Green Sides: Minted Cumin Peas and Roasted Citrus Sesame Green Beans

Here are a few green side dishes I've made recently.

The peas include two of my favorite go-to ingredients: frozen garden peas and good old mint sauce. The peas (one 9 oz bag)  were cooked still frozen in a sauté pan with a little bit of olive oil. I then added two heaped tablespoons of mint sauce and a few pinches of cumin--that's really all there is to them. You should make these peas because they are unbelievably flavorful and because you'll find yourself using the mint sauce for all kinds of other things. My husband eats it with everything--steak, cottage pie, lamb of course, chicken pot pie--like I said, it's a staple in our house.

A word or two on mint sauce. You can find prepared mint sauce at Ralphs and Fresh & Easy these days. Ralphs carries the Cross and Blackwell brand pictured below and Fresh & Easy carries the thicker brand that I prefer from Duerrs, which I think you are supposed to dilute but I never do. You could also make your own by finely chopping fresh mint then mix it with malt vinegar, sugar, and hot water. This is how my nana used to make hers. You know it's right by looking at it. But how could you know if you've never made mint sauce before, right? So here's a good BBC recipe if you need more specific instructions.

For the green beans, I roasted them in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes with the juice of one blood orange (you can use any citrus) some olive oil, or olive oil spray, and salt and pepper. When they are nice and brown bring them out of the oven and sprinkle on a tablespoon of sesame seeds. It's a lovely toasty way to enjoy your greens! 

And hey, these are both perfect dishes to serve at all those Saint Patrick's Day parties you'll be throwing. Bonus.

Red Light Spaghetti Squash

I never met a squash I didn't like, and the spaghetti squash is no exception. I'm astounded and disappointed that I haven't tried it sooner. Not a revelation for most, I know, but a culinary surprise for me. 

So here's how it started: I wanted pasta, and because pasta isn't on my horizon for a few months to come, I bought a spaghetti squash, put it in a 400 degree oven cut in half face down on a baking tray with some thyme and olive oil spray. I didn't scoop the seeds first because, to be honest, I thought the edible part was the part right in the middle with the seeds, but you should scoop, please, because it's much easier that way. When it came out after 30 minutes, what  a lovely gift of pastaesque strings I received when I started to fork the entire squash

The sauce is simple:

• 2 cloves of garlic minced with a tiny splash of olive oil cooked very quickly
• Add 8-ounces of Tomato sauce and/or chopped tomatoes, canned or from a carton
• 1 teaspoon of oregano
• 10 Olives
• Red pepper flakes (to taste)
• 1 tablespoon of freshly grated Parmesan
• A few leaves of Basil
• Salt and Pepper

Toss the scooped spaghetti strands with the ingredients above in the same pan you used to for the sauce and you'll swear you're eating a Spaghetti alla puttanesca dish from your favorite Italian restaurant. Oh, and I didn't forget the capers, I'm just not a big fan, but go right ahead and caper it up, lady of the night

Smart Salad

I hoped that the only meals I would be making for my badass, amazing, breast cancer-surviving friend, Sharon, would be on Friday nights with a bottle of wine--not dropping off dishes at her home because life had dealt her one more ugly hand.

But it has and so I did and this is the salad I delivered along with a sweet potato soup and whole wheat broccoli pizza for her boys.

I call this a smart salad because it's full of cancer-fighting foods like massaged kale, pomegranate seeds, avocado and citrus juice.

The pizza was super easy to make with a store bought whole wheat dough, shredded mozzarella and organic broccoli florets.

Here's to Friday night meals once again very soon.

Berry Berry Pavlova

Everyone deserves a pavlova for their 40th birthday. When my husband (who loves any dessert that involves meringue) recently reached this milestone celebration, I decided to put on my meringue hat and give it a go. Pavlovas are pretty popular in England and Austrailia--where the pavlova was first created, but many of our American guests hadn't even heard of this luscious dessert, much less eaten one. Named after the famous Russian ballerina, it's a dessert that is both light and unctuous all at the same time and everyone really seemed to love it.

My mum reminded me there is a dessert called Eaton Mess that uses the same components with a little less fuss. Nigella makes a great version if you're in a messy mood.

For my pavlova attempt, I took a lot of advice from Deb's Smitten Kitchen post for a berry pavlova that was adapted from Ina Garten's recipe.

A few changes included macerating the berries in Limoncello for a few hours, and instead of one large meringue, I made four six-inch meringues that I stacked on top of each other creating a tower of whipped cream and berries. The most important piece of advice for a pavlova is that it should be assembled just before serving to avoid too much of a soggy situation. Make it a party trick--a little performance food art at the end of your dinner is always fun!

Vegetables, Vegetables, Vegetables...

 ...this is my new mantra. I thought I could come home from our trip, stop eating Roses chocolates/egg salad sandwiches/prawn cocktail crisps, and those holiday pounds would melt away--just fall right off me. But now it's February and I'm still waiting for the melting to commence. Granted, my last post was about a buttery pound cake, but I only had a sliver, I swear.

Anyway, when all those taunting smiling pictures of Jennifer Hudson in her white pants proved too much to ignore, I marched myself back into the brand new Encino Weight Watchers shop around the corner from my house.

And oh how happy I am to have some control once again. This colorful little roast included Brussel sprouts, cherry tomatoes and green cauliflower. That oil you see is just a spray that I coated the foil with before giving the veggies a little rolling ride. Before the holidays, I bought a selection of gourmet salts from Trader Joe's, one of which includes edible flowers and it brings a whole different level of flavor to these beauties that isn't floral so much as steeped in the brightness of a garden.

So roast away. I think this make a gorgeous side dish for any meal, or in my case a whole meal that's much more filling than a bag of prawn cocktail crisps (and almost as good.)

Mrs. Miranda's Grapefruit Cake

Lemon cake is really important to me. That might sound a little dramatic, but it's true. It would be my desert island dessert. My grapefruits are also important to me. They are particularly beautiful right now and it pains me to see them drop and rot. So imagine my excitement when I found a recipe in the recent Cooking Light magazine for a grapefruit pound cake.

Let's just say that I'm not known for my baking. Give me some meat, a starch and a veg and I can put something together that is usually tasty. But if my husband sees me with my standing mixer out and a bag of sugar, he shakes his head and quietly closes his office door. Most of the time, we make a mess--we meaning the girls and me--and end up with a lackluster cake or cookie or a dense loaf of bread. 

This grapefruit cake has changed my baking world! Again, dramatic I know, but it I swear it rivals a certain graceful baker whose green and white tins I have had many lovely opportunities to open in the past--hence the tongue-in-cheek title to this post.  I am not going to take all the credit--when I looked on the Cooking Light Web site there were numerous glowing and even ecstatic reviews for this recipe precisely because it's not it not at all fussy so that even challenged bakers like me can end up with a remarkable cake.

Because I am never meticulous when it coms to baking and don't have the patience to wait until I have all of the ingredients I need (it's baking, I know!)  I used non-fat whipped cream cheese instead of the 1/3 less fat kind and olive oil instead of canola oil and it still turned out great!

From the zesty buttery inside to the syrupy gooey top, this cake has what every citrus pound cake should. Make it, please!

Homemade Cointreau or Orange Infused Vodka

January is supposed to be a month of abstinence. Less cream, less meat, less fat, less booze. So far, since we returned from our wine-soaked, pavlova-drenched, cheese overfloweth trip to the UK, things have definitely been more Spartan on the food and wine front. But it's a crisp delightful Sunday before a holiday and I thought it might be fun to have cocktails tonight.

The great thing about infusions is that they don't take long to be drinkable. So in my marmalade pot (I had a dijon pot at the ready, but it still smelled a little mustardy) I put the peel of two oranges from our tree, filled the jar to just below the brim with vodka and then added a tablespoon of granulated sugar. Screw on the top, shake it up and that's all it takes. A little later on when the Magical Elf and her sister the Pixie are snug in their beds, my husband and I can enjoy a little Sunday night orange vodka cocktail that, in my opinion, no January should be without.