2012 Year in Review: Cooking Up A Storm

A lot of these 2012 Year in Review posts are really for my own archives, so that I can pull them up later to see what I noted for various years, or when I experienced a certain thing. Like cooking - this is my way of keeping a record of my favourite recipes, and I find that this is the post that I end up referring back to the most throughout the year, especially when it's 5pm at work, "what groceries should I pick up when I get home in a few hours so that we can eat something tasty?" Here are my favourite recipes from the past year:

Healthy/Quicker Dinners - good ways to get massive amounts of veggies 

1. Curried lentil soup: Saw this featured on Posie Gets Cozy, excellent mix of celery, carrots, ginger, lentils, parsnip and more, with a cup of dark lentils. Rich and tasty, excellent with a dollop of sour cream and hunk of crusty bread.
2. Scalloped tomatoes with croutons: This is such a favourite, often inspired by rereading Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir with the author photo where she's holding a crate of tomatoes. About a dozen massive tomatoes, baked with some croutons, basil and cheese.
3. Vegetable soup with rosemary and chickpeas: Put carrots, celery, an onion, chickpeas, rosemary & other herbs in a big pot with a bunch of water and some diced tomatoes, and let it simmer away, what a flavourful broth!
4. White bean stew: There are two versions to this that I have used, and in this one there's a "deglaze the pan with white wine" step that makes the broth even more delicious. 
5. Baked feta with tomatoes: This recipe became an instant staple in our kitchen. Like, when you're home late from the office, and trying to figure out what to cook, this is the way to go. Grab a block of feta, a bunch of cherry tomatoes (chop them in half), a jar of olive tapenade, a few shallots or onions and a handful of green herbs. Put it all together and bake for half an hour, serve with bread. Absolutely delicious. 
6. Broccoli fritters: I cook this when I just want a big pile of veggies for dinner, they're delicious tempura style and not too oily since they're almost all broccoli. Good with a dollop of dijon mustard too.
7. Potato salad with pesto and green beans: Very refreshing, with crunchy green beans. I used a pack of fingerling potatoes, some of which had purple skin, and their insides were purple too and we had fresh basil from our own garden to mix with the pesto. 
8. Pizza dough: This is so satisfying to make, it's magic to whip together such simple ingredients and see the dough rise. We would make a batch and then top it with a ton of good veggies and stuff. It always reminds me of Iolanda to make this. :)
9. Asian noodles with cabbage: James and I cooked these great noodles, used regular spaghetti instead of soba since there wasn't any in our little grocery store, and enjoyed this very much. Lots of crunch because of all the cabbage.

Favourite Tasty Fancier Dinners - Occasional cooks, lots of fun to try out these new recipes

1. Cassoulet: We had found jars of this bean stew, imported from France, in the "forbidden" pork section at the grocery store and it is really delicious. But I wanted to make my own! So on a hot July day, I felt like cooking something complicated inside our AC apartment and this recipe had lots of fun steps. I got a lambchop, sausages and bacon (hence the forbidden pork section provenance), and followed the "easy" recipe in this link that uses canned cannelini beans. It took about four and a half hours and the results were fantastic! A labour of love.
2. Roast chicken: Foolproof recipe, works so well! Cooked this a few times, often using parsley and sage from our herb garden. For Christmas dinner, I finally covered the pan with foil and didn't have to scrub out the oven afterwards.
3. Tortilla de patatas: Excellent tapas meal with lots of potatoes and eggs (particularly useful when we were given a massive bag of farmfresh eggs). It's even better the next few days as leftovers when it's more potato tasting than eggy. There's a step where you have to "flip" it, and this is a little scary (made it twice, had a few burns on fingers on the 2nd attempt). Super satisfying. 
4. Chicken and Artichokes with wine sauce: I substituted mushrooms for the artichokes and we paired this with a pile of greens with olive oil and balsamic. The chicken sauce was delicious and James paid me the ultimate French chef compliment by mopping his plate clean with a piece of bread 
5. Chicken & Mushroom Marsala: I didn't have Marsala so I used a sweet white wine instead. The mushroom sauce was buttery and delicious. 
6. Escarole and orzo soup with meatballs: Fun to make these meatballs and the orzo was really creamy and tasty. I made a ton of substitutions, because our little grocery store didn't have ground turkey or escarole, so I used ground beef and spinach. The meatballs were delicious, and I used our garden parsley.
7. Potato chip casserole: You slice up a bunch of potatoes into super thin slices, arrange them so that they are standing vertically in a pie plate, put some sliced onions in between the potato slices and bake it. There was a whole layer of crunchy caramelized potato on the bottom
8. French onion soup: Hurray the Spinneys sells pre-chopped onion. Followed the instructions to really brown the onions and used port instead of the glug of cognac at the end for flavour. It took a few hours of high maintenance work, but the results were delicious. I scooped some into a loaf pan and did the bread/cheese melty thing in the oven.
9. Grilled cheese and avocado sandwiches: No recipe, just put some cheese and avocado slices on some bread slathered in Dijon mustard, heat it up to meltiness.
10. I made a QUICHE! With Egg Fest in full effect thanks to the enormous bag of fresh eggs our neighbour gave us, I hunted down recipes that would use tons of them at a time. This spinach quiche was fantastic and easy easy easy. I burned myself on the oven and will forever think of my proud quiche when I see the scar. 
11. Zucchini rice gratin: Smitten Kitchen posted this recipe one week and my Mom wrote to me about it just as I was adding to my need-to-cook list. Instead of thyme, I used zaatar and I added more cheese to the top, because I wanted more melty goodness.

Desserts

1. Apple cake (sharlotka): More apple-y than doughy, quite sweet and tart.
2. Lime cookies: Because I love lime.
3. Fruit galette with plums
4. Vanilla bean pudding: We bought vanilla for our wine tasting standards and so I wanted to ensure it didn't go to waste. This was a pudding made with whole milk, not too unhealthy, but not as much of the vanilla flavour as I would have liked. Very light. 
5. James chocolate stout birthday cake, aka Birthday Bundt Delicious Disaster: In addition to *not* falling out of the bundt pan in one piece, there was also a blizzard of cocoa powder in our kitchen thanks to my hijinks. But WOW did this taste good!  
6. Peanut butter brownies for my birthday

Here's Some Other Stuff I Cooked and Loved

1. Scallion and mushroom frittata: We cooked this on a Saturday night and it was easy and tasty, enjoyed with a nice white wine, baguette and some cheese & salami. It puffed up like a crazy souffle in the oven.
2. Risotto style pasta: I added chicken, and used portobello mushrooms & orzo in this tasty dish, and it was especially delicious the next day after the flavours had all melded a bit more.
3. Chili: Needing a good dose of red meat, I whipped this up one evening. Only had cumin, and didn't use garlic, but it still turned out deeeelicious. 
4. Chicken Milanese: I bought Panko bread crumbs and wanted to use it for more than one dish, so I searched out this chicken dish. It was fun to make, dredging in flour, then egg, the Panko+parmesan, and it turned out to be delicious, totally devoured. There's a step where you have to let the breaded chicken sit in the fridge for an hour, thankfully I saw this ahead of time.
5. Bubble and Squeak: "What's 'bubble and squeak,'" I asked James after seeing it on a restaurant menu. Mashed together Brussels sprouts and potatoes, delicious.
6. Simple Tomato Sauce: I made this a few times back in Jersey, and it suddenly popped in my mind in July, so I whipped up another batch of Smitten Kitchen's tomato sauce with onion and butter. Simple and delicious on fresh pasta.
7. Huevos rancheros: You cook the egg on top of a tortilla then flip it over.
8. Mom's quinoa salad with sunflower seeds, cucumber and more. I used dried cherries and couscous because, as I wrote to her, quinoa is tragically expensive here. And I had to shell the sunflower seeds, as I couldn't find a bag of unshelled.
9. Buttermilk chicken: It was juicy and tangy, but needs a day to soak in the buttermilk and then took an hour to cook in our inconsistent oven. If I was to do it again, I'd use chicken breasts instead of drumsticks.
10. Corn pakoras: When I spotted corn cobs at the grocery store, I grabbed them for this recipe. I made a bunch of modifications, like I didn't do the whole seed-toasting-in-ghee step, and added a tsp of cumin to the batter. I also used corn flour instead of corn meal and didn't grind up the kernels. I added an egg to make the patties stick together. But overall - were these every tasty! 
11. Rice noodles with peanut lime chicken: Made this one night when we had cold leftover chicken from fajitas the night before. Thin pieces of cucumber & carrot, some cilantro, some chives, some snap peas, some peanuts plus the chicken, all over a bed of rice noodles. The dressing had, amongst many many other ingredients, peanut butter in it, very tasty and tangy.
12. Lemon thyme mushrooms: Yummy! I used zaatar instead of thyme, excellent. Put them on homemade pizza dough.

Comments

[Anita]

I must go through these again and try some

[Jennifer]

Especially that first category, those are really easy and super tasty. I think I made a non-wine version of the white bean stew and the rosemary chickpea soup when we were home in May. And of course, you've tried my favourite, the baked feta.