A Spanish Potluck!

I think they liked the empanadas!

What can students cook on campus? My daughter provided these photos from a recent event at her college. She attends a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. Not exactly the center of  the culinary universe. The Spanish Club puts on a Tapas potluck each year. The club buys all the raw materials and the students volunteer to cook the food. The kitchens are pretty spartan but they manage to pull off some nice things, like empanadas.

They come together to enjoy all the delicious Spanish food.

Looks like it was a great success! Food is a great way to bring people together and build community.

Spanish tapas are first-rate party food. Many of them are easy to make. Looks like they had a nice selection of things on toast, including tuna and capers. Very Spanish!

Tuna Salad for Tapas
(serves 6 as an appetizer)

This is a very tasty tuna salad on its own and unlike most tuna salads, it contains no mayonnaise.

1 6-7 ounce can tuna fish, packed in water, drained and flaked
2 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 Tablespoons minced dill pickles
½ teaspoon pickle juice
½ teaspoon white wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon minced onion
1 hard-cooked egg, minced
1 teaspoon minced capers
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
salt and pepper
12  ½ inch slices of French or Italian bread
whole capers for garnish

Combine all the ingredients except the bread and whole capers in a bowl. You can make the salad ahead and refrigerate it until you are ready to serve it; it gets even better after some time in the refrigerator.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Place the bread slices on a baking sheet and toast until they start to brown. Place a bit of tuna salad on each slice of toast and serve.


(Adapted from Tapas by Penelope Casas)

Baked Rice

Here at School of Eating Good, we want to give you information that makes cooking easy. Like how to make rice, which isn't quite as easy to prefect as most people think. We previously posted an article on cooking rice in the microwave. It's pretty solid, but because microwaves have different power ratings, you need to watch it the first time and possibly tweak it. That makes it imperfect in our mind but if all you have is a microwave, it's great.

Most folks have an conventional oven, however. And baked rice is literally foolproof. You start it just like rice on the stove-top but you finish it in a very hot oven.

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

For 1 cup of rice, bring 1 ½ cups water (or stock, if you prefer) to a boil in an ovenproof medium saucepan. Add the rice and stir. Cover and place in the oven. Bake for 17 minutes. Remove from the oven and let rest for 5 minutes. It will keep warm for another 15 minutes.

Green Beans with Pineapple

Does that sound like a strange combination? It works rather well in this very simple Asian side dish. It's an unusual way to get your fruit!

You can make this with fresh green beans (see our post on cooking fresh green beans) but it works nearly as well with frozen green beans. Frozen green beans aren't quite as good as fresh ones, but what they lack in texture and sweetness, they make up for in convenience. No cleaning, no cutting.

You can cook frozen beans in the microwave or on the stove-top. Takes under 15 minutes either way. To cook in the microwave, put beans in a 2 quart microwavable dish with a cover. Add ¼ cup water. Cover and microwave on high for 4 minutes, give them a stir, and cook for another 4 minutes. Let stand, covered, for a couple of minutes. To cook on the stove-top, bring ¼ cup water to a boil in a 2 quart saucepan. Add beans, cover, and cook for 8 minutes. In either case, drain them well before proceeding with the recipe.

Nutritionally speaking, they are equivalent. Frozen beans are quite inexpensive. Fresh beans in season are close, but the frozen ones are consistently cheaper.

How about canned green beans? Their texture is mushy and their flavor is over-cooked. Stick to fresh or frozen.

Green Beans with Pineapple
(serves 4, costs $2)

12 ounces cooked green beans, either fresh or frozen, well-drained
2 Tablespoons butter
1 clove garlic, minced (optional)
1 8-ounce can diced or crushed pineapple, drained
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
A pinch of salt

Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add garlic, if using, and saute for about a minute. Add green beans and stir to cover with butter. Add pineapple and soy sauce. Cook another minute to heat up the Add a pinch of salt if you think it isn't salty enough.

Cajun Meatloaf

Meatloaf - comfort food of the first order. It's easy to make and delicious as a leftover. This recipe is adapted from Bon Appetit's Fast, Easy, Fresh. What makes it Cajun? The Holy Trinity, the Pope and a good dose of heat. "What are you talking about? What does religion have to do with Cajun meatloaf?" The hallmarks of Cajun cooking are 4 ingredients: onion, celery, green pepper, and garlic. The onion, celery, and green pepper make up the Holy Trinity. Garlic, highly revered in Cajun cooking, is the Pope. With a bit of cayenne and Tabasco sauce, there's plenty of heat, if you want it. The meatloaf is still full-flavored without it.

Cajun Meatloaf
(served 6, cost is $6.15)

 2 Tablespoons butter or olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
½ green pepper, chopped
2 stalks celery, minced
½ teaspoon dried thyme, crushed
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ - ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper, depending on how spicy you want your meatloaf
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 pound ground beef
1 egg
½ cup fine dry breadcrumbs (see Note)
½ cup ketchup
1 Tablespoon Tabasco or other hot sauce

Preheat oven to 350°F. Heat butter or oil in a medium skillet over medium-low heat. Add onion, garlic, green pepper, and celery. Cook for about 10 minutes. Add thyme, salt, black pepper, cayenne, and cumin and cook for another minute. Remove from heat and allow to cool for 15 minutes.

Mix together ketchup and Tabasco in a small bowl.

Combine ground beef, egg, breadcrumbs, and about ½ of the ketchup mixture in a large bowl. Add vegetables and mix with your hands. Form into a loaf in a 8"x8" baking dish (it fits best if you form it on a diagonal) or a 11"x7"x2" dish. Bake for 20 minutes. Spread top of meatloaf with remaining ketchup mixture and bake until cooked through, another 40 minutes.

Note: To make your own breadcrumbs, allow bread to dry out until hard then grate it on the smallest holes of a grater. Great way to use up odds and ends of bread.

Food Revolution Day 2013

Last May, the School of Eating Good, as part of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, was proud to host a Food Revolution Day event. You can read about our Food Improv Potluck and get excited about Food Revolution Day 2013, Friday May 17. We'll keep you posted on what we're cooking up. We're hoping we can join forces with our fantastic local Whole Foods on this; we'll be meeting with them early next year.

If you don't live near Boulder, Colorado, we urge you to find a local Food Revolution group so you can join in the fun and support the Food Revolution!

Pasta with Greens, Garbanzos & Feta Cheese

A pot full of tasty pasta

Here's the second pasta dish from out latest class. Super easy and quick. It actually takes longer to boil the water and cook the pasta than it does to put the final dish together. The lemon zest is key. Along with the feta cheese and tomatoes, it brings some bold bright flavors to a pot full of earthy ingredients.

The recipe calls for orecchiette (which means "little ears" in Italian) or small shells. Any smallish pasta will work. We used campanelle (which means "bellflower" in Italian) and that worked just as well. We found that it was necessary to cook the pasta for nearly 12 minutes, but we are cooking this at an altitude of 5400 feet. If you are at sea level, it will probably be al dente in 10 minutes.

Pasta with Greens, Garbanzos & Feta Cheese
(serves 4, cost is $10.30)

8 oz. orecchiette or small shells
¼ cup olive oil
1 garlic clove, crushed
12 ounces baby spinach
1 (15 ounce) can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup small cherry or grape tomatoes
4 ounces feta cheese, cut into ¼“ cubes or crumbled
1 teaspoon lemon zest (see Note)
Salt and black pepper

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm, stirring occasionally, about 8-12 minutes. Reserve about a 1⁄2 cup of the pasta water and drain pasta.

Wipe the pasta pot out with a towel, and over medium-high heat, heat the olive oil. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant and lightly browned, about 2 minutes. Using a spoon, remove the garlic and discard.

Add the spinach, the beans and tomatoes and cook for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and add the pasta, half of the cheese, the lemon zest, and season with salt and pepper. The feta cheese is quite salty so be careful not to over-salt. Toss well and thin out the sauce with a little of the pasta water. Garnish with the remaining cheese and serve.

Note: How do you zest an lemon if you don't have a lemon zester? Use a vegetable peeler to carefully peel off strips of lemon peel. Try to get as little of the white pith as possible since it is terribly bitter. After you have peeled about ½ the lemon, which should be enough for this dish, mince it. It smells intensely lemony and provides great flavor to this dish, so don't leave it out.

One of our students checking out the intense aroma of lemon zest