Veggie Pasta Class JJC Spring 2021 Recipes

Veggies for pasta? What? Yes. There's so many varieties of vegetables that can be used in the place of pasta, leaving a healthier, more colorful, and equally tasty result!

For anyone who hasn't attended one of my classes at JJC, you may notice that there are no measurements for these types of recipes. Everyone has different preferences on flavors, so part of the fun with savory cooking is that creativity can flow and the end result will be delicious. The biggest thing to remember when approaching recipes like this is to TASTE YOUR FOOD! Taste it before it's cooked, different stages while it's being cooked, adjust seasonings based off of what you're tasting, taste it again. It's a math problem, really. Finding balance in a recipe is about understanding how ingredients affect each other.

With that said, here's the veggie pasta recipes from the Spring semester of cooking classes at JJC!

Asian Carrot & Mushroom Stir Fry

Ingredients:

Mushrooms, quartered

Carrots, spiralized

Garlic, minced

Shallot, minced

Crushed red pepper

Fresh ginger, grated

Soy sauce/cornstarch slurry (1 to 2 ratio of cornstarch to soy sauce) (coconut aminos for gluten free)

Orange juice

Orange zest

Peanuts (toasted)

Cilantro (chopped)

White sesame seeds (toasted)

Instructions: Saute mushrooms on medium/high heat in a little bit of cooking oil (canola or vegetable oil with a high smoke point). Don’t stir too frequently so they get good caramelization. Add carrot “noodles,” saute for a few minutes until slightly tender. Add minced garlic, shallot, crushed red pepper, and fresh ginger, cook until aromatic (a minute or two). Add a slurry of soy sauce and cornstarch (1 to 2 ratio). Cook until slightly thickened, then add orange juice until the sauce is at the desired consistency. Finish with orange zest, toasted peanuts, cilantro, and toasted white sesame seeds.

Zucchini Italian Sausage Lasagna

For this recipe, the only ratio that needs to stay consistent for the binding functionality of this lasagna is one egg to one half of a cup of cottage cheese for the filling mixture of the lasagna. If you're making a larger batch, three eggs to a cup and a half of cottage cheese is perfect. The tomato sauce is something that can be made a variety of different ways, with different meats, wines, and seasonings. Even the cheeses can be experimental here, about any blend of Italian cheeses will do!

Ingredients:

Zucchini (1 for small batch, 3 for large batch)

Tomato sauce recipe

Egg (1, 3 for large batch)

Parmesan Cheese

Cottage Cheese (1/2 cup, 1 1/2 cup for large batch)

Mozzarella Cheese

Crushed red pepper

Fresh Basil

Buttery toasted breadcrumbs

*Tomato sauce:

Italian sausage

Garlic, minced

Shallot, minced

White wine (for a darker, richer sauce, use red wine here)

Canned tomato (San Marzano)

Dried herbs and seasonings of choice (oregano, parsley, basil, fennel seed, bay leaves, black peppercorns, crushed red pepper, etc...)

Instructions: Start with tomato sauce, cooking Italian sausage fully in a larger pot. Drain fat if necessary, add minced garlic and shallot and cook until aromatic (a minute or so). Add dried herbs, salt and pepper to taste, crushed red pepper. Deglaze with white wine, let cook until the wine is mostly reduced, then add the canned tomato and let simmer until the sauce is thickened.

Mandolin the zucchini to about a ¼ inch thickness, lay out on paper towels and pat dry.

Mix together egg, cottage cheese, seasonings, parmesan cheese.

Layer the zoodles, sauce, cheese mixture, and mozzarella cheese, then repeat, until the pan is full (ending with extra mozzarella cheese).

Bake at 450 degrees until the top is bubbly, top with buttery toasted breadcrumbs (toast breadcrumbs with a couple tablespoons of butter in a skillet on medium heat until it's golden brown) and lightly torn fresh basil.

Bonus Recipe!

Although this last recipe is certainly not a pasta dish, it is an absolute show stopper, highlights vegetables, and is super easy to make!

Fried Brussels Sprouts

Ingredients:

Brussels Sprouts, quartered

Sweet Chili Sauce (Mae Ploy is my favorite brand)

Frying Oil in a large pot (canola or vegetable oil)

Instructions: Heat frying oil to 375 degrees. Half or quarter sprouts, depending on how large they are. Fry in the oil until they're crispy and golden brown. Be careful when you put them in the oil, they have a tendency to splatter the oil a bit because of the moisture in/on the sprouts. Once they're crispy, remove from the oil, salt, and toss in a bowl with sweet chili sauce. Enjoy!

These recipes are meant to inspire creativity and a comfortable vibe in the kitchen. They are forgiving recipes that highlight common ingredients that you likely already have at home in your fridge or pantry. Don't have one of the ingredients in one of these recipes that you want to make? No worries! There's probably a decent substitute in your kitchen already. Think about what role the ingredient plays in the recipe (sweet, sour, salty, acidic, etc), and what could work in its place. Want to make an adjustment to fit the taste buds of your family better? Do it! As long as a basic understanding of how ingredients work together is paired with a basic understanding of how to manage heat and temperature control, the results are deliciously unending!

Make one of these recipes at home? Take a picture and share it on social media! Tag @FlourchildstuffLLC or use #flourchildstuffllc, show us the flours you have blooming in your kitchen!

*A big thank you to Chef Bucci for teaching these recipes, methods, and techniques at JJC. I truly learned that a proper foundation of fundamentals of cooking can take you anywhere you want to go.

Celebrating Double Birthdays With Fresh Flours for a Private Dinner from FCS

Double the birthdays definitely ended in double the fun with this private dinner with Flour Child Stuff! Custom cakes with ice cream, sauces, and garnishes, a carved ice bottle chiller with wine pairings, a multi course dinner with a veggie fresh Modern Italian vibe, and scratch baked fresh breads with compound butters and jams were perfect for this special occasion.

A private dinner starts with the table settings, of course! Just the right plates, tall and elegant wine glasses, freshly polished silverware, crisply folded napkins, freshly printed menus, coordinating earthy stands and in this case custom decorated cakes and ice carvings are perfect for making the room have an atmosphere that matches the quality of the food.

This bottle chiller was super cool to make! Really, I can't help myself, the cold puns just flow effortlessly! ;) It started with a slab of ice that was cut with the CNC into four squares with a hole cut in the center to perfectly fit a bottle. Well, truly it starts with programming the CNC, but that's a story for another blog post.

After that, it's beveled with a hot plate and fused together. This is literally one of my favorite steps to any carving. A simple hot iron for just a few seconds on an ice carving can change it completely. Although it's a fairly simple process, there is definitely a trick to it! The result is a beautiful geometric bottle chiller, a perfect centerpiece that is also functional!

To start dinner off, a veggie gnocchi with a citrus butter sauce was served as an appetizer with lemon herbed chicken "coins," pickled oranges and fried shallots.

A springy salad was next on the menu, both adult and kids versions. Savory parmesan and thyme shortbread squares were the perfect garnish for this lemony spinach salad with spicy walnuts, rainbow carrots, and pickled apples.

As the main course, a red wine marinated New York Strip paired with a beefy macaroni and cheese and spicy rainbow carrots with a carrot top basil pesto.

Since there were double birthdays, there had to be double the cake! The first cake was zingy lemon with vanilla buttercream, decorated with a hand painted Todoroki fondant plaque and finished with red airbrush accents.

And of course, no birthday celebration is complete without a double chocolate cake. This one is a buttermilk chocolate cake, fudgy chocolate ganache, chocolate cookie butter buttercream, and piled with mini cupcakes, cookies, and chocolate. Honestly, I'm not sure what could be more delicious than that.

Of course, a special dinner like that was created by a team. After all, team work makes the dream work!

A big thank you to Nadeau's Ice Sculptures in Forest Park (https://www.nadeauice.com/) for facilitating the icy creations that go into these events.

Everything that is learned in the shop and every piece of ice that is created is truly an unforgettable experience not just for me as the ice carver but for every person that gets to enjoy them at the event.

Also, a big thank you to Corporate Business Cards in Franklin Park (www.corpbuscards.com) for doing all of the printing for the FCS brand. From labels and stickers, to business cards and thank you cards with matching envelopes, to custom menus for private events, it's been the component that has continued the Flour Child Stuff brand identity from the quality of the food I produce to the image of the company as a whole.

And because this Flour recognizes where she got her roots, a big thank you to all the Chefs at Joliet Junior College (https://jjc.edu/) for being an amazing school to learn the basic fundamentals of really good cooking that led to building these menus. Truly, the entire experience at that school changed my life.

Overall, a wonderful birthday celebration was had by all! There was delicious food, a comfortable atmosphere, a close family, icy and sweet decorations, and a birthday song to finish things off. Whether it's a special birthday, an anniversary, a holiday gathering or another special event in your family, fresh flours from FCS is the perfect way to celebrate (https://www.flourchildstuff.com/contact-us)!

We're Gonna Steak Night... We're Gonna Eat It Right!

Tomahawk steak. Like J.D. and Turk from one of the best T.V. shows of all time, I also think that steak is such a treat! Whether it's for your 31st birthday like this steak here (yeah, I said it, I'm a 90's kid and proud of it!) or just a celebratory dinner with your buddy (after doing the proper steak night song and dance in your scrubs, of course!), cooking a steak so that it is honored for its quality is not always a treat if you aren't sure how to do it.

Both what I learned growing up cooking meat on the grill the we built ourselves with brick and concrete in our country backyard and in culinary school at JJC in Thrive on grill and sauté pointed to one common theme, and that's to keep it simple. A beautiful piece of protein doesn't need a lot of extra help to taste delicious.

My favorite method to cook a steak is a combination of both methods, old country and new school. Cooking with an immersion circulator (sous vide) for a couple hours (instant pot has a great one available, I have had mine for a couple years and still like it!) and finishing on the grill or in a very hot cast iron pan is a simple way to get a lot of flavor into the meat that doesn't create a lot of dishes and is easy to do ahead of time for a busy schedule!

Let's talk about ingredient lists. Recipes with long ingredient lists full of peculiar things that you'll never use the rest of are inefficient and expensive, am I right? You've already spent thirty bucks on a steak, no need splurge on the rest. What's in this vacuum sealed bag is simple!

In the bag:

1. A steak. Ribeye or New York Strip are my favorites for this.

2. A couple tablespoons of butter. I use salted. I know, that's against what most people do, but as one of my mentors Chef Thompson would say, "Salt tastes good."

3. Fresh parsley, or whatever fresh herbs you have in your fridge. Stems of herbs are great here, too.

4. A couple cloves of garlic. No need to get fancy and mince it, just crush it slightly, peel it, and toss it in the bag.

5. A splash of Worcestershire sauce. This one you can skip if you don't have it, but who doesn't like some umami?

6. A splash of red wine. This one you can also skip, but I really like to use Cabernet Sauvignon, it's like $3 at Aldi and tastes delicious in this recipe.

7. Seal up the bag! I use a Food Saver to seal my bags at home (it's lasted a long time and works well, other brands are fine too). A vacuum sealer is great for reducing food waste as well, so it definitely has many uses in the kitchen!

Let it cook for a couple hours at 120 degrees/rare doneness (set your circulator to this temp, it will keep the water at this temp consistently) ahead of time. Once it's finished, throw the bag in an ice bath to chill it down and keep it in the fridge until it's time for steak night!

Once you're ready to finish cooking and serve, take it out of the bag (reserve liquid for making the sauce), pat it dry with a paper towel and season with a little oil, salt and pepper, and sear it on high heat either on the grill (wrap the bone with foil if you use the grill so the bone doesn't burn) or in a cast iron pan until it has nice color on both sides and is cooked to the temperature of your preference.

While the steak is searing and resting, if you want to get fancy and make a quick pan sauce, that's the time to do it! It can be as simple of a process as reducing the liquid from the bag with a little beef stock until it's almost nappe (consistency covering back of spoon), then take it off the heat and monte au beurre (swirl in the butter to create an emulsified sauce that is a thickened consistency). Finish with a little lemon and salt to taste, and that's it!

I served mine with 112 Carrots (one of the first recipes we learned at school - carrots with shallots deglazed with white wine and stock, super simple!) and risotto (which is basically fancy mac and cheese in our family now, and also doesn't have to be a complicated thing to make!). This steak could easily be served with a simple salad and garlic bread, or classic French style with some fries, too.

Overall, simple is best! Who knew honoring an ingredient like a beautiful piece of protein and creating a delicious meal could be so easy?! Just 6 ingredients, minimal prep, easy clean up, and you'll be having your own steak night and eatin' it right (and probably doing your own steak night dance moves).