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I recently learned how to roast garlic and it has become a delightful new part of my repertoire. Cut the top quarter inch off a head of garlic and peel off as much of the paper as you can. Drizzle with olive oil (I suspect any vegetable oil would work), wrap in tinfoil, bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 40+ minutes.
I like to time my roasted garlic by "the length of an episode of The Great British Bake Off," because that way it's nice and roasty and also I'm super ready to eat it when it comes out of the oven because it is impossible to watch The Great British Bake Off without getting hungry.
And voila! Roasted garlic! Supposedly it keeps for a week, but in fact I suspect that it would keep just fine for a while longer than that - provided of course that you don't gobble it all up; it tastes delicious on toast. It's also good for garlic bread: rather than dicing up all that garlic, you can just mash the roasted garlic cloves into the butter, spread it on bread, sprinkle with cheese, zip it in the oven and - cheesy garlic bread! Hooray!
Both garlic toast & cheesy garlic bread make a wonderful side dish for soups of all kinds. After the success of my white bean soup with bacon (I made it for my parents tonight and they were suitably impressed. "Julia Child always said a bean soup should have a velvety texture," Mom commented.), I decided to branch out and try black bean soup, which I finally did last week and...
"It's nice," Julie said diplomatically.
"It tastes exactly like the white bean soup, doesn't it?" I sighed.
I cut everything I didn't like out of the recipe (carrots, celery, cumin, and also I substituted bacon for the ham because I only like ham on alternate Tuesdays) and therefore basically recreated the white bean soup recipe, except with black beans and a spot of lime juice.
So back to the soup pan I went, and added lime zest as well as lime juice, twice the amount of red pepper flakes, and even - daringly - about a quarter as much cumin as the recipe asked for, which was small enough that it didn't do anything obnoxious to the soup, either because it was so slight that it did not affect the flavor in any way, or because the lime and the pepper flakes were so very zesty as to mask any untoward cumin happenings.
This is perhaps a little too zesty. I will need to fine-tune further.
Other cooking plans for the winter: new biscotti flavors. My giant cookbook has recipes for orange-almond and lemon-anise biscotti - I'm not sure I trust anise; I may substitute poppy seeds. Possibly a cassoulet? (Elaborating upon the bean theme.) Certainly pot roast. It's certainly cold enough. Perhaps this will be the year that I master pot roast!
I like to time my roasted garlic by "the length of an episode of The Great British Bake Off," because that way it's nice and roasty and also I'm super ready to eat it when it comes out of the oven because it is impossible to watch The Great British Bake Off without getting hungry.
And voila! Roasted garlic! Supposedly it keeps for a week, but in fact I suspect that it would keep just fine for a while longer than that - provided of course that you don't gobble it all up; it tastes delicious on toast. It's also good for garlic bread: rather than dicing up all that garlic, you can just mash the roasted garlic cloves into the butter, spread it on bread, sprinkle with cheese, zip it in the oven and - cheesy garlic bread! Hooray!
Both garlic toast & cheesy garlic bread make a wonderful side dish for soups of all kinds. After the success of my white bean soup with bacon (I made it for my parents tonight and they were suitably impressed. "Julia Child always said a bean soup should have a velvety texture," Mom commented.), I decided to branch out and try black bean soup, which I finally did last week and...
"It's nice," Julie said diplomatically.
"It tastes exactly like the white bean soup, doesn't it?" I sighed.
I cut everything I didn't like out of the recipe (carrots, celery, cumin, and also I substituted bacon for the ham because I only like ham on alternate Tuesdays) and therefore basically recreated the white bean soup recipe, except with black beans and a spot of lime juice.
So back to the soup pan I went, and added lime zest as well as lime juice, twice the amount of red pepper flakes, and even - daringly - about a quarter as much cumin as the recipe asked for, which was small enough that it didn't do anything obnoxious to the soup, either because it was so slight that it did not affect the flavor in any way, or because the lime and the pepper flakes were so very zesty as to mask any untoward cumin happenings.
This is perhaps a little too zesty. I will need to fine-tune further.
Other cooking plans for the winter: new biscotti flavors. My giant cookbook has recipes for orange-almond and lemon-anise biscotti - I'm not sure I trust anise; I may substitute poppy seeds. Possibly a cassoulet? (Elaborating upon the bean theme.) Certainly pot roast. It's certainly cold enough. Perhaps this will be the year that I master pot roast!
