by Hilah Cooking on July 6, 2010
Pasta salad is the perfect thing to try “winging it” on in the kitchen. Like almost all salads, you can throw anything in there and it’ll be good. This is YOUR MOMENT. YOUR CHANCE to experiment. Be like Dr. Frankenstein but without all the lightning and stitches and stuff. Hell, maybe you’ll create a masterpiece of pasta salad and the family will sing your praises on high as they scarf it down, face in a wilted paper plate, shoveling it in with a spork, chugging from a plastic pitcher of Country Time lemonade. Wait. Spork? Not for my opus! Best to eat this pasta salad from an abalone shell , delicately, with a gilded fork and follow that with a rain-water spritzer. Just kidding. Ain’t no snobbery in pasta salad. It’s food for everybody.
So consider this a starting point. Like a diving board into a sea of possiblities. Sorry, I should say “pastabilities”. Ooh. Sorry again.
Ingredients
- 9 ounces dried, smallish pasta (tortellini, bow-tie, rotini, whatever you have) – cooked according to package and rinsed lightly with cool water
- 1 cup cherry tomatoes
- 1 cup diced red bell pepper (about half a large pepper)
- 1 small zucchini, shredded
- 4-8 green onions, roasted if possible, sliced into 1/4 inch pieces
- Optional ingredients: canned chick peas, spinach or arugula, grated parmesan, artichoke hearts, olives
Dressing
- 1 ounce red wine vinegar
- 2 ounces olive oil (or whatever you have)
- 2 teaspoons dijon mustard
- 1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper, each
- 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
- 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano and crushed red pepper, each
Put dressing ingredients in a jar and shake well. Set aside while you prepare other ingredients.
by Hilah Cooking on June 29, 2010
Okay, okay, okay. I’ve read enough cookbooks and eaten enough (mediocre) peach cobblers to know that my mom’s recipe is not what people mean when they talk about peach cobbler. But this is what it means to me. It’s upside-down from most cobblers and more soft-cake-like than those tough, dry, biscuit-topped jobbies they serve at Luby’s and “home-style” restaurants like Grandy’s. Probably if Grandy’s made better cobbler (like this one), they wouldn’t have had to close all those locations in the 90′s. Suckers.
Anyway, Mama got this recipe from her Girl Scout troop leader in Lometa, Texas. They used to make it in a Dutch oven when they took camping trips. Isn’t that cute? A buncha scouts making cobbler over a fire. Telling ghost stories. Roasting weenies. Learning life skills. Earning badges. I’ve never found a recipe like it in a book. It’s the best!!! I’m not even exaggerating.
PEACH COBBLER: EAT IT.
2 cups fruit (sliced peaches, plums, or other stone fruit, whole berries, or a mix of fruits)
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 stick butter (or a whole stick like mama does)
3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup sugar (can be reduced to 1/2 cup)
3/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
Mix the fruit with 1/4 cup sugar and let it sit while you get the other stuff ready. Turn the oven to 350 degrees F and put the butter in a two-quart baking dish. Put the dish in the oven while it’s preheating to melt the butter.
Mix dry ingredients and add milk. Stir. It might be lumpy. That’s okay.
When the butter is melted, take the pan out and pour in the batter. Spoon the fruit and its juice on top. Bake for 45-50 minutes. EAT IT.
by Hilah Cooking on June 24, 2010
Scrambled eggs sometimes get people all in a tizzy. There’s so many panic-inducing “tips” or “rules” out there in cookbooks and on the internet on how to properly cook eggs, it seems like it requires some special talent or skill or whatever that only a few people in the world possess and they shall be called the Egg Whisperers. Come on! Now that’s a buncha baloney!!! Eggs don’t require anything more than some butter and about five minutes of your time. Once you get scrambled eggs down, you’ll be making them for breakfast AND lunch. It’s true. My favorite sandwich when I was a kid was toast with mayonnaise and tomatoes and scrambled eggs with lots of pepper.
Yum. Yum, I say.
Here’s the deal with scrambled eggs:
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Beat the hell out of them. Use a whisk if you have one. And you need not bother with adding water or milk. Just seriously whip those eggs. You want to get some air in there. If you’re making a whole lotta eggs, you can even use your blender!
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Use an appropriately sized skillet. Probably the smallest one you have will be good. A thick layer of eggs is easier to control than a thin layer.
- Use some butter!!! Or you can use a nonstick skillet with some spray oil if you must, I understand.
- Be nice. Stir gently with a wooden or silicone spoon, if you got one. Cook over a medium heat and take them off the heat before they are completely dry — should still be shiny but in firm curds. There will be enough residual heat in them that they will finish cooking on your plate.
See? Isn’t that EASY? Don’t you want some eggs right now? I do.
P.S. If you want to make cheesy eggs like they serve at Waffle House (I do!), sprinkle the eggs with grated cheese as soon as you put them in the skillet so they can get cooked all up in that cheese’s face and that cheese can get all melty up in those eggs. Mmm.
by Hilah Cooking on June 22, 2010
While typically thought of as breakfast food, Home Fries are also sometimes served as a side dish with supper. (Think about that the next time you forget to put the potatoes in with the roasty chicken. Oh SNAP!) I’d even go so far as to say that a pile of perfectly made Home Fries can be served AS supper, provided you throw a little cheese or crispy bacon and onions in there. Or top with a fried egg and Yumsies! Breakfast for dinner.
The thing about perfect Home Fries is don’t put too many in the pan. Use a pan that’s big enough so you only have one layer of potatoes going on in there at a time so every potatoey piece is touching hot oil at some point in his little, fried life. The OTHER thing about perfect Home Fries is you have to cook them twice. Like the best french fries are twice-cooked, so be the best hashbrowns. So says the Queen of Hashbrowns. (Bow down, ye CareBear Cousins, Cabbage Patch kids and kittycat dolls.)
The first go round is to make sure the insides are soft. The second time is to make the outsides real, real crispy. My preferred method for the first cooking is to boil whole potatoes, let them cool, then cut them up. This is almost NEVER practical, however, since how am I supposed to know that the next day I’m going to want some hot, crunchy Home Fries with my beer so I better cook some potatoes before I go to bed? I mean, come on — that just ain’t happenin’, my cooking brothers and sisters.
What usually and actually happens in the morning is this: microwave to the rescue! Cut up your potatoes into 1/4 inch or 1/2 inch cubes (however small or large you like your fries), put them on a plate with some water – just enough to cover the bottom of the plate, like 2 tablespoons – stick them in the microwave for a couple minutes. Stir. Microwave a few more minutes, until the potatoes are soft. Be Careful! That plate is hot as hell! Drain the water off and let them sit on the hot plate while your skillet heats up. The heat from the plate will dry them completely. Then you just cook them up in the oil like usual.
Ingredients
- Cooked, diced potatoes (about a cup per person)
- 2 teaspoons of oil per cup of potatoes
- salt and pepper
- diced onions (optional)
Heat a heavy skillet on high for one minute. Add your oil. It should immediately turn hyper-fluid and start moving and shimmering all over that skillet. Move the skillet around to get the oil everywhere. Add your potatoes in one layer. Leave them alone for a minute. Shake the pan. They should be moving freely. Leave them alone again. Shake the pan every minute or so to make sure they aren’t sticking. When they’re good and brown, stir them around. Shake the pan some more. They will probably take about 8 minutes total. If you want onions, add them in after about five minutes. Just keep shaking, flipping, browning until they are toasty as a pair of kittycat mittens. Salt and pepper those puppies and you got it made in the shade.
P.S. In Spain, these are called patatas bravas and are served alongside a special, spicy sauce as a tapa. Proving that potatoes and drinkin’ are great company, the world over.
by Hilah Cooking on June 15, 2010
This is a classic middle eastern salad, traditionally served as part of the mezze, which is kind of like tapas in Spain or “drinkin’ snacks” in my house. Don’t tell the sheik, but I eat it for breakfast, too. That’s right, with yogurt! What the fudge? — That’s crazy! — I know!
It’s a wheat grain-based salad that uses bulghur (or bulgur or bulgar), also sometimes called cracked wheat (although they are not exactly the same thing). What it is though, is wheat grains that have been parboiled, dried, and cracked into small pieces. Since it’s already cooked, all you have to do is rehydrate it. It’s easy to prepare and it’s a whole grain. What’s better than that? — A million dollars? — Okay. Agreed.
Anyway, tabouli (or tabouleh) is a great thing to take to a potluck for a change of pace from the usual mayonnaise-fests. It’s light and fresh and goes great with spicy barbecue-sauced meats or grilled seafood. PLUS (and this is very important to me) you can add other vegetables you may have on hand and while I suppose you couldn’t really call it tabouli anymore, everyone will call it “super delish”! Double plus, it gets better the longer it sits in your ‘fridgerator, unlike the aformentioned mayonnaise-fests.
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