Adventures in Culinary Hedonism

Cinnamon, take 2 (they're small)

2012-01-27T21:20:00.000-08:00

Oh, there’s so much to write about! There’s been so much cooking in this house since I last posted! Soups and stews and tuna casserole (oh my!).

However, I fear there would be riots if I didn’t write about my baking adventures of the past couple of weeks.

And by that I mean the sticky buns.

This will be another case of food blogs colliding. I Googled “sticky buns” and this was the first thing that came up. A recipe for Cinnamon Sticky Buns at SimplyRecipes.com.

I read quite a few recipes, but I kept coming back to this one. It had all the elements I was looking for: an egg-rich dough that was supposed to sit in the fridge overnight, plenty of cinnamon-sugar filling (with brown sugar, not white) and an ooey-gooey, sticky syrup mixture loaded with pecans in the bottom of the pan that ooze all over the baked buns when they were turned out of the pan.

I also loved that, for those who aren’t used to working with or proofing yeast, it had a link to a picture of what the yeast was supposed to look like when it was done proofing, all bubbling and foamy. Nice detail!

There are some out there, I’m well aware, who believe the pecans get in the way of all the yumminess, but I’m here to tell you they are necessary for the yummy. The provide a richness and a slight bitterness that balances all the sweet. I honestly don’t think I could handle all of that sweetness without the balance of some nuts. Walnuts would probably also be fine, but I really love the butteriness of the pecans. It’s really perfect, in my opinion.

The dough was easy to work with…dense and smooth because of the egg yolks. There is nothing quite like the feel of a yeast dough when it’s just right. It gets slightly shiny, it’s moist without being sticky, it’s almost velvety. It's really kind of sexy.

I did things a little out of sequence from the recipe. Because of timing, I put the dough in the fridge after the first rise and let it set there overnight. Then I took it out the next day, let it rise a couple of times, punching it down every couple of hours, before I rolled it out, prepped the goo for the baking pan and baked the rolls.

What did that extra rising time get me? A little more fermentation time, which means a little more flavor to the dough.

There were two things that annoyed me. First, the dough wouldn’t stay on the dough hook of my mixer and I’m not sure why. Maybe it wasn’t sticky enough. It was a rather dry day…the dough didn’t even take the minimum amount of flour the recipe called for. Maybe my egg yolks weren’t large enough. Or maybe it just wasn’t terribly humid.

That’s the thing about yeast doughs…you kind of have to play it by ear when it comes to adding the flour. Too little and your dough will be sticky; too much and your dough will be tough.

While they were baking, the house filled with this gorgeous, sweet, yeasty, cinnamony smell. I couldn’t help myself when they came out of the oven. As soon as they were cool enough, I had to try one. To my credit, it was one of the ends from the pre-cut roll, so it was kind of small.

The other thing that annoyed me…well, maybe annoyed is too strong a term. It just wasn’t quite what I was expecting even though it did taste wonderful.

The ooey-gooey syrup had a pronounced honey flavor. It certainly didn’t keep me from eating them. They were delicious! But I found as the week went on that it wasn’t quite the flavor I remembered from my mom’s rolls. So I need to experiment with the sticky topping. Maybe less honey or no honey at all and dark Karo instead of light.

All in all, it was a really tasty treat. Nice and chewy from the sticky syrup, plenty of cinnamon, a nice, tang to the bread and the crunch from the pecans.

I guess I’ll just have to keep experimenting till I get it right!

Seriously Cinnamony for the very first time

2012-01-13T19:56:00.000-08:00

As many years as I have been baking (and we’re talking in the 30s here), it’s really quite amazing that I had never, until last weekend, made cinnamon rolls.

I have friends who don’t consider themselves bakers who have made countless batches of the delightful treats. I think my friend Bryce might know his grandmother’s recipe by heart. I saw him make them once and I don’t remember seeing a recipe.

I remember when my mom made cinnamon rolls, it was an overnight process. She made an enormous amount of dough, letting it rise a couple of times, then she’d roll and cut and then refrigerate them overnight, then take them out in the morning, let them rise again and then bake.

If I remember correctly, she would put a mixture of Karo syrup, butter and nuts in the pan, too. (A conversation with my friend Marty last weekend jogged that memory loose.) Which would technically make then sticky buns, not cinnamon rolls.

What’s the difference?

Well, both cinnamon rolls and sticky buns start with a rich bread dough rolled with butter and cinnamon sugar, but the similarities end there.

Cinnamon rolls are baked in a fairly naked pan (with a little butter, Crisco or cooking spray), allowed to cool most of the way and then drizzled or spread with some sort of vanilla frosting. Some use cream cheese to give it richness and a little tang. Some go with a simple milk and powdered sugar glaze.

Cinnamon rolls will sometimes contain raisins.

Not in my house.

I’m not against raisins in baked goods. I love a nice, chewy oatmeal raisin cookie (unlike a good portion of my friends). I will not turn away an offered cinnamon roll if it has raisins in it. However, if I have the choice, I will go sans raisins.

Cinnamon rolls might have some nuts going on. Usually walnuts, because walnuts go well with raisins. Not many of the rolls I’ve eaten in my lifetime have walnuts in them because, as I mentioned, I prefer my rolls without raisins.

Sticky buns? That is a horse of a different color altogether.

Sticky buns are baked in a pan of which the bottom has been prepared with a mixture that has many variations, but most often includes cinnamon, dark Karo, some butter and some pecans.

Here’s the thing. The pecans are important. They define and set apart the sticky bun from it’s white-coated cousin. There are probably buns that have walnuts or hazelnuts or macadamia nuts (oooh….that sounds good!).

But to me, pecans are the definitive nut for a sticky bun.

So you make this concoction of sugar, syrup, butter and cinnamon, you pour it into the baking pan, sprinkle that with nuts and then you lay the prepared rolls on top of this elixir and you bake it all together.

Not only do you have to goo at the bottom of the pan, but then you also have the butter and cinnamon sugar from the inside oozing out a bit.

When you bake these, it’s crucial to turn them out of the pan almost right after they’re removed from the oven. If you let them cool in the pan, you might as well say goodbye to the rolls and the pan. You’re never going to get the rolls out of the pan.

The hardest part is waiting for them to be cool enough to eat without burning several layers of tissue off the roof of your mouth.

Of course, last weekend, I made cinnamon rolls. They turned out pretty good. The recipe I found on epicurious.com was simple, yet tasty.

But apparently what I was craving was sticky buns. So I gonna have to bake again. Soon.

Thanks for stopping by, y’all. Eat something fabulous this weekend!

Holiday Wrap Up

2012-01-06T20:10:00.000-08:00

As I get older, the holidays are met with decidedly mixed emotions. It’s more exciting now, with a little boy who gazes with wonder at the lighted tree and the pretty decorations on it (taking the French horns off to try and play them and making the little bells jingle).

Christmas always makes me miss my mom and dad. During the last few years of their lives, I loved going down to their house on Christmas Eve, having some homemade goodies (cookies and fudge, mostly), driving to Spanaway Park to see the light show, and having some quiet time just to talk. It was nice to have that peaceful time with them before the house got filled with everybody else.

There have been times in the last few years when facing Christmas literally hurt. It made my chest ache with the emptiness of missing them.

But this year was different.

Part of that, I know, was the focus on little G-man and the excitement of seeing him open his presents on Christmas morning.

But it was due, in great part, to Lovefest 2011, the grand dinner I wrote about last week.

Sitting around that table, looking at all the people I rarely see, but have been a part of my life, some of them, for nearly twenty years, was a celebration of family all its own.

I have shared many meals with these wonderful people. Whether it was salami, cheese and wine during rehearsal or a Thanksgiving dinner for 30 people that we cooked ourselves or pork chops and an improvised pan sauce (“I had all that in my kitchen?”) or Mexican food and a bucket of margaritas…whatever the repast, we shared it with joy and love.

There have been other amazing meals, too. The homemade manicotti at my birthday party in Everett (meal inspired by what my dad cooked for me when I was a kid). The culinary adventures enjoyed before watching Battlestar Galactica in a darkened back room. The beautifully tender steak tips cooked by a vegetarian because she loves to feed her friends who eat meat. The gorgeous beef roast my inlaws made for Christmas dinner. The pate and brie and champagne I shared with my beautiful N on New Year’s Eve.

And fantastic desserts as well. Like the chocolate cake a friend made me for my birthday one year that made me cry because the only other person who had ever made me a birthday cake was my mom. The amazing sugar cookies we got as a Christmas present this year. The great cake experiments my friends have let me make for their special occasions (weddings, book releases, birthdays). The candy my mom used to make or to pies my dad baked.

The really wonderful thing about all of these dishes has been that they have been shared with family, both blood and chosen.

I am so blessed with so many lovely and loving people in my life. This holiday season I got to see a lot of them. So when the new year came around, I found myself surprisingly happy.

So thank you, to all of my friends, my chosen family and my blood family, for being here. You make life better.

I started writing here regularly in February and managed to make it to the page 35 times.

Thank you to all of you who visit, regularly or occasionally. I love food and I love words and I love getting to bring them together here every week.

Happy New Year, everyone. Here’s to another year of culinary adventures!!

Lovefest 2011!

2011-12-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

If there’s a recurring theme in my writings (other than food), it has to be the sharing of a meal around a communal table and how it brings people together in a very special way.

Last night, a group of our good, long-time friends got together because, by some miracle, we were all in town at the same time. We were all excited to get around a table to share some food and some memories.

Another part of the excitement was the place we planned on meeting. A new restaurant headed up by Chef Tamara Murphy called Terra Plata.

Seattlites dined on Chef Murphy’s food for several years at the now-defunct Brasa. Well, those who loved Brasa should be very happy indeed that she is back.

There were about 15 of us (my mind is blurred, you see, from the fabulous food and drink, as well as the late night and the early morning that followed) seated around a long table in the middle of the room.

Our hostess and event organizer, our friend Sheila, had ordered several appetizers for us to munch while everyone arrived and got settled.

I had done a little research beforehand, so I was very excited to be able to dive in as soon as I got there.

On the table were plates of delicate potato chips, waffle-cut on a mandolin so they were thin and crisp. Sprinkled with truffle salt, they were mouth-wateringly good. At this moment, I am weeping because I don’t have a bucket of them next to me while I write. I barely got to the lovely, slightly tangy pecorino-chive cream that came with them because the chips were so delicious on their own.

Also waiting for us were some gorgeous cappelletti (stuffed pasta that look like little hats) stuffed with local winter squash and served very traditionally with hazelnuts and browned sage butter. The pasta was tender and the squash filling light and creamy. I couldn’t stop eating them.

To my left on the table was a bowl of mussels, which I didn’t give a second glance. I’m not much of a shellfish person. I have texture issues and mussels and clams in particular tend to be chewy, which, frankly, makes me want to gag.

However, after handing a few over to my partner, who loves them, and listening to someone who doesn’t like mussels say they liked these, I decided to try one. And it was good. Apparently the reason I haven’t liked them in the past is that they have been criminally overcooked.

These mussels were cooked perfectly, were tender and almost melted in my mouth. The broth was savory and subtly flavored and went to very good use as a dunking liquid for stray pieces of bread. :o) So maybe I’ll try them again someday.

The star of the starters, for me, anyway, was the roasted grapes, olives and walnuts served with a small wedge of bleu cheese. It was a surprising and heavenly blend of salty, sweet, smoky and bitter. I could have eaten a plate of that all by myself.

Thankfully, however, I did not do that. Because there were more wonders ahead!

Roasted potatoes with a gorgeously fresh-tasting remoulade. The tender potatoes and wonderfully eggy sauce made me wiggle with glee and roll my eyes heavenward. I nearly stole the ramekin of sauce. The only thing stopping me was that I didn’t have a spoon handy with which to eat the remoulade directly from the dish.

There were the roasted heirloom carrots that were just warmed through, retaining their delightful crunch. That plate of carrots was just gorgeous…they looked like they’d just been pulled out of the ground, washed, roasted and rushed to our table.

The one thing I couldn’t get myself to try was the marinated beets. But the beet-lovers near me said they were delicious. I will take their word for it. I’m not quite ready to try beets again. The presentation was striking though, with pale white ribbons of ricotta salata snaking their way over the top.

When it came time to order entrees, I was already pretty full, so I decided to go with one of the starters. How could I not when it’s country pork pate? Chef Murphy is very dedicated to her pork products, her roast pig is legendary, so how could I pass up the opportunity to have a rustic pork pate at her establishment?

I was not disappointed. It was everything I hoped it would be and more. This was a pate made with love. Served with the traditional cornichons, plus some sweet red pepper, some tiny olives and two kinds of mustard, it was an incredible plate of earthy, snacky goodness. It was lovely with the Graves Cellars ’06 Syrah that was being poured at the table.

A diner across from me had the lamb sirloin, which she very graciously shared with me. It was perfectly cooked, tender and succulent. I missed getting to taste the duck, so I’ll have to go back another time to try that one. There were quite a few of our party that had the water buffalo burger and a couple that had the tuna. Everyone was very pleased and satisfied with their meals. I didn’t hear from the burger eaters (they were on the other end of the table), but the tuna eaters said it was fabulous.

There were glasses of bubbly and red wine passed around the table, all of them very tasty. And then there were the cocktails. I got to taste the Pearsephone and the Blood Orange Martini. Both very nice drinks, though the martini was a little more grapefruity than blood orangey to me. But kudos to the establishment for the use of a local spirit, Dry Fly Gin, in the drink.

I had the Monk’s Robe, a concoction of Woodford Reserve bourbon, prosecco, Benedictine and fernet branca (an aromatic bitter liquor often served as a digestif). It was a very interesting cocktail and I would love to try it again with a clean palate so that I can try to ferret out the different flavors. I love a good bourbon, so I will definitely have that again.

And then there was dessert. Oh my. Dessert.

I had the chocolate hazelnut terrine with the cardamom crème anglaise. Oh, dear GODS, was it good! Surprisingly light and fluffy (unlike some I’ve had in the past), a phenomenal bite of chocolate with a little crunch of hazelnut, a hit of extra flavor thanks to the sprinkling of salt across the top. It was airy and rich at the same time, so amazingly flavorful (I love a little salt with my chocolate)…it just knocked my socks off. It’s a simple dish, but really phenomenal.

In and amongst all of this wonderful food was the unsurpassed company of so many friends I call family. And some new friends as well.

What could be more satisfying to both body and soul than an incredible meal with so many loved ones?

And soul is certainly abundant at Terra Plata. Chef Murphy and the whole crew are obviously laying their souls bare on plate after plate, night after night.

Really. You should go. It’s a beautiful room in which you can eat beautiful food.

Next time, a holiday recap. Until then, thanks for stopping by. Happy Holidays, everyone! Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Yule!

Giving Thanks

2011-11-25T20:06:00.001-08:00

This week, how could I write about anything else, really?

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, the Mother of all Food Holidays. Yes, there are other holidays with food associated with them, but few others are so focused on the Feast.

It really is my favorite holiday. I love cooking for other people. I love the turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy (“Gravy, gravy uber alles”…everybody sing!) and sweet potatoes and green bean casserole and, yes, even the cranberry sauce.

There are other things, too, that can be part of the feast. My mom always put out a relish tray.

What, you say, is a relish tray?

At our house, it consisted of a tray (or two) of pickles (Dad’s dills, Mom’s 14-day sweets, sometimes bread and butter pickles or pickled beets or dilled green beans, all homemade, of course) and olives. As kids, we used to put the black olives on our fingers (like you didn’t…come on, admit it). I wouldn’t touch a green olive…hated them and their suspicious-looking red centers. I have since changed my tune and will eat almost anything that can be called an olive, especially when stuffed with things like pimiento or garlic.

Other families munch on things like smoked oysters and smoked clams. That’s great for them. I won’t deprive them of their joy.

And speaking of seafood, some really awesome sisters make shrimp ball, some of which is sitting in my fridge right now because I am too full to eat any. Shrimp, cream cheese, onions…oooooh…so tasty!!!

There are so many variations on the theme. Turkey wrapped in bacon. Chicken wrapped in duck wrapped in turkey. Turkey stuffed with herbs and aromatics. Turkey stuffed with stuffing (don’t listen to Alton Brown. Stuffing is not evil if you are careful. The best stuffing in the world is the stuffing that comes from the turkey.).

Then there’s the stuffing. Cornbread stuffing (my mom’s favorite), oyster stuffing, sausage stuffing, apple stuffing, plain old bread stuffing. Start with butter, onions and celery and go hog wild if you want. My favorite is plain old bread stuffing, but made with some good artisan bread, plus lots of fresh sage and extra turkey or chicken stock to get it nice and moist. I love getting Grand Central Bakery’s bags of stuffing bread. It’s their bread, already cubed and dried and ready. Oh, so good! And it supports a local business!

Some families have varieties of fermented fruit to drink with the meal (and before and after, too). One friend loves to have cranberry wine (and why not?). Some would say that one must serve white wine because it’s poultry, but a light red like a pinot noir is wonderful with turkey (as evidenced by last night’s bottle with dinner, Pinot Evil.). There are lots of fruit wines (in my basement) that would go well with Thanksgiving dinner. Or to go with dessert after dinner.

Oh, dessert. I nearly forgot.

Traditionalists would say pumpkin pie only. Truthfully, that would be enough for me. I would be very happy with a big slice of pumpkin pie with a mountain of whipped cream on top (no Cool Whip, please).

But there are other wonders of the pie form that would be equally appropriate and delicious. Apple pie, for example. Apple is a fall fruit and is wonderful in a pie, particularly the crumb-topped variety (like the one my niece made for yesterday’s dinner. The one we had to fight my brother-in-law to get a piece of. We just claimed it was for the 2 year old and got away with it.)

There are other forms of pumpkin dessert that can grace the table, too. One friend does not like piecrust, so she makes a pumpkin custard in ramekins and serves it like that. Or there is pumpkin cheesecake, like the one made by my other niece for yesterday’s dinner. With a little chocolate swirled in to make it sexy. :o) The 2-year-old like that one, too.

But for all the various forms the meal itself can take, one thing remains constant. The gathering of family, however you choose to define the word, to feast and give thanks.

It can make the absence of lost loved ones ache in your chest and your throat. But ultimately it creates joy and reminds us all what is truly important in life. Good food and the company of good friends and family to share it with.

I have said it before and will say it many, many times more. The most satisfying, humanizing, communal thing we can do is sit down and break bread with one another. It is nourishment not only for the body, but for the soul as well. And today, both body and soul are full up to here!

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!
Thanks for stopping by!

PS – And a Happy Birthday to my son, who is 2 years old today!

Good for what ails you

2011-11-18T20:13:00.000-08:00

This week we decided to pull an old, cold weather staple out of the hat. Cold, rainy weather has always means soup to me. So we made garlic soup!

Mmmm…garlic soup. Let’s just enjoy that for a moment, shall we?

Even if you have never had it in your life, even if you have no idea what to expect, it sounds fabulously yummy, doesn’t it?

So what is this wonder that we call garlic soup? I’m sure you have your own version of it, but here’s mine. It comes from a cookbook my mom bought me years ago. I think it was called 365 Italian Recipes. I don’t even think I know where the cookbook is. I just know the recipe by heart. :o)

Garlic Soup (from 365 Italian Recipes)

Serves 4

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp olive oil

12 cloves garlic, quartered

6 slices of Italian bread, cut into 1 inch cubes

6 cups chicken stock

½ cup dry red wine (and more for the chef, of course)

2 tbsp fresh Italian parsley

4 eggs

grated parmesan cheese

In a soup pot, heat the oil and butter until the butter is melted. Add the quartered garlic cloves and sauté for a minute or two. Do not brown garlic.

Add the cubed bread, tossing to coat it in the fat.

Stir in the stock, wine and parsley. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes.

One by one, crack each egg into a small dish and slip it into the soup. When all four eggs are in, cover the pot and poach the eggs until the whites are solid and the yolks are still runny (3-5 minutes, depending on whether your eggs are room temp or refrigerated).

Serve with grated parmesan cheese.

* * * * *

It is such a simple soup to make. And the poached egg makes it so soul-satisfying. N and I always start to crave it when the weather turns chilly.

I know you’re probably wondering about all that garlic. Twelve cloves? Really?

Here’s the thing. You quarter them, not crush them, so there’s less of the oils released into the system. And the garlic kind of gets poached in the oil and then the stock, so it comes out very mellow. Not as sweet and decadent as roasted, but still nicely present but muted. It’s a great flavor. This is definitely one of those soups that is better the next day. If there’s any left, that is.

One warning – you will burn your mouth if you don’t wait for a couple of minutes after you’ve dished it up to start eating. All of that bread holds the heat, so it’s like eating napalm until it cools off a bit. So just to be safe, you might want to undercook your egg a little. Because there are few things in life more disappointing than a poached egg that doesn’t have a runny yolk. ;o)

No rats were harmed in the making of this blog

2011-11-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

There are, in fact, no rats in ratatouille (as opposed to Ratatouille, which does contain rats…many of them).

Now I can’t speak to what the real thing is like. I don’t think I have the desire or the patience to cook each vegetable individually, cut each of them precisely the same size. It is, by all I’ve read, a very fussy dish to prepare.

There are those I know who wouldn’t even think of attempting to cook it because it has that vegetable of no nutritional value: eggplant.

That’s another reason I wouldn’t be likely to make it. I’m not a huge fan of eggplant. It has to be prepared just so for me to even be interested in trying it. And by just so, I mean with TONS of garlic.

I’m not really selling this, am I? I mean, you don’t even know why I’m writing about ratatouille this week.

We made it in the crock pot. Really. Nancy looked in Slow Cooker Revolution last weekend to find something for us to make this week. When she said, “What about ratatouille?” I took a look at the recipe and said, “Why the hell not?” We’d been wanting to eat more veg and, hell, I’ll try anything once.

It did take a lot of prep, though not as much as the classic preparation. I had to cube two eggplants and three zucchini, slice two onions, mince a few cloves of garlic, chop fresh thyme. But I had my good chef’s knife.

I also had to brown the veggies in batches, eggplant, then zucchini, then onions, garlic and herbs. But at high heat, it didn’t take long to get some brown on them and get them quickly into the crock pot.

According to the recipe, the browning is one of the big reasons it works. So how could I not, right? They haven’t steered me wrong yet.

I even remembered to turn the crock pot on the right temperature this week!

The suggested cooking time was 4-6 hours on Low. My plan was to cook it only 4 hours, but time got away from me a little bit and I ended up cooking it almost 5.

We didn’t eat it that first night…I started cooking in the late afternoon on a Sunday, so it wasn’t finished cooking until almost 9pm.

But even microwaved the next day, the vegetables, especially the zucchini, still had some crunch to them.

I topped the dish with some homemade pesto I’d taken out of the freezer.

I admit to some trepidation before I ate it the first night. I just couldn’t imagine it turning out tasty, even though it really did smell delicious. I was so afraid of slimy eggplant, I almost wasn’t able to make myself try it.

But it really was delicious. I tired of it by the third night, but it was a great way to get some tasty veg. We got a roasted chicken from the grocery store for our protein.

No rats. But now I want to watch the movie again. :o)

Happy Friday, y’all. Thanks for stopping by!

Oops, I did it again (or Always Have a Backup Plan)

2011-11-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

So, this week, we picked another recipe from the Slow Cooker Revolution.

It’s called Bachelor Beef Stew…probably the lowest maintenance recipe in the book. Frozen peas, baby carrots, frozen potatoes. They do recommend using beef tips instead of stew meat, which means you would have to cut up the meat. But you even use frozen chopped onions, so no crying! Canned broth, tomato paste, a little soy sauce to deepen the flavors. And you thicken the gravy with a couple of tablespoons of tapioca. Brilliant!

Simple, right? No possible way to screw it up, right?

I’m sure you’re not surprised when I say “Wrong!!”

I did cut a couple of corners…I used stew meat and I didn’t microcook the onions before I put them in the crock pot. Nor did I add the fresh thyme it called for (because I forgot to get some).

But otherwise I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter.

it’s supposed to cook for 9-11 hours on LOW. So Monday morning I put everything in the pot, turned it on and went to work.

When I got home about 10 hours later, the house smelled pretty good, but it wasn’t as fragrant as I expected. I went to check the pot and the meat at the top looked oddly not brown. Usually the stuff at the top gets a bit brown, at least around the edges. And the sauce hadn’t thickened like I’d expected.

Apparently that doesn’t happen when you set the cooker to KEEP WARM!

I was in a hurry, wasn’t paying close attention, and didn’t turn the crock pot to the right temperature.

It could have been worse, for sure. I could have turned it on high and come home to an incinerated mess (or the fire department hosing down my dinner). This, at least, could be salvaged.

I turned the temp up to HIGH so it would get really hot and make sure everything was cooked through. But we sure didn’t have it for dinner that night.

Thank goodness for the rice I’d made that morning and the frozen gyoza from Costco.

And with all that, it still tasted pretty darn good. The next night I got home, put it in a soup pot and let it heat to bubbling on top of the stove. I added the frozen peas, microwaved the frozen potatoes, stirred it all together and voila!

The gravy was dark and thick, the peas were bright and green, the meat was fall-apart tender. It really was a delicious meal. And it lasted us the rest of the week.

I also made some pumpkin bread last weekend using the pumpkins I roasted a couple of weeks ago. Our friend Carolyn had given us two sets of mini loaf pans before Gideon was born with the thought that we could make some quick breads in these handy, single-serving sizes and freeze them so we would have them after her was born and we didn’t have the time or energy to cook.

They really are great. They're the perfect size! I made a double recipe of the pumpkin bread which made 12 mini loaves. We have half the dozen in the freezer and have consumed all but one of the other half dozen over the last week. G loves it, which is great, because he is being very fussy about what he eats lately.

But that’s another story that will have to wait until such time as I am not falling asleep at the keyboard. T.G.I.F!

Thanks for stopping by, y’all. Have a great weekend and cook something fabulous for yourself!

Nearly November already???

2011-10-28T20:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve quite gotten out of the habit of reserving Friday nights for sitting and writing, so it feels good to head straight for the computer tonight.

Before I start in on the food, I want to give a shout out to my friends who are participating on NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. For those of you not familiar, the goal is to write a novel, or at least 50,000 words of one, in 30 days. That is an average of 1,667 words a day.

I have participated once, writing just under 30,000 words that year, and I will again someday. I’m shooting for next year, ladies. Just so you know. :o)

So here's to you!! Knock ‘em dead!! And have a donut for me when you go to Portland on Tuesday! :o)

And now, the food. Because that’s what I assume you are really here for!

With the advent of autumn, we have gotten back into the crock pot big time. After all, we have a whole cookbook of recipes to try out.

Yes, I am referring to what I think might be the crock pot bible, Slow Cooker Revolution from America’s Test Kitchen. We have now tried four recipes and they have all been fantastic.

Two weeks ago we made a white bean chicken chili. Hopefully since I am crediting them, I won’t get slapped for sharing the recipe here.

White Chicken Chili – from Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen

3 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 15-oz can white or yellow hominy, drained & rinsed
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 onions, minced
4 jalapeno chiles, stemmed, seeded and minced
6 garlic cloves, minced
4 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
3 cans (15 oz) cannellini beans, drained & rinsed
3 lbs bone-in chicken thighs, skin removed, trimmed of fat
salt & pepper
2 tbsp minced jarred pickled jalapeno chiles
¼ c minced fresh cilantro
2 avocados, pitted and diced

Puree 2 cups broth with the hominy in a blender until smooth, about 1 minute. Transfer to slow cooker.
Heat oil in 12 inch skillet over medium high heat until shimmering. Add onions, jalapenos, garlic, cumin and coriander and cook until vegetables are softened and lightly browned, 8-10 minutes. Stir in remaining 1 cup broth, scraping up any browned bits. Transfer to slow cooker.
Stir beans into slow cooker. Season chicken with salt and pepper and nestle on top of vegetables. Cover and cook until chicken is tender, 4 to 6 hours on low.
Transfer chicken to cutting board, let cool slightly. Shred into bite sized pieces, discarding bones. Let chili set for about 5 minutes, then skim fat from the top.
Stir in shredded chicken and pickled jalapenos and let sit until heated through, about 5 minutes. Stir in cilantro, season with salt & pepper to taste, and serve with avocado.

* * *

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. FOUR jalapenos? Really?? I have to admit, I agreed. I was a wimp and decided to only include 3 because they were rather large. Turns out adding the fourth would have been fine. In the slow cooker, the chiles cook until they are very mellow. And since you don’t put in the seeds, really there’s nothing to worry about.

Where you control the heat of the dish is at the end, adding the pickled jalapenos. Those mothers still have the seeds in them. They’re very tart and hot and you can add extra to your own bowl of you want to. I was a little surprised at finding them in the recipe, but the add the acid you need to help brighten up the slow cooked stew, along with the cilantro (which, if you use it sparingly, does not taste like soap. Really.)

The addition of the avocado gave it creaminess and freshness without adding cheese. Avocados are such a luxurious food…creamy and decadent and really good for you. How can you argue with that??

If you wanted to add cheese? I’d say get some queso fresco or some cotija. Something light and white. But this really didn’t need it.

The only downside of making this is that I have been craving a margarita ever since.

Since we’re running a little long tonight, I’ll give you the quick low down on the Swiss steaks we made last week. Again from the Slow Cooker Revolution book, they were a little labor intensive, but totally worth the work.

It required a pound and a half of mushrooms until they were dry and browned…close to 15 minutes. Then cooking thinly sliced onions with thyme and paprika until the onions were very soft and starting to brown. Add a little flour and cook just long enough to get the floury taste out, then add broth and dry sherry to deglaze the pan.

I did all of that one evening after dinner. By bedtime, the house smelled glorious. But we had to wait two days before I was able to actually cook the dish.

You dump the veg into the slow cooker, add the steaks on top (6 6-8 oz blade steaks) and cook 9-11 hours on low. When they’re done, you remove the meat, skim the fat from the gravy, then stir in ¼ of heavy cream and some fresh parsley. Serve the steaks with the gravy.

I would highly recommend some mashed potatoes to go with this stuff.

Oddly, I realized as I was eating this that it was basically my old standby crock pot dish. Beef with cream of mushroom soup and onion soup mix. Sort of. It did bear a passing resemblance to that dish from cans and envelopes. But it was so much better.

Don’t get me wrong. If I am pressed for time, I will go back to the easy way. But if I have the time to invest, I will do this again. It was deep with flavor, the sherry gave it a nuttiness and the cream…well, I used sour cream because it’s what we had and man, did it make that dish.

You may be wondering, has something changed? These are not her perfect, no-fuss recipes here.

I have to say I’ve enjoyed taking the time to build these meals and cook them carefully. I get into a zone and just enjoy chopping and slicing and sautéing. I’ve even been reminded of the joys of cleaning as I go, so that when I’m done there’s no mess.

Perhaps it is the nip of Fall in the air. The cooler weather and more frequent rain always make me want to cook and bake. I even roasted pumpkins for the first time in my life. I’ll be making some pumpkin bread this weekend with the fresh pumpkin.

I guess that’s it. I just love this time of year. It’s Fall. Root vegetable season. :o)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need some cocoa.

The Magic of Chocolate

2011-10-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

N asked tonight what I was going to write about this week. The first thing that came to mind was the cake I made this week. But then I remember, I made a kickin’ chicken chili, too.

Surely both deserve mention, but this week, it’s just going to be the cake.

There was a bake sale coming up at work. I knew I would make something…I always do. I love baking and homemade things make people happy. Normally I would consider trying something new, especially when we’re in the middle of a season of Top Chef: Just Desserts.

This time, however, I had a request to fulfill.

I’ve been making this Guinness chocolate cake for several years. It all started at my friend Sheila’s wedding. She asked me to make her cake and she told me about this cake she had at a local restaurant. So I found this recipe, and the rest, as they say, it history.

It is, hands down, the most requested cake I have ever made. I’ve made it for four weddings, several birthdays and other special occasions. The first few times I made it, I frosted it with white icing because it was for weddings.

The recipe, however, comes with it’s own icing. A chocolate ganache. And that’s what has become famous among my friends.

The cake is dense and rich and moist. And when you top it with a bittersweet ganache, it becomes mouthful after mouthful of rich, chocolately goodness. It’s not to sweet, exceedingly decadent.

The recipe makes a gigantic cake. Three deep layers of fudgy cake is a lot. So I usually serve only two layers when I take it somewhere. Especially when someone else is going to serve. It’s hard to cut and serve a cake that is probably eight or nine inches tall and three layers.

So, I did a two layer cake with the ganache on top for the bake sale at work and split the single layer (with my fantastic 14” cake splitter knife) and iced it with a simple buttercream for the birthday girl.

The birthday cake was a total hit. The Bunny loves cake and it was wonderful to be able to make her a cake for her birthday.

The bake sale cake…well, I’ve auctioned that cake off at work before, so it’s sort of legendary there. Which is why it was requested. :o) And now a whole new group of people have been introduced to it’s magic.

You may think I’m tooting my own horn quite a bit, but I’m really not. It’s such a great recipe and it’s not fussy at all. Not the cake, anyway. The only thing you really have to be careful of is making sure your cocoa, butter and beer mixture is cool enough before you add it to the eggs and sour cream. If it’s too hot, you could cook your eggs and that would be very bad.

The really nervewracking part of this cake is the ganache. Ganache is relatively simple on paper. You heat cream, pour it over chopped chocolate, stir until the chocolate melts, let it cool until it’s the consistency you need it for your recipe.

Do it right and you get a beautifully textured mixture that goes onto a cake so easily, then it solidifies to a point where you can make the corners and edges of your cake sharp as a knife’s edge.

No problem, right?

Wrong.

If you overheat the cream, it breaks down the fats in the chocolate and you get a lumpy, gross-looking mess that you can’t do anything with. It still tastes good, so you could eat it with a spoon. But you can’t serve it. Broken ganaches make the angels cry. Okay, maybe not the angels, but it makes me cry. It’s made me cry several times before. And say lots of bad words. Lots.

Under heat the cream and your chocolate doesn’t get melted all the way. Then you have to baby it either on the stove or in the microwave to get the chocolate just warm enough to melt without breaking. It’s very stressful.

But when everything goes right, when the cream is just hot enough to melt the chocolate, when you catch the chilling ganache at just the perfect moment when it is easy to spread and doesn’t immediately solidify on the cake, it is a wonder to behold.

You can make a pretty impressive, professional-looking cake with a minimum of fussing.

That precision fascinates me. I don’t consider myself a terribly precise person. I don’t weigh my baking ingredients. I tend to measure everything on the generous side. I don’t use cake flour even when a recipe specifically calls for it.

But riding that fine line, looking for that perfect moment when it’s time to move to the next step, watching the transformation of a liquid and a solid into this wonderous amalgam that allows you only minutes to work with it when it’s at that just right place. That is what really gets me jazzed about making this recipe.

Well, that, and the delighted faces of people eating what I’ve baked. Because ultimately it’s feeding people good food that makes me happy.

Birthday Celebrations, Part Deux

2011-10-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

This week, we celebrated N’s birthday, which, of course, required cake.

Her favorite is yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Given our busy lives, she very kindly said, “If you want to use a mix, it’s okay with me.”

Let me give you a little background on that. I have probably used one cake mix in the last twenty years. It’s not that I think they’re bad. I grew up on cake mix cakes. My mom made wedding cakes with mixes and guests swore they were from scratch.

It’s just that I tend to not have a cake mix in the house when I want to bake a cake. But I usually have all the component ingredients. If you think about it, most people do. Flour, sugar, eggs, butter, vanilla, salt baking powder and milk.

When it came to baking night, I still had not gotten a cake mix, but I certainly had all those items in my kitchen. So scratch it was.

Since I don’t have a favorite yellow cake recipe, I went searching. I was very interested in the recipes that called for buttermilk, but I didn’t have that. Nor did I have sour cream. But I’ll be trying those cakes at a later date.

What I landed on was this.

Yes, Martha Stewart.

Say what you want…the woman knows her stuff.

The cake is simple. Butter and sugar creamed together. Eggs and vanilla beaten in. Flour, baking powder and salt added alternatively with milk. Thick batter poured into two 8” rounds and baked for 35 minutes.

So simple. So easy to screw up. :o)

I didn’t really totally screw it up. But because I’m currently in the middle of a season of Top Chef: Just Desserts, I’m a bit more critical of my baking right now.

The cake was a little bit dry. But it was totally my fault. It needed a couple of minutes less in the oven and it would have been perfect. But it did have that wonderful butter flavor, delicate and rich. I will definitely be using this one again.

Now, I do have a favorite chocolate frosting recipe. It’s in the old McCall’s cookbook that my mom had. The flavor of this chocolate frosting is really unparalled. But it is complicated. You have to melt the chocolate, let it cool, cream the butter and sugar, add the chocolate, add the egg (yes, I said egg), beat it over a bowl of ice water to get it to the right consistency. If you are in a hurry or not meticulous, you can fuck this mother up. This is not something the middle-aged mother of a toddler should attempt, especially on a school night .

So I went hunting again. And I found this from a food blog called Savory Sweet Life. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the recipe.

What intrigued me about this recipe was the salt. It’s a pretty basic chocolate frosting recipe, but then it had salt. I knew this would bring out the flavor of the cocoa, so I decided try it.

It is now my favorite chocolate frosting. It’s easy to make, it tastes wonderful. How can anyone argue with that combination?

There is an option to use either vanilla or almond extract. I used vanilla. I’m not all that fond of almond flavoring in things. It is so easy to over do. And it wasn’t the right application here. But I think I will try it at some point. This frosting was tasty enough that I think it would be fun to play around with. Some cinnamon and cayenne, maybe?

In the final analysis, however, what matters is not whether I used cake flour or all purpose, whether I used almond or vanilla extract. What matters is how it tastes.

Well, the birthday girl rated it “awesome”. And that’s what’s important to me. :o)

The Birthday Burger

2011-09-30T20:56:00.001-07:00

I’ve often written here about food being integral to a celebration. For me and for many.

This, I believe, is most definitely true for birthdays. The celebration of another year past is always made better by a satisfying meal.

This week I celebrated a birthday. Not mine…my sister’s. She turned the big 5-0 on Wednesday. And she wanted to spend it with me, which honored me greatly.

It got me to thinking about the way we celebrated birthdays when we were kids. We got to pick our birthday dinner, which, for me, was always manicotti. It was my favorite thing.

Dad didn’t make it very often. It was a special occasion dish. So it made birthdays feel very special.

Before you ask, no, we’re not Italian. We’re mostly a mutt mixture from the British Isles. But for some reason, manicotti became soul food to me. :o)

Dad would make a filling of ricotta, spinach and ground beef, combining the two filling recipes that came on the box. Sauce was the Smith family recipe…a jar of prepared sauce, some tomato sauce, tomato paste, garlic and onion powder, dried herbs. He might or might not have started with some frozen leftovers.

When we were little he followed the instructions, boiling the noodles and filling them when they were soft. Such a pain! Then, before they started putting out the ‘ready to bake’ variety, he would stuff the shells uncooked, add water to the sauce to give the noodles something to soak up, and baked it. Easier by far!!

Of course, birthdays would not be complete without cake. That was mom’s territory. And there was always something spectacular. Winnie the Pooh, Holly Hobby, Marvin the Martian, a piano, books, 3-D dolls…you name it, my mom made it into a cake. And not only was it beautiful, it was damn tasty, too.

Well, there was no manicotti or beautiful cake this week for my sister’s birthday, but there was some really, really good food.

At my sissy’s request, we went to Red Mill Burgers on Phinney Ridge. It has always been high on my list of best burgers in Seattle. The Bleu Cheese and Bacon Burger is to die for. It’s so cool to order your burger and look over at the grill to see the wall of bacon waiting to be paired with a patty of beef.

This burger is just the right amount of juicy. It’s not too messy at first, but after three or four bites, you get past the point where the crispy edges of the toasted bun can no longer hold in the sloppy, melty blue cheese and the juice running from the perfectly meat.

They add tomato and lettuce, but don’t add mustard or ketchup. Those are on the table so you can dress your burger yourself. I appreciate that. I’m not a huge fan of ketchup. I like a little occasionally, but if I have a choice, I wouldn’t have it on my burger.

Oh…it was a heavenly lunch. My sister and I couldn’t even finish our burgers. Good thing we just shared the onion rings (which are apparently legendary…they were pretty fantastic).

We started the day with pedicures at Gene Juarez and ended our time together with coffees from Cloud City Coffee in Maple Leaf.

It was a short time, but it was great fun. We had some amazing food, had a lot of laughs, cried a little bit. And I’m sure Mom and Dad were around somewhere. They would never miss a birthday.

It was a privilege to share such a milestone day with her. And I’ve got six years to figure out what we’re going to do for my 50th!

I love you, Sissy. Happy Birthday!

The Modern Conveniences

2011-09-16T20:37:00.000-07:00

Last time we met, I might have mentioned that our stove went out. The oven just crapped out while we were cooking a take-and-bake pizza a couple of Fridays ago.

Since we went through our home warranty service to get the repair done, it took a while for it to happen.

Finally yesterday someone came to fix our stove (Hurray!!). It was just a loose wire, thank goodness. Mr. Appliance (the real name of the repair company) was in and out in about 15 minutes and we had a working stove/oven again!!

But you know what? In this world of convenience food, it is pretty easy to live out of your microwave.

Thank goodness for Costco. They sell boxes of single-serving packets of vegetable yakisoba that are pretty darn tasty. And then there are the chicken nuggets. Which we are actually very fond of. They remind me of when Nancy was pregnant and couldn’t handle cooking smells. We ate a lot out of our microwave back then, too. :o)

Another bit of convenience we acquired because of the stove going out was an electric kettle. This is something I have always wanted, but could never quite bring myself to spend the money.

Now I don’t know how I ever lived without one. The water boils so fast and cleanup is dead easy. Bloody fantastic.

Sorry for going a bit Brit on you. Electric kettles remind me of our trip to the UK a few years ago. I’m pretty sure we had a kettle in every B&B we stayed.

Of course, being without certainly makes one appreciate things. I’m looking forward to making egg sandwiches for breakfast tomorrow. I might need to go get some bacon. Mmm…bacon.

But while we’re on the subject of easy meals, I have to mention what I ate while I was in Virginia on business.

I was lucky enough to visit friends in Richmond while I was there. They had me over to their house and we noshed on hot dips and chips for dinner.

I love hot dips. I used to make a parmesan artichoke dip for parties all the time. I have a hard time making it very often any more because it’s mostly mayonnaise. I can eat an whole recipe of it on my own and I really have a hard time justifying eating an entire cup of mayo at a sitting.

At our friends’ house, there was a very tasty spinach-artichoke dip and pita chips. This version had significantly less mayo and thus was (thankfully) not guilt-inducing. I got a lot of veggies that way!

And then there was my favorite…a simple layered dip of cream cheese, refried beans and shredded cheese.

I couldn’t stop eating it. It was so good. The beans were really well flavored (I think they were the Whole Foods store brand). And the best part? All you have to do is open packages, spread out the layers, and bake until bubbly. Now if that isn’t a great emergency party dish, I don’t know what is! Serve it with the scoop Fritos and you will not be able to pry people away from the dish until it is empty. I hurt myself on that stuff.

Alternately, you could use a can of chili instead of the refrieds. An old friend of mine used to do a quick dip that was cream cheese and chili. Put it in a bowl, get it hot in the microwave and you’re done.

Which brings us full circle, doesn’t it? We’re back at the microwave.

I wouldn’t want to use it as my main cooking appliance all the time. But it sure does come in handy sometimes.

Necessity: The Mother of the Crock Pot (or Thank God for Easy Mac)

2011-09-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

This week we brought out the crock pot out of sheer desperation. You see, our stove decided to start crackling at us while we were baking a pizza last weekend, so we had to plan to do without it for a while.

Yes, we’ve called for repair, but the warranty company we have a policy through has turned out to be less than responsive. Combine that with a very hectic week at work, and suffice it to say I’m glad we have a crock pot and a microwave.

So we broke out the America’s Test Kitchen book again, this time to make some shredded beef filling for tacos or burritos.

Three pounds of chuck roast, some chili powder, a couple of onions and 9-11 hours yielded us some mighty tasty filling.

One interesting thing about this recipe is that it had me sweat the onions and garlic (along with the chili powder, cumin and coriander and a little vegetable oil) in the microwave for 5 minutes.

What did this do for the recipe? Well, it gave the flavor development a bit of a head start. It also created a little bit of liquid so that the meat ended up covered in this paste of aromatics and spice. It made the house smell wonderful!!

It definitely needed some salt and pepper. I didn’t season the meat very well. I was in a hurry and didn’t want to deal with proper sanitation, so I skipped the salt and pepper on the meat. I won’t make that mistake again.

So this is winner number two from Slow Cooker Revolution.

Once I added a little salt, the meat had great flavor. The chili powder I used was nice and smoky and the cumin added some smoke and zing as well. The finish of a squeeze of lime gave it the bright balance it needed.

We ate it in bowls with tortilla chips, some black bean and corn salsa, shredded cheese and some sour cream.

I think this would make a killer Mexican lasagna filling. Layers of the meat, lots of melty cheese and some good fresh tortillas. Oh yeah, baby. All I’d need is a shot of tequila and a wedge of lime to top it off.

To keep things lively, we also used our microwave a lot. Like I said in the title, thank god for Easy Mac. Little cups of mac and cheese that you cook in the microwave. G really likes them and it makes for easy cleanup as well. And hot dogs cook really well in the microwave, too. Round it out with some frozen veg and G was a happy camper for the whole week.

If I really think about it, we don’t really use our stove much during the week even when it’s working. Between the crock pot and the microwave, we don’t really have to.

Thanks for stopping by! Next week I’ll be traveling for business and will be dining with friends, so that installment will probably make its appearance on Saturday.

Have a great week and a fun Labor Day Weekend!

Summers Bounty, continued....

2011-08-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

We love going to open air markets in the summer and have done so much more this year than any other.

G likes to look at all the people and listen to the buskers. We love looking at all the fresh flowers and fruits and vegetables. And eating crepes and cupcakes and other yummies.

What always surprises me (though I don’t really know why I find it surprising) are the other food vendors, particularly the folks selling eggs and meat.

At the Edmonds Market we have seen people selling pork, beef and lamb, chicken eggs, duck eggs, butter and cheese. While we have yet to be brave enough to buy meat from one of them, we have gotten eggs before. Nothing tastes quite like fresh eggs. I never thought there was a difference until I had one. It just tasted more ‘eggy’. More flavorful.

And then there’s the butter. A local dairy called Golden Glen Creamery makes delicious butter. We had discovered their plain salted butter a couple of years ago. There is another product where you can really taste the freshness. I could have eaten the butter straight out of the tub.

Then they came out with flavored butters. I’d seen them at Metropolitan Market, but had never tried them. And the last time we went to the Edmonds Market, they were there with their cheeses and their butters. Garlic and sea salt butter, Cinnamon Spice butter, dill butter…I think they even have a butter that has orange and chocolate in it. That, my friends, is true decadence.

Speaking of decadence, we recently picked up some product from Pasteria Lucchese. They sell fresh pastas and sauces as well as some desserts, all of which are made the day before market. They get up early in the morning and work until late at night making their delightful wares.

We couldn’t resist the Wild Boar Plin, a kind of ravioli-like pasta filled with a mixture of meat, tomato herbs and spices. We also couldn’t resist a sauce they make…I think it’s called norcina. It’s a cream sauce whose major flavor components are pork sausage, mushrooms and black truffle salt.

I took a whiff of that sauce and my eyes rolled back into my head. It smelled so GOOD. It was the earthy scent of truffle that won me over. I had to have it. Along with some spinach tagliatelle to eat it on.

That sauce still makes me a little teary thinking about it. The freshness of the cream, the delicate seasoning in the pork, the amazing dark richness of the mushroom and truffle.

The real beauty of it all was that from freezer to plate it took only about 8 minutes. Three minutes to boil the pasta and the other five to toss it in the warm sauce, plate it and pour the wine.

So, Seattle area foodies, if you go to Edmonds or Ballard Farmers’ Market, look for Pasteria Lucchese. Heck, look for them at other markets, too. Those are the two I know for sure where they sell.

Too bad the outdoor markets are only in the summer, huh?

The Bounty of Summer - The Elusive Apricot

2011-08-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

Today was a beautiful summer day. The chilly marine layer of the morning burned off and revealed a hot, sunny afternoon. I passed a thermometer on the way home that said it was 82 degrees. In a car with no air conditioning, that’s hot. :o)

I had a little time, so I stopped at the Juanita Friday Market, one of the many outdoor farmers’ markets in the area. It’s small compared to the Edmonds Market or even the Lake Forest Park Market, but, thankfully, I was still able to find what I was looking for. Something I had been chasing for weeks.

Summer has always been and will always be synonymous with jam in my world. Summers growing up were filled with steaming jars, soup pots full of bubbling fruit and sugar and pectin, the distinctive POP of the tops sealing over the jewel-toned containers of jelly and jam.

A couple of years ago when I first attempted making jam myself, I made strawberry, apricot and raspberry. I decided at the time not to do blackberry because I was to lazy to deal with the seeds and most people get annoyed with jam that is full of seeds.

That year, my favorite was the apricot. It had turned out so good. Perfect balance of tart and sweet. Just delicious. It was, of course, the first thing we ran out of. Besides, it was my mother-in-law’s favorite. So I wanted to make sure I made some again this year.

But I seemed to be just missing the apricots. The first week we went to the Edmonds market, there were some there, but I knew I only had time for one fruit that weekend and it was the end of strawberry season.

The last time we went, there were no apricots. There were plenty of peaches which were not quite ready for jam making. But I thought maybe I was make peach instead of apricot. I’d go back in two weeks, when the vendor said the peaches would be right for jam.

I thought I had somehow missed the apricots this year. The growing seasons are so screwy because of our very cool spring and our lagging summer. So I resigned myself to go without apricot jam.

Then I went to the Kirkland Market this past Wednesday and saw them. Only one of the vendors had apricots, but she had them. With my dumb luck, however, I couldn’t actually buy them because they weren’t scheduled to open for another 45 minutes and I had to get back to work!

At that point I was determined. There were still apricots to be had and I was going to get them.

On the way to pick up G-man from daycare in the evenings, I would pass Juanita Beach Park. On Friday nights I would see the tents of the Juanita Friday Market. So today I decided to make a quick stop in to see if anyone happened to have apricots.

Lo and behold! One fruit vendor had apricots!!! And because it’s the end of the season, he was pretty desperate to get rid of them. After just missing the yummy little darlings for weeks, now I could get them for a dollar a pound if I wanted to buy a 22 pound box!

Let me tell you, it was tempting. But that’s like 9 or 10 batches of jam. There’s no way I have the time or the energy to make all that jam. So I settled for what was still a pretty good deal on six pounds and left it at that.

They tried to elude me, but I was triumphant!!

So I have enough ‘cots to make a couple of batches of jam and I got a flat of blackberries to boot! So it’s more jam making for me this weekend!

I can’t wait!!!

Summer, I love summer, give me that summertime!

2011-08-12T20:27:00.001-07:00

I can’t believe it’s been three weeks since I posted last. In that time, I must have cooked a ton, right?

Well, no. Schedules have been incredibly weird and there have been lots of out-of-town visitors, so it’s been hard to get some quality keyboard time.

That’s not to say we didn’t get some good cooking done. Just not the regular stuff.

We did have a crock pot adventure last week. Pulled pork. Which is really not new. We’d tried a pulled pork recipe a while back that was really pretty underwhelming. But we recently purchased Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen, the folks who bring you Cook’s Illustrated magazine.

I have really enjoyed reading this cookbook, mostly because at the beginning of every recipe is a paragraph called “Why this recipe works.”

The folks at the test kitchen did a major electrical overhaul so they could have racks upon racks of slow cookers so they could test and perfect meals for that appliance that is the savior of most suburban families. Bottom line: I trust them. And I also find them entertaining.

I won’t print the recipe here because it’s a new book and I don’t want to wake up and find a cease and desist in my inbox. But I will share some of their pointers.

First: you need a dry rub so you can start your flavor layering. Before you rub your pork shoulder, cut the roast into four sections and then put the dry rub on all sides of all four pieces, letting them sit a minimum of 8 but up to 24 hours.

Then all you have to do is put it in your slow cooker with a cup of your favorite barbecue sauce and cook it for 9-11 hours on low.

When the time is up, shred the pork, skim the fat off the sauce, combine the shredded meat with the pot sauce, adjust for seasonings (salt, pepper, vinegar and sugar). If I ever do this for a party, I'm making it a day or two ahead of time so I can put the sauce in the fridge and let the fat solidify on top. I hate skimming. I get impatient.

Et voila! Some pretty kick-ass pulled pork.

The dry rub is in the recipe. We used a rub that was made by our local market to make it easy. I discovered that I like my bbq on the tart side, adding more apple cider vinegar than I thought I would.

That’s what I loved most about this recipe. Once their part of it was done, they instructed the cook to adjust the flavors to their own preference.

Barbecue is a very personal, very regional thing. Some like it with more vinegar, some with more sugar, some with tomato, some with smoke. They didn’t mention liquid smoke, but if you like your barbecue smoky, you could certainly use a hickory or mesquite sauce or just put a drop or two of liquid smoke in there.

I love that they had the respect and knowledge to understand the personal nature of barbecue and put the reins in the hands of the cooks to finish the dish as they wished.

In other news, we’ve visited the Edmonds Farmer’s Market a couple of times in the last few weeks. One week we met friends and we bought a half flat of strawberries, which I promptly turned in to freezer jam, 16 half-pints worth.

Last weekend, we went again and spent a little more time just poking around and shopping. We got two bunches of gorgeous basil, which I turned into pesto. That also went into the freezer, 4 half-cup containers. Then we ate two this week. Half our efforts gone in the blink of an eye.

If we want pesto this winter, I think we’re going to have to get more basil. And I think we’re going to have to put it in the deep freeze in the basement so it’s not so easy to get to. Right now, it’s just too tempting.

We’re also thinking about going back to veggie bin delivery. G is getting more interested in veggies. And, frankly, we would eat more of them if they were delivered to us. So there may be a host of chard and kale recipes in our future, dear readers.

Thanks for stopping by. And thanks to everyone who's let me know they're reading. It's great to know you're there! Extra points for anyone who can identify the source of this week's title. (Hint: they're song lyrics)

Have a great weekend and I’ll see you next Friday!

Tales from a Saucy Wench

2011-07-22T19:53:00.000-07:00

This week was a little challenging, food-wise. Last weekend, N and I both got sick. Thankfully, I didn’t get as sick as she did, so I didn’t have as far to recover.

Since her tummy was touchy and her appetite sparse, we were kind of limited to what sounded good to her. So we had grocery store fried chicken and boxed mac and cheese a couple of nights. G loved it. :o) And guiltily, so did I.

But finally, mid-week, she decided that spaghetti sounded good. So I decided to break out the family red sauce recipe, but make it in the crock put instead.

Now, before you get too excited, my family is not Italian. This is not a from scratch kind of recipe. This is a middle-American, doctored up kind of recipe. Which makes it great for the crock pot!

The Family Sauce Recipe
(or at least one version of it)

1 jar spaghetti sauce (Dad always used Ragu. This time I used Barilla Tomato & Basil)
1 14-oz can tomato sauce
a few dashes garlic powder
a few dashes onion powder
a small palm-ful of Italian seasoning (about ½ - 1 tsp)
1 lb ground beef, browned and drained of fat

Put all that in a crock pot; set it on low and let it cook till you come home. Boil one pound of spaghetti according to the package directions. Serve with grated parmesan cheese (lots! And from a can, of course).

Okay, so the ‘original recipe’ just gets simmered for an hour or two on the stove. But that was in the days when I started the sauce when I got home from school at 2 in the afternoon and dinner wasn’t until 5 or 6pm.

Other versions used a couple of small cans of tomato sauce plus a can of tomato paste. Usually there was a pint or so of ‘starter’ in the freezer (leftovers from the last time we had spaghetti) which, once thawed, dictated what we would add to the mix. There were also occasions where the protein addition was bulk pork sausage.

This time, since I’d seen several recipes for spaghetti sauce in my crock pot cookbooks, I decided, why not give this a shot?

And you know what? It turned out pretty good. I also added a package of Lawry’s spaghetti sauce seasoning mix, which I won’t do next time. The sauce was a little too salty for my taste and I think the packet was to blame.

But otherwise the sauce was rich, dark and flavorful.

And it was gone in two nights. We both have our appetites back now! :o)

Next time I want to add some red, orange, and/or yellow bell peppers and a good splash or three of red wine. And maybe some of my rosemary olive oil.

There was only one thing missing from dinner to make it perfect. Okay, really two things. A glass of red wine (all we have in the house is Pinot Grigio. It’s tasty, but not that exciting with a red sauce) and a big hunk of garlic bread to sop up the sauce.

Ah…memories.

Summer Vacation eating at home

2011-07-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

The inception of this blog was prompted by a vacation to Las Vegas and the amazing food we had there.

Now, while we didn’t travel anywhere for our week of vacation this summer, that doesn’t mean we couldn’t or didn’t find a way to have some great culinary adventures in our own home town.

We started planning weeks ago to have lunch in places we couldn’t conveniently go with the Sprout in tow. We looked at food trucks, restaurants, sandwich places, anywhere we’d heard about but never been.

So in between working on shelving for our basement, we went out for lunch and had some great food.

The week began with lunch on Capital Hill in Seattle at Skillet Diner, the stationary location spawned by Skillet Street Food’s food truck. We’d had their food a few years ago at a Rat City Roller Girls bout at Magnuson Park. We’d seen them recently on a show called Eat Street, a show in the Cooking Channel devoted to food trucks all over the US. That’s where we learned about the Bacon Jam.

Bacon jam? Why, yes. Bacon jam.

Technically the jar says Bacon Spread. But they call it Bacon Jam. And we have a jar in our fridge waiting to be unleashed.

It was on the burger that day. Fresh, local beef, fresh baked roll from Macrina Bakery, gorgonzola, Bacon Jam and arugula. For an extra few bucks, you can upgrade your fries to poutine (fries with gravy and cheese).

This was the place that had been hyped the most, so I suppose it stands to reason it would fall the farthest in our estimation.

It wasn’t bad. The food was good. We could taste that the beef was fresh in our burger, but we didn’t expect the burger to be dry, which it was. The arugula was wonderfully peppery, which means it probably came from a small, organic farm. Most of the time if I have arugula at a restaurant, it doesn’t have the flavor I’m expecting. This bunch of greens did. The gorgonzola was tangy, the Bacon Jam smoky and sweet, the roll light and chewy.

It was a good burger. It wasn’t a great burger. And we were expecting a great burger.

The poutine was also very tasty. I wish I had been hungrier, because I thought it was delicious. I would have liked a little more gravy because I like my poutine a little wetter, but it was very good. For those Canadians reading, the cheese was cheddar and the brown gravy brightened with herbs. Not quite traditional, but a nice homage to the original.

My favorite part of the lunch ended up being my milkshake. I had a chocolate peanut butter, N had a chocolate malt. Both were generously endowed with the additional flavor. Since the shakes came well before our food, it was difficult not to down the whole drink before we even saw our burgers and fries. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have enough room for burger and poutine. :o)

All in all, it wasn’t a bad experience, but the food sat in our stomachs like rocks the rest of the afternoon and we had a hard time getting past the fact that our burgers were dry. For a patty that was supposed to be medium-rare, it was surprisingly devoid of juiciness and was barely pink.

Leaving Skillet hanging on the wall, the next day we went to another place we’d been anxious to try. This place had been recommended by a friend who’d recently dined there while in town from Utah (Hi, Jen!).

Tuesday, we went to Boom Noodle for lunch. After the heaviness of burgers and fries, we were craving some ramen. And we were not disappointed!

N had their miso ramen. I had their tonkotsu ramen (a slight misnomer because there wasn’t an actual fried pork cutlet involved). The miso ramen pleased the expert (N puts it on her list of comfort foods…if she liked it, it must be good). She would have liked the broth to be a little stronger, but that’s her personal preference. She said it was a lovely bowl of soup (to which she added a soft boiled egg, another level of comfort food).

The tonkatsu ramen was flat out the best bowl of soup I have ever had in my life. The broth defies description, but I’ll try anyway.

It’s a pork broth, simmered for 24 hours, bones and all. It’s rich and creamy (and by creamy, I mean it looks like it has cream in it, but it doesn’t), full of pork flavor. You could tell they used marrow bones, because the broth had that distinct, marrow-y flavor.

In the soup were some wonderful bits of roast pork, perfectly cooked noodles, soft boiled egg, green onion and pickled ginger. The pork had crispy bits on the edges and was delightfully tender inside. There were a couple of fatty pieces that I had to pick apart just because I have a weird issue with fresh pork fat (I have since I was a kid…I don’t get it…it makes me nauseous…maybe it’s a texture thing), but like N’s thing with the miso broth, it is a personal thing. It’s not anything to do with the quality of the food.

This soup was, in a word, heavenly. I felt transported by this dish. Like I told N, you can’t fake time. Not when it comes to broth like that.

We both had their yuzu lemonade to drink, which had a refreshing tartness to it thanks to some umeboshi plum. And we had a side of their kim chi, which was a little heavy on the sesame, but was delicious nonetheless.

Wednesday we ended up eating in because we had a sick little boy on our hands. Leftovers were our friend that day. But Thursday G went back to daycare, so we went to a local taqueria we’d been wanting to try for a long time.

It had been recommended by a friend at work whose brother used to go there all the time when he was working in the area. It also had location on its side. We felt like we were on borrowed time because we weren’t 100% sure our little boy was all better and we really wanted to get work in our basement finished. At least the work that required both of us that couldn’t really be done while he was at home napping.

Taqueria El Sabor is in Shoreline, just about 20 blocks from where we live. It is the real thing, authentic Mexican food. Their painted windows advertise current specials, including menudo (tripe soup) and pozole (pork and hominy stew).

We weren’t adventurous enough to try the soup, but N had the enchiladas mexicanas with chicken and I had the chile verde.

It was refreshing to get Mexican food that didn’t have a thick layer of melted cheddar cheese covering it. My food had no cheese at all, N’s had some cotija sprinkled over the enchiladas, which were only lightly sauced, not drowning.

We didn’t talk much, we just tucked into our lunches. My chile verde featured bits of pork shoulder braised in the sauce, which was to be eaten with their fresh, handmade corn tortillas.

It was delicious, homey food, not fussy. And not too much food like at most Americanized Mexican chain restaurants.

We will definitely be eating there again. I want to try their tacos! Not sure if I’m brave enough to try tacos de lengua (tongue). But I will be all over the carnitas!

Today, we were planning to go for either another burger experience or to get Cuban sandwiches, but since our boy was home sick again today, we had to change those plans a bit.

However, since his schedule was out of whack from sleeping until 8:30 (when his usual wakeup time is around 6:30), we decided to take in the first day of the Bite of Seattle, visiting The Alley (formerly Hinterberger’s Alley), where you get bites from seven restaurants for $10. It’s now being hosted by local restauranteur Tom Douglas, who features one of his restaurants each day of the Bite.

Today, the menu was:
Seatown – grilled flatiron steak with a blueberry corn relish (sliced and served by Tom Douglas himself. Delicious, and the chef looked like he was having a great time)
Seattle’s Little Italy – grilled Italian sausage with onions and peppers (yummy, moist homemade sausage, really nice people)
Gordon’s on Blueberry Hill – Watermelon salad with feta cheese, seared tiger prawn and a rhubarb lavender vinaigrette. (phenomenal. Loved drinking the vinaigrette after I ate the salad. I got a really great hit of lavender that made all the other flavors bloom in my mouth.)
Andaluca – Spicy calamari on bruschetta (very yummy, and that’s saying a lot because I don’t really care for squid. The calamari was tender, not overcooked and chewy. And their Chef Wayne Johnson is going to be on Iron Chef America on July 31st!)
Purple Café - Shaved beef sliders with caramelized onions and horseradish mustard on a pretzel bun (not terribly innovative, but well executed and mouth-watering. The food was not overly seasoned, so the salt on the bun didn’t make the dish too salty.)
Din Tai Fung – Vietnamese steamed pork dumplings filled with soup (yes, a soup filled dumpling. Popped in the mouth, the savoriness explodes. Delightful!)
PinkaBella Cupcakes – Triple Chocolate Cupcake (a lovely little morsel of chocolate, the cake was a little dry, but saved by the chocolate chips inside, the ganache on top was gooey and wonderful)

This has always been my favorite way to experience The Bite of Seattle. It has become an increasingly good deal. The price was $10 when I went the last time, which was probably 15 years ago and it’s still $10 today. And now, if you want, you can go sit in the wine tasting section, pay an additional $15 and get wines that were picked to go with the food on your plate. We didn’t do that this time, but we might next year.

N and I talked about making this an annual thing…taking the Friday of The Bite off work so we can go and do The Alley and not have to deal with the weekend crowds. She’d never gone to The Alley and really enjoyed it. I love it because you get a lot of tastes for your money, the money goes to a local charity (Food Lifeline) and it’s a lot mellower than the rest of the event.

It was also a lot of fun today because we shared a table with a couple from Arizona who visit Seattle frequently and claim to eat their way through town every time they come. The first time they ever went to the Bite, it was still at Greenlake. And there was a single woman at the table who has been to the Bite every year since it started. She said it was still fun, even after all those years.

So, our vacation is at an end. We have the weekend and then we’re back at work. But the fun isn’t over quite yet. We’re planning to get milkshakes from Molly Moon’s tomorrow. I’m going for the salted caramel, because the first sip always sets my eyes rolling back deliriously at the sweet, salty, fresh cream taste of it.

Who needs to leave town to have a great summer vacation?

Slow Cooking: Moroccan Style

2011-07-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

Just so you know, I have the theme from Love: American Style going through my head right now. I thought I should share, if for no other reason than to see who actually remembers that show. Besides my sister, that is. ;o)

But on to the food!

This week we tried a Moroccan chicken stew. It started out in the recipe book as Moroccan Beef Stew, but after the summer fruit attack from the previous week, I wasn’t sure I was ready for beef quite yet.

The recipe is from a Prevention Guide cookbook we got at the grocery store. The same book that gave us the beef carnitas we love so much.

Moroccan Chicken Stew
Adapted from the Prevention Guide Cookbook

6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
4 parsnips, diced
4 carrots, diced
2 small onions, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp cumin seed
2 tsp coriander seed
1 cinnamon stick
½ tsp cracked peppercorns
1 can diced tomatoes, 28 oz.
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 cup beef broth
½ cup dry red wine
2 tbsp flour
1 tbsp lemon juice
½ tsp ground red pepper (cayenne)

In a large, dry non-stick skillet, toast the cumin and coriander seeds until fragrant. Grind the toasted spices and put into crock pot.
Spray the skillet with cooking spray, then brown the chicken thighs on all sides. Add to crock pot.
Spray the skillet again with cooking spray, then sauté the vegetables until slightly soft. Add the tomatoes, broth, wine, tomato paste and flour. Bring to a boil and let thicken slightly. Add to crock pot. Stir to combine. Tuck the cinnamon stick in the crock.
Cook in crock pot on Low for 8 hours.
Turn heat to Warm, then add lemon juice and cayenne. Serve within 4 hours. Serves 6.

Done reading the recipe? Good. Think I did all of that? HAHAHA!!! NO! Of course not! It’s me we’re talking, remember? :o)

You know me; my ‘method’ was to toss it all in the crock pot, set it to Low and let it cook while I was at work. Turn it down to Keep Warm when I get home, add the lemon and cayenne (only ¼ tsp for me. ½ tsp just seemed like too much). Much easier and way less time consuming!

So how did it turn out? It was pretty darn delicious, actually. Even without the beef broth (I used water instead). It was the only thing I’d forgotten about. I’d purchased all the ingredients two weeks before, but then couldn’t face spicy food that week, so the chicken went in the freezer and the veg stayed in the crisper drawer until I thought I could handle it. Thankfully everything held up well in the fridge.

The only thing I was really skeptical about what whether the flour would actually thicken the sauce at all. It wasn’t going to ever truly boil, so I didn’t think it would make a difference.

I was wrong.

It gave the sauce enough body to make it really feel like a stew rather than a hearty soup.

Do you have to toast the spices, brown the meat and simmer the sauce? No. Would it taste better if you did? Most assuredly. I would love to try this again sometime when I have the time and energy to follow the instructions as well as the ingredients.

It was very tasty using my slap-dash method. It would be that much more yummy if I took the time to build and layer the flavors. Browned and toasty bits are my favorite part of just about anything. I love eating the cracklings from the fry pan after I fry bacon. Mmmm…bacon.

By the way, this stuff was just crying out for a loaf of crusty bread to go with it. We ate it with a nice spelt bread, which was surprisingly good. The bread was a little sweet and had a thin spread of butter on top. And of course everything is better with butter.

Oh, and this? Is only 4 PointsPlus on the Weight Watchers program. Which is great because I had a horrible case of the munchies all week. :o)

Not sure what’s in store for us this week. We’re on vacation, so we would probably have more time to cook, but we’re cleaning the basement, so we probably won’t have the energy. Maybe something new!

Thanks for dropping by, y’all! Have a great week and I’ll see you next Friday!

The Great Cherry Debacle

2011-07-02T20:22:00.001-07:00

This week there will be no new crock pot recipe, nor will there be a fabulously quick and easy soup or skillet recipe.

You might ask, “Why?”

And, of course, that is the subject of this week’s entry.

Nothing is more hedonistic in the summer than diving into the bounty of local summer fruits. We have, in Washington State, on both sides of the mountains, orchards and fields full of gorgeous examples of glorious summer eating.

In the Puyallup Valley there are berry fields and cherry orchards (not to be confused with The Cherry Orchard, which is a play). I remember as a kid going to the u-pick farms in the valley to pick strawberries and to the Duris Farm to pick cherries.

Back then, we would, every once in a while, sneak a snack straight from the berry bushes. Not so much the cherry trees, because we were mostly picking sour pie cherries. I love tart, but that’s a bit much for me.

I remember taking a berry from the stem, wiping the dirt off with my hand and popping the sweet treasure in my mouth, the berry still warm from the sun. That’s a moment that, even as a kid, makes you close your eyes because you know it’s something divine and transcendent.

Did I ever get sick from doing that? Not once.

This week, however, I’ve been nursing my cranky tummy back to health after a big mistake the prior week. I ate bing cherries I got from the grocery store without rinsing them off first. (I know…I can hear you all now…I have learned my lesson…trust me.)

I really wasn’t sure what was causing my gastric distress. A virus maybe? Or a food allergy? I had been consuming more dairy and wheat on a regular basis. I’d had some high fat content ice cream recently…could be gallbladder. Or IBS. I’d eaten some raw scallion with the carnitas and hadn’t had raw onion in a long time.

The internet was no help in diagnosing my problem, but it did give me a lot to ponder while I burped and farted.

I spent about 5 or 6 days with the worst gas cramps imaginable. I was certain there was something seriously wrong. But I had a doctor’s visit scheduled for this past Wednesday, and I seemed to be gradually improving every day. So I decided to stick it out.

When I described my symptoms to my doctor, she looked at me and said, “Food poisoning, probably from unwashed fruit.” As I thought back to the previous week, I remembered having just a few of those cherries before I washed them.

I shook my head. What an idiot. I never do that! I always wash stuff I get from the grocery store before I eat it. What was I thinking??

Well, I was thinking about the summers when I was a kid getting berries from the small local farms where I picked the fruit myself. I wanted to be a kid again and live a little dangerously. But my over 40-year-old stomach wasn’t having any of that adventure.

So, the moral of the story? Wash your fruit. And you can’t go home again.

Look! Two morals for the price of one. :o)

At least it’s finally summer fruit season around here. The local strawberries are in. Which means I need to hit a farmers’ market and then make some jam!!

Next week, I’m hoping to make some Moroccan crock pot chicken. I think my tummy is up for the spices now.

Happy Independence Day to all! Enjoy your summer favorites this weekend. And remember, we continue to fight so that everyone in the US has the same freedoms!

Summer is Repeat Season - Part 2

2011-06-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

Back to the Crock

Yes, Ladies and Gents, we’re back to the crock pot this week. Frankly, I was hoping by now that the weather would be warm enough that I didn’t look forward to something hot and comforting. But as those of you who are with me here in the Pacific Northwest know, it’s been a dismal Spring. The first day of Summer was gorgeous and warm, but it’s been drizzly and rainy ever since.

But enough about the weather.

Dinner this week was a repeat of one of our first endeavours, Beef Carnitas.

And since I didn’t actually put the whole recipe down last time, here it is.

Beef Carnitas
From the PreventionGuide Slow Cooker Recipe Book

2lb lean beef stew meat, cut into ½ inch pieces
¾ cup mild salsa
2 tbsp chopped chipotle peppers in adobo
½ tsp salt
1/8 tsp ground black pepper
1 cup beef broth or water

Combine all ingredients in large slow cooker. Cover. Cook on low 6-8 hours.
Serve with warm tortillas, sliced avocado, shredded cheese and chopped onion.
Yield – 6 servings

So I went back to the last time I mentioned this recipe and noticed that I mentioned something about adding cumin and chili powder. If I did that last time, it was my idea, because this recipe doesn’t have those things in it. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt it any. It would give the flavors some nice depth and a little smokiness. So by all means, if you try this, experiment with a little of each.

Now, since we’re doing Weight Watchers and tortillas can cost you some serious points, we decided to do Carnitas Bowls. Some brown rice instead of a tortilla, some diced avocado tossed in lime juice, salt and pepper, some fat free shredded cheddar, fat free sour cream and a little taco sauce and chopped green onion later, we were very happy with our bowls of colorful, tasty goodness!

I would, of course, never make this with water. Use broth. You will thank yourself for the added richness.
I also added some extra chipotle because I love the flavor. It’s easy to overdo it, though, so be careful!

This recipe was from the book that got us started on this crock pot rollercoaster ride. And this week of carnitas reminded me why we kept going. The recipes we’d tried were bursting with deliciousness!

There are still several I want to try from this book, like the Turkey, Sweet Potato & Cranberry Stew, but they’ll have to wait until later. I just can’t face a recipe like that in the summer. If we ever get summer, that is. Until we do, I don’t want to tempt fate by making an autumnal meal.

The Moroccan Spiced Beef, however, is something I am willing to take a chance on now! Lots of chopping for that, though, so it may have to wait until I have a less busy weekend!

Thanks for reading, everyone! Happy Pride Weekend!!
See you next Friday!

Going Crockless Again

2011-06-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

It’s good to be back again after a week away. My commitment to do this every Friday was challenged last week because my singing group got an amazing opportunity, as most, if not all of you, already know. But I have to admit, when things calmed down, I really missed the time I would have spent at the keyboard.

So this week, because last weekend was so crazy and we didn’t have a lot of time to plan, we went crockless.

Why, you might ask, did we do that if we were so tired?

Well, we had about a half a rotisserie chicken in the fridge that needed to be used and we had bags of mixed veg in the freezer. In this house, that can only mean one thing.

Chicken soup.

Before I started living with N, this idea had never occurred to me, but it is, to my mind, brilliant. She’s the one who turned me on to this quickest and easiest of nearly homemade chicken soups.

The ‘recipe’ I’m going to write in is simply the proportions we used this week, but you can fiddle around with it until you find your preferred ratio of chicken to veg to broth.

Quick and Easy Chicken Soup

½ a leftover grocery store rotisserie chicken, meat stripped from the carcass (no skin…it gets slimy and gross in the pot)
1 16 oz bag of frozen mixed vegetables
1 32oz box of chicken stock, preferably reduced sodium
dehydrated sliced garlic
mixed dried herbs (such as Italian seasoning or herbes de Provence)

Combine ingredients in a soup pot. Bring to boil. Simmer 20-30 minutes. Enjoy. Serves 4.

I know you’re thinking, “Really? That’s it?”

Yes, that’s it. It is so freaking easy and so satisfying. And the real beauty of all that? It’s only 4 WeightWatchers PointsPlus per serving for a pretty decent sized bowl of soup!

You can, of course, do a lot with this basic recipe. Put in your favorite spices. Use different veggies, maybe even fresh ones (although they wouldn’t cook quite as quickly). Add some pasta (like orzo or pastina) or rice. You could even use your own stock. The last time I made this, I only had 2 cups of chicken stock, but I had a bunch of homemade turkey stock in the freezer, so I added that to the pot.

The only really time consuming part is stripping the meat off the carcass, which is maybe a 10 minute job. So yeah…for me, it’s the quickest, easiest pot of chicken soup I’ve ever made.

The chicken was roasted, so it’s already got good flavor. The store-bought stock I use is dark and rich. The dehydrated garlic adds a lovely, toastiness. And the herbes de Provence that I used this time gave it a fresh, floral herbiness.

Not bad for something that took about 30 minutes all told to make!

Next week, we will probably go back to the crock pot, maybe something new. Although, I’ve been craving the crock pot beef carnitas recently. We will just have to see. :o)

If you have any suggestions about something you love that you think we should try, please comment here or on Facebook!

Have a great week, everyone! See you next Friday!

Summer is Repeat Season

2011-06-03T20:05:00.000-07:00

This week we repeated the first recipe we got from the WW site, the chicken, mushroom and brown rice meal, of which I did not post a full recipe. So I thought I would do that this week and then ask you for some feedback.

Chicken, Mushroom and Brown Rice Slow Cooker Dinner

8 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, approx. 2.5 ounces each
2 cups canned chicken broth, reduced sodium
½ pound cremini mushrooms, sliced
1 cup leeks, white and pale green parts only, sliced and rinsed thoroughly for grit
1 cup carrots, sliced thinly
1 cup celery, sliced thinly
¾ cup uncooked brown rice, medium grain (such as brown Arborio)
2 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp dried sage
1 tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper, freshly ground

Coat a large, non-stick skillet with cooking spray. Brown chicken thighs, turning once. Set aside.
Combine remaining ingredients in a 5-6 quart slow cooker. Nestle the chicken thighs on the vegetable mixture. Cover and cook on low for 7 hours. Yields one chicken thigh and approximately 2/3 cup vegetable/rice mixture per serving.

Now that you’ve seen the recipe, let’s get to the modifications.

You probably already know by now that I didn’t brown the thighs. I know it will add flavor. But I don’t want to #1, dirty another pan, and #2, risk the chicken being more overcooked than it already will be because I have to let it cook for 10 hours instead of seven.

That said, after the first time we tried it, N and I both thought it could use a little more flavor. So this time I added an extra tsp of Worcestershire and an extra tsp of Dijon mustard.

Both times I cooked the rice separately in the rice cooker. Since the disaster of the Cuban black beans and rice, I haven’t quite been willing to cook rice in the crock pot again. But as soon as I find some brown Arborio, I will try it. I’m very curious to see how it will turn out.

Adding the rice for about the last 15 minutes before serving gave it a chance to soak up the yummy juices in the pot, but I put in too much broth this time, so it ended up a little soupy. The first time we made it, it actually had a risotto-like consistency which was very satisfying. N and I both LOVE risotto, but it is both time- and calorie-prohibitive. So this was a nice surprise. Next time, less broth.

It was as tasty as we remembered; perhaps a bit more so because of the extra seasonings. But it still needs something. Which is where you come in.

I would love to know what you would add or change to make it more flavorful. I think it needs acid. The flavors are rich and hearty, but it needs some brightness for balance. Lemon? Vinegar? Maybe a little balsamic drizzled over the top at serving? Or a little heat?

Tonight I sprinkled on some of Cajun seasoning that I bought last fall in Portland and amped the flavor up quite nicely. I also thought of the spice rub we got at Central Market last week with its smoked paprika and brown sugar. That might be interesting, too.

So, what do you think? What would you do differently? What would you add or subtract to make it more interesting? Comment here or on Facebook and let me know!

Because there’s no reason why a repeat has to be boring!

Have a great week and I’ll see you back here next Friday!!

Curse you, little turkey balls!

2011-05-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

I’m just going to cut to the chase. This week’s recipe? More work and less payoff than any crock pot recipe so far.

We tried another off the Weight Watchers site and were hoping for the rousing successes of the past two weeks to be repeated. Sadly, this was not the case.

It’s called Greek Meatballs and Artichokes. Sounded interesting enough to me to give it a shot.

My first clue that it wasn’t going to be all I’d hoped for should have been the fact that it called for ground turkey breast. And the only thing to season the meatballs was salt and sage.

And then there was all the extra work before you put the whole thing together in the crock pot.

First you had to form the little one-inch meatballs. Then you had to brown them. Then you put them in the crock pot with new potatoes, frozen artichoke hearts, chicken broth, oregano, salt and pepper and let it cook for 5-6 hours.

This time it didn’t have the opportunity to drastically overcook because Nancy was home sick that day and could turn the pot to ‘keep warm’. Still the meatballs came out dry. Saharan, even.

But before I go any further, let me share the recipe.

1 pound ground turkey breast
¼ tsp ground sage (or more to taste)
½ tsp salt (or more to taste)
8 small new potatoes, scrubbed, unpeeled
9 oz frozen artichoke hearts
½ tsp dried oregano
¼ tsp black pepper
1 cup canned chicken broth
1 tbsp cornstarch
1 tbsp lemon juice

Combine turkey, sage and salt. Shape into 1-inch balls. Add meatballs to skillet and brown on all sides, about 3-5 minutes. Remove and place in a 4-5 quart slow cooker.

Add potatoes, frozen artichoke hearts, oregano, pepper and chicken broth. Cover and cook on high heat 5-6 hours.
About 15 minutes before serving, spoon cornstarch into a cup. Add 1 tbsp of the slow cooker liquid and the lemon juice; stir well. Stir into slow cooker, cover and cook on low heat 15 minutes more. Yields about 1 2/3 cups per serving.

Got that? Cook the meatballs, then put them into the slow cooker and cook them again. Oh, and cook them on HIGH for 5-6 hours. HIGH??? I actually missed that when I read the recipe at the time of execution. I cooked them on LOW for 5-6 hours. AND THE MEATBALLS WERE STILL DRY!!!! I shudder to think what would have happened if I’d cooked them on high.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I even attempted this when it goes against one of my basic rules for perfect crock pot recipes. I had to cook something before I put it in the pot.

Well, I thought it sounded interesting. And a little different. I was feeling a little energetic. I still didn’t have to chop anything. :o)

I can’t say it was a complete failure. It definitely has promise. The potatoes were rather tasty, having cooked in herbed broth for several hours. They were Nancy’s favorite part of the dish. The meatballs were decently flavored as well, even if they were dry. Oh, and did I mention they were dry?

But the lemon and cornstarch? I can only assume that it was meant to approximate an avgolemono sauce. But it didn’t thicken at all. I’m uncertain whether it was from the lack of sufficient temperature or if it was the acid in the lemon juice. But it couldn’t have been the acid…you use cornstarch to thicken the filling for lemon meringue pie. Right?

What would I change next time? Because, yes, after all that bitching, I still might try it again.

Firstly, ground turkey with dark meat in it, so the meat would be moister. Secondly, I probably wouldn’t make it in the crock pot. I’d pan-fry the meatballs, boil the potatoes and artichokes in the broth, put them all together in a pot and try thickening the sauce then. Or take all the solids out of the pot and thicken the sauce on its own.

I’d probably add some sundried tomatoes, too. Nancy suggested chopping them finely and putting them in the meatball, which sounds very yummy indeed. We got crazy and started talking about adding some chopped kalamata olives and stuffing each meatball with a tiny bit if feta. Now that sounds like it would be much more satisfying to the tastebuds. Though not quite as friendly on the points value.

I’m not done trying recipes from the WW site. So far it’s 2-1, which is still a winning record. But next time I think I’ll read a little more carefully before I try one.

Another winner...from Weight Watchers?!

2011-05-20T20:15:00.000-07:00

Remember when Weight Watchers recipes were like this?

For those of you who haven’t busted a gut over the recipe cards from the mid-1970s, you must follow the link above and look at all of them. And then go buy the woman’s book. The pictures are scary and the commentary is some of the most hilarious stuff on the internet.

But now back to the recipes.

I remember when ‘diet food’ was scary. It was nothing to look forward to; it was something to endure until you reached your goal weight. Then when you did reach your goal, you went back to real food with real flavor and gained it all back.

Some of us have discovered over the years of our adulthood that changing the way you eat in order to lose weight can be exciting and flavorful. Like the crock pot recipe we tried this week.

Since we loved last week’s effort so much, we went back to the Weight Watchers site for more. This time I found Jerk Turkey Soup. Looking at the list of spices, I thought we might have another winner here. And this soup was indeed full of win.

I throw caution to the wind this week. If I’m not supposed to share, they’ll send me a cease and desist. Until they do, I’m sharing. :o)

Jerk Turkey Slow Cooker Soup (from Weight Watchers)
¼ tsp allspice
¼ tsp cayenne
½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp garlic powder
½ tsp black pepper, divided
½ tsp salt
1 lb turkey breast, cut into 1 inch chunks
1 clove fresh garlic, minced
1 medium onion, chopped
14.5 oz can diced tomatoes with green chiles
15 oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
2 cups canned chicken broth
1 tbsp fresh lime juice
2 tbsp fresh cilantro, chopped

In medium bowl, combine allspice, cayenne, ginger, garlic powder, ¼ tsp black pepper and salt. Add turkey and toss to coat. Let stand for 15 minutes. (since I usually do all my prep the night before, I tossed the turkey in the spices and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight. The result was worth it.)
Place turkey in crock pot, then add garlic, onion, tomatoes, beans, broth and remaining ¼ tsp pepper. Cook on low setting for 6 to 7 hours. Stir in lime and cilantro, let sit for 5 minutes. Yields about 1 ½ cups per serving. 6 servings.

Sounds yummy, yes? It really was delicious. And for you who know the WW points system, it is only 4 points per serving on the new system! Plenty of room for a nice slice of crusty, Mille Grane bread from Essential Bakery to go with it.

I was so thankful for this soup, not only because it was both light and delicious, but also because the cayenne in it made my throat feel so much better while I was sick this week.

We liked it so much that we’re going to try the spice mixture in our easy chicken soup (meat from one grocery store rotisserie chicken, one bag of frozen mixed veggies, one 32 oz. box of chicken broth…dump in a pot and let simmer for about 30 minutes. Could use some spicing up, right?).

The only real disappointment was that, even though I measured the servings according to the recipe, we only ended up with 5 servings. Maybe there was more evaporation that expected because the soup ended up cooking for 10 hours instead of seven.

So yeah…Weight Watchers has changed. And we’re going back for more. Next week, Greek-style turkey meatballs and artichokes.

Plump thighs and flavorful fungi

2011-05-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

If you read here because you’re my friend on Facebook, then you know Nancy and I started Weight Watchers a little over a week ago. So you may be wondering what this has done to our little crock pot venture.

Let me tell you…we got a great recipe from none other than the Weight Watchers site.

So as not to violate any copyright laws, since you actually have to be a member of their online tools to get to the recipe, I won’t post it here, but I will describe it. If you want the actual recipe, you can email me and we’ll talk.

It was highlighted as a recipe of the week, so I clicked. The title sounded yummy: Chicken, mushroom and brown rice.

The base of the recipe was chicken thighs (which, I have found over the weeks, fare far better than breast meat for all day cooking), leeks, carrots, celery, cremini mushrooms, and brown Arborio rice.

BROWN Arborio rice??? Yes, folks, it exists. I’ve never had it, but I’ve seen it in stores. Sadly, I did not get it for this recipe. We used our rice cooker, cooked the rice in that and added the cooked rice to the crock pot about 30 minutes before we ate. But next time I will be prepared with the requested ingredient because I’m curious about this strange-sounding product.

The seasonings…well, they didn’t get to join the party until late. I was so excited that I’d done all my veggie chopping prep the night before (with my beautiful new knife) that I forgot I needed to measure out the Worcestershire, mustard, sage and salt. So the seasonings only went in about 45 minutes before dinner was ready. Whoops.

Still and all, it was a very tasty dish. The rice cooked in chicken broth, so it was nicely flavored all on its own. And the chicken had a modified mirepoix to help flavor it. The only thing in the recipe that I deliberately didn’t do is brown the chicken before it went into the pot. It’s not necessary for the cooking of the dish, only to help add some flavor. Maybe next time.

The flavors were subtle, but well rounded. I could taste all of the flavors I’d put in to create the end product. It was eight servings, so it lasted the whole week and we didn’t get tired of it. And since it was only 5 points per serving, we got to have a bite of chocolate for dessert every night. :o)

I might add a little extra mustard and Worcestershire next time, just to experiment. It certainly wasn’t bland, but I thought it could use a little more oomph. Perhaps next time I’ll add what the recipe calls for at the beginning of the cooking process and then taste and add a little more if I think it needs it.

This recipe is definitely a keeper. We will be making it again. Soon.

On a related note, I experienced something today that I’ve never experienced before.

Crock pot envy.

One of the gals in my office had made chicken the night before for a pot luck and brought it in her crock pot just to warm it up.

This thing had a timer on it and four temperature settings. You could set the timer for it to cook at one temp, then tell it to switch temps to low or keep warm or whatever for another amount of time.

I mean, I knew they existed, but I’d never actually seen one before with my own eyes.

And when I set eyes on it, I was envious.

That isn’t to say I’m going to go out and buy one tomorrow. We have two perfectly good crock pots here. We’re not going to need one for a long time.

But when we do? We’re getting one with a timer.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week and I’ll see you again next Friday!

Uncrocked!

2011-05-07T20:33:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I mentioned a recipe I grew up eating. Something my mom loved to make in the crock pot for dinners as well as potlucks at work. It’s called Tijuana Sandwiches.

In this frenzy of slow cooking, I finally had a craving for them. So I offered to finally make them for Nancy last weekend.

We went out and did our shopping Sunday morning, getting everything we needed for the recipe. I would get everything prepped and cook it that day because it only takes a couple of hours. It’s not a leave-it-all-day kind of crock pot recipe.

Well, the day kind of got away from me and by the time I got around to prepping, it was too late for them to cook in the crock pot.

So I did a daring thing. I made the recipe in a regular pot on the stove!!

I know…scary, huh?

Since I didn’t actually have the recipe, I had to go looking for it on the internet. Thank goodness for this wealth of information! I found it!!

The Tijuana Sandwich recipe does not fall into my category of perfect crock pot recipes. It requires meat to be cooked beforehand. It requires vegetable chopping. And then it’s pretty easy from there.

Here’s the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens Crockery Cookbook (c. mid-1970s)

3 C chopped cooked beef
1 can (16 oz) refried beans
½ c chopped onion
½ c chopped green pepper
1 small can chopped ripe olives
1 can (8 oz) tomato sauce
¾ c water
1 tsp salt
2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
¼ tsp garlic powder
¼ tsp pepper
¼ tsp paprika
1 dash celery salt
1 dash nutmeg
1 cup crushed corn chips

Put all ingredients except corn chips into crock pot. Cook on high for two hours. Add the crushed corn chips immediately before serving.
Serve with taco shells, lettuce, chopped tomato and shredded cheese. Pass hot pepper sauce.

That’s it. Easy, right?

Of course, if you don’t happen to have three cups of cooked beef hanging around, you have to cook some. My mom always used ground beef. I used ground turkey this time and didn’t notice the difference.

Reading the recipe for the first time in years, it struck me how odd the combination of seasonings always seemed to me. Especially the Worcestershire sauce. And then I saw a bottle of Jarritos tamarind soda and thought it probably wasn’t all that weird. I don’t particularly associate tamarind with south of the border fare; I think of it more in Asian food. But then this isn’t exactly anywhere near authentic Mexican food anyway. :o)

It’s a very middle-American approximation of Mexican food. Especially with the addition of the crushed Fritos.

And you know what? It’s delicious.

It worked very well on the stove top. Instead of cooking for 2 hours in the crock pot, I let it simmer, covered for about 30 minutes or so. Just until the veggies are tender. I let it cook uncovered for about another 15 minutes to let some of the liquid evaporate.

We enjoyed it for four nights, which was awesome! When we ran out of taco shells, we ate it from a bowl with tortilla chips. We think we’ll try it with rice next time we make it.

It’s probably partly a trick of memory that makes me love it so. It’s something I associate very closely with my mom. But then love and memory are sometimes the best seasonings.

In other news, it was my birthday this past Tuesday and I got a culinary related gift from my lovely Nancy. It is the most gorgeous, well-balanced knife I have ever had the privilege to cut with, a Shun Ken Onion 8-inch chef’s knife.

I made stir-fry for dinner tonight so I could use it. That thing sliced through the middle of a head of cabbage like it was a baked potato. It allowed me to slice my still partially frozen boneless pork chops so thin that the meat took maybe two minutes to cook in a hot skillet. I thought I was going to weep, and not because I was chopping onions! It is a thing of beauty.
If you ever want a good knife, consider investing in this one. You really only need a good chef’s knife, a paring knife and a pair of kitchen scissors to do most things. If that’s all you’re buying, you might as well invest in good equipment. You’ll thank yourself or a loved one later.

Back in the Swing

2011-04-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

I thought I’d dip back into the slow cooker this week and bring you up to speed on what we’ve eaten the past couple of weeks.

Most recently I made pot roast. My in-laws were visiting last weekend and they love my pot roast. Usually I just do the roast in the crock pot, but since we were going out and leaving the grandparents to feed both themselves and the G-man dinner while we went to see Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart in concert, I thought it would be best to give them the full experience, potatoes, carrots and all.

Next time? I won’t add mushrooms. Let me ‘splain.

No wait. Is too much. Let me sum up.

I’d decided to go to Trader Joe’s and get the veg since they always have lovely pre-sliced and diced packages of veggies. Like the bagged, sliced crimini mushrooms that are so wonderful.

I got little bags of fingerling potatoes, baby carrots and sliced crimini to go in the pot with the roast. Fabulous! I wouldn’t have to do a thing except open bags and pour them into the pot.

Well, I was reminded why I don’t usually add veggies in the crockpot for this particular roast preparation.

I like the resultant gravy from cooking just the roast with the mushroom soup and onion soup mix. But with the veg, especially the mushrooms, there was just too much added water and the gravy was not only way too thin, but it was bland as well.

The in-laws still appreciated it, but I was a little bummed. It just wasn’t the flavorful deliciousness I’m used to.

The week before, Nancy found a great recipe for us to try. It was titled Chicken Provencal.

Comparing it to some more traditional recipes for the classic stew, it came somewhat close. The chicken, tomatoes, garlic, thyme and basil that are the basis of the dish were there.

The crock pot recipe added yellow and red bell peppers and an onion but did not include any white wine or broth, nor did it have olives, which would certainly have deepened and rounded out the flavors.

The most fascinating thing about this crock pot version was the strips of orange peel which cooked until they practically melted. The lovely floral and citrus flavor was so mellow by the time I found a piece, I couldn’t believe what I was tasting. It was a very pleasant surprise! The traditional recipe calls for lemon, which I think would be equally as tasty and would add a tartness that I was really looking for in this dish.

Nancy and I were so happy to be eating so many vegetables. It was chock full of them!

But next time, I’m adding some olives and using lemon instead of orange peel. It will give me an excuse to get some herbes de provence. And a bottle of white wine (like I need an excuse). It needed the additional flavor!

I’m finding that the all-day-long cooking is robbing my dinners of bold flavors (unless condensed soup of some sort is involved in the cooking process). Hopefully my next new cookbook (which I haven’t purchased quite yet) will help with that. America’s Test Kitchen, the people who bring you Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, has put out a slow cooker cookbook. If you think I’m passing that one up, you are crazy.

Meanwhile, we’ll try something new again this week and perhaps be a little more liberal with the salt shaker, the herbs and the citrus. And I’ll hope that the recipes from America’s Test Kitchen are as simple as I want them to be.

Getting Schooled

2011-04-22T20:32:00.000-07:00

This week, thanks to the quick thinking and generosity of my dear friend, Marty (and a coupon from LivingSocial), I took a cooking class. It was a fun chance to spend some time with Marty and, perhaps, learn a new skill or two.

The class was Italian Home Cooking at Dish It Up, a housewares store with a beautiful teaching kitchen as a focal point. Adjacent to the retail space there is a design shop where you can get help designing your dream kitchen.

They have Viking appliances and cookware, Shun knives…it’s a great place to cook!

The set up of the class is part demo, part hands on. The chef/instructor, the entertaining and skilled Karen Binkhorst, did some demonstration, talked us through some basic knife skills, then had volunteers come up and help with the prep and cooking.

The first order of the evening was to make pasta dough.

We each got an egg and some flour and went to town. It was fascinating…it had been probably nearly twenty years since I’d made fresh pasta. But Chef Karen kept talking about the alchemy of making pasta as we kneaded our dough. The magic moment when you feel the dough turn from rough to silky. Where it has just the right amount of flour, enough so that it doesn’t stick to your hands or the counter anymore, but is not dry, and the action of pushing and turning and folding creates this beautiful, golden, tenderly resilient piece of wonder. And it did.

I am used to bread dough, which you never work to that point. But I could tell the moment my dough started to change. It was indeed a revelation.

Once we were all done with that bit of excitement, we got straight to the appetizers so we could eat something before it got too late.

The antipasti course included roasted eggplant stuffed with herbed goat cheese, fried cauliflower with pine nuts, golden raisins and chile flake, and roasted peppers with olives and capers.

It was fun watching some of the other students who were less familiar with chopping and slicing. Two gals worked on the goat cheese filling for the eggplant, one of them getting busted for licking her fingers after working the herbs into the cheese by hand. To her credit, she did not put her fingers back into the cheese after she licked them.

They both were tentative at first when chopping herbs, but quickly built confidence and did a great job with the chopping and mincing. They looked so excited, like a whole new world was opening up to them.

I got to help strip the roasted peppers of their charred skin, then chop them and put them into a bowl. Chef Karen told a story about her only attempt at roasting peppers on an electric burner (quickest method to roast a pepper is to turn your gas burner on high and put the pepper right on the flame, letting it get black on the outside).

So she and a buddy in the kitchen were trying to roast peppers on an electric stove. If I remember the story right, someone else came into the kitchen and asked who was smoking. It was then they realized that the charring peppers smelled like weed. She never roasted peppers on an electric stove again. :o)

While we ate our antipasti, Chef Karen made the filling for the ravioli. Peas, mint, a bit of salt and pepper. Then we all got up again, some of us to start rolling out our pasta and some to work on making the fennel cream sauce to go with it.

I was proud to pick up a knife and follow her directions to notch out the core on the fennel and cut the bulb in half, putting one half on each of two cutting boards. My knife skills are nothing to write home about, but it was easy to take the top off the fennel, notch out the core and split the bulb with the nicely sharp chef’s knife. I did so with no fear, and with a little excitement to be able to show off what skills I do have for someone who would recognize that I was no stranger to a kitchen.

What made it even more fun was that Marty was at the other station doing the same thing. We got to simultaneously work on two pans of sauce. It was really fun to cook with him! I hope I get to do it again soon!

Once the ravioli were cooked and sauced, we sat down to eat again. So delicious, so fresh. Beautiful for a spring night. And lovely with the wine they poured.

Oh. Did I forget to mention that they were serving wine as well? A white and a red. Which they poured pretty liberally. If your glass was empty, they offered to fill it.

The antipasti was also wonderful, by the way. I’m not usually a fan of either eggplant or cauliflower, but I LOVED both of the dishes! Roasted peppers I liked already, so there was no surprise. But the other two? I would totally make them at home and they were fabulously tasty!

Our final course was the meat course, which consisted of chicken breast with prosciutto and sage. Very classic Italian flavors.

We pounded the chicken fairly flat, laid on a slice of prosciutto and some sage leaves, rolled it, sliced it in ½ inch pieces, skewered it and put it in the oven to bake.

While we waited for them to cook, Chef Karen showed is a neat trick with grape tomatoes. Put a layer of them between two plastic lids (like from a Glad or Ziploc container), take a sharp knife and slice between the lids. Voila! A bunch of halved tomatoes! She talked and made a quick tomato compote which was served with the chicken.

I have to say, this was my least favorite part of the meal. The chicken was overcooked, so it was dry. The fat from the prosciutto wasn’t enough to help. But, they would be great on the grill, so I might have to try the recipe this summer when grilling season finally arrives.

It was such a fun evening! I got to spend time with Marty, which never happens! I got to cook in an amazing kitchen with a lot of fun people and I learned at least one new skill.

I want to go back and take their knife skills classes. Chef Karen teaches them. And I’m going to take my knives there to be sharpened when I’m off work for my birthday. They’re having their monthly knife sharpening event on May 2. Take your knives in and for 3-6 bucks per knife, you get them well sharpened. Pick them up the next day.

Again this week I was reminded that my love of cooking and eating is tied so tightly to my love of my friends and family. It is true that I love to cook. It is more true that I love to do it for and with those I love.

The Harvard Day in Review

2011-04-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

No, you haven’t stumbled on the wrong blog. The title of tonight’s episode is in honor of my dear friend, Sheila, the Harvard graduate, with whom I got to spend a bit of the afternoon. A rare occasion because she lives in San Diego.

Why is this food-worthy? Well, we did meet for lunch. Originally intending to go to Serious Pie, Tom Douglas’s pizza restaurant, as we drove up First Avenue from Pioneer Square, we crept past the Seattle Art Museum and I was reminded of the wonderfully peaceful, tasty meals I’ve had there. So we amended our plans and ate lunch at Taste, the restaurant in the museum.

It was the quiet place we both needed. And the classy comfort food wasn’t bad, either. I had a burger and fries, which were very good, suitably messy, but nothing remarkable. The dipping sauce for the fries, however, I could eat by the gallon. Sheila had their take on grilled cheese and tomato soup, which looked and smelled delicious. According to her the soup was very flavorful and had a good body to it. It was a beautiful, deep red soup with flecks of herbs floating in the broth. The cheese in the sandwich looked wonderfully melty and pulled like it was mozzarella.

I had a nice glass of tempranillo with my burger and then had their Black and Tan ice cream sandwich for dessert. This was the most interesting part of the meal for me. It was an ale ice cream and a stout cookie with an herbaceous sugar syrup drizzled on the plate and a pool of mustard crème anglaise underneath the sandwich.

Mustard crème anglaise? What? Wait a minute. Yep. Those little things are mustard seeds.

The mustard flavor was subtle, but added an amazing dimension to the dish. And there were three little little salty, toothsome crackers in the corner of the plate.

So my dessert? Was beer and pretzels with mustard. Now that’s a creative dessert!

We ran a couple of errands and headed back to Elliott Bay Café where she was helping family and friends prep for a breast cancer fundraiser event tomorrow night.

It was a delightful afternoon topped off by just chatting while we buffed glassware for tomorrow night’s party. I am really looking forward to reading my new book, Tender, Chef Tamara Murphy’s cookbook. It looks beautiful and the recipes I’ve looked at sound delicious!!

Spending the afternoon with Sheila reminded me of a concept that is not new to anyone, but that I think we all forget sometimes. Food is best shared in the company of loved ones. Sitting around a communal table is one of the most pleasurable and intimate things we do as human beings.

It is a place of peace, of ideas, of joy. Even the saddest of occasions is lifted when people gather around to share a meal. It is humbling, it is equalizing. It can be an education, as it has been many times at the tables of my friends. I always learn to like new things when I eat food prepared by my friends.

So thank you, Sheila, for reminding me of one of the reasons I love to eat and cook. Because it is a place and a reason to bring together the people I love and spend quality time with them. Next time you’re in town, karaoke! We will make it happen!!

But I Digress....or A Break from the Slow Cooker

2011-04-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching a lot of food tv lately. Chopped All Stars and Top Chef All Stars have captured my attention and my heart. Sadly, they are both over. For now. But I suspect they will be back.

But watching all of these highly trained, very talented chefs compete, cook, and explore their culinary roots has made me question “Why do I cook?”

Beyond the obvious reason of needing to eat, that is. Because if I didn’t want to cook, I really wouldn’t have to. There are plenty of places where I could get prepared meals either already hot and ready for me, or requiring very little other than a pop in the microwave to call them dinner (or breakfast or lunch). And for a while, I did that. It was hard to find time to cook with such a busy life.

Some have said that is the 83-year-old Jewish woman inside me that makes me not only want to cook, but to feed people. Now, I’m neither 83 nor Jewish, but I do love to feed people. I love to make people happy and watch them enjoy something I’ve taken care and love to make for them.

It’s why I’ve made wedding cakes for family and friends. It’s why I used to do a little small-time catering in college. Why I used to make candy at Christmas time and why I still try to give something yummy and homemade for the holidays today.

The next question that begs to be asked is then, “What or who instilled this love in me?”

That’s an easy answer. My parents. My love of food and cooking and baking is ultimately tied up in them. I think one of the reasons I haven’t cooked as much the last few years is because it was hard to cook without thinking of them and I missed them both terribly. As the years go by and the sting of loss dulls, it has been easier to try to be creative in the kitchen again.

Still, many of the things I really love to make are the things I watched them make when I was a child. The crock pot extravaganza is really sort of a tribute to my mom, who was the Queen of the Crock Pot. She made these things called Tijuana Sandwiches. The recipe called for ground beef, refried beans and seasonings. You let it cook for a few hours and right at the end, you add crumbled Fritos. It was so wrong and yet so delicious.

When I cook fried chicken or chicken livers or when I put Tabasco on my eggs or when I cook biscuits and gravy, that’s when I pay tribute to my dad, the King of Skillet Suppers. He taught me how to make milk gravy (for such applications as the fried chicken, sausage gravy for biscuits or the ever popular shit on a shingle) so long ago I don’t measure anything anymore. I can eyeball how much fat, flour and milk need to be combined with the crispy bits in the pan to make nirvana in a skillet.

Pork tenderloin sandwiches? Mom again. She cooked them all the time when we were kids. I remember when the sight of French’s sandwich rolls would make my mouth water because it meant we were having tenderloin sandwiches for dinner.
What makes them so special, you ask? Perhaps it’s that they’re Iowa soul food. A medallion of pork loin pounded very thin, dipped in flour, egg wash and cracker meal, then fried crisp and served with A-1 (and later, American cheese) on a sandwich roll. I’m whimpering a little right now just thinking about it.

When I eat a dill pickle, I long for my dad’s spicy hot dills along with the pickled pearl onions and pickled garlic cloves in the jar. I’m certain I was a stinky child because of it.

I’m sorry, Mom, but you know I never liked your sweet pickles.

But I did admire the work she put into them. And some days I wish I had gotten one of her pickle crocks even though I would never make a 14-day pickle in it. Fourteen days? Yes. Seven days in the brine. Take the plate off the top, scrape off the mold. Rinse the pickles and put them back in the crock with a hot, spiced sugar syrup. Each day for the next seven, drain the syrup off, bring it to the boil and pour it back over the pickles. On the final day, while the syrup heats, put the pickles into pint jars and then ladle the hot syrup into the pickle jars. Apparently, according to the kids from my high school drama picnic, they’re good dipped in cheese whiz.

So along with sharing crock pot recipes, which I know we will all get bored with after so long, I will be sharing food memories as the mood strikes. One thing I learned about people who have a passion for food in the past several weeks, it is a visceral, soul-deep feeling. And the more often you tap into that place when you’re making food, whether it’s for yourself, for your family or for a panel of judges, the better and more satisfying the experience is going to be.

I think the same goes for writing about it.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

The Perfect Crock Pot Recipe (and some Top Chef spoilers)

2011-04-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve mentioned my ideal crock pot recipe before. It involves opening packages and cans, dumping stuff in the cooker and leaving it to cook for upwards of 10 hours while I’m at work.

Most of the recipes I’ve been making recently haven’t been that simple. Some have been tasty, some have been downright delicious. But none of them have been as easy as the infamous pot roast of my childhood.

Until now.

Last weekend we were trying to find something that didn’t have tomatoes or beans because our aging digestive systems needed a break. It surprises me how many recipes had one or both of those ingredients in them.

Then I hear Nancy say “Hey! Easy Beef Stew!” And I think, “How easy can this be?”

As easy as the pot roast, actually.

In fact, it was the pot roast.

Let’s compare recipes, shall we?

Pot Roast – 2-3 lb beef roast, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 1 envelope onion soup mix, 1/4 - 1/3 soup can of water. Cook on low for 8-10 hours.

Easy Beef Stew – 2 lbs stew meat, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 1 envelope onion soup mix, 1/3 cup red wine, 1 package sliced mushrooms. Cook on low for 8-12 hours.

The stew got a little fancy, adding wine and extra mushrooms. But essentially they’re they same recipe. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before on my own. It was brilliant!

So Monday morning I dumped the ingredients in the crock pot and turned it on; Monday night I got home from work to a house redolent with the fragrance of hearty stew. I started the rice cooker to cook some rice to go with the stew, added some frozen peas and carrots to the stew for some extra veg.

Et voila! Thirty minutes later dinner was ready. The stew was delicious!!! Particularly over the rice. The recipe says to serve over noodles, which is fine, but there’s something about pouring meat and rich gravy over rice that gets to my culinary soul. My father would definitely have approved!

It was so good, we were sorry when it was gone Thursday night. Next week, we’re going to try it with chicken, cream of chicken soup and some other kind of powdered soup mix. I’ll let you know how it turns out!

Now to completely switch gears, I have to express my congratulations to Richard Blais for winning Top Chef All Stars!! I have never been so excited or invested in a reality show. Ever. It was like watching old friends (or enemies), seeing some of my favorite chefs from previous seasons competing again.

I was a fan of Richard’s when he was on Season 4 of Top Chef. He was the guy to beat then, but he choked in the season finale, letting his head get in the way of his gut and letting his self-doubt cripple him.

Going in to All Stars, he was the man to beat, I thought. It was his title to lose. His combination of exquisite taste and knowledge and the playfulness of a little boy make him unique among the men who have come to the top of Top Chef. He is a NICE guy. He’s not an over-confident prick with anger issues.

His lack of confidence in his own ability makes him both endearing and a little irritating sometimes. Sometimes I wanted to hug him and tell him it was going to be okay. Other times I wanted to Gibbs-slap him.

I was so happy for him when he won, I cried as if he was a member of my own family.

That being said, Mike Isabella surprised the hell out of me. I didn’t know until last night’s episode that he had worked for Jose Andres, had run one of his restaurants for two years. Mike took the break between the ‘regular season’ and the ‘post season’ in the Bahamas to study, hone his skills, train and make himself ready for the finale. And it showed. He won the majority of the challenges in the Bahamas. He came out with a truly impressive menu for the finale and really showed his knowledge of how a restaurant runs during the set up portion, talking to the servers, choosing wines. He showed everyone that he really belonged there.

Both chefs presented amazing meals I wish I could have eaten. In the end, what separated those two chefs was very little indeed. During the celebration/consolation shots at the end of the show, Tom Colicchio hugged Mike and said “You may not have won, but you did great and you have a great career ahead of you.”

I am so proud of Richard and I really hope he is able to make his culinary dreams come true!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go add a bunch of chefs to my Twitter.

Crock Pot Cuban

2011-03-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

It kind of sounds like a band name, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

Okay, maybe not.

This week we wanted to try something different. We had recently gotten Cuban sandwiches at a local deli and fell in love. The ham, roast pork, swiss cheese, mustard and dill pickle…what a magical combination. Grill and press the sandwich? Heaven!!

While browsing our cookbooks, I found a recipe for Cuban black beans and rice, aka moros y cristianos.

I was kind of excited. I’d had moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians) at a Cuban restaurant in Seattle several years ago with some gorgeous flank steak. I remember looking forward to the leftovers only to find that they had been stolen from the fridge at work. The meal was good enough that the bitter disappointment of not getting to eat those leftovers still lingers five or six years later.

So I thought, great! I’ll make this crock pot recipe and we can supplement with some protein. It will be fabulous!

A niggling doubt at the back of my mind about cooking rice in the crock pot was profoundly ignored. It must work, right? It’s in the cookbook. Someone must have tested it.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Well, it wasn’t as horrible as it might have been. It was actually rather tasty. The rice was cooked with chicken broth, cumin, onions, garlic and jalapeno. So it was bound to be flavorful. The beans were added in the last 20-30 minutes, so they wouldn’t be mushy.

But the rice? Oy, it was mush! Savory, slightly spicy mush. It lasted four nights, so it was great for feeding us all week. But I was definitely ready to trash the crusty, burned bits at the bottom by Thursday night.

Will we make it again? Actually, yes. But next time, we’ll make it in the rice cooker. :o) If that one works, I promise I’ll post the recipe.

When you're sick and all you want is soup

2011-03-18T19:35:00.001-07:00

or Capsaicin - good for what ails you.

When I picked out this week's recipe for the crock pot, I didn't plan on being sick. No one plans that, right?

But when I finally got around to cooking on Wednesday, I was really glad I'd picked this recipe.

When you're sick, any Jewish mother, aunt or grandmother worth her salt is going to tell you you need chicken soup. Her chicken soup. It has magical healing powers. And even though I'm not Jewish, I believe it.

Okay, so it's not a Jewish mother's chicken soup. But I think it still has some magic in there.

In the book, it's called Chipotle Chicken Casserole. I was a little dubious, because so many of the things I'd made recently were heavy, even gummy in the case of the Thai Chicken. But, I thought, with the broth and the juice from the canned tomatoes, it will hopefully be light enough that it won't turn me off.

Here's the recipe:
From the Crock-Pot Recipe Card Collection cookbook

1 pound boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cubed
1 teaspoon salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1 bay leaf
1 chipotle pepper in adobo, minced
1 medium onion, diced
1 can (15 oz)navy beans, rinsed and drained
1 can (15 oz)black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can (14.5 oz) crushed tomatoes, undrained
1.5 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup orange juice

Combine everything in a large crock pot and cook on LOW for 7-8 hours or on HIGH for 3.5-4 hours. Remove bay leaf before serving.

Let's get down to brass tacks, shall we? A couple of things attracted me to this recipe. First was the fact that I had chipotle in adobo in my fridge that needed to be used up. Second, it had two different kinds if beans, which I thought was interesting.

However, the orange juice? I decided to leave that out. Maybe some other time I'll try it, but I just can't see it being good here. Lime or lemon juice, okay. But orange? I just don't think so. If any of you have opinions on that, please, chime in.

By the time I got around to making this recipe this week, it was already Wednesday and I was home sick from work. Smelling the stuff cook, at first all I could smell was the onions and I thought, "Am I going to be able to eat this?" It had never really occurred to me how the aromas evolve during slow cooking. But as the day went on, things started to mellow and I got less worried.

When N got home from work and it was time to eat, the scent of this spicy, savory soup filled the house. It smelled divine. And it was just what the doctor ordered.

The little bit of kick from the chipotle and cumin bathed my sore throat in their warmth. Capsaicin, so 'they' say, can cure many ills. Arthritis pain, sinus problems, and sore throats. It might sting a little at first, but it helps seal sore throat tissue and allow it to heal faster.

The thigh meat was tender and moist without seeming overcooked. I think boneless chicken thighs are my new meat of choice in the crock pot. The onions had pretty much melted, so there was no slimy, weird pieces of onion to turn me off. And I'd added a red bell pepper, which added some nice color and a little more veg to the mix.

This was the perfect thing for us to have this week, given the virus that whipped my ass the last few days.

No, it's not your mother's homemade chicken soup, bubbeleh. But it is a satisfying, healing bowl of soup. Or maybe it's a stew. It sure as hell isn't a casserole, no matter what the title of the recipe says.

Now, I hope you won't mind a digression from all things crock pot here. Remember this week's subtitle? Capsaicin, right?

I've been drinking a lot of tea with cayenne in it the last few days. I learned several years ago in a local production of Singin' in the Rain a never fail recipe for helping sore throats, especially if you can't give yourself vocal rest because you're in the middle of a show. Our Lina Lamont was sick and losing her voice and this is what got her through it.
We got it from our stage manager, Stacy. We called it Citrus Ass Tea, but I'm not sure I ever knew the real name. And I'm not sure I have the real recipe right, but this is how I make it and it works for me.

Peppermint tea
lemon juice
honey
cayenne pepper

Brew the tea, add lemon juice and honey to taste and as much cayenne as you think you can stand. Keep a spoon handy to keep the tea stirred up, otherwise the cayenne will sink to the bottom and you will get a hell of a surprise in those last couple of swallows!
It's not all that pleasant to drink, really, but it doesn't taste all that bad and it sure as hell works.

And now, since I have to sing tomorrow night (for only about 20 minutes, but still), I'm going to make myself some Citrus Ass Tea. Because it's good for what ails me.

Cheers!

Who Knew You Could Do That With Salsa or Crock Pots - Not Just For Dinner Anymore

2011-03-11T20:04:00.000-08:00

If you remember last week, dear readers, I talked about cooking in the crock pot with salsa. And I mentioned the Thai chicken we were going to make this week.

Well, I gotta tell ya. It was definitely interesting.

It was intended to be, essentially, rama chicken, chicken with spicy peanut sauce. In order to make this happen with minimal effort, the recipe called for mixing a cup of hot salsa, a quarter cup of peanut butter, a couple of tablespoons of soy, fresh ginger and lime juice. Mix, pour over chicken pieces (I used boneless thighs) and cook on low for 8-9 hours.

I will say it was tasty. We ate it over rice and fresh spinach, taking the swimming rama thing as far as we could. Would I call it an unqualified success? Probably not.

Because the chicken was so tender, it fell apart in the sauce, so it looked a bit more like goulash than rama. Also, the salsa I used was more chunky than saucy, so there wasn’t quite enough liquid to keep things moist. That meant the sauce burned a bit on the sides and when I first peeked into the crockput when I got home, the top looked, well, kind of like vomit now that I look back. Kinda brown and chunky. I’m not really selling this, am I? ;o)

This time we were glad that it only made enough for two nights worth of dinners. It wasn’t bad. If it was that bad, we would have tossed it out. But it was heavy and not in a good way. Definitely not something I could eat more than twice in a week.

Thankfully we have a lot more recipes to try. Next time I come around to this one, I'll use some soupier salsa and play around with more soy and lime and maybe some coconut milk. I do love me some peanut sauce.

But enough about dinner. Let’s talk about a meal that doesn’t see enough slow cooked love. Breakfast.

The first time I heard the words ‘crock pot oatmeal’, I thought, “Are you crazy?” That would turn the oatmeal into gluey mush.

I was still among the uninitiated. Then.

Granted, this past week wasn’t my first time. Thanks to the advice of friends and the genius of Alton Brown (rumored to be the love child of Mr. Wizard and the Galloping Gourmet), I tried the overnight oatmeal a few years ago. His recipe is delicious and you really should try it. It’s right here. Do it. I dare you.

When I opened one of our little cookbooks and saw they had an oatmeal recipe, I decided to give it a whirl. We already had the steel cut oats in the pantry. All we needed to get were a couple of apples and some slivered almonds. You dump everything in the pot before you go to bed, turn it on low, et voilá, you wake up to breakfast. Set up the coffee pot on the timer and you don’t have to do a damn thing except dish up and pour in the morning!

This recipe wasn’t quite as good as Alton’s, I must say. Next time, I won’t mess with perfection. I’ll stick with the genius. Still, I’m looking forward to taking the leftovers tomorrow, making them into little cakes and frying them in butter.

And someday I’ll try the bacon and egg breakfast casserole. Because who doesn’t want to wake up to the smell of bacon?

Crockpots. Not just for dinner anymore.

Who knew you could do so much with salsa?

2011-03-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

Okay, so remember those grocery store checkout stand cookbooks I mentioned last week? Well, we have three of them and, as I said before, we’ve been eating very well out of them for several weeks now.

One of the most surprising things about the recipes we’ve read and tried is the unexpected use of ingredients like salsa. Before this, I thought salsa was just for chips (with or without the Velveeta. But that’s an entry for another day ;o)) But I’d never thought of using it to cook meat in a crock pot. Until now.

My favorite recipe is still one of the first we tried. Beef carnitas. I loaned the book out, so I don’t have exact recipe handy, but I do remember most of it. Two pounds of stew meat, some salsa, beef broth, cumin and chili powder in the crock pot for 6-8 hours. No browning or chopping. Just dump it all in and turn it on low. Fabulous!

When I got home that night, the house smelled glorious. The beef and salsa and spices filled the place with a dark, rich aroma. I couldn’t wait to taste it!

Serving suggestion was corn tortillas, sliced avocado and cheddar cheese. Wanting to make this as easy as possible, I purchased some premade guacamole from Trader Joe’s (Avocado’s Number, which makes me giggle every time I see it!) along with the tortillas and got some pre-shredded cheese.

The result was succulent morsels of spicy beef with a delicious, brothy sauce, wrapped in slightly chewy tortilla and creamy, cool guac. The beef was lean and flavorful, thanks to the hours stewing in the slow cooker. And thanks to the pre-packaged accoutrements, it was easy to put together. A little messy to eat, but neither of us minded.

Fast forward to about a month later. We were now contemplating a chicken chili verde. This time, the only liquid in the recipe was a 16 oz. jar of salsa verde. About two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breast, the salsa, a little cumin and oregano, and some chopping. I was mildly annoyed that I had to actually use some kitchen skills to make this dinner happen, but really, only mildly. I was intrigued by the prospect of cooking meat in nothing but a jar of salsa.

I chopped and diced the onion, yellow pepper and garlic the night before so I could do what I love to do the next morning, throw everything in the pot, turn it on and let it do its magic. The last hour, you add beans, which for this recipe were shelled edamame. Interesting. Not sure I would do that bit again. If I thought it needed beans (which I’m not convinced it does), I’d probably add cannellini or Great Northerns. The edamame were a little toothsome for my taste and didn’t really seem to go with the rest of the dish.

While admittedly not as surprisingly delicious as the carnitas, it was very tasty and satisfying in its own right. I added the cilantro the recipe called for right before serving and also squeezed over a little fresh lime juice to brighten things up. That was my own afterthought. But really, would you do all that and not want to squeeze some lime on top? (Hmmm…suddenly I want a shot of tequila.)

The recipe got a little fancy and gave instructions on how to bake one’s own fresh tortilla chips. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray (I used canola oil spray), arrange fresh corn tortilla wedges in a single layer, spray the wedges with more oil, then bake them at 400 degrees for around 4-6 minutes. Watch them, carefully, though, because they go south very fast! Sprinkle a little salt on when they’re still hot, and presto! Fresh chips! Add a little shredded cheese on top of the chili and you’ve got a rather yummy meal.

Both recipes stretched at least three nights. I think the chili verde actually lasted for four, which was just about the time I get tired of leftovers.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about the use of salsa in these dishes. I mean, they’re essentially variations on Mexican food. But the next recipe we try that has salsa in it truly had me doing a double take.

When I saw the Thai Chicken title, I thought, “Oooh! What makes it Thai? And how can you do it in a crock pot?”

Honestly, I’m a little skeptical. The recipe calls for hot salsa and peanut butter (along with some lime juice and cilantro). That doesn’t sound good at all. In fact, it sounds a little scary. And yet, I’m going to try making it. So far those little cookbooks haven’t steered me wrong!

I want to say thank you to everyone who commented on Facebook last week. Thank you for reading!

But the biggest thanks goes to my partner, Nancy, who declared Friday night Blog Night. She closes bedtime with our son and I get to skip cleaning the kitchen so I can exercise my writing muscles. Thanks, Baby. You rock!

Next Week: It made how much?

Beginning Again

2011-02-25T20:45:00.000-08:00

I’d say this is a beginning, but the beginning of this blog was a couple of years ago as a result of a trip to Vegas. Hence the “Culinary Hedonism”. The time we spent in Sin City was really just an excuse to eat very, very well. We didn’t care about the gambling, though we did find the slots entertaining. We aren’t gamblers. Unless, of course, you count taking a chance on a celebrity chef’s cuisine gambling. Some would.

Nearly three years after this blog began, I find that the hedonism has kind of leaked out of my culinary life. I suppose that’s what happens when you have a day job and a toddler. You give up hedonistic pursuits for more practical things like, say, sleeping.

That’s not to say that one can’t still have adventures, though. And part of the title of this blog is about adventure. For a while it was our semi-monthly veggie and fruit bins, which we have given up on for now. I miss the twice-a-month challenge of what I could do differently with the chard or kale that was in the bin. But working and taking care of a 15-month-old, it’s hard to have time to cook during the week. And the weekends? I’d rather spend them playing with my family.

Given the lack of intensive time to spend at the stove, we’ve turned to a time-honored, middle-American kitchen must-have, the crock pot, to keep us from pissing away our mortgage on delivered pizza and Chinese food.

Crock pot? An adventure? Seriously?

Yes. Seriously.

Until recently, I’d only ever cooked pot roast in my slow cooker. A family staple growing up, it’s the simplest and one of the tastiest memories from my childhood. A 2-3 pound top round roast, a can of cream of mushroom soup and an envelope of dry onion soup mix. Put it in the crock pot on low. Eight hours later, you can shred the meat, mix it into the gravy and serve over toast, rice or mashed potatoes. I’d say it was a slice of heaven, but the meat is too tender to cut. It falls apart if you look at it funny. So maybe a big old spoonful of heaven.

After the turn of the new year, my partner and I decided we needed to work harder to feed ourselves decent food instead of relying on frozen chicken strips and mixed vegetables all the time. We needed to stop eating only foods that could be taken out of the freezer and thrown in the microwave for four minutes or less.

If eating Bobby Flay’s mashed potatoes with cilantro pesto or the hanger steak at Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak was hedonism, then this was utility eating at nearly its worst. We had not yet resorted to boxed mac and cheese or Top Ramen. Yet being the operative word.

So we picked up a couple of grocery store checkstand cookbooks with slow cooker comfort foods in them. One of them was from Prevention, which is a magazine my doctor recommends, so I figured, what the hell?

It’s been an exciting month or so since we started doing something in the crock pot every week. We started with beef carnitas, which is still my favorite, though everything has been delicious so far.

We’ve had turkey sausage cassoulet, pulled pork, beef pot pie, and this week’s adventure, chicken chili verde.

My initial expectations of these recipes were that they would basically require you to dump all the ingredients into the slow cooker, turn it on and leave, returning to the house hours later to the mouth-watering smells of dinner. So when I had to chop onions or brown something before it went into the cooker, I had to ask, is this really saving me time? But being able to come home to find dinner at least mostly ready for me? With still very little preparation? Let’s just say I believe it is saving my sanity. What little of it there is left to me.

I feel a deep-seated responsibility to feed my family. I’ve been doing it since I was about twelve years old when my dad first taught me to make Hamburger Helper. When all else fails, I can always feed people.

It had begun to really stress me out that I had a hard time getting home from work with our son, watching him and keeping him out of trouble, and having something ready for dinner by 6pm. We needed to eat about then to be able to get our son ready for bed by 7pm. And my partner generally wasn’t getting home until 6, so we really couldn’t wait for her to get home to cook.

What a relief it is to come home and have dinner ready to serve. Or be able to take leftovers out of the fridge and heat them up quickly. We’ve had have several weeks of satisfying, tasty meals with relatively little prep time or cleanup. Frankly, it’s been a bit of a revelation.

So all hail the crock pot. It’s not the most hedonistic thing to escape from the ‘70’s, but it is certainly turning into an adventure.

Next week: What yumminess we have wrought.

Throwing together deliciousness

2010-01-28T19:16:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, but I’m hoping to make it a more regular thing, at least while I’m off work taking care of my newborn son.

N and I have been home since the day after Thanksgiving watching our little man grow, all the while getting very little sleep. It’s only been the last couple of weeks that I’ve felt I had enough brain back to think about getting near knives and a hot stove. :o)

Tonight, N suggested that I write up dinner, if for no other reason than to keep track of what I threw together.

As I’ve mentioned before, we get a bin every other week from a local produce delivery service and have learned to cook and eat things we never thought we liked (like cauliflower…take a page from Chef Tom Colicchio’s book; if you don’t like a vegetable, try it roasted. It makes all the difference! I still don’t like beets, but I tried.)

Tonight I decided I wanted to use the collard greens we got in this week’s bin. So I started thinking about what else we had in the fridge. And I was inspired.

I started by crisping up five slices of bacon cut into lardons. I had to add a little canola oil for additional fat because the bacon was so beautifully lean. When the bacon was crisp, I scooped it out of the fat and added some thinly sliced onion and red bell pepper, letting them soak up the yummy bacon fat.

When those veggies were close to soft, I added thinly sliced crimini mushrooms and a couple of cloves of sliced garlic, salting to help the mushrooms get rid of their liquid.

It didn’t take long for the mushrooms to soak up the delicious liquid in the pan and take on the flavors that had built up. Once everything looked done, I added a little more oil and added the collards, which I had rinsed and cut in rough strips. The sauté pan was a little small, so I had to add them in batches.

I let them continue to cook down with the rest of the vegetables, adding the reserved bacon, while I boiled the pasta, a spelt angel hair in deference to N’s wheat sensitivity.

After the pasta was rinsed, I tossed it with a blood orange infused olive oil, salt and pepper. At the last minute, I sprinkled the veggie/bacon mixture with some red wine vinegar to brighten up the flavors.

The pasta was plated with a generous mound of the veg and bacon. Sadly, I didn’t think to take a picture. It was a beautiful dish.

It turned out delicious! The peppers and onions had carmelized a little, adding a dark sweetness to the whole affair. The greens still had some good tooth to them, the mushrooms, peppers and onions were soft and almost creamy, the bacon was scrumptiously crunchy and chewy. There could have been a little more acid and maybe an herb (like thyme or basil) to brighten the whole thing a bit more. And the blood orange olive oil gave everything a lovely floral, citrus note.

It’s just so satisfying to look in the fridge, pull out some raw ingredients and come up with something that is both beautiful and tasty.

Next time, I’ll try to remember to take a picture before we eat it all!

When Food Blogs Collide

2009-03-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think the internet is just too damn big...too many resources, too many choices to make. I could get lost in the minutiae while looking for a simple recipe.
For the last two veggie in deliveries, we've received the great bounty of late winter - the blood orange. The first delivery of these, I wasn't feeling too well and didn't have the energy to do anything with them, so we just ate them. But as I ate the ruby-jeweled citrus, I thought, "What a crime that we don't have enough to make sorbet. Blood orange sorbet sounds so good!"
Well, in this week's bin, we got more blood oranges!! So I was determined to make some sorbet.
As I looked for recipes, I found one that kept appearing in different blogs. Thankfully all the bloggers I saw gave credit to the man who originally published this divinely simple recipe, David Lebovitz.
And so here I am to pass on the love of this incredible gift, David Lebovitz's blood orange sorbet recipe.
It's so riduculously basic, you'd think "It can't possibly be as divine as all that." Oh, but it is!
Clean and tart and refreshing. A frosty taste of the pure fruit.
It begs to be floated in a martini glass filled with vodka and a splash of lemon, lime or orange juice. Maybe some Hangar One Kaffir Lime vodka. I had a glorious martini made with that vodka and a float of rhubarb sorbet a couple of years ago.
Or even in a glass of plain soda water instead of an ice cube.

I didn't quite follow his recipe to the letter. I didn't have enough blood orange juice for a whole pint, so I combined the blood orange juice with some tangelo juice to fill out the pint of liquid. The other modification is that Lebovitz recommends 1/4 cup sugar for each 1 cup of juice. But the tangelo juice was so sweet that I only used 1/4 cup sugar for the 2 cups of juice I had (about 1.25 blood orange juice and .75 tangelo juice). I wanted to preserve the tartness of the blood oranges.

It turned out beautifully! And it's so packed with flavor, a small amount is enough to satisfy me. Which is a good thing because I only made a pint. That's not going to last in this house. *g*

SO, if you like blood oranges, or really oranges of any kind, I say hie thee hence to the grocer! Get yourself a bag of blood oranges and juice them like there's no tomorrow! Because their season is short...they might not be there tomorrow. :o) Just save some juice for a blood orange Cosmo.
And thank David Lebovitz's blog for the incredible recipe. I'm going back to find his recipe for a flourless chocolate cake made with Scharffenberger bittersweet chocolate. I have a dessert to make for a party next week and I promised chocolate. And that recipe sounds downright sinful!

But first? I need to go roast the eggplant we got on Friday. I'm going to make baba ghanouj. Yum!

Holiday Sweets

2008-12-30T12:31:00.001-08:00

It's nearly the end of 2008 and I fully intended to write here more often. So perhaps a resolution is in order to write here at least once a month!

So for December, it seems appropriate to write about homemade sweets. Growing up, my parents' kitchen was always full of either Mom or Dad cooking.

Mom made candy and cookies every year. Fudge (the 'family recipe' is on the marshmallow creme jar), penuche, divinity, butter cookies from the old cookie press, sugar cookies that she'd let us decorate with colored sugar.

My favorite candy she made was a family recipe she called Dixie Cremes. They have a center of crunchy peanut butter, cornstarch and powdered sugar and a hard maple coating. The coating was a pain in the ass...you had to cook it to a certain temperature, cool it a little, beat it by hand until it was sugary, then put the pan in hot water to melt the coating again so you could dip the peanut butter balls. I haven't made them in years. My copy of the recipe was ruined. I can't read the card anymore. And I don't know that my mom's recipe is in the house anymore. But that's another story.

I started making candy and cookies when I moved out on my own. It made me feel like I was continuing a tradition, gave my holidays away from home a feeling of familiarity. I always made fudge, sometimes I made dixie creams. My own addition to the tradition was butter caramels. I found a recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook that made amazingly smooth, slightly chewy, buttery caramels. They were my grandma's favorite.

Over the years, the holidays have gotten busier and it's hard to spend the time making lots of candy, especially hand-wrapping five pounds of caramels. So a couple of years ago I decided to shorten the cooking time and make caramel sauce instead. It was a hit with my friends!!
This year, with the popularity of salted caramel, I decided to try something different. I made the caramel sauce like I had before, but when I put it in the jars, I sprinkled a layer of grey salt on top. I'd considered doing it for several years, ever since I had my first glorious Fran's grey salt caramel.

When I gave the first jars to friends last Friday night, just reading the label made them squeal. :o) One of them immediately got a spoon, opened his jar and ate a spoonful. He pronounced it "Jesus in a jar". *g* Needless to say, I was rather proud.

I remember when I was little how excited people got when Mom would give them a wrapped platter of homemade goodies. My Mom and Dad are both gone now, but one of the things I do to honor them now is make homemade goodies for my friends at the holidays. And with the jars of caramel sauce (and Kahlua hot fudge sauce), if they give back the jars when they're empty, they'll most assuredly get more! :o)

So, Mom and Dad, thank you for teaching me the value of sharing something homemade, something made from the heart. I miss you and I love you.

Adventures in Freshness

2008-08-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

Recently N and I started getting a produce delivery service from New Roots Organics. We'd been talking about eating better, eating more healthily. Her acupuncturist talked about this service...we thought it sounded like a cool and easy way for us to increase our fresh food intake, so we decided to go for it.

This is how it works. We get a bin of veggies and fruits every two weeks. Fresh, organic produce, as much locally grown as possible, but supplemented by organics from California if the local season is light. For example, our first bin was almost all from California because the spring growing season was so cold for so long.

This week's bin contained, among other things, local lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli, green beans, summer squash, a Walla Walla sweet onion, nectarines, a cantaloupe...lots of gorgeous produce.

We're really loving the incredible summer bounty we're receiving right now. It brings back dreams of childhood summers spent with homemade ice cream, just-picked berries, eating myself sick on bing cherries, shucking sweet corn on the back porch or snapping green beans in the living room. Things we remember being excited to eat. Things we're still excited to eat.

Tonight we enjoyed some incredibly tasty treats that were direct results of our organic bins. We had some homemade avocado ice cream with a pluot (a cross between a plum and an apricot) that had been sauteed in butter and brown sugar. Dense, creamy ice cream with the fresh taste of avocados covered in sweet, tangy, warm plouts.

Of course, we don't really choose what we get in the bin. It's what's fresh now. And sometimes, that's not so exciting. Getting these bins is going to force us to eat some things we wouldn't otherwise eat. Like beets. We got beets in the bin, too. I don't like beets. N likes them roasted...little yellow and red baby beets. But these are the big, purple monster beets of my childhood nightmares. I live in fear, wondering what we're going to do with them.

We think we're going to grill them...we found some cool recipes on the internet. Most of the recipes we found said that beets were fantastic paired with goat cheese. So tomorrow we're going to grill beets and eat them with goat cheese.

Maybe, just maybe, my nightmarish fear of beets will depart after the grilling experiment. But if it doesn't, I still have a one pound bag of bing cherries in the fridge. I don't have a back porch, but I still might be able to eat myself sick. :o)

Saltoro Splendor

2008-07-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest pleasures in life is sharing a meal with friends. Last Saturday I did just such a thing with two of my nearest and dearest. They took me out to dinner as a belated birthday present to a local restaurant called Saltoro.
It was ‘girls night out’ since my partner was out of town visiting her family. My friends, Lo and Shtup, picked me up at my house and promised to drive so I could drink. :o) They showed up in velveteen top hats (which aren’t real until they’re loved according to Lo’s husband), sunglasses and feather boas, holding a set for me. We were decked out for a night on the town.
Seated in our booth, we got to the most important thing first...cocktails.
Lo went for a classic Manhattan, Shtup had their Basil Grande (vodka, muddled basil and strawberries, splash of cranberry juice), I had their Peach Ginger Cosmo (just what it sounds like...a little sweet for me, but tasty). I think I liked Shtup’s drink better than mine. It was sweet, but not cloyingly so. The Peach Ginger Cosmo could have used a splash of lemon to brighten it up a bit.
Then the food started in. First, an order of their truffle fries, a gigantic pile of shoestring potatoes tossed with truffle oil and parmesan. Dark, dusky truffle and salty, creamy parmesan atop perfectly crispy fries. I had to have the waitress box them after we’d eaten half because I just couldn’t stop. The next morning I had an egg scrambled with some of the leftover fries crisped in a skillet. They were equally delicious the second time around.
We ordered salads for a second course, the Saltoro Salad (Lo and I) and the Spinach Salad (Shtup). The Saltoro salad was comprised of greens, citrus shallot vinaigrette, Point Reyes Blue cheese and toasted slivered almonds. A tasty salad that would have been even better with some grilled skirt steak.
The Spinach Salad had an anise vinaigrette, proscuitto, pickled onions and little nuggets of crumb-crusted, fried goat cheese. Shtup was kind enough to get the prosciutto on the side. She’s vegetarian, but didn’t want to deprive us of the whole experience. It was quite delightful...I will certainly have it again!
I thought I was done eating...but they had other ideas. Lo ordered a small pizza with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella and an order of butternut squash ravioli in a mushroom cream sauce. The ravioli was tasty, the creamy squash filling balancing the earthy mushrooms. However, it was oddly under-seasoned, unusual for this restaurant.
I had but one slice of the pizza...I was so full by that time. It was good, and it was nice to have some fresh tomatoes. But again, the flavors seemed a little flat.
With all of those delightful flavors, we drank a tempranillo, Finca Antigua 2005. Dry, a little tannic, some cherry notes.
Of course, since this was a ‘birthday’ celebration, we had to have dessert. We ordered a chocolate pots de creme and a fallen chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream melting on top.
The custard of the pots de creme was dense and silky, the cocoa flavor present but not overpowering. I could still taste the cream and egg underneath, which is what I love about custards.
The fallen chocolate cake didn’t really look like a cake at all, except for the candle sticking out of the top. *g* It was a gratin dish full of rich, hot, chocolatey goodness. I wish I hadn’t been so full because I wanted to eat it all...the chocolate was dark and velvety and delicious. The vanilla ice cream was also rich and delicious, but I would have been happy without it. I want the full-on chocolate experience. Maybe next time. :o)
For all the great food, the best part was sharing it with good friends. By the end of the meal, Lo was the only one still wearing her hat and glasses. The meal over, we put our feathers back on and waddled out of the restaurant under the weight of the fabulous dinner, buoyed by the joy of sharing it with friends.
Thank you, Ladies, for a merry and memorable evening!

Truffle Night at Fiamma Trattoria and Bar

2008-06-15T20:50:00.001-07:00

I've been lax in getting our last night in Vegas posted here. My apologies!

Our final dinner in Vegas was a bit of a surprise. We couldn't decide where to eat. We knew we didn't want to leave the MGM, where we were staying. We just wanted to relax, drops some money in the slot machines, and enjoy the little city that is MGM.

We thought we'd try Emeril's...I've been to his restaurant in New Orleans, which remains on my top ten list of restaurant experiences. But we couldn't get in until 9pm, which was too late for us. Putting the promise of eating at the bar in our back pocket as a fallback, we looked at the other choices:
Shibuya - sushi, which sounded fabulous, but we weren't really in the mood for seafood in a landlocked place.
Seablue - seafood, meditteranean - again, didn't want seafood. We come from the Pacific Northwest. Las Vegas is too far away from the ocean for us to want to eat seafood there. :o)

Several times we walked by Fiamma Trattoria & Bar, thinking, huh...Italian...okay, but how special could it be? Well, we looked at the menu and found several things that sounded tasty. We were lucky enough to get reservations at 6:30...a perfect time for us.

First on the menu for us was an order of beef carpaccio with a salad of chopped mushrooms and black truffle vinegar and shavings of parmegiano reggiano. The beef was so thinly sliced and tender that we couldn't pick the slices up. It was creamy, tangy, salty and earthy. Delicious!

For our entree we decided to have the Fusilli with prosciutto, English peas, and black truffle butter sauce. The flavors were fairly delicate, smoky prosciutto, sweet peas and earthy, luscious truffle butter.
Accompanying our dinner, we drank an effevescent white wine called Conundrum. Aptly named. We puzzled and puzzled till our puzzlers were puzzed. I wanted a red wine. My palate was ready for a dry, tannic, Italian red. But nothing on the by-the-glass list really hit us. So we went with the waiter's recommendation. Then we realized we'd had it before! So we're going to try and find it again here at home.
Nicely fruity, with some hints of pear and a clear finish, it cut through the fat of the butter sauce and highlighted the individual flavors of the pasta dish beautifully.

So it ended up being truffle night at Fiamma for us. And we left satisfied and very pleased with our choice.

Our trip really woke my palate up. I wanted to cook when I got home! Just like a trip to see theatre in New York makes me want to be a better actor and fires my desire to perform, this trip to Las Vegas made me want to be a better cook and baker.

And speaking of being a baker, up next will be a writeup of the cake I made for my friend Maia Strong's book release party.
Thanks for all the comments, y'all!

Colicchio Day - Vegas Day 2

2008-06-04T21:19:00.000-07:00

Day two, really our first full day in Vegas, began with a rather predictable trip to Starbucks. We were awake and hungry, but the place where we wanted to eat breakfast wasn’t open until 10am. So coffee and a small snack (I wish they had cheese pockets here in Seattle...they were yummy!) started our day.

Our destination for what ended up as lunch was an establishment called ‘wichcraft, located on the Studio Walk in the MGM Grand, where we stayed. ‘wichcraft is a sandwich place owned by Top Chef judge and James Beard award-winning Chef Tom Colicchio. Again we were checking up on a favorite tv chef. We really enjoy Top Chef (especially this season), but knew little about Chef Colicchio and wanted to see what his food was like.

‘wichcraft had two breakfast sandwiches on their menu that had us salivating. One was a skirt steak, fried egg and oyster mushroom sandwich and the other a fried egg, bacon and frisee sandwich. Both sounded wonderful to us, being great fans of breakfast sandwiches. Nancy got one (steak) and I got the other (bacon) and we shared. The steak was cooked perfectly, the flavors nicely balanced, not too bold for morning, but still very tasty. The fried egg and bacon sandwich was a little piece of breakfast heaven. The bacon was thick cut and sweetly smokey but not salty, the egg perfectly cooked (though I would have preferred the yolk left unbroken) and the frisee dressed with a light vinaigrette, all served on a soft roll. The sandwiches were so large we couldn’t quite finish them, though we made a valiant effort. I did eat all the bacon, which was probably the best bacon I’ve ever had.

I kept the plastic bag they packed our sandwiches in...what a great souvenir! And that afternoon, for a snack, we went back for a homemade whoopie pie, a chocolate cake sandwich filled with lightly sweetened whipped cream. *drool*

The meal that came closest to sex was at Craftsteak that same evening, the steakhouse in the MGM Grand. Also headed by Chef Colicchio, Craftsteak promised simple ingredients cooked well. Where Mesa Grill offered up layers of bold, complex flavors the night before, Craftsteak presented clean, well-executed simplicity.

Knowing we would be sharing so we wouldn’t overstuff ourselves, we were heartened when the server, before we even said anything, mentioned that their menu was set up with sharing in mind. All their sides are served family style.

We ordered a 12 oz. hanger steak after asking the waitress what it was. *g* We’d heard of the cut before, but couldn’t remember anything about it. When she told us it’s often called the butcher’s cut because it’s what the butcher usually keeps for himself, we decided to go for it. It turned out to be the best single decision we made the whole trip.

The steak arrived medium-rare, already sliced, in a cast iron gratin dish, a scattering of thyme on top of the gorgeously seared beef (the only other seasoning was salt and pepper). Our side of fried squash blossoms came with the baby zucchini still attached to use as handles. To drink with our meal, we ordered a Tamarack Cellars Firehouse Red blend...a bit of wine from our home state of Washington. Suggested by the waitstaff, it perfectly complemented the steak. Flavorful, yet lean, the steak was exquisite. Quite literally the best steak ever.

As if the incredible meal weren’t enough, the cocktail menu boasted over 100 single malt scotches. If I wasn’t already in love with Tom Colicchio, that cinched the deal. Awed by the sheer depth of choice, I went with a scotch flight of Bowmore, 12 yr, 16 yr and 21 yr. These are the kind of Islay malts I love, smoky without being peaty.

The 12 year (distilled in 1989, Jewels of Scotland, Bottled by Lombard) had a nice deep smoke with some grassy notes that opened up with some added water.
The 16 year (distilled 1988, bottle #221 by Signatory Vintage) looked almost paler than the 12 year, had a surprisingly fruity nose and a sweetly smoky flavor.
The 21 year (distilled 1982, cask strength, Duncan Taylor Collection) nearly singed my nose hairs on first sniff. I’m guessing it was upwards of 55%. *g* Dark honey and smoke on the nose, toasted coconut and caramel to the taste. It was delicious with dessert.

Oh, yeah, dessert! How could I forget the molten chocolate cake crusted with hazelnuts, served a quenelle of espresso ice cream? Yeah, molten chocolate cake was really popular a few years ago. Frankly I was a little surprised to see it on the menu. I didn’t think it was ‘the thing’ anymore. But it was perfectly cooked, dark and richly chocolatey, and the ice cream was smooth and tangy with espresso. The perfect end to a perfect meal.

In case you’re wondering how I remember all this when we’ve been back almost a week now, I took notes. I had a little notebook that fit in my purse and I wrote notes because I knew I wanted to come back and write about it. At the end of the notes for this meal, there’s a small note from Nancy. OMG. What it took me several hundred words to say, she expressed in three letters. That’s my girl. :o)

There was one more evening in Sin City and one more dinner to go with it. Come back in a couple of days for tales from Fiamma Trattoria and Bar.

Las Vegas: Not Just for Gamblers Anymore

2008-05-31T15:58:00.000-07:00

It's not news to anyone, really. Vegas has long been touted as a place to shop, see shows and eat as much as fritter away your hard earned cash. Still, its reputation as a gambler's paradise kept me from visiting until well into my adulthood (don't ask how far, it's not polite).

My partner and I returned from a vacation to Las Vegas just a few days ago, my wallet decidedly lighter and my ass a bit heavier. Only ten dollars were left at the casinos. Most of our money went to the restaurants of Sin City and our stomachs are more than happy for that.

And since I'd been toying with the idea of starting a food blog, I thought "Why not now?" Hence, the inaugural entry in Culinary Hedonism!

Since the meals were so fantastic, we're going to take it one day at a time. First, our arrival on Monday, May 26th. We knew we wanted to visit Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill, so we'd already made reservations before we hit town. A little early, 5:30pm, but after a day of driving and flying and shuttling, we were glad of it. We hadn't really had time for a decent meal, so dinner was it.

For a long time, I didn't like Bobby Flay. His reputation as brash and arrogant preceded him, led by his grandstanding appearances in the original Iron Chef. But over the last year or so, watching his new shows on the Food Network (yes, I'm a junkie and make no apologies for it!), I've developed a new respect for the man. He is willing to put his skills on the line against anyone, his intent not to outcook them, but to showcase their talents.

We were excited to eat at Mesa Grill. We would finally find out whether Chef Flay knew his business. The pre-trip intelligence we'd received from one of my partner's coworkers pointed us toward the mashed potatoes, which were billed as better than sex. Of course, the coworker admitted to being drunk at the time she consumed the potates. *g* Still, we had to try them, right?

I'd done a little recon of my own before we left for vacation, reading the menus online. Hence, I already knew what I wanted for a cocktail. They had a pisco sour on the menu, so I wanted to try it. I'd had a taste of straight pisco a couple of years ago (nearly breathing fire as a result!) and wanted to experience the famed cocktail. Sadly, the restaurant was out of one of the ingredients, the pasteurized egg whites, so we had to go without. *sniffle*

Since the menu declared that Mesa Grill lives and dies by the margarita, we decided instead to put our faith in my favorite cocktail. The bartender did not disappoint. A silver tequila, house-made sour (lime juice and simple syrup) and a dash of triple sec. No fancy extras, just a basic margarita served on the rocks. Not even a mention of a blender (thank gods!). Just a glass of sweet-tart heaven with a salted rim. The evening was indeed looking up.

Booze problems solved, we turned to the food. For a starter, we ordered the creamy wild mushroom grits with a poached egg, charred serrano sauce, cotija cheese and crushed blue corn tortilla chips. There's something sexy about breaking the yolk of a poached egg. The yolk mixed with the creamy grits and crunchy chips, the spicy, smoky sauce. Man, that was a mean bowl of grits. An extremely satisfying combination of textures and flavors.

We decided to steer away from seafood for our entree in spite of the yummy-sounding tuna steak on the menu. We went instead for the Sixteen Spice Duck Breast with carrot-habanero sauce, a chorizo-goat cheese tamale and thyme butter. The duck arrived sliced, medium rare and juicy. The waiter was generous enough to give us a few more ingredients to the sauce...carrot juice, habanero pepper, orange juice, star anise and cinnamon. Sweet, spicy, melding beautifully with the flavor of the duck. The tamale made a great, mellow accompaniment, though it kind of underwhelmed me. I missed the goat cheese...don't really remember seeing it or tasting it.

When we looked at the dessert menu, there was really no other choice than the profiteroles. Instead of whipped cream or plain ice cream inside, there were small nuggets of cornflake crusted fried ice cream. The sauce covering the lovely puffs of dough wasn't an ordinary chocolate sauce. It was a mexican chocolate sauce with cayenne and cinnamon. We wanted to lick the plate, but we restrained ourselves. *g*

The verdict? Chef Flay definitely has something good going on. The combinations of flavors and textures never stopped challenging and delighting my palate. I only wish I'd had room for more! It was a fantastic meal.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! We did order the mashed potatoes, swirled with cilantro pesto. They were indeed delicious, though not quite as good as sex. That distinction was saved for our dinner the following evening. Stay tuned for details...