Multitasking Quesadillas

I was never one to improvise. If there was a resource to seek out I would, trusting the wisdom of the printed word over my own ability to fumble through. When I learned to play the piano it was through years of lessons and dozens of songbooks, exercises and drills and scales. When I learned to knit, it was through Debbie Stoller’s Stitch and Bitch and patterns on Knitty. When I learned how to cook a few years ago, actual full balanced dinners for two adults and not just mac and cheese and frozen broccoli or rice and beans, I turned to cookbooks and followed recipes down to the quarter teaspoon. Chemistry was never my strongest subject, but no one would know by watching the precision in my cooking. I needed exact direction, exact measurements, exact ingredients. No substitutions, no guesstimating, nothing. What was on the page was in my bowl.

This was no way to go through life. It drove me crazy. I need to eat every day – do I have to follow a recipe to the letter to do that? I had to allow myself to break away from the books and figure things out for myself. I want to just sit down at the piano and fool around, playing notes on the blues scale. I want to sit in front of the TV and figure out how to knit some leg warmers. I want to throw all of my food in a 12-inch skillet and sauté until it’s done.


I hadn’t meant to start out with this recipe because like all my recipes it’s not really much of a recipe at all. Still, it’s a fitting first entry, because it’s probably the first time I trusted myself to make up a whole meal on my own, and it’s now a go-to weeknight meal. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it might be healthy, and the prep is the hardest part. And while I will in the course of this blog post the possibly maybe kinda ethnic meals promised in the introduction, what follows is definitely of the “ethnic” variety.

Multitasking Quesadillas

This recipe could also make fake fajitas, depending on if you decide to melt the cheese at the end. The boyfriend and I have been known to eat these both ways, depending on our mood and time constraints.

1lb chicken breast or cutlet, cut into strips
1 small yellow onion, cut into strips
1-2 peppers, cut into strips, or most of a 16oz package of frozen pepper strips
Large tortillas or wraps
8oz shredded cheese (cheddar, taco blend, what-have-you)
1 1/2 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon chili powder (or more to taste)
salt to taste
Lime juice
Olive oil
Cooking spray (optional)

Serves 2 with leftovers


In a 12-inch skillet or other large skillet over medium heat, put a quarter to half dollar-sized drop of olive oil in the pan, and add chicken. Move the chicken around in the pan until it turns white and is cooked through. Thinner chicken strips will cook faster. Remove the chicken to a bowl or plate.

If there is no more oil in the pan, add another quarter to half dollar-sized drop. Saute the onions and pepper strips until the onions and peppers are shiny and wilt a little. (5-10 minutes)

Add the chicken, then add seasonings: oregano, paprika, chili powder, salt if using, and a squirt of lime juice. Feel free to eyeball these – besides chili powder, it’s hard to use too much of the spices. You can also add a 1/4-1/2 teaspoon of cumin, but since I don’t have any I never do. You could also add garlic powder, but since I prefer minced garlic and that’s another step I don’t use that either.

If you’re making “fajitas,” you’re done. Wrap the chicken and shredded cheese in your tortilla wrap and eat. If you want quesadillas, you can either move the chicken and peppers to your bowl or plate, or use a separate griddle. If you use the same pan, the grease spots and leftover stuff will mean your quesadillas might not be as pretty when cooked, but they’ll still taste great.

If using, spray your pan/griddle with cooking spray. Your burner should still be over medium heat. Lay your tortilla in your pan and top evenly with shredded cheese. Use as much as you’d like, but as more cheese will take longer to melt, you should turn down the heat slightly for a pile of cheese. Add chicken and peppers to one side of the tortilla, and fold the other side over on top of it. Cook for a moment (a minute or two) turning over halfway through. Remove quesadilla, and repeat process until you’re done, you’ve run out of chicken, or you’re bored. You can eat the rest as fajitas, and you can freeze the chicken better if it’s not assembled into a quesadilla. Assembled quesadillas will taste fine reheated from the refrigerator the next day or two.

I have served this as an appetizer at football parties - cut into wedges and served with salsa, guacamole, and sour cream. Sometimes for dinner we have none of those things, but it’s still good. Enjoy.

A note on lime juice: I keep both a bottle of lemon juice and lime juice in the fridge for use in many recipes as well as to flavor my water and beer. They’re cheap and keep much longer than lemons and limes. Of course, you can’t zest them, but when’s the last time you used lemon zest, anyway?

Pumpkin soup two ways

Sometimes you come across a familiar food in an unfamiliar setting, a food you'd written off as gross or weird, and discover that you like it. Pumpkin was one such revelation for me, in the form of pumpkin soup one of my dad's colleagues brought to our house when we spent the summer of 1996 in New Zealand.

At the bottom of the world, living in winter when I thought it was summer, I was ready to give something new a try, and I was hooked within two spoonfuls. When I thought of pumpkin, I thought of the dessicated inside of a jack-o-lantern, not something you'd eat, and the rich warmth of the pumpkin took me by surprise. The flavor was complex but smooth, and it was perfect for the cool, damp New Zealand winter. People kept apologizing to us for the "terrible weather," but by our standards it wasn't all that bad—50 degrees and rainy? People from the northeast United States will take that anytime over ice and snow.

A little more than five years later, it was winter in New York, and I was thinking, as I often do, of pumpkin soup. It's one of those food archetypes that gets lodged in my brain when I'm hungry, along with real Long Island pizza, crispy roasted potatoes, tapioca pudding, and ripe summer tomatoes. I googled "pumpkin soup" and got a lot of recipes involving whole pumpkins. A whole pumpkin? Cue jack-o-lantern mental imagery. Where was I supposed to get a whole pumpkin? And I had a small kitchen in a Barnard dorm—how was I supposed to dismantle said whole pumpkin? Oh, and I didn't own a blender, which seemed to be necessary.

I panicked a bit and got grouchy, and then I read through the recipes and did something I've often done since—I made a makeshift version of the real thing using a few shortcuts. Not a bad thing to do when you don't know what you're doing. I went to Appletree Supermarket (supermarket is overstating the case a bit, but I have a serious soft spot for Appletree even so) and grabbed a few things and was ready to go.

Plimpton Hall Pumpkin Soup

1 can pumpkin pie filling
1 can chicken broth
few splashes whipping cream
salt and pepper to taste

In a medium saucepan, heat the chicken broth. I'm picky about chicken broth and only like College Inn and Swanson brands. They taste the best by far. Don't be duped by the store brands at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods—they are inferior.

Dump in the pumpkin. Stir until blended. Heat until, well, hot.

Transfer to a bowl. Stir in a few splashes of cream (enough to flavor the soup but not enough to significantly change the color or texture) and salt and pepper to taste.

Eat while doing the readings for class tomorrow.


Fast forward again, this time to my life post-college. I've spent a semester in Dublin and have become enamored of the pureed vegetable soups that are common in Ireland, and I own a blender. I spend several winters pureeing vegetables left and right with varying results. I'm so into pureed soups that my roommate gives me an immersion blender for Christmas.

What follows is the butternut squash-dominated soup I made the other night for the trial run of the immersion blender. Squash has a nice warm flavor that works particularly well in this kind of soup. You can mix up the vegetable combinations and proportions to suit your taste, being mindful of the interplay of different flavors and textures, but I think this version is one of the best I've come up with. The principle of pureed vegetables and broth is similar to the Plimpton Hall Pumpkin Soup, but the result is more nuanced (which is not to say I wouldn't make the Plimpton soup again in a pinch!).

The basic recipe is adapted from one in Darina Allen's Irish Traditional Cooking, a really fun book that's part cookbook, part history lesson.

Pureed Vegetable Soup

approx. 2 lbs. peeled and chopped butternut squash
approx. 1 lb. chopped winter vegetables (turnip, carrot, potato, parsnip, etc.)
4 or 5 shallots, chopped
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 14-ounce cans chicken broth, or the equivalent amount of homemade stock
whipping cream
salt and pepper
parsley for garnish

Chop the vegetables and peel as necessary or desired and transfer to a bowl. I prefer my potatoes with the skin on, which means you have to wash them well. I cheated by buying peeled and diced butternut squash, which should be easy to find, but it's not that much trouble to peel and chop a squash (use a knife to peel it). I recommend shallots over regular onions because their flavor is more delicate. If you use carrots, take it easy because they can overwhelm the other vegetables and will turn the entire soup orange (not a concern with the squash base, but something to be aware of). I don't really care for parsnips, but I mentioned them here because some people like them and they would be an appropriate ingredient if you liked them.

In a dutch oven or large, deep saucepan, melt the butter (I always use unsalted). When it is melted and begins to foam, add the vegetables, being careful not to splash yourself with hot melted butter (drop handfuls in very close to the surface of the pan). Stir the vegetables to coat evenly with butter. Cover the pan and allow it to sweat for 10 or 15 minutes until the vegetables are shiny and are starting to look a little cooked.

Meanwhile, heat the chicken broth in a separate saucepan. You can use water, but I wouldn't because the flavor of the soup won't be as strong or complex.

Carefully pour the warm broth over the vegetables. Stir gently and cover the pot. Cook for 20 minutes or so until the vegetables are tender but not overcooked. If you overcook them, they'll begin to loose flavor and texture. The texture of the vegetables is important to the texture of the puree.



The next step is pureeing the soup. You can do this three ways: with a foodmill, with a regular blender, or with an immersion blender. I don't own a foodmill, so I have no direct experience with that method. If you use a regular blender, transfer the soup a few ladlefuls at a time into the cannister of the blender. Puree at a low-ish speed while holding the lid on tight. Transfer the pureed soup to a bowl.

If you have an immersion blender, just puree the soup right in the pot. Be careful not to splash yourself or to nick the pot if you're using nonstick, and make sure you get all the vegetable chunks (stir around to find them). I thought the immersion blender took a bit longer than the regular blender, but it seemed to keep the soup at a higher and more uniform temperature, and the texture was just right.

In any case, make sure the soup really is pureed and not just finely blended. It should be smooth and uniform in color and texture. Taste a spoonful—it should be velvety and not at all chunky. It's OK to feel the vegetable fibers a bit, especially if you didn't peel the potatoes, but you shouldn't have to chew.



Transfer the soup to serving bowls and stir in a dash of cream. This is not strictly necessary but is a nice touch for flavor and texture, and you can substitute sour cream, creme fraiche, plain yogurt, half and half, or even milk to similar effect (I wouldn't bother with skim milk, though, because it's too watery). Garnish with the chopped parsley and serve with green salad and bread for dipping, mopping, and whatever else you like to do with your soup.

The soup freezes well and is great when reheated for lunch. I freeze leftovers in serving-size containers and defrost and reheat on the stove. Start by soaking the container in a bath of hot water, and liberate the soup when the edges have melted enough to make it easy to remove.

Because dairy doesn't freeze well, don't stir in cream if you intend to freeze the soup. You should add it to the defrosted soup just before you eat it, just as you add it to the soup just before you eat it when it's first prepared.

And so it begins

Sheena and I have decided to start our food blog. Welcome to the Garlic Knot!

Garlic knots are a Long Island pizza place specialty: little knots of pizza dough slathered in parmesan and garlic and baked. They are wonderful, and you can't find them outside of the New York area. We are both Long Island expats and wanted a name for the blog that would somehow reflect our vision of who we are and what we like to cook, if you will: straightforward food, strong flavors, simple preparation, possibly maybe kinda ethnic at times (depending on your definition of "ethnic"), unpretentious, and fun to eat with your friends. With a strong dose of some transplanted Long Island attitude, of course.

Let the cooking begin!