What's Baking? February: Bake your own convenience food!

This month's theme was chosen by Stephanie from Brownies and Blondies. She challenged everyone to bake something they'd normally buy- example were pie crust or pie filling. I thought this was a great theme! And so I thought about what I'd make.

And I thought and thought. I don't buy a lot of baking things. I buy a lot of cooking convenience items, but not a lot of baking ones. So my husband got in on the brainstorming. He had some great ideas, but not things I'd use for baking.

Like cheese. Who makes cheese, really? Well, this girl!

And I used it on a pizza (and used the leftover whey in pizza dough). But I always make my pizza crust, I wanted something I'd never done before.

I fully intended to make puff pastry. This has been on my bucket list since I saw the Martha Bakes episode on puff pastry. It looks tedious and time consuming, but not really hard. Well, that never happened- it will, though! I promise, it will happen, and I will blog about it.

So I present to you:

meatballs!

This might seem like a total cop-out, but if we have swedish meatballs (which is rare), we usually buy the big bag from the freezer at Ikea and slowly work our way through them. But one night, something made me think about meatballs- we had 1lb of ground turkey in the freezer, not much else, and it was too late to start chili for dinner. So I went hunting for a meatball recipe, and let me tell you, these are amazing. I'll buy my meatballs from my own chest freezer from now on.

Spiced Apple Swedish Meatballs
adapted from A Spicy Perspective

I made half a recipe- I just had 1lb of ground turkey and no sausage of any kind.

For the meatballs:
1 small onion, chopped finely
1T butter
1lb ground turkey (or beef or lamb, etc)
1 cup panko bread crumbs
1/4 cup apple butter
2T sour cream or yogurt
1 egg
dash of salt
1/2t allspice
1/4t black pepper


For the sauce:
1/4 cup broth (chicken, beef, veggie, etc)
1/4 cup apple butter
1T honey
pinch of chipotle powder

note: I think I have more homemade items that could be convenience than I thought- the apple butter and chicken broth I used are homemade

Preheat your oven to 400F. Line a *rimmed* baking sheet with foil and spray with nonstick spray.

For the meatballs: finely chop the onion and saute in butter over medium heat until the onion starts to brown. Remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes. Then put the onion and all the rest of the meatball ingredients in a large bowl and work with your hands to combine everything. Form into small balls and place on the baking sheet- mine were about 1.5T each and I got 44 meatballs from this batch. The original recipe used twice the ingredients and made 45 meatballs so apparently those were quite large!

Bake for 15min at 400. Mean while, make the sauce.

Combine the sauce ingredients in a bowl and whisk.

After 15min in the oven, take the meatballs off and spoon the sauce over each meatball.

Return to the oven and bake another 7-10 min.

And that's all! Enjoy!

I have to say, these are delicious. They smell delicious when you're making them, they smell delicious when they're baking (and normally I avoid smelling raw meat because I find the smell unpleasant). The combination of the apple butter, allspice and onion is amazing. I bought more ground turkey and also some ground lamb the other day so I can make these again tomorrow.

I served them with spaetzle and roasted brussels sprouts. I tossed the brussels sprouts in the same sauce as for the meatballs (plus 1T olive oil) and baked for 25min at 450F. We also enjoyed them with some Swedish schnapps we bought on our honeymoon, in the duty free shop in the Stockholm airport. And for dessert, we split a semla bun, for a very Swedish evening!

Summertime, and the eating is good...

Yeah that doesn't really work with the melody of "Summertime", but it's accurate. The eating is very good in our house.

But I have NEWS. Food-related news. I am on a "diet"! I "" it because I stopped thinking about "dieting" as "dieting" 12 years ago when I started going to weight watchers. I prefer to think of it as "rethinking what I eat." Because what good is going on a diet for a month, losing 10 or 15 or 50 lbs or whatever (don't lose 50 in one month, that's not healthy!) and then realizing you can't maintain your new "diet" long term, and gaining all or most back? That's just depressing. As someone who is more interested in eating delicious food than making sure it's healthy (there's something to be said for that, and you definitely can make delicious and super healthy food, but I have a serious sweet tooth and am somewhat lazy), I'd rather just educate myself on my food intake.

I also went to a new ear doctor at the beginning of July who recommended a low salt, low caffeine and low alcohol lifestyle to keep my ear stable (fluid is vital to ears, and a high salt diet will really mess up the equilibrium), so it was then that I started really thinking about what I was eating. Also, when I went to the national DAR meeting at the end of June last year, I was so busy and was basically eating just fruit and yogurt in any spare minute I could find, not the lavish sit-down meals at Old Ebbitt's Grill that we'd enjoyed in previous years (best crab cakes ever!), that I lost almost 5 lbs in 9 days, which made my size 8 capris fit and me very happy. This year, I was just as busy but sadly did not lose any weight , but a week after we got back, I shot up to a somewhat horrifying weight I hadn't seen since high school. I realized an immediate change, a "rethinking" was in order.

Step 1: I began to write down everything I ate. I didn't count any calories, I just acquainted myself with what I was eating. I learned that I snack a LOT. And I make very poor choices when I snack.

Step 2: I downloaded the My Fitness Pal app on my iphone (it's free!). I did start calculating calories after that first week, and then my husband said, you know, I bet there's an app for that. There is indeed. It's easy to input your food and it helps you calculate the calories and other nutritional info. Based on your current weight and height, your normal activity level and your desired weight loss rate, it calculates how many calories you can have in a day. There's a spot to enter in your current weight. And even better, it remembers the food you've eaten before, so if you eat the same thing every day (like I do, for the most part) it's right there and you just need to select it.

Step 3: I actually haven't gotten here yet: exercise. I am lazy and hate to exercise. I walk instead of driving whenever it's possible, but I choose not to count it as exercise, especially since I'm pretty sure each walk is burning less than 100 calories.

Since the day I stepped on the scale and saw the "horrifying weight", I've lost 11 lbs. I've set my app to lose only 1lb a week, and it's been a month, but I'm still overeating (according to their calculations) yet still losing. This makes me think I was horrible, horrible snacker before.

Now this dress fits! Much excitement :)

Fortunately, with the farmer's market just down the street, it's very easy to eat large quantities of nutritious and low-calorie food, like beets, cabbage, zucchini, etc. I'm not overly hungry, and sometimes when I have a very large helping of veggies (such as the night I decided to just cook up all the broccoli, it was a very small head of broccoli and I'm the only one here who likes it) I'm pretty full. The nestle's chocolate chip cookie recipe comes out to 150 calories per ounce of dough. My "big" cookies are about 1oz. I think my big splurge right now is corn on the cob (usually no butter), it looks healthy but it's like 90 calories an ear.... and I can easily gobble up 4 ears of corn at dinner- I loooove fresh corn.

Anyway, that's my current update. Please note: this isn't necessarily right for everyone. It may not even be the best thing for me, but I feel good, I'm healthy (my doctors agree) and I'm sticking to it. The only thing I can recommend is being fully aware of what you eat. If you're not happy with your weight, write down your food intake. Pay attention to your activity. A lot of weight-gain seems to be because people just aren't paying attention to what they're doing. It's far too easy to open that tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies and lose track of how many you've eaten.

Because of my efforts, I'm not baking much (except bread, since I have toast for breakfast every day) unless it's to bring somewhere or give someone. I reallllly want to make some jerky, we bought some at the VT beer festival and it's delicious, makes a very filling snack (even just a couple bites) and it's only 70 calories an ounce! 1oz of jerky is kind of a lot, too.

But now to the recipes. We've been eating a ridiculous number of turkey burgers. At about 300 calories a burger, plus an ear of corn and some broccoli or a helping of corn and blueberry salad, it's a very filling dinner for a decent number of calories. I've also been playing around with a lot of Penzey's spice blends: Northwoods on corn on the cob makes you forget you ever even put butter on corn in the first place, and Muskego Ave seasoning on broccoli will make you devour the entire head of broccoli (unfortunately, both of these blends contain salt so watch out).

Turkey Burgers

recipe adapted from a recipe from the July/August issue of Everyday Food

1lb ground turkey

3T panko

1T whole grain mustard

1t dried sage

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Mix all together. Form into 5 patties, and grill or broil until done (like 5-7 minutes on each side)

Easy peasy! We've been buying some delish whole wheat ciabatta rolls at the grocery store, which are 140 calories each, although the photos here are of kaiser rolls- we've tried just about every roll they carry. I should dig up my burger bun recipe and just make my own, because those were pretty darn good.

Blueberry Corn Salad

loosely adapted from Two Peas and Their Pod

kernels from 3-4 ears of cooked (steamed, boiled, grilled) corn, cut off (however much you have)

3/4-1 cup blueberries (or more, or less)

2T lime juice

1T honey

2T minced pickled jalapenos

1/2t cumin

1/4t chipotle powder (or less)

dash salt

Whisk the lime juice, honey, and spices together, then toss with the corn, berries and jalapenos. 

This is delicious. I've made it like 5 times now. Last night I actually got a little crazy and substituted this for corn and bean salad for our fish tacos. There is about 400-500 calories in the entire salad (depending on how much corn and how many blueberries you use, last night's batch was 312g corn (312 cal) and 300g blueberries (170 cal), and we usually get 6-8 servings out of each batch. Help yourself to seconds!

You also see on my plate onion rings. These are not healthy. They're not exactly unhealthy, since they're baked. They're dipped in flour, dunked in flour/egg/buttermilk and coated in panko drizzled with olive oil. They are ridiculously good, but I haven't made them nor calculated the calories since I started paying attention to my food intake. I'll report back when I figure it out! I like to eat them with storebought BBQ sauce. This is also not all that healthy, but it's my little indulgence!

Best Sandwich Bread EVER

Last night I made some sloppy joes. Now, I don't really like sloppy joes (Clint does), but these were sloppy joes with a Vietnamese twist. And you can pretty much give any dish and Asian twist and I'll try it. But when we ate the sandwiches, what blew us away was not the sloppy joes (they were totally fine) but the sandwich bread. The sloppy joes recipe wanted to be put on French bread, and of course I didn't feel like going to the store, so you know me, I'll just make some. I googled "french bread recipe" and made the first recipe I found... which was ridiculously amazing. This is my new favorite sandwich bread. Forget your wonder bread, your healthy multi-grain bird seed bread, even your fancy artisan bakery bread. This is an easy-peasy bread recipe and only took me about 2.5 hours start to finish. I cannot wait to make a nice cuban using this bread, or maybe I'll get brave and make a french dip.

Best Sandwich Bread EVER
recipe from food.com
makes 3 grinder roll-sized loaves, each loaf good for 2 sandwiches

2 cups warm water
1T yeast
pinch of sugar
1t salt
1T oil (I used olive)
5-5.5 cups bread flour*

*I used King Arthur's First Clear flour, which is a high gluten flour used in Jewish rye. I'm not sure if it's as high gluten as bread flour, but it has a nice earthy taste to it, kind of like whole wheat flour. I used 4 cups of first clear and 1 cup of whole wheat, and the bread wasn't heavy like whole wheat, but had that kind of hint of flavor to it. I highly recommend the First Clear.

In a bowl, sprinkle the yeast and sugar over the warm water. Let sit for 10-15 minutes for the yeast to wake up. Stir in the salt, oil and 3 cups of the flour. Stir for about 2 minutes. Add 2 more cups of flour and knead for 10 minutes. Let sit in an oiled bowl until doubled, about 1-1.5hrs. Shape into long baguette-shaped loaves (I shaped into 2 loaves, next time I'll make 3 loaves), cover with a towel and let rise for another 30 minutes. Sprinkle with water (liberally) and bake in a 375F preheated oven for 30-40 minutes, until they start to turn golden brown.


This bread is crusty without being rock-hard-crunchy, and super soft in the middle. It's still kind of chewy like french bread, not cottony like most grocery store sliced breads, and is my ideal sandwich roll texture. It's not so flavorful it takes away from a sandwich, but it tastes good on its own. You have to try this!!


Vietnamese Sloppy Joes, or Sloppy Baos
recipe modified from Martha Stewart

I halved the recipe, which would serve 4-5, and wanted to use onion instead of shallots

1-1.25lb ground beef (or sub in another ground meat if you like)
1 small onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1T chopped lemongrass (I used dried)
2T red curry paste
1 cup ketchup
1T fish sauce
10 basil leaves, minced
1t brown sugar
2T mustard
julienned green mango or green apple
sliced jalapenos
french bread

In a large skillet, brown the meat with the onion, garlic, lemongrass and curry paste. Cook for about 5 minutes, then add the ketchup, fish sauce, half the basil, brown sugar and mustard. Turn the heat down and simmer for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, slice the loaf of french bread lengthwise (like for a grinder/sub) and toast in the oven for about 5-8 minutes.

To assemble the sandwich, spread the sloppy joe mixture on the bottom half of the bread, arrange julienned mango/apple and sliced jalapenos on top, and top with the top half of the bread. Slice the grinder into individual-sized portions and enjoy!


I really only made this dish because we wanted to use up some ground beef in the freezer. Clint loves sloppy joes and used to eat them often before we got married. I kind of can't stand them. But like I said, I'll try almost anything with an asian twist. And.... these were ok. Clint had seconds, so you *know* he liked them. If you're a sloppy joe kind of person, you'll probably like these. And like I said before, the bread is amazing.

Meatballs, hold the spaghetti

I don't keep this a secret, but people are still shocked when I say I don't like pasta. I just don't. If it's filled with delicious cheesey goodness then I'll eat it, but otherwise I pass it up if I have other options.

Therefore, the only meatballs I've ever really had are these tiny things on toothpicks. Or the giant bags of frozen Swedish meatballs from Ikea. The meatball is largely ignored in my kitchen. But a few months ago, Martha Stewart had a show all about meatballs. And my eyes were opened to the variety of the meatball: it's not just for spaghetti!

I found this recipe on tastespotting, after having forgotten completely about the MS show. Now I remember, and I have make these buffalo chicken meatballs next.

Asian-inspired turkey meatballs
from Gina's Skinny Recipes (look at that, healthy and delicious!)

1/4 cup panko crumbs
1-1/4 ground turkey (I used chicken and ground it myself in the food processor)
1 egg
1T freshly grated ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2t salt
1/4 cup cilantro, roughly chopped
2 scallions, chopped
2T soy sauce
2t sesame oil

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients together with your hands (icky, but it's the best way). Form about 3T of meat into balls, and place on a *rimmed*, parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake at 400F for 15-20 min.

Dipping Sauce

4T soy sauce
2t sesame oil
2T fresh lime juice
2T water
1 scallion, chopped

Mix all the ingredients together. Serve with the meatballs.

I never realized how simple meatballs are to make. A little messy, yes, but quick to throw together, quick to cook, and these were ridiculously good. Served with some steamed asparagus and rice, this is a great weeknight meal.

Pumpkin Party: Main dishes, part 1

I'm only 3 weeks behind on posting.

You may have guessed, but yes, stuff is going on in real life. Stuff interferes with blogging, with baking, even with exercising (sigh!). Hopefully stuff will improve soon, but in the meantime, we all have to eat, and I have plenty of recipes saved up to try (I know, that doesn't help you at all).

Back to the pumpkin party. November, and even December, is still pumpkin season, so these are still good for making now.

At the pumpkin party, I served pumpkin chili with pumpkin cornbread, as well as pumpkin gnocchi, pumpkin pizza, and my favorite, pumpkin, spinach and leek quiche.

Let's quickly start with the gnocchi.
Oh, man. This was my first time making gnocchi- even my first time eating gnocchi. So I didn't quite know what I was doing. I followed this recipe, which I found on taste spotting and chose because the blogger is Italian, and of course, an Italian would undoubtedly know how to make gnocchi. I think the Italian knew more than I did and either lost info in translation, or makes assumptions I don't know about, but this was a huge recipe fail. I wish I'd used Lidia Bastianich's recipe from a recent issues (October 2010, perhaps) of Bon Appetit- next time.

However, we do have a silver lining: the cinnamon walnut cream sauce (inspired by the suggestions of a Nestie) was delicious and almost saved the dish. The cream sauce was made by making a roux of 1T butter and 1T flour (melt the butter in a saucepan, then whisk in the flour and cook a couple minutes), then slowly adding about 3/4 cup of fat free 1/2&1/2, cooking til thickened (a few minutes- I really wasn't paying full attention) and then sprinkling in about 1/2t cinnamon and 1/4 cup crushed toasted walnuts.

Moving on.

The pumpkin chili was a huge success in comparison. It was like a standard chili of ground turkey and beans and the standard spices (lots of cumin, oregano, cilantro and chili or chipotle powder), but had a nice subtle pumpkin undertone. Love, love, love.
Pumpkin Chili,
adapted from The Family Kitchen

1-1.5 lb ground turkey
2 15oz cans beans- I used red kidney and black beans
4 cups pumpkin puree (canned or fresh, I used 2 15oz cans)
56oz tomatoes (the original recipe calls for 2 large cans of diced tomatoes, but I used 1 14oz can and 48oz peeled tomatoes that I'd frozen over the summer)
4 cups chicken broth (if using canned, choose low sodium- you know I used my homemade stock)
1 large onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1T cumin
1t chipotle powder
1t salt
1t black pepper
small handful of fresh cilantro, or 2t dried
2t dried oregano

In a large pan/pot, brown the meat. When it's about half cooked, add the diced onion. Transfer to your crock pot (or, alternatively, you can leave everything in the large pot and cook on the stove top). Add in all the rest of the ingredients. Cook on low for 6-7 hours, or high for 4 hours. (or on the stove top, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook 2 hours).

Serve! Garnish with cheese and sour cream, and whatever else you like on your chili.

To pair with your chili, make some pumpkin cornbread. Now, I have to admit, this wasn't as huge a success as the chili itself- mostly because the cornbread was simply too sweet. It was more like cornmeal cake for dessert than something to have with chili, so next time I will reduce the brown sugar by half or more.

Pumpkin Cornbread,
taken from Recipe Girl

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1T baking powder
1t salt
1/2t ground cinnamon
1/4t ground nutmeg
1 cup cornmeal
2 eggs
1 cup pumpkin puree
2/3 cup brown sugar (I'd go 1/3 cup or less, maybe even just 2-3T)
¼ cup canola oil
1T molasses

Combine dry ingredients (flours, baking powder, salt, spices, cornmeal). In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, then add the pumpkin, brown sugar, oil and molasses, whisk together and then add to the dry ingredients- stir just until combined, don't overmix. Pour batter into a greased 8x8 pan, and bake for 30-35 min at 400F.

CSA #7

CSA #7 gave me quite a shock. In the previous 5 weeks, we'd been inundated with lettuce. We gave and threw lettuce away, because we couldn't use it all. In week 6, I finally found ways to use up all our lettuce, and wouldn't you know, I had to go out and buy lettuce, because we ate it all up in 5 days. So I was pretty excited for the next batch of lettuce... but there was none! CSA #7 included no lettuce at all.

We received:big bunches of very fragrant parsley and basil, more little broccolis, a small, perfect cabbage, two little tiny garlics, summer squash,
boy choy, green beans, 1lb of very dirty potatoes (it makes them seem fresher!), a bunch of beautiful carrots, 3 tiny red plums, and some flowers (cosmos, snap dragons, zinnias, and a sunflower).

The potatoes amuse me. It took me at least a minute to figure out what they were.
Mmm, the herbs

I love these carrots! They gave me about 1cup of chopped carrots.
Little tiny broccoli!

And the little tiny garlic!

I love that all these things are tiny and cute.

So I'm sure you're wondering what in the world I made with all these goodies. Well, not to toot my own horn, but I did a pretty good job using things up. Currently we are left with only garlic (which was just too cute to use), broccoli and herbs.

First: abish.

Online we have a FQOTD: Foodie question of the day. CSA#7 day's was, what type of food have you not yet tried but want to? The overwhelming answer was Ethiopian. I have actually had Ethiopian, exactly one time, but that one meal haunts me, even a year later.

Clint and I visited R in Boston, and we went to her favorite Ethiopian restaurant, Addis Red Sea, on Tremont. The seating is a bit odd for a restaurant in the US, it was mostly little stools crowded around tiny tables. The three of us ate out of a giant, wide, low bowl, which was lined with a flatbread, and on top were our dishes- a veggie dish, a fish dish, and a lamb dish.

This was one of the few times I actually finished all my food. I could not stop eating the deliciousness.

The next morning, I woke up from a dream about the previous night's meal, and almost cried when I remembered we didn't have leftovers.

So when people online were discussing Ethiopian, I had to look up some recipes. I found abish, a meat dish with tomatoes, onions and spices. I added in 2 medium-sized summer squashes and one tiny zucchini.

I also tried to make injera, but that is a fail-tale for another day. Pictured below is a reasonably successful attempt at Americanized injera, using typical US ingredients. The "authentic" injera I made a few days later was revolting- leading me to believe either injera is not what I think it is, or I seriously screwed up the authentic recipe. Because the version below is similar to what I mean to make, I think I screwed up the authentic recipe. I may try again, I may avoid it like the plague. But first, the wildly successful abish.



Abish
my Americanized, CSA-using version

1T butter
1 onion, diced
1T ginger, grated
2 cloves garlic
2 tomatoes, diced
1 lb ground turkey or beef
dash salt
3 eggs, beaten
2 medium summer squashes or zucchinis, cut into bite-sized pieces
1t Turmeric
1T berbere (note: I used 1 sanaam chili, not 10 unspecified small chilis- 10 is scary. 1 is dull, I'd recommend 3-4)
1T Butter
1T chopped parsley
Extra parsley for garnishing

Saute the onion in the butter in a very large pan. Stir in ginger, garlic, tomatoes. Add in ground turkey/beef, cook for 15-20 min, uncovered, over low heat. Stir occasionally to prevent burning/sticking. Season with salt as desired.

Beat 3 eggs, add to pan. Once eggs are stirred in, add squash and turmeric and berbere. Cook over low for 10 min, then stir in butter and parsley. Remove from heat.

Serving recommendations from the website:
serve with rice or bread, mix with corn, or use to stuff other things. (I love that last one- how about an Ethiopian take on a chili relleno?)

I would have preferred this served with some Ethiopian flatbread, but either I'm really awful at making it, or I'm making the wrong kind. I ended up eating this meat with a whole wheat tortilla, burrito style.

Note: as I took my first bite, I was shocked that I made such a delicious dish, especially in only about 40 minutes (all while doing lots of other things, such as making the berbere while the meat was cooking, and sauteing breaded beets). So I really, highly recommend this dish. I will be making it again!

Pictured with the abish are some sauteed beets! I still have the previous week's beets to play with.

I found this recipe because American ways of using beets are boring. It's either roasted and served over a salad, or pickled. Um, can we say boring?

Indian sauteed beets, modified

beets (I used 2 large and 4 baby)
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 t spice mix (I used the berbere from above)
2T butter

Wash and trim the ends off the beets. Boil for about 45 minutes, until soft. Let cool (under cold running water works nicely) until cool enough to handle, then rub the beets with your hands (or a paper towel if you don't care for red palms) to remove the skins. This should be easy. Slice the beets.

Beat the egg in a bowl.

Mix breadcrumbs (make your own: toast some bread, the pulse it in a food processor. Today we used the stale marble rye in the breadbox. Random, yes, but a good way to use it up) with spices, put in another bowl.

Dunk each beet slice in egg and then breadcrumbs. Saute in butter (unhealthy and delicious) for a couple minutes on each side, until crispy. Enjoy!



To end my CSA meal, I made peach cobbler. Unfortunately, the peaches were not from the CSA, but Big Y. However, they were 69 cents/lb. They were also as hard as a rock.

Now, I'm not going to give you details about the peach cobbler. Unfortunately. Why? Because the topping was pretty bad (big fat fail, Martha Stewart!). It was gloppy and flavorless, and when I the cobbler, I think nice biscuity topping. But the filling was good.

Find a good cobber topping recipe, and here's your filling:

8 peaches, sliced (I left the skin on)
1/4-1/2 cup sugar (depending on the ripeness of the peaches- more ripe=less sugar)
1T cornstarch
1T lemon juice
2T basil, chiffonaded (from the CSA!)

Mix all of that, put into a square baking dish. Top with a good topping (let me know if you find one), bake at 350 for about an hour.


Finally, I made aleecha, an Ethiopian veggie stew. Because Clint and I are primarily meat-eaters, a vegetarian meal has to be really hardy to please us (i.e. risotto, or a lot of bread and cheese). This meal didn't quite do it for us, but as a side, it's really good. If you tend towards vegetarian, you may enjoy it.

Aleecha, CSA-ed.

1T oil
1 small onion, diced
(original recipe calls for 10 cloves of garlic, I omitted)
2 cup carrots, diced
1.5 cup water or stock (veggie, chicken, etc)
1t turmeric, ground
1t berbere
1 hot green peppers, halved (I omitted)
1 lb cabbage, coarsely sliced (I threw in the bok choy as well, the two together were 1lb)
2 medium summer squashes
1T tomato paste
1t salt, to taste
1 lb potatoes, cut like french fries

In a large pan/shallow pot, saute onion, garlic and carrots for a couple minutes over medium heat. Add 1/2 cup water/stock and cook for 5 min. Add spices, peppers, cabbage/bok choy and squash. Cover and cook for 2 minutes. Add potatoes, salt and tomato paste and stir well, cook, covered, for 5 more minutes. Add remaining water/stock and cook until potatoes are cooked through, 5-10 minutes more.

Serve with inerja/pita/tortilla/ciabatta/whatever you have on hand, as a meal or a side.

Note: the primary reason I'm telling you about this recipe, even though we weren't so excited by it, is because the summer squash in this dish were phenomenal. Usually I steam them and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and they got the same texture here, but were so incredibly flavorful. I need to modify this for just the squash.