My menu is all over the place this week — some meals I can cook without a recipe, like comfort food favorite spaghetti and meatballs. But I’m also trying a couple of new vegetarian dishes, one based on white beans and the other on chickpeas.
Still, I am most excited about the baking I have planned. I’m trying Ina Garten’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake to take to a morning event early in the week. Then I plan to test out Chewy Butterscotch Graham Cookies, but I’ll use toffee chips instead of butterscotch. I am participating in a holiday cookie swap at the end of the month, so I need to figure out what I’m bringing. I may make a batch of Martha Stewart’s Pretzel-Shortbread Bars, as well, since I think they’d make a unique contribution to the swap instead. Either way, I need to make small batches before I decide which sweet will be multiplied to 6 dozen.
I first tried gigantes at Lefteris Gyro, a local Greek restaurant. “Gigantes,” which is both the name of the large white beans used to make the dish and the name of the prepared beans themselves, means “giant” in Greek. And these beans are enormous. In the past I was able to find gigante beans locally; most recently I could only find large lima beans which are slightly smaller. I love Greek food, but no one else in my immediate family does so I rarely get to eat it when we go out. Once I’d tried gigantes at Lefteris, though, I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I had to try to make them at home, since I knew it would be a long time until I could have them again at the restaurant. Now that I know how easy they are to make, I’ve made them several times. They keep well in the fridge so even though I make a large batch, I can eat them over the course of the week — even if no one else shares them with me.
I use Closet Cooking’s Gigantes Plaki recipe and I think it’s perfect as written, though I tend to add a little more dill (that’s my mom’s influence… she loves dill!). Even though the beans are soaked overnight and then baked, the finished dish is light and has a very fresh flavor thanks to the herbs. This recipe is naturally super-healthy: minimal oil, lots of vegetables, and protein from the beans. Better yet, it is seriously delicious. (I have eaten a bowl of gigantes for breakfast — it’s that good.) You could serve gigantes as a side dish for roasted chicken or grilled fish, but I like it best as a vegetarian meal unto itself.
I spent a weekend in Boston earlier this summer and my dear friend Rachel showed me this simple, delicious dish. Use a vegetable peeler to make ribbons out of your yellow squash and zucchini, rotating the squash after each ribbon or two so you get even pieces. Leave over the seeded middles. Blanch the squash ribbons (that’s dropping them into boiling water briefly and then dunking them in ice water to stop the cooking) and drain them well. Toss with your favorite pesto.
Please don’t pretend you’re eating pasta, because you won’t be impressed. However, as a vegetarian side dish or a way to highlight your CSA or farmer’s market finds, this simple dish is perfection. Slightly salty and rich from the pesto; fresh and light from the squash. With some sliced CSA tomatoes, it’s a perfect summer dinner.
I’m going to handle meals on the fly this week, since the boys are off from school and we’ll be more flexible with both our eating times and locations. They’ve requested Baked Ziti one night, so I’ll make that. I’ll have to go food shopping first, because my fridge is really empty! But, we do have a nice store of homemade food in our freezer: 16 Bean Soup with Flanken, J.’s Smoked Beef Ribs, Vegetarian Mushroom Barley Soup, and Moroccan Beef Meatballs in Cumin & Coriander Tomato Sauce.
I also cut out a batch of recipes from the March 2011 issue of Cooking Light magazine — I am excited for some hearty, new meatless or low-on-meat ideas. The only problem is they’ll be a long-shot in terms of the boys eating them. And, when I handed J. the stack of recipes to see which he’d like me to make first, he said “None of them.” Boo! Everyone is raining on my new recipe parade. Still, I think they’re worth sharing in case you have more receptive families:
Chicken Fried Rice: one of my favorite Chinese take-out dishes, with a more reasonable nutritional profile;
Vegetarian Moussaka: subs bulgur for the ground beef, making it both vegetarian and kosher;
I'm Dara, the Chick in the Kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two school-aged boys and husband. Feeding my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Read more about me and CITK, and keep in touch:
Want to Try
Cheesy Kale Crisps: We rarely eat kale now that our farm share is over, and I want to fix that. I've wanted to try using nutritional yeast, and this recipe looks like a tasty way to do it.
I’m going to handle meals on the fly this week, since the boys are off from school and we’ll be more flexible with both our eating times and locations. They’ve requested 
I'm Dara, the Chick in the Kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two school-aged boys and husband. Feeding my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Read more 
Want to Try Archives