Risotto-Style Barley with Mushrooms

Every now and then it seems that I forget what it's like to get sick and be miserable. So last week, I thought I'd test the waters and come down with a fever, sore throat and a cough to add to the fun trying to sleep. Oh, and mucus in the lungs. I can't believe I almost forgot that part. Silly Susie. Well, the verdict has just come in. Being sick is just as miserable as I remembered. And nothing really can beat having to write a paper and work on a presentation all the while wanting to crawl into bed and not move for three days straight.

Somehow I survived the in class presentation on Saturday, and thanks to two rounds of Advil provided by one of my professors, I even had a voice. Went home, made this recipe, and then promptly slept for twelve hours and thought I was going to keel over when I finally made it out of bed on Sunday around 11. Oh, to be young and home and have Mom take care of me when I am sick. But wait! I had the second best thing! Mom and Dad are visiting Denver from NH, and after I discovered that I had left my bottle of Advil at work, they came with a special delivery on Sunday for me. Almost as good as getting to stay home from school and watch a combination of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Little Mermaid, and The Princess Bride.

I'm finally feeling significantly better tonight. Well enough, in fact to post this week's blog entry. After last week's success with wheat berries, I've decided to test the waters by going through all of the grains I can come across in the bulk bins at Whole Foods. This week it was pearl barley. I don't know what the difference is between pearl barley and husked barley yet. But there was another bin for those as well. I also massively overstocked on barley, so I already have another barley recipe lined up for next week, if I can handle another week of it so close to this recipe. Only time will tell.

This recipe is adapted from Bon Appetit, November, 1998 as viewed at http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/15672

This recipe yields 4-5 servings. Total recipe time: about 1 hour


Ingredients:
1 cup pearl barley (way costlier than wheat berries - I think it was a full $1.39/lb)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
12 oz baby bella mushrooms (I'm trying to teach myself about mushrooms, too. Baby Bella mushrooms are darker than the standard button mushrooms, and after trying them in this recipe, they have a lot more flavor as well. The original recipe calls for button mushrooms and one large portabella mushroom. Quite frankly, you don't need more than the 12 oz mushrooms in this recipe, and I will be cutting them smaller than I did as well. I sliced them. In the future, I will halve and then slice them.)
See original recipe for spice recommendations. I used dried basil and garlic powder (quickly becoming my two staples)
5 cups water (The recipe calls for either mushroom broth or vegetable broth. I made some vegetable broth in the original 4 cups of water, using one bouillon cube but frankly it wasn't even needed. When the mushrooms cook down they add a lot of liquid with a lot of flavor.)

Directions:
1. Cook the onion in a large saucepan over medium heat for 4-5 minutes, until the onion starts to cook.
2. Add the mushrooms, cook until mushrooms have browned, about 15 minutes.
3. Add the barley and stir until it has absorbed the excess liquid from the cooking mushrooms (about 1 min)
4. Add 4 cups water and bring the whole thing to a boil
5. Reduce the heat back to medium-low and simmer for 30 minutes, covered. (I didn't turn the heat down enough and the barley stuck to the bottom of my pot. Total bummer. Especially when you're sick and just want to go to sleep anyway.)
6. Add one additional cup of water, and stir off and on for final 10 minutes, uncovered. The barley and mushrooms will get creamy and totally take on a risotto texture and appearance.

So my initial reaction to this recipe was mixed, as I think my reaction always is to new tastes. But now that I've tried it again, I think I like barley. It's not as high in protein as quinoa and wheat berries, which makes me think I probably won't cook with it as frequently, but it does have a distinct taste. This dish does taste a lot heavier and heartier than the wheat berries do, and I totally understood why this would be served traditionally with meat. It almost tasted like it had meat in it, which was a little weird for me. I will likely make some form of this again, but perhaps substituting for a less flaverful mushroom.

Alright, bedtime.

Wheat Berry Salad with Olives and Tomatoes

Before I say anything else, let me just quickly say one thing: wheat berries are the greatest thing since before sliced bread. They've been around pretty much since the beginning of time, and since they are a primary ingredient in bread... but I digress. People are all talking up the awesomeness of lentils, of black beans, of all sorts of other foods (they are also good. I'm not saying otherwise.) that are a good bang for the buck. Well, forget them. I bought wheat berries at Whole Foods yesterday for $.69 a pound. Organic. I splurged, and bought a pound and a quarter for just under a buck. Then all I had to do was figure out what to do with them.

What exactly are wheat berries you might ask? Well, let me tell you everything I've learned about them in the past few days while browsing the internet/my cookbooks/ while I could have been being a productive member of society in some other way. Wheat berries are the whole grains of wheat with the husks removed. In order to cook them, they need to be soaked overnight, and then cooked for about an hour.

There are two main varieties from what I can tell: hard and soft. The hard wheat is typically ground and used for making breads while soft wheat berries don't have quite as strong a flavor, and are used in pastry flour. I bought soft wheat berries because they were forty cents cheaper per pound. (A penny saved is a penny I can save up to pay for my greek yogurt obsession). From what I read, they are also supposed to be easier to digest.

Wheat berries have all of the nutrients traditionally stripped out of commercial bread, and 7 grams of protein per serving. They can be used and substituted in recipes for rice or quinoa, or where one might use pasta (it sounds odd, I know). Wheat berries have a nutty flavor, and I found them to taste sort-of like quinoa and oatmeal combined. Only way better than that sounds.

Since I've now made the oatmeal reference, I was a little bit nervous heading into this week's recipe, because one of its suggested uses was in replacement of oats for a morning breakfast. While I think this would work, I think there must be far less starch in wheat berries, because there wasn't any stickiness in these, and a totally different texture, so wheat berries can go places that I would never go with oats... but anyways...

This week I made wheat berry salad. It's a really easy recipe as long as you remember to soak the wheat berries overnight, and are doing homework or something else around the apartment for the hour or so required for them to cook. (Once cooked, wheat berries can be frozen, so one of my cookbook authors recommends making large batches and freezing to avoid the long prep process.)

I altered the recipe from a WeightWatchers.com recipe I found with the same name. Then I changed it all. If anyone is reading this who is currently following WeightWatchers, this recipe is 6 PP (PointsPlus). It makes 4 servings of over a cup each.

Ingredients:
1 cup wheat berries, soaked overnight in water
2 medium tomatoes, seeds removed and chopped
40 black olives, coarsely chopped (This was the majority of a can of black olives. I didn't want to use the whole can, but if you really like olives, go for it.)
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon dried basil (I didn't have any fresh ingredients, and other than the missing color that it would have provided, dried worked just fine thank you very much.)
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar


Directions:
1. Rinse the wheat berries, and discard the water they were soaking in. In a medium size saucepan, add the wheat berries and about three cups of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for about an hour, until the berries are soft and fully cracked. As the wheat berries are about halfway through cooking, add a pinch of salt.
2. Drain the wheat berries and put into a medium size bowl. Add the tomatoes and olives, mix.
3. Add the garlic and basil.
4. Mix together the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then stir into the salad.

Easy, right? So crazy good tasting! I can't wait to make more with wheat berries. They're awesome. I can't believe that I'm writing this, but this blog is totally working. I'm starting to feel more and more like I'm learning my way around the kitchen, and figuring out this whole cooking thing. And the scary thing is, I'm liking it more and more too... who could have known?

Butternut Squash Risotto

Who knew that babies have the cutest little fingernails! Congratulations to Ethan and Kate. I'm now an aunt to an absolutely adorable and wonderful nephew named Andrew, and I can't wait to get to watch him grow. Andrew is the first baby who I have ever seen at such a young age. And I got to hold him too! The whole idea of the miracle of life got present for me today in a way that it never has before.

It's perfect, really, that I would become an aunt this week. I had a doctors appointment on Monday and was officially diagnosed with high blood pressure. In my defense, the nurse taking my blood pressure reading made the mistake of asking me how school was going while putting the inflatable arm-cuff thing around my upper arm. I could literally feel my chest clench as she asked the question. "Stressful," was all I could respond with. I knew I hadn't passed the test when she immediately took a second reading. "I shouldn't have asked you how school was going, huh?"

It just so happens that I had a finance paper due yesterday that was not started on Monday, that I may or may not have spent some sleepless hours thinking about on Sunday evening before my doctor's appointment on Monday. So no, she should not have asked me how school was going before checking my blood pressure. It didn't exactly make my day, though, when my doctor informed me that my blood pressure was what she would have expected in a woman more than twice my age. Oh to be young again.

This week's recipe reflects some changes as a result of the whole high blood pressure thing. I didn't add any salt at all, and didn't even add cheese to this week's recipe. That was no easy feat. I realized today just how addicted I am to cheese. One of these years I'll find an alternative to it. Until then, I'll just be cutting back a bit... maybe...

I found this recipe on epicurious.com. This website may just be my new favorite. I found the written instructions pretty confusing, however. The link to the original recipe: Kaboucha Squash Risotto with Sage and Pinenuts. It makes 6 large portions, and will take at least 2 hours from start to finish.

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

1 2 1/2- to 3-pound kabocha or butternut squash, peeled, seeded, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (about 6 generous cups)

2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh sage

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (The original recipe calls for sherry vinegar, which I didn't have, and only 1 tablespoon. I really like the zing of apple cider vinegar, anyway.)

2 onions, chopped (about 3 cups)

4 cups no-salt added vegetable broth (I couldn't believe they really made that. Good stuff.)

1 1/2 cups arborio rice or medium-grain rice

3/4 cup pine nuts, toasted, divided (I didn't toast the pine nuts. In retrospect, I would have looked up how to do this, as it would have brought out more flavor, I think.)

2 teaspoons cinnamon (this wasn't in the original recipe, but I thought it would work, and it did. Go me. I'm learning how to combine flavors. In some recipes, anyway.)

Preparation: 
Note: I used a large saucepan with high sides for this recipe. If I hadn't had that, I would have used a dutch oven. 
1. Preparing the squash took forever, and epicurious doesn't factor it into the total recipe time, which I found incredibly annoying. At some point growing up when there was nothing else on television, I watched a cooking show that mentioned that if you but butternut squash in the microwave before trying to cut it, it makes it way  easier to cut and prepare. It totally works. Prepping the squash still took a long time, but I didn't break any knives. As far as how small to cut the squash, I think 1/2 inch should be the max, and even smaller wouldn't be bad either.
2.  Cook the squash in a large saucepan in two tablespoons of oil for about 10-12 minutes, until the squash begins to get soft. 5 minutes into the process, add the sage and 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Right before removing from the heat, add the 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar.
3. Wipe out the pan and cook the onions in the other two tablespoons of olive oil until cooked mostly cooked (about 15 minutes). 
4. Add the rice to the pan and cook for about 4 minutes, until the color changes slightly. Stir the rice so that it doesn't stick. While doing this, heat the vegetable broth in a separate pot with 2 cups of extra water.
5. Add one cup of broth to the rice and onion. The rice must be stirred almost continuously. Once the liquid is all absorbed, add an additional cup. Continue doing this until half of the broth is gone. (About 20 minutes)
6. Add the squash to the pan.
7. Continue adding the broth 3/4 - 1 cup at a time until all of the broth is absorbed. (About another 25 minutes.)
6. Add 1 teaspoon cinnamon.
FINISHED.


The squash adds a lot of sweetness to this risotto, as well as a lot of volume. While butternut squash has grown on me to the point that I can eat it, it still isn't my favorite vegetable, but oh, well. I did like this risotto. I will likely eat it at work this week - and add cheese.  

Super Bowl Vegetable Frittata

So what exactly does my meal this week have to do with the super bowl? Not a whole lot. But I am writing about it right now, in the first quarter of the game. I've been thinking a lot today about how I used to love and follow football. I remember the first time I was old enough to follow the Patriots and they made it to the Superbowl. I think it was the mid-90s. I remember all the local new stations carried stories about Green Bay fans, and how they were "cheese-heads." I didn't like them. Especially when they didn't make Drew Bledsoe look very good. Or the rest of the Patriot team for that matter. I've hated the Packers ever since. Can you tell that I'm from Boston? Good thing we really know how to let go of a grudge...

Did anyone else see the Cowboys & Aliens trailer during the Superbowl commercials and think it was a joke? Daniel Craig, what were you thinking? I mean, you went from staring in my favorite James Bond movie of all time (and I don't say that lightly) to this? I'm so so sad right now, not only for the end of the James Bond franchise, but now my happy memories of Daniel Craig are forever tarnished... but I digress. If anyone's interested, this is another trailer for the movie, in case you missed the commercial during the Superbowl. Not the same preview, but almost as good. You Tube Trailer for Cowboys & Aliens

As I was figuring out what to put in my vegetable Frittata today, I learned a bit about the difference between a frittata and an omelette and a quiche. "Frittata" is Italian for omelette. Unlike an omelette, however, they are more versatile, and can be served for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The commonalities I found among the various recipes is that the vegetables are all cooked first, then the egg is added, and then the whole dish is cooked in the oven. While many frittatas are cooked under the broiler, I cooked mine the same way that I cooked my crustless quiche (see January 2nd entry).

This recipe makes about 6 servings and the prep took me 30 minutes. It took another 45 minutes in the oven. (I do live at 5280 feet, so I think that increases cooking time, for both onions and ovens).

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons olive oil
6 small potatoes, cut into pieces (I tried to buy red potatoes, but couldn't find them sold individually. So then I bought purple potatoes thinking that they were the same thing. They're not. They're actually purple. Well, it did add some color to this this recipe. Go Saints! Oh wait, that was last year...)
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 small zucchinis, cut in half length-wise and then sliced
1 large red bell pepper, cut into small pieces (I'm so technical with my size descriptions, aren't I?)

5 whole eggs, 3 egg whites
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese 
3/4 cup crumbled Feta cheese 
1/4 cup milk or soy milk
1/2 - 1 teaspoon each: herbs de provence, black pepper, basil

Instructions:
1. In a large pan, cook the potatoes, onion, and zucchinis, and red pepper in the olive oil. (15-20 mins)
2. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, then add the milk, spices and cheese.
3. Grease an 8 inch square baking pan, then add the cooked vegetables. Pour the egg mixture on top and put in the oven for 40-45 minutes. (I used a knife to see when the center was cooked through.)

Let cool to room temperature, then cut.