Summer time...

and the livin' is easy....

Or at least most of the recipes I am willing to tackle this time of the year are.
Easy, I mean.

Case in point?  This Strawberry Balsamic Dressing recipe from the Whole Foods recipe website.

Caveat:  I rarely shop at WF, but I do check their site for recipes using seasonal ingredients now and again.  I have a local market I frequent for emergency supplies and do all the rest of my food shopping at Wheatsville Co-op.

Because, that's why.

Whether you have thyme or strawberries either one growing in your garden currently, their flavors in combination hold pride of taste in this particular summertime offering, a no-oil dressing that is supposedly also "delicious as a dip for pear or apple wedges".   I have a pear rolling around here somewhere and will bravely taste test this assertion for you after we get the dressing organized.

But first, let's get our ingredients gathered and make some dressing.

The recipe calls for:
2/3 cups sliced fresh organic strawberries
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 shallot, chopped
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
1 1/4 teaspoons Dijon mustard (I used whole grain)
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper





Combine all the ingredients plus 1/4 cup water in a blender and blend until very smooth.
Makes about 1 cup / Serves 8
Store in the refrigerator if not using promptly.

The dressing is a cinch to make.  I'm not sure you need to get too invested in chopping your berries or shallot half since the blender will be doing plenty of that on your behalf.

The dressing's flavor is predominantly thyme, though I imagine that might vary according to how fresh your thyme leaves are. I picked my thyme sprigs right before making the dressing.  The final flavor balance will also reflect how ripe your strawberries are.  I used berries from the store, which means they were not nearly as sweet or juicy as home grown.  Still, delicious over all.

I put together a quick lunch salad of arugula and romaine, sprinkled with more sliced berries, crumbled goat cheese, toasted pecans and a little bit of left over grilled chicken.  See how pretty?  It tasted every bit as good as it looked.  (Did I lean over and not-so-daintily nibble a bite off the top while marching back into the house with my lunch after I snapped this shot?  Perhaps.....)

  

A final tasting note.  I tried the dressing as a dip for a ripe pear slice and honestly?  As much as I like the dressing AS dressing, I wasn't so crazy about it as a dip for fruit.  To me, ripe fruit is good enough all by its lonesome.  Maybe that disqualifies me as arbiter so feel free to dip away if that is what floats yer personal boat.

UPDATE:  After a couple of days in the refrigerator my dressing got a little thick.  I simply stirred it well and it was fine to use.  I'd even say the flavors were a bit better blended after having hung around together for a while.

Love Me Tender(s)

I haven't used many Whole Foods recipes lately although I still regularly read their emailed newsletters.

You know, I need to be careful when I set myself up to receive an emailed newsletter. I sign up for something and I feel obligated to read it, at least cursorily, before I can delete it.  I am reluctant to stop many of them, even after I go a stretch without seeing anything there I am interested in. I guess I am secretly convinced that next issue will be The One.

What I mean by The One is the issue that will have two or three articles or recipes I will find illuminating, life altering, revelatory and fulfilling. If I unsubscribe I might miss something spectacular and then where would I be?

Yeah. I gotta get out more.

Anyway, the Whole Food featured recipes have tended (for me) to hop erratically around, hitting the way too much trouble (Chilean Chicken Pie), or the way too weird ingredient combination (shrimp watermelon and goat cheese salad) marks as often as not.

Recently however, they featured a budget dinner idea that struck me as something I wanted to try here at home.  Sour Cream Chicken and Mushroom Pasta.  

I already had organic chicken broth, organic sour cream, and some of our well liked No Yolks broad noodles on hand, so only needed to pick up mushrooms and chicken tenders off the list.

I hit Wheatsville to shop for ingredients.  They did not have chicken tenders, but had a package of Grateful Harvest Turkey tenders.  I like cooking with organic turkey, it has great flavor (as opposed to the bizarrely no flavored birds grown in CAFOs).  Turkey tenders it would be. 

I decided to use two cups of mushrooms and I was a bit sloppy with the paprika so I am guessing I ended up with closer to two teaspoons when all was said and stirred in. Perhaps my heat was a bit high, a common failing of electric heat sources as opposed to gas flames, because when I was ready to add the noodles the sauce had boiled down a bit too far. Would this looks-so-easy dish prove to be trickier than I thought?

Naaaah - no worries - a glug or two of chicken broth and a quick reheat brought my dinner entreé back to plating readiness. I served the paprika influenced orange noodles with steamed organic green beans and a few slices of a nice baguette from the Old World Bakery in Kyle.  

There is a word in Italian for that piece of bread you use to sop up the extra sauce.  I can't recall the term at the moment but I know why they have a special word for it.  Using a piece of sturdy bread to make sure none of a delicious sauce is left to waste needlessly away on a plate just makes good plain sense.  It is ever so much more delicate to swirl your bread around and pop it in your mouth than to hold your plate up and lick it clean.  Or so I'm told.....The sour cream tenderloin and mushroom pasta is very delicious. The smokiness of the paprika worked really well with the mushrooms in the sauce, and the turkey tenders cooked through without drying out at all - one complaint I often have with teensy pieces of simmered poultry. 

We each had a generous serving and we still have two servings left that ought to reheat nicely for lunch or another go round at dinnertime. Next time I might bump the mushrooms up to three cups. This sauce cooks just long enough (25 minutes or so) that the mushrooms could stand to have a stronger presence in my thinking. Or you could cook them separately and stir them in so they don't cook down quite so much but that defeats the only-uses-two-pots advantage of this.

I am sure I spent more than $3.17 per serving because I used organics wherever I could. The only ingredients that were not organic were the salt, pepper, and the noodles. Those were at least Kosher - well, two out of three - never seen Kosher pepper have you? I didn't even try to tally up the additional cost per serving for using organic because using organics is not about the math for me. 

Actually, in an ideal world, nothing is about the math for me. I will just go ahead and say it - Math sucks. Yeah. There you go. Math sucks. I said it and I'm glad. Deal with it.

It will be interesting, as this recession processes, to see how rigidly adherent to my "organic options are always better" policy I can be if/when the pennies need to be pinched a little harder. I suppose that would be considered another reason to ease away from so much animal protein in our diets. Meat and seafood are always pricier than their alternatives. Not to mention carbon footprints (although ooops - there - I just did!).

If you are a stroganoff fan, this dish will be right up your alley. As simple as it is, and that is as much why it appeals as anything, you could certainly use it as a starting point and dress it up with the addition of other seasonal ingredients or proteins. You'll want to keep that flour in there to thicken the sauce some way, but otherwise, you could pretty much pull this together 48 different ways, 48 different weeks.

For your convenience, to follow is the recipe off the Whole Foods website:

Sour Cream Chicken And Mushroom Pasta
Serves 4

Ingredients
3/4 pound chicken tenders
1/4 cup all purpose flour 
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tablespoon butter 
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 cup sour cream
1 cup chicken broth 
1 1/2 cups sliced mushrooms
1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
1/2 pound dried fettuccine or bowtie pasta 

Method
Put chicken, flour and salt and pepper into a large bowl and toss to combine. Set aside. Melt butter in a skillet with olive oil. Add chicken and brown on all sides. Stir in sour cream, broth, mushrooms and paprika. Cover and simmer on low heat for 25 to 30 minutes. Prepare pasta according to package instructions. Drain well, then transfer to bowls and spoon chicken and its sauce over the top.

Nutrition
Per serving (about 11oz/301g-wt.): 600 calories (220 from fat), 25g total fat, 11g saturated fat, 75mg cholesterol, 990mg sodium, 65g total carbohydrate (4g dietary fiber, 6g sugar), 28g protein

Penny Pinching

Once upon a time, there was a national chain that started out small. As it got larger, (and larger), people often complained it had forgotten where it came from. They said the chain was pricing them out of being able to shop there, and they began referring to the stores by a nickname, "Whole Paycheck".Well, Austin based Whole Foods may have heard your grousing, and perhaps to prove they haven't completely lost their affinity for serving the non-glitterati, they've recently unveiled a Budget Recipe Challenge.

How does it work? You go to the site, review the recipes and comment on your favorite dish. That casts a "vote" for that dish, or rather the blogger who submitted the dish, to win the challenge.  

What's the catch?  You do have to register on their site to vote. (You can always un-register later if that becomes a nuisance for you.) 

What's the reward?There are 6 budget minded recipes submitted by popular food bloggers for starters (although you don't have to register to read the recipes).  Past that, anybody voting is entered to win a $500 Whole Foods Gift Card and ten runners up will get a $25 gift card. (!) (!!!)

I don't know about you, but I would have a ginormously fun shopping trip spending 25 dollars at Whole Foods that came out of their pocket to start with.  500 dollars to spend would be surreal.  I'd splurge on items I wouldn't ordinarily buy, like foie gras or really nice wine. Or maybe half and half on fine bottles of wine and incredible cheeses.  Maybe I'd play it thrifty and stock up on nonperishables.  (naaaaaah)

But to win, you have to vote. I read all the recipes carefully and then voted for the Wonton Soup dinner. That is the one dish I know my family would happily devour, and at slightly under $3 a serving, that makes it a winner already in my book.

Part of the rationale behind my Fall Pantry Challenge is using up perishable food on hand rather than throwing it out. Thrifty habits like that make even more sense in our current economic pickle.

As does checking out and voting for a budget minded recipe that potentially wins me $25 or $500 in grocery money.

How about you? Which recipe rocks your palate while hugging your piggybank?

Better yet, if you won the $500 prize from Whole Foods, tell me, what would you spend it on? I'm all ears.

Sprig has sprung

Most of the time I consider myself a veritable Mistress of the Universe when it comes to online searches. I suffer perhaps from a surfeit of overconfidence, based upon nothing more substantial than my ability to, say, find and print out the instructions for planting the Caesalpinia pulcherrima (Pride of Barbados) seeds I bought today.

Pride of Barbados is a gorgeous floral display masquerading as a low water use, neglect tolerant, deer resistant plant that flourishes locally in street medians. I personally have killed two of these otherwise sturdy specimens, leading me to speculate that overconfidence in my abilities extends past my internet search skills. But I digress.For dinner tonight I prepared a dish specially selected from recipes featured in the occasional newsletter thoughtfully provided me by Whole Foods Market.

The friendly folks at Whole Foods email a "foodie" type advertising circular posing as an informational exchange highlighting seasonally available ingredients and providing recipes featuring the same. I don't mind, in fact I subscribe to it and use their recipes regularly. I don't shop there often, but that is a topic for another post another day.

Today I was all about preparing their "Lemon Roasted Chicken Thighs with Chanterelles", which is where and why I bumped up against my technology snafu.

The recipe calls for 4 sprigs of fresh thyme.

No worries - I just happen to have thyme growing my garden and I'll allow as how I chuckle with delight each and every time I get to use some from my yard as opposed to having to go out and buy some, dried or fresh.

As I stood in my back yard, scissors in hand, gazing with admiration at my healthy flourishing thyme plants, (take THAT you persnickety Pride of Barbados show offs), I realized.

I have no idea what constitutes a "sprig".

Back inside I scurried to my faithful computer. I searched for "sprig equivalent". Aaank! Nothing. "Sprig substitute". Nope. "Sprig". Did I mean "spring"? *sigh*

I ended up cutting a length that approximates what I recall seeing as the length of the fresh herbs I can buy at my grocer's - around 4 inches. Having never prepared the recipe prior to this, I hoped for the best.

Results? I think the recipe is delectable. My husband was not so impressed with the inclusion of lemon. He was, however, able to eat his serving without discernible distress. Apparently while not a new favorite of his, not all that off putting, either.

So, a good recipe for somebody, but not one that will see another visit from us. I'll spare you the recipe at this point, but if you are interested, just let me know and I'll send it to you separately.

Meanwhile, back to whatEVER constitutes a "sprig"? Still guessing on that count.

Earlier today I speculated to one of my pastors that given 5 minutes and internet access I could determine for him the origin of the statement he included in his sermon that the church is always/only "one generation away from extinction".

I'll admit here I wasn't able to find the source of that quote in seven times that interval. I found it used, tweaked and referenced hundreds of times, but nary a sourced or original citation.

So, two strikes to my credit I'll bid adieu to the internet for just now. An amazing tool, a wonderful way to share ideas and recipes, and yes, a superhighway of information. Not the answer to every question certainly, but surely an engaging way to be reminded that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my Google searches.All things in balance, my week is off to a mellow start. I've worshipped, spent time playing and talking with my entire family by turns, and prepared a meal that not only stretched my food horizons but gently reminded me of my technology limitations.

Not too shabby a start. Onward....