Calzone

Well, it seems like I use the same combination of ingredients whenever I make anything Italian (tomatoes, mushrooms, onions), but I guess it's just because they are tried and true. I had really been wanting to make calzone, which is typically full of meat and cheese, but I couldn't figure what to put in it instead, so finally I just decided to try the combination Italiano and it turned out pretty good. Anyway, it's fun to eat the same old stuff in a different shape now and then.

All you need for four calzones (four servings-in our case two for dinner and two for lunch) is:

• Pizza dough (I made my own-a slight hassle, and you need eggs which I don't normally have laying around-so next time I will just buy Rhodes)
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 1/2 cup chopped mushrooms (3 or 4 medium)
• 8 oz can chopped tomatoes (or a cup of fresh-kinda spendy here)
• 1/4 cup chopped green onion
• 1/2 cup cooked wheat berries
• 2 Tablespoons Italian seasoning
• seasoning salt (to taste)
• pepper (to taste)
  
• spaghetti sauce
• butter
• parsley flakes

Optional:

• 1/4-1/2 cup chopped veggie sausage
• 2-3 tablespoons Parmesan cheese (I consider this more of a flavoring than actual cheese)
  
• chopped green or red pepper
• 1/4 cup corn
• some type of canned white bean, as much as you can fit in
• whatever else you can think of
  

1. Make four 8-inch diameter circles out of the pizza dough (about 1/4 inch thickness) on a greased cookie sheet and spread spaghetti sauce up to 1/2 inch from the edges.
2. Mix all the chopped veggies, wheat and spices (except for parsley) and any optional ingredients and spoon them onto one half of each dough circle.
3. Fold the dough over the filling and press the edges together tightly, so you have a sealed half circle full of filling.
   
4. Butter the tops of each calzone and sprinkle with parsley flakes.
   
5. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the crusts turn golden.
   

This meal should be relatively easy and quick to assemble (if you cooked and froze your wheat berries ahead of time or boiled them while the pizza dough was rising), even if you make your own pizza dough (but don't forget the time it will take for store-bought or home-made pizza dough to rise). It looks pretty, and the filling has a meat-like consistency. It tastes pretty good the second day too (better than pizza I think).

Portobello Burgers

This is not really a grains recipe, but it was surprisingly good and it satisfied my craving for BBQ during the fire-ban. I usually buy Morningstar Farms chick patties instead of hamburgers because they are so delicious (I used to serve them to Garth's friends when they came over and gave him a hard time about me never cooking meat-but they were completely deceived by the chicken-ness of these patties). Anyway, this time the store was out of chick patties so I used Morningstar Farms "Bacon" strips instead, which were also surprisingly meat like despite their appearance. Turns out they are made of egg whites, but we ate them anyway.

For 2 people:

• 2 portobello mushroom caps
• 1/4 inch Red onion slices (or white-as many as you want on each burger)
• tomato slices
• lettuce leaves
• 4 Morningstar Farms "Bacon Strips" (can be purchased in the garden burger section of frozen foods at most grocery stores-even in AK)
• Two whole wheat sesame hamburger buns (toast them right before assembling burger)

Basting Sauce for Mushrooms and Onions:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
• 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 Tablespoon Dijon Mustard

I used my new cast iron skillet (dr. says I'm anemic-duh) that Garth got me for my birthday to "grill" the mushrooms/onions and fried the bacon in another skillet at the same time- but if you use the same skillet...

1. put the bacon in first on the cold skillet and fry the strips on medium heat until they're crispy, turning once or twice.
   
2. Spoon or brush the mushrooms (both sides) with basting sauce and put them in the hot cast iron skillet (careful the basting sauce will smoke and maybe spray so use a guard or lid or something) and "grill" for about 5 minutes.
   
3. Add the onion slices (also brushed with sauce) and cook both onions and mushrooms together for another 5-10 minutes.
   
4. If you want to put a tiny bit of BBQ sauce on the toasted buns that's what I did, then put the lettuce on both buns (the mushroom can get really juicy so the lettuce keeps the buns from getting soggy).
   
5. Layer the portobello, tomato, onions and bacon, close the burgers and eat!

We had these with corn on the cob (also a good cast iron skillet item) and baked beans. It was a good compromise smoke flavored meal since we don't actually have a real grill. Of course you could just use a real grill for all of this...

Sorry no photo- imagine a big yummy burger- I couldn't wait to eat it long enough to take a picture.

Tastes Like Chicken

Holy cow, I haven't posted anything since October!! Well, I have been expecting since then and until January I was really sick and completely stayed out of the kitchen. I couldn't even stand to smell the kitchen. And then since January we have been living in hotels where I only cooked two meals total. But now we are in Alaska, mostly out of boxes and I have cooked every meal we have eaten since we moved here (except for one pizza slice at Costco), because I will never eat at a restaurant again. Hotels and restaurants are great once in a while, but every day for 6 weeks is a nightmare. I got food fatigue before dinner on the first day. Ok anyway, back to cooking-in case I have never said it before in these words, Garth and I both agree that the best vegetarian dishes are actually meaty dishes reconstructed with a meat substitute. Most other vegetarian dishes either use cheese or eggs instead of meat, or they are not very substantial and husbands start going to burger king after dinner, or they are overly complicated and require a lot of special fresh ingredients which are difficult to find and expensive in Alaska. (But most vegetarian cookbooks have lots of great side dishes, and other inspiring ideas-although after making a main dish I usually just put some fruit in a bowl next to it and call it a meal-but someday I might make a side dish from one of those vegetarian cookbooks because they look tasty.) My latest attempt to convert a meat dish is this recipe for enchiladas:

1 cup of brown rice (and some cooked wheat berries if you want)
1 packet of fajita, nacho, enchilada or taco seasoning
1 fresh tomato chopped
1 cup of corn
1/2 medium onion chopped
1 green or red bell pepper chopped
about 8 large tortillas
1 can of enchilada sauce
salsa or pico de gallo

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cook the rice and add the wheatberries if you want after the rice is all cooked. Add all or most of the enchilada, fajita (I think this tastes the most like meat), nacho or taco seasoning packet and mix it into the rice. Add the chopped tomato, onion, bell pepper and corn to the rice and mix it all up uniformly. Get a big casserole dish and pour enchilada sauce until it covers the bottom of the dish. Take a tortilla and lay it flat in the dish so the back gets covered in sauce. Add a spoonful or two of rice mix to the tortilla and roll it up like a burrito so that the whole outside of the tortilla is covered with sauce, and slide it to one end of the casserole. Put another tortilla in the dish so it gets saucy and repeat this process until the pan is full of rolled up tortillas. (Obviously it will get kind of hard to get the last few tortillas completely saucy, so just keep adding sauce on top of the rolled up enchiladas and roll the last few on top of them-it doesn't' matter how you get them covered in sauce, just find a way.) When the pan is full, pour on the remaining enchilada sauce and bake for 15-20 minutes. After taking the enchiladas out of the oven, pour some fresh salsa or pico de gallo on top of the enchiladas and serve. In the picture above, I also cut up and avocado and mixed it with this amazing mango salsa from Costco. I didn't miss the meat at all in this recipe, and I doubt I would have noticed if some ground beef or chicken had been in there somewhere anyway. Ok maybe I would have noticed, but this actually was a very meat like substitute and it was yummy. Have fun.

Sneaking More Wheat Into You

I'm back--with a few ideas for sneaking more wheat into your meals via wheat berries, since they are so nutritious and since meals otherwise have very few whole grains (unless you eat whole brown, black or red rice every meal-boring).


The first is pizza. That doesn't sound very nutritious at first but lets begin with what you need:

1. Crust (I use Boboli which I buy and freeze. Also sometimes I use a packaged bread mix or Rhodes frozen dough. Homemade crust is obviously the most delicious besides American Dream, but it is a question of diminishing returns after you spend all that time just to make pizza.)
   
2. Sauce (I rotate between tomato or pasta sauce, BBQ sauce, and olive oil, but we use BBQ sauce the most-it's also surprisingly, the cheapest.)
3. Wheat berries (boiled until soft, in any proportion you desire-or can add without your guests noticing).
4. Toppings (for example, kalamata olives, cilantro, eggplant, artichoke, peppers, veggie sausage, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, canned tomatoes, onions, green onions, etc. Whatever you feel like.)

That's all. This is one of the easiest meals in the world actually. My mom makes boboli pizza every Friday night, that's EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT! Imagine how much this simplifies the weekly grocery list and the weekly cooking anxiety. And all it takes is a bunch of yummy veggies and some pre-cooked wheat berries. Anyway, I make pizza about once a month, but for some reason I don't have a pic-so I guess you'll have to imagine what it looks like in all of it's simplicity too!

The second dish you can sneak wheat into is pie. Let's just begin with the crust and I'll throw out some things I've tried. Crust itself can require prohibitive effort, or it can be a matter of no effort at all in exchange for a few dollars. Here are some options:

1. Make your own crust. I'm sure there are recipes online, some of which require food processors, but I'm not going to link you to them because I don't believe in making crust.
2. Buy a crust mix. I do this at Winco where they have bulk crust mix (Winco is only available as the name suggests in Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California and Oregon-once again-sorry Utahns) for something like 50 cents a pound. That is delightful! A pound of crust for 50 cents! And it is at least as delicious as I could possibly make myself (knowing my ability to wreck stuff-it is likely far more delicious than a me-made crust). Crust mix also comes in boxes that are surely sold at all grocery stores, even in Utah. You just add a few tablespoons of water and mix it with a fork, then roll it out and cut it into a pie shape. Could it be simpler?
3. Yes. Buy a pre-made crust. This will cost (at Winco) up to $2.77, but is more delicious (probably at least a little less healthy) and is the simplest of them all. I use Pillsbury.
   

Now, for the filling. Here are two ideas:

1. We had some leftover mashed potatoes from Sunday dinner. Now these potatoes had been mashed on Saturday night, and it was already Tuesday. They were rock solid. So I used a pre-made crust and put one layer of crumbly crusty potatoes on the bottom with a bit of Worcestershire sauce (but now that I think about it, BBQ sauce would have been another excellent choice) and on top of that was a layer of frozen (defrosted) mixed veggies, and wheat berries. Then another layer of potatoes with sauce, and repeat veggies and wheat. Then another crust on top with air vents, bake for 40-50 minutes and we came out with the pie in the picture at the beginning of this post (notice the layers). Quite good, and doubtless better if fresh mashed potatoes had been used, but chopped baked potatoes would have been delicious too, (see phyllo strudel post).
   
2. Garth's parents have an apple tree and therefore, too many apples for two people to eat. So while we were in Corvallis two weeks ago, we stocked up. Unfortunately we were also unable to eat the apples faster than they were rotting, so I salvaged as many as I could by chopping them all up and making apple pie filling. Now there are exactly one zillion apple pie recipes but they almost all use the same ingredients (I used the one on the Pillsbury box) namely, 6 apples per pie, spices, brown sugar, flour, lemon juice and butter, or "butter." I added a handful of wheat berries to each batch of apple pie filling and froze them. Now I have already had three opportunities to take the frozen crust and filling out of the freezer and throw an apple pie together in 5 minutes (plus the hour to bake). AND, this pie is not only filled with delectable and nutritious fruit, but also you get a handful of wheat berries too. (I actually used Kamut, an ancient Egyptian wheat buried with a mummy, that's appetizing!)

More from Squash, Get the Most Out of Your Squash

This is an excellent way to squash (chuckle) every food group into one dish. I like to serve it to guests because after trying it out once, it's really easy and then all you have to make is a dessert- (which is the pear strudel I told you guys I was going to try-I'll put it up later).
You need:

• two acorn squash, cut in half, cut sides brushed with butter and sprinkled with brown "sugar"
• a handful of raisins or currants soaked in apple juice.
• one sour apple chopped
  
• a handful of chopped green onions
• one half of a red pepper chopped
• cinnamon
• "butter"
• a handful of slightly broken cashews (hit the bag with the back of a spoon a few times)
  
• one cup vegetable stock
• one half cup millet
• salt and pepper

1. Bake the squash according to the instructions on the last squash post.
   
2. While you're baking the squash, put the onions and two table spoons of "butter" in a large saucepan on medium heat for about two minutes.
3. Add the millet and stir until its all coated with "butter."
4. Add the apple, the raisins, and the bell pepper and a couple of shakes of cinnamon.
   
5. Add the stock and cover the pan, reduce heat to low.
6. Cook on low for 20 minutes and then remove from heat and let stand for 10 minutes with the cover on.
   
7. Add the cashews and a few shakes each salt and pepper.
   
8. Spoon the mixture into the fully baked squash shells (that you put in the oven before you started chopping-or about an hour earlier.
   
9. Serve. (or you can cook the millet the night before and then bake it inside the squash for the last 15 minutes)

Like I say-this dish gets easier and easier the more times you make it-and it's really filling. Remember to make the most out of your squash.
P.S. Hey you aspiring quilters-check out the product from a quilter with no experience whatsoever.

Nuts and Squash (sounds like spam)

Sorry it's been a few weeks since I've added anything here, I've been busy at work and haven't been cooking as much. Today I just want to add this fun recipe for pecans and walnuts that you can add to green salads, desserts, apple salads, trail mix, etc. Pecans and walnuts are quite expensive (but less so at WinCo Foods- sorry Utahns-where you can buy them bulk) and Dr. Mirkin (check out his excellent Good Foods Book in which he teaches all about eating whole grains) recommends eating them in moderation although they are an excellent source of vitamins, minerals and protein. This recipe is for spicy pecans, but you can alter the Cayenne to taste.

• 1 cup whole pecans or walnuts

• 1/3 cup brown sugar (I use SugarTwin)

• 2 Tablespoons water

• two shakes cayenne pepper

Bake on a cookie sheet or pie tin at 300 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

I'm pretty sure you've seen pecans in salad before, but just in case I added the picture.

Moving on to the squash part of this post, one other great way to use these nuts is on top of baked acorn squash. If you've never baked acorn squash before it is a very tasty yellow (on the inside) veggie, and is also good mashed like yams (as Jessica taught me in Hong Kong). There are baking instructions on the squash label (that is, the little sticker on the rind-think apples) when you buy it at the grocery store, but to eat it with nuts:

1. Cut the squash in half and slice off a small piece of rind so that it will sit cut side up in a baking dish.
   
2. Brush the cut sides with melted "butter" and stick a fork in it to make vents all over the cut surface.
   
3. Bake for 40 minutes at 400 degrees.
4. Pour the unbaked pecan/walnut mix on top of the squash "bowls" drizzling some of the sugar water around the rims.
   
5. Bake for another 15 to 20 minutes or until the squash is soft all the way through (use a fork to find out).
   
6. Eat with with a spoon, it is really delicious.
   

Well, that's all for today friends. I have a few more recipes on the docket this week so stay tuned!

Polenta

Polenta is easy, and it's good because it's made out of the same stuff as cornbread: cornmeal. You can buy it dry labeled as "polenta" or just as plain yellow cornmeal. You can also buy it pre-cooked, and refrigerated- which you can take home and slice into patties and fry in olive oil- which is good- but you can do that yourself at home for a few dollars cheaper, and without extra labor.

• 1 cup cornmeal
• 3 cups water
• a couple of teaspoons of salt or seasoning salt
• 3 tablespoons Smart Balance "butter"
• a handful of frozen corn
• pasta sauce or pico de gallo
  

1. Boil the water in a saucepan.
2. Add the polenta and salt.
3. Reduce heat and cook for about 15 minutes or until thick (think about the same consistency as oatmeal).
4. Add frozen corn and "butter" in the last few minutes before turning off burner.
5. Spoon into bowl(s) and top with pico de gallo or pizza sauce.
   

I like pico de gallo on polenta, but Garth doesn't like to go that spicy, so sometimes while the polenta is cooking, I throw an 8oz can of diced tomatoes, the same amount of fresh sliced mushrooms, half an onion chopped and some Italian spices in a frying pan and let that all simmer while the polenta is cooking. Then I put all of that over spaghetti sauce on the polenta after it's ready. Basically, the polenta flavor is very versatile, so whatever sauce sounds good-give it a try because it probably will be.

An alternative preparation is to boil the polenta as above omitting adding the frozen corn, but when it's done, instead of eating it, put it in a bread pan in the fridge overnight. The next day, turn the bread pan upside down on a cutting board to get the polenta out. Slice the loaf into 1/2 inch slices and then cut those into 2 inch squares. Fry the squares in olive oil and serve with the same sauces as above. This is for when you don't feel like eating mush. Polenta is not made out of whole grains, it's made out of ground up grains (which is a difference that you slowly start to notice)- so it doesn't have quite as many benefits. I've never tried adding wheat berries to polenta but I think it would be a really good vehicle for getting the wheatberries into a day's diet if someone else wants to try it. No matter what, it is really good for variety and it's a no-brain recipe, so I cook it maybe once a month. Plus it's pretty.