Ratatouille

One of my favorite things to do with squash and zucchini is make ratatouille with it. Ratatouille is traditionally a rustic French dish that packs a lot of flavor and is considered an art to execute perfectly. The dish has become a hallmark of lauded French chefs, and can make or break a restaurant (they even made a movie about it).

My Mom made a version of it when I was growing up that was far from haute cuisine - It normally consisted of cooked veggies with some kind of Ragu sauce thrown over it. The fact that my Mom called it "ratatouille" probably would've made Julia Child turn over in her grave, but it still got me to eat greens I otherwise would've skipped.

So, there's definitely a ratatouille spectrum out there that you can get creative with. Ratatouille can take a few minutes or a few hours, depending on how fancy you want to get with it. I'm going to give you a pretty basic (i.e. non-traditional) version of it to try. If you like that, I'd suggest googling more extreme recipes.

Now, one major difference between the ratatouille that I make and a traditional one: 99% of traditional ratatouille recipes include eggplant. Mine doesn't. Don't get me wrong, I love eggplant, I just prefer to use eggplant as the main component of a dish instead of as a supporting character. A lot of traditional ratatouilles also use alcohol and take a long time to cook down. I don't always have time for that.

And so, on to the recipes. Both are fast, but taste a bit different since one uses a home made veloute-like sauce (with stock, butter, and flour) and the other uses previously canned tomato sauce. I'll give you the option to choose your own adventure in a second...

Ingredients:
- Squash
- Zucchini
- Onion
- 2 tbsp Butter or Olive oil
- Tomato (optional)
- Eggplant (optional)
- Lemon, juiced (optional)
- Flour (optional)
- Chicken or Vegetable stock (optional)
- Tomato sauce (optional)
- Salt & pepper & parsley to taste

Throw all your favorite chopped veggies into a pan with some butter (olive oil if you're vegan) on medium heat with some salt and pepper and cook until everything's soft.

Here's where the 2 possibilities diverge...choice one is a lemon veloute sauce (one of the five French mother sauces) that requires SLIGHTLY more work, and choice two is over in another 30 seconds...

1) Add about a half cup of stock (chicken works best in my opinion, but veggie works too), turn your heat to medium-high, and let it boil down just a little. Take a tablespoon of flour (maybe a teeny bit more than that) and sprinkle slowly into your sauce, stirring the whole time to thicken it up. When everything's sticking together pretty well, add the juice from 1/2 to a full lemon. Continue stirring, taste it, add some fresh parsley, and you're finished. (This option is the one pictured above, with a tomato in there, which adds to the sauce as well).

2) Open a jar/can/whatever of tomato sauce (bonus points if it's home made and home canned), pour just enough in the pan to cover your vegetables until the sauce heats up, taste it to see if it needs anymore salt or pepper and you're finished.

This can be a side dish or put over rice or noodles for a heartier meal.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Butter/olive oil, Salt/Pepper

Braised Endives

I had never cooked with Belgian endives before (not to be confused with the curly endive, which has crazy leaves). My friend Kevin showed me this recipe that was in this awesome cookbook called Canal House.

BRAISED ENDIVES

Ingredients:
- 3 belgian endives (I had two white, one red)
- 1/2 cup chicken (or vegetable) stock
- 2 tbsp butter
- Salt & pepper to taste

Melt butter in pan on high heat.
Brown endives on all sides (this part is really important or else they won't caramelize and will taste bitter later!)
Pour stock in the pan. Once it's been brought to a boil, turn the heat down to simmer.
Cover the pan and braise for 30-40 min (I ended up going closer to 40 min to make sure they were cooked through).
Uncover, turn the heat back up to medium-high and reduce the pan juices.
Serve.

Endives are naturally pretty bitter. If you caramelize them enough and cook them long enough, this should offset the bitterness by a lot. However, they'll still be a little bitter. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Chicken stock, butter

Vegan Radish Greens Soup

It's happened.

SOUP MONTH has returned. As it's gotten colder, I've become obsessed with soups again. I forgot how easy and delicious they are.

So, quick Soup 101:

Almost all European-style savory soups begin with what's called a mirepoix (a French word pronounced meer-ah-pwah), which basically means onions, celery, and carrots sauteed with butter or oil (and usually with some combination of spices added). They create this bangin' set of flavors that create the base to most soups, stocks, and sauces. Without them, your soup just won't taste as hearty unless you're making an Asian-style soup or curry, in which case the flavors are going to be coming from other ingredients (like ginger, chili, curry, garlic, etc).

Next, you just add your main ingredients to your mirepoix, add some water or stock, blend it up, and go. Super easy.

So, this next dish isn't 100% from the dumpster because I had the chance to go to a pick-your-own farm near my house. I ended up getting pumpkins for my curried pumpkin and potato soup (and to put out at Halloween for the kiddies), sweet potatoes, beets, broccoli, and a bunch of daikon radishes, which I had never used before.

I ended up using all the daikon radishes (typically used in Asian dishes) for my first experiments with kimchee (a Korean fermented snack/condiment) and pho (a Vietnamese soup)...however, I was left with a bunch of daikon radish greens that I didn't know how to use. I came up with this recipe, which you can actually apply to a lot of different types of greens if you're over-stocked. The radish greens are especially great, though, because they have a nice peppery flavor to them already. Plus, I had all the ingredients for soup that I had recently dumpstered, so this was a perfect solution for using them.

Unfortunately, there's no picture for this soup because I threw it in a container to take to work right after making it...and then promptly ate all of it for dinner with some bread. Several people saw me eating it and asked for the recipe, so I figured it was worth the share. Plus, my boss is really allergic to dairy, so he appreciated the fact that it was vegan (bonus points)!

VEGAN RADISH GREENS SOUP

This soup makes like 5-6 cups with these proportions, so you'd have to double or triple them if you were going to make a lot for a family:

Ingredients:

- 2-3 tbsp olive oil or butter (vegan with oil)
- 1 medium-large potato
- 1 red onion
- 2 long celery stalks
- 1 medium carrot
- 4 cups daikon radish greens (or chard, kale, spinach or some other kind of yummy leafy green - if it's beet or radish greens, there'll be more flavor since both of those are kind of peppery. For other kinds of greens, you'll probably need to adjust the seasoning of the dish)
- 1-2 red or daikon radishes (optional - I didn't use them because I had used them all up in my kimchee)
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp fresh sage
- 1 tsp fresh parsley
- 1 tsp fresh thyme
- Salt & pepper to taste
- 1 bay leaf (remember to take it out before you blend it up)
- 4 cups chicken or vegetable stock or broth, warmed up (I used 4 cups water with chicken bouillon because I was out of everything else)

On medium-high heat, heat up the onions, celery, carrots for a few minutes. Add the potatoes, radish greens, garlic, and spices.
Warm up the broth in a separate pot while the other stuff is cooking.
Add the broth, then boil everything. Turn to medium-low and simmer for 5-20 minutes.
Remove the bay leaf.
Put everything into a blender. DONE.

Ingredients not dumpstered, donated, or picked/grown myself: Olive oil/butter, bouillon cubes, bay leaf, garlic, salt/pepper

Soup Month - Jeremy's Soup & Homemade Vegetable Stock

So, I drove my man-friend Jeremy to the airport for the holidays, and to my surprise, included with my Christmas presents was a Tupperware with all the food that would go bad before he got back! Most of what was in the Tupperware were ingredients for a soup he makes often (and is freaking delicious). I didn't have all the ingredients to make the soup quite like he does, so I made some variations. I made the soup a few times, so I ended up making vegetable stock from scratch for the second batch of soup. I made two versions of this soup, so I've included all the variations possible.

JEREMY'S SOUP

Ingredients:
Veggie, Chicken, or Beef stock (I started w/ 2 veggie stock packs from Trader Joe's, donated from Jeremy)
1 tbsp olive oil
3 min. noodles (or other dumpstered pasta)
Green Onions or Shallots
Onions
Green Curry Paste (canned)
Ginger
1 Egg
Water
Carrots
Mushrooms
Juice from 1/2 a small lemon
Salt & Pepper to taste

Cut up veggies & ginger & throw in boiling water/stock/olive oil combo. Cook until tender.
Throw in a spoonful or two of curry paste (to your liking), lemon juice, & salt/pepper.
Put in pasta of your choice. Cook until tender.
Turn heat to medium-low and crack 1 egg into soup. Cover and let sit for a few minutes - don't let the egg yolk cook. Stir egg around in soup.
Eat up!

Other incarnations can involve rice, sesame oil, honey, bacon fat, basil, or coconut milk in lieu of water.

If you don't have veggie stock at hand, here's how to make it from scratch:

HOMEMADE VEGETABLE STOCK

Ingredients:
1 Large stalk of celery
1 medium onion
2 tbsp olive oil
A few pepper corns/ground pepper
1 bay leaf
2 large peeled carrots (or 6 baby carrots)
Salt
Water
Garlic (optional)

Sautee everything in olive oil (except the bay leaf) until tender. Add water & bay leaf. Bring to a rolling boil. Simmer for 30 min-2 hours. Remove bay leaf.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Green curry paste, Egg, Spices, Celery

Turkey Stock & Turkey Soup

After Thanksgiving and Christmas, there were a lot of leftovers.

My mom donated her leftover turkey (and turkey carcass) to me after both holidays. This isn't necessarily dumpstering-related, but free food is free food.

I did end up eating some of the turkey, but decided to make turkey stock from the carcass, and modify my dad's chicken soup recipe (which is fucking awesome) to make turkey soup. (so you can do this whole process with chicken too)

TURKEY STOCK

Ingredients
1/2 Onion
1 large carrot (or 6 baby carrots)
1 large celery stalk
Turkey carcass
1 bay leaf
Pepper & salt

Cover the bottom of a large pan with olive oil. Cook all your cut-up veggies on medium heat until tender.
Fill your pot with water, then drop in the turkey carcass and spices.
Bring to a boil.
Simmer for a minimum of 2 hours (the first batch I made I simmered for 5 hours, the second for 3). Skim off any scum on the water's surface.
Strain the turkey stock. Remove any bones & the bay leaf from your strainer and throw the veggies back in the stock. Remove the meat off the carcass's bones and set aside for your soup.

TURKEY SOUP

Ingredients:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion
2 carrots (or 6 baby carrots)
1 large celery stalk
1 can diced tomatoes (or boil and de-skin/de-seed your own tomatoes by running them under cold water)
2 large potatoes (optional - makes a heartier soup)
2-5 tbsp rice (wild rice is my favorite in this recipe)
Turkey meat
Turkey stock (you can substitute canned chicken stock if you don't want to spend 3 hours making your own)
Salt & Pepper to taste


Repeat the same process of softening your veggies as you did when you made your stock (leave the tomatoes & potatoes out).
Pour in turkey stock, tomatoes (with or without the water from the can), and turkey meat
Bring to a boil.
Throw in potatoes, then cook until they're soft.
Throw in rice.
Cover and cook under medium heat for about 30 minutes (or until the rice is done).

This soup tastes especially good with bread and butter that you dip into it.

Et voila!


Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, can of diced tomatoes, butter for bread, and rice (which I got from The Beet Food Co-Op)