages to Janet Janet's torso out there, (The Amateur Gourmet's cupcakes are anatomical likenesses indeed) and the concept of the erotic bakery is not a new one, so I would be able to point out that other dirty minds out there wearing aprons.
I just don't know now. I am not a young, ironic thing, so perhaps I will bring a more sedate hamper of GF goodies for my sweetie to enjoy tomorrow. These bosomy bits seem more suitable for a bachelor party or a meeting of the local La Leche League. Or maybe I'll put more than one red jalapeno adornment atop each snack to avoid the whole business entirely.
Let's just hope the members of The Who won't be brandishing their bits at tomorrow's half-time show. I don't want to have to bake up any of their septugenarian body parts.
The 20th edition of My Legume Love Affair (MLLA) is being hosted here at The Crispy Cook from today through February 28, 2010. This popular foodie event is the brainchild of Susan, The Well-Seasoned Cook, and was started to celebrate information and recipes about the edible members of the Fabaceae family (formerly Leguiminosae), most commonly known as legumes.
Legumes include a broad variety of beans, peas, pulses and other vegetables and leguminous by-products, and any of these can be featured in a MLLA submission, including: beans (fresh and dried), peas, tofu, black-eyed peas, tepary beans, lentils, chickpeas and chickpea flour (besan), fenugreek, peanuts, limas, favas, mung beans, and many other legume varieties.
To join in the MLLA fun you can submit a post featuring one of these legumes with a link to this post on The Crispy Cook and to Susan's blog here. Recipes submitted to other events are also permitted but recipes from one's blog archives can be accepted ONLY if updated and reposted as current.
There are two prizes to be awarded to a randomly generated winner. Susan is generously donating a copy of "The Pasta Bible" by Teubner, Rizzi and Lang to be sent worldwide. If the winner resides in the U.S., they will also receive a Hurst Bean Box - A case of six bags of the winner's choice of Hurst Bean products, suitable for every diet, donated by Hurst Bean. (Due to shipping restrictions, this prize can only be awarded if the winner is a U.S. resident.) Susan does not receive any product nor financial compensation for her arrangement with Hurst Bean to provide this prize supplement for My Legume Love Affair.
You may submit more than one recipe or blog post to MLLA #20 but only one submission will be considered for these prizes. Susan and I, and our family and friends are not eligible for the prize drawing.
Send your MLLA entry to me at: oldsaratogabooks At gmail dOt cOM, with an attached photo (250 pix wide preferred), your blog post URL and your location. I will post a roundup for MLLA #20 shortly after the deadline of February 28, 2010. Don't have a blog, but still want to join in the fun? Send my your information and I'll post it for you on The Crispy Cook.
For leguminous inspiration, you may want to check out some of the previous MLLA roundups or see one of my MLLA posts below:
Previously I have enjoyed contributing to this beany bonanza with recipes for
Zippy Black-Eyed Pea and Pasta Salad,
Red Noodle Beans (very fun to grow) and Tofu,
Fava Beans,
Spicy Roasted Chickpea Nibbles,
Black-Eyed Peas with Preserved Lemon,
Dan's Favorite Gluten-Free Veggie Burgers,
Rice Noodle Sushi Salad
Green Bean Bhajis.
I look forward to seeing what everyone will cook up for My Legume Love Affair this month!
I was delighted to once again be the guest host for Weekend Herb Blogging, a weekly exploration of recipes and informative posts about edible plant ingredients that is hosted by Haalo of Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once. This week we have a wide-ranging buffet of wonderful recipes from cooks from seven different countries; some showcasing popular fruits and vegetables in new and exciting ways, and some featuring plant ingredients that seem exotic indeed.
Let's start out in Singapore with Cheng Huann of Eat.Read.Live who fills us in on Chinese wolfberries. His recipe calls for rehydrated berries to be sauteed with garlic and nai bai, a variety of baby bok choy.
Remaking a favorite salad, Winnie from the Healthy Green Kitchen in New Paltz, New York pairs blanched broccoli with zinc-rich pumpkin seeds and dried cherries for a zingy new recipe.
Broccoli is also the featured vegetable for Jessica in her Massachusetts-based Fearless Kitchen. She contributes Ginger Lemon Broccoli to our WHB smorgasbord which sounds like a wonderful combination of flavors.
Graziana is harvesting a bounty of beautiful chili peppers in Italy over at the Erbe in Cucina. She used some almost black-colored ripe Pasilla Chiles in her Nachos with Beans and Chili recipe.
Here at The Crispy Cook in upstate New York I tramped out to my snowy kale bed and harvested some leaves for a spicy, hearty batch of Mrs. Lewis' Kale Soup, an heirloom recipe from the Azores.
Marija of the gorgeously photographed Serbian food blog Palachinka serves up a medley of oven-fried root vegetables, including parsley root, potatoes, carrots, beets and celery root.
Susan, The Well-Seasoned Cook of New York City offers us a treasured family recipe for Jewish Apple Cake with wonderful written and photographic accompaniment. Susan also hosts a popular monthly blog event, My Legume Love Affair, which celebrates the variety of legumes, from peas to peanuts, which you may want to explore. I am happy to note that I will be the February 2010 host for MLLA, so I am hoping to learn even more about the oh so tasty Vegetable Kingdom in the coming weeks.
It is late summer in Melbourne, Australia, where Johanna of the Green Gourmet Giraffe has made a pretty batch of Tomato and Peach Relish.
Also in Melbourne, Australia, our awesome WHB Headquarters Hostess Haalo, of Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once lives up to her blog's title by test driving some gorgeous and huge (check out the photos of variously sized beans on her blog post for comparison) Gigantes Beans.
Saveur blogs over at the Toronto, Canada blog Taste Space and introduces us to Baked Asian Eggplants with Miso, the "yummiest eggplant ever". Bookmarked that post for next summer's eggplant harvest!
The House of Annie recently relocated to Sarawak, Malaysia and bloggers Nathan and Annie have been reporting on all kinds of wonderful recipes using local produce. This week's contribution to WHB is an exploration of colorful bell peppers in the dish Black Bean Chicken and Bell Peppers.
From the shores of Lake Garda, Italy, Cindystar sends us a velvety bowl of Zucchini Cream Soup topped with apples browned in butter. Cindystar's wonderful blog is written in both English and Italian, and her soup sounds even more succulent in its native tongue, "Vellutata di zucchine".
Bri of Briiblog in English, Cindystar's "neighbor" in Lake Garda, tempts us with a vegan recipe for Chocolate and Coconut Muffins. Bri also takes us on a foodie field trip to some ethnic food markets in Trento with some food blogger buddies, so be sure to read her exuberantly written post.
Finally, we have a sampling of Chenna al Timo (Thyme-Flavored Chenna), an Indian cheese dessert that Simona of Briciole prepared for us in her northern California kitchen. Simona's been on a cheesemaking jag of late and this herbal-infused Chenna sounds tempting. Briciole will be hosting next week's edition of Weekend Herb Blogging, so be sure to stop by to see what's cooking and being harvested in everyone's WHB posts.
Thank you again to Haalo for the opportunity to host Weekend Herb Blogging. I have such fun indulging in my passion for cooking, gardening and learning about new edibles and cuisines with this event. I hope you all enjoyed our virtual buffet as much as I did. And now after this fabulous spread, I am off to get into my virtual sweatpants with the forgiving waistline....
If you are a food blogger and you haven't yet joined the Leftover Queen's Foodie Blogroll you are missing out on a whole lot of foodie fun. In addition to connecting with great cooks from all over the world, our Queen puts together numerous contests for various edible and kitchen-related gifts. I was the lucky winner of a weekly drawing for a fabulous and very flattering Black Cherry apron from Cupcake Provocateurs recently, as well as a wonderfully-packaged "Cupcakes in a Jar" mix. The Cupcakes in a Jar are not gluten-free, though my wheaty daughters and their friends enjoyed them very much, but Chief Cupcake Cynthia told me that she is working on developing gluten-free and dairy-free versions of her wonderful cupcake mixes, so we all have that to look forward to. Thank you Cynthia and thank you Leftover Queen for my delightful food prize.
And now for a chance to pay it forward with the contest karma. I am a participant in My Blog Spark (see the badge on the right hand side of The Crispy Cook below), in which the Betty Crocker company offers me the chance to try out new products and offer prize packages to my loyal readership. Previously I've been able to share the new BC gluten-free cake and cookie mixes and Fruit Snacks with you and this time the prize pack is a mite spicier!
It's all about the Green Chiles. First, there is a link to get a coupon for El Paso canned green chiles here. There is usually a can of these mildly spicy babies in my pantry and they are great for stirring into cheesy casseroles, dips, and homemade salsa when the garden is pumping out tomatoes in the summer. Second, I can offer one of my readers the "El Paso Tackle the Taste" gift pack that I just received. It contains two cans of green chiles, a ceramic football-shaped chip and dip dish, and some football-themed napkins, plates and a table runner. I'm bringing my prize pack over to a friend's house for the Superbowl Game (Go Saints!) with a green chile-infused offering and am offering one of you the chance to win this prize package too. Just leave a comment below and I'll randomly pick a winner from the entries after February 15, 2009. This contest is limited U.S. readers only, however.
A bookseller colleague sent me an heirloom recipe many moons ago when we were chatting about our mutual love of cooking. She has a neighbor, a certain Mrs. Lewis, a native of the Azores, who was 102 years old and still cooking up wonderful things in her kitchen at the time my buddy sent on her recipe for Kale Soup. I like to think Mrs. Lewis is now 103 and still stirring up pots of this wonderful soup, which is a traditional favorite in Portugal and the Azores, an Atlantic chain of islands 900 miles west of Lisbon and a Portuguese Autonomous Region.
My hardy kale plants soldier on in the Crispy garden even under the snow and after enduring several bouts of freezing and thawing along the temperature scale. Kale is a super vegetable in terms of nutrition too. Kale is high in many great vitamins and nutrients, including betacarotene, Vitamins C and K, lutein and calcium, and it makes a hearty soup for these chilly days of deep winter in upstate New York.
I am reproducing this treasure of a recipe below verbatim, (**funny typos and all, you'll see) and will just note that in deference to my Crispy spouse, Dan, who eschews meat, I substituted 1 (12 oz.) package of Melissa's meatless soy chorizo, removed from its inedible casing, for the linguica sausage called for by Mrs. Lewis.
Mrs. Lewis' Kale Soup
4-6 cups water (depends on how many you're severing**)
1/2 cup chopped up onion
1 clove garlic
1 potato small
1/2 cup thin slice linguica
2 cups kale chopped
Salt to taste
Bring water, onion, garlic, salt and linguica to boil. Add greens and potato, cook until tender. Serve with bread. If you don't have linguica you can use salt pork and if you don't have meat use red beans.
This hearty recipe is my contribution to this week's edition of Weekend Herb Blogging. Weekend Herb Blogging is a weekly event that was started by Kalyn's Kitchen and has been organized by Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once for the last year or so.
I am happy to report that I the host of WHB #218 this week and will be happy to accept recipes featuring plant ingredients (herbs, vegetables, fruits, seeds, stems, flowers, etc.) until Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010. Entries must be submitted by:
* 5 pm Sunday - New York City Time (EST)
* 3pm Sunday - Utah Time
* 10pm Sunday - London Time
* 11pm Sunday - Rome Time
* 9am Monday - Melbourne (Aus) DS Time.
Your post can be informative, spotlight a particular ingredient and/or include a recipe where your chosen ingredient is one of the primary ingredients in the recipe. WHB posts must be written specifically for this blog event and may not be cross-posted in other events.
If you have a great veggie recipe to share this week, please send your posts to oldsaratogabooks AT gmail DOT com with WHB#218 in the subject line and the following details:
Your name Your Blog/URL
Your Post URL
Your Location
Attach a Photo: 250px wide
Looking forward to seeing what's cookin' in your kitchen this week. I've already had several cool WHB submissions and can't wait for more to include in the roundup.
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