This is an excerpt from the forthcoming cookbook by Leanne Stephens about cooking in small spaces. We first met her on the road in New Jersey and then again at the Georgia Tiny House festival where the #TinyLab won Best Tiny Home. See the picture below the recipe and thanks Leanne for sharing our story and my cooking with others!
Most tiny houses don’t have big kitchens.
This should not limit big taste. We have three eyes in the #TinyLab similar to a boat’s set up, varied sizes.
I love my dutch oven. I use it to toast bread, make amazing one pot meals, cornbread on the camp fire and of course, gooey chocolate chip cookies. This dish requires mostly this one pot and while I usually do the fettuccine in a separate pot for ease, I’m keeping this recipe to one dutch oven delight. This is a perfect meal for comfort, loaded with protein for recovery, if you do a lot of manual labor like we do.
#TinyLab’s Dutch Oven Kale Comfort Food
1 2 Quart Dutch Oven
7 cups of water
1 Tsp of salt
1 Large Spanish Onion
4 Tbs of Olive Oil
1 Package of Trader Joe’s Garlic Herb Chicken Sausage
1/2 cup of White Wine (whatever is on hand, water works too.)
6 ounces of Sharp Cheddar Cheese
2 Tbs of Chunky Garlic Stir in Paste
Cracked Pepper
2 Generous Handfuls of Chopped Kale
1 7.5 oz Package of Explore Cuisine Organic Edamame & Mung Bean Fettuccine
Trader Joe’s Balsamic Vinegar Glaze to taste
Prep your food by slicing onions, slicing sausages into bite sized rounds, and cubing cheddar into small cubes
Fill dutch oven with water, salt, and bring to boil
Add fettuccine and cook for 8 mins
In a colander place your two handfuls of chopped kale
Drain fettuccine slowly over the kale
Add two tbs of olive oil and toss together leaving in colander
Add two tbs of olive oil to Dutch Oven and brown onions to a light caramel color over med. heat
Add sausage and continue to brown until the bottom of the pan has a nice flavorful coloring, add more oil in cooking if needed, but the browning will appear on the drier side
Add white wine to deglaze the pan and using your spatula get up all of that browned goodness into the wine broth
Add the garlic stir in paste and mix
Add the fettuccine and kale back into the pot and combine all the goodness
Finally add in the cubed cheddar and cracked pepper to taste until it’s just distributed through the goodness
Cover lower heat and simmer for 3 mins
If you are a real fancy pants and own a cooking torch add a little more cheddar just before serving and torch it to a nice crunchy golden brown
Serve with Trader Joe’s Balsamic Glaze. It’s the dish’s hot sauce, if you will ;)
Voila!
Grace Lunsford and her husband, Corbett and baby Nanette, constructed their #TinyLab in the beginning of 2016 and hit the road in April for their nation wide Proof is Possible Tour, using their tiny house to teach homeowners about their own houses using building science. The Huffington Post said "#TinyLab is what all houses should grow up to be." With a high performance design the public toured the home breathing fresh air, despite two cats, dirty diapers, and a composting toilet. People experienced a tiny home that was being actively lived in yet felt comfortable, smelled great, and was completely off grid. The point being that high performance homes are possible and through scientific testing contractors can prove that they did the work right.
ProofisPossible.com tells the story of the tour, #TinyLab and offers the now online course "Home Performance for Tiny Spaces" to help tiny house owners, dreamers, and builders. This course is a more comprehensive, resource-rich version of the live class 'How to Engineer and Build a High Performance Tiny House on Wheels', which was attended by hundreds of tiny space enthusiasts across the U.S. on the Proof Is Possible Tour.
photo credit Leanne Stephens
