After another successful farmer’s market outing (please don’t go away for the winter, farmer’s markets! Please? I just really love cooking with seasonal, locally grown vegetables. God!) I decided to roast everything that looked good and make cilantro pesto with some pasta. It turned out better than I expected.

Roasted Veggie Pasta with Cilantro Pesto

I’ve always been a fan of basil pesto, but I’ve been on such a cilantro kick lately that I figured it would work too.

So I made this with butternut squash, zucchini and red potatoes. To roast them, begin with the squash (cut it in half, scrape the innards out, cut off the hard outer shell while being very careful not to lose a finger, because that shell is hard as hell to cut off, then cube the flesh.) Add the cubed zucchini and halved potatoes. Toss with olive oil, salt, pepper and a little Italian seasoning. Bake on a cookie sheet or in a roasting pan for about 30 minutes for all of them. Stir occasionally, and adjust cooking times for how well-done you like your veggies. Make sure to read Rob’s review for more info on this.

For the cilantro pesto, I mixed a big handful of cilantro leaves, olive oil, fresh grated parmesan, peanuts, salt and pepper. I really have no idea what the measurements were here, but start with a little olive oil and keep adding more (or add a bit of water, if you’re worried about fat EVEN THOUGH IT’S THE GOOD FAT) until it’s the consistency you want.

I garnished with peanuts and parmesan to mirror the flavors in the pesto and served the whole thing over whole wheat rotini, to a very dubious boyfriend. The words “cilantro pesto” are enough to make him run for the nearest Burger King.

Rob’s review:

Surprisingly, he didn’t cry, or stick out his tongue, or pound his fists on the floor! He just said the zucchini was a little overcooked and gave it 7.5 hot dogs. Whew! To counteract that, i think next time I’d just roast the squash and potatoes together and saute the zucchini in a little oil on the stove, just for a few minutes. It can’t seem to handle the long cooking process of roasting without getting flimsy and a little gross. Lesson learned. Anyway…

There you have it.

There’s a little Asian market in the Strip District here in Pittsburgh that sells tofu for 25 cents a brick. 25 cents! That is insanely cheap. So whenever we go to stock up on veggies from Stan’s, we always stop in at the Asian market and grab some tofu.

From that, I made this apple-soy tofu. The recipe was originally from a VegWeb user, but I ended up having to do a little tweaking.

about 1 lb. firm tofu, drained and pressed
1/4 cup unsweetened apple juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 medium-sized garlic clove, minced or pressed
1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

Slice tofu into triangles. Mix the above ingredients in a Ziploc bag and marinate the tofu in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, but up to overnight.

Place the tofu into a glass baking dish. Here’s where your preference comes in–if you want your tofu to be crispy, set the leftover marinade aside. If you want it to be chewier and less crispy, pour the remaining marinade over the top. When I made this, I actually discarded the leftover marinade (stupid!)

Bake uncovered at 375 for about 30 minutes.

This is what they looked like:

If I were to make this again, I would have saved the leftover marinade (or made more, depending on how long you let it marinate for and how much was left) and served it as a sauce on top of the tofu, with some rice for soaking it up. All in all it was good, but it definitely needed more kick.

Rob’s review:

Seven hot dogs. Not a resounding victory, but not terrible either!!

I’m sorry, I should have probably explained this earlier, but I got a question from a reader about Sriracha.

Sriracha is an Asian chili sauce made with garlic. It is really spicy, so a little goes a long way. It’s fairly inexpensive, and moreover, it’s pretty accessible. I found it in our local supermarket (which is a dump) alongside the other Asian sauces–soy and teriyaki and whatnot.

Here’s what it looks like (not my hand):

If you’ve ever read my other blog, you may know that Rob and I went on vacation this summer to Cape Hatteras, where we went deep sea fishing. Yeah. And caught this guy:

That’s a wahoo, which is a firm, dense white fish. I know, completely horrifying, right? What’s even more horrifying is the sheer amount of fish in our freezer that Rob’s stepmother passed off on us.

Fortunately, this past weekend we’d gone to the Pumpkin Festival at a local orchard/farm

and picked up some apple cider. So if you’re gonna get cider, you gotta get bourbon. And if you’re gonna get bourbon, you gotta glaze something.

Bourbon-Glazed Wahoo
(adapted from Cooking Light)
This would also work with salmon, tuna, or any other dense fish. Adjust the cooking time as necessary. Actually, you could probably use it on chicken or other meats too. It’s got a really sweet Asian flavor, so that seems like it’d be good.

In a Ziploc bag, mix (per fillet of fish)
1.5 TBS brown sugar
1.5 TBS bourbon (I used Evan Williams, because it’s cheap but doesn’t taste like it and it reminds me of swigging from a flask in places you’re not really allowed to have a flask)
1 TBS soy sauce
1 minced clove of garlic
the juice of one lime half
a good sprinkling of ginger and some black pepper.
Marinade these for about an hour or so, flipping the bag over a few times and really rubbing the marinade in. Yeah, rub that marinade in goooood. Mmmm–what? Anyway.

After the fishies are done marinating, heat a skillet on your stove until it’s good and hot. Dump the whole bag in, marinade and all. This wahoo took for-e-ver to cook, because it was thicker than my arm. I’d estimate it was about 8-10 minutes per side. If you had salmon, which cooks considerably more quickly, I’d guess about 4-5 minutes per side. Just poke at it a little, you’ll be able to tell when it’s done. Anyway, after the fish is done, drizzle it with the sauce leftover in the pan from the marinade. It’s so good. Sprinkle with sliced green onions and sesame seeds.

I served this with my go-to Asian side dish, Sesame Rice. I think this also may have originally come from Cooking Light too, but I’m not sure.
Quick fact about me—I cannot, to save my life, cook rice. It always comes out wrong. It’s always too sticky, not sticky enough, scorched on the bottom, whatever. I can’t do it. Thus, I resort to my only real cooking shortcut, the Walmart to my gourmet: boil-in-bag rice. You know, you can’t win em all. And I’m okay with that.
So, cook your rice and have it all ready to go. In a skillet, heat a little sesame oil. I prefer the dark kind, but the light would work too. Add to this a few handfuls of peas, carrots, broccoli, snow peas, whatever you want and some sliced green onions. The onions are key. Cook this all together for a few minutes, as long as it takes to get your veggies to a nice texture. Add a few shakes of soy sauce and some Sriracha. Mix well. Add the cooked rice and toss the whole thing together until it is well-mixed and well-heated. Turn off the heat, mix in some sesame seeds, and scarf.

Rob’s review:
8.5/10 hot dogs. He said it would have been higher had the rice not been so spicy (so, I MAY have gone a bit overboard with the Sriracha, but I liked it!)

So for a few days there, it really felt like fall in Western PA. But then the temperatures rose again, and I think the high is like 70 today. But no matter, because technically it is fall, and that means I’m making soup.

At Rob’s suggestion, I made clam chowder. I’d never done this before, so I had to read through a few recipes to try to adapt them. Apparently, clam chowder is serious business. I mean it—people in the Northeast are crazy about their clam chowder. Being from Pittsburgh, which some will argue is the Northeast, some will argue is the Midwest, I’m far less concerned. So if this recipe is not “authentic” (and I know it isn’t), don’t complain! This recipe made two very large bowls of soup–we definitely didn’t finish them!

2 eight-ounce bottles clam juice
about ½ pound red potatoes, unpeeled, cut into bite size pieces
1 tablespoon butter
1 cups chopped white onions
2 stalks of celery, chopped well (including the leaves, they are so good!)
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup flour
3 six-and-a-half-ounce cans chopped clams, drained, juices reserved
1/2 cups half and half
squirt of Sriracha (see a pattern with this?)
salt n pepa

So, pour the clam juice into a pot and add the potatoes. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat a bit to cook the potatoes—around 10 minutes, depending on how big the potato chunks are. This will make your kitchen smell a bit bad, because let’s face it, clam juice is kind of gross. Remove from heat and set aside.

In another pot, melt the butter. Add the celery, onions, garlic and bay leaf, cook until the veggies are soft (5-7 minutes, maybe?) Stir in the flour slowly and whisk like hell. Don’t let it brown. Cook about 2 minutes, stirring constantly, and then slowly begin adding the reserved juice from the clams. Keep whisking…build those whisking muscles. Try to break up any clumps of flour and veggies. Add the potatoes with the clam juice they were boiled in, half and half, canned clams and the Sriracha. Stir well and allow to simmer, stirring frequently, for 10-15 minutes, just to let it get hot, let the flavors blend and the soup thicken. Be sure to take the bay leaf out, that’s a surprise that no one wants. Season chowder with salt and pepper and slurp away.

I served it with a sprinkling of parsley and some sourdough bread. You know what, this was damn good. It would definitely have been better with fresh clams, but when you’re landlocked in the fall, you do what you can.

Rob’s review:
Also 9/10 hot dogs!

You know, I’m beginning to think Rob’s being overly nice on the giving of hot dogs because he has to live with me. If you’d like to become a hot dog rater, please come over for dinner.

Do you remember that children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Well that’s the kind of day Rob had on Friday—a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day—one of those days in which everything seems to go wrong. Being the wonderful girlfriend and roommate that I am, I decided to make a whole bunch of really fatty foods for dinner. You know, comfort food. So I made chicken for Rob (yes, I handle raw chicken. According to our favorite bartender, Sheila, this makes me “a keeper.”) and tofu for me.

On the side, I made scalloped potatoes and the best homemade macaroni and cheese I have ever had. The potatoes were a combination of a few recipes I saw online and my preferences, and the mac-n-cheese was straight from an episode of Alton Brown’s Good Eats on the Food Network. And oh my god, was it good.

1/2 pound elbow macaroni
4 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
6 ounces evaporated milk
1/2 teaspoon hot sauce
1 teaspoon kosher salt
Fresh black pepper
3/4 teaspoon dry mustard
10 ounces sharp cheddar, shredded

In a large pot of boiling, salted water cook the pasta to al dente and drain. Return to the pot and melt in the butter. Toss to coat.

Whisk together the eggs, milk, hot sauce, salt, pepper, and mustard. Stir into the pasta and add the cheese. Over low heat continue to stir for 3 minutes or until creamy.

I followed this recipe pretty closely—the only substitution I made was a squeeze of Sriracha for the 1/2 teaspoon of hot sauce. The key to this recipe is good quality cheese. Somehow I don’t think it would be as good if you just threw in a bag of shredded Kraft cheddar. Go the cheese counter and buy some good, sharp cheddar and grate it yourself. I promise it’s worth it. Besides, good cheeses are fun, and buying something from the cheese counter always makes me feel like a foodie. For this one, I used a big block of Tillamook.

It even looked like heaven. This recipe makes a LOT, so prepare for leftovers. Luckily, it reheated really well. Thanks, Alton Brown. I’d marry Alton Brown, if only he’d reply to the daily fan letters I mail him. Sorry, Rob.

Next up, the potatoes. I think when most people think of scalloped potatoes, they think of a big browned cheesy mess. Which is good, but probably not that great when you’re already eating a big cheesy mess (see above.) So I decided to do a more traditional French preparation with the addition of some herbs I had in my fridge. Still pretty fatty, still delicious, just no cheese.

2 large potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (I used Yukon Golds)
2/3 quart of whipping cream (oooh, fat!!)
2 minced garlic cloves
2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
Small amount of butter

Layer the slices of potato in a buttered glass baking dish. In a bowl, mix together the cream, garlic, salt and pepper and pour over the potatoes. Dot the top with butter and place in oven for 50 minutes while it gets all brown and delicious. Simple as that. Take it out and sprinkle with any herbs you might want (I used parsley and chives, because they both pair with potatoes so well.) Let it rest for about 15 minutes and then dig in.

(Please note the Sur La Table chef kitchen timer that Rob gave me for my birthday peeking over the dish. Sweet moustache!)

Rob’s reviews:
The potatoes:
8.5 out of 10 hot dogs

The macaroni and cheese:
A whopping 9.5 out of 10 possible hot dogs! Seriously ladies, the way to a man’s heart is by clogging his arteries.

The way I see it, there’s no point in talking about food if you aren’t going to discuss books about food. I just got this from Amazon (used for like, $1.59) and it’s completely awesome:

It’s a collection of essays from women about the nature of food and its presence in their lives, bucking the ideas that women are constantly dieting or worrying about what they shouldn’t eat. The essays are nostalgic, funny and touching. My favorite (thus far) is by a woman named Pooja Makhijani, whose traditional Indian mother packed her leftover aloo tikki for her school lunch, when all Pooja wanted was to buy chicken nuggets and pizza bagels from the cafeteria. It’s definitely a good read for anyone– but in particular women– who love food. Highly recommended!

Right now, we have more apples than we know what to do with. The giant bag of them keeps moving around the kitchen in an effort to keep it out of the way, and it seems that no matter how many we eat, the bag never gets any emptier. So I decided to try to put apples in something savory instead of sweet, and came up with this recipe. (I’m also trying to do a better job of including some form of measurements with recipes on here.)

Potato-Apple-Feta Pancakes
2 large baking potatoes, peeled
2 large Granny Smith apples, peeled and cored
Handful of crumbled feta cheese (about 3 oz?)
2 eggs, beaten
2-3 TB flour (I actually forgot that I had planned to add flour when I made these, and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. They’d probably be more cake-y, less potato-y, so try whichever you want)
About 2 TB snipped chives
Salt & pepper to taste
Olive oil

Into a large bowl, grate the apples and potatoes using the largest holes on a box grater. The apples may just turn into mush, that’s okay. You just have to work quickly to keep them from browning. (If you absolutely need to, toss the mixture with some lemon juice, which slows the oxidation process that causes browning in certain fruits and veggies.) Sprinkle with salt, mix well.
Taking the potato mixture in small handfuls, squeeze the hell out of them. Get as much moisture out of them as you possibly can. Don’t worry about squeezing too hard, just get them as dry as possible. Place the dry mixture into a colander until the bowl is empty. Wipe all the moisture out of the bowl with a paper towel and move the potato mixture back to it. Add the eggs, chives, feta, pepper and flour, if you’re using it. (Be aware that if you don’t use flour, there will be liquid in the bottom of your bowl, just drain it off the best you can.)

Place a frying pan over high heat. Add a bit of oil and let it get good and hot. A good trick to use when frying things: if you flick some water onto the oil and it bubbles on contact, the oil is hot enough. With a spoon, drop some of the potato mixture onto the oil, and use the back of the spoon to smoosh it into a thin pancake. This recipe should make about 8, so use that to judge how much mixture to add.

Now, this is the key: don’t mess with it for three minutes. I think people’s tendency when cooking something in a pan is to poke at it, try to flip it, shake it around, etc. Just don’t. Go read a magazine, clip your toenails, something. Three minutes. Okay. Flip it and give it three minutes on the other side. Drain on paper towels. Add a bit more oil and repeat. Then devour.

Along with being aesthetically not-too-appealing, this dish is also totally unhealthy. I served these with sour cream and chives because in terms of fat, I think you should go big or go home. I also made baked apple-tamari tofu, which I’ll post the recipe for later. Oh god, do we have a lot of apples. Finally, serve this meal with classy beverages!!

Robbo’s review:
Surprisingly, he really liked these. One thing you have to understand about feeding Rob is that it’s often like feeding a kid (ask him what his favorite food is sometime—it’s chicken fingers and French fries.) So it can be difficult to get him to try things that are a bit out of the ordinary, including apples in potato pancakes. When I get him to admit he likes something ‘alternative,’ it’s always a big victory for me. Anyway, he gave it 8/10 hot dogs.

Normally I’m not a big fan of being dependent on recipes—I think it’s better to have a good understanding of food and flavors and how they work together, but when it comes to baking: 1) I am vaguely inept and 2) as a craft, it requires a lot of precision. So here is the Whole Foods recipe that I adapted slightly for Robbo’s birthday, even though he doesn’t really like pie. Because, you know, I like pie.

Pumpkin-Apple Pie
Serves 8

1/3 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, ground
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup water
2 tablespoons butter
3 cups Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and thinly sliced

1 large egg
1/3 cup sugar, granulated
3/4 cup pumpkin, mashed (fresh or canned)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, ground
1/4 teaspoon ginger, ground
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup evaporated milk
1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell

Combine the brown sugar, cornstarch, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon salt in a 2-quart saucepan. Stir in the water and butter. Cook, over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture comes to a boil. Carefully add the apple slices and cook for another 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

Combine the egg, sugar, pumpkin, 1/4 teaspoon salt, spices, and evaporated milk in a bowl. Beat until well blended using a rotary or electric mixer set on low speed. Pour the apple mixture into the unbaked pie shell and then spoon an even layer of the pumpkin mixture over the apple mixture. Bake in a preheated 425°F oven for 10 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 375°F, and bake for another 40 minutes, or until the filling is set around the edges. Cool on a wire rack.

Here it is (with vanilla ice cream, because what’s the point of pie if it’s not a vehicle to carry ice cream to your mouth?):

Robbo’s review:
Like I said, he doesn’t really like pie, but Rob also claims to not like things he’s never tried. He looked at it and said, “I’m nervous!” He took a bite, swallowed and said, “Well, it’s not bad.”
So, 6.5 out of a possible 10 hot dogs.

Caveat: As a pie fan, I thought this was awesome. On Thanksgiving, I always have to pick between pumpkin and apple pie because I never have room for both—PEOPLE, this pie is both!
And Rob’s dad asked that we leave the leftovers at his house, so I call this pie a winner! Rob is full of it!

Within 12 hours of the launch of this blog, I received several offers of contributions, which I think is a great idea. If you’d like to contribute, email me your recipe using the little envelope at the bottom of each post and I’ll cook it (to the best of my ability)and have Robbo review it.
Alternately, if you’d like to write an entire post, just email the text to me with a photo and your own review.