I love this pasta recipe – the original, from Cook’s Country, includes a pound of sausage and uses chicken stock in lieu of vegetable stock. The kale reminds me of brewing beer — how long the hops boils informs what type of fragrance / flavour it imparts in the beer. Added at the beginning and boiled for near sixty minutes, you get bittering flavors without aromas. Added near the end of the boil, you get aroma without bitters. Here you add some kale at the beginning of your ‘boil’ and reserve some kale to remain a little firmer.

I use a mise en place technique when cooking this recipe. Watch any TV chef and they’ve got pre-measured and pre-chopped ingredients in little bowls. When the recipe step says to sauté the onions, they dump the ready-to-go onion bits into the pan. This process speeds up filming – they aren’t paying three dozen people per hour to record the chef chopping an onion, dicing carrots, and measuring out six cups only to edit those bits out later. But professional chefs use a similar technique to organize the cooking process. It also makes the cooking process more relaxed – you aren’t trying to chop your kale while stirring to keep the onions from scorching.

Putting each component into its own little bowl like a TV chef looks cool but it makes a LOT of extra dishes! I have little piles of chopped veggies around the cutting board. Large volume components that aren’t dangerous uncooked (i.e. the kale here), I put in one of the bowls I’ll use to serve dinner. If my meal has a few flakes of uncooked kale and Anya has a few extra shreds of Parmesan cheese … not the end of the world. Cannellini beans, drained and rinsed, remain in the strainer. Pasta bag opened but sitting upright on the counter.

Cook’s Country One Pot Sausage, Kale and White Bean – Vegetarian Modification

Ingredients

2 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 (15-oz) can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
2 roasted garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 teaspoon dried Italian spices
6 cups vegetable stock
16 oz orecchiette
12 oz chopped kale
1 oz Parmesan cheese
Salt & pepper

Method

1. Heat 1 Tablespoon of olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add onion and beans and cook until onion is lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Stir in garlic and oregano and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds.

2. Stir in broth and bring to a boil. Stir in pasta and half of the kale. Cover, reduce heat to medium, and simmer for 8 minutes. Add remaining kale on top of pasta, without stirring, and continue to cook until kale is just tender, about 4 more minutes.

3. Stir to incorporate kale into pasta. Simmer uncovered until most of the liquid has been absorbed and the pasta is cooked, 4 to 8 more minutes. Off the heat, stir in the cheese. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Broccoli cheddar soup is great on a cold winter day (especially when everyone’s coming down with a cold).

Ingredients:

1 medium sweet onion
3 cloves roasted garlic
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
pinch hot pepper flakes
3 cups stock
4 cups milk
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
2 cups broccoli florets
2 cups shredded broccoli stems
1 cup shredded carrots
14 ounces sharp cheddar cheese

Dice onion. Melt 1t butter in a cast iron dutch oven (big, heavy pot) using medium heat. Add onion and sauté until translucent. Mush the garlic and add to cooked onions. Sauté for 30 seconds, then remove from pan.

Add remaining butter to pan and melt, then stir in flour and hot pepper flakes. Stirring constantly, cook a medium roux. Slowly stir in stock and milk. Add salt, pepper, and paprika. Reduce heat to low and simmer for ten minutes.

Return onion and garlic to the pot, add broccoli and carrots. Simmer for twenty minutes – broccoli should be cooked but not mushy. Slowly stir in cheddar and allow to melt.

This is good served alone, but it is amazing served in bread bowls!

Random tip – roast garlic and caramelized onions keep well in the freezer. Whenever you have almost dodgy onions or garlic (especially if you grow your own and have a big harvest that cannot be used quickly enough), cooking and freezing them is a great way to avoid food waste and have these ingredients available quickly (i.e. you’re not surfing the internet for bad tips on how to speed up caramelizing onions).

For roasted garlic – when you’re cooking something else, drizzle olive oil on the garlic, wrap in aluminium foil, and toss it in the oven along with whatever else you are cooking. You can even turn the oven off and let the garlic continue to roast as the oven cools off.

Caramelized onions aren’t quite as easy – probably need to dirty a new pan (although I’ve cooked onions for a dish and re-used the pan to caramelize a bunch of onions) and they need to be sliced (a food slicer makes a quick job of this step). Plus you need to give them a stir every now and then. But if you’re already standing at the cooktop making dinner … watching an extra pan isn’t a big effort.

I hate sweetened coconut shreds. I don’t know if it is the propylene glycol or sodium metabisulfite, but there is an odd chemical taste to the stuff. When I happened across a recipe for making coconut shrimp at home, I was hesitant to try it. A lot of flavors get lost in cooking – I’ve tried unsuccessfully to get citrus hop flavours to come through in beer battered fried fish, and purposed a terrible tasting six-pack from Rogue for fish and chips because none of the off flavours are present in the finished meal. But I didn’t want to chance enduring that strange sweetened coconut taste. But you can make your own sweetened coconut shreds. I happen to have big flakes of dried coconut, so the first step is to run them through the food processor long enough to have small flakes. Measure the small flakes – I had two cups. Take an equal volume of water (here’s where the measurement gets funky – I used the dry measuring cup for the water so I don’t mean “1 cup of water per cup of small coconut flakes” as properly measured). Boil the water in a large saute pan, then add sugar until no more dissolves. Then stir in the coconut flakes. Reduce heat and simmer until the water is absorbed/evaporated. Voila, sweetened coconut bits. Edible ones!

Put a cup of flour in a bowl, and add about 1/4 t each of salt and pepper.

Put a few eggs into a second bowl, add a pinch of salt.

In a third bowl, mix a 1:1 ratio of panko bread crumbs and sweetened coconut flakes. Mix to combine.

Using thawed, peeled, deveined shrimp – lightly coat a shrimp in flour, then dip in egg. Place shrimp into the panko/coconut mixture, spoon mixture over shrimp, and lightly press. Gently remove shrimp from the pile and drop into hot oil to cook. Repeat, again and again and again 🙂 Remove when the shrimp float and have turned golden. (You may not want to use the largest shrimp you can find as the coating may get overcooked before the shrimp is done.)

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 large sweet onion, thinly sliced
• 2 medium cloves roasted garlic
• Pinch of red pepper flakes
• 1 (28-ounce) whole San Marzanos tomatoes
• 2 cups stock
• 1/3 cup heavy cream or 1/2 cup whole milk
• Freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Heat the olive oil over medium low heat, add a pinch of salt, then slowly add the onion slices (allowing time for the liquid to evaporate off between additions) and sauté until the onions begin to caramelize. Mush the roasted garlic and add to onion. Deglaze the pan with stock. Run tomatoes through a blender, then add to pot. Add red pepper flakes and black pepper. Reduce heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Stir in cream. Voila, tomato soup!

We served this with cheddar biscuits – whatever bread recipe you like, then add grated cheddar cheese. I used about a cup of cheddar for four cups of flour in the bread.