Happy Little Stove » Sides and Salads

Crab Salad w/ Corn and Chickpeas

Carrie — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:09:03 +0000

At hand: a can of Bumblebee canned crab, going spare.
Needed: a sandwich filling with versatility (since it was unlikely that we’d consume the entire can in one evening’s meal, between only my husband and me).
The solution:

This is another of those recipes that’s less “recipe” and more “procedure for combining.” Into a bowl containing the can of crab, drained, I put:

Corn, one ear’s worth, freshly removed from the cob
Chickpeas, one can’s worth, drained
Capers, about a tablespoon
Cilantro, fresh, about a quarter cup
Chopped roasted red peppers, miniature, about 4
Chopped pea shoots, about a cup’s worth

Thusly mixed, I dressed the bowl with about a tablespoon of good curry powder and three or four tablespoons’ worth of jalapeno mustard. Some extra kosher salt got added to taste after everything was gently folded together.

I put it onto flatbread, on a bed of fresh spinach. Delicious. Today, I added slices of fresh tomato from our farmers’ market. Even better!

Makes about six half-cup servings. Per serving: Fat: 1.2g; Carbohydrates: 17.4g; Calories: 118.0; Protein: 6.7g.

Bulgur and Veggies with ABU

Carrie — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:55:01 +0000

My parents are visiting starting tomorrow, and in anticipation of their visit, I may have gone a bit overboard in grocery shopping. My fridge’s produce bins were full to the point of overflowing. I needed to do something fast!
Yep, that’ll do the trick.

This “recipe” just barely deserves the title of such; it’s just an assortment of stuff thrown together, really. I read an article in “Runners’ World” a while back suggesting different techniques for putting together a “complete” salad, and I tucked the notion away for future use. Tonight seemed as good a night as any to try my hand.

The base: bulgur. What a nice little grain! It can be used interchangeably with couscous, but it’s got so much more going for it: B vitamins, iron, lots of fiber. Fewer calories and less fat than brown rice, and over four times the folate! What’s not to love? Oh, yeah, and then there’s the fact that cooking it really just entails adding hot water (an equal amount to the dry bulgur being prepared; I used a cup of each) and letting it stand for thirty minutes or so. (I added some vegan bouillon to my hot water.)

The veggies: in this case, chopped zucchini, carrots, fennel, and garlic, all sautéed in a tablespoon of olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. Also present are a handful of sun-dried tomatoes, a can of artichoke hearts, and a can of kidney beans (rinsed). After sautéing the first vegetables, I combined them all and set them to chill in the fridge alongside the soaked bulgur.

The sauce: for this, we can thank Emily, who fired the shot heard ’round the food-blogging world. I may be a Johnny-Come-Lately to the party, but I’m glad I showed up in time to hit the refreshment table! For my ABU, I combined half a cup of chunky almond butter with a full cup of unsweetened vanilla Almond Breeze. I didn’t add any sweetener, since I felt that the vanilla in the almond milk was just enough sweetness to match the vegetables in the rest of the dish.

I made all the parts earlier this afternoon, so by the time I came back to them, everything was nice and cold in the refrigerator. I layered them into my bowl, took a bite…and melted. Or reconstituted, perhaps; this is a perfect meal for a warm summer day, or perhaps merely one where you’ve managed to work up a sweat with cleaning in preparation for a parental visit!

Serves 6. Per serving – Fat: 14g; Carbohydrates: 46g; Calories: 364; Protein: 15g.

Roasted Portobellos

Carrie — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:17:09 +0000

While I was making the Broccoli Polenta, I was also thawing some pork chops, feeling very “meh” about them. In the meantime, though, I got an email from a friend who said she was in the process of making a tofu and shiitake stir-fry, and suddenly my mind flew to the baby bellos I had in my own possession. Now, those appealed much more! The Veganomicon to the rescue, yet again!

(Can I just take a moment here to say that I am completely won over by this cookbook? If you had been debating getting it, do it. Whether you’re vegetarian, vegan, or omnivorous, understand that when it comes to delicious vegetable presentations, vegetarians and vegans have it going on!)

I yanked the mushrooms from their box, scrubbed and stemmed them, and got set to prepare. Into a pie plate, I mixed the marinade: half a cup of “cooking wine” (pshhht; I used a good cabernet sauvignon, under the rule that you should never, ever cook with a wine that you wouldn’t drink), a tablespoon of olive oil (man, I’m almost out!), two tablespoons each of balsamic vinegar and tamari soy sauce (yes, you can tell the difference), and two minced cloves of garlic.

Is that not pretty?

The mushrooms went into the marinade. I didn’t have the full-sized portobellos that the book suggested, so I used twelve baby mushrooms instead of the two large or 4 small ones in the actual recipe. They lay on their backs, and I filled each cavity with the marinade and let them drink it up for twenty minutes.

Then I covered the pie plate with foil and baked them for 30 minutes at 400 degrees. After that, the foil came off, they got flipped to their bellies, and they roasted like that for another 10 minutes.

Yeah, don’t even waste these guys on the kids. They just won’t appreciate them. (This is what you tell yourself repeatedly as you hoard every last one…maybe grudgingly letting your partner have a few. )

Made 12 mushrooms. Per mushroom, allowing for extra marinade on top – Fat: 1.2g; Carbohydrates: 1.5g; Calories:24.5; Protein: 0.7g.

Chickpea Salad

Carrie — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:52:22 +0000

Sometimes you need an easy protein for a meal, and you don’t feel like futzing with meat. Canned beans are one of the simplest ways to do that. Ordinarily, I’m a fan of the dried bean, for convenience and simplicity, but they do take time to prepare, so if for whatever reason I don’t want to devote hours to that, the pantry is stocked with a few cans of beany happiness.

I love chickpeas. I love hummus, I love them roasted, and I love them in bean salad. As of tonight, I love them as the star of their own salad, backed up by capers and roasted red peppers.

The cast of characters: a can of chickpeas, capers, jarred roasted reds, olive oil, salt, lemon (for juice), and a really good parmesan cheese. (Eric would want me to point out that this parmesan is two years old, got from a wonderful Italian deli locally. Fabulous.)

I used the whole can of chickpeas, two tablespoons of capers, and about six of the little red peppers, chopped (they vary in size; the nutritional info here assumes about 90 grams of peppers). Make sure to drain and rinse those chickpeas and capers; it’s probably not a huge deal, but I don’t know what “disodium EDTA” is, and I don’t think the salad needs extra added.

To the veggies, add about a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice, a half a tablespoon of olive oil, and a dash of salt.

Say cheese – to the tune of about a quarter cup.

Then gently stir to combine all the ingredients…and that’s it! You can serve it right away, or, as I did, pop it in the fridge so it gets nice and chilled first.

Serves 6. Per serving – Fat: 3.5g; Carbohydrates: 16.1g; Calories:116.4; Protein: 5.4g.