Collegiate Cuisine - Freshman Hill House Style: Stuffed Bell Peppers

This opportunity came to be when the Penn Vegetarian Society decided that a veg-love potluck was in order for one of our meetings.  I was a little hesitant at first never having "cooked" in the college environment and a little fearful of the sketchy kitchen two floors below my room with a countertop version of a convection oven instead of a stove unit.  I was not sure what to expect.  Having raided the free fruits and veggies given as part of the "Eat Local Challenge" day on Tuesday, I was prepared.

Naturally with so many bell peppers, I decided to stuff some of them with...well...more peppers! 


Ingredients
6 Bell Peppers

• red are sweetest, orange are tastiest according to me, green hold up the best in the oven, and zucchini can be substituted 
• Split lengthwise if ginormous
• Cut the top off with the stem and reserve if normal-sized 
• de-rib and de-seed the peppers 
• blanch 1-2 min and shock the bell peppers to bring out their beautiful colors

Brown Rice: about 1.5 cups

Mushroom stock 2.25-2.5 cups for cooking the rice

2 plum tomatoes, diced and salted
4 cloves garlic
1 medium onion (I used a red onion)
1 can black beans, drained(or you can cook dry bean)
6 large stalks chinese broccoli or other hardy greens - blanched
1 large red bell pepper, diced
1 large green bell pepper, diced
1/2 medium summer squash or zucchini
small bunch of parsley
palmfull of cumin
palmfull of coriander
2 tsp of cayenne pepper
salt and paper
1 tbsp of olive oil

Directions:

1. cook the rice and set aside
2. prep and blanch peppers and greens (kale or collards or something on the hardier side can be substituted)
3. rub peppers with just enough olive oil, salt, and pepper to coat
   
4. chop garlic into a paste with salt and sauté, add onions and cook until translucent
5. add diced peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and greens
6. add cumin, coriander, and cayenne to taste
7. add black beans
8. test for seasoning
9. remove from heat; using a fork, crush and mash some of the beans by vigorously stirring and mashing what's in the pot (leave some whole)
10. add salt and pepper to taste
11. stir in cooked rice to combine
12. spoon mixture into seasoned peppers, put tops on those that were prepared in that style and put in the oven at 350F for about 15 minutes (I used a convection oven with this time and temp)
13. remove and enjoy...they're even better the next day or two days later reheated!

Try sprinkling them with cheese or toasted breadcrumbs.  Maybe substituting quinoa for the brown rice would pique your interest.

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Fall Fest 2009

From top to bottom: Lemon cookies, lemon eater post-Miracle berry

courtesy of Phi Gamma Nu, pie in the face, trying a Miracle Berry

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Photo by Rebecca S Havivi

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The Intrepid Baker Sets Out: Nuttela Chocolate Chip Cookies

This is my first in what will be a series of posts on the tribulations and exhilarations of concocting new recipes for a cookbook. Each post will include a back-story– the inspiration for the recipe –the recipe itself and the takeaway. The takeaway is a tip or technique showcased in the recipe that can be stored in your arsenal of cooking knowledge. So here it is, my first ever Penn Appetit post!

The inspiration for these cookies is pretty simple. I think all homemade chocolate chip cookies should strive to be as soft and chewy as possible. In my humble opinion, that almost-underbaked gooiness is what separates homemade cookies from Chips Ahoy (don’t get me wrong – chips ahoy dunked in milk is pretty much edible nostalgia). When I began my cookbook venture this past summer creating a chocolate chip cookie that would stay soft even after it cooled became my Holy Grail. Add to this my boyfriend’s love of Nuttela and we have…

Nuttela Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

½ stick butter (1/4 cup)

¾ cup Nuttela

½ cup brown sugar

¼ cup golden syrup (I used “Lyle’s Golden Syrup” but corn syrup will work too)

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup chocolate chips

Directions: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream the butter, Nuttela, brown sugar, and syrup together. Add the eggs one at a time and then the vanilla, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the dry ingredients and the chocolate chips. Chill the dough for as long as your patience will hold out (eager for cookies? Stick it in the freezer for about 15 minutes). Drop generous tablespoon-sized balls of dough on to baking sheets lined with parchment paper or wax paper. Bake for about 10 minutes...

The takeaway here is a whole bunch of tips for keeping your cookies soft and chewy. First of all, the Nutella helps. Any fat that isn’t 100% fat (like butter is) will cause the cookies to spread less – less spread means more concentration of dough in one spot, creating the gooey middle lost in totally flat wafers. This substitute fat is often shortening, but you can use peanut butter or Nutella for a better taste. Next, adjust your sugar. White sugar creates crispy cookies. Brown sugar has more moisture so the cookies stay moist. I took that one step further with the addition of a liquid sugar. Any liquid sugar – corn syrup, molasses, honey, etc. – will have the same effect. You can make any cookie recipe thicker and softer by adjusting your baking technique. Chilling the dough means the butter won’t melt and spread the cookies thinly as soon as the heat from the oven hit them; it gives the dough a chance to bake before flattening out. Also, placing your cookies on parchment paper or wax paper instead of greasing the baking sheets also prevents over zealous spreading. And remember, be careful not to overbake, the cookies will continue to cook as they cool.

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Saturday Blog Lovin' - Seventeen and Baking

Blog: Seventeen and Baking

This teen blogger balances her love of baking and photography with high school.  Check out this blog for a delicious recipe for cream cheese and chive biscuits!

Note: Click here to see the original post.

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Fun Food Fact

Did you know that honey is the only kind of food that never spoils? The unique composition of honey makes it suitable for long term preservation. As long as it is properly stored and sealed, honey can last for centuries. In fact, honey has been found in the ancient tombs of Egypt! A little definitely goes a long way when it comes to honey.

source: www.funtrivia.com

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Azie on Main Review

Within Philadelphia’s city limits there is a wide variety of excellent dining choices.  However, in a search for new delights, I decided to head out to the suburbs, because I am convinced that the city is not the only place to find a good meal.

Azie on Main is a new addition to the Villanova area, a Philadelphia suburb, and is located in a new office park. It is right off the Villanova University campus and is easy to get on regional rail. Azie on Main is the second location of the restaurant Azie in Media. Japanese chef Takao Iinuma, who has competed on Iron Chef Japan! heads both restaurants.

As you enter Azie on Main, you enter a warm and inviting restaurant.  The rich fabric draped around the restaurant, the warm wood and low jazz music pulls you into the restaurant, away from the austere office park the restaurant is located in. 

The food claims to be Japanese with global influences, and they live up to that claim, having both obvious Japanese dishes and others with a more global influence. They do have a sushi bar, which seemed to be the main focus of many of the patrons.  However, I decided that since there are so many places to get really good sushi in the city, I would try the rest of the menu and see if this restaurant has anything to tempt us out of the city with. 

I started with a Blue Fin Tuna Ceviche.  It was a very charming dish presented in a mock martini glass with a lemon slice on the side. The tuna was in a yellow pepper sauce with orange slices, red onion, halved grape tomatoes and green peppers. The sauce was very spicy with the green peppers in it, but it was nicely balanced by the meaty taste of the tuna, and the sweetness of the oranges, onions and tomatoes. The dish also had a very pleasing mixture of textures, with the crunch of the onion and the softness of the orange, and the slight toughness of the tuna. The dish was garnished with sprigs of green salad, really just to offset the very yellowness of the whole dish by adding a much needed burst of green.

For the main course I ordered the Pan Roasted Divers Scallops with sautéed mushroom and spinach in rice. This dish could have used a burst of color, because even with the spinach, the overall impression of the dish was BROWN. The scallops were in an americaine sauce and sprinkled with what tasted like small onion rings. The rice was well seasoned and the mushrooms and spinach melded well together.  However, the scallops,  the sauce and the crispy bits were all quite salty. The entire dish was far too salty to be palatable, and the americaine sauce was no more than a salty, garlicky cream sauce. The dish looked unappetizing and was unappetizing. 

Despite this poor showing in the main course, the ceviche was truly amazing, and I think this restaurant warrants a second visit. So, bottom line, if you are looking for a nice restaurant, which has an excellent wine and sake collection I should add, to take a date, or just treat yourself, try getting out of the city for a change and heading out to the suburbs to Azie on Main.

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My Lovash Nosh

As food connoisseurs, we’ve painted an idea in our heads of the fundamental nature and purpose of food. It is more than just a means of sustenance; it is a form of recreation, pleasuring us with endless possibilities of tastes and textures. But as the carefree days of summer end and the stress of exams, papers, and internships mounts, this idealistic view of food begins to fade, giving way to a bleaker prospect: we must pepper our hectic day with some form of nourishment that will keep us going. Unfortunately, taste and texture give way to convenience and price, as we try to sustain ourselves as quickly and cheaply as possible. At Penn, such a task is made easy by the abundance of food trucks on the streets of our campus, cheap, often ethnic, in-and-out venues for food in a rush. But what if we could get the best of both worlds? What if students didn’t have to sacrifice a quality meal in order to get cheap, quick food? With the opening of Lovash Indian Cuisine Food Truck on 37th and Spruce Streets, this prospect, for me, suddenly seemed attainable.

I visited Lovash’s in a situation like the one described above: swamped with impending project deadlines and mounting reading assignments. On the way home from class I picked up the special of the day advertised colorfully on a whiteboard just outside the truck, the mattar paneer--a traditional Indian dish of fried, curdled cheese with peas in a sweet, spicy sauce. Lovash’s version seemed consistent in its preparation from the other versions of the dish I had enjoyed before. Aiming for maximum nourishment to get me to the end of my jam-packed schedule, I opted for their "platter" size, a dollar more than their regular size, featuring as accompaniments a generous serving of soft, buttery roti bread and a heaping of basmati rice. I handed the smiling and efficient truck-tender a five, grabbed my food and headed on my way, preparing for a brief stint at my dining room table with the food before tending to my academic duties. I was greeted by a more than adequate serving of food in a characteristic white take out container. Each compartment was filled the brim as I began my journey into the latest version of one of my favorite Indian dishes. So, how did this rendition stand up?

The mattar paneer was nothing special: only mildy flavored, crumbly cheese cubes soaked in an overpowering tomato sauce that brought upon, no matter how hard I tried to resist them, after-school childhood memories of Chef Boyardee SpaghettiOs. Gone was the rich, creamy, succulent texture of the paneer I fell in love with. It was replaced with a weirdly tangy taste that dominated anything provided by the mushy peas and insignificant cheese cubes. The yellow-tinged basmati rice seemed even more irrelevant, proving its role as a simple filler in order to provide a justification for the dish’s "platter" status. Not fully cooked and slightly hardened, the grainy bits that remained in my teeth certainly didn’t help alleviates the qualms I had about my main dish of paneer. The one saving grace (maybe too generous of a term) of my meal was the three slices of roti nestled in the upper-left compartment. Although indistinguishable from the flour tortilla used in at least three other food trucks on Spruce, it had the perfect balance of softness and crispiness; lightly buttered, it was a great vehicle for soaking up the now homogenous cheese-and-pea slop that the paneer had degraded into. A solid roti does not a quality Indian dish make, though, and after the my white take-out dish was reduced to a smattering of oily sauce, I was full, but certainly not satisfied.

All in all, my expectations of a quick, cheap, delicious Indian meal were not provided by Lovash, much to my disappointment. However, I haven’t given up on this newcomer to Spruce Street, and would love my opinion to be reversed with my next outing to the truck, which is sure to be during the next week as I explore other options on their menu. The truck is also an extension of the actual Lovash restaurant on South street, where I plan to visit to give the eatery another chance at delighting my very picky taste buds. My experience at the truck, however, didn’t exactly make me want to catch the next rickshaw down there. The final verdict? Try these so-called gurus out, but don’t expect nirvana.

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Live Blogging Top Chef Season 6: Episode 7

Back to Top Chef this week after one of Bravo's inexplicable one-week hiatuses. As usual, the Quickfire gets us started, and Tyler Florence is here as the guest judge. In this "high-stakes" Quickfire, the chefs have to prepare a meal in the style of Cookstr.com by taking three random keywords via slot machine, like "romantic," "tart," "Latin American," and creating a dish that incorporates all of the phrases. Jen is feeling really sick this week, so understandably, the kitchen is the last place she wants to be, and she lands in the bottom three for the first time, along with Robin and Eli. Kevin beats Mike and Michael for the win and, because this is a "high stakes" Quickfire, he gets to pick between immunity and $15,000, what might normally be a tough choice, but he makes it easy and takes the cash.

Padma gets all secretive and doesn't reveal the Elimination Challenge, but it becomes all too apparent when the chefs get home and find all the supplies for a dinner party scattered around the house and Padma magically waiting for them in the backyard. They'll have to work in pairs to create a family style dish for a dinner party, and Mike's wish is granted as he's paired with his favorite punching bag, Robin. They run into the house and chaos ensues as the chefs clamour for kitchen space and the scarce resources. Hey, this is Vegas, I doubt anyone cooks at home. Each pair has a bag with products hand-picked by the celebrity chefs from the Macy's Culinary Council, including Florence and Seattle restranteur Tom Douglas, serving as guest judges and dinner party companions. For the most part, the pairs, even Mike and Robin, seem to be collaborating pretty seemlessly, and I almost wish there were a few more fireworks than the zingers offered in the confessionals.

10:37

Like clockwork, Mr. Colicchio arrives to check on the chefs, and most of the dishes seem pretty promising, but I doubt they'll all turn out so well. Plating, though, leads to some issues, with tripped circuits and marginal space to get everything together, and the seemingly invincible Michael appears most worried about his chances tonight. Unfortunately, Toby is in Gail's place again tonight, which should provide for some assuredly bad jokes at judge's table. Michael and Ash's take on carbonara with halibut falls short, especially compared with Byran and Laurine's superior version of the same fish. Ashley and Eli also take a beating, with no one appreciating the salty gnocchi. The two clear favorites, however, look like Jen and Kevin and Mike and Robin, whose beef and tuna, respectively, earn heaps of praise and little criticism.

10:54

Somewhat surprisingly, Bryan and Laurine take a spot in the top two alongside Kevin and Jen. Both pairs give each other due credit, and it's a nice segment before the bottom two teams arrive and the bickering starts. Jen claims her first Elimination Challenge win this week, along with a $10,000 gift certificate to Macy's, a great rebound after her Quickfire struggles. Michael and Ash and Eli and Ashley assume their expected positions in the bottom two, and Bryan grows immediately uncomfortable at the prospect of losing his brother in this competition. He shouldn't worry, however, as Ash might have sealed his fate with his bizarre monologue at Judge's Table, showering Michael with praise and painting himself as the clear number two on this team. Both Ashley and Eli struggle with explaining their dish, and Tom has little patience for their lame excuses. Ash looks like the likely candidate for elimination tonight, and he understands too late that he may have said just a little too much.

11:00

In somewhat of a surprise, Ashley gets the boot tonight. She had stumbled in a few challenges, but over the past two weeks she was definitely on an upswing. Ultimately, she was dead weight, though, as some of her competitors are far more talented. Next week, there's some definite brother rivalry, and the testy relationship between Mike and Robin grows even more volatile. There also seems to be a big name guest judge making everyone nervous, so you'll have to come back next week to see who it's going to be.

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Lemongrass Ice Cream

I came up with this recipe for a delicious lemongrass ice cream out of my love for exotic ice cream flavors. I was inspired by the newly opened Tara’s Organic Ice Cream in Berkeley, CA, which offers up delicious, homemade, and extreme ice cream, ranging in flavor from garam masala to goat cheese raspberry. I have made ice cream many times before, but have never been fully satisfied with the recipes I have used for the base. The ice cream base that I came up with produces an ice cream that is extremely creamy yet not overly rich or overwhelmed with egg flavor. I use light cream cut with non-fat condensed milk to reduce the richness without sacrificing flavor or texture. Moreover, I only use two egg yolks, which is just enough to create a custard that can take up plenty of air during churning without making ice cream taste like a hollandaise sauce. The refreshing citrusy flavor of lemongrass pairs excellently with the sweetness of the ice cream to create one delicious dessert.

Note: If you do not have an ice cream maker, do not despair. Pour the chilled custard into a wide, shallow baking dish and freeze, stirring vigorously every 30 minutes or so to break up the ice crystals (sort of like making a granita). In about 2-3 hours, you should have ice cream. While the ice cream produced by this method is not as smooth or airy as ice cream made in a machine, it is just as delicious.

Lemongrass Ice Cream (makes about 1 1/2 pints)

Ingredients

2 cups light or regular cream

3/4 of a 14 oz can of nonfat sweetened condensed milk

2 egg yolks

3-4 stalks lemongrass

1 pinch salt

Directions

Cut off the root ends of the lemongrass stalks and remove the outer layer. Finely chop the lemongrass to obtain about 3/4 cup. Warm the cream, condensed milk, lemongrass, and salt in medium saucepan over medium heat until mixture steams. Do not let the mixture boil. Remove from heat and let steep at least 30 minutes but preferably up to 1.5 hours. In a small bowl, whisk egg yolks to combine. Reheat cream mixture until it steams, but does not boil. Slowly pour in a small amount of hot mixture into egg yolks, whisking constantly. Then pour egg and cream mixture back into the pot. Heat, stirring constantly, until mixture reaches 175 degrees F or until mixture coats the back of spoon. Strain mixture, cool and freeze in ice cream maker. Then freeze in freezer until hard (3 or more hours).

Photo by Elizabeth Cunningham

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