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On a recent trip that took us through Scranton, PA, I had an awesome dish that the menu called “Lebanese Fried Rice.” It was brown rice, chickpeas, walnuts, and some vegetables, and it was a perfect lunch. I loved it, and thought that it would make a simple, hearty side dish for the blog, though I thought I’d alter it a bit for my own tastes.
So here’s my take on that dish. It would be a great side dish with any protein or with a salad. The original salad had red bell peppers in it, but I’m not a big fan of them, so I left them out here. This dish does contain walnuts. You could leave them out, but it is a major flavor component and the dish would be a bit bland without.
Mediterranean Fried Rice
Mediterranean Fried Rice
1 cup walnut pieces
1 bunch of scallions, sliced finely, green and whites separated
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 can or 16 oz. cooked chickpeas
3 cups cooked and cooled brown rice (I use brown jasmine rice for almost everything)
1/4-1/2 teaspoon salt, to taste
2 cups chopped spinach
In a skillet over medium heat, toast the walnuts. Don’t leave them — I burn so many nuts this way. Wait until they become fragrant, and then remove them from the heat. Reserve to the side.
Add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and the white parts of the scallions to the skillet. Cook over medium heat about 2 minutes. Then add the chickpeas, stirring well.
Finally, add the rice. Stir well and add another 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil — you want a light coat of olive oil over the whole dish.
Cook for 3-5 minutes, until the rice is heated through. Add the rest of the scallions* and the spinach, along with the salt. Stir well, and cook until the spinach is wilted.
Serve topped with the walnuts.
*If you like a stronger onion flavor, reserve half the green bits to add raw, when serving.
Okay, I know I already did a bunch of tater tots, but I had to do a chili head version. Seriously, you expected that I’d just leave it alone? I often use Sriracha (my homemade version, as I no longer can use the commercial version, sob, sob, although mine’s pretty close) instead of ketchup on fries or home fries. So why not put the Sriracha straight into the tater tot? It’s sweet and hot and yummy all at the same time. I didn’t take as many pictures this time, because there’s two other tater tot posts out there you can look at (Roasted Garlic and Pesto DIY Tater Tots and Chimichurri Spiced DIY Tater Tots) for reference, and mostly because I forgot. Oops.
Sriracha Sweet Potato DIY Tater Tots
3 large or 4 medium sweet potatoes
2-4 Tablespoon(s) of Sriracha, depending on your spice tolerance (use a safe version for you, I ferment my own at home, since I don’t have a safe version)
2 Tablespoons of olive oil, or other safe for you oil, and some to put in a oil mister
1/4 teaspoon of salt
Preheat your oven to 400°F. Peel and wash your potatoes. Place the potatoes on a small baking sheet. Bake the potatoes for about an hour.
When the potatoes are ready to come out of the oven, remove the potatoes and turn the temperature on the oven to 425°F. If you’re using a large hand grater, you need to wait until the potatoes are cool so you don’t burn your fingers. Since I was using the grating blade on my food processor to grate the potatoes, I grated them while they were still hot. I sliced them lengthwise just enough to get them in the food processor, and grated them up.
Grated potatoes after baking
Some of the grated pieces may be too long, Feel free to chop them up a bit either with a knife or a potato masher. When the pieces are small enough for you, mix the Sriracha, salt, and the 2 Tablespoons of your safe oil into the potatoes until they are well combined.
Spray your baking sheet with your safe oil in a mister. I used a small cookie scoop to portion out the tater tots, but you could use two teaspoons to drop the mixture on your baking sheet.
Use your oil mister to mist the top of the tater tots, and place the baking sheet in the oven for 25-30 minutes. Use some tongs or a spatula to turn them over, and then bake them for another 25-30 minutes. You want to watch them closely, as you’ll notice mine were a little on the brown side.
Sriracha Sweet Potato DIY Tater Tots
Take them out of the oven, salt to taste, and enjoy!
This is one of those areas where Denise and I diverge — neither of us is allergic to fish, but I love tuna, and she hates it. Conversely, she loves haddock, and I, eh, can’t get excited about it. If you’re pro-tuna, this might be your recipe.
The first time I had tuna — and liked it — was when I was in Greece in college. The whole experience was amazing, and so was the food. I had a simple salad one day, when I wasn’t feeling great and wanted something light. It was just lettuce, with canned tuna in oil and a few tomatoes. So simple, but so amazing. It was such a difference from the mayo-covered tuna salads I’d seen growing up, and it opened me up to tuna.
I first tried fresh tuna in sushi, and it’s still one of my favorites. But ordering tuna at a restaurant made me consider making it at home. Once you get more used to not cooking it all the way through (that dries it out!), it is SUPER EASY and seems pretty fancy.
This dish actually came out of leftover seared tuna. Normally, I make tuna for just me, as an occasional indulgence. But my grocery store was having a sale on some great-looking frozen tuna steaks, so I thought I’d give it a whirl as a mid-week dinner for me and my boyfriend. I cooked the fish and served it with steamed asparagus and bamboo rice — it was quick and easy, even though I got home late that night.
I overshot the amount of fish I needed, though. I’ve never had a leftover tuna steak before! Turns out, fresh tuna also makes an amazing salad. THAT is the recipe you’re getting today. But feel free to just buy too much fish for one dinner and make this salad the next day. Just scale the marinade up.
This recipe serves ONE. Scale up appropriately.
Seared Tuna Salad with unmixed dressing
Tuna Steak Salad
1/3 lb. tuna steak, about 1 1/4 inch thick (the exact amount of tuna is up to you! But if your steak is substantially thicker or thinner, adjust your cooking time accordingly)
Marinade
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar (look for unsweetened, unseasoned, for the most flexible version)
If your fish is vacuum-packed, slit the packaging before you defrost it (put it on a plate first, of course) in the fridge. I usually take it out the night before and give it the night and day in the fridge.
Marinate the fish for about 20 minutes, 10 minutes per side. If I’m serving the fish with rice, this is about the perfect cooking time for rice. The fish takes about 5 minutes to cook, so get everything else ready before you start the cooking.
The salad is easy — steam the asparagus, heap it and the greens on a plate. Make the dressing by mixing all the ingredients together with a whisk or fork — taste and adjust the seasonings as needed. If you are using salted pumpkin seeds, you won’t need more salt. If you aren’t, you might want a dash of salt at the end.
Heat a well-seasoned cast iron skillet over medium-high heat until it is good and hot. You are going to sear the fish quickly, so make sure the pan is hot. If it’s a well-seasoned pan, you won’t need to add more oil.
Sear the first side of the fish. For cooking steaks an inch and a quarter thick, 3 minutes the first side and 2 minutes the second should be about perfect. Baste it with the marinade right before you flip it. Because tuna changes color as it cooks, you can watch the fish to get the timing correct — watch the cooking up the side and flip it when it’s cooked about 1/4 of the way through. Then take it off when it’s 1/4 of the way through the other side. The center of your fish should be warm, but pink. That is perfect tuna.
Add the tuna to the salad, sprinkle the salad with pumpkin seeds, and drizzle on the dressing.
In attempting to use up my glut of apples (they are finally all gone!!!), I wanted to do a chutney of some sort. But most of the recipes call for raisins, and at the moment, I don’t have safe raisins I can buy at the store because most of them have sunflower oil all over them. I thought about it, but I drew the line at dehydrating some grapes so I could have chutney. So I considered other options. I found an apple habanero hot sauce recipe, but I also wanted another flavor in it. I had some cranberries in the freezer, so I decided they’d be good. This hot sauce is lovely, but really vicious. I used six fairly large habanero peppers, but you can switch them out for milder peppers or cut the number back a bit. This recipe makes about 3 cups, so depending on your hot sauce usage, you may want to cut the recipe in half.
Apple Cranberry Habanero Hot Sauce
2 large cloves of garlic, diced
1 shallot or small onion, diced
1 Tablespoon of fresh ginger, diced
3 cups of peeled, cored and chopped apples (I used a mix from my apple trees out back, mostly McIntosh and Galas.)
1 cup of fresh or frozen cranberries
1 cup of apple cider vinegar (I used Bragg’s as it is generally safest for people with corn allergies)
2/3 cup of white sugar
2/3 cup of brown sugar
6 large habanero peppers, destemmed, deseeded and chopped
2 teaspoons of salt
a small amount of safe for you oil to cook with (I used grape seed oil)
In a large saucepan, over medium high heat, sauté the garlic, shallot/onion, and in ginger in your safe oil until soft.
Garlic, ginger, and onion cooked until soft
Add the apples and cranberries and cook for another 5 minutes.
Add the vinegar and bring the mixture to a boil. Then add the white and brown sugar and stir until it dissolves.
Add the habanero peppers and simmer over medium low heat for 30 minutes.
Cooking complete
Put the mixture in a blender and puree it until smooth.
Apple Cranberry Habanero Hot Sauce pureed until smooth
At this point, you can use the sauce as it is, or you can strain it to remove any seeds, pepper and cranberry skins that haven’t been broken down. You may need to use a spatula to press the sauce through the strainer.
Straining Apple Cranberry Habanero Hot SauceStraining Apple Cranberry Habanero Hot Sauce
Refrigerate the sauce and use often. You can also freeze it if you think you won’t use it soon enough.
I don’t know if we’ve ever mentioned it, but Denise and I do have a plan for the blog. We have a calendar and recipes we’re working on, and sometimes what is on the calendar finds its way on to the blog on the day we scheduled it. Often, though, we’re working on things and they just aren’t ready to go when the calendar says. We have some exciting things in the works right now, but this week, you’re getting a quick, simple, but amazing weeknight dinner.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had found, tried, and lovedthis stovetop-to-oven method of cooking pork chops. I have messed with it a few times, and want to share my version of the recipe as I think it’s turned out great. These pork chops are juicy and flavorful, with an unusual (to me, at least) but subtle spice flavor to them. They are, even with the brining, a meal quick enough to make on a weeknight for dinner. And the meat is so juicy that they reheat well OR make a great sandwich the next day.
The spice blend in here is inspired by what I remember of a homemade chai recipe I made a few times years ago. It’s the reason I bought star anise in the first place. I never made chai with actual peppercorns, but this is a savory dish, so it suits — I’ve done this with regular and Sichuan peppercorns, and both work well.
Chai-spice brined pork chops
For brine:
1 cup boiling water
2 Tablespoons salt (I used kosher salt here)
2 whole star anise (or pieces to make up about 2 whole)
3 whole cardamom pods, smashed to open the pod (but not crush the seeds)
1 2-inch cinnamon stick
2 pinches whole cloves (about 6-8)
1 pinch whole peppercorns (about 4-6)
2 cups cold water
2 bone-in pork chops, about 3/4″ thick (I used center cut, as that’s what looked good)
Take the pork chops out of the fridge and let them rest at room temp while you make the brine. You will need a baking dish or something comparable to brine the chops. Lay them out in a single layer in the pan.
Put all the spices (salt through peppercorns) into a heat-safe container. I use a Pyrex measuring cup. Bring your water to a boil and pour 1 cup over all the spices and salt. Stir to dissolve the salt, and let it steep for 5 minutes. Add the two cups of cold water.
Pour the spice “tea” over the chops. You are aiming for room temperature brine, and your chops should be covered completely. Add more water to make this happen, if needed. Leave all the spices floating.
Let the chops brine for 30 minutes to an hour. According to the original recipe, you can brine them for up to four hours (in the fridge), but I’ve not tried this.
When your chops are brined, turn the oven up to 400ºF, with a cast iron skillet on the middle rack. When the oven is up to temperature, carefully remove the skillet and put it over medium-high heat on the stovetop.
Remove the chops from the brine and pat them dry. Season with salt and pepper — but remember the brine was salty, so don’t go overboard with the salt.
Carefully add the chops. Brown 3-5 minutes on one side, getting good browning, but not burning the chops. This may cause smoke, so be ready, but it’s worth the hassle.
Flip the chops and immediately put them in the pre-heated oven. Bake for 6-8 minutes, aiming for an internal temperature of about 142ºF. Remove them to rest for 5 minutes. You want your final temperature to be 145ºF, but remember that they keep cooking while resting, so don’t overshoot.
I served mine with simple boiled broccoli and sweet potatoes I’d thrown in the oven earlier to roast. If you want to do a side dish in the oven, consider turning it on and starting the side(s) while the pork chops brown. This is an excellent use of the brining time.
Enjoy the subtle spice flavors in your perfectly cooked pork chops.
You guys are noticing a trend, right? It’s apparently a bumper crop year for apples. When I was trying to figure out how to use up apples, my friend Erika sent me a link for this recipe for Mom’s Apple Cake from Smitten Kitchen. For obvious reasons, I had to change the original, and I tried making it more like an upside down cake. It took a couple of tries, but I have it where I like it now.
Apple Cake, Vegan and Gluten-Free
Apple mixture:
6 large apples or 7 medium apples (I used a mix from my apple trees out back, mostly McIntosh and Galas.)
1 Tablespoon of ground cinnamon
5 Tablespoons of brown sugar
Cake batter:
2 and 3/4 cups of all purpose gluten-free flour mix (I used Cara Reed’s mix from her blog, Fork and Beans)
1 Tablespoon of baking powder (For corn free baking powder you can use this recipe.)
1 teaspoon of salt
1 cup of safe for you oil (I used olive oil and grape seed oil, mostly because I ran out of olive oil and had to top it off with grape seed oil.)
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of brown sugar
1/4 cup of orange juice (I don’t have a safe orange juice so I squeezed mine myself.)
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract (Here’s a bunch of recipes for vanilla extract, make sure to use safe alcohol if corn or wheat are an issue for you. I used a vodka made only from potatoes, be careful as some vodkas may also use grain or corn.)
1/2 cup of applesauce (I used my home canned but use any safe applesauce you have.)
1/4 cup of aquafaba(The liquid from a can of garbanzo beans or chick peas. I used my home canned garbanzo bean liquid.)
1 Tablespoon of ground chia seed
Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease an 8 inch by 8 inch baking pan with some safe for you oil.
Peel, core and slice apples. Place them in a bowl and toss them with the 5 tablespoons of brown sugar and the cinnamon. Set the apple mixture aside for now.
Apple mixture
Stir gluten-free flour mix, baking powder and salt together in a bowl.
In a separate bowl, mix together the oil, orange juice, sugar, the remaining brown sugar, vanilla, applesauce, aquafaba and ground chia seed. I use a stand mixer with flat beater to do this.
Wet mixture
Once these ingredients are fully incorporated together, add the flour mixture slowly to your wet mixture, with the mixer speed on low. You could also mix this manually, but the stand mixer makes my life a lot easier.
Cake batter after mixing wet and dry ingredients
Pour half of the apple mixture into your greased baking pan, spreading them evenly across the bottom of the pan.
Pouring half apples in bottom of baking pan
Pour half of the cake batter over the apples, spreading it evenly across the pan.
First layer of batter over apples
Then pour the remaining apple mixture over the batter evenly.
Second layer of apples over first layer of batter
Cover the apple mixture with the remaining cake batter.
Second layer of batter over second layer of apples
Bake for about an hour and half or until a tooth pick comes out clean.
Apple Cake after baking
Cool in pan on wire rack for 5 minutes. Loosen edges around the pan with a butter knife, and then invert the baking pan onto platter. Don’t let it cool too long or it will stick and be harder to remove from the pan (which you can tell mine did because I got distracted.)
The problem with chocolate chip cookies? Everyone likes them differently. Some people like them soft, others chewy, some crunchy. This is why there are a billion recipes out there. And when your recipe no longer works for you, you might try 5 recipes and still be disappointed. Because “just like Mom made” may not be YOUR mom’s recipe. Or YOUR perfect recipe.
So I’ll tell you what I was aiming for in this recipe and you can decide if that’s what you’re looking for before you start measuring.
The Ryan perfect chocolate chip cookie should be crunchy on the edges, softer and puffier in the middle, but not underdone or actually soft. SoftER, but still with a good crumb. I believe my mother’s cookie recipe was an altered version of the classic Tollhouse recipe, tweaked until it was perfect for our family — or, rather, perfect for my dad. The man used to eat about a dozen cookies as they came out of the oven, usually burning his mouth at least a few times. These cookies are great for dunking, and another thing I learned from my dad (after “don’t eat hot cookies if you don’t want to burn yourself”) is that cookies dunked in coffee are an excellent morning treat. These don’t spread out as much as my mother’s did, but they do get the texture right.
Key to getting this texture is a trick I learned from my friend Corianne who runs a vegan bakery in Phoenix, Arizona: Treehouse. If you’re in Phoenix, check it out. Anyway, the trick is to freeze the cookie balls before baking. It adds another 30-45 minutes to the process but it is so worth it in terms of payoff.
Dough, Prep for Freezing, Prep for Baking.
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
Since I’ve fussed with this recipe more than almost any other recipe on this blog, I have some very specific notes on what has worked and what hasn’t.
The two major ingredients are measured by weight — I hope you have a kitchen scale if you’re trying to do gluten-free baking. It really is necessary, and you can get a decent one for under $20.
For ALL of your ingredients, I hope it goes without saying that you need to source what’s safe for you.
For “shortening,” I’ve used Spectrum shortening. Feel free to use a vegan shortening, vegan butter, or, if you aren’t vegan, another fat or shortening of your choice. I’ve done these with soy-free Earth Balance, but because if it’s really low melting point (it’s really soft at room temperature), the cookies are flatter and crispier, so reduce the baking time by a few minutes. Actually, if you mess with anything, watch your baking time. If you really like a buttery flavor, I’d suggest half margarine and half shortening as a compromise.
For the flour mix, I’m using Cara’s Gluten-Free Flour Mix. Still. Nothing else I’ve tried has worked as well. Sorghum flour is great — I am particular about sourcing, and I buy Authentic Foods sorghum flour and super-fine brown rice flour.
Sugar. I know my mom’s recipe used both white and brown sugars. I ran out of brown sugar while trying this recipe and subbed in the molasses and white sugar and I liked the flavor better, so I kept it.
Last, but not least, chocolate chips. I’ve used Enjoy Life chocolate chips for a while now, but I can never find regular-sized chips and don’t always want mini chips. I did use the mini-chips here, and I use a scant measurement of the mini chips so that they spread out better. I also recently discovered Equal Exchange chocolate chips and I’m a fan. I used this in a lot of the test versions of this recipe, but I’m out at the moment. As far as I know, neither of these brands is corn-safe, as corn is used the processing of the chips and generally isn’t on the label. If you have corn allergies and have a safe chocolate brand, tell us in the comments?
1 cup (or just under, if mini chips) chocolate chips
With a mixer, cream the shortening, sugar, and molasses. When it’s nice and creamy, add the aquafaba and the vanilla and mix well.
Separately, mix the flour, salt, soda, powder.
Add the flour mix to the shortening mix slowly, and mix well. The dough will be pretty stiff, pulling together and way from the sides of the bowl.
Mix in the chocolate chips by hand. I find a rubber or silicone spatula works best for this.
Now portion out the cookies on a tray lined with parchment or a silicone baking sheet and pop it in the freezer. Since I don’t have room in my freezer for two trays, I just put the cookie balls close together to freeze, and then space them out onto two trays for baking.
Pre-heat the oven to 375ºF.
When the cookies are frozen (30-45 minutes in my freezer), space them out to give about 2 inches of space around each cookie ball, on the lined baking sheet, and bake 15-20 minutes, until golden brown. Cool completely — I tend to just drag the liner from the tray to the rack and leave it. This is me being lazy, but it’s also a good way to deal with the fragility of gluten-free, vegan baked goods.
As I said a couple of weeks ago, I’m drowning in apples. In addition to all the apple canning projects I’ve been doing, I’m trying to cook with them too. So I came up with doing a pork loin with a rub using apple pie/mulled cider spices on a bed of onions and apples.
Autumn Spiced Pork Loin
4 pound whole pork loin
2 large or 3 medium onions, peeled and diced into 1/2 inch pieces
2 large or 3 medium apples, peeled, cored and diced into 1/2 inch pieces.
Small amount of safe for you oil to grease a 9 inch by 13 inch roasting pan with.
Rub for pork loin:
3 Tablespoons of brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon of sea salt
1/2 teaspoon of ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon of ground allspice
Preheat oven to 375°F. Use your safe oil to grease a roasting pan. Place ingredients for the rub (brown sugar, sea salt, black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice) in a small bowl and mix thoroughly with a fork.
Place diced onions and apples in the bottom of the roasting pan.
Apples and onions in roasting pan
Place pork loin on top of diced onions and apples.
Pork loin in roasting pan on apples and onions
Cover top of pork loin with spice rub. It’s okay if you get a bit on the apples and onions.
Pork loin with rub
Place the roasting pan in oven and cook until the internal temperature is at least 161°F. In order to get the correct internal temperature in my oven with a four pound pork loin, it took 1 hour and 45 minutes. If you have a much smaller pork loin, like the one to two pound pork loins you generally find at the grocery store, I’d start with 45 minutes and check the temperature at that time.
Once you’ve reached the correct internal temperature, remove the pork loin from the oven and let it rest for a few minutes.
Pork loin after roasting
Slice the pork loin and serve with some of the roasted apples and onions.
