Moroccan-style slow-cooked beef stew

For New Year's Eve, my fiance and I made a delicious Moroccan-style beef stew inspired by the lamb stew made by Michael Chiarello on a recent episode of Easy Entertaining. We started by searing the beef (we used boneless chuck) on the stove with a little flour, salt and pepper. We pulled the beef off and stuck it in the crock pot. In the same pan, we sauteed a mix of cippolini/yellow onions and carrots (both from my family's Pete's Greens Good Eats Localvore CSA) with gourmet baby yukon golds. We threw in paprika, chili powder, cumin, coriander, parsley, and cinnamon. We tossed the veggies in with the beef and deglazed the pan with some delicious cabernet sauvignon. We added the wine to the beef and veggies along with some chicken stock, a giant rosemary sprig and a few tablespoons of thick pomegranate sauce (Narsharab from Azerbaijan), and let it go for the rest of the day (maybe 6 hours?). The result was a deliciously fragrant stew -- perfectly tender veggies and melt-in-your-mouth beef.
We served the stew alongside an Israeli couscous salad with chickpeas, celery, and quick-preserved lemons, dressed with extra virgin olive oil and fresh-squeezed tangerine juice. We mixed the salad in as we ate and the combination was fabulous. The only pitfall here was that our crockpot is small. =)

homemade rice-a-roni

I love Rice-a-roni, but there's so much sodium per serving... I was looking for another way to get the same flavor with things that I already have around the house. Big thanks to chaos in the kitchen for the recipe, which you can find here. Love it!

Oven-dried Cherry/Grape Tomatoes

A few weeks ago, we found ourselves with an abundance of tomatoes -- a mix of salad tomatoes, sauce tomatoes, heirlooms, cherry and grape tomatoes. I had been wanting to test this whole oven-dried tomato idea -- which was an ideal option given that the sun hadn't shown its face for days.

I sliced the tomatoes in half -- I only used the cherries and the grapes -- and laid them cut-side up on a baking sheet (with the help of my 3-year-old niece).
I drizzled the whole thing with extra virgin olive oil, and seasoned the 'maters with salt and pepper.
I put them in a 250 degree oven, and let them hang out for a few hours. The length of time really depends on size and thickness of the tomatoes.
I packed them in jars with extra virgin olive oil, and stuck 'em in the fridge. Some recipes claim that they stay good for only two weeks, but mine are still going strong. My hope is that the olive oil will take on the essence/deliciousness of the sweet tomatoes, and I'll be able to dress salads with it or drizzle it over focaccia dough before baking.

dinner party apps

I know... I haven't blogged in a long time. It's been (yikes!) over a month. I've been making/eating good food in the meantime but haven't had time to write so much as a paragraph about what I've been cooking. In fact, I've barely had time to enjoy a meal sitting down. I've started a new job, and technically am working three jobs right now. One will end this week just in time for another to start. Luckily I'm good at time-management and am great at multi-tasking. Yay for being type-A!

Anyway, these are some tasty apps that I whipped up for a dinner party last night. I carved out some squarish pieces of puff pastry, carved out a smaller square (halfway through the dough) to make a raised edge, pressed in some feta cheese, added a tomato slice (1 slice of San Marzano plum tomato or a quarter slice of a larger tomato), and drizzled with herby oil (1 cup extra virgin olive oil and mixed garden herbs, along with some salt and pepper -- whipped into happiness with an immersion blender). Just a few minutes in the oven and we were ready for the party!