Recipe of the Day: Peanut Thai Noodle Salad

Love It: Even avowed peanut butter haters enjoy sesame noodles. This recipe grinds its own, making a sweet-tangy sauce with nutty richness.

Fear It: Peanuts do have lots of fat, but it’s generally the healthy kind, so you only need to worry here if you have a peanut allergy.

Teach It: In a pan-saving technique, the recipe calls for throwing the veggies into the pasta pot during the last bit of cooking. Excellent! A fast and simple way to take a little crunch off and make the nutrients more available.

Eat It: While the recipe calls for eating the dish right away, while it’s still warm, these sort of nutty noodles are also great cold. They make a great lunch at work or school.

Peanut Thai Noodle Salad
Source: Kraft Foods
Yield: 1 serving

• 1 Tbsp. lime juice
  
• 2 teaspoons low sodium soy sauce
  
• 2 teaspoons honey
  
• 2 Tbsp. PLANTERS Dry Roasted Unsalted Peanuts, divided
  
• 2 ounces rotini pasta, uncooked
  
• 4 baby carrots, cut into thin strips
  
• ¼ cup snow pea pods, cut into thin strips
  
• ½ medium red pepper, cut into thin strips
  

PLACE lime juice, soy sauce, honey and 1 Tbsp. of the peanuts in a blender or food processor; cover. Blend until smooth; set aside.
COOK pasta as directed on package, adding carrots, pea pods and peppers to boiling water during the last 3 min. of cooking time. Drain pasta and vegetables in a colander; transfer to a serving bowl. Combine pasta and vegetables with peanut sauce and remaining peanuts.
ENJOY grapes for dessert.
SERVE a glass of water with the meal.

Nutritional notes:
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories 440
Total fat 11g
Saturated fat 1.5g
Cholesterol 0mg
Sodium 400mg
Carbohydrate 78g
Dietary fiber 7g
Sugars 29g
Protein 15g
Vitamin A 150%DV
Vitamin C 250%DV
Calcium 6%DV
Iron 25%DV

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Blazy’s Pepperoni Studded Lasagna

Love It: Pepperoni! My favorite cured sausage, spicy with just enough grease. Plus, we’ve got here the merging of two yummy comfort foods, pizza and lasagna. Finally, it’s got Italian sausage, and Scott loves sausage.

 

Fear It: All that cheese and sausage equals diet disaster. We might have some serious self-control issues when presented with such a delightful, melty, spicy, cheesy concoction.

 

Teach It: Guy Fieri cooks the pepperoni in a skillet before adding it to the lasagna, reducing the sausage’s grease factor (no surface pools!) while releasing that spicy fat for another use (like making some extra-porky pasta sauce).

 

Eat It: I’d suggest serving alongside some salad out of a sack and Diet Rite from a two-liter, as if you’d just gotten some delivery from Little Papa Hutino’s.

Blazy’s Pepperoni Studded Lasagna
Source: Guy Fieri
Yield: 8-10 servings

• 2 lbs. lasagna sheets
  
• 2 cups hand cut 1/8-inch slices pepperoni
  
• 4 cups tomato sauce, recipe follows
  
• 1 lb. ricotta
  
• 16 ounces shredded mozzarella
  
• 2 lbs. bulk Italian sausage, cooked
  
• ¾ cup grated Parmesan
  

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Boil 6 quarts of water, add pinch of salt, and cook pasta to almost done. Remove from water and shock in ice bath.

In medium saucepan add pepperoni and saute over medium heat until crispy. Remove from heat and drain on a paper towel.

In a 10-by-14-by-3-inch baking pan or dish, pour 1 cup of tomato sauce in bottom and around sides. Layer lasagna sheets on the bottom of the pan, overlapping by 1/2-inch. Add 1/3 amount of ricotta, 1/3 amount of mozzarella, 1/3 amount of sausage, then sprinkle generously with the Parmesan, add 1/2 cup tomato sauce, and 1/4 cup of pepperoni. Repeat this 2 more times.

On the very top sheet, top with remaining ricotta, tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, and dust with Parmesan. Bake for approximately 45 minutes. Remove from oven; let sit for 15 minutes. Cut and serve immediately.

Tomato Sauce:
3 ounces extra-virgin olive oil
1 yellow onion, minced
5 medium-sized garlic cloves, crushed
6 cups skinned and diced Roma tomatoes
2 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil leaves
1 tablespoon minced fresh oregano leaves
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a medium saucepan, heat olive oil. Add onion and cook over medium to low heat until transparent. Add garlic and cook until almost brown. Then add tomatoes and cook for 1/2 hour over low to medium heat. Add the basil and oregano and continue to cook for another 1/2 hour. Season, to taste, with salt and pepper, cool and store in the refrigerator until ready to use.

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Saucy and Rebellious

Fresh off of getting yet another scolding from Mario Batali about how we Americans (which, last I checked, included hailing-from-Seattle Batali) over-sauce our pasta, a grayish light shines down from heaven: The Minimalist says we don’t have to minimize the saucy goodness.

 

And it’s about time. I’m tired of being stalked by the Italian pasta polizia.

 

I’m not saying I’m always a pasta drowner. I don’t even know how much sauce must be considered a drowning. I certainly don’t end up with an excess when I make spaghetti alla carbonara, but I do enjoy ample tomato and meat sauces on my pasta.

 

And why not? Pasta has lots of carbohydrates but little fiber. It’s not offering a lot, nutritionally speaking. Plus, for most Americans, I think the problem is more that we put too much pasta on our plates rather than too much sauce.

 

I mean, come on — Rachael Ray is always saying a full pound of dry noodles serves only four. That’s 400 calories already without any sauce at all. Still, even that much isn’t enough at a restaurant — at the Sbarro in my university’s student center, an order of spaghetti with plain tomato sauce clocked in at about 820 calories with a weight of one and a quarter pounds.

 

More and more, I like my pasta to be an accent to a dish full of vegetables and lean meats rather than the main event. I don’t feel so bad about eating pasta when I know it’s a reasonable portion.

 

Lest we forget, another tenet of the Italian pasta-serving gospel is that pasta should be the small first course, not the entrée. On all of the menus I looked at in Italy on my honeymoon, the pasta and pizza we Americans would consider main courses were separated out from the list of entrées. Also, every pasta dish I got came in a small bowl with a portion half the size you’d expect at an Olive Garden or Macaroni Grill.

 

I’d like to share this portion of Bittman’s column:

 

As the years went by, though, a kind of “if it’s Italian, it must be good” mentality developed here, and home cooks began enjoying pasta with a minimum of sauce. (We also began undercooking it, just to show that we could take al dente one ridiculous step further.)

But today, barely moistened pasta often doesn’t make sense. Even setting aside the extreme recommendations of the Atkins diet, it’s widely agreed that highly refined grains — a group that includes the semolina flour from which the best-tasting dry pasta is made — do us little nutritional good. From the point of view of the body, there’s little difference between pasta and white bread (and, for that matter, biscotti); neither has much in the way of protein, vitamins, micronutrients or fiber, and all are digested quickly and may ultimately be stored as fat.

 

Ahhh.

 

The release of some tagliatelle tension.

 

Go check out the recipes from the column for more cooking fun.

Cottage Cheese Mac

I have a secret shame.

 

I love macaroni and cheese from the blue box.

 

Okay, nowadays I prefer the blue box that says “Deluxe” to the original Cheese and Macaroni, but nonetheless, I truly enjoy elbows or shells coated in a processed cheese sauce.

 

Velveeta Shells and Cheese, Kraft Deluxe, Annie’s — it doesn’t matter which. As long as it comes with a packet of cheesy goo, it’s okay with me!

 

Although, come to think of it, the boxes with powder have their merits, too. When the grocery budget has dwindled, those 50-cent meals look mighty appetizing. Plus with the powder kind you have more control over how much fat goes into the sauce (always skim milk and skimpy butter).

 

Of course, I do have a reasonable argument for my dependence on packaged mac and cheese. It’s simple.

 

All recipes for the homemade stuff I’ve ever tried suck. Big time.

 

Alton Brown’s casserole is mostly flavorless and often comes out grainy (although it is tasty when deep fried). Paula Deen’s baked mac is greasy, clumpy, and again, mostly flavorless. These are the two most prominent disasters in my memory, but no recipe I’ve tried has produced results that could compete with the boxed stuff for punch. Rather, they taste as insipid as the Stouffer’s frozen cheesy mac my mom stocked before I could cook for myself.

 

Obviously, we’re coming in a roundabout way now to the recipe that is the exception to the rule.

 

I found a recipe that called for incorporating cottage cheese and sour cream into macaroni and cheese on Art Smith’s Back to the Table blog at Yahoo Food.

 

Now, as I am in Slovakia for the next several months, I had to improvise a bit with this recipe. Cheddar cheese is pricey in these parts; for the same price you can can two to four times as much Edam, Gouda or Emmentaler. Also, everything is measured in metric over here, so I can buy cottage cheese in either 180-gram or 150-gram tubs; no cups or ounces.

 

I decided too that I wanted to add a bit of one of my favorite flavors to the sauce, so I picked up one tub of cottage cheese with chives along with a plain tub. The herbal flecks made the finished dish look a bit prettier, as it turned out.

 

This mac and cheese came at me with knock-my-socks-off flavor. Yum, yum, yum! I think the extra acidity from the sour cream and cottage cheese helped kick the cheesy flavor up, and the touch of chives added some interest to a normally bland dish.

 

Some tips now.

 

Here, I am kind of stuck with whatever’s on the shelves as far as dairy goes. Reduced-fat blocks of cheese don’t seem to exist. Products aren’t required to have nutritional information, so often they don’t. Also, whereas in America you might be offered sour cream in nonfat, low-fat, and full-fat varieties, here you are likely only to find one type (and hopefully you pick up the soured “smotana” as opposed to the fresh-from-the-cow kind, which come in pretty much the same packages).

 

Thus, I suggest making this a healthier dish if you live somewhere with a variety of dairy products by subbing in lower-cal versions. I myself usually like to go the middle-of-the-road low-fat route. The nutrition stats in the recipe, though, are for the highest fat products you might use.

 

In addition, go ahead and take a page from the Volumetrics diet — stir in some warmed veggie mix from the freezer to stretch the dish, increasing the nutrients but reducing the calories per serving. You’ll feel full on less cheese that way. For lunch the next day, I stirred in the leftover peas, corn, and carrots from dinner, and it was lovely.

 

Finally, don’t give up if it looks like the cheese is not melting right away. It takes several minutes of stirring to get those cottage cheese curds to meld with the sauce, but trust me, they will eventually.

 

Cottage Cheese Mac
Source: Colleen Fischer
Yield: 6 servings

• 2 cups elbow macaroni, (about 7 ounces)
  
• 1 large egg, beaten
  
• 1 cup cottage cheese
  
• 1 cup cottage cheese with chives
  
• ¾ cup sour cream
  
• 1 teaspoon table salt, plus more for the macaroni water
  
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
  
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
  
• 1 ½ cups Emmentaler cheese, shredded (about 7 ounces)
  

Boil a large pot of water. Add salt to taste and the macaroni. Cook until just before al dente, as the pasta will cook more in the cheese sauce.

Meanwhile, mix the egg, cottage cheeses, sour cream, salt, garlic powder, and pepper thoroughly in a medium bowl. Stir in the shredded cheese.

Drain the macaroni and return it to the hot pot, off the heat. Add the cheese mixture to the pot and fold it in with a rubber spatula. Return the pot to the burner over low heat, stirring gently and constantly for about 5 minutes, or until the shredded cheese and almost all of the cottage cheese melts. This will also gently cook the egg in the sauce. Don’t rush it — too much heat will not yield a nice, creamy sauce!

Take the pot off the heat and allow it to sit for about 5 minutes to thicken. Serve warm.

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Worms and Eyeballs

Note: Originally posted on my old site on June 14, 2005. I’ve made the noodles since then — still delicious!

 

I’ve found a new love: bucatini rigati. This perfect pasta resembles thick spaghetti, being long and cylindrical. However, the strands are hollow and have tiny ridges, both great features for picking up sauce. Combined with the substantial texture of the pasta (cooked al dente), it appeals to all my preferences.

 

As for the dish I used it in, it’s somewhat hit and miss, much like my track record with all of Rachael Ray’s recipes. Sometimes, she comes up with something delicious that’s a hit with everyone (such as her Apricot Chicken or her Bacon and Black Bean Smash), but on occasion, her recipes just look better than they taste (see Super Sloppy Joes).

 

In this case, the worms easily wriggled their way down my throat, but I choked on the eyeballs.

 

The “worms” are, of course, the bucatini, along with the matchstick-cut carrots, snow peas, red bell peppers and bean sprouts. With a light coat of soy sauce, it tasted like a fresher, less greasy and more delicious version of lo mein.

 

The “eyeballs” were chicken meatballs. I’ve had chicken dumplings, but I’ve never cooked with ground chicken. It definitely feels slimier than ground beef. The recipe here looks like it ought to be good, but I found that the ginger overwhelmed the other flavors, even though I think I ended up with less ginger than was called for. Especially with the milder, sweeter poultry in play, I had the uncomfortable sensation of eating a chicken cookie. Maybe it was the hoisin sauce, maybe it was using ground chicken instead of ground chicken breast (I couldn’t find it), maybe it was me using two pounds of chicken instead of 1 1/2 (it only came in 1-pound packages). But they were unappealing. Maybe beef or pork would have been better. Maybe.

 

However, the worms more than made up for the overly sweet eyeballs. If I make it again, it’ll be a nightcrawler-only affair.

 

 

Worms and Eyeballs
Source: Rachael Ray
Yield: 4 servings

 

• 1 ½ lbs. ground chicken breast
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 tablespoons chopped ginger root
• 2 scallions, finely chopped
• 1 small red pepper, 1/4 finely chopped and the remainder thinly sliced
• 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce, Chinese style barbecue sauce
• Salt and coarse black pepper
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
• ¾ small red bell pepper, sliced
• 1 cup shredded carrots
• 1 cup bean spouts
• 1 cup snow pea pods, julienne cut
• 1 lb. bucatini, cooked to al dente
• ¼ to 1/3 cup dark soy (Tamari) sauce, eyeball it

 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

 

Combine chicken, garlic, ginger, scallions, finely chopped red bell pepper, hoisin and salt and pepper. Roll meatballs into the size of chicken eyeballs. Place balls on a nonstick cookie sheet and coat lightly with vegetable oil, about 1 1/2 tablespoons. Roll balls around with your hands to gently coat with the oil. Roast the chicken eyeballs 10 to 12 minutes in a very hot oven.

 

About 5 minutes from the meatballs coming out of the oven, start stir-frying the veggies. Heat a large nonstick skillet over high heat. Add remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil. Add the sliced red bell pepper, carrots, spouts and pea pods to hot pan. Stir fry 1 minute, then drain noodles and add them to the vegetables. Add dark soy sauce to the noodles and toss to combine and evenly coat.

 

Transfer noodles to a serving platter and top with chicken eyeballs.

 

 

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