What I cooked this week, Episode 10

Posting early this week, as I'm leaving for a business trip.

Look--bigger pictures! There are also buttons down at the bottom of each post to make them easy to share, if you so wish. Expect a few other blog tweaks here are there over the next couple of weeks, but nothing major.

Episode 10, August 9-August 15

Brussels sprouts with lentils and prosciutto

As promised, this is not a Smitten Kitchen recipe! It came from a blog I've just started reading, The Stone Soup, which focuses on minimalist cooking (and minimalist living in general), with most of the recent posts falling into the "5 ingredients, 10 minutes" category. This particular recipe came from a post about using sweet and sour flavor profiles to season dishes, in addition to the standard salt and pepper. This dish called for red wine vinegar; I used champagne vinegar because that's what I had, and I feel like a minimalist would approve of me not running out to buy a bottle of vinegar just for this recipe. I really liked this dish, and will consider experimenting with the vinegar next time--I also have balsamic, which would probably be too heavy, and apple cider, which might be too tart. We'll see!

Spiced chickpeas with cauliflower

Another recipe from The Stone Soup, I was excited to try cooking cauliflower, a vegetable I don't think I've outside of an Indian buffet in ages. It's barely cooked in this dish, and the slight crunch is a nice companion to the soft chickpeas.

Cauliflower brussels sprout gratin with gruyère and italian sausage

Guess who had some brussels sprouts and cauliflower leftover from the previous dinners? Initially, my plan was to follow this Smitten Kitchen recipe to use up the rest of cauliflower (and gruyere left over from the gougeres a couple weeks ago) and then to cook the brussels sprouts with some bacon on the side. However, I discovered that I didn't have enough cauliflower left and, since buying a whole other head would defeat the original purpose of using up what I had left, I decided to just throw everything all together. Italian sausage replaced the bacon, and I cooked it up like a casserole.

Yeasted waffles

In the interest of using up some buttermilk I had in the fridge, I decided to make some waffles. I used this recipe from my friend Jeters, with a couple changes: I used the aforementioned buttermilk instead of sour milk (seriously, isn't it the same thing?), and I had instant yeast instead of active dry. Instant yeast can be added directly to the other dry ingredients without having to take a warm water bath, so I added an extra 1/4 cup of regular milk to compensate for the missing water. The waffles turned out perfectly.

As I mentioned at the outset, I'll be on a business trip next week and so won't be doing any cooking. I may get around to whipping something next weekend, but don't surprised if you need to wait an extra week for Episode 11 to show up. I'll try to get a post or two of some kind up in the meantime, though.