Veggie Scraps Pasta Sauce

Basically Free Pasta Sauce

--or--

Making Something From Nothing

-or--

You can eat that?

I just couldn't decide what to call this post. 

The very last thing I did with my week of roasted vegetables was to make a sauce out of the scraps. In An Everlasting Meal, she calls it a pesto, but I didn't think it was quite tangy enough to fit the connotation of a pesto.

It is indeed a delicious sauce, and it is indeed made from scraps. The parts of the vegetable that I have always thrown away became the basis for this sauce, and therefore the inspiration for dinner. 

As I prepped my vegetables, I kept aside those things I ordinarily toss in the compost bin. The leaves from the broccoli and cauliflower, the cauliflower core, the tough ends of the broccoli stalks, the chard stems, and the tiny little cores from the brussels sprouts all went into my cooking pot.

I chopped everything into smallish cubes and put them in a pot, just barely covered with water. To that, I added a few whole garlic cloves and a tiny little bit of salt.

Bring it to just under a boil, and let it simmer a good long time, until everything is tender enough to easily smash with a fork. This takes a good half hour at least, so it is a good thing to do while you are cooking something else. I let this pot simmer the same evening I was making the risotto. The cooked veggies will then keep in the fridge another couple of days, so you can be making two dinners at once!

Once everything is cooked through, puree it all in a blender with a good dose of olive oil and a handful of parmesan cheese. If it needs more water, pour it in a quarter cup at a time, and keep it pureeing until it is a nice, thick, pale-green sauce. Season it with salt and pepper and whirl it one more time.

That's it!

Serve it over pasta, and wait for comments like I got:

"Mom, I usually don't like tortellini at all, but this is really good!"

--and--

"Yum! Can I have seconds?"

That, my friends, is turning trash into a treasure.

greens gratin

I finished off my week of following Tamar Adler's advice from The Everlasting Meal, and the last two dishes I made with her guidance and my roast vegetables were a gratin with the sautéed greens, and a pasta sauce with the odds and ends left over from chopping the raw veggies back on the first day of vegetable prep work.

Both were, once again, delicious.

The gratin was a very basic dish. Other than needing to be able to put it in the oven an hour before eating, there isn't much to do.

First, make a basic white sauce.

Melt a tablespoon of butter in a medium pan over medium heat. Add a tablespoon of flour and stir together. Add a cup of milk and stir and simmer until it thickens up a bit. To this, add a small handful of parmesan cheese and season with salt and pepper.

Combine the cup of cooked white sauce with a cup of cooked greens. Spread it into a small buttered baking dish, and bake for about an hour at 350.

It came out creamy and sweet and delicious! It was a great side for chicken breasts.

Sandwiches made with sautéed greens, mozzarella,and garlic

This was the second meal I made out of the pile of veggies I roasted and sautéed earlier this week.

I am telling you, I love each meal more than the last one!

These sandwiches took only minutes to prepare, but they were so very flavorful and scrumptious, that I am already wishing I could have another one tonight!

First, make some more vinegared onions (thinly slice some red onion or shallot, sprinkle vinegar over them, and let them sit for 10 minutes or so to soften). When the onions are ready, take some good crusty bread (I bought a fresh baguette), and slice thickly. Take out 2-3 cloves of the garlic you roasted with the vegetables, and squeeze the mushy garlic out of its skin. Spread this over one side of the bread. Then spread a thick layer of the sautéed greens (mine were chard, green garlic, and beet greens). Finally, top each with a slice of mozzarella cheese and close the sandwich.

Place the sandwiches on a baking sheet, and place another baking sheet on top. If your baking sheets are not heavy, you may want to put another pan on top of that, to weigh it down.

Place the smooched sandwiches in the broiler for just a few minutes... until the sandwich is a bit warm and toasty and the cheese just on the verge of melting.

Enjoy one of the tastiest, easiest meals ever!

roasting and sautéing enough veggies for a week

Come along with me.

I am going on a little bit of an eating journey this week.

I have been reading The Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. It's an amazing book. As I read, and thought, and made my plans for my vegetables this week, my mouth was literally watering. Let's hope things turn out in reality the way they are in my mind. I am only part way through it, but I had to stop right there in the middle of chapter three and do what she told me to do.

If you love food, and cooking food, and eating food, this book is amazing. I am not going to say it is light reading or a page turner by any means. It is also not a cookbook that you can leaf through during spare minutes or while making your shopping list.

But, it you like to enjoy great writing and amazing descriptions of food and its preparation, this book is fabulous.

Her entire premise is that we ought to stop burying ourselves in recipes. We can stop having to go through a process of researching, reading, shopping, and prepping every time we want to put dinner on the table. Although the book is all about how to cook food and enjoy amazing meals, there are actually very few recipes, and very very few measurements. Rather, she describes what type of ingredients to use, and what ways they can be prepared. By letting each thing you cook build on the last thing you cooked, you don't ever have to find yourself standing in the kitchen at 5:00, wondering what the heck is for dinner. Tonight's dinner can most likely be built upon last night's dinner, and is therefore mostly decided upon and already partially done.

At any rate, in chapter three, she describes her process for shopping for a bunch of vegetables, roasting and sautéing them all on one day, and then having prepared ingredients for a week's worth of meals. According to Tamar Adler, they will be as easy and versatile to use as a can of beans, once the initial cooking is completed.

Most importantly, though, the ways she describes the meals she makes out of the vegetables... soups, salads, risotto, curries, pestos, and sandwiches, made me wish I were sitting at her kitchen table. Right. Now.

Well, since I have a beautiful box of vegetables sitting here that I picked up from Abundant Harvest Organics, I decided to give it a go.

I followed her instructions to roast the hefty veggies and sauté the greens on the first day.

Tamar Adler lists many many different veggies to roast, and I chose to use everything in my box that seemed like a "cookable" vegetable (All that was left, besides fruit, was cilantro, napa cabbage, a salad green called mache, and arugula).

I had broccoli, potatoes, cauliflower, beets, brussels sprouts, turnips, and carrots to roast. I also sautéed chard, green garlic, and the greens from the beets.

I thought I was doing well with making candy out of orange peels and stock out of onion skins, but according to Tamar I am not making the most of my vegetables! She suggests saving the core and leaves of the cauliflower, the tough stems of the broccoli, the core of a cabbage or the stems of chard. These can be made into a pesto, and I will give you that recipe when I try it later this week. For now, I have dutifully set them aside and I'm saving them for their ultimate fate.

I began with this amazing pile of gorgeous, fresh vegetables:

I chopped and roasted two pans that held broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts, with some whole cloves of garlic.

I also chopped and roasted two pans with the root vegetables: carrots, potatoes, and turnips.

Finally, I roasted a pan of beets. These need to be tented and cooked with a bit of water so they steam all the way through while they roast.

Preheat the oven to 450. Scrub, peel, and chop all the vegetables except the beets.

Spread each set of vegetables out on a baking sheet. The sheet can be pretty full, but they need to be in a single layer, with a bit of space between them. Toss them with some olive oil, until they are coated, and sprinkle with salt. Pop them in the oven, and after a half an hour, start checking them to see if they are done enough to make you want to keep eating. Be sure and tuck a few whole cloves (unpeeled) of garlic onto each baking sheet. Apparently we will use this later this week.

This is romanesco cauliflower. More on that to come! It's wild!

The beets are a bit different. Cut the greens and stems off and place them in a sink full of water, to use later with the other greens. Tuck the beets, tails intact, into a baking pan, and wash them with hard running water. Tip the pan while you wash them, and allow the water to run out. Once the waste water is clear, the beets are clean enough to cook. (Removing the skins after roasting them also removes any little bits of dirt that are left). Leave a little bit of the water in the pan, drizzle with olive oil, and and cover the pan tightly with foil. Place this in the oven.

Now that all of your veggies are cooking, you may want to check them once in a while. If they are getting too brown but not soft enough, scoot them all together to build up steam. If they are getting soft but not browned, spread them out.

The majority of the veggies should be done in half an hour to 45 minutes. She explains that they need to roast until they are "completely, completely tender." Rather than giving a specified time to let them cook, she says to check after a half an hour, "Test the doneness of...vegetables by tasting them. When you don't wonder, but reach to eat another, they're done."

And boy oh boy was she right about that. I couldn't stop myself from reaching again and again to munch on the first pan of veggies to come out of the oven while I continued prepping and cooking other things.

The beets, though, are going to need a bit longer, and won't necessarily all be done at the same time. Check the beets by lifting the foil, and trying to pierce each one with a knife. If it goes in easily, pull the beet out of the oven. If not, let it keep cooking. Tamar says "If you're not sure if they're done, they're not." Be sure to re-cover the pan tightly after checking and removing any beets, so they can continue to steam. After they are done and cooled, remove the skin by rubbing it off with your fingers. Cut them into slices or wedges and then sprinkle them with red wine vinegar and salt.

Once a pan of veggies finished and there is a little space in the oven, Tamar recommends placing a pan of nuts in. Let the walnuts or pecans cook for about 10 minutes, and they will come out toasted and perfect for topping a salad.

After all of the roasting vegetables are in the oven (and some may be back out again by this point!), it's time to take care of the greens. Add any greens you have to the beet greens that are soaking in the sink. In my case it was green garlic and chard leaves (I cut the chard stems off and added them to my collection of cauliflower leaves and core and broccoli stems that I am saving for later). Swish them all around in the sink to get them clean, and then pull them out, chop them roughly, and sauté them in a little olive oil and a tiny bit of salt. Keep most of the water that clings to them after washing... they are supposed to steam more than they sauté. If they dry out while they cook, add a tablespoon of water every once in a while. Cook them in as many batches as you need to. I did two frying pans full. Tamar recommends adding chopped garlic in with the greens, but since I had green garlic I didn't want to overdo it. These are done when they are completely wilted and can be easily cut with a knife.

After I spent a couple of hours in the kitchen, I had changed that beautiful pile of veggies into these containers of prepared ingredients:

Come back tomorrow and I'll share the first meal I made out of them! It couldn't have been simpler, and it was one of the most delicious meals I have eaten in a long long time.

Pretty sneaky, sis.

As you may or may not recall, last week I was complaining musing about trying to get my kids to eat enough any amount whatsoever of vegetables.

I decided, last night, to revisit the concept of hiding the vegetables in a pureed form. It really does work. The pasta I concocted last night contained three tomatoes and a large bunch of chard, and no one was any the wiser. They all ate their fill of it and said they liked it! I am not sure how much of a serving of veggies this counts as, exactly, but it is certainly a step in the right direction!

Of course, I also set out a dish of carrot sticks ... I know they would be suspicious that the veggies were in the pasta if they didn't see them next to the pasta. I also garnished it with a sprig of basil. They somehow believe that basil is flavoring, while chard is a veggie. Basil in sauce is acceptable; chard in sauce is just mom being mean, again. I knew the basil would be a perfect foil to account for the slightly greenish-brownish coloring of the chard sauce.

I feel so sneaky.

This dish was very simple, used a minimal number of pots and pans, was quick and healthy. What more can I ask of a weeknight meal?

For your healthy pleasure, past with chard-tomato-cream sauce:

3 medium tomatoes, cut into large chunks
1 bunch swiss chard
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
1 Tbsp. dried Italian herbs
1 pound pasta
1/4 cup heavy cream

Bring a large pot of water to a boil.

Cut up the chard into large pieces, and when the water is boiling, add the chard. Let it cook for a few minutes (until the chard is getting wilty), and then lift out the chard with a pair of tongs. Also remove a half cup of the boiling water.

Begin to cook the pasta in the boiling chard water. Cook it for a couple minutes less than the recommended time (it will continue to cook later with the sauce).

Place the cooked chard in a blender with the tomatoes, diced garlic, herbs, parmesan cheese and cooking water. Puree until it is smooth.

Once the pasta is done, drain it and toss it in the pot with the chard-tomato sauce. Add the cream and toss until combined. Let it all cook over low heat for a few minutes until the sauce thickens a bit.

Mangia!

desperate times...

Oh yes, I did.

My husband was working late, and I didn't feel like bothering to make a big dinner.

Which is not to say that I was about to let the kids off veggie-free. After all, that box of veggies keeps coming at me. At mach speed.

May I present to you:


Chard Pizza.

Actually, it was pretty dang good! Everyone had seconds.

It would be better if you could put a candle in it.

It is a friend's birthday today, and I wasn't sure what to give the girl who wants nothing. I settled on a jar of strawberry jam and a night off of cooking for her. In order to give her family a dinner that would travel well, I went with my old standard: pasta. In order to give her family a dinner that would be tasty and fresh, I incorporated some of this week's fabulous fresh organic produce.

Now I know that some of you are thinking that I was just trying to get rid of some of my veggies. A few weeks ago, you would have been so right. But I actually have gotten to the point where I use up almost all of it myself. This week, for example, all I have left is some lettuce, an onion, and a few potatoes. I can't say whether the kids have gotten better at eating their veggies, but I sure have. So when I made this dinner, it was out of thought for my friend. On her birthday.

But while we're on the topic, anyone want some slightly old potatoes?

This pasta dish is loosely based on a recipe from the New York Times a couple of years ago. I made a few distinct changes to it, though, so I'll give you my version. Just remember that I was making enough for two families (mine and hers) so you may want to cut everything in half.

Buttermilk Pasta with Cauliflower and Chard

1 head cauliflower
1 bunch chard, leaves and stems separated
2 pounds penne or other similar pasta
1/2 cup olive oil
2 Tablespoons minced garlic
1/2 cup plain bread crumbs
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup buttermilk

First, start a pot of salted water to boiling. Wash your chard and cauliflower. Cut the cauliflower into large florets, and cut the stems of the chard into 2 inch lengths.

Boil the vegetables until they are soft but not mushy.

Meanwhile, heat the oil over low to medium heat in a large skillet, and add the garlic. Cook until the garlic is golden. Add the chard leaves to the skillet, and sauté until the chard is wilty. 

When the cauliflower and stems are done, remove them from the boiling water with a handled sieve or a slotted spoon. Put the pasta into the boiling water and cook until it is about 2-3 minutes away from being completely done. Drain the pasta.

Set the vegetables aside until they are cool enough to handle, and then chop them up into smallish pieces.

Mix the cauliflower and stems into the skillet of leaves and garlic. Add the bread crumbs, and stir to mix thoroughly. 

When the pasta is done, combine the pasta and the veggie mixture. Add the buttermilk and salt and pepper to taste.

Top with parmesan cheese and serve with a simple salad.

Did I mention I used to be a teacher?

Hello class, we are having a pop quiz today. Clear your desk of everything but a pencil. Keep your eyes on your own paper, and no talking, please.

There is just one question, and it's fill-in-the-blank.

For a delicious side dish, put some _____________ in a pan, and sauté it with olive oil, garlic, and parmesan cheese.

Finished?

You get an A.

Because you can fill that blank in with anything (spinach, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, roof shingles, crazy Aunt Tilly), and you will indeed get a delicious side dish. Studies have shown this to be true.

Now stay with me (we'll get back to your quiz results in a moment). This week, one of the veggies that made me feel a little nervous was the chard. Not really knowing what to do with chard, I went with the usual plan of attack: whine about it with anyone who would listen. They all said "Sauté it with olive oil, garlic, and parmesan cheese." Well, okay, let me be truthful for a moment here. Not everyone said that. Some people said,"Sauté it with butter, garlic, and parmesan cheese."

But here is the thing. If you have to take this vegetable, and sauté it with oil, garlic, and parmesan cheese, just to make it palatable, that doesn't really make it any better than roof shingles. Studies have shown. It just doesn't make any sense to cook it at all. You might as well just saute garlic and parmesan cheese with no chard, and eat that. I can only imagine it would be better.

But, here I was with a big, beautiful bunch of chard, a family to feed, and not a whole lot of time to cook dinner.

So, I put the chard in a pan and sauteed it with garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan.

And it was delicious!

I have to warn you, though. Even though your original bunch looks like enough chard to feed all of the vegetarians at UC Berkely, it will cook down into a teeny tiny little bit. As in, such a small amount that I didn't even share with the kids. Nope, I kept it all to myself.