Mollie Katzen's Cooking Show; 301; Make-Ahead Meal

Hi I'm Molly Katz and if you ever invited friends over for dinner and then spent the whole meal in the kitchen. Me too. We got to do something about that. How about a menu that's made entirely ahead of time. Spicy Brazilian black bean soup flavored with garlic cumin an orange is a great beginning and this elegant pizza has a surprising zucchini crust that's pre-baked So it comes together quickly at the last minute. When you make Bermuda salad in advance it just gets better and better. And for dessert strawberry rhubarb Crisp is zero stress and phenomenally good. Joining me for a make ahead meal with a surprise guest at the table you next on Molly Katz is cooking show Molly Katz is cooking show is brought to you in part by heart healthy soy based Boca burger products meatless products that taste look and cook like real meat with the health benefits of soy protein. Boca burger. Vegetarians celebrate meat lovers salivate. Some women are soccer moms or baseball moms and I happen to be a dance mom. My kids are

always going off to dance rehearsals and recitals and competitions and I need dinners that I can make ahead so I can just heat them up when I get home. And so I'm going to show you today an example of a very popular make ahead meals that we love in our household. Popular in my household I think you're going to like it too. The first dish I'm making is a pizza a pizza that a lot of moms can feel really good about because the crust for the pizza is made with zucchini. It's a vegetable crusted pizza with a lot of extra protein in it. And I'm going to use my food processor to grate the zucchini because of course we're busy and we can't wait around. Thanks. To great things by hand. And I had some in there that I dated earlier and just to be really efficient after I took the zucchini out of the food processor without washing it first because I'm so conscious of everyone's need for efficiency I'm going to put it back. I rate the cheese for the crust or as I said it's a high protein dish. And it's cheese in the crust. So now I put it back together and I've got a nice piece of mozzarella cheese Let's see if it

fits fits perfectly. And this is the protein element of the crust. I'm the with. I'm fluffing with a fork I want all the mozzarella completely distributed among the zucchini zucchini. The most popular summer squash in recent years I'm finding it in the supermarket all year round. So it's a summer squash but it's a year round summer squash. Anyway you will notice I did not I salted the zucchini but I didn't salt and sweat and squeeze out the water. I don't mind if all the moisture from the zucchini is in this crust. And the reason I don't mind is because I'm adding some flour to it to absorb whatever water it might give off and I'm also adding more protein some grated parmesan cheese. Although I love fresh herbs and they're wonderful and I love to rub my fingers on them that smell my fingers which is the best way to smell herbs. I'm not going to use the fresh herbs. Why. Because in this kind of cooking where this is actually going to get baked fresh herbs might turn rubbery and black. They're not really necessary and a

good fresh dried herb meaning a driver that hasn't been sitting in your kitchen for years getting stale will taste actually better. But I like to use dried herbs in a mixture like this. All of this parmesan cheese and all those flowers I said will absorb the liquid. But I'm adding a little additional liquid I'm adding liquid for two reasons. One I'm adding eggs to eggs to bind it together and to give it more protein of which we're all conscious these days. Just beat them lightly. And I like so. And they go in and we can beat them more. And then I'm also going to add about a tablespoon of olive oil and the purpose of the olive oil again twofold one flavor extra virgin olive oil is really delicious and also it'll give a little bit of chewy and crispness to the crust because you don't want to be soggy. So mix it all up.

And this Fred likes a green will stay green during the baking which is another reason I love to make zucchini crust. And this is ready I think. I didn't put the black pepper in so let me just do that. Now it's really ready. I prepared a tray baking tray sort of like a little jelly roll tray and I just prepared it by giving it a light spray of oil and a little very very light dusting of flour. And I'm going to put all this mixture on and kind of carry it out till it's flat. This is something that your children with their very clean hands might really love to help you do so this speaks by itself. Before we put any toppings on it it sort of encourages a nice crisp dry upper surface are going to put it in the oven. And I made one earlier. I actually made several earlier. I wanted to show you the whole thing so I made one earlier that I completed in one earlier that I just took to the stage where I made the crust and I let it cool. And I I didn't lie did I about those green flecks there they are so nice. So you really know this is a very egg zucchini cheesy crust full of goodness and

protein. You know give it some more goodness and protein. This is the part where you can get creative or use whatever you have at hand or use up leftovers. I like to put mozzarella cheese on first. Now there was mozzarella in the crust in there's also mozzarella on top. And as you know it's so maybe you don't know it's a curd She's a very mild high protein curd cheese that's been stretched and pulled so it literally is the same thing as string cheese. But it's often made into a ball. When I used to live near an Italian neighborhood in New York City where I lived there for one year I used to go every day to the little Italian shoe store and watch them pull the mozzarella. This however is not fresh and for your use at home you can you start about mozzarella. I like to put on about this much. And as I said I like to put it on first because it holds everything down and then the other things can show and they're more colorful so I'm going to lay on some mushrooms. And you notice that they're cooked and you could of course also use raw mushrooms like you do in pizza normally. But if you saute them

first with a few aromatic herbs like the ones I used in the crust oregano or bezel or time would be good. Then they get really really really tasty and they have much more flavor than if you put them on RAW. I have some Greek olives that I took the time and trouble to shave off their pits So those are pitted Greek olives. Again you don't have to put these toppings. You can put. I mean cooked beans would be caught on here leftover cooked vegetables. Just about anything you'd put on pizza. I'm going to put on some artichoke hearts and some tomatoes let me cut this for you. These are artichoke hearts from a Can they were canned in water. And I like to put them to cut them into these kind of thin long pieces. The kind that come marinated can be a little intense for this and they're also kind of wet. They're very. Saturated with the dressing so I like these they're nice and clean. We make it a little smaller. So scatter them around. Now my kids wouldn't eat these artichoke hearts so they'd pick them off their piece and give them to me. That would be great. That's why I put them on. And then with the tomato

again anywhere you want to do it. But the way I like to do it is I cut out the core. It's my favorite little tomato knife as a place for grabbing the tomato Chor little tomato Chor hook. And I'm just going to make some slices like this. And scatter them all about on top. I said I want to put mozzarella cheese on top of these tomatoes because I want that bright red smiling up at me. I did not pick up the bell peppers the way I did the mushrooms because these are sliced so thin and there's such a soft and tender vegetable that they don't really need that much cooking. So I did not precut these. This is really looking like it's almost there. I have some place garlic also that is very important to me. It's strategically placed and for the final touch before it goes in the oven I like to put a little bit of extra permission choose just to brown the top. And this is now ready to go into the oven.

I have one that I made earlier because as I mentioned I want to show you every stage of this recipe. And it's up there in the oven. On the top. Looking. Very bright and cheerful. And I just have a few little touches I want to do before I'm ready to serve. I like to give a little shine to the top by adding I'm just a shaker of olive oil is a nice thing to have just drizzle on a little olive oil extra virgin olive oil and those fresh herbs that I didn't really want to put in the crust. I'd love to put a few of those on top. So I'm just pulling these little flowers of oregano and I just sort of tear them with my fingernails like this over the top like so and the one final I touch some crushed red pepper. That kind of spicy gives it a finished look and a little bit of bite. And there we have crusted pizza. Now I'm going to make a soup and salad to go with the zucchini crusted pizza. This soup I'm about to make black bean soup is a classic recipe of mine classic to me anyway I've been

making it for about 30 years. It was one of the first soups I ever learned how to make. And the first thing I'm going to do I'm putting my hand in the pot just because it feels so nice and warm but the black beans are cooking in here. The first thing I'm going to do is to get the main flavor punch roasted the main flavor punch is a little container of cumin seeds and humans are delicious. They're delicious on their own but when they're toasted in a hot pan and in a dry hot pan of cold dry roasting the flavor really comes out so I'm going to toast them watching them really carefully they burn kind of quickly they go from nothing to burn in just a short amount of time. So I keep my eye on them and I'll go over here to the other pan of onions and carrots. I started cooking these in olive oil a while ago I got the onions really sweet and soft. The carrots are almost tender. I put the carrots in before the other vegetables because I don't want crunchy carrots in the soup and putting garlic in twice now with at the stage of the onions and carrots sort of half cooked. And I'll put a little bit in later the garlic I put in sooner will have a softer more subtle flavor. And the garlic I put in later will

give some heat to the soup and I'm going to put the other two vegetables and I have I'm adding some orange bell pepper. And some green bell pepper. I just love the color contrast. But I'm putting them into this sort of late stage of the SUCH A because they get cooked very quickly and they don't take much time to cook. And while all this is cooking I'm going to just do a quick little ho run down on black beans here are black beans that are dried and. That's just been stored in a cool dry place in my kitchen. And this is what they look like after they've been soaked. They look beautiful and shiny after your soak the beans. You should rinse drain and rinse the soaking water and when you cook them you should use fresh water. This is what they look like after they've been cooked. You see all this liquid in here this is the water that I poured in it's not stock it's just water. I poured it in after I drained off the soaking water. And I always like to tell people when is a good time or a bad time to use canned beans but I really like to start with dried

beans soak them and then cook them because the water that you cook them in becomes this wonderful rich sort of earthy in a good sense tasting stock if you can be as you don't have the advantage of water they were cooked in which is actually not only flavorful but nutritious and minerals from the beans go into the water. So that's why I didn't You can be in today. And. Let me keep checking his vegetables. Human seeds are ready and putting them in. The vegetables first before they go in the soup because I want to toss them and all the olive oil and I and garlic. This is a tomato that has been peeled. I blanched it in simmering water in the peel just came right off. The other thing I'm going to do to it is take up the seeds. This is not essential but it makes for a much a much smoother soup with the tomato seeds which are a little bit slimy or not floating around in the soup so I just squeeze that out could use this for stock if you want to. I usually just toss it though so the seeds are out. And I'm just going to coarse the chop this and I'll use it in a moment.

And I like to put tomato in the soup but I also like to put an orange juice. A lot of it fresh orange juice so I'm going to continue my orange juice project I started earlier. Black beans and looking super traditional in both Cuba and Brazil. And it's not unheard of to use oranges with them it's actually somewhat traditional This is a really juicy oranges makes me very very happy. Get all the juice. Stronger presence and putting in more garlic. I use a lot of garlic in the soup. Just brace yourself. That amount goes in there. And don't forget it will continue to cook when it hits the simmering soup it all distributed here first. A little cayenne a little more Cayenne. This looks like it's ready and it really smells like it's ready. To go in the soup. Carefully and. Slowly scoop it into the soup.

Beans are nice and soft at this point. I'm adding not only the salt that was in the vegetables but a little extra salt I don't like to add salt to beans while they're cooking. With grains it's fine with beans sometimes if you add salt to the water while it's cooking the beans kind of toughen up than their outermost layer and they stay tough and then they never get tender so I wait till they're just as soft as I want them. Today I'm going to put everything in before I. Give it the puree job. Orange juice goes and as I said it's a lot. It's really good though. I'm going to use the immersion blender which is literally an immersion blender it goes into deep pots of soup only to use it in a shallow pan and I'm going to just puree some of this. That's all I want to do because I love the little flecks of color. I love seeing the flex of tomato and bell pepper So this looks exactly how I want it to look. Now I'm ready to serve.

And I have. A little tray of accoutrement. That I'd like to add to my black bean soup. Or not. I have sour cream. I have mango salsa and tomato sauces so you can make your own personal version. And I'm going to serve up this lovely soup. Which is smelling so good. And the only thing I'm going to put on top is some salons. I love the way it looks and I love the way it smells. Being the plant version of the coriander seed. So we'll know up the bowl a little bit. Find a couple of nice leaves. That I like to just. Tear by hand and just lay on top. How nice. And there we have a Brazilian black bean soup. The thing that amazes me so much about this meal is as I said my kids who are somewhat selective eaters eat everything that I'm making today. Wonderful feeling when your kids

actually like to eat food as well as to make it they love to make this food and they love to eat it so that's very nice but I did tell you a few minutes ago that this is a make ahead meal that soup not only can you make it a few days ahead and reheat it but you can also freeze it. And that zucchini pizza it keeps and reheats beautifully also. You will notice some grating cheese. I'm making a Bermuda salad it's a salad of green beans and cheese and onions and the cheese that I'm craving is one of my favorite kinds of cheddar a sharp Canadian cheddar it's very much like a Vermont cheddar. And you notice I'm using a red onion and it's called red but it's really light purple. Oh lovely pigment pigment anthocyanins. But I like it to be a bright bright shade of pink to contrast with the green beans and cream the salad and I like to pour boiling water over red onions and I get like. Whoops I get two benefits from doing that for the first benefit I get is that any possible bitter flavor from The Onion or butter sharpness from The Onion somehow just gets taken away.

I'm pouring slowly by boiling water so I'm going to let them sit for a little while and in the meantime I'm going to start my Vinogradov it's a very simple salad dressing and putting in some olive oil extra virgin olive oil from the very first pressing of the olives and a little bit of that anger in this case Apple Cider Vinegar red wine vinegar would be also fine. Approximately two parts or else one touch in addition just whispering together. But I'm looking at my amount of green beans and I'm going to put in a little more of each. You notice how I like to not measure. I really like to cook by feel and some more garlic. I say more because I know there was garlic in the pizza and in the soup. Just want to wish it you know to get fixed just like that. The other ingredient for the dressing is parsley. Just and these have been steamed in their cool down and in fact after they were steamed I put them in cold water it's called refreshing them or shocking them in cold water. And that's why they they got to keep their bright green color. Now I have to say that the bright green color caused by the chlorophyll pigment. Will not last long in the vinegar

the acid will start to leach it out and they will fade so I'm going to surface pretty shortly after I make it. I'm turning green beans and dressing to get them all coated and glistening and deeply flavored. I'm adding a little bit of salt pepper and salt and a little pepper not a lot of salt because there's a fair amount of salt and cheddar cheese. So of course cooking is all about balance. And I'm going to just simply drain my red onions and it's nice to have a sink right there to shake off the water. And in they go. They're nice bright shade. In turn some more onions will not lose their color and another thing about onions after they've received this treatment is that they'll stay current crunchy. And now that she's over the top and I think I'm also going to add a little extra parsley of all this minced parsley here and it's a lovely clean flavor and it's a lovely shade of green so I'll turn this and keep turning a little bit more until it seems like it's

all mixed in. And I want to make sure that there's a nice kind of distribution of the red onion in the cheese turning so you're just dressing all over everything. Just like that the farm side of the plate. That's just fine clean it up a little bit because presentation of course is very important. And there we have a Bermuda salad. When you've been gone all day sometimes that's when you most need a nice warm dessert coming out of your oven after dinner and it seems the least likely time you'll have one unless you learn about some make ahead desserts that you can do really easily. The night before I'm going to show you my favorite one. It's a fruit crisp in this case a rhubarb Christe with strawberries and I just want to explain to you that you can prepare the fruit and the topping the night before and then when you come home after a long day away from home you can just put it in the

oven while you're eating dinner and you'll have a warm dessert when you're done eating. This rhubarb has been frozen and defrosted and I'm putting in the strawberries as I speak. It's one of those fruits that has a season that's very limited similar to pomegranates. They're available at Christmas time and at no other time. And it's not like they're growing them somewhere in the world with an opposite season rhubarb has a short spring season and that's the bad news but the good news is it freezes beautifully. I did nothing to that I just froze it whole stocks to frosted it chopped it and it was fine. So I'm just stirring these together. There was a little bit of liquid that came out when I defrosted the rhubarb and that's not so bad there's not that much of it and it will kind of bubble up and make a nice kind of sauce. So I'm going to leave it in there. Now one of the facts about rhubarb that one has to face and you can't get around it. Rhubarb is incredibly sour. It is in edible sour and you must sweeten it. You can't get away from having to sweeten rhubarb and putting in this amount of sugar to make my point. You can't use artificial sweetener with rhubarb. You have to use so much that you taste it. Same with honey. By the time you add enough honey to rhubarb

you have probably the 100 flavor that overpowers the rhubarb flavor the topping flour just all purpose flour a generous pinch of salt and a lot of rolled oats which make it really crunchy somewhat nutritious and give a beautiful brown texture that Brown really nicely in the oven. Speaking of brown brown sugar and I'm going to crumble it in. Actually I'll do it this way. But make sure there are no big lumps although sometimes the big lumps actually taste really good. And when I get this all mixed up I just want to add a little bit of spice. I'm going to add three spices and I want to show you what they look like in their original dried whole pod form or in the case of cinnamon whole dark cinnamon which is dark and nutmeg which is kind of like a seed pod two layered seed pod and allspice which is actually a berry and allspice Berry is not a mixture of other spices it's just I called the mockingbird of spices because it tastes like so many other

spices but it really is just itself. And today I'm not going to grind any of this fresh I'm just going to dump in the cinnamon that's ground I just love to show these that because they it's sort of a prehistoric look to them. I'm going to just take a pinch of the nutmeg and a pinch of the allspice because they're pretty strong flavors and I don't want to stew. I don't want anything to overpower that nice tart rhubarb in the tart. The strawberries are great too. That's about as mixed as this needs to get. All it needs now is some melted butter. And this is cooled down so I can touch it. And I want to get everything extremely well mixed sort of stirred around till it's wet. Time to use my hands. I'm squeezing it together. It's very important that the butter get all distributed. And again I use my hands to put it very generous layer on top of the fruit. Like so. I hope I'm not exaggerating when I say that. That was really really easy. There's no slate of hand this is really the whole recipe and patting it down pretty tightly like a nice

crust on top. And it needs to make so we'll go to the oven. And I did make one earlier I love to show you what it looks like when it's done. And I like to bring this to the table hot. But before I do that I just like to give it a little finishing touch. A light dusting of powdered sugar. And that's about it. But to serve it with. Some vanilla ice cream. Or perhaps a little bit of whipped which is right here and there we have strawberry rhubarb crisp. It's kind of hard to believe and really wonderful that everything on the table can be made and served together on a day when you've been away from the house and you've been busy. You can still have this food this black bean soup just heated up and it's just it's ready to eat. You can have the zucchini crusted pizza. Bermuda salad. You can cook the green beans ahead here's the theme here. You can make the dressing ahead. Throw it together at the last minute. And for dessert

strawberry rhubarb crisp and you have a wonderful very comforting very soothing dessert if you like some wine with your meal try a big spicy Claridge from Napa Valley California it goes really well with especially the black bean soup. You really can make it for you and your busy family any time you will like it. I know. See you next time. Please visit our website at w w w dot Mollie Katzen dot com. All the recipes from this series can be found in the updated editions of Mollie Katzen classic Moosewood Cookbook and the enchanted broccoli forest which are available by calling the toll free number on your screen featuring full color photographs and Molly's original art. These special editions are personally signed by Molly and include a complimentary gift to purchase each book for 1995 or both books for $35 plus shipping and handling. Call 1 800 A3 4 6 5 2 0. Mollie Katzen is cooking show is brought to you in part by heart healthy soy based Boca burger

products meatless products that taste look and cook like real meat. With the health benefits of soy protein Boca burger vegetarians celebrate meat lovers salivate.