Recipe A Day #5: Green Apple Charoset

This is an intriguing and easy recipe inspired by the unusual cookbook Ripe by Cheryl Sternman Rule and Paulette Phlipot. It's typically eaten at Passover, but thanks to the wide, year-round availability of the sturdy and tangy Granny Smith apple, you can make this delicious and easy side dish at any time of year. Enjoy!

Green Apple Charoset

Ingredients:
4 large Granny Smith apples, cored, quartered and diced
2 Tablespoons sugar (more or less to taste)
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup pecans, well-chopped
1/3 cup of any sweet white wine

Directions:
1) Stir the diced apples, chopped pecans, spices and wine in a large serving bowl until well-combined. Serve immediately!

Serves 6 or more.
*************************
Recipe Notes:
1) The most time-consuming part of this recipe is the dicing of the apples. Three ideas for making the job easier:

a) Find somebody else to do the prep work.
b) Failing that, here's a tip on technique for a faster dice process: First, quarter and core the apples, then make lengthwise cuts through each quarter (four, five or six lengthwise cuts, depending on the size of the apple and how small you want the dice). Then line the two quarters alongside each other and make crosswise cuts across each. Then, make a few desultory chops diagonally on the pieces that are left. Scrape the diced apples off the cutting board and repeat with two more quarters.
c) Finally, a bonus monotony-reducing tip: measure out a full cup of the sweet white wine and drink two-thirds of it as you chop the apples.

2) Savings idea: This recipe calls for pecans, which can be a fairly pricey item in the grocery store. Feel free to use walnuts to save a buck or two.

3) What kind of wine should you use? It almost doesn't matter. We used a simple, inexpensive box white wine with delicious results. Feel free to choose anything from Riesling to Gewurztraminer to a sweet Sauvignon Blanc. If you happen to have a drier white wine handy, you can compensate by adding more sugar to the apple mixture. Obviously don't feel any obligation to use expensive wine, since the wine in this recipe is a mere seasoning, not the main act.

4) If you have leftovers, store in an airtight container. And don't worry if the apples brown a little bit over the next few days, they'll still be delicious!



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Links--Friday June 5, 2015

Links from around the internet!

Don't forget! The easiest way to support Casual Kitchen is to buy your items at Amazon using the various links here. Just click over to Amazon, and EVERY purchase you make during that visit pays a modest affiliate commission to support my work here. Best of all, this comes at zero extra cost to you.

As always, I welcome your thoughts. And don't forget our Recipe-A-Day trial for June! We posted yet another recipe earlier today... look for it!

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
Homemade laughably cheap Mustard. (Addicted to Canning)

Delicious homemade Olive and Feta Vinaigrette. (Closet Cooking)

A quick guide to perfect eggs. (Mark’s Daily Apple)

Related: How to jazz up your morning eggs. And: An easier way to crack an egg.

The very action of telling people "you can't have large sodas" makes them want large sodas even more, which, weirdly, makes banning large sodas even more costly in terms of foregone consumer welfare. (Jayson Lusk)

Why don't French kids have ADHD? (Psychology Today)

What 9,000 years of selective breeding have done to corn, peaches, watermelons and other crops. (Vox)

Interesting letter to the editor of an Australian paper that touches on the trade-off between safe "sell-by" dates and food waste. (Sunshine Coast Daily)

"Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness." (Planet Infowars) See also the original source of this quote from the Editor of The Lancet here.

What happens when a professor writes a caricature of university "trigger warning" activists... and they turn around and instantaneously prove her caricature 100% correct? (Talking Points Memo)

Is the market about to crash? (A Wealth of Common Sense)

On keeping voicemails. (ProPublica)


Got an interesting article or recipe to share? Want some extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Recipe A Day #4: Sauteed Kale in Coconut and Lime Sauce

A quick programming note: I'll run this week's Friday links post a bit later in the day today as we continue to plow through "Recipe A Day" June with yet another brand new recipe! 

*****************************

I don't really like kale all that much, despite my eye doctor wife's insistence that it's great for my maculae. I mean, I'll eat it, but it's not something I, uh, look forward to, exactly.

"Woo hoo! Kale for dinner!!"
--something nobody ever says

But that was before I discovered this recipe, which is so good that it makes kale taste literally delicious. It's inspired by and slightly adapted from Rebecca Katz's amazing The Healthy Mind Cookbook, a cookbook we've already seen in this recipe-a-day trial: Seared Curried Scallops with Coconut Rice. Somehow the lime juice and coconut milk combine to add a sweet and tangy taste that compliments and completely cancels out the typically bitter taste of kale. I hope you enjoy this dish as much as we did.

Sauteed Kale in Coconut and Lime Sauce

Ingredients:
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil
About 1 Tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
One large bunch kale leaves, de-stemmed and chopped coarsely
a dash or two of salt, to taste
Black pepper, to taste
3/4 cup coconut milk
2 teaspoons lime juice

Directions:
1) Saute the minced ginger and garlic in oil for 1-2 minutes on medium-high heat.

2) Add kale, salt and black pepper, and continue to saute for 3-4 minutes until the kale wilts and turns a deep rich green color

3) Add coconut milk and lime juice and saute for another 3-4 minutes. Serve over white or brown rice, pouring remaining juices from the pan over the rice.

Serves 2-3 as a side dish, serves 2 as a main dish.
***************************************

Recipe Notes:
1) Use more kale than you think you need. It really cooks down. You might start with a heaping mountain of chopped kale, but it will cook down to something like 1/5 the volume once fully cooked. If in doubt, jam more kale leaves in the pot!

2) Shared ingredients: Take another look at the other day's Seared Curried Scallops with Coconut Rice, but this time pay particular notice to the ingredients shared with today's recipe. Surprise! You've stumbled onto a great time- and money-saving cooking tip: Whenever you see a recipe you like and decide to cook it, try to find one or two other recipes that share the same ingredients. These two recipes both have ginger, lime juice and coconut milk in common. This saved me from having to waste a portion of the coconut milk (the Scallops recipe called for one cup, this recipe used up the remainder), and it allowed me to get extra mileage out of a chunk of fresh ginger and a container of lime juice.

3) Variations: As written above, this dish makes an exceptionally easy and really good side dish. But you can vary this dish just slightly, say by adding a can of chickpeas or white beans, and voila, you've got a very filling, fully vegan main dish. Also, consider variations with spicing: add cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes to the first step (sauteing the ginger and garlic in oil) and you've got a version with a spicy kick. Add a little turmeric for a rich yellow color. And so on. If you can think up any variations of your own, please share them in the comments!

4) Kale changes color: One of the striking things about cooking Kale is how it changes from a grayish green to an incredibly rich dark green color as it cooks. The two photos below, both unretouched and taken within minutes of each other, give you a sense of the radical change:

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Recipe A Day #3: Spicy Tuna, Tomatoes and Red Beans

I can't guarantee it just yet, obviously, but I’m highly confident today's recipe will end up being the easiest of this entire month of brand new recipes.

The original inspiration for this dish came from an excellent cookbook: Jules Clancy’s Five Ingredients Ten Minutes. Seriously: this is a great, great cookbook. If you're the kind of person who wants to cook more at home but who doesn't want to spend a lot of time (or money!) doing so, then Jules' book is for you. Get it.

Okay, onto today's recipe--which, by the way, took me less than 15 minutes from start to cleanup, and cost only about $1.20 a serving.

Spicy Tuna, Tomatoes and Red Beans

Ingredients:
2-3 Tablespoons olive or canola oil
¼ to ½ teaspoon hot red pepper flakes, to taste
2 5-ounce cans tuna, in water, drained
About 2 cups grape or cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
2 teaspoons paprika
1 14.5 ounce can of dark red kidney beans
small handful of fresh parsley

Directions:
1) Heat the oil and hot red pepper flakes on medium high heat for about 1 minute. Then add the two cans of tuna, the grape/cherry tomatoes and the paprika. Mix well and saute for 4-5 minutes until tomatoes begin to soften.

2) Add beans, combine well and saute for another minute or two until everything is well-heated. Serve immediately on a bed of white or brown rice, and garnish with the fresh parsley.

Serves 3.
************************

Recipe notes:
1) Spiciness: Feel free to tweak the hot pepper flakes or even leave them out. Also, keep in mind: sauteing the hot pepper flakes in oil for a minute first will help release even more heat and flavor.

2) Other spices/variations: I could imagine a creative experimenter coming up with wildly different variations of this recipe merely by experimenting with the spices: replacing paprika with curry for example, or with ground chipotle pepper, or even thyme or poultry seasoning. You could create an entirely different recipe around the same ingredients. Also, regarding the beans: feel free to use cannelini beans, or plain red or pink beans, or honestly, any bean type of your choice.

3) For a 100% pantry recipe variation: All you have to do to make this recipe 100% pantry ready is substitute a can of well-drained diced tomatoes for fresh tomatoes, and use a few shakes of dried parsley in lieu of fresh parsley. See my post The Best Way to Save Money By Cooking From Your Pantry for more on this.

4) A final comment on Jules' book: What I find so valuable about Five Ingredients Ten Minutes is how it shapes your mind to think about how to come up with a wide range of permutations of a relatively small number of basic ingredients and a relatively simple collection of cooking steps, and voila: all of sudden you have the basic tools to produce a shockingly wide range of varied, creative and easy recipes. Get this cookbook. You won't regret it.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Recipe A Day #2: Shaksouka

You can prepare today's hilariously cheap and easy recipe in about 30 minutes... for a total cost of around three bucks. Three bucks! If I ever put together another "More! Top 25 Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen" post, this one will go right at the top of the list.

Shaksouka

Spice mix:
2 teaspoons cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon paprika

Ingredients:
3-4 Tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
about 3/4 cup water
4-6 eggs

Directions:
1) Saute onion and garlic in oil for 1-2 minutes on medium-high heat. Add spice mixture, reduce heat to medium, combine well and continue to saute until onions are softened.

2) Add crushed tomatoes and water, stir and bring to a low boil, and then simmer for 20 minutes.

3) Gently crack eggs into sauce (do not stir once you've added the eggs!) and simmer for another 5-7 minutes, or until eggs are done to your liking. Serve immediately with rice, couscous or bread.

Serves 3.
***********************************
Recipe Notes:
1) This recipe is so simple that it doesn't even have any recipe notes. Enjoy!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Recipe A Day #1: Seared Curried Scallops with Coconut Rice

Today's recipe, the first of our June Recipe-a-Day experiment, was inspired by Rebecca Katz's spectacular The Healthy Mind Cookbook. This recipe isn’t quite laughably cheap. But it is laughably easy. And with a little practice, you can get this meal on the table in just 15 minutes or so.

And it is amazing. You'll see, as you look over the ingredients, that the ginger, the coconut milk, the lime juice and the scallops combine to make this a world-class recipe. Truly, truly incredible. You'll love this recipe, and it's worth paying a little extra for scallops, something we here at Casual Kitchen don't often eat.

Seared Curried Scallops with Coconut Rice

Ingredients:
12 medium to large sea scallops
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil
curry powder
salt
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 cup coconut milk
1 Tablespoon lime juice
White rice, cooked

Directions:
1) Season scallops with a few generous shakes of curry powder and salt. Then, heat oil in a large, non-stick skillet to medium-high. Place the scallops on in the pan (six at a time for a large skillet, perhaps four at a time for a smaller skillet so the scallops are well-spaced). Sear for 2-3 minutes per side, until lightly browned and firm to the touch, then flip and sear another 2 minutes on the other side until done to your liking.

2) When the scallops are done, place in serving dishes on beds of warm white rice. This will keep the scallops warm.

3) Reduce heat to medium-low. Place the grated ginger in the skillet you just seared the scallops in, saute for 1 minute in the remaining oil and leftover drippings from the scallops. Add the coconut milk, simmer for 2 minutes or so until the sauce is simmering and beginning to thicken. Add the lime juice, stir well, remove from heat and ladle over the scallops and rice. Serve immediately.

Serves 2-3.
**********************
Recipe Notes:
1) I tend to lack confidence with cooking seafood, particularly shellfish, and I never know when a scallop is really done. This is an additional challenge if your scallops are different sizes. And I'll be honest: the first time I made this recipe, I undercooked some of the scallops a little bit. But it didn't matter. This recipe was so delicious it literally didn't matter at all. So don't lack confidence!

2) One note on the cost of this recipe: CK readers are used to truly hilariously inexpensive recipes here, some of which cost well less than a dollar per serving. This is not one of those recipes. I’d estimate the cost of this dish to cost about $15 in total for 2-3 servings. But then again, if you want to compare this to a restaurant meal of comparable quality (feel free to go ahead and imagine, say, Brooklyn or San Francisco hipsters paying $20-30 a plate for this in some snazzy restaurant, which they will), it just goes to show that you can cook even relatively pricy foods at home for a fraction of what they’d cost in any restaurant.

3) Finally, if you'll forgive the plug, please take a look at Rebecca Katz's The Healthy Mind Cookbook. It's full of an incredibly wide range of exceptional recipes, and I'm planning to sample from it repeatedly over the course of this month. Keep in mind if you follow any of the links here at Casual Kitchen over to Amazon, I'll receive a small commission on any product you buy, at no extra cost to you. This is a great way to support your favorite writers and bloggers!





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

“A New Recipe a Day” in June

Readers, for the month of June I'm going to spring a new cooking project on you--an ambitious one: a new recipe post a day. I've been in a really bad cooking rut lately, and for the past few months I just haven't had any interest in, or patience with, cooking. I've been doing the absolute bare minimum in the kitchen to keep us well-fed.

Fortunately, with many of the laughably easy recipes here, as well as all of the various tools, tips and techniques available at Casual Kitchen for cooking efficiently and without much of a time commitment, it isn't that difficult any more for me to get good meals on the table with practically zero effort.

But who wants cooking to be a chore when it can be something we enjoy? So I intend to change my crappy cooking attitude. Aggressively. So, for the month of June, I'll be running a new post, with a new recipe, every single day.

Some of the recipes will be my own, others will be inspired by or taken from the many cookbooks in my home just waiting to be exploited, and all of the month's recipes will be easy and inexpensive. This is an ambitious project and I can't wait to share the results with you.

Get ready to be (temporarily) buried in posts! I'll be sharing the first recipe tomorrow.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.