Serious Eats
Cooking with a Friend: Tortilla Soup, Carrot Cake
Editor's note: Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J.
J. and I are definitely developing a rhythm to this project. Like clockwork, we now discuss the week's menu via email on Fridays, and then I compose the shopping list and we divvy up responsibilities. She's still learning my food quirks that revolve around my desire to buy from local farmers. This week, I didn't go to a farmers' market so she and I shopped together at Rainbow Grocery, a local co-op that sells locally-grown produce, and then supplemented a couple of items from Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. While I pay pretty careful attention to where my food comes from, sometimes convenience rules all, and a bag of frozen organic peas made it into the basket instead of buying fresh peas and shelling them.
A few years ago, I became obsessed with the recipe for tortilla soup from the movie of the same name. The recipe was developed by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger and is a tomato based, flavorful broth that I find to be addictively good. To add some protein to the dish, we poached two bone-in chicken breasts, shredded them, and added the meat to the soup. I then let it cook altogether for a few minutes at the end.
I've mentioned in the past that I do best with the menu planning when the food involves a last-minute preparation component in order to impart a fresh taste, and this dish succeeded on that requirement. While we made the broth on Sunday, the last minute prep involves cutting up avocado, adding tortilla chips, cilantro and lime and the result is a great-tasting dish that does not taste like leftovers.
We had a lot of carrots leftover from our CSA box, and were looking for recipes to use them. I came across a carrot cake recipe on 101 Cookbooks that looked delicious so we tried it out. I know that Heidi, the recipe wizard behind 101 Cookbooks, was trying to create a heart-healthy recipe, and we followed it until we got to the cream cheese frosting. Heidi recommended mixing agave syrup or maple syrup to cream cheese to create a frosting, but we ended up pulling out the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and making a traditional cream cheese frosting with butter and sugar. J., it turns out, is extremely serious about her carrot cake and I wanted to be sure she was happy with the end result. I have been happily nibbling on carrot cake all week, and J. seems to be content with the cake as well.
The soup and the cake, added to a couple of new ideas, created a nice mix this week. Several recipes came from blogs this week, and we tried out Chile Pea Puffs, another recipe from 101 Cookbooks and a broccoli beef recipe from Simply Recipes. We froze the Chile Pea Puffs so that we could pull them out of the freezer and cook as needed. The broccoli beef turned out delicious, and I am looking forward to having that for dinner tonight.
Final Menu, Week 6
Chile Pea Puffs
Tortilla Soup with Chicken
Beef and Broccoli with Steamed Rice
Carrot Cake
Chopped Salad with Poached Salmon
Cost: $35 each*
*I am the lucky recipient of a freezer full of Alaskan salmon and halibut, as my dad lives in Alaska and ships it to me once a year. While I am not paying for the salmon, I will now be working it into the Cooking With A Friend budget at $25 per pound. So while this week's real cost was $26 each, I adjusted it up to take into consideration the price of salmon if I had to pay for it. I will be doing this from now on.
About the author: About the author: Jennifer Maiser is the founder and editor of the Eat Local Challenge website and writes at Life Begins at 30, her personal weblog.