Cookbooks 9 & 10: irish stew and chicken salad

As I'm going through cookbooks, I'm trying to mix up food types so I don't end up with all of one genre of cuisine at the end of the year.  So I decided to hit something from across the pond.

During the cold winter months, there is nothing like a good stew to both fill you up and keep you warm.  So the "Irish Stew"  recipe seemed like the perfect recipe to try from Irish Pub Cooking.

The recipe uses lamb meat. I'm not sure that I've ever used lamb in stew before.  It was a fairly simple recipe; toss the cubes of lamb in flour, salt and pepper and put into a dutch oven.  Add chopped onions, carrots and potatoes on top.  Throw in some thyme and then add some hot beef stock, put it in the oven for 2 1/2 hours.  Serve with some parsley on top.

The meat was really tender and the stew was solidly good.  There wasn't anything extraordinary about it, but it was so simple, that I would make it again. I didn't take any pictures, but I'm sure you can imagine what it looked like...don't think too hard or it will make you hungry!

Next for lunch, I tried a recipe from Salad for Dinner (I'm assuming that it okay to have it for lunch too).  "Chicken and Orange Salad with Shredded Beets" made good use of some produce still in season.  I cut the orange into supremes and then squeezed the juice from the membrane and tossed the shredded beets in that and a little lemon juice.  It made the beets really tender.  The beets and oranges were added to bed of baby arugula, along with some shredded chicken, thinly sliced red onion, crumbled goat cheese, walnuts and a simple vinaigrette.  It was a really amazing combination and pretty quick to assemble.  This will certainly go on my "make it again" list - for breakfast or dinner!

cookbooks 7 and 8: scandinavian cooking and a quinoa salad

So I've gotten behind on posting...but not on cooking!

For Christmas Jacob bought me a new cookbook, Tina Nordstrom's Scandinavian Cooking.  We've seen her show New Scandinavian Cooking on PBS and I love a good Scandinavian cookbook.

right out of the oven

 It's a beautiful cookbook full of interesting recipes and beautiful pictures.  One of the first pictures I saw was for the recipe, "Cod with Green Pea Pesto."  The food looked delicious and was intrigued.  The pesto was made with thawed frozen peas, cashews, arugula, parsley, parmesan and olive oil - plus a little salt.  Just place the cod fillets in a baking dish and cover with the pesto, bake for 30 minutes and you're ready to eat!

served with cauliflower

I wanted to really like this recipe, but something was missing.  Maybe it needed a little lemon?  While part of me would like to see if I could figure out what needed to change, I don't know that I would make this recipe again since there are so many other wonderful recipes out there.  I'll have to try another recipe from this cookbook another time.

Fortunately my next recipe was more successful.  I've made quite a few recipes from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special already.  In fact one of my favorite salad recipe is from this cookbook (Spicy Pineapple Tofu Salad - for those who don't think you like tofu, this could change your mind!).

Andean Quinoa salad at work

I try to mix things up a bit with a grain-based salad for lunch, especially since in the winter the produce isn't at its peak.  It's nice because grain based salads keep for a couple days and we can usually get two lunches for both Jacob and me out of one recipe.  This time I made "Andean Quinoa & Corn Salad." I usually use red quinoa; it has a pretty color and offers a nice contrast here to the corn and the fresh cilantro & parsley.  It also has onions, red pepper and a fresh chile (I used half a jalapeno) sauteed with cumin, garlic and coriander.  The recipe says to add chopped tomato; I only add them to the portions we are going to eat so that the tomato doesn't add too much moisture in the salad and get mealy when it sits for a day or two in fridge.  I also used some grape tomatoes I bought because they were actually decent for winter tomatoes.  Finally, the dressing was just some lemon juice - nice and simple.  The salad was quite good and had a bit of kick to it with the jalapeno.  It earned a "make it again" designation without any changes.