Welcome to kidscookdinner.com.  We have been focusing on food from our garden–like many of you we have a lot of tomatoes and a lot of zucchini.  Today I am trying to use up some tomatoes: by making a quick batch of bruschetta.  This is easy because you don’t have to chop anything.  You just need tomatoes, olive oil, a clove of garlic, basil and some crusty bread.  The tomatoes and basil came from our garden.   We also grew some very light colored zucchini so we did a taste test against our usual dark green version.

First step for the bruschetta: grate the tomato using the box grater:

Once you have a good amount of grated tomato, add a little olive oil and salt and pepper.  Then slice the bread and put it in the toaster.

Once the bread is toasted, cut the clove of garlic in half and rub the cut side on the toasted bread.

Then spoon the tomato-olive oil mix over the bread and add some basil leaves

Finally, time to taste!

For the zucchini taste test, I decided to slice and roast the two squashes.

(There was extra room in the pan so I added some tomatoes and mushrooms.) Once everything was roasted, I tasted the squash (and served the other roasted vegetables with cheese ravioli).  Honestly, I didn’t like the light green squash….it was almost tasteless but good to know.

Welcome to kidscookdinner.com.  To learn more about the history of this website, scroll down a few posts.  Otherwise, if you want to know what my sister and I have been cooking: stay right here.

This week I (Max) wanted to try to incorporate something from our garden into at least one meal a day.    Our garden is doing pretty well: we had a lot of peas early on (they’re done now), and now zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and potatoes are in season.  None of our sunflowers made it (the birds ate the seeds as soon as we planted them); only a few of our zinnias bloomed, and only one kale plant survived.  (I am saving that for mom.)

Monday, July 27, 2020

Today’s yield from the garden was mainly cucumbers and tomatoes, so I incorporated them into a tomato-cucumber salad to go along with souvlaki style chicken, pita bread, and rice.

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

We picked a full basket (almost everything in the garden made it in the basket), so I used the lettuce and tomato in a salad with goat cheese, the cucumbers in a separate salad and baked the potatoes (and served that all with steak sandwiches.)

After dinner, I decided to use up some of our zucchini to make zucchini bread: so delicious!

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Today’s yield was a lot of tomatoes, basil and (of course, more zucchini and cucumbers) so I decided to make a tomato-mozzarella-basil salad.

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Today’s yield was a lot of lettuce and a few zinnias.  However, we had zucchini and basil leftover so I decided to make a zucchini-basil frittata.  This is pretty easy.  You just sautee garlic, thinly sliced zucchini, and basil in olive oil till zucchini slightly soft.  Then pour in 8 beaten eggs.  Cook till eggs are set, sprinkle grated parmesan cheese on top and broil until golden brown.  (This is a family favorite.)

Friday, July 31, 2020

Today’s yield was mainly tomatoes (and very hot peppers) so I decided to make an arugula, tomato, and corn salad.  The peppers are way too hot to put in the salad!

Welcome to kidscookdinner.com! Today I (Alex) wanted to experiment with Sous Vide.  I took an online class with the Institute of Culinary Education at noon that demonstrated how to make a variety of dishes using Sous Vide and decided to try their strip steak recipe.

The first step was to cook a head of garlic (to be used in flavoring the steak).  Apparently, if you use raw garlic as a flavor element in Sous Vide, it can taste a little bitter but cooked garlic is fine and pretty easy to do: cut off the tops of the cloves in a head, wrap in foil and cook in 340-degree oven for 30 minutes.  Then you squeeze the soft cloves out of the head.

Next step was to sear the steaks (after salt and peppering them well). ICE recommends searing both before and after the sous vide cooking process because if you only do it after, by the time you have gotten the steaks appropriately brown, you will have overcooked them.

Meanwhile, the water is heating up to precisely 57 degrees Celsius.

Then the steaks go into plastic bags to be vacuumed sealed and placed into the water.  Per the ICE recipe I put one clove of cooked garlic and 1 sprig of thyme in with the steak.  They recommend that the flavor elements not touch the steak because they may get embedded into it.

Meanwhile, while the steaks cooked, I made a quick chimichurri sauce: chopped garlic, parsley, basil, and olive oil; prepped potatoes for baking; and chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, and avocado for a simple salad.

After 2 hours, I removed the steaks from the water bath, one by one, patted them dry, and seared them briefly one more time to remove any moisture.

Then everything went on the table and I plated up dinner. The steaks were perfectly, evenly, cooked inside. Yum.