Madhu Knits and Cooks

Rick Bayless's Queso Fundido al Tequila - Weeknight Comfort Food

As a cheese lover, any meal based in cheese does it for me.  I particularly love any form of melted or baked cheese - on pasta, nachos or tortillas, in dip form, or with bread.  As my head dances with images of gooey cheese dishes, my mouth is now starting to salivate as I focus on my latest melted cheese effort - Rick Bayless's Queso Fundido al Tequila.  

I'm not quite sure how I stumbled upon the recipe, but I am glad I did because I thought queso fundidos were for only those that had those special baking ramekins or fondue pots.  To learn that I could simply make this in a saute pan and then serve with no issues?  Amazing.

I halved this recipe, but otherwise followed it largely as is.  Basically saute the vegetable medley of tomatoes, onions, and chiles until fragrant.

Then add a splash of tequila to infuse a nice, almost sweet / sour flavor.

Then just add your shredded cheese - I used monterey jack - in small portions until just melted.  Garnish with cilantro and season generously with salt and pepper.

Because I initially didn't season the queso with salt, it was quite bland.  After seasoning heavily with salt though, the queso mixture still didn't feel like a complete meal.  So then I discovered the key addition - homemade tomatillo salsa - which alternatively could just be a generous splash of lime juice with maybe some additional fresh chopped chiles.  Some oregano, garlic and/or chile powder in the vegetable mix would also help liven up the queso as well.

With one of those extra little kicks, this queso is a fantastic weeknight comfort food!

King Arthur Flour Chip Cookies - Good Base for an All Purpose Cookie

When King Arthur Flour employees declare something their "favorite," you have a sense you are about to embark on a fantastic baking journey.  While I am not sure if the KAF description matched my experience, I did find the "Our Favorite Chip Cookies" recipe to be a pretty good chip cookie base.  

Part of my not-fully-fantastic experience may have been slightly underbaking the cookies (and using nearly melted butter - a result of letting the butter sit on the counter for too long), resulting in a softer cookie than the crunchy cookie promised in the description.  

The flavor of the cookies was spot on though - ground oats added a nice deep flavor to the cookies, and my mix of semi-sweet and mini cinnamon chips also resulted in great tastes.   

So hopefully, the next time, I will hold course and bake the cookies for longer - closer to the 14-15 minutes called for in the recipe than the 11 minutes I did with this first batch.  

Otherwise, this is a relatively standard cookie recipe - combine the wet and dry ingredients separately before blending both mixtures together.

The only slight deviation from your standard cookie recipe is to grind the rolled oats up before adding them to the dry ingredients.

Roll, bake and serve!  I'll report back if I get the texture right with these in the future, and if they live up to the KAF employee high praise!

 

Mark Bittman's Savory Oats with Soy Sauce + Scallions - Not as Crazy as It Sounds!

My husband is not a fan of the sweet steel cut oats I make on occasion.  Whether it's brown sugar, cinnamon, maple syrup, cardamon, or honey, he's never been a fan.  And when my first attempt at steel cut upma, a savory Indian dish adapted to this Western grain staple, didn't turn out as expected, I kind of just resigned myself to being the only oatmeal eater in the house.

When I came across Mark Bittman's seemingly crazy recipe for savory oats with scallions and soy sauce, I thought this may the solution to my husband's oatmeal aversion.  It was a simple way to dress up oatmeal with ingredients we otherwise use all the time in our dinner time meals.  So what wouldn't there be to love?

Unfortunately, it seems that some people just aren't a fan of oatmeal.  It doesn't matter if it's less watery or more watery, sweet or savory, it seems my husband just doesn't like oatmeal.  

For my benefit though, I found yet another way to prepare this healthy and satisfying grain.  I basically just used a package of takeout Chinese soy sauce with some scallions, and viola, a pretty tasty meal.  I encourage those oatmeal-lovers out there to try it!

Pati Jinich's Arroz Rojo - an Oven-Free Method to Perfect Mexican Red Rice

My go-to Mexican rice recipe of late has been Cook's Illustrated Mexican Rice.  The recipe produces unfailing delicious Mexican red rice - flavorful and great texture.  However, it creates a preparation challenge for me in that it requires cooking the rice in the oven after toasting the rice and adding the seasonings on the stovetop. 

That oven step adds more complexity in that you need to not only pre-heat an oven and cook it longer than it would take on the stovetop, but also it takes up your oven when you may need to preparing other items like vegetables or enchiladas.  So I'd love to find a stovetop-only good Mexican Rice recipe, but unfortunately my prior experiences trying to find such a recipe have failed.

Enter Pati Jinich, my new favorite Mexican cuisine TV chef (sorry Rick Bayless!).  Pati has such amazing energy and pride for her food in her show, and I've made some of her great recipes in the past.  On a whim, I tried her Arroz Rojo recipe from her Pati's Mexican Table book to complement some drunken beans and homemade tortillas one weeknight.

The rice was fantastic - incredibly flavorful from the pureed onion, garlic, chile, and parsley (I may have subbed cilantro though), and nice texture from the added corn, carrot, and peas.  And the stove-top only prep made it a perfect side dish that didn't take up too much time (or oven space or time) from other dishes.

To start, saute the rinsed and drained rice with oil until slightly translucent.

Then add the pureed tomatoes, onion, garlic and salt mixture.

Cook down for a few minutes, and then add the broth and vegetables.  Cover when it reaches a boil, and simmer until cooked to your taste.

Then let the rice sit covered for five minutes off heat, then fluff and serve.  Yum!

Simple Quinoa Pilaf - or Why Not?

We eat a fair amount of quinoa, but to say it's something that brings me great joy would be a clear overstatement.  Quinoa is healthy and it can absorb flavor from other ingredients, but it's overwhelming feature is blandness.  It's functionally an inoffensive way to sop up other stuff, or feel less guilt than from eating rice.  

Enter Cook's Illustrated Quinoa Pilaf with Herbs and Lemon - or a "why not" experiment given this post's introduction.  The end result was pretty good - a deep onion flavor from the onion itself and some chives I added, and a lightness and tartness from the lemon juice.  I'm not sure if it really changes my view of quinoa - a flexible backdrop to other stuff.  But this recipe may be a repeat insofar as it can complement perhaps some stews, soups, and other small party plates (grilled cheeses and the like).

You start by washing and drying out the quinoa on paper towels, which was a bit of a pain, but not an awful first step.

You then toast the quinoa until fragrant and nutty.

Then you set aside the toasted quinoa to cook down the onion in some butter before adding back the quinoa and water to complete the cooking.

After the quinoa is cooked fully, you then let it sit (covered) for ten minutes before fluffing the cooked quinoa with a fork, adding the lemon juice and other herbs as you go.  

Vegetarian Drunken Beans - New Sunday Bean Pot Staple

As followers of my Instagram account (@madhuknitsandcooks) know, Sundays are often bean night in Casa Madhu Knits and Cooks.  I like to soak dried beans on Saturday night, and then on a lazy Sunday afternoon, boil beans for an hour or two until they are perfect for dinner.  The added benefit of cooking a big pot of beans on Sunday is that I have a protein base for meals for the first half of the work week as well.

I mostly cook chickpeas, red kidney beans, and black beans, and for some reason, pinto beans have never really been on my Sunday bean pot rotation.  In fact, I am not sure if I have ever really cooked pinto beans from dried as opposed to using canned whole or refried pinto beans from the store.  

Well, that gap in my bean repertoire changed when I got an America's Test Kitchen email about Tex Mex / Mexican favorites, including Drunken Beans.  While their recipe calls for cooking the beans and vegetable / herb seasonings in bacon fat, I decided to try the recipe with olive oil.  To my pleasant surprise, the recipe turned out so amazingly well such that my husband and I made this recipe our Sunday bean pot recipe for three consecutive weeks!

The beans this recipe produces are simply fantastic - perfectly creamy yet whole, tart from tomato paste, spicy from peppers, and nicely acidic and slightly sweet from the cooked down beer and tequila.  I have halved this recipe to date, but moving forward, I will be going to the full 1 pound bean recipe.  

To get started, you soak the beans overnight in salt water.  You'll definitely notice that they get rehydrated and nicely plump by the time you wake up.

To make this modified vegetarian version, you then cook down the onion, poblanos, and garlic in olive oil.  

Then to the pot goes the tequila until it largely evaporates.

Then add the beans and remaining seasonings to the pot, bring to a boil, and then put the pot in a pre-heated oven.  Our friends at Cook's Illustrated reports that cooking beans in the oven allows for more even cooking and less blowouts, and in practice, that certainly seemed to be the case.

After the beans come out of the oven, you add the final ingredients - beer and tomato paste - and periodically stir for 30 minutes or until the flavors meld.  Given the time in the oven and 30 minutes of stovetop cooking after, this is sadly not a weeknight recipe, but a much richer and satisfying ~2 hour cooking effort.

(beans out of the oven)

(beans cooking down with beer and tomato paste)

Serve the beans immediately with cilantro, and if desired, Cotija cheese.  We've also put the cooked beans in corn tortillas for bean tacos, which is also a satisfying meal for days.

Sick of Tomato Sauce? Try Fusilli with Ricotta and Spinach

As the title of this post indicates, at some point, I couldn't stomach both of my go-to weekend pasta sauce options - one a simple, pureed tomato sauce with garlic and olive, and the other an olive oil, garlic, dried red pepper and parsley combination.  And so to the internet I turned to get some new inspiration, particularly for a pasta that incorporated greens (something we could all use more of!). 

The recipe that immediately attracted me was Cook's Illustrated's Fusilli with Ricotta and Spinach, which seemed to pair the greens with a rich, creamy sauce.  The two-pot recipe was fairly easy to prepare, but the results were a bit bland so I don't think this will be a recipe repeat.

To get started, you cook the pasta and spinach in boiling water, while concurrently seasoning and whisking the ricotta to create a simple sauce.  

After you drain the cooked pasta and spinach, bloom the remaining spices in a saute pan and then add the remaining unseasoned ricotta to start to create a holistic sauce.

You then simply toss the pasta with the two ricotta mixtures, let it rest, and toss again before serving.  

I did make a few alterations to the recipe, namely decreasing the amount of pasta to approx. 2/3 - 3/4 of the recipe servings to fit the smaller amount of ricotta I purchased for this dish.  I also didn't have heavy cream on hand, but the sauce texture still turned out quite smooth. 

I think what was missing from this dish was more citrus / lemon, and maybe some tomato or some other complementary acid flavor?  In any case, there are more than enough greens pasta recipes out there such that I think this recipe is now condemned to the annals of my cooking history.