Vegetables – Page 3 – Rosemary and the Goat

Pesto Cauliflower with Arugula Salad

No boring cauliflower taste here.

A side dish or salad? You decide how you want to serve it.

I’ve really never been a cauliflower fan and it’s one of those vegetables and have to talk myself into buying because I know it is good for me. Not even a fan of raw cauliflower on a veggie tray even though I know it is going to get dipped into something really good.

I would like to learn to add the white flowery head to my vegetable repertoire especially since I’ve, for the time being, taken potatoes off the table. Cauliflower can actually be made into mashed potatoes by steaming or boiling it and mashing as if it were a potato. The mashed cauliflower is great when folded in with some mashed green peas. Beautiful combination.

In case you are trying to talk yourself out of trying this recipe, remember that cauliflower is one of the cancer fighting vegetables, is full of Vitamin C, low fat and high in fiber. Now, did that change your mind?

July 27, 2011 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Jalapeno Potato Salad

Some like it hot!

A roasted red pepper makes the perfect vessel for this potato salad. This may look like an ordinary potato salad but it has a lot of punch.

I know, we are having hot enough days as it is this summer and why make anything a little bit hotter. BUT, it is summer and you just have to make potato salad once this summer even if you are trying to get into that swimsuit. You aren’t going to eat the whole bowl and a small serving of anything isn’t going to kill you.

Have you ever thought of all the things you can do with a potato. It has to be the most versatile vegetable ever. It is made into all kinds of dishes that are fried, baked, boiled, steamed, broiled, hashed, torted and even stamped (?). The potato is made into all kinds of chips, different shaped fries and even potato flour. They can be the star of a pot of potato soup or just have a supporting roll in a big pot of stew. Gnocchi is a great main dish and it is totally made of potatoes.

You can make vodka from a potato. A slice of potato will take away your puffy eyes. A potato can cure warts, help you sleep, relieve a headache, clean rusty knives, remove stains and I’m sure a million other uses. Hey, it’s the miracle vegetable.

As a kid I remember cutting a design into the bottom of a potato and using it as a stamp with an ink pad to make beautiful patterns on paper. Seems like we made do with what we had because we didn’t have all the nice craft stores to shop at like we do now.

You kind of wonder what more can be done with a potato that we don’t even know about. A potato contains no fat and 80% water. Now, how can that hurt us. I guess it is what we have done to the potato that makes it bad for us.

June 16, 2011 By Sherry

Morning Foods/ Side dish/ Vegetables

Sweet Potato Hash

Hash of a different color.

Everyone knows how good sweet potatoes are for your health. They are full of potassium, Vitamin A, low in fat and high in omega 6 fatty acids. Did you know that one small sweet potatoes provides you with twice the daily recommended amount of Vitamin A. That’s amazing.

Several decades the sweet potato was introduced in the southern United States and since that introduction, oh what we have done with them. They are delicious mixed with herbs and spices and different flavorings. They are in every thing from baby food to main dishes, casseroles, salads, and pies like Sweet Potato or even Sweet Potato Pecan Pie. I have done an appetizer with sweet potatoes (coming soon). This past weekend, for my daughter’s birthday dinner, I did a Bobby Flay recipe that had sweet potatoes mixed in with grits and topped with shrimp. Just another delicious sweet potato recipe. This recipe for Sweet Potato Hash is good with just about anything.

June 1, 2011 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Grilled Vegetables with Balsamic Dressing

Can be prepared ahead of time and just waiting for your guests.

Whatever you are planning for your Memorial Day celebration, these vegetables are easy to make and will be a hit at your party.

I loved grilled vegetables mainly because I don’t have to cook them. Usually, anything grilled falls on my husband. For this recipe though, I decided to do them on my cast iron grill top inside because sometimes my husband tends to over grill vegetables leaving them charred and burned.

I did make a cool discovery doing these vegetables. I used my waffle cutter to cut my vegetables. So when I put the vegetables on the flat top grill, the waffle cut of the vegetables left marks on them like they had been done over a grill.

For some reason every time I make grilled vegetables (and I posted some roasted root vegetables back in the fall) I can never get a good picture of them. They taste wonderful but do not photograph well. I’m thinking if you see a beautiful picture of roasted or grilled vegetables in a magazine, the photographer must have waved his magic wand and created some magical setting that took a great picture of a heap of grilled vegetables. Maybe a little torching, painting with oils, I don’t know but I want to eat mine, not just look at them.

So I hope you will try this recipe even though the pictures don’t do justice to the recipe.

May 24, 2011 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Potatoes Colcannon

Poor man’s dish but fit for a King!

In honor of my husbands family tree I decided to make this potato dish this week for St. Patrick’s Day to go along with some corn beef.

Back before the Irish Potato famine the average Irishman ate 5.5 lbs. of potatoes each day. Potatoes were a staple diet for rich and poor and with dwellings being so small, there was not a lot of room for kitchens like we have today for storage of food. A meal of potatoes need only to be dug, washed and either boiled or roasted. Potatoes Colcannon is an Irish dish similar to the British dish Bubbles and Squeak and potatoes contain almost all the vitamins we need. We just can’t eat too much of a good thing.

Back when my husband was in college at the University of Missouri – Rolla, St. Pat’s weekend was one of the biggest party weekends of the year. The main street would be painted with a green stripe down the center and all the fraternities would work on these elaborate mechanical floats (this was an engineering school) for the St. Patty’s Day parade and like I said in an earlier post, they dyed everything green. If the guys didn’t have a nice beard grown by St. Pat’s, they would get a green beard painted on their faces. So, whenever St. Pat’s rolls around each year, it brings back memories of party weekends I attended while he was at school.

My sister gave me this recipe a few years ago. I love cabbage, I love mashed potatoes, and combine the two along with some milk, butter, onions, and cheese you have a wonderful side dish to your evening meal.

March 16, 2011 By Sherry

Entree/ Fish/Seafood/ Side dish/ Vegetables

Crab, Corn and Bacon Maque Choux

The last of my summer corn and it tasted fresh out of the field.

After making my Corn and Crab Fritters back in the summer I decided to use some of my corn that I had frozen and add some crabmeat to a Corn Maque Choux recipe I have been wanting to try for a long time. Good decision.

Can’t say I ever had Maque Choux before but when a neighbor once showed me how she was cutting the corn off the cob, I knew that was what we always called “fried corn”. Our version didn’t have the onions or peppers — just good corn, and bacon drippings and you cooked it until it was creamy and thick.

Sometimes we get fresh crabmeat on sale and when that happens, I just have to buy some. I decided to add the crabmeat to this dish and I think it would make a wonderful accompaniment to a steak dinner — surf and turf.

January 12, 2011 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Rosemary Roasted Vegetables

Thanksgiving day roasted vegetables.

Can’t you just smell fall in the air, looking at these roasted vegetables. This is the time of the year in Texas that I start feeling like it is fall. Some of the leaves are falling, a few trees may be changing colors, and the temperatures have gotten out of the 80’s and 90’s, and these wonderful vegetables can be found very proudly sitting in the produce isle just begging you to buy them.

Some graffiti eggplant, golden beets, red beets, miniature onions, maroon carrots, a few potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

I do roasted vegetables just about any time during the year but for some reason it seems like they are perfect for the fall season. All the beautiful colors and shapes that you find in your produce section just makes you want to gather up a bunch and take home to roast for dinner.

Recently, I was at gourmet grocery waiting to take a class in their Viking Cooking School. I had some time to kill and I love walking around in this store so I was looking for some vegetables to cook for dinner.

November 20, 2010 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Cuban Style Brown Rice and Black Beans

Braggadocios over this rice dish!

In case you don’t know where Braggy or Braggadocio is, well it’s in Southeast Missouri, the “Bootheel” of the State. And it is where my twin sister lives and where her husband grew up farming cotton, wheat, soybeans, rice, and running a cotton gin until a tornado blew the gin away a couple of years ago.

When we go back home for I always start thinking of all the farming adages ….. like “I’m in tall cotton”, “we’re in the short rows”, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, “make hay while the sun shines”, and many others that I can’t think of right now. If you haven’t heard any of these look them up and you will understand what they mean.

The closer we get to our part of Missouri, we start seeing rows of crops growing in different stages. I always start thinking of our (my twin and me) grandfather teaching us to drive in hay fields and how we would swerve in and out around the hay bales trying to perfect our driving skills, or, how we chopped cotton once and were fired by the time we broke for lunch. Also remember wheat fields that use to be in our back yard and how we would take a wooden sled out and drag it through the wheat to make little paths that we could play in. That is the extent of my farming experience. We weren’t raised on a farm but we were surrounded by them. We had huge grain elevators on the river and a big compress in town to compress cotton bales for shipping. My mother or grandmother would often go out to my grandfather’s sister house to buy butter, milk and eggs at their farm. My husband’s family use to buy unpasturized milk from her too (they’d pour the milk into gallon mason jars). Maybe that’s where he learned to like milk so much — he can drink 4 gallons a week by himself.

August 27, 2010 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Thin and Crispy Onion Rings

I have two words to say about these onion rings — thin and crispy!

I have always loved onion rings but always hated biting into one and having the onion slice slither out of the breading, usually burning my lip because I was in a hurry to eat it. This will not happen with these onion rings.

This was one of my parent’s recipes that my mother use to make. When my dad started taking over a lot of the cooking, he then did these to perfection also. He would even use this same method to make fried squash or even fried banana peppers. I really think you could use this on just about any vegetable. I’ve been wanting to try green beans and will do that the next time I get out my deep fryer.

If you have never tried making onion rings because you think it would be too complicated, think again. In this recipe you simply dunk the thinly sliced onions (I think having a mandoline is a must) into buttermilk. Let them set a few minutes and then shake in self rising flour. Definitely use self rising flour because the flour already has salt and baking powder in it and it just makes for a tastier coating . I’ve tried using plain flour but when I do, it seems like I can never get them salty enough after frying.

August 23, 2010 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Zucchini Corn Boats

How about putting some of that summer produce to use with these Zucchini Corn Boats.

This is a delicious recipe using zucchini and corn that you may pick up at your local farmer’s market this summer.

I love going to farmer’s markets in the summer and getting all kinds of wonderful locally grown produce. I purchased some corn and zucchini recently and just love making these little boats. I have made this often and think they are so cute.

If you don’t want to fool with trying to make the boats then I have put all the mixture in an oval casserole and put some corn husk at each end and pile in the corn/zucchini mixture. Looks like a big corn cob. Then you can just sprinkle all the chips and cheese mixture on top and bake in the oven or out on your outdoor grill. This is a great accompaniment to your summer bar-b-q.

June 19, 2010 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Fried Smashed Potatoes with Lemon Thyme

I don’t think I ever met a potato I didn’t like.

I was laying in bed this morning watching one of my favorite FoodTv chefs, Giada and she was making everything with lemons. I sit out on my deck each evening admiring all the blooms on my Myer Lemon Tree and I swear there are at least a million blooms on this tree this Spring and I’m envisioning what kind of things I will be able to make with the beautiful lemons come fall. Even with all these blooms I will probably only get about 20 lemons. Never figured that out but I appreciate each and every one I get off this tree.

I have a fabulous herb garden this year and am anxious to try my lemon thyme and parsley in this dish. I love potatoes, and who doesn’t. This is a great recipe that would be oh so good for summer cookouts. And, believe it or not, it is so much fun smashing these little potatoes with your hands.

April 23, 2010 By Sherry

Side dish/ Vegetables

Pistachio Zucchini Fans

Here I go again playing with my food!

The other day I was cleaning out my freezer, or at least looking to see what I had in there that has been hiding for a long long time and I came across some panko bread crumbs (Japanese bread crumbs) and some chopped pistachios that I had left over from making cannolis a while back.

I love zucchini and I had bought some smaller ones recently and decided to make this dish to go with some grilled fish my hub was making for dinner.

I learned to play with food way back when I had a semester of Garde Manger. This was when I first made sushi (never tasted it), I did my first and only ice carving, cooked all kinds of organ meats, did terrines, galantines, plate painting and learned to make all sorts of vegetable garnishes. I would go home from this class all eager to go to the grocery and buy an arm full of vegetables and start carving away. I remember trying to make this staircase from carrots. That was a disaster. I’ve done kiwi birds, napa cabbage angels, pear reindeer and even Mario boiled eggs (yes, they did look like Mario).

November 16, 2009 By Sherry

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