Mr. RstataSas - Vegetarian Sushi

Wait, why is guest month still going on? Wasn't it supposed to end a few weeks ago? Yes, it was but life is busy and I still have delicious food to post. This meal comes from Mr. RstataSas, king of statistics and figuring out why the poor are always getting screwed with health-care. I was lucky enough to take part in eating and making this meal. It was my first time making Sushi. Best thing about Sushi is you can wing it, add whatever you want, and it will be delicious. The post and pictures are by Mr. RstataSas.

Think of this setting as five meals:
breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and dessert.
Or Tex-Mex, Italian, vegetarian, Japanese, and Wisconsinite.

So the appetizer / breakfast / Tex-Mex was a breakfast burrito sushi roll. Basically you take avocados and wrap them up with egg and melted cheese. The egg only serves as the burrito/seaweed component and also adds that great egg flavor that most cheeses lack on their own.


The 1st course, a.k.a. brunch e.g. Italian platter was a sushi roll filled with brown rice, mozzarella cheese, and roasted peppers. This is a particularly difficult dish, because not everyone enjoys fire-roasted peppers drizzled with olive oil. You've been warned.



Next, the pan-veg-asian-fusion requires the hand-grinding of veggieburger patties and your favorite mango salsa. Anyone wishing to replicate this dish can purchase a bathtub of mango salsa at costco. After combining these two ingredients in your favorite sizzling frying pan, wrap them up in brown rice & seaweed & avocado, and eat them before anyone else has a chance
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Finally, the main course: avocado, cucumber, brown rice, wasabi, and seaweed. Kind of boring, but you won't have leftovers unless you make a ton and have no friends. Even then, these five ingredients will probably make you friends, but I'm sure you don't need them.

Rolling technique is important.

The final spread!!!!

For dessert, frozen blackberries, rasberries, blueberries, bananas, and some skim milk go into a blender. A tablespoon of vanilla extract should follow; this little gem will make your diners believe you when report that you've used whole milk and not skim.

NoxRox - Butternut Squash Soup

Guest month continues with NoxRox, a follower and master cook. I have one more guest lined up then I am on my own again. As an aside, I am really enjoying using fall vegetables in my cooking these days. Lots of squash, brussel sprouts, and pears. All delicious.

Nox Rox -

So easy, and so good! Cut the butternut squash in half. Put some oil on a baking sheet and put the squash face down in the oil. Bake for about an hour and a half at anywhere between 425-450. The squash should be nice and soft when you it is done.


Chop up some garlic, onions, shallots, or whatever else might taste good and brown a little bit in a pot with some butter or oil.
Scoop out the squash into the same pot with the onions along with some vegetable stock. I used a cup and a half, but use more or less depending on the amount of squash and your desired consistency. Let the whole mixture come to a boil. Turn off the burner and put the whole thing in a blender.
Puree the soup until the desired consistency - about thirty seconds. Put it back in the pot to keep it warm.
Serve as is or add spice to taste. I like mine with a little Greek yogurt in it - Delicious!

Acorn squash and apple

Guest blogger month is almost over. I have one more guess blogger lined up, and one more recipe from Mr. Boy.

Mr. Boy again, this time with a side dish/dessert. It's an acorn squash and apple salad.

Ingredients:

Acorn Squash
2 Apples
Walnuts
Cinnamon
Brown Sugar/Maple Syrup
Dash of salt
Butter

Peeling the acorn squash can be a pain, but if you boil it for about 15 minutes then you can just peel the skin right off with your fingers (cool it first). Then cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and then cut it into one inch chunks. Core and cut the apple into one inch chunks as well. Roughly chop the walnuts and throw them into the mix, then sprinkle on cinnamon, and brown sugar. If you don't have brown sugar, maple syrup works just as well. Don't go overboard on the cinnamon because it's so strong, but a liberal dose of brown sugar/maple syrup will make it nice and sweet. Sprinkle on salt to taste and add a few small dollops of butter to melt in when you cook it.

You can either bake it in the oven 350 degrees for about an hour, or put it in the microwave for 7 minutes, stir it, and cook it for seven minutes more. Serve hot.

Mr. Boy - Eggplant Parm

I found a guest blogger more from my heart. If Mr. Solo was the white collar, Mr. Boy is definitely the blue collar chef. The bottom line is he gets it done. Enjoy his first meal, cooked from vegetables that he picked with his own hands.

Mr. Boy's eggplant parm:

I like to keep recipes short and sweet. It shouldn't take much longer to cook it than it does to eat it.
Ingredients:

Eggplant
Mozzarella/Parmesan cheese
Tomato sauce
Eggs
Bread crumbs
Seasoning (Garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, etc.)
Olive oil

This is pretty much an eggplant casserole. Working as a sharecropper on a CSA farm, I have to find ways to make otherwise inedible food palatable, and voila! Turns out you can eat eggplant after all.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Beat the eggs together in a bowl, and on a plate mix the bread crumbs with your seasonings. Cut the eggplant into thin slices and dip them in the egg batter, then coat each side with the seasoned bread crumbs. You'll want to bake the eggplant first to make it nice and crispy, so lay the slices out on cookie sheets and drizzle olive oil over them. Then put them in the oven and bake them on each side for about five minutes.

Once both sides are baked, turn the oven up to 400 degrees and make the casserole while the oven is heating up. This is simply layering the eggplant, tomato sauce, and cheese. Start by covering the bottom of the dish with the breaded eggplant, then cover that thinly with tomato sauce, then cover that with cheese, then cover that with eggplant, that with tomato sauce, that with cheese, etc. until all your eggplant is used up. It can be two layers, three layers, really it just depends on how much eggplant you have and how deep your dish is. Bake that for 20 minutes or until the cheese is nice and melted.

Mr. Solo Part 2 - Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup

The main man, Mr. Solo, is back for round two. Exciting news, I have two more guest bloggers lined up maybe more. And here he is....

Mr. Solo -

The idea for the second dish has actually been kicking around in my head for about a month for no better reason than hunger and the fact that my roommate and I seem to share a love of pan-fried bread. It's a grilled cheese sandwich with cream of tomato soup. Take some Challah bread, some dried oregano or other herb, and heat up some oil in a non-stick frypan. Throw the bread on there until it's soaked up most of the oil and is starting to brown. In the meantime baste some swiss cheese in truffle oil (you've essentially ended any effort to make this dish taste less than awesome once the truffle oil makes a showing). Flip your bread, throw the cheese on to melt for a few more seconds. For style points, add caramelized onions and chopped chives to the finished sandwich.

The tomato soup is actually pretty involved, but well worth the effort. You need to roast roma tomatoes with olive oil/herb of your choice (thyme works well) at 400°F for an hour. You also need to throw some standard tomatoes through a food processor, and then throw the pulp on a strainer with some salt in the fridge overnight. All the liquid drips out (incidentally, you've just made tomato water which has about a hundred amazing uses) but what remains is your very own homemade tomato paste. Fire up some onions on the stove with some butter, let them rock until they're translucent, throw in some rough chopped normal tomatoes, then the roasted tomatoes, thyme, bay leaf, and water to cover, and let that simmer down. When you're finding that the water is coming out of the tomatoes and things are trending more liquid than creamy, throw in your homemade tomato paste. It soaks up all the excess liquid like a friggin' sponge. When everything's softened down, throw your concoction through a fine-mesh strainer. Add a junkload of butter, a touch of heavy cream, salt to taste, back in the pot and crank the heat until the whole thing comes to a boil, then immediately turn off your heat. D for done.

Mr. Solo - Tomato Tatare and Green Beans

The next guest is the one and only Mr. Solo. If you don't know who I am talking about, trust me.... you know!!!! Good thing setdinnerhereveg has a executive board of only ONE, because if we put this to a vote, I might lose my head chef/blogger status... replaced by Mr. Solo.

He contributed two courses of a fantastic meal that he cooked for fellow friends and forwarded the pictures and description. Here is part one.

I guess [Mr. gorgeous] wasn't kidding about having a guest month on his blog! SO without further ado...a little bit of background on this I'm a pretty voracious meat eater, but with an increasing cadre of vegetarian friends. In the interests of being able to have people over for dinner every once in a while without thrusting steaks on unwilling palettes I've been forced to explore their strange and unfamiliar world. Fennelwhatnow?

Being a meat eater at heart, the first dish is actually a riff off of raw steak tartare, the idea being that you could use tomatoes instead and approximate the same color and texture as uncooked beef. I've been referencing the French Laundry cookbook, a recent Bible of mine, so I definitely can't take credit for the concept. There's two main techniques you need for this dish, quick blanching and slow roasting. Basically you take some vine-on tomatoes, dunk them in boiling water for about a minute, and then immediately shock them in ice cold water. What this lets you do is remove the skins really easily. Then you quarter the skinned tomatoes, remove and discard the pulp, add some olive oil, salt, and thyme, and slow roast the remaining tomato pieces in the oven at 250°F for about 2 hours. What you get is super concentrated tomato with a somewhat more solid texture, that you can rough chop, add chopped shallots and toss in a ring mold. Tartare: done. The salad on top is green beans in a mixture of heavy cream and red wine vinegar (with a pinch of salt), and then the sauce is the oil drippings from the roasted tomatoes.

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