Category: food

Vegetarian: Clarissa’s Vegetable Ragout

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I felt a craving for a good, colorful vegetable ragout. However, a long Internet search didn’t result in a single recipe that didn’t look boring or monochromatic and didn’t include either meat or canned vegetables. So I had to invent my own recipe. Some of the ingredients of this vegetarian ragout were things that I’d never tried before, like eggplants. (Yes, I’d never eaten eggplant in any form in my life.) I really loved the result and decided to share it with my readers.

Here is what my Vegetable Ragout ended looking like:
I’m folding the detailed description of how to make it under the jump break to spare those who aren’t interested the trouble of scrolling through endless photos of diced vegetables.

These are the main ingredients I chose for my ragout but you can, of course, change any of them. I selected three kinds of baby potatoes (yellow, red and black) because it’s very important to have a colorful ragout, juicy heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, baby turnips, baby eggplant, young carrots, garlic, ginger, and a bunch of cilantro.

Peel several cloves of garlic and crush them. Heat some olive oil in a large pan and place the garlic in the oil. In the meanwhile, cut your baby potatoes in half and place them in the pan, too.
Every step of this recipe looks colorful
and delicious. And it smells fantastic, too
Dice the turnips and the young carrots making sure that the chunks are not too small. If you cut them too small, they might become mushy, which is something we are trying to avoid. Vegetables in a ragout should be cooked but still preserve some firmness. Otherwise, we can just make a puree and be done with it. Then, add a bay leaf and some coriander seeds, if you like them. Dice ginger in very small cubes and add them to the pan.
The white chunks are pieces of baby turnip
Cut baby eggplant and add it to the pan. You don’t have to spread it around the way I did, of course. I just did it to make sure the photo is pretty, that’s all. During this entire time, the pan has been on medium-high.
In the same manner, cut the zucchini and the squash and throw them into the pan. Now it’s time to add herbs and spices (the choice is really up to you) and start making the sauce. Put 1 tablespoon of coarse-grained Dijon mustard and 1 tablespoon of tomato paste into the pan. Mix everything up. Add as much or as little salt as you want. (I’m trying to avoid salt altogether, so I added none and the ragout still tasted heavenly.) This is how your ragout will look after you complete this step:
Dissolve a tablespoon of flour in a cup of cold water and add the mix to the ragout. This will thicken the sauce. Close the pan with a tight-fitting lid and let the ragout simmer until the vegetables are almost ready. Then, dice the tomatoes and add them to the ragout. Also, add fresh cilantro. This is how the ragout will look at this point:
Mix everything up, close the lid, and leave the ragout on slow for another 10 minutes. And here we have it:

>Seafood Risotto

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

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This is the seafood risotto I just made. Making risotto is extremely hard. The first time I made it, it stuck to the plate like cement and, I couldn’t get it to budge in any direction. I still ate it all just to punish myself for wasting great ingredients. Of course, I had to use a steak knife to saw through that sad plate of risotto-based Crazy Glue.

Restaurants almost never know how to make risotto either. More often than not, you just get a plate of rise smothered in cheese. Even expensive, famous restaurants frequently mess it up. There was an absolutely perfect mushroom risotto that was served at a restaurant on McGill College in Montreal. Sadly, that restaurant has closed. Even at The Modern restaurant in New York the risotto was the weakest dish of all.

The good news is that with every risotto I make, I get a little better. This seafood risotto I made today looks great and doesn’t stick to the plate at all. This particular version of risotto contains clams, scallops, shrimp and oysters. Even if the risotto itself were bad, the beautiful seafood would go a long way to redeeming it.

P.S. By huge popular demand of one reader, here is the recipe:

1. Pour some olive oil into a pan. Add some crushed garlic and fry it for not more than a couple of minutes. Add 1 cup of arborio rice. Make sure that every grain of rice is covered in olive oil. 
2. When the rice starts acquiring a slightly golden hue, slowly add one glass of dry white wine to the pan. (Feel free to skip the wine and add fish stock instead.) Keep mixing the rice the entire time. It should be prevented from sticking to the bottom of the pan.
3. When the wine reduces, add some fish stock. Keep adding the stock in little portions as it keeps reducing. Remember that you will need to stop adding liquids when the rice is al dente. Nothing is worse than a risotto whose cook didn’t stop on time.
4. In the meanwhile, peel and devein shrimp. Place clams in a pan of boiling water. In a bout two minutes, the clams will open. When that happens, take them out of the pan. If there are clams that failed to open, throw them out.
5. When the rice is about 5  minutes away from being al dente, add the shrimp, the oysters, and the scallops to the pan. (This seafood can be substituted with any other kind.) Add some grated Parmesan. I also add cilantro because I love it and add it to everything. 
6. When the risotto is about two minutes away from getting done, place the clams strategically all over the surface of the risotto. Make sure you serve it while it’s hot. Leftovers are not bad either but nothing beats freshly made risotto.

>Ukrainians and Food

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

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Once I invited some friends over to my parents’ place. After a huge meal with many different dishes, the sated friends started getting up. “Where are they going?” asked my mother who doesn’t speak English. “Tell them all to sit back down. These were just the appetizers. I also have hot sandwiches, entrées, and a dessert to serve.” 
At the end of the meal people had to crawl away from the table because they were so full. “Ask them if they want a snack,” my mother said. “I have a lot of snacks to offer. It isn’t like I’d allow your friends to leave the house hungry.”