Do you know what’s delicious? Olive oil, parmesan, nuts, lemon and a lot of black pepper. Oh, and something green in the mix too.
Last week I was talking to my mother on the phone, when she happened to mention that my cousin had made kale pesto for the family over the weekend. I promptly filed that away in my head as “something I’d like to try.” Continue reading
Food photography is a pretty insidious hobby. It starts off innocently enough – you’ve just made a beautiful fruit salad with ingredients you received from friends, and you want to send them a photo of the finished product. Or you’ve just purchased a bounty of fresh vegetables at the farmer’s market and you want a photograph to remind you what gorgeous vegetables look like when everything in the winter produce aisle is dull and limp. Or maybe you are thinking about starting to take pictures of food. Where do you start? Continue reading
Yay! It’s Thanksgiving week! To me Thanksgiving is the best holiday. There’s just food, libations and very little pressure. Sure you want the food to be delicious, but that’s as demanding as inviting friends or family over for dinner in general. And although there are staples that everyone expects, it’s fun to throw a curve ball in every once in awhile. In this case, the curve ball is making a staple much, much, better than the original. Continue reading
Technically this is just a Panang Tofu Curry recipe that I take some liberties with. Good artists borrow, great artists steal and great cooks – well, we fix recipes. So here’s the way I like my curry. Continue reading
In the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, this recipe sticks it to the man – and it also embraces the conservative ideal of being self-sufficient. By making your own “condensed soup in a can” from scratch, you are saving $1.39 and not giving money to huge corporation. Wait, but that takes money out of the economy. Hmmm, that’s a conundrum. But, since we all need a full stomach to really consider big questions, why not make this old-fashioned chicken casserole while you ponder the question. Continue reading
I could say that the impetus for a meal of stuffed artichokes was because spring has finally sprung in Vermont. But I would be fibbing.
Sure it’s great to see grass after a ridiculously long winter, but the reason for this spring-like meal was just the fact that I was craving anything that wasn’t meat. (I go through periodical vegetarian phases.) And although I don’t make stuffed artichokes very often, I thought they would be a perfect fix for my “no chicken, no pork” craving.
When I’ve made these before, I’ve normally stuck to a stuffing of Panko breadcrumbs, parmesan and thyme. This time though, I decided to add seven green olives to the stuffing. And even though the artichokes were fantastic, I did have one complaint. I didn’t use enough of the new ingredient. I can’t stress this enough, green olives in stuffed artichokes are amazing.
“There are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who are smart enough to know better.” -Tom Robbins
When we first started our cooking blog, one of the first posts was about popovers. At the time I was convinced that cold-oven popovers were the best choice over popovers made in a preheated oven. The science made sense (cold batter brought slowly to a very hot temperature would create steam to make them pop) and to be honest, I had only eaten/made cold-oven popovers. And my husband and I loved them, and the cats vied for scraps.
But, with the new year, a sad thing has recently happened to our oven; It takes forever to heat up now and recent attempts at making popovers have been a gooey mess without a crisp crust, or any height.
So, I decided to make popovers in a hot oven and … wow.
What a difference starting off at 400 degrees can make.
Here is the photo that accompanied the cold oven method. They had popped, but they weren’t killing themselves being overly ambitious.
And here is a close-up photo of a popovers using the hot oven method.
All six of them looked like Tomoyuki Tanaka movie monsters.
And their height and airiness was even more surprising considering the fact that they had prosciutto, dill and cheddar in the batter.
Prosciutto, Dill and Cheddar Popovers (Hot Oven Method)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Pan fry the prosciutto in olive or grapeseed oil until brown and crisp.
With a pastry brush use the melted butter to grease the muffin tin cups, and place the pan in the oven for a couple of minutes until the butter is sizzling.
Add salt, pepper, cheese, prosciutto, flour and eggs to the warmed milk.
Take the pan out of the oven and drizzle the rest of the melted butter into the bottom of the tins. Pour the popover batter into the tins until they are approximately 1/2 to 3/4 full.
Place the muffin tin into the hot oven and tiptoe away from the stove for 35-40 minutes. (Even if they aren’t done at 35 minutes, they won’t collapse if you take a peek and decide they need to brown a little bit more.)
Happy Recipe Sunday. Let’s talk about food.
Our anniversary was last week, and to celebrate we walked around Burlington and then we went out to dinner.
It was an amazing dinner. In fact it was so good, that I intentionally left about half of it on my plate to bring home for dinner the next night. But, the restaurant was busy, we had shopping bags in the booth with us, and it took us a while to pile on our layers of winter attire. As a consequence, I didn’t realize that I had left my doggie bag on the restaurant table until we were half-an-hour away.
I’m not going to lie, I was irrationally annoyed.
And I know that, “Something, something, something, is the chipotle chicken of invention.” So I decided to try to recreate the dish.
Chipolte chicken with cumin cream sauce
Mix the spices together on a plate.
Cumin cream sauce
Rub the chicken breasts with olive oil on both sides, and coat the breasts on both sides with the spice mixture.
Grill both sides of the chicken until done and tent the with foil to keep warm.
For the cumin sauce: In a small saucepan saute the sliced shallot and diced onion in olive oil. When the onions and shallots are soft, add the white wine and remove from heat. Stir in the cumin and, when the sauce has cooled for approximately 5 minutes, turn the heat on low and slowly add the half and half. (Letting the sauce cool for a few minutes will keep the sauce from breaking. (Or it least it helped quell my paranoia about the sauce breaking.)
Slice chicken and serve on top of Spanish rice with the cumin sauce drizzled on top.
You asked for it, you got it. Share your noms here.
Someday I will share my mom’s recipe for choereg and you will make it and never eat any other kind of bread again. But not today.
