Oh hello, my dear blog! Long time no see. Roughly two months ago, I started a new job that involved a commute to a mysterious land called “the Peninsula” (that’s south of San Francisco, for you non-Bay Area folk). I spent 3 1/2 hours commuting on a good day and when there were delays, up to 5 hours a day. I was transferred to the San Francisco office a few weeks ago and I’m finally adjusting back to life as usual and getting into the habit of cooking on a daily basis – and of course, blogging! Much of what I’ve been cooking the last couple months are tried and true old favorites, but I’ve started to wipe the dust from my cookbooks and RSS reader again. I’ve had Turkish cuisine on my mind a lot lately, as Cory and I recently sown the seeds of planning a two-week trip to Turkey next April, and have started to dip my toes into exploring Turkish food. Those recipes will have to wait for another day, though.

Most of the cooking I do now is on Sundays, fresh from shopping for the week, when there is a seemingly endless amount of fresh produce at my disposal. I’ve been experimenting with making mini-feasts with mezzes, or pasta dishes when I don’t feel like cooking for three hours. Although fava beans can be a bit of a pain to prepare, I always look forward to fava bean seasonn. The nuttiness of fava beans lends well with pasta dishes. And it’s hard to go wrong when cooking with bacon and cheese!

Oh, and! Last Sunday was my 26th (!) birthday. I am generally not very big on birthday celebrations, but I am a fan of using my birthday as an excuse to eat whatever I like.

It’s true. Despite my love for Mediterranean food, what do I choose to eat on my birthday? Diner food and ice cream from Fentons Creamery in Oakland. Diner food is kind of my secret shame, but it’s also what I grew up eating. I suppose I won’t have to worry about splurging on diner food until Cory and I make the cross-country trek to the Midwest at the end of the summer. In any case, on with the pasta!

Pasta with Fava Beans, Kale, and Bacon
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4 slices bacon, cooked and cut into 1″ pieces (reserve 1 tablespoon bacon grease)
1 cup fava beans, shelled (that’s roughly 1 pound in the pod)
1 pound pasta of your choice (I used macaroni)
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 bunch of kale, stems removed and torn into small pieces
1/2 cup parmiggiano reggiano
salt & pepper, to taste

Prepare the pasta:
Fill a large pot with water and boil pasta according to package directions. Rinse and set aside.

Prepare the bacon:
In a large stockpot, cook bacon over medium-low heat. Once cooked, transfer bacon to a plate lined with paper towels and drain. Once bacon has cooled, cut into 1″ pieces and set aside. Reserve about a tablespoon of bacon grease.

Prepare the fava beans:
Bring another large pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, remove the beans from their pods. By now, the water should be boiling. Blanch the beans for about 2 minutes and drain in a colander. Rinse thoroughly with cold water. Peel off and discard the outer shell. Set the fava beans aside.

Bringing it all together:
Heat oil to a large pan (you may want to use a large pot, your pan may get very crowded). Once hot, add the garlic and saute for 30 seconds, or until fragrant. Add the kale and cook until Cook until the cabbage has wilted, about 8-10 minutes. Once wilted, add garlic and stir for about 30 seconds or until fragrant. Add the kale and saute for 2-3, or just until the kale is beginning to wilt. Toss in the bacon, bacon grease, pasta, pasta, fava beans, parmiggiano reggiano, salt and pepper. Continue to saute until pasta is heated through. Serve immediately.

Serves 6

Try the recipe index for more ideas!

Related posts:

1. spaghetti with fava bean sauce
2. pasta with bacon, red cabbage, toasted walnuts, and rosemary
3. ham and walnut pasta

Egypt has been on my mind constantly. It all started when I finally got Cory to watch one of my favorite movies, The Band’s Visit, just after the New Year. Then a couple weeks later, we watched Dr. Zhivago (seeing it made me even more proud to have been an extra in a film that starred Omar Sharif). Now in the wake of the protests in Egypt, I’ve been glued to Al-Jazeera English’s live stream everyday and find myself constantly refreshing certain blogs for live updates.

I miss Egypt. A lot. I spent almost a year there, over the course of three separate visits. Egypt will always have a special place in my heart. It was a place of firsts – first international flight, first time living on my own, first roommates, and the place where I first took an interest in food and cooking. Although I had a lot of frustrating experiences in Cairo (as any woman will tell you), I long for the day I can return and introduce Cory to my favorite bookstores, restaurants, and neighborhoods.

I especially miss the cats. Don’t even get me started on the cats. I have more pictures of cats than pyramids (which is easy, since cats are everywhere).

I loved all of the cats, even the ones that tried escaping my loving embrace. I could totally do without the geckos (bors), though.

And, of course, there’s the food.

I arrived in Egypt a very picky eater and returned to the States with a new love for food and cooking (lentils, fava beans, and chickpeas… where had they been all my life?). With Egypt so much on my mind lately, I started off the week with plans to only make Egyptian and Egyptian-inspired foods. So expect to see lots of Egyptian recipes here in the near future. My produce market was overflowing lots of interesting greens – butter lettuce, dinosaur kale, and brilliantly purple escarole. Once I got home, I wanted to put them all together in salad. For the record, I was never served anything quite like this salad in Egypt. It’s Egyptian-inspired, with a tahini based sauce laced with cumin and coriander. You see, I can’t help but put a somewhat foofy California cuisine spin on the dishes I make.

By the way, if you subscribe via email or RSS take a look at avocado & bravado’s new look. I planned on coding my own WordPress theme from scratch, buuut… I never quite got around to it. Instead, I found a nice minimalist theme to use as a base and customized it myself. I’m still smoothing a few things out, but the blog is finally looking the way I’ve always wanted it to. I love it.

Mixed Green Salad with Tahini Dressing
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For the dressing:

3 garlic cloves, chopped finely
2/3 cup tahini
1/3 cup plain yogurt (you could leave this out and add more tahini, but sometimes I find that tahini can be too strong)
2-4 tablespoons water (depending on the thickness of your yogurt. I used full fat Greek yogurt, so I used about 4 tablespoons of water)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon coriander
salt

Chop the garlic and toss into a blender, along with the remaining the tahini, yogurt, 2 tablespoons water, lemon juice, cumin, coriander and salt. Blend until smooth. If the dressing is too thick, add more water, a tablespoon at a time until you’ve reached your desired consistency.

For the salad:

3 cups mildly tart greens (any of the following: endive, escarole, dandelion greens, kale, purslane, watercress), washed and chopped into bite-sized pieces
2 cups mild greens (any of the following: butter lettuce, loose leaf lettuce, Romaine lettuce), washed and chopped into bite-sized pieces
1 onion, diced
1 cucumber diced
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 15-oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
black pepper, for serving

Toss together the the greens and add to individual bowls. Drizzle the dressing over the greens and add the onions, cucumber, walnuts, and chickpeas. Grind some black pepper over the salad and serve.

Serves 6-8

Try the recipe index recipe index for more ideas.

Related posts:

1. green salad with apples and pecans with buttermilk honey dressing
2. salad with carrot ginger dressing
3. mint and cucumber noodles with tahini dressing

When I think about it, having a food blog is kind of strange. I post recipes of the dishes I’ve made and share them with strangers. When I first launched avocado & bravado, some acquaintances who had no idea that I had ventured into the world of cooking, assumed I’d gone the route of dutiful housewife (girlfriend, rather) on a quest to become the next Martha Stewart. Not quite. Um, do I look like Martha to you? I grew up knowing very little about food and even less about cooking. As I’ve mentioned here before, I chopped my first onion a few weeks shy of my 23rd birthday. If a reformed McDonald’s addict can learn to cook, so can you. And if I’ve made any impact at all on your cooking or helped boost your confidence in the kitchen, I couldn’t possibly ask for anything more. Thank you all for the kind comments, emails, and constructive criticism throughout the last year. Oh, and a big thanks to the occasional troll for the laughs. I’m looking forward to updating avocado & bravado for many more years to come.

Now that I have a shiny new camera, there are many many more recipes in the queue, but I haven’t had much time to edit most of the pictures. So the recipe I have for you today is a simple avocado and cilantro dip. Cory bought blue corn tortilla chips for a stew he made a couple weeks ago. We never have tortilla chips on hand, so the urge to snack on them was pretty strong. But it would be a shame to snack on just the chips alone, so I wanted to make a dip to accompany them. I planned on making guacamole, but I was missing many of the ingredients.  That was okay, though.  Once the cilantro was chopped, everything came together rather quickly and I didn’t even miss the tomatoes, onions, or chilies.  Also, I ate almost the whole thing in one sitting.  Just a warning for those with very little willpower.

Cilantro and Avocado Dip
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2 medium-sized avocados
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt (or more, to taste)
1/3 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

Cut the avocados in half, remove the pits, and scoop out the meaty avocado goodness into a mixing bowl. Mash the avocados with a fork and mix in the garlic, lemon juice, cumin, salt, and cilantro.

Serves 2 (or less!)

Try the recipe index for more ideas.

Related posts:

1. mast-o khiar (persian yogurt and cucumber dip)
2. hummus with roasted garlic and fresh herbs
3. tomatillo salsa verde

Usually when I go produce shopping, I make a bee-line for the greens and pick up a bunch of kale whenever it’s available.  Kale is sturdy and hearty, which makes it ideal for soups and stews, but it still tastes excellent raw – for those who can stand its mildly bittersweet flavor.  Since I buy kale so often, it sometimes lingers in the fridge a few days longer than I’d like and I don’t know what to do with it.  When that happens, I usually make kale chips.  But once I found a recipe for kale gratin I knew had a new go-to favorite recipe for kale.  I’ve made this gratin a handful of times in the last couple months and it even made an appearance at our Christmas dinner.  It’s such a comforting and satisfying dish, perfect for chilly winter nights.  And of course, this is also an easy way to incorporate some greens into your diet.  And cheese.  Lots and lots of cheeeeeeeeese.

Kale Gratin
(adapted from Sceptical Cook)
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1 pound kale, washed, stemmed, and cut into small pieces
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour (I used all purpose)
1 1/5 cups milk (I used whole)
1 cup extra sharp cheddar cheese, grated
salt & pepper
1/2 teaspoon turmeric (optional, for color)
a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
a tablespoon of olive oil, for greasing the baking pan

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Wash, stem, and chop up the kale into small pieces. Add a couple tablespoons of water to a large stockpot and add the kale. Cook the kale over medium heat for about 2 or 3 minutes, or just until it’s started to wilt. Drain the kale through a colander and squeeze out a little bit of the liquid. Let the kale continue to drain as you grate the cheddar cheese.

In a skillet, melt the butter over medium low heat. Stir the flour into the butter, then add the milk a couple tablespoons at a time, stirring constantly until the mixture has formed a thick and smooth sauce. Add salt, pepper, turmeric (if using), and nutmeg. Add in the cheese, stirring constantly until melted.

Grease a baking pan (mine was 8″ x 8″) with olive oil and add the kale. Pour the cheese sauce over the kale and tip the baking pan back and forth to make sure all the kale is covered in cheese. Transfer to the oven and bake for 20 minutes, or until bubbling. If you’d like the gratin to have a nice brown top, add it to the broiler for 3-5 minutes.

Serves 6-8

Try the recipe index for more ideas.

Related posts:

1. kale chips
2. kale salad with honey dressing and pine nuts
3. pasta with fava beans, kale, and bacon

I’ve mentioned my love for sumac many times in the one year history of this blog (well, it will be one year in a little over two weeks!). Sumac is a spice that I sneak into just about anything. I love its sourness, it’s not as overpowering as lemons can be. Sometimes I even find myself eating small spoonfuls of it just before adding it to dishes. Hey, it’s not nearly as weird as trying to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon. Sumac adds a nice tart kick to vegetable dishes and I’ve been roasting lots of vegetables lately (broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and carrots). Partly as an excuse to keep the oven on for over an hour (our heater is only in one room!), but mostly because there’s no such thing as eating too many vegetables. Or too much sumac. Sumac most likely isn’t available at your local grocery store, but can easily be found at Middle Eastern grocery stores – or places like Amazon.com, if you’re willing to shell out a couple dollars for shipping.

Sumac Carrots
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1 lb carrots, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon sumac
salt, to taste
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped

Preheat oven to 350F.

Toss the carrots with olive oil, sumac, and salt on a baking sheet or baking pan. Transfer to the oven and roast for 20-25 minutes, or until tender. Sprinkle with a little bit of parsley before serving, if you’re feeling fancy.

Serves 2

Try the recipe index for more ideas.

Related posts:

1. sumac potato salad
2. carrot salad
3. roasted broccoli