Perpetual Dabbler

This weekend I made Coffee Crunch Bars, recipe care of Molly Wizenberg’s column at Bon Appetit online.  They were very easy and extremely tasty. And the timing was lucky as we had unexpected guests arrive for dinner Saturday night. Somehow when they called we had dinner in the crock pot and these cookies already made. When does that happen? The cookies are every bit as wonderful as Molly says they are. But next time I think I might actually tweak them a bit. I’d like to try adding eggs and make them more of a normal bar cookie consistency.  Just for curiosity sake. Since we’ll undoubtedly finish off the batch I made tonight that will probably happen sooner rather than later.

November 16, 2009, 11:35am   Comments

Steak with horseradish sauce, rosemary rolls, and the above salad - Spinach with goat cheese, pomegranate seeds, and balsamic dressing.

Recipe for rosemary rolls here.

Horseradish sauce - horseradish, mayonnaise, dijon, salt, pepper, other seasoning as desired.

Steak care of Blood Farm, Groton, MA, which I highly recommend.

November 02, 2009, 11:02am   Comments

I made yeast bread for the first time this weekend. Well minus the brief time we owned a bread maker, which is a fairly unsatisfying experience when it comes to bread. I’ve made plenty of quick breads but for some reason I’d never baked real bread from scratch. Which is strange given my lust for bread. I am a serious bread addict. It’s my downfall when trying any low carb diet. I could live on bread and cheese for a lifetime and never grow bored. But why I’ve never made it comes down to two reasons.

First, as a true San Francisco Bay Area native, sourdough is my #1 bread choice. So much so that every year of the past 15 years I’ve lived in New England I’ve thought about getting a mail order subscription of it from San Francisco, but I’ve encountered enough passable versions to make do. Anyway, while I have dreams of having my own sourdough starter frankly it’s just too much effort. And I can’t get past believing, as I once told, that true sourdough can only come from the airborne yeast of SF’s magic fog. I like believing that. In my love-hate relationship with my home it’s one of the few things about it that makes it really seem magical to me. So I’m leaving the sourdough to the experts. And making another kind of bread just didn’t have quite enough of a draw.

Second, my entire life my mother has spent all of Christmas Eve day and night making Stolen. Endless kneading and rising (under the electric blanket in her bed) that goes well into the next morning because she never leaves herself enough time and always makes a dozen loaves even though she and my grandmother were the only ones who ate it. It always seemed like a crazy amount of effort to me for something so icky. Yes icky is the best word I can come up for my mother’s Stolen. What a waste of bread and icing. Filled with raisins, my nemesis, and scary neon colored candied fruit that sits in a plastic container in syrup in our cupboard or my grandmother’s pantry all year long. At some point the candied fruit became hard to find so they stocked up on it. I’m guessing it became hard to find because it was found to be a carcinogen or made people glow alien light. So every time I think of making bread I think of the hours and hours of labor spent on something I despised.

But I’m me. A bread addict. Someone who loves to bake. So at some point I had to start making bread. This first effort went well. Easy. No hours of labor. No mishaps. That happy bread baking smell and a pretty brown loaf at the end. It was a very basic recipe out of a vegetarian cookbook I have and didn’t end up tasting like much of anything so it’s not really worth sharing. Not bad at all just very very plain. But it’s a start. A start of something wonderful I’m sure. In my future I  see much more bread, lots of pizza dough, some Biga at least to try to get a little of that sour flavor, and maybe… just maybe… a sourdough starter of my very own.

October 08, 2009, 11:16am   Comments

That ugly thing above? That is one of my favorite vegetables.  Celery root. But for some reason the only thing I’ve ever done with it is cook it like mashed potatoes. It honestly never occurred to me to try it any other way. Then we saw a recipe in Martha Stewart Everyday Food with a side of roasted celery root and potatoes. How novel! I mean, we certainly roasted every other root vegetable imaginable. But for some reason this was a completely new idea. The result was tasty, but honestly no different really than a turnip or parsnip. But sometimes it’s just fun to cook with scary looking vegetables.

Roasted Celery Root

• 2 small or 1 large celery root
• 3-4 tbsp olive oil
• salt and pepper

Peel the celery root and cut into about 1 inch cubes. Toss in baking dish with olive oil and salt and pepper. Bake in 400 degree oven for about 40 minutes.

In the theme of combining an old standby cooking style and an old standby vegetable that you never thought of combining before, we also made parmesan broccoli. Normally we use cauliflower in this dish.

Parmesan Broccoli

• 1 head of broccoli
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/3 cup grated parmesan
• salt and pepper

Prep the broccoli. Toss in baking dish with olive oil and salt and pepper. Sprinkle parmesan cheese on the top. Bake in 400 oven for about 25 minutes.

September 18, 2009, 11:32am   Comments

Welcome to my new feature, Ill-Advised Culinary Delights, where every week or so I will feature a recipe that is anything but tantalizing. I was planning to start this feature with something from the “Wilton Gifts From The Kitchen: Recipes and Ideas for Take Along Gifts” book I unearthed the other day. But I’m having technical difficulties with the images at the moment. So all of those wonderful recipes will have to wait for another day. Instead I’d like to start with Ambrosia Salad and Seafood Chow Mein casserole, two lovely gifts from my grandmother’s kitchen.

It seems like in every food blog or book I read lately the author has a rich family food history. Favorite recipes handed down through generations, lush detailed kitchen memories, and important foods that were woven into the landscape of their childhood. I on the other hand was drawn to food exactly because of my lack of food history. My mother was a single parent who worked long hours. All our dinners were in front of the TV at around 10pm. The only meal I remember that made frequent reappearances was bean dip. A big plate of refried beans, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and guacamole, and a bag of chips. At the same time this was contrasted with a lack of kid geared processed foods. Fruit roll-ups, pudding cups, and twinkies never had a place in our house. (Which apparently led to a bartering system in kindergarten wherein I traded home baked chocolate chip cookies for all sorts of crap.) So I grew up in some sort of odd in between world of respecting and appreciating real food and vegetables but also never branching out beyond a very limited scope of foods.

Real meals were always served at my grandparents house.  Well, real in the sense that they involved sitting down at a table at a “normal” dinner time and that they included most of the food groups. But there was always an odd choice of salad OR vegetable because for some reason you could not have both. That would be too much green. And waldorf and ambrosia salads (neither of which contain anything resembling a vegetable) counted in that salad or vegetable choice. Everything was very mid-century. Like the ambrosia salad with the it’s pastel colored mini fruit flavored marshmallows. And the variety of Good Housekeeping style casserole dishes. Like the Seafood Chow Mein Casserole.

Ambrosia Salad - I’ve seen a lot of versions of this dish and this particular combination if ingredients doesn’t seem to be particularly common.

• 1 c. salad dressing (mayonnaise)
• 8 oz. cool whip
• 1 lg. can fruit cocktail (drained)
• 1 can mandarin oranges
• 1 cup grapes
• 2 c. mini fruit flavored marshmallows

Mix it all together and pretend it’s somehow nutritious and can substitute for a green salad or a vegetable.

Seafood Chow Mein Casserole - I had to search around for a recipe approximating this because I don’t remember it exactly. What follows is a Tuna Chow Mein Casserole but I know my grandmother called it seafood and it wasn’t tuna. I just don’t remember what other canned seafood she used. I made adjustments to the recipe I found to more accurately represent my grandmother’s recipe. What I remember most about this recipe is that none of the crunchy elements remained crunchy. Everything was soggy and gooey and creamy in a very bad way.

• 1 can (10 1/2 ounces) condensed cream of mushroom soup
• 1 can (6 1/2 to 7 ounces) tuna, drained
• 1/2 cup salad dressing (mayonnaise)
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 can water chestnuts
• 1 can (4 ounces) chow mein noodles, divided, about 2 cups*

In a large bowl, combine all but 1 cup of the chow mein noodles; move to a casserole dish. Top with remaining 1 cup chow mein noodles. Bake in 375° oven 25 minutes or until hot. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

September 15, 2009, 3:58pm   Comments

Of summer’s bounty.  These:

Got made into 3 different kinds of tomato sauce.  A herb packed version, a sun dried tomato version, and a balsamic version.

I also made 20 loaves of zucchini bread.  14 of the version previously mentioned and linked on here and 6 more of this pesto version.

There was also more corn, carrots, green beans, and peaches.  And now the freezer is nearing its maximum capacity but there is so much more I want to try to freeze.

And my confession? I don’t even really like tomato sauce.

September 14, 2009, 3:50pm   Comments

Recipe:

I’m kind of making up amounts here. We just sort of threw everything together until it seemed right and went with it. So now I’m guessing how much of everything went in.

• Approx 1 lb ground pork
• 1/4 cup ketchup
• 2 tbsp mustard
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 4 good dashes hot sauce like Tobasco (though we used another kind)

Mix up the ground meat with all other ingredients. Form into patties and cook in grill pan.  Place on a nicely toasted bun and top with mayo and green tomato relish (we bought this at a farmer’s market so I don’t have a recipe but I’m sure there are some great ones out there if you search).  Enjoy.

September 14, 2009, 3:37pm   Comments

For the last couple summers the only ice cream that has come out of my ice cream maker is a sour ice cream made from a recipe I found last year that contains sour cream and buttermilk. I love the tang and serve it with fresh berries or dark chocolate.  Then last week I stumbled upon this recipe for sour peach ice cream and I fell in love with the idea of putting the fruit right in the ice cream.  Instead of peaches I had nectarines and I also had a container of raspberries that needed to be used in something so I figured why not combine the two. The result was better than I could have possibly expected and the only fruit ice cream I’ve ever had that really tasted like real fruit.  It was just like biting into an ice cold nectarine. Now I can’t wait to run out and freeze as much fresh fruit as I possibly can while it’s still available so I can make variations of this frozen magic all winter long.

Recipe:

• About 3-4 large nectarines
• 1/2 pint raspberries
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 cups sour cream
• 1 cup whole milk

Slice the nectarines and toss with the sugar and berries.  Combine sugar/fruit mixture with sour cream and milk in a blender or food processor.  Freeze in your ice cream maker.

September 14, 2009, 3:28pm   Comments

I’m excited and grateful for all the new traffic from Design Sponge.  A lot of people asked to see more pictures so here you go.  Enjoy.

Same view as before with light that shows the colors more accurately:

Baking station and chalkboard cabinet door:

Doggie station:

September 10, 2009, 9:03pm   Comments

Tomorrow I’ll roll out the start of something that I hope will be a regular feature, “Ill-Advised Culinary Delights,” in which I highlight some recipes you probably won’t want to try.

Also I’ve got a bunch of lovely teeny tiny tomatoes that I want to make a tart with. Depending on when that happens and how it turns out I’ll share more here.  Tomatoes pictured in the bowl in front here:

If anyone has a fabulous tomato tart recipe they want to share I’ll happily try it.

September 10, 2009, 12:20pm   Comments