Soup Swap

This is a bit delayed, but I'm finally getting my recipe from Soup Swap (which was almost four weeks ago!) up here. It was a swimming success and Soup Swap II will hopefully happen sometime in the next few months.

My soup was a sort of chicken and veggie concoction based on this previous recipe. I made significant changes to the vegetables used, some for better and some not.

Ingredients
1 large can (28oz) diced tomatoes
1 quart vegetable stock
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp cinnamon
2 cups cubed chicken
2 cups chopped carrots
2 cups cubed pumpkin
2 cups sliced zucchini
2 cups chopped red onion



Procedure
Add all ingredients to a large pan. Boil, stirring occasionally, until all vegetables are tender. I did this on the stove and served it in a crock pot, but it's probably doable in a crock pot too.



Vegetable amounts are approximate; you can see in the picture that I was a bit heavy on the pumpkin and a bit light on onions and zucchini.

I didn't realize it as I was cooking it, but this is significantly more vegetable than I had last time, but with the same amount of spice. I would increase each of the spices by about 50%. I also wish I had, like last time, used a clearer broth. This one was pretty dark and it didn't give me the flavor I was looking for. I think I used vegetable bullion cubes before.

The pumpkin was used because I had one around. Others thought it was pretty good but I wasn't a big fan. I think a better addition would be 2/3 dry cup brown rice. Since brown rice takes a while to cook I would then probably add the rice and chicken, boil for fifteen minutes or so, then add the vegetables. If you boil the vegetables for too long they will get mushy.

Overall, this is still a fine recipe. It's even better if you have some bread to dip in it. I'm not sure how many it serves; it was sampled by eight-ish people and left significant leftovers. Probably something like 6 large servings.

I would also like to draw your attention to a few of the other soups that were featured at Soup Swap. I've just got a few pictures here; Sarah has more and is compiling the recipes to send out to everyone.

Sarah made French onion soup, complete with cheesy toast.	Taylor made a spicy chicken chili.
Ricky brought a hearty venison stew.	Aaron and Katie brought wonton soup.
Bryn brought a festive Korean soup that you assemble on the spot.	We also had Caitlin's creamy broccoli soup and Alec's cheesy potato and onion soup

Most unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of my fridge after soup swap; Between Sarah and me we had just short of ten pounds of soup!

French Toast

This is a very simple recipe, and fast enough that you can even make it in the morning before work. From cracking the first egg to chowing down is something like fifteen minutes.

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 oz vanilla yogurt (approx) (a little smaller than an egg)
1/2 tsp cinnamon... I'm guessing at the amount here. A few shakes of the cinnamon shaker.
baguette
butter
topping

Procedure:

Slice some baguette. How many slices you need will depend on the size of your baguette. Mine was pretty small and I used about eight. I like to cut them diagonally to get that nice angle, plus it makes the slices bigger.

A crunchy baguette is fine, since it will soften up as you cook it, but if it's stale it'll be difficult to cut without breaking it. A baguette only lasts a few days before turning into a rock, so make sure you do something with it if you have one sitting around!

Mix the eggs, yogurt, and cinnamon. Butter a pan. Dip the slices of bread completely, one at a time, in the egg mixture. You will probably want to use a fork to flip them around and perhaps flop some egg on top of them. Slop the toast into the pan. It should cook for a minute, maybe less, then need to be flipped. Wait another minute and serve.

I like to eat my french toast with black cherry jam. Sarah likes maple syrup heated up in the microwave. Applesauce is also a good topping. Sometimes I even just put a slice of pepper bacon on my french toast with nothing else.

This recipe works just fine with regular bread too. Two eggs is about the right amount for four pieces of bread.

Skittles Vodka

Hey all, Sorry for my long time away. I've been busy and haven't had much time for exciting recipes. However, today I've got something pretty exciting. You may have seen posts about Skittles Vodka floating around the internet in the past few months. Well, I did too. So I made some. It's great.

My first batch was with the classic Skittles. I split them up by color and did each one separately. I did end up mixing yellow and green ("lemon" and "lime"), which was pretty good. But I felt that red and orange just tasted like chemicals and the purple one like cough syrup.

I went back through with the Skittles Blenders and had a much better experience. That's what I'm going to share with you.

The first thing you need to do is choose your color (or colors). I used a mix of pink (Strawberry Lime Blast) and yellow-orange (Mango Lemonade Freeze). An entire bag of Skittles will make about one and a half liters/quarts, so all of two colors makes about twenty ounces.

Some of the people who have done this did so with flimsy plastic water bottles. That seems gross. Alcohol is some pretty powerful stuff so I'm inclined to keep it in glass (or plastic bottles specifically intended to hold alcohol). I used old pasta sauce jars, as I do for just about everything.

The first thing you do is add the vodka to your jar of Skittles. They should start to melt just about immediately. If you look closely you'll be able to see the color sloughing off of them.

Let this sit for a while. The candies themselves take some time to dissolve. Furthermore, there's a good deal of waxy gunk in Skittles. You need to give that enough time to melt, then resolidify and rise to the top. I let mine sit at room temperature for two days.

Now we filter this sucker. I use coffee filters, though in the previous batch I used paper towels and they worked fine. You can see the waxy buildup has risen to the top, and there's some kind of condensation on the bottom as well that we'll filter out. Unless you have an enormous funnel you'll have to do this in stages. It strains pretty slowly so getting it all strained took me coming back to it maybe half a dozen times over the course of a day.

Filter is again. You can see the difference between once-filtered and twice-filtered vodka just by looking at them. You can also see how much gunk came out in each filtering state. I ended up filtering mine four times, though after the first two there wasn't much contaminant left.

Now it's ready! Bring it to a party and impress your friends! We ended up speculating that it would probably be fantastic with 7up or something similar; it's very sweet and just about 40 percent alcohol. It's best cold, but be warned that more gunk may condense out of it if you keep it in the freezer (which isn't really a problem, it just doesn't look as nice).

More updates soon, I hope! I have a few more waiting to go.

Enchiladas

Welcome back to Cooking with Charles... now with Sarah!

This is a recipe based loosely on something I found here. It was surprisingly difficult to find a recipe which didn't require the use of canned cream of chicken soup.
I suspect that the exact recipe is pretty flexible here; it's basically just a bunch of stuff, rolled up in a tortilla and stuck in the oven until hot.

Ingredients:

1/2 pound	chicken breast
1 cup	dry rice
1 (10 oz) can	black beans
1 (28 oz) can	diced tomatoes
1	garlic clove, crushed
1 tsp***	cayenne pepper
	salt and pepper
6 tsp	butter
1	large onion, chopped
1/2	red bell pepper, chopped
2	jalapeno peppers, seeded and minced
1 (8 oz) box	cream cheese
1/2 tsp***	cayenne pepper
1	garlic clove, crushed
1/2 tsp	paprika
1/2 tsp	chili powder
1/2 tsp	ground cumin
1 (10 oz) can	red enchilada sauce
10	small flour tortillas
1 (4 oz) can	sliced black olives
1/2 cup	green onions, chopped
	shredded cheddar cheese

***This was spicy. I recommend using only half this amount of cayenne in the future.

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 350F.

Rub chicken with cayenne, garlic, salt, and pepper (the ones listed before butter). Drain diced tomatoes, reserving juice. Add water or broth to the juice until you have 2 cups of fluid. Put the chicken, rice, beans, and tomato juice in a baking dish. Add about half of the tomato chunks. Bake until the chicken is no longer pink and the rice is done, about 45 minutes.

Set aside the rice and beans. Shred the chicken with a pair of forks and set it aside.



Put the butter, onions, and peppers in a frying pan and stir over medium heat until the onions start to become clear. Stir in cream cheese and spices until smooth. Stir in the chicken and set aside.



Mix the can of enchilada sauce into the remaining half of the tomato chunks. Pour half of the sauce into the bottom of a 9x13 pan. Wrap the enchiladas (shown) and put them, seam side down, in the pan. They may overlap some; I ended up fitting 8 in one pan and putting the other two in a separate pan. Pour the rest of the enchilada sauce over the top. Add shredded cheese, olives, and green onions. Bake until the insides are bubbly, about 30 minutes.



At this point you may need to reheat the rice and beans (you might as well put them in the oven for the last five minutes of baking). Serve with salsa, sour cream, avocados, chips, and whatever else sounds good. Serves 6-8.



These are delicious. The only change I would make, as I said before, is reducing the amount of cayenne. I think more enchilada sauce would be appropriate as well -- the online recipe recommended a 28 ounce can, not a 10 ounce one. That would make it a lot goopier, as I suppose most enchiladas are, but I wouldn't say it's necessary.

One thing to note about this recipe is that it takes a long time. Overall the chicken spends 75 minutes in the oven so preparation time will be around two hours, perhaps a bit more.

I will be making these again.

Pasta Salad

Ingredients:

1.3 lb	Pasta (approx) (I prefer whole wheat fusilli because it holds a lot of salad dressing)
1	head broccoli florets
1/3 lb	salami, cubed
1/3 lb	sharp cheddar, cubed
1/3 lb	sharp monterey jack, cubed
12 oz	italian salad dressing
10	green olives
1	green bell pepper, chopped
15	grape tomatoes, halved
1 bunch	mini pepperoni

Procedure:

Prepare pasta as directed. Stir the broccoli in right away to get a little steam on it; it will still be crunchy but the florets will be greener. Then allow everything to cool (to avoid melting the cheese or wilting the tomatoes). Stir in everything else.

I would not use the mini pepperoni again; they are prone to sticking to the sides of the bowl. I would also recommend red or yellow bell peppers instead of green. It was very sharp. I guess some people liked them, though, so that's up to the cook.

Overall, this is a very tasty and easy recipe. Maybe it's not particularly healthy, with tons of cheese and salami and dressing, but it's not that bad. There are some fresh veggies in here. And it's huge; it'll make lunches for a week.

Adventure Pasta

I haven't got many pictures of this because I didn't plan to write it up -- I was just throwing things in the pan to make a big batch of food for the week. The primary motivation for my ingredient choices was using the last bits of things that were almost gone. That said, it turned out very well. Keep in mind that I was just throwing this together as I went; all quantities are extremely approximate.

Ingredients:

2	half-empty packages spaghetti noodles
1/3 pound	bacon, diced
1/2 pound	sausage (I used chorizo), chunked
1	large red onion, chopped
2 cloves	garlic, minced
1	green bell pepper, chopped
10	kalamata olives, sliced
5	sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
1 jar	tomato sauce
1 handful	pine nuts, chopped
1 handful	pumpkin seeds, chopped
1 handful	slivered almonds
1 tsp	crushed red pepper
1 tsp	basil
1 tsp	oregano
3 tsp	parmesan cheese, grated

Procedure:
The first thing to do is get some grease. Throw your meat into the pan and stir it around until it's basically done and has given off enough oil to fry the rest of your ingredients. If necessary, supplement your meat oil with olive oil. Once the sausage is mostly done, add all of the ingredients except for the pasta, sauce, and cheese.

Start the pasta in a separate pan. Keep in mind that you'll want to stop cooking it when it's still a little firm; it will finish up in the other pan.

Stir everything around while your pasta cooks, seasoning to taste with whatever's handy. When your pasta is nearly done, add the pasta sauce to your stir fry to warm up. Drain the pasta and add it. Decrease the heat to avoid drying out your sauce while you stir everything together. This makes a lot of food, so it's likely your pan is full to the brim and stirring is difficult. Be patient. As you stir, add the cheese.



This made me lunches for an entire week, as well as a few dinners.

The one ingredient I felt I should have added was wine. We have cooking wine sitting right above the stove. I just didn't think to add it. It ended up a little dry and this would have remedied it. Overall, though, a very tasty and exciting dish.

Sweet Potato Tacos

This recipe is a lot like my potato stew in spirit, though they really don't taste the same at all. I made this out of curiosity and it turned out very well. It's dominated by sweet potatoes but it's got a little bit of spice to it as well. It's probably very good for you. Next time there will be more spice, as well as more spices.

Ingredients:

5 cups	sweet potatoes, diced (about 3 potatoes)
1 lb	ground chorizo or other sausage
2	red onions, chopped
1	green bell pepper, chopped
4 cloves	garlic, minced
2	jalapeño peppers, seeded and minced
2 tsp	brown sugar
1/4 tsp	cinnamon
1/4 tsp	ginger
	salt and pepper

Procedure
The two parts of this recipe are listed one after the other but can be easily done concurrently, even by only one person. Also, though I won't say it past here, salt and pepper should be added to taste all through the recipe. Just eat a little spoonful to help judge if you need more.



First, boil some water. Add about half of your potatoes. If you're like me, the chunks got larger as you got sick of cutting; if that's the case, boil the larger chunks. Once they are very soft, drain them and mash them. Add brown sugar and cinnamon. This is also where I would add any other spices you're thinking about trying. I threw in some ginger and some chili powder (but not enough of either to taste, I think). I suspect other good ones would be nutmeg and allspice. Basically anything that would be good in a spice cake or pumpkin pie can go in here. Kate also recommended cumin and coriander, which she recently used in squash tacos. I will use those next time. Set this mash aside until you're ready to mix it in to the rest of the recipe.



Start a fire and get your sausage going. Once it starts to give off grease, add your potatoes. Once they start to soften add the peppers, garlic, and onions. Scramble this around until the frying potatoes have basically finished then add the mash. (Once you add the mash you don't want to cook it for very long; it will start to dry out.)



I've just been eating this with tortillas. No cheese or salsa or anything. It's very sweet so I'm not sure what would compliment it. This is probably 6 to 8 servings; it's very filling.

Leftover Turkey Stew

This was meant to be based on a recipe I found here. However, there were several hitches along the way. First of all, I actually had a lot more turkey left over than I had thought. Additionally, the turkey is smoked, making it taste more like ham, so the sage seemed like a bad idea. I was similarly unconvinced on the curry powder so I left that out as well.

As I realized this Aaron suggested rosemary as a replacement. It seemed like a good idea, but we were out. Even so this recipe is easy (if time intensive) and very tasty.

Ingredients:

5 cups	small chunks of leftover turkey
5 cups	cubed potatoes
2 cups	chopped carrots
1 cup	chopped celery
2 cups	chopped onion
4 cloves	minced garlic
3 cups	chicken broth
2 cups	vegetable broth
	salt and pepper
	olive oil

Procedure:
Fry the garlic and onions in olive oil until they begin to soften, then add the turkey, potatoes, carrots, celery, and broth. Hold at a boil, testing occasionally to see if the potatoes are done all the way through (if the pieces are as large as mine, this could take half an hour or more). Season to taste with salt and pepper.



I realized during cooking that I had cut my potatoes too large. Not only did they take forever to cook, but they were too big to fit on a spoon with anything else. After the cooking was just about done I hit the whole stew with a potato masher a few times. This broke up the largest potato pieces and also thickened the broth with potato starch (which is something I like).

Almost all of the turkey we had left over was dark meat, which was great. Well, it was a pain to get it off of the bones, but the flavor is much stronger.



Don't be shy about the salt and pepper -- particularly the pepper. This makes something like eight pounds of food so it needs no small amount of seasoning to make an impact.



My guess is that this recipe is pretty robust to changes. If you swap a cup of potatoes for a cup of carrots, it'll be fine. More turkey would be fine, though much less would be a problem. Potatoes, carrots, and celery are all pretty neutral. You'd need a replacement source of defining taste.

Relatedly, I'll say again: if working with smoked turkey or ham, I suggest adding 1 tsp rosemary. If working with ordinary turkey, use 1 tsp sage.

New Year's Eve Appetizer Bonanza!