Meyer Lemon Sorbet

I just have to share this recipe with you.  I found it here, on the Pioneer Woman's Tasty Kitchen blog.  The person who uploads the recipe says it's a "delightful blend of lemon and orange with just the right amount of sweetness and tartness," which I think is funny because the recipe doesn't have any orange in it at all.  It does, however use Meyer Lemons, which are sweeter than typical lemons, so this sorbet does really have a wonderful balance of sweet and tart.  This sorbet is also great because it has a nice creamy flavor, without adding any dairy!

Prep: 15 minutes (plus chilling time of a few hours to overnight--your choice)
Total: 35 minutes
Serves: I think it makes about a quart

Ingredients
1-3/4 cups sugar
2 cups water
1 egg white
3/4 cup fresh meyer lemon juice
2 teaspoons freshly grated meyer lemon zest
4 teaspoons vodka

Preparation

1. Zest lemon and set aside.  Juice lemons and set aside.

2. Combine sugar and water in a small saucepan and place over low heat.  Stir until sugar dissolves.  Raise the heat and boil for 1 minute.  Remove from heat.

3. While you are dissolving the sugar/water mixture, in a large bowl, lightly beat the egg white until foamy.  Slowly beat in the hot simple syrup created from step 2.  Continue to beat until the mixture cools down slightly.  Add the meyer lemon juice.

4. Cover and chill until cold or overnight.  The mixture will have the egg white foam on top, but it will mix in when placed in the ice cream freezer.

5. Once the mixture is cold, churn the mixture in an ice cream mixer.  Mix in the zest and the vodka and freeze until it is the consistency of a soft-serve custard (~25 minutes).  Remove from the ice cream mixer and place in a container appropriate for freezing.

A very tasty salad: Jamie's Cranberry Spinach Salad

With the record-breaking heat, I most certainly did not want to cook something for dinner tonight.  Since we had a half-bag of spinach left over from a soup recipe I made late last week, I decided to make some sort of spinach salad.

The spinach salads I had bookmarked to try didn't really inspire me, so I googled spinach salad and found this recipe (the bonus was that I didn't even have to go shopping--had almost everything at home!).  Since the recipe serves 8, I used AllRecipe's handy calculator to turn it into 2 servings (which I've posted below).  I also added chicken to make it a main course salad. Gavin, who rates all salads as 3/5, said that this salad was "at least a 4," which really shocked me!

Below is my take on the salad (added chicken, omitted poppy seeds, a little extra onion).

Jamie's Cranberry Spinach Salad

Prep time: 10 minutes
Total time: 20 minutes
Serves 2

Ingredients:
3/4 tsp butter (I eyeballed this)
3 TBSP slivered almonds
1 boneless chicken breast
salt & pepper
1/2 bag baby spinach
1/2 c. dried cranberries (I threw in a little more...maybe 2/3 or 3/4 cup, but this is not necessary)
1-1/2 tsp toasted sesame seeds
2 TBSP white sugar
1/2 tsp minced onion (I eyeballed this and my guess was that it was more like 1 tsp, and it was just fine...not too oniony)
1/8 tsp paprika
1 TBSP white wine vinegar
1 TBSP cider vinegar
2 TBSP canola oil

Preparation:

1. In a skillet, melt the butter over medium heat.  Cook and stir the almonds in butter until lightly toasted. Remove from heat and let cool.

2. Salt and pepper the chicken breast on both sides.  In the same pan the almonds were cooked in, cook the chicken breast. (I find cooking an average boneless chicken breast for 6 minutes per side gets me perfect results: safely cooked, but still juicy.)

3. In a large bowl, combine the spinach with the toasted almonds and cranberries.

4. In a smaller skillet, toast the sesame seeds.  (If I were smart and had read the recipe closely from the beginning, I would have, in the same skillet, first toasted the sesame seeds, then melted the butter, toasted the almonds and then cooked the chicken.  Hopefully if you're smart and reading this carefully before you begin, you will save yourself from washing 1 extra skillet!)

5. In a small bowl, whisk together the sesame seeds, sugar, onion, paprika, white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, and canola oil.  Toss with spinach just before serving.

Moroccan Chicken with Fruit and Olive Topping

In going through my bookmarked recipes that I've recently made but haven't filed, I found this recipe that I thought I'd share.  Both Gavin and I found it to be very tasty!  And since it's a Cooking Light recipe, I guess it's also better for you!  (Recipe taken from here)

Prep time: about 15 minutes

Total time: about a half hour

Serves 4

Ingredients

1 TBSP olive oil, divided

1/2 tsp salt (I use Diamond Kosher Salt, which I love)

1/4 tsp black pepper (I eyeballed this with a pepper mill)

1/4 tsp dried thyme

4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts

1/2 c. onion, chopped

2 tsp bottled, minced garlic

3/4 c. dried mixed fruit (Gavin and I have a lot of dried fruit in our pantry.  When I made this, I used a combination of: apricots, cherries, white peaches and prunes)

1/2 c. dry white wine 

1/2 c. chicken broth

1/4 c. chopped pitted green olives (I used some with pimentos in the olives and didn't bother removing the pimentos)

1/8 tsp salt

1/8 tsp black pepper

Preparation

1. Heat 2 tsp oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.  Sprinkle 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp pepper and thyme evenly over chicken (I didn't bother measuring out--just eyeballed it).  Add chicken to the pan; cook 4 minutes on each side, or until done.  Remove from pan; cover and keep warm.

2. Heat remaining 1 tsp oil in pan (use the same pan you cooked the chicken in).  Add onion to pan; sauté 2 minutes until tender.  Add garlic to pan; sauté 30 seconds.  Add fruit and remaining ingredients to pan; cook 5 minutes or until liquid almost evaporates.

3. Place chicken on plate or in bowl and spoon the fruit mixture over the chicken.  (I can't remember what I served this with, but it would go nicely with rice, quinoa, or couscous.)

Aunt Trisha's Smashed Potatoes

These are truly a treat.  I am not sure where my Aunt Trisha got the recipe from, or if she devised these herself, but they are a keeper!

You will need time when you make this recipe... allow for an hour or so.

Ingredients:
Yukon gold baby potatoes (or baby potatoes of other sorts, I know fingerlings also work well)
Coarse salt
Olive oil (Aunt Trisha uses peanut or canola oil because they have a higher burning point than olive oil, but I used plain old olive oil and they turned out fine)

Preparation:

1. Scrub clean baby potatoes, submerge in pot of water and heat over medium/high flame.  Basically, what you're doing in this step is boiling the potatoes until they're fork tender.  I didn't time how long it took mine to get tender -- I just kept checking.  My guess is something like 10 minutes?

2. Once they're tender, remove the potatoes from water.  Place the potatoes on a sheet pan and let them cool slightly. (I lined my sheet pan with parchment paper, since I didn't want a messy clean-up, and this only sorta worked for me...I still had to clean the baking sheet, but I guess it could have been worse.)

3. Once the potatoes are slightly cool, carve an X on the tops of each potato, slicing them about 1/2" deep.  Then, with your fingers (or I guess my Aunt Trisha uses a spoon, probably to keep her fingers from burning on the hot potatoes), smash/pinch the potatoes together, so that the potatoes open up a little (see the picture above, difficult to explain in words).

4. Drizzle oil over the potatoes, making sure to put enough on so that the potatoes will get crispy, but not too much to drown them.  Then sprinkle coarse salt over the potatoes and place in an oven heated to 425 degrees for 45 or so minutes.

The potatoes will come out soft, but crunchy!  Like a mixture between french fries and baked potatoes!

Flank Steak with Parsley-Garlic Sauce

This is a truly tasty recipe that I've made a few times!  Thank you very much, Martha Stewart!  I found the recipe here, but I'll reprint it below for you.  Most recently, I served this with Aunt Trisha's smashed potatoes (recipe here) and some watermelon...except I only made half of the parsley-garlic sauce because I find that if I make the whole batch, I have tons extra.  Easy, tasty -- what more could you want?

Prep: 20 minutes
Total: 25 minutes
Serves 4

Steak Ingredients
1.5 lb flank steak (you could also use skirt or hangar steak cuts)
Coarse salt and ground pepper
1 TBSP olive oil

Parsley-Garlic Sauce Ingredients 
1/4 cup olive oil
1 or 2 cloves garlic
1 bunch flat-leaf parsley, stemmed (about 4 cups) (this is pretty important -- take the time to remove the stems from the parsley...if you leave them in, the sauce will taste too much like parsley)
3 TBSP oregano leaves
3 TBSP white wine vinegar

2 TBSP water

1/2 tsp salt

1/8 tsp red pepper flakes

Preparation: 

1. (Step 1 is for the steak)  Generously season both sides of flank steak with salt and pepper.  Heat 1 TBSP oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Cook steak 5-8 minutes per side for medium-rare.  Transfer to a board; let rest, covered, 10 minutes.  Thinly slice against the grain.

2. (Step 2 is for the sauce)  Meanwhile, make sauce: In a food processor, pulse garlic until finely chopped (I start with it chopped, so I skip this step and just pile everything in).  Add parsley, oregano, vinegar, pepper flakes, 1/4 c. olive oil, water and salt.  Pulse until herbs are finely chopped.  Serve with steak.

Lime-Vanilla Frozen Yogurt

A few weeks ago I made some vanilla ice cream.  In order to do that, I had to buy a vanilla bean, which are incredibly expensive (anyone want to go in with me on a bulk order?).  The package I bought had two, and I only had to use one for the ice cream.  I saw that I had this Lime-Vanilla Frozen Yogurt recipe bookmarked from Epicurious, so I decided to make that last night before the extra vanilla bean I had went bad!

The result: I think it's really, really yummy (and easy to make).  It's not super sweet, since you use plain ice cream.  I like the slightly tart combination of the vanilla bean and lime together.  Gavin thinks it's ok--turns out he thinks limes have a little too much flavor if you add them to things.

Here's the recipe, with my commentary:

Two 32-oz containers of whole-milk plain yogurt
1 Vanilla bean
1 tsp finely grated fresh lime zest
6 TBSP fresh lime juice
1/2 c. light corn syrup
3/4 c. superfine granulated sugar

Preparation:

1.  In a cheesecloth-lines large sieve or colander set over a bowl, drain yogurt (covered and chilled, 12 hours).  Discard liquid in bowl.  I did this one container at a time (colander set over a bowl), with two different types of plain yogurt, because I happened to have two different types, Mountain High and Yoplait (did you know Yoplait did plain?  I did not know, either).  I found that the Mountain High took forever to separate, because it kept on draining liquid.  The Yoplait barely drained anything--the consistencies were totally different!  

2.  With a knife, halve vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape out seeds (discard pod).  In a blender, puree together vanilla seeds, half of drained yogurt (this was easy for me, since I kept my two yogurts separate), lime zest, lime juice (I only used 5.5 TBSP, since I didn't want to cut open a whole new lime), light corn syrup (one of the commenters said she used simple syrup, which worked) and superfine granulated sugar (I just used plain white granulated sugar and it worked just fine).

3. In a large bowl, stir together blended vanilla mixture and remaining yogurt.

4. Transfer mixture to an ice-cream maker and freeze.  Transfer frozen yogurt to an airtight container and put in the freezer to harden.