A delicious stew

Winter's here, and that means one thing: stew. Stew for dinner, stew for lunch, for breakfast, brunch, midnight snack. Stew in your stocking, stew in the bathtub.

No, not really. But there are few things better than a good hot stew on a cold night, and you can make a big pot of it and eat it all week long, or freeze it for later. Full disclosure here: I don't actually know anything about stews. This particular one is based on a recipe my friend Andrew makes all the time, and I don't know if he got it from somewhere or if he just made it up. But it's hard to screw up, and totally delicious. You'll need:

A big pot
Lots of time
A big onion
a big zucchini or two small ones
Two carrots
A couple celery stalks
Butter
Garlic
Four or five big potatoes, any type
Chicken stock
Spicy uncooked sausages, 4 or so
Roasted tomatoes

Chop the onions, and brown them in butter or oil, with garlic, for quite a while... 20 minutes or so, until almost black. Andrew swears this is the key to a delicious stew. Add the celery partway through.

Then, add the zucchini, potatoes, and carrots, all chopped fairly small, and add chicken stock and water (half and half or so) until the veggies are just covered. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and cook for a good half hour. Add the sausage, keep simmering until the sausage is cooked and and its juices have permeated the stew. Note: whatever sausage you choose will totally flavor the whole stew, so make them good! Add the tomatoes at the very end.

That's basically it. Feel free to add/remove veggies you like/don't like. This stew tastes better when it's cooled for a bit, so when it's done, take it off the heat and let sit for 20 minutes or so.

New Feature: Quick Links!

Dear Recipe Go Round Readers:

Now that we have a small but solid base of recipes and other posts, I have created links (top left of the main page) to quickly access certain types of recipes. Want an easy meal? Click 'easy.' Want a dessert? Click 'dessert.' You get the idea.

Keep posting, keep labeling, and keep on keepin' on.

Apple Cranberry Pie with cornmeal crust

Jessica and I made this last night, and it came out fantastic. Pretty easy, really... but allow a lot of time to make it. Goes best (as usual) with vanilla ice cream.

Crust
2 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup yellow cornmeal
5 tablespoons sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons solid vegetable shortening, room temperature
6 tablespoons (about) buttermilk

Filling

1 cup fresh cranberries
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
3 pounds Pippin apples, peeled, cored, cut into 1/2-inch thick slices
1/2 cup dried currants (note - we did not use these. They seemed redundant)
5 tablespoons all purpose flour

+ Buttermilk for brushing

For crust:
Mix first 5 ingredients. Add shortening and cut in until mixture resembles coarse meal. Blend in enough buttermilk by tablespoons to form dough that begins to clump together. Gather dough into ball; divide in half. Flatten each half into disk. Wrap each disk in plastic and chill 45 minutes. (Can be made 1 day ahead.)

For filling:
Position rack in lowest third of oven and preheat to 375°F. Coarsely chop cranberries with sugar and pumpkin pie spice in processor. Transfer mixture to large bowl. Add apples, currants and flour and toss well.

Roll out 1 dough disk between sheets of waxed paper to 13-inch round. Peel off top sheet of paper; invert dough into 9 1/2-inch-diameter deep-dish glass pie dish. Peel off paper. Fold under overhanging dough to form double-thick edge. Crimp edge. Roll out remaining dough disk on lightly floured surface to 1/8-inch-thick round. Using 3-inch-long leaf cookie cutter, cut out leaves. Using knife, mark veins in leaves. Slightly mound filling in pie dish. Arrange leaves around edge of pie and all over top, overlapping decoratively. Brush pastry all over with buttermilk.

Place pie on baking sheet. Bake 45 minutes. Cover pie with foil and continue baking until juices bubble thickly and crust browns, about 35 minutes more. Transfer pie to rack and cool 1 hour. Serve warm or at room temperature with ice cream.

Coconut Rice

This is super easy, super delicious and super not that great for you.

If you want to mix it up and have something more exciting with your meal instead of the same old brown rice, white rice, etc; try using a can of low fat coconut milk instead of water. Works best with white rice. It is freaking amazing. Burma Super Star inspired me to try this because it is so delicious, and a bit over priced, and I figured it couldn’t be that hard - and it wasn't! I would recommend using the low fat coconut milk though - even the low fat has quite of bit of fat. yummm...fat.

1 cup basmati rice
1 can coconut milk

Put the two in the rice cooker, press down the button and wait for it to be done. Easy as that.

Mommy's Buttermilk Pancakes

This makes enough for about 2 people...I usually double it because the pancakes are good later to snack on cold.

Sift before measuring: 1 cup cake flour (make sure this is cake flour and not normal flour)

Resift with:
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda

Beat until light: 1 egg
add: 1 cup buttermilk

Combine the dry & liquid ingredients with a few swift strokes

Beat in: 1 - 2 tbsp melted butter

I cook on a electric griddle and set it at 350....you can always cook them on the stove too though. Just pour some batter, and then one the cakes start bubbling up a little they are ready to flip.

A Quick Sort of Oven-Fried Chicken

This is SUPER easy...and yummy!

Get some:
Chicken - Breasts are the best, I think.
Corn Flakes, or even better Trader Joe's Toasted Oatmeal Flakes
Butter
Paper bag
rolling pin
baking sheet
if you use plain corn flakes you might want some seasoning like garlic powder, paprika dried oregano....but if you use the oatmeal flakes its good as is.

Preheat oven to 375
Put enough cereal in the paper bag to cover your chicken, then use the rolling pin to roll the bag and crush the flakes into crumbs.
clean your chicken
put wet chicken in paper bag and give it a good shakin
place covered pieces on baking sheet, there will probably be crumbs left in the bag that you can place on top of your chicken
drizzle some melted butter over pieces
stick it in the oven!

The cook time depends on the type of chicken - breasts: 40-45 min

*its kinda fun to use different types of flaky cereal for this - even some with clusters!

Doughlicious

Here's a good pizza dough, brought to us courtesy of Leo Menashe, via some restaurant or other in the East Bay:

Pizza dough for 6 pizzas

2/3 c warm water
2/3 c flour
1 1/3 T dry yeast

disolve yeast a bit stir in and mix flour let sit 20 minutes
add water plus half of next flour (with the salt):

1 c warm water
1 lb 2.5 ounces flour
1/4 c rye flour
2.5 tsp sea salt

let sit 20 minutes
add the rest of flour/salt
mix a bit then add

1/4 c olive oil

knead well and let rise a bit (hour?), then push down, roll out into portions and rise each dough.