I’m coming up for air from the long overdue process of updating old recipes on this site with the formatting that you can see down below.
I’m not gonna lie, it’s mind-numbingly tedious, but it brings out my Type A-ness. Once I started, it was hard to stop.
I’ve also been cleaning up some of my old pictures (as far back as those I took in November 2010) with sizing that makes them load more quickly on the screen of a computer. (What I wouldn’t give to have known I should do that from the very beginning.)
The good news is that the updates make it easy to print recipes and, if you use it, to save them to a shopping list and recipe box in Ziplist. I say all this only because, if you are reading this, and you have a food blog, don’t make my mistake. Start using a recipe formatting program sooner than later. You’ll be glad you did.
There is one really great thing that has come out of working through every recipe I’ve ever made for this blog. It is reminding me of some favorites that got lost in the shuffle. A few like Panko Shrimp Skewers with Orange Couscous, Roasted Salmon and Bread Salad, and Spinach with White Beans and Pine Nuts should not have gone unmade for so long. In fact, I just decided we’ll be making that last one for dinner tonight.
Spinach with White Beans and Pine Nuts for dinner calls for the making of a giant pot of white beans, which I love. I can always think of something to do with a pot of white beans.
When I make a big pot of white beans, I give them a bit of extra flavor by throwing a half an onion and a half a carrot (sliced) into the mix. I learned this trick from Tom Colicchio’s Marinated Chickpea recipe, and I really do think it’s worthwhile for all the extra flavor it gives the beans.
You can, of course, always use canned white beans for that Spinach and White bean dinner, but then you wouldn’t have leftovers. And leftover white beans really come in handy for making this snack-worthy purée.
My friend Katie who blogs at the The Muffin Myth also made a white bean purée recently and called it a “mellower cousin to hummus”, and she’s spot on. A white bean purée has a bit of sweetness that hummus lacks, and it becomes even more creamy than its chickpea-based relative. But you can use it in all the same ways. Dunk carrots into it, use it in wraps or on sandwiches, or spread it over toasty, olive oil drizzled bread.
You can see which route I went.
Bruschetta with White Bean, Roasted Garlic, and Rosemary
Ingredients
- 4 cloves garlic (do not peel or crush them)
- 1 and 1/2 cup cooked white beans (rinsed and drained if from a can)
- juice from 1/2 lemon
- 2 sprigs fresh rosemary, minced
- 1 Tbsp. olive oil
- 1/2 tsp. coarse sea salt
For serving:
- 1 small baguette, sliced into 3/4 inch slices
- 8 leaves fresh basil, thinly sliced
- olive oil
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
- Place the cloves of garlic in the center of a square of foil. Drizzle with about 1 tsp. olive oil and seal the foil tightly around the garlic. Place the foil packet in the oven and roast until the garlic becomes very soft, 35 minutes. Remove the foil packet from the oven and open it carefully. Allow the garlic to cool and then gently remove the peels.
- In the bowl of a food processor, combine the roasted garlic, white beans, lemon juice, rosemary, olive oil, and sea salt. Pulse several times until the beans become uniformly smooth and creamy. Taste and add additional salt, if needed.
- Brush each of the baguette slices with olive oil and toast under the oven's broiler, or (as in the image above) in a large skillet over medium heat. Top each of the toasted baguette slices with a generous spoonful of white bean puree and set out on a plate. Top with sliced basil and drizzle with olive oil. Serve immediately.
Wow good for you going back into each recipe! I’m very very very slowly going through mine and even making them again so I can improve on the terrribly bad photos I took way back when I started.
I like the idea of hommus’s sweeter cousin. Yum!
Ooo, you’re so good to update the pictures. What a headache, but definitely worthwhile!
You both are SO good to go back and update the recipes – wow Im too lazy to even do that! LOL
xoxo from Trinidad
What a job!!!! The site looks WONDERFUL!!!!
That seems like a tremendous amount of work! I’m still snuggled under the security blanket of WP hosting, but debating constantly whether to go self hosted. Being able to use a recipe plugin is a big attractor, but having to deal with updates, security, backups, is a big deterrent.
And I’ve debated going back and re-shooting some older recipes, but then I think that a blog is a growing process, and as much as it pains me to see terrible pictures in the beginning, that’s where I was then.
Anyways, this bruschetta looks great! A mellower cousin to hummus indeed it is. I’ll have to try this version for an upcoming dinner party.
Katie – I definitely never know how far to go when it comes to updating old stuff on the blog. I still make so many of those early recipes so often that I actually think making them printable is something I’ll use myself! 😉 But you’re right about preserving the early stuff – it’s nice to look back and think about how my own preferences have evolved. There have for sure been some learning curves with self-hosting, but I so love all the plug-ins and tools. I use Bluehost now, and they are constantly backing up my site (I know this because I’ve crashed it on more than a few occasions…I tend to get a bit overly confident these days when it comes to tweaking the coding on the blog…woops).