Michele's Delicious Life

State Parks: Los Encinos SHP

2012-01-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

Los Encinos State Historic Park is located in Encino, CA. It really is just right in the middle of the city, taking up a couple of city blocks. On one side, through the orange trees, it runs into a grocery store parking lot. Yet, the park still manages to be a lovely, quiet, refuge from any city noise or bustle. We visited on a weekend day, and there were several families out letting their kids run around, feeding the ducks, and picnicking.

The adobe is open for free guided tours, but I think at this point they are by appointment only. However, the visitor center (in another of the buildings) is unlocked during regular park hours so that visitors can go look around.

There are a lot of orange trees and other plants on the property.

There's also a pond with lots of ducks in it. You can buy little bags of birdseed and feed them. The ducks get really excited about this.

Its just a nice park, a great place to go walk around on the weekend, and an interesting museum/visitor center. Currently its open Wednesday - Sunday from 10-5, but it would probably be best to check the website before you go.

State Parks: San Pasqual Battlefield SHP

2012-01-05T11:44:00.000-08:00

First of all, I am really quite embarrassed by my lack of state park posts. We did visit quite a few parks last summer, but once I started graduate school in the fall we were no longer able to see as many. I neglected to really post any blogs at all, but hopefully I'll get a few done here in the next few weeks.

Most of the 70 state parks scheduled to close will be still be closing by this summer. A handful have been saved, either through private partnerships or being taken over by another park system (national, county, or city). Hopefully more parks will be able to stay open at least on a limited basis in this way. I would highly encourage you to support the California State Parks Foundation, or at least to go to their site if you're interested in finding out more.

Over Memorial Day weekend last year, we went down to Escondido to see San Pasqual Battlefield State Historic Park. For such a small park, this one is really great. The visitor center has excellent exhibits, beautiful views, and a short yet very informative video about the Mexican-American War. Travis and I felt much better about ourselves as California citizens after watching this; we realized as we went in the visitor center that we really knew nothing about that war. The person staffing the visitor center was incredibly knowledgeable about the history of the area.

The park has a nice quarter mile nature trail as well as a longer (one mile I believe) trail. However, when we visited, the longer trail had not been maintained in a while, and we were advised not to try it. I don't know whether or not this is still true, but I would assume that it is, due to the ongoing budget issues.

The view out to the valley from the visitor center and from the nature trail is really lovely. The valley is where the majority of the battle was fought.

At any rate, I highly recommend this park. It is basically next door to the San Diego Wild Animal Park in Escondido and is currently still open on Saturdays and Sundays.

New Year's Dinner

2012-01-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

Cooked dinner for the first time in our new house today! I made a pot of collard greens and some cheesy grits, then just included fried chicken from Albertson's (best grocery store fried chicken ever). It was pretty good, although the grits weren't the best I've ever made.

I also tried to think about New Year's resolutions. I made a resolution that I would try to do meatless Mondays. Then (as shown above), I promptly forgot that it was Monday. Next week! My other resolutions are:

1. Take my multivitamin.
2. Don't get so stressed out all the time.

We'll see how it all goes. Happy New Year!

Almond Cheesecake and Brownies

2011-10-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

In all fairness, this should be called Almond Cheesecake Filling. It was a bit awkward how it all turned out.

A while back, I saw this recipe called Decadent Chocolate Layer Cake in Cooking with Paula Deen. It's two layers of chocolate cake with a layer of almond cheesecake in between, with chocolate frosting. You'll notice that it looks AMAZING. However I've been trying to eat better, and although I don't deny myself dessert if I want it, I was still fairly sure I should never make that. It sounds like it could kill you after a few bites. So I had another thought. What if I saved the filling recipe and the cake recipe separately and just made them as separate cakes?

As you will undoubtedly have noticed, what happens to the cheesecake part is that it has no crust. It's not a cheesecake, it's a molded cheesecake filling. Tasty, but a bit odd and definitely too rich to eat on its own. So, what's a girl to do in this situation? Why, make a batch of brownies and smear small amounts of the cheesecake on top of them. Voila:

The verdict? They were okay. I think the biggest problem is that I don't like cheesecake, but I do like cheesecake brownies. So, I definitely believe that if you swirled this batter into brownie batter before baking it, fantastic things could happen. Maybe someday I'll try it, because this recipe is actually really easy to make.

Almond Cheesecake Filling

Ingredients:

2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons almond- flavored liqueur (or almond extract)

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 300°. Line a 9-inch round baking pan with aluminum foil, letting edges of foil extend over sides of pan. Lightly grease foil.

In a large bowl, beat cream cheese at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy. Add sugar, beating until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in sour cream and liqueur. Pour batter into prepared pan; bake 45 minutes. Turn oven off; leave cheesecake in oven with door closed for 1 hour.

Pork Burgers: A Public Service Announcement

2011-10-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick PSA about potentially one of the tastiest things I've ever cooked. Pork burgers. Travis was skeptical at first, but in the end he was a believer. The recipe (Perfect Pork Burgers) came out of Food Network Magazine but can apparently also be found on their website.

It's really easy. Basically you just grind some bacon and garlic in a food processor, mix it with ground pork, season, make into patties, grill (or broil), and serve on some toasted potato buns (brushed with a little butter, of course). Amazing. The key, of course, is the bacon. Just try it. And now, back to my regularly scheduled massive amount of schoolwork that needs to be done.

Perfect Pork Burgers (from Food Network Magazine)

Ingredients:

5 slices bacon
1 clove garlic, minced
1 pound ground pork
kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 teaspoon dried rubbed sage
freshly ground pepper
4 potato buns, split
unsalted butter, softened, for spreading

Instructions:

1. Pulse the bacon and garlic in a food processor until coarsely ground.

2. Combine the ground pork, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and the sage in a large bowl. Add the bacon mixture and gently mix with your hands. Gently form the meat into 4 balls, then lightly press into 4-inch-wide 1-inch-thick patties. Make a 2-inch wide indentation in the center of each with your thumb to prevent the burgers from bulging when grilled.

3. Preheat a grill to medium high. Season the patties with pepper. Grill, undisturbed, until marked on the bottom, 5-6 minutes. Turn and grill until the other side is marked and the patties feel firm, 4-6 more minutes. Meanwhile, spread the cut sides of the buns with butter and toast on the grill.

4. Serve the patties on the buns.

Great White Shark

2011-09-09T15:21:00.001-07:00

Yeah, I know... I talk about sharks a lot. But this is it for a while, I swear. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of the only facilities to have successfully kept a great white shark in captivity. They keep them only for a few months at a time before releasing them back into the wild. I've never actually seen a white shark in person, so when I heard that the aquarium had one on display, Travis and I decided to drive up to Monterey for Labor Day weekend.

The shark was amazing. He's only a few months old, less than 5 feet long and weighing about 43 pounds. But, it was still one of the most remarkable animals I've ever seen. I took this super short video when we first got there after the aquarium opened on Saturday. It was taken on my camera, so the quality isn't amazing. At any rate, I hope you enjoy it.

In Honor of Shark Week

2011-07-31T18:54:00.000-07:00

Like much of America, tonight I will be glued to my television watching Shark Week programming. And like you, I will be alternately terrified, riveted, disgusted, and amazed. I may have to turn away during some sort of especially graphic shark bite story, and there will certainly be expletives yelled that are not appropriate to detail in a blog that my parents read.

However, I hope that we can all take a moment to stop and think about how amazing sharks are. They might be terrifying, but they have as much right to protection as any other endangered species. One of the sad truths of environmentalism is that its much easier to raise money for cute fuzzy endangered mammals, like pandas. But, sharks deserve our protection just as much as anything else - they are, in their own way, extraordinary and beautiful.

So, if you are as fascinated by sharks as I am, I hope that you'll try to help them in some way.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium supports a shark-finning ban in California (as well as the sale of shark fins). They also have an excellent guide to sustainable seafood and information on supporting their Save White Sharks program.

But for now, I leave with you with this:

Holy crap! Did you SEE that? That thing is TOO BIG to be able to leap out of the water like that!

Happy Shark Week!

State Parks: Palomar Mountain

2011-06-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

The first park we went to was Palomar Mountain State Park, over Memorial Day weekend. Palomar Mountain is in San Diego County, northeast of Escondido. When you read about Palomar, most people say variations of "it feels like the Sierra Nevada". I haven't spent time in the Sierra Nevada yet, so I can't verify this. However, if you have; perhaps it will give you an idea of the atmosphere.

It's obviously very pine-y and woodsy in a way that LA isn't. Our nearby mountains have a lot more chaparral than giant pine trees. I had also read in my state parks book about some ancient live oaks. However, there is really only one book published that I have found that includes information about all of the state parks, and it was published in 2001. Since none of the other material I found mentioned oaks, I was afraid they had met an untimely demise in a fire or something. Luckily, I spoke to a kindly park ranger at the entrance who helped me map out a trail that would show us all of the features in the park that I wanted to see, including the pond, meadow, nature trail, and oaks.

The nature trail starts through a lot of lovely wooded area and basically follows a creek, which you can always sort of hear off to the side. You actually have to cross the creek to get onto the nature trail, and although its not a big deal at all, of course I managed to fall. I was convinced there were gold flecks in the mud on my jeans, but Travis just scoffed.

There are also an amazing amount of birds, although I missed out on seeing a mountain bluebird. Apparently one flew right in front of us as I bent down to pick up my binoculars - the binoculars I was carrying as part of my current attempt to be an amateur birdwatcher. (I want to go on a birdwatching hike in the Santa Monica Mountains, but I'm afraid the real birdwatchers will sneer at me. But, I digress.)

Once we'd hiked the nature trail for a bit and gone up to the Weir Historic site (which seems to be a chimney - none of my research attempts have informed me as to why it is historic), we switched over to a different trail. This trail basically cut straight across a meadow. The trail here definitely got a bit patchy and wound around a lot. Some of the time, I was not at all sure we were going the correct way. But, eventually we ended up back in the woods and happened acros the definitely ancient live oaks.

The park ranger had told me that the oaks had to be a couple of hundred years old. And they were definitely quite large. One of the most amazing things about them is that they have grown around and on top of these huge boulders. In the picture above, you can see Travis standing on top of a boulder and next to an oak, for scale.

And then we came across possibly my favorite part - a particular oak that had fallen down across the trail several years before. They just left it there, because it's so big that you can actually walk underneath it. It looks so menacing, but also beautiful.

That's pretty much it for our adventure. After this point, we had originally intended to loop back and finish the part of the nature trail that we had missed. However, after already hiking about 5 miles, we were exhausted and opted to cut through a campsite and head back to the car. It was an excellent day and a fantastic park, and I don't even have pictures of Doane Pond or the incredibly foggy Boucher Lookout. If you've never been, definitely check this one out quickly before it closes.

California State Parks

2011-06-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

I know I usually only blog about food, but if there is one thing I love more than food, it might be parks. It doesn't hurt that hiking increases my appetite, and there is usually some sort of delicious food to be discovered while out adventuring.

Recently, the California state government announced that 70 state parks would be closed by July 1, 2012 as part of a $33 million dollar budget cut to the state park system. While closures have been threatened in the past (I think at least twice in the past five years), this time it seems to be actually happening.

Some argue that the state budget has long been bloated or simply sigh and say, "Everything has to be cut. Money has to be saved, no matter what the cost." I maintain that the cost here is simply too high. There is evidence that closing parks won't save money at all; in fact, it could cost far more than it will save.

Visitors to state parks tend to spend money in the nearby areas, which helps local economies. Closed parks will become havens for criminal activity. The risk of wildfires (already a huge issue for Californians) will only increase. Federal funding will be lost, and the state could still be liable for people injured while trespassing in the closed parks.

But, I digress. My main point here is just to say that I love state parks. To that end, Travis and I have decided that we will try to visit as many of the closing parks as possible over the next year. This is complicated by the fact that we live in Southern California, and the majority of the park closures are further north. But, we'll still give it our best shot. We've been to a couple so far, and it occurred to me in the last couple of weeks that perhaps I should blog about our progress.

During the time that I've been thinking about this, I've actually stumbled across another blog called 70 in 70, which is much more adventurous - they're attempting to visit all 70 parks in 70 days. I highly recommend it. The photography is absolutely stunning, and I cannot wait to see the parks in Northern California.

So that's it. We've been to three parks so far, which I will hopefully post about soon. This coming weekend, we'll be attempting to see 5 of the closing parks (plus 1 non-closing park) in 3 days. Whew. Wish me luck!

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chip Cookies

2011-06-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in ages, but I was so pleased with these cookies yesterday I thought that I should just go ahead. I was definitely craving cookies last night, and I'd been wanting to do something to use up some peanut butter and some oats that I had.

I got this recipe from a blog called Brown Eyed Baker, and I only made one rather minor change and one specification to it.

A while back, I bought this Jif "Natural" peanut butter with 1/3 less sodium and low sugar. I thought it would be an easy way to have Travis eat something semi-healthy. About two days later, he declared that it tasted "like the void" and he needed new peanut butter. It's been sitting around ever since. I used it in this recipe for two reasons. 1 - it doesn't actually taste like the void and 2 - it has a really really peanutty taste, which I thought would do well in a cookie. I mean, you're adding more sugar and salt anyway.

Secondly, the recipe called for semisweet chocolate chips. I happened to have a bag of mixed semisweet chocolate and peanut butter chips, so I used those instead. And, they are delicious. Gooey and really really peanut buttery. I highly recommend it.

Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Makes about 16 cookies

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 stick (½ cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
½ cup creamy peanut butter
½ cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup light brown sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
½ cup rolled oats
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips and/or peanut butter chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

2. Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.

3. On medium speed, cream together the butter, peanut butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract, about 3 minutes. Add the egg and beat to combine. On low speed, gradually add the flour until just combined. Stir in the oats, and then the chocolate chips.

4. Use a large cookie scoop (3 tablespoons) and drop dough onto prepared baking sheets about 2 inches apart. Bake for 10 minutes, or until the cookies are lightly golden. Cool completely on the baking sheet and then store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Cornbread Fail!

2011-04-03T19:34:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick note because I thought it was funny. Yesterday, Travis went to see a movie with a friend, and I decided to bake while he was gone.

One would think that I would learn from my prior cooking failures, but unfortunately that is not the case. This is the second time in the last few months that I have cooked something in this loaf pan that overflowed into the oven. Sigh.

At least this time I had a cookie sheet under it to keep it from making such a big mess. In retrospect, I don't know if it's better or worse that I suspected it might happen again but did it anyway...

Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

2011-04-02T16:35:00.000-07:00

I made this pasta recently, and it was so simple and so delicious. It's rich but not too heavy, and the leftovers were tasty as well. Most carbonara recipes use heavy cream, but this one does not. I suppose that's probably why it feels a bit less dense.

I think this is a good dish to make on the weekend in that it looks really impressive, but it still leaves you with plenty of time to enjoy your weekend too. This is not the first time a pasta dish has surprised me - the recipes always seem so easy, but the end result is so elegant and so tasty. Sometimes I can hardly believe that I made it myself!

The recipe is from the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, which Travis's parents got me for Christmas and is quickly becoming one of my favorite cooking resources.

Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

Ingredients:

3 large eggs
1 1/2 ounces Parmesan cheese, grated (3/4 cup)
1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
3 garlic cloves, minced
8 ounces bacon (8 slices) chopped fine
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup dry white wine
salt
1 pound spaghetti
pepper

Directions:

1. Adjust an oven rack to the lowest position, place a large serving bowl on the rack, and heat the oven to 200 degrees. Bring 4 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot for the spaghetti.

2. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs, cheeses, and garlic together and set aside.

3. Cook the bacon and olive oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium heat until the bacon is crisp, about 8 minutes. Add the wine and simmer until it is slightly reduced, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cover.

4. When the water is boiling, stir in 1 tablespoon salt and the spaghetti. Cook, stirring often, until the spaghetti is almost tender but still a little firm to the bite.

5. Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta cooking water then drain the spaghetti, leaving it slightly wet. Remove the warm bowl from the oven and add the spaghetti. Immediately pour the egg and bacon mixtures over the spaghetti and toss to coat. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add the reserved pasta water as needed to loosen the sauce before serving.

Dekopon (Sumo Tangerine)

2011-03-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

I heard about this fruit on a Good Food podcast recently, and then I happened to stumble across one at Whole Foods after work the other day (I was actually only looking for pie, so it was a pleasant surprise).

There is a really fascinating article here about the fruit, but here's a quick summary: Dekopon is a tangerine variety from Japan that has been incredibly popular there since the early 90s I think. It was so popular it could cost up to $10 per fruit. However, it was illegal to import because of possible exotic diseases, etc. But, someone did managed to smuggle in some branches to graft new trees from.

After that, there's a lot of secret groves and corporate espionage sounding stuff. The article I linked to even contains the quote "I'm not happy that you found out about the Dekopon ... Some heavy hitters I work with are interested in it". And, if that doesn't sound like Chinatown but with fruit instead of water to you, you're totally nuts.

Finally, the fruit is available here in California this year (sold under the name Sumo Tangerine rather than Dekopon). So, after hearing all that craziness on the radio, I really had no choice but to buy one when I happened across it. And, it was delicious. It tastes like one of the best mandarin oranges you've ever had, but it's the size of a navel orange. It's seedless, really sweet, and really juicy. I have to say though that I also bought some Murcott tangerines that I might have even liked a little bit more. All in all, the citrus varieties available this time of year in Southern California are amazing, and you should definitely look into it.

Favorite Corn Muffins

2011-03-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

I made this recipe over a month ago.. needless to say, I've gotten a bit behind on blogging. I also either haven't been doing much really interesting cooking or I've just forgotten to take photos of it. But, these corn muffins are amazing. It's definitely the best cornbread recipe I've ever used, and I highly recommend it. The name of the recipe (Peerless Corn Muffins) seems a little sure of itself, but it turns out to be accurate.

Peerless Corn Muffins
from The Breakfast Book, by Marion Cunningham

Ingredients:
1 egg, room temperature
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk, warmed
1 cup cake flour
2/3 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 400. Grease muffin tins.

Beat or whisk egg, melted butter, and oil in a mixing bowl until well blended. Stir in warm milk. Combine cake flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and sugar in another bowl and stir with a fork until well mixed. Add dry ingredients and stir until blended. This is a light, medium-thick batter.

Spoon batter into muffin tins so each cup is three-quarters full. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the edges of the muffins are slightly golden and a straw comes out clean when inserted into the center. Remove from tins and cool a little on racks, or simply serve in a basket, hot from the oven.

Cranberry Oat Delights

2011-02-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

During my quest to use a 5-pound of whole wheat flour, I made these cranberry oat delights. I have to say, this is the only recipe I made that used entirely whole wheat flour rather than a 50/50 mix of whole wheat and all-purpose flour that I liked.

The recipe calls for dried cranberries, and I used craisins although I'm not sure I was supposed to. Also, I used some slivered almonds that I had in the fridge rather than walnuts or pecans. All in all, I liked these a lot. It just made a TON of cookies, and after two weeks I just couldn't eat any more and had to get rid of the last few. The cinnamon was also a little strong; I'm not sure it needed two whole teaspoons.

Cranberry Oat Delights
(recipe from King Arthur Flour)

3/4 cup ( 1 1/2 sticks, 6 ounces) unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 large egg
1 1/3 cups (4 5/8 ounces) old-fashioned rolled oats
1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups dried fruit: cranberries, diced apples, chopped dates, raisins, chopped apricots, or the dried fruits of your choice
1 cup (3 3/4 ounces) diced pecans or walnuts

Cream together the butter, sugar, spices, leaveners, salt, and vanilla. Beat in the egg. Add the oats, flour, fruit, and nuts, and stir to combine.

Drop the dough by heaping tablespoonfuls onto a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake the cookies in a preheated 350°F oven for 7 minutes; reverse the pans on the racks, and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, until cookies are beginning to brown around the edges, but are still soft in the center. Remove from the oven, and cool on a rack. Yield: about 4 dozen cookies.

Amazing Salad Dressing

2011-02-06T16:28:00.000-08:00

If you have never tried making your own salad dressing, I definitely recommend it. It's about 18 times easier than you think it's going to be and so delicious. Just look at those instructions! It's two lines!

This is a sesame vinaigrette I made recently, I've been eating a ton of salad lately just to get to use it. I couldn't find chili garlic paste and didn't have time to venture over to the Asian grocery, so I used chili garlic sauce instead.

Sweet Sesame Soy Vinaigrette
from Cook's Illustrated Magazine

Ingredients:

1/3 Cup rice vinegar
2 1/2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1/4 Cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 Teaspoon grated fresh ginger
2 Teaspoons Asian chili garlic paste
1 Tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1/2 Cup vegetable oil
2 Teaspoon sesame seeds, toasted

Instructions:

Whisk vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, ginger, and chili paste in medium bowl until sugar dissolves. Gradually whisk in oils, whisk in sesame seeds. can be refrigerated up to 3 weeks.

Cooking Romanesco

2011-02-05T16:43:00.000-08:00

Romanesco is a variety of cauliflower that is just gorgeous. It is actually a natural fractal, which is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole" (thanks wikipedia!) In this case, it is a logarithmic spiral, and each bud consists of a series of smaller buds that are also logarithmic spirals. As soon as I saw it at the farmers market, I of course thought: Awesome. But what does it taste like?

I took it home and considered what to do with it. Here's another view, of me contemplating this strange vegetable:

Ultimately, I decided on cooking it the same way I do cauliflower. So I chopped it up. At this point, it looks like a tiny felled evergreen forest!

I roasted it on 450, tossed with olive oil and salt. I used a grey sea salt that I had instead of regular kosher salt. Then, when it came out, I grated fresh parmesan over it. I understand that it looks a bit burned. That is called caramelization, and it tastes delicious.

Sidebar: ignore that fish. It tasted like the void, as Travis says. It's as if the fish had negative flavor, so that it not only was bland, but it pulled the flavor out of the bacon and sent it off into some abyss. I ate a lot of romanesco.

Red Lobster Biscuits?

2011-01-30T14:18:00.000-08:00

Every month, Food Network magazine does a feature on recreating a restaurant menu item that they cannot get the recipe for. I usually don't pay much attention, until one time, it was Red Lobster's cheddar bay biscuits. These are traditionally one of Travis's favorite things ever, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

They actually came out amazingly, which is sort of miraculous since I'm not generally good at breads and such (other than cornbread I suppose). The only thing I would change if I made them again would be to add a little bit of salt to the garlic butter mixture. I really didn't think that cooking a smashed clove of garlic in some butter for 60 seconds would do anything, but I was shocked. I should do that more often and brush it on rolls or something. Amazing.

I was also really surprised at how easy they were. This recipe taught me a nifty trick that I've used a few times now - use a food processor to cut in the butter! It's so much easier, I can't believe I ever tried to cut butter into flour in other ways. It also keeps the butter cold, because you aren't touching it, which is important in biscuits. So, here you go.

Almost Famous Cheddar Biscuits

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups all-Purpose flour
1 Tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons baking powder
2 1/2 Teaspoon Sugar
1/4 Teaspoon Salt
3 Tablespoon vegetable shortening at room temperature
4 Tablespoon cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
6 Ounce grated yellow cheddar cheese (about 1 1/4 cups)
3/4 Cup whole milk
FOR GARLIC BUTTER
3 Tablespoon unsalted butter
1 Clove garlic, smashed
1 Teaspoon fresh chopped parsley

Instructions: Position a rack in the upper third of the oven and preheat to 425. Lightly mist a large baking sheet with cooking spray.

Make the biscuits: pulse the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a food processor. Add the shortening and pulse until combined. Add the butter, pulse 4 or 5 times, until the butter is in pea-size pieces. Add the cheese and pulse 2 or 3 times. Pour in the milk and pulse just until the mixture is moistened and forms a shaggy dough. Turn out onto a clean surface and gently knead until the dough comes together. Do not overwork the dough or the biscuits will be tough.

Drop the dough onto the baking sheet in scant 1/4 cup portions, 2 inches apart, and bake until golden, 15 or 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the garlic butter. Melt the butter with the garlic in a small saucepan over medium heat, cook for 1 minute. Remove from the heat and stir in parsley. Brush the biscuits with garlic butter and serve warm.

Waffles for Christmas

2011-01-18T20:48:00.000-08:00

For Christmas, I got a waffle iron! So, New Year's weekend, I decided to tackle the waffle iron and my ongoing whole wheat flour experimentation in one fell swoop. I settled on a recipe for Nutty Whole Wheat Waffles that was in the Cuisinart instruction booklet.

It was so much fun! I've never made waffles before, unless you count in the cafeteria at UT in college (where the waffle irons imprint a UT logo on your waffles). I thought it might get sort of boring, like the time I made pancakes, but it was really fun. It took some experimentation to get the batter amount right, as you can see below.

But, overall, they turned out amazingly. I didn't bother trying to keep them warm in the oven while I went, because I was just planning to eat the last one and freeze the rest. I loved how the nuts made the waffles sort of crunchy. You can use several different types of nuts, but I love almonds and already had some on hand. I honestly couldn't tell that there was whole wheat flour in them, but it did make me feel sort of superior for eating it, and isn't that the point? I felt like this was a success all around.

Nutty Whole Wheat Waffles
makes eight 6 1/2 inch round waffles

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups reduced fat milk
6 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans, walnuts, almonds, or hazelnuts

Place ingredients in a large mixing bowl and combine until well blended and smooth. Let batter sit 5 minutes before using. Preheat your waffle maker.

Pour 1/2 cup batter (in my case less, unless you love cleaning waffle batter off the counter) onto the center of the lower grid; spread evenly using a heat proof spatula. Close cover. (My waffle iron has an indicator light to let me know when they're through. If yours doesn't, just play with it, but don't leave it more than a few minutes at first I'd say.)

Open cover and carefully remove baked waffle. I used a spatula for this, but it did split a couple of the waffles through the middle, so emphasis on "carefully" I think. Repeat with remaining batter.

Serve immediately or keep waffles warm in a 200 degree oven until ready to serve.

Random Blog Thoughts

2011-01-12T18:11:00.001-08:00

I've decided that part of the problem with my food blog is that the photos are awful. I blame this mostly on the lighting in my kitchen. But, I don't quite know what to do about it.

How do other people with food blogs take such fantastic photos? Maybe their kitchens just aren't as poorly lit as mine. Perhaps I need some sort of secondary light source. Thoughts would be appreciated.

Now, I have to go fix some dinner. I just looked at too many other food blogs for inspiration, and now I'm starving.

Smores Cookies

2011-01-12T17:53:00.000-08:00

I made these cookies for New Year's Eve. They were really tasty; the cookie has a nice cinnamon flavor, and anything with marshmallows is fantastic in my book. They were best the first day, but they actually still tasted really good a few days later when I took the last few to work. I would definitely recommend giving this a shot. Just be sure that you keep a close on them during the broiler step - you can see that a few of the ones in the back of the photo are a bit on the dark side! I believe that the recipe came from Everyday Food magazine.

This is also part of my experiment in using whole wheat flour, which is working pretty well so far. You really can't tell in these, other than the whole wheat offering sort of a nutty flavor, which I love. Although, that could also have been the oats.

Ingredients:

1/2 Cup old fashioned rolled oats
1 Cup all-Purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
1 Cup whole wheat flour (spooned and leveled)
3/4 Teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon baking soda
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
1 Cup unsalted butter, room temperature
3/4 Cup light brown sugar
1 Large Egg
8 Ounce bittersweet chocolate or semisweet chocolate, cut into 30 squares
15 Large marshmallows, halved horizontally

Instructions: Preheat oven to 350. In a food processor, pulse oats until finely ground. Add flours, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt; pulse to combine. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg, scraping down side of bowl. With mixer on low, beat in flour mixture until just combined.

Drop dough by tablespoons, 1 inch apart, onto two baking sheets. Top each with a chocolate square. Bake just until lightly golden 11 to 13 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through. Remove sheets from oven, heat broiler. Top each cookie with a marshmallow. One sheet at a time, broil until marshmallows are lightly browned, 1 to 1 1/2 minutes. Transfer cookies to wire racks to cool.

Eggnog Pound Cake, Version Two

2010-12-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

This cake is wonderful, even if the photo is not so much. It's fluffy with a little crunch from the almonds around the outside. The eggnog taste isn't too in your face. Also, it's cooked in a bundt pan which is always fun and exciting. The recipe is here. If nothing else, the first cake-tastrophe led me to find this new recipe, which I like even more.

one of those update blogs

2010-12-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged in ages. It's not just this I've been neglecting... it took me three months to finish a book, I'm reading comics from September, and I just uploaded a few Halloween photos to Flickr. But, I have still been cooking a bit - it's just been quite hectic here. Since I last posted a blog, I applied to graduate school, and I've nearly finished up by two classes (only a statistics project and final left). My Christmas shopping is done, and my packages are mailed to their appropriate destinatitons. Cards are out, tree is up... I've been baking...

Okay, well clearly the first baking did not come out as planned. I was making an eggnog pound cake recipe that I found in Southern Living last year. It's actually a delicious cake. Last year I made it at Travis's parents house, and it was delicious. But, it turns out my loaf pan was too small. I smelled something burning while watching Walking Dead (which is sort of funny, like 4D TV if you've seen the finale), and when I went to check on the cake, it had risen at least 5 inches above the top of the pan.

Cake was oozing EVERYWHERE... it was in giant stalactite looking blobs on the bottom of the oven... such a mess. I couldn't finish it, even after I fished out the blobs, the burning from the oven floor kept making my smoke alarm go off. So, the picture you see above is after it settled again, with a few pieces missing from the done side where I decided to give it just a little taste.

More successfully, I made this for dinner one night. I used a frozen shrimp scampi to make some shrimp and grits for myself. It was actually pretty tasty.. I used some parmesan cheese grated into the grits as well. With it is braised bacon cabbage, which was also quite delicious. I actually finished up the leftovers of that tonight.

These pumpkin pancakes are soooo good, I still have a few in the freezer. The recipe is from Martha Stewart.

And finally, I made this lovely roasted chicken and butternut squash soup back before Thanksgiving. Honestly, I think I should've just eaten the roasted chicken and squash separately. I cut up a butternut squash (not an easy feat) and roasted it on a cookie sheet with some oil and chicken thighs. I ate quite a bit of it off of that pan before I managed to get it in the soup. If I can bring myself to cut up another butternut squash, I will definitely roast it that way again. The soup was okay, but for some reason I never like soup when I make it. I think I must be doing something wrong.

Baked Chicken with Potatoes, Onions, and Garlic

2010-10-24T19:11:00.000-07:00

I was so excited to finally cook a proper dinner that I thought I wouldn't be able to decide what to make. But, I have been craving roast chicken recently, and autumn is the perfect time of year for lovely roast dinners. There was a one pan chicken dinner in Everyday Food a few months ago would do nicely.

I had a whole chicken cut up in the freezer, so I thawed that out. Put it in a pan with one cut up red onion (in big pieces, like eighths), a quartered lemon, about a pound of halved or quartered (depending on their size) white new potatoes, six springs of thyme, and a head of garlic broken up into cloves but not peeled. Drizzle with 3/4 cup olive oil and 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar (whisked together). Salt and pepper, then roast for 50 minutes.

The recipe called to roast it 450, but that was too high for my oven. I ended up around 375. I suppose it actually could have been 450 in real temperature - I suspect that my oven runs hot, but I keep forgetting to check it. Also, my roasting pan was a little too big. I needed 12x16 but only had a bit smaller and a bit larger than that. I settled on the larger one, but some stuff on the edges burned. I think it was too exposed to the heat.

Overall, this was really great. The potatoes (especially the ones that burned a little on the outside actually) were delicious - soft and creamy in the middle and crispy on the outside. The chicken was juicy, and the garlic was sooo good. I actually just ate a couple of cloves of it, but I love roasted garlic. It was good to squeeze out the cloves from the peel and spread it on some bread.

I also had made Paula Deen's marinated tomatoes, which are really easy and tasty. I make them quite a lot actually, they're really good for company because you can do them early in the day and just put them out to get to room temperature.

A Decline in Food Adventures

2010-10-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, I decided to go back to school. So, this fall I decreased my work schedule, signed up for two classes at Santa Monica College, and started focusing on studying for the GRE and preparing the various essays, etc. that are required for the UCLA graduate admission application. All of this has lead to a sad decline in cooking here recently.

That's not to say I don't cook at all, just that I've been incredibly lazy about it. For example, tonight we had macaroni and cheese (the kraft gourmet kind) and some pre-cut and pre-seasoned fresh brussel sprouts (that were actually pretty tasty).

However, that's not to say I haven't had any food adventures at all. And hopefully, after I take the GRE this week I'll have a bit more time again. Anyway, here is a summary:

This is some ice cream Travis and I got at the new Santa Monica food truck lot. His is cake donut flavored (it tasted exactly like a cake donut, oddly enough) and mine is a Salty Scotty - it's a lightly salted butterscotch. If you've ever had a salted caramel (which is sooo good, if you haven't), it tasted like that but in ice cream form.

I really wanted to bake cookies, but without the time, I just grabbed a thing of refrigerated cookie dough. It is clear to me now that I should've used a larger pan.

Had these great shrimp and chips with remoulade sauce from the Shrimp Pimp truck a few weeks ago. So good!

Saw an enormous freaking pumpkin at the LA County Fair!

And we also shared a giant turkey leg. There are pictures of me eating too, but I look sort of demonic, like I might eat the person taking the picture next or something.

Rib-Eye Steaks with Garlic and Rosemary

2010-09-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned recently how much I love the Stinking Rose Restaurant Cookbook. This weekend I decided to try to recreate the ribeye, which Travis and I have had at the restaurant several times. It was absolutely the best steak I have ever cooked. I made it with some cauliflower that I roasted with olive oil, sea salt, and garlic, and then I took some leftover french bread and made garlic bread from it so that Travis would have something to eat besides steak, bless his veggie-phobic heart.

For the steaks, you will need:

2 large cloves garlic, halved

4 (10 ounce) rib eye steaks (I used two and halved the rosemary but not the garlic. What can I say? I like garlic!)

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 springs rosemary

1/4 cup dry white wine

2 tablespoons butter

I also didn't halve the wine/butter, I just made a bit extra sauce. You also need a cast iron skillet. I guess you could use a different kind of skillet, but why would you?

1. Rub the cut edge of 1 garlic half around your skillet.

2. Set the skillet over medium heat. Lightly sprinkle the steaks with salt and pepper on both sides and add steaks to the skillet. Place all the garlic and a sprig of rosemary on one side of the skillet to add a hint of flavor. (I had to do the steaks in two batches because they wouldn't both fit in my skillet, so I used one garlic clove and one rosemary sprig in each batch).

3. Cook steaks on first side for 3-4 minutes, then turn and cook another 6-7 minutes for medium-rare (for a 1 1/2 inch steak). Once rosemary and garlic begin to brown, remove them from the pan.

4. Transfer steaks to a warmed plate. Add wine and butter to the skillet, stirring to scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. When the mixture starts to bubble, remove from the heat and drizzle over the top of the steaks. Serve immediately.

Best. Hot Dog. Ever.

2010-09-21T22:45:00.001-07:00

Okay, so maybe I could just be thinking best hot dog ever in the heat of the moment, but it was a really good hot dog. It's Tuesday. I've been feeling sort of sick, so I was super drowsy (in spite of the insanely strong coffee that I had at breakfast). But it was food truck day! I couldn't decide what to get, but I settled on something simple: The Greasy Wiener truck. I will now list the amazing things about this hot dog:

1. it is deep fried

2. it is wrapped in bacon

3. with this enormous thing of fries, it cost $6. I could barely eat all the fries.

I've also had the Iggys from Greasy Wiener (mini burgers on Hawaiian rolls) and they're pretty great as well. So, all in all, it was a good day.

Cappuccino Muffins

2010-09-19T19:15:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a new muffin recipe to try, since I generally make chocolate chip or lemon poppyseed, and I found these! It's a Cappuccino Chocolate Muffin - you can find the recipe here.

They're really delicious, and they're supposed to freeze well too, which is nice. The coffee flavor isn't too strong, and it's soooo good with the chocolate chips. I really can't wait to have these for breakfast at work this week. I recommend heating in the microwave for a few seconds to get the chocolate to melt some.

Trout with Garlic Lemon Butter

2010-09-11T22:41:00.000-07:00

This was sort of an interesting meal experiment. It's based on a recipe from The Stinking Rose Restaurant's cookbook. It's possibly my favorite restaurant, and I've really gotten to love cooking out of the cookbook at home as well.

But, I say this is based on the recipe because nothing went quite according to plan. The recipe in the book is actually for Lemon Baked Salmon with Garlic Caper Butter.

However, that's not what actually ending up happening. I apparently looked at the wrong week's sale ad today for the grocery, so they didn't have the salmon that I thought would be there. But, there was some fairly nice looking trout. I'm also not in love with capers (and the jar in my fridge looked a bit off, so I tossed them. Upon retrospect, they could've actually been there for years). Finally, I decided to be bold and not really measure a lot of stuff. So this is what I did.

I tried to bring about 3/4 a stick of unsalted butter to room temperature. It sort of worked. I actually put it in the microwave for a few seconds as well. I then mixed it with the juice from half a lemon, a tablespoon of white wine, and two (albeit very large) cloves of minced garlic. I folded in some fresh parsley and then added salt and pepper.

Then I put the trout in a baking dish and added 1/2 cup of water. I put the trout in the dish and spread some of the butter mixture on each fillet (I think about a tablespoon on each) and then topped it with some slices of lemon. It baked on 325 for about 15 minutes. I wasn't sure it was done, so I bumped up the temperature to 400 and baked it another 5.

It's served on some leftover egg noodles from last night. I put another tablespoon or so of the butter mixture in a saucepan and let it cook for a few minutes (since the garlic was raw). Then I just tossed the leftover pasta around in it. The noodles did originally have some butter and parmesan cheese on them, but this butter addition definitely helped. On Friday night they were far too bland.

It was really quite tasty, but the garlic was very strong on the fish. I think it would've been nice to cook the garlic a bit first. Some roasted garlic cloves in the butter would be great as well. I liked the butter mixture so much that I saved the leftovers to do something else with later this week. Maybe just put it on fish again, who can say?

ICBC: Cardamom!

2010-08-30T18:36:00.000-07:00

This is one of the blogger challenges that I skipped a few weeks ago. Cardamom was ridiculously expensive at the grocery, and I just couldn't quite bring myself to buy it that week. But, this week I managed to find a smaller and more reasonably priced container. I didn't feel like doing something sweet (I still have muffins to make), so I decided to try Cardamom Chicken and Rice. I found the recipe on the Food and Wine website. It was pretty easy.

The recipe actually called for chicken legs, but I couldn't find any leg/thighs still attached. So instead, I got some bone-in chicken breast halves. I rubbed the chicken with some canola oil and seasoned it with cardamom, salt, and pepper. It roasted on 375 for about 50 minutes I think.

In the meantime, I had to work on the rice. I needed 2 1/4 cups chicken broth for 1 1/2 cups of rice, but I forgot broth at the store and certainly didn't have time to make my own. I did have some chicken bouillon though, and so I made about 2 cups of that and added another 1//4 cup of water (it seemed a bit strong/salty). I sauteed some shallots in oil (the recipe called for onions, but I thought shallots would be nicer, and I was totally right).

Then, I stirred the shallots around in the oil/shallot mixture until all the rice was coated, added the broth and about a teaspoon of cardamom, and brought to a boil. Like really any rice, once it's at a boil, you cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Let it stand for 5, then fluff it and serve.

It was so good! I was very proud of having used cardamom in both dishes. Travis didn't like the rice much, but he did enjoy the chicken so it all worked out.

ICBC: Tomatoes!

2010-08-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure what to do for the ingredient this week, tomatoes. I love tomatoes, but especially in the summer, I usually just eat them marinated and raw. So good. But I wanted to try something different, and I remembered that in the Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook, there is a recipe for tomato pie.

It's actually really easy. Prebake a pie crust, layer 4 peeled and sliced tomatoes, about 10 chopped basil leaves, and some chopped green onion. Top with a mixture of shredded cheddar and mozzarella mixed with mayonnaise. I think I could have used slightly more cheese or slightly less mayo, I'm not sure which. But, the pie was delicious.

I also learned a ridiculously easy way to peel tomatoes. It was craziness.

Fun Weekend/ICBC Pause

2010-08-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

My dad came out to visit LA this weekend, so I did not finish the blogger challenge for last week. I'm planning to do coffee and maybe even cardamom this week!

In the meantime, here are some beautiful macarons from Europane Bakery in Pasadena and some sea salt caramels from Little Flower Candy Company. They're all really quite delicious.

ICBC: Yogurt (Part One)

2010-08-08T18:06:00.000-07:00

The secret ingredient this week is yogurt. I don't like yogurt at all, but I felt confident that I could find ways to use it that would be delicious. I was right.

I've been thinking for a while about using yogurt in baking, and I've been very curious as to whether or not this could in any way be successful. I actually talked to someone at work about it earlier this week, and they said they hadn't had any luck with this, because they found the final product too tangy. I wondered if greek yogurt could possibly help this, since I've noticed it has less of that distinctive yogurt tanginess.

So, I tried these double chocolate brownies. I get the recipe out of Food Network Magazine. Maybe it's the double chocolate, but they are So. Good. Chocolatey, moist.. just lovely. Travis even likes them, but I didn't tell him that they have yogurt in them. Shh, it's a secret.

The recipe also calls for whole grain pastry flour, but being sort of drowsy at the grocery, I accidentally bought whole wheat flour. No worries though, some quick internet research told me that I could use 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup cake flour. If you didn't have cake flour on hand like I do (I have a very well stocked pantry, in spite of the lack of cardamom), you could use the full whole wheat flour, your final product would just be denser.

I definitely recommend this one. You cannot beat a brownie this tasty for 160 calories. You know, just don't feel like that entitles you to eat the whole pan or anything :)

Double Chocolate Brownies

6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup whole grain pastry flour, or 1/2 cup whole-wheat and 1/2 cup all-Purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
4 large eggs
1 cup light brown packed sugar
1/2 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1/4 cup canola oil
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Instructions: Preheat oven to 350. Coat a 9 by 13 baking dish with cooking spray.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water, stirring occasionally. Do not let the bottom of the bowl touch the water.

Whisk the flour, cocoa, salt, and baking soda in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs and brown sugar until smooth, then add the yogurt, oil, and vanilla, and whisk to combine. Whisk in the melted chocolate mixture until blended. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just moistened.

Spread the batter in the prepared pan and sprinkle with walnuts, if desired. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with a few moist crumbs. Cool completely in the pan on a rack before slicing.

Huckleberry - Maple Bacon Biscuit

2010-08-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I ate the most amazing thing. It is a maple bacon biscuit from Huckleberry Cafe and Bakery in Santa Monica. It was really crumbly and delicious, with bacon pieces and this lovely maple glaze on top. Oh, man. There's really not much else to say. It's just good stuff. It was a little tough to eat while walking down the street, being super crumbly and all.

I have come up with a formula that expresses how I feel about this:

Salty + mapley + bready = perfection.

Food Truck Round Up

2010-08-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

I didn't make the blogger challenge this week. We'll just have to call it a fail and move on I guess. The ingredient was cardamom. I found some recipes online that I was quite excited about, but at the grocery I couldn't find any cardamom less than $11, and I just couldn't bring myself to go through with the purchase.

However, I did get a new phone yesterday! And in the process of going through my old phone, I found some delicious looking food picture that I had never posted. So, I decided to do a food truck round up with a few of my favorites.

Border Grill Taco Truck:

The Border Grill truck is amazing. These tacos are sooo good, particularly the potato and the fish. It's funny, the third taco shown here is pork. Pork is almost always my favorite, but not in this case. I've also tried the carne asada since then, but I'm still fish and potato all the way. Not together, although that might be interesting.

The fish taco (on the far right) is a crispy fish with chipotle honey and a creamy salsa fresca. It's one of the best things I've ever eaten. The potato rajas taco (center I think) is roasted potatoes, chiles, mexican cheeses, and pickled onion. They both have amazing texture. The fish is crispy, the potato is soft and all the ingredients sort of melt together. Hmm, this is actually making me quite hungry.

You can also see the rice and beans side. It was alright. On that particular day, my red rice was sort of hard. The green rice and the beans were pretty tasty though.

Next: Vesuvio LA

This is a good truck as well, but this appetizer is my favorite. Their entrees and sandwiches are pretty good, but generally I will just get these for a snack. These are arancini, or fried Italian rice balls. Italian salame, parmesan cheese, and parsley with a mozzarella core. Deep fried. Usually they put a bit more cheese on top and serve it in a really nice marinara sauce. Not quite enough for lunch on its own, but it makes a delicious (if probably unhealthy) snack.

Finally: Fishlips Sushi

I know the idea of sushi from a truck can be a bit scary. But come on, it's not like they don't have a refrigerator! This truck advertises a 'real sushi man!' on the side of their truck. And you can see him through the window, making sushi. He looks very serious, the truck looks very clean, and I would definitely recommend this to anyone.

What makes it so amazing is the temari sushi. Those are the 5 perfect tiny sushi pieces that you can see above. You don't have to try to cram a whole sushi piece in your mouth or awkwardly bite it in half while rest sort of falls apart. It is the perfect size for sushi. I would actually rather have a huge tray of this and just leave out the california/tuna rolls that come with the lunch plate. I remember it being fresh and light and just a fantastic lunch. Come to think of it, I might have to track this one down again soon...

LA Street Food Fest

2010-07-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went to the LA Street Food Fest! It was pretty fun, a bit warm and a bit too crowded for my taste. You can see me below, standing on the field at the Rose Bowl.

That's right, the festival was on the field at the Rose Bowl. Maybe this is only strange to me because I went to the University of Tennessee, where the field of Neyland Stadium is worshiped as a minor deity. NO ONE is allowed on that field. The grass is grown with the blood of those who have tried. And failed.

But there we were - 5,000 food fest attendees tramping all over that field in front of god and everyone. No kidding.

I had a pretty awesome celebrity sighting too! For a good while, I was right next to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Susan Feniger (co-founder of Border Grill in Santa Monica and recent contestant on Top Chef Masters). She's not in the picture below, that is just the Mayor of Los Angeles with his recently broken elbow.

I don't have any food pictures. There was a lot going on.. I was by myself, standing in lines, carrying around food trays, avoiding hipsters. It was a busy day. I ate a couple of amazing things: deep fried shrimp tacos from Mariscos Jalisco and something fried with cheese in it from Antojitos Carmen. I was a big fan of both. There was also a lot of great looking stuff that I missed. I left about an hour and a half early because my feet were killing me, I had to drive home from Pasadena still, and because I desperately did not want to miss the finale of Doctor Who (I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool.)

All in all, it was not a bad afternoon.

Chocolate Pound Cake

2010-07-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

I found this photo the other day, and I realized that I totally forgot to blog this! A few weeks ago, we decided to have a dessert party at work. A few people chipped in, and I made this chocolate pound cake. The recipe is not for the faint of heart. It is from Paula Deen's The Lady and Son's Savannah Country Cookbook, and you know how that goes. I ate only a couple of very thin slices, but it was really good. The color was a little strange I thought, but no one seemed to mind.

I was pretty sure this wasn't going to come out of my bundt pan for a while (I don't have a tube pan, I just use the bundt pan interchangeably). However, after a bit of zaniness (insert cake montage here), it all worked out fine.

Chocolate Pound Cake
Serves 16 to 20 (at least)

3 cups sugar
2 sticks butter
1 stick margarine
5 eggs
3 cups cake flour
4 tablespoons cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350. Mix sugar with butter and margarine; add eggs one at a time, beating after each. Mix together dry ingredients. Add dry ingredients alternately with milk to butter mixture, beginning with flour and ending with flour. Add vanilla. Bake in a greased and floured tube pan for about one hour.

ICBC: Goat Cheese + Red Onion

2010-07-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

Last week I neglected to complete the challenge, due to some forgetfulness while grocery shopping combined with laziness. So, this week I decided to combine last week's and this week's ingredients into one delicious recipe. I settled on: pizza! The pizza contains: baby portabello mushrooms, spinach, red onions, goat cheese, and mozzarella cheese. It is drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper. I thought the pizza was okay, but it needed the following:

1. more salt
2. onions to be caramelized
3. garlic
4. mushrooms possibly pre-cooked a bit? I'm not sure about that one.

Other than that, it was pretty tasty.

Travis did not eat any of this. In fact, he was pretty disgusted by what I had done to the poor defenseless pizza crust. He made a grilled cheese with fresh mozzarella and colby jack. It smelled fantastic. I was a little jealous.

ICBC: Blackberries

2010-07-11T17:34:00.001-07:00

I'm going to be really honest here. I did not make this blackberry recipe during the week of the blackberry challenge. I had recently made it but just had not posted a blog yet. And, I was so proud, I decided to use it for this week's challenge.

I made this yummy looking pie! It's probably the best pie I've made yet. As you can see below, it actually thickened properly and didn't ooze apart after being cut! I realize that doesn't seem like a big deal, but I was super proud.

I don't really have a recipe, but I do have some pie tips that I followed from The Lost Art of Pie Making Made Easy, which is my favorite pie book.

Use 5 cups of fresh fruit, 3/4 cup sugar, and 3 tablespoons of cornstarch or tapioca. Start off in a 425 degree oven for 15 minutes, then turn down the heat to 350, bake another 30-45 minutes. Allow the filling to totally bubble for a few minutes in the innermost part of the pie to insure a filling that "sets". That's where lattice crust comes in handy. Plus it looks so yummy when it bubbles over. Delightful.

Food Trucks!!

2010-07-05T07:55:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty big food truck week last week. It actually took me a while to remember what I ate on Tuesday, which is pretty sad. Dim Sum on Saturday, Nom Nom on Monday, Vesuvio on Tuesday, Border Grill on Friday. I don't have pictures of all of it though. I keep forgetting to take photos of the Border Grill tacos, but oh my gosh that fish taco is divine. So, here is what I do have:

Nom Nom Truck

I have never had authentic Vietnamese banh mi, so I don't know how this sandwich holds up in comparison. I only know that I love this sandwich. I had it a couple of times and passed it up a couple of times at the Century Blvd truck lot because I thought it would always be there. Then they went off the road for a couple of months, which was rough. But, now they're back!

There are a variety of meats you can get on your banh mi, but I always go with grilled pork. It also includes: cilantro, marinated carrots/daikon radish, cucumbers, jalapenos (which I leave off), and some sort of mayonnaise spread. I don't even like cilantro, but I don't mind it on this sandwich for some reason. The marinated vegetables are amazingly tangy, the grilled pork is to die for, the baguette is perfect. I really do adore this sandwich.

As a side note, I got curious about the origins of banh mi - turns out it's a remnant of French colonialism in Indochina. Hence the baguette!

Dim Sum Truck

Also last week, I finally found the Dim Sum Truck at Santa Monica College. From left to right above, there is a peking duck taco, shrimp har gow dumplings, and steamed chicken and mushroom buns. The dumplings were amazing. The taco was really good too (but not as good as the duck taco from the Flying Pig truck). The buns were okay too but not my favorite. However, the problem here could be more that I don't love buns than that they weren't good. A bit too starchy for my taste, I definitely prefer dumplings.

Again, I haven't really had authentic dim sum (I find the ordering process overwhelming), so I don't know how this truck compares. However, I have heard that it is really good dim sum (particularly for Westside Los Angeles).

Since we got an origin story for banh mi, here's one for dim sum as well. Did you know that dim sum originated from tea houses that opened along the Silk Road to provide food to travelers? It's true.

ICBC: Puff Pastry

2010-07-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

For the ingredient puff pastry, I really wanted to make some sort of meat wrapped in pastry. Mini beef wellingtons sounded best, but I ultimately opted for Chicken Wellington instead. You can find the recipe here.

It's basically a mixture of cream cheese, mustard, and herbs, some pulled rotisserie chicken, and a sweet onion/mushroom/garlic mixture seasoned with some salt and pepper. You layer all that in a square of puff pastry and I loved it, although it was way too hot to heat when first cut open. The only strange thing was that the recipe said you only needed one sheet of puff pastry to make four of these, but for the life of me I could not get the dough to roll out enough. I think my puff pastry had been partially thawed and then refrozen before I purchased it, so it wouldn't unfold properly.

For the sauteed onion, mushroom and garlic mixture, I used walla walla onions and cremini mushrooms. The mixture was so amazing that I ate the leftover straight out of the skillet. (I only ended up making two pastries, and I left this mixture out of one of them because Travis hates mushrooms). All in all, it was a successful and not that difficult of a dinner. A perfect start to a holiday weekend.

the Habit Burger Grill

2010-07-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

This was a while ago, so I must say that I don't remember a ton about this meal. I liked it quite a bit, but not as much as I like In N Out. Michele F and I went for dinner one evening. The hamburger was nice and charred on the outside, and the patty is thin so it got sort of crispy, which I do like in a hamburger from time to time. So, in the chronicle of California hamburger chains, I place this one in second. Honestly, I just wanted to post this because I'm fond of the photo for some reason. It looks so yummy.

Mrs. Beasley's - Peanut Butter Cupcake

2010-06-27T10:52:00.000-07:00

So, Mrs. Beasley's bakery also has a truck! They were at the Century Blvd food truck lot the same day that I had the grilled cheese from the previous post. I decided to purchase this cupcake to use as an incentive to get a lot of work done that afternoon. It is peanut butter with a marshmallow on top!

I ended up not eating the cupcake that day, but waiting until later that night to share it with Travis. I don't remember a lot about the cupcake itself, but the icing was divine. It tasted basically like really fluffy peanut butter. The marshmallow on top was pretty good as well, in spite of having sat there all day.

Grilled Cheese Truck

2010-06-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

I love the grilled cheese truck. It's one of those things that you want to dislike because it's quite popular, but then it's so good that you can't. This was my second time eating at the truck, so I got their special for that day. I can't remember exactly what it was.. at least two kinds of cheese, one of which I think was gruyere, lots of mushrooms (crimini I think), and chicken. Possibly grilled onions as well. It was really really tasty, if a bit overwhelmed by the mushrooms. Not a problem for me, as I love mushrooms, but I can understand if some people thought it was a bit off-putting.

ICBC: Lemon

2010-06-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

It was my week to pick the ingredient this week, and I thought lemons would be a lovely summery flavor. Plus, it gave me a reason to make lemon bars! I made some a long time ago from a Paula Deen recipe, but I thought they were too sweet. So, to correct this, I resorted to my Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook.

Considering that this book was an old edition when I bought it for $2 at a Junior League rummage sale six years ago, I get an awful lot of use out of it. For quite a while, I was trying more and more complicated recipes, making a huge mess, and then getting upset because nothing was turning out quite like I wanted it. So, I decided to go backwards a little in the complicated-ness of things I cook. I've been working on my more basic cooking skills.

The lemon bars were really delicious. I didn't have enough peel (my lemons were a week or so old and had gotten a bit soft. The juice was still fine but they were a bit difficult to try to zest.) Travis seemed to like them a lot as well, judging by how fast they disappeared.

I love that the texture was sort of like a chess square, with this thin sugar crisp layer on top. Yum.

Lemon Bars

1/3 cup butter or margarine
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons finely shredded lemon peel
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon baking powder

In a medium mixing bowl beat butter or margarine with an electric mixer on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add the 1/4 cup granulated sugar; beat until combined. Beat in the 1 cup flour until crumbly. Press mixture into bottom of an ungreased 8x8x2 baking pan. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 15 to 18 minutes or until just golden.

Meanwhile, for filling, in a small mixing bowl combine eggs, the 3/4 cup sugar, the 2 tablespoons flour, lemon peel, lemon juice, and baking powder. Beat 2 minutes or until combined.

Pour filling over baked crust. Bake 20 minutes or till lightly browned around edges and center is set. Cool on a wire rack. If desired, sift powdered sugar over the top. Cut into bars. Makes 20 bars.

ICBC: Eggs

2010-06-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

For the secret ingredient eggs, I decided to make egg drop soup. It was okay. I didn't really like it as much as I like egg drop soup from Chinese restaurants. I think I might have made my slurry improperly, and so it didn't thicken quite right.

However, it's very easy to make. It's just 4 quarts of chicken stock with 1/2 teaspoon grated ginger and a tablespoon of soy sauce. Bring that to a boil. Separately mix 1 tablespoon of cornstarch with an extra 2 tablespoons of chicken stock. Once the soup is boiling, stir this mixture in slowly while stirring. Reduce heat to a simmer, slowly pour in two lightly beaten eggs while stirring. That's my favorite part - watching the eggs sort of feather out. Then remove from the heat and add 2 chopped green onions.

And there you go. Personally, I'll probably just order take out next time and make less of a mess :)

ICBC: Mustard

2010-06-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

I have made the decision to start abbreviating Iron Chef Blogger Challenge into ICBC. I know. This is a Big Deal.

Last week the ingredient was mustard. I made this fish, then forgot to blog it. It was really yummy. And really fast. I am too tired to blog much today, so here is the recipe. I left out the chives, because I think chives are no bueno.

Dijon Mustard Fillets
from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook

1 pound fish fillets, 1/2 to 1 inch thick
lemon pepper seasoning
1/4 cup dairy sour cream
1 tablespoon milk
1 tablespoon dijon style mustard
2 teaspoons snipped fresh chives

Rinse fish and pat dry with paper towels. Cut into 4 serving size pieces, if necessary. Measure thickness. Place fish on unheated rack of broiler pan. Sprinkle with lemon pepper seasoning. Broil 4 inches from heat till fish flakes easily with a fork. Allow 4-6 minutes per 1/2 inch thickness of fish. Turn 1 inch thick fillets over halfway through cooking.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan stir together sour cream, milk, mustard, chives, and a dash black pepper. Heat through but do not boil. Serve with fish.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Strawberries!

2010-06-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

Secret ingredient this week? Strawberries. I love strawberries, and they are in season right now! We have a lot of amazing things in California, and this is one of them. My friend Beth Abernathy and I picked strawberries once when I lived in North Carolina, and I remember that she made freezer jam with them. I did not do anything so industrious with mine. Actually, I think I tried to make some sort of jam, but it turned out more like ice cream topping. Delicious, yes. But it was not my intended result. Now, 6 years later, I decided to conquer freezer jam once and for all.

I had some stumbling blocks on the way. I had some "trouble" finding 1/2 pint freezer jars. I use trouble in quotes because it turned out Ralph's had them the whole time, I just hadn't realized that they were freezer safe.

I bought too many strawberries, as per usual. It actually only took me one normal sized strawberry basket (although they do pile them pretty high at the farmers market). I had two extra, one of which I will address shortly.

The first thing to do is to crush the strawberries. You need 4 cups whole to make 1 3/4 cups crushed. You can do this with a pastry cutter, a blender, or a food processor.

I started off, all cute in my new apron, trying to crush them with a pastry cutter.

I quickly switched to my food processor.

From there, you add 4 cups sugar and 1/4 teaspoon finely shredded lemon peel. I know it seems like way too much sugar, but most recipes are pretty adamant about not reducing the amount of sugar. Apparently it affects how the jam ultimately sets. Let this mixture stand for 10 minutes.

Then, mix half of a 6 ounce package of liquid fruit pectin with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. (For the mathematically challenged, that's 3 ounces of liquid fruit pectin.) Add this to the berry mixture. Stir it for 3 minutes.

Ladle this into half pint freezer containers. Leave a half inch headspace. Seal and label. Let stand at room temperature for 24 hours, or until set. Store 3 weeks in refrigerator or 1 year in freezer. It theoretically makes 4 half-pints. Somehow, mine made 5.

I still had 2 baskets of strawberries left! So I made the delightful raspberry lemonade you see below. I just mixed it with cold water instead of sparkling water or club soda, but that sounds amazing too. I ate the other basket plain. They were quite tasty.

Emeril's Strawberry Lemonade

Ingredients

2 cups water
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
1 cup fresh lemon juice
1 pint fresh strawberries, hulled and halved
2 cups cold sparkling water or club soda
Ice
Mint sprigs, garnish
Whole strawberries, garnish

Directions

In a medium saucepan, bring the water and sugar to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves. Add the lemon peel and lemon juice, stir, and remove from the heat. Let cool completely, then strain into a clean pitcher.

In a blender, puree the pint of strawberries and add to the pitcher with the lemon juice. Stir well to combine and refrigerate until well chilled.

Add the sparkling water and stir well. Pour over glasses filled with ice and serve, garnished with mint and strawberries.

Smores in the Oven

2010-06-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

This isn't really a recipe, because you know how to make smores. It's more of a process question, because something interesting happened to the smores you see above.

Michele Fitzgerald and I decided to make oven smores on Memorial Day. We preheated the oven to 350, laid down graham crackers (one with chocolate, one with the marshmallow, as shown above), and left them in the oven a while.

The marshmallows browned as expected, but the chocolate didn't melt. The inside was so hot it felt like a little fire in your mouth, but the chocolate stubbornly refused to lose it's shape. It actually sort of dehydrated, which is not the reaction one would expect at all.

Michele F. had done this before and says the chocolate would barely stay on the cracker. So, I've been pondering this and come up with a couple of possibilities for what went awry.

1. There is some physical difference between large and snack size Hershey bars (I used snack size.)

2. The oven temperature should have been higher.

or

3. The chocolate should have been left in longer and the marshmallow added later in the cooking time.

There could also be any combination of these three possibilities. Thoughts?

Pasta with Shrimp, Garlic, and Anchovies

2010-06-02T18:11:00.001-07:00

On Saturday I made this pasta, mostly because it was really fast and I still had a few anchovies to use. I was seriously impressed by how delicious it was and how quickly it all came together. I could easily do this after work.

Again, you can't really taste the anchovies, they just add an underlying flavor. Of course, that could also be because I only used the few fillets I had leftover instead of a whole tin. Anchovy side note: it's safe to eat the tiny little bones, but I pulled out as many as I can anyway.

While this was cooking, it looked and smelled like something I could get at a restaurant. I was so proud.

PASTA WITH SHRIMP, GARLIC AND ANCHOVIES
from cooks.com
8 oz. spaghetti
1/2 lb. shrimp, cleaned
1/4 c. olive oil
4 lg. garlic cloves, minced
1 tin flat anchovy fillets, chopped
1 tsp. lemon juice
Chopped fresh parsley
Grated Parmesan cheese

Over low heat, cook garlic, shrimp and anchovies in oil. Add lemon juice and season with pepper.

Cook pasta as directed on package and drain. Return to pot, add oil mixture and toss to coat. Sprinkle generously with parsley and serve with Parmesan cheese.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Avocado!

2010-06-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

For the challenge this week, I made guacamole. But, I neglected to take a picture of it. It was good though! It was green, and very smooth, because I made it in my trusty food processor. I don't like chunky guacamole so much.

It seemed to be a fairly big hit at the cookout we went to yesterday. At least it was until the sun turned it brownish.

I wanted to plant the avocado seeds to see what happened, but Travis vetoed it.

Sorry for the lackluster blog this week...

Guacamole
from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook

2 medium very ripe avocados, halved, seeded, peeled and cut up
1/2 small onion, cut up
1/2 of a 4 ounce can diced green chili peppers, or several drops bottled hot pepper sauce (I used Texas Pete)
1 tablespoon snipped cilantro or parsley (I left this out... my parsley has gone rogue again and I think cilantro tastes like soap.)
1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt

In a food processor bowl combine all ingredients. Cover and process or blend till mixture is smooth, scraping sides as necessary. Transfer to a serving bowl. Serve immediately or cover and chill up to 24 hours. Serve with chips. Makes 2 cups dip.

Mixed Berry Muffins

2010-05-29T21:47:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I bought some fresh berries, with the intent of having berries for breakfast and being all healthy. But then I decided it would be much more fun to make muffins. I used a mixture of blackberries and raspberries. They were very tasty! Some of them turned sort of blue at the top, but they still tasted fine. It wasn't their fault that they looked like smurfberry muffins or something. At any rate, I had delicious breakfast for the week, if not the most healthy ever.

Ingredients:

Mixed Berry Muffins

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 1/3 cups fresh berries , such as blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, huckleberries or sliced strawberries, or a combination.

Directions:

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 400°F. Lightly butter twelve 2 1/2-inch muffin cups or place paper muffin cups in the muffin tin.

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt to combine and make a well in the center. In another medium bowl, whisk the milk, oil and eggs. Mix well and pour into the well. Stir just until blended. Fold in the berries. Spoon equal amounts of the batter into the muffin cups, filling them about three-fourths full.

Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, 15 to 20 minutes. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Remove the muffins and serve warm or cool on a wire rack.

Old Fashioned Beef Stew

2010-05-29T16:30:00.000-07:00

This beef stew recipe is one of my favorites ever. I make it a lot, especially when it's chilly or gray outside. You can tell I like it a lot, because the page it's on in my copy of The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook is really stained. The recipe includes carrots and celery. However, I like my stew to be basically meat and potatoes, so I tend to omit those. I also cook the stew a bit longer than necessary so that everything is falling apart. It tastes wonderful and comforting, just like stew should. And, like most stews, it is even better reheated.

Ingredients:

2 lb stew beef
2 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 cup water
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 or 2 bay leaves
1 medium onion, sliced
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon paprika
dash ground allspice or ground cloves
3 large carrots, sliced
4 red potatoes, quartered
3 ribs celery, chopped
2 tablespoon cornstarch

Directions

Brown meat in hot oil. Add water, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, bay leaves, onion, salt, sugar, pepper, paprika, and allspice. Cover and simmer 1 1/2 hours. Remove bay leaves and garlic clove. Add carrots, potatoes, and celery. Cover and cook 30 to 40 minutes longer. To thicken gravy, remove 2 cups hot liquid. Using a separate bowl, combine 1/4 cup water and cornstarch until smooth. Mix with hot liquid and return mixture to pot. Stir and cook until bubbly.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Spinach!

2010-05-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

This week's secret ingredient was spinach. There was also a rule that it could not be a salad. I was a bit sad about that, because I wanted to try making a warm bacon dressing like the one I had at Mt. Vernon. However, I discovered another equally delicious way to combine bacon and spinach. I made a quiche! I had never made a quiche before, but it really wasn't too hard. And, I think it came out beautifully. It probably helped that I was starving by the time it was done, but it was filling and very tasty. I would definitely recommend it.

I accidentally dropped the lid to my nutmeg in the egg mixture, but it still seems to have turned out okay. Also, if you don't have white pepper, black pepper is fine. I think it's a visual difference more than a taste difference.

The only other issue is that the original recipe calls for pre-baking the pie shell. I didn't, but it might help keep the crust from getting mushy. I thought it was just fine without (and I didn't have to deal with foil on the crust or anything).

Spinach Quiche (from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook)

1 pie crust
1/2 cup chopped onion
6 slices bacon, chopped
8 eggs
1/2 cup dairy sour cream
1/2 cup half and half
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
Dash ground nutmeg
3 cups lightly packed chopped fresh spinach
2/3 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup shredded swiss cheese

Preheat oven to 325. Cook onion and bacon in a large skillet until onion is tender and bacon is crisp. Drain on paper towels.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat eggs slightly with a fork. Stir in sour cream, half and half, salt, pepper, and nutmeg (if desired). Stir in onion mixture, spinach, and both cheeses.

Pour egg mixture into pastry shell. Bake in 325 degree oven 45 minutes or until a knife inserted near center comes out clean. If necessary, cover edge of foil to prevent over-browning. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Anchovies!

2010-05-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

The ingredient this week was anchovies! I was more excited than you might originally think. A few years ago I experimented with anchovies, in this recipe where you make a thin dressing and grill romaine lettuce a bit. It was really good.

I immediately thought I wanted to make my own Caesar salad dressing. While I was looking up that recipe, I found one for anchovy deviled eggs as well.

They were both really good. Anchovies, especially when minced, really aren't that strong and add a nice salty sort of meaty flavor. I would definitely recommend both recipes!

The Caesar salad recipe can be found here. I went with the option to substitute 1/4 cup mayonnaise for the coddled egg. I reduced the olive oil to somewhere between 4 and 5 tablespoons (at 4 I thought it was still a bit thick).

The anchovy deviled eggs recipe is here. I didn't use the caper garnish, and I didn't use the fresh parsley either. My parsley plant has gone rogue again, so I just used a little bit of dried.

And, here are some other Iron Chef Blogger updates:

Garlicky Baked Shrimp (This looks amazing and pretty easy; I am definitely going to try it.)
Eggplant and Anchovies (in the same meal, not the same dish)
Eggplant Lasagna

99 Things to Eat in LA - Bob's Coffee and Donuts

2010-05-08T18:34:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, LA Weekly came out with a 99 Things to Eat in LA before you die list, compiled by Jonathan Gold (who is a Pulitzer prize winning food author - he wrote the book Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles). We also sort of similar food tastes. For example, he doesn't refuse to eat at Tito's Tacos, insisting that it isn't authentic (like so many LA "foodies", but I digress).

I am not planning to eat everything on the list, but I did take the interesting sounding ones off and make my own list. I'm a compulsive list-maker, it's what I do. God bless the 'Notes' section of my iPhone.

Anyway. One item was the plain donut from Bob's Coffee and Donuts. I have eaten here before, it's at the LA farmer's market. This place really is fantastic. It is simple and to the point. There is coffee, I guess probably a few other beverages, donuts, and some coffee cake. The coffee does not come in varieties (besides decaf), and the menu is not cluttered up with non-pastries. The coffee cake I had previously was really great. The donut I had today was probably better.

This stuff is also cheap as all get-out, I think the donut and coffee cost me maybe $1.50. Eat This, which is another book I'm rather fond of, raves about their apple fritters. Not really up my alley, but some day I plan to get one for Travis, who does love a good apple/pastry combo.

Salmon with Mixed Greens

2010-05-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

We eat quite a bit of fish, and I'm always trying to cook it different ways. Today we had salmon. I mixed some melted butter with garlic powder and a little Old Bay seasoning. Then I sprinkled it with some smoked salt and baked it. It's served on top of some mixed greens.

I also made some corn and a yellow rice mix. The creamed corn is just 2 corn cobs with the corn sliced off, a tablespoon of butter, and some freshly ground pepper. I put the butter on top and put the corn in the microwave for two minutes. Then I stirred it and put it in for another minute. It's really quite good, probably my favorite way to eat fresh corn.

The salmon was okay, but it definitely needed more seasoning. I also think I like salmon better broiled than baked, generally. But, it was a nice fast dinner, which was good after my garlic extravaganza of yesterday!

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Garlic!

2010-05-01T18:36:00.000-07:00

This week it was my turn once again to pick the secret ingredient! I thought about it for a while, and for some reason I kept thinking about garlic. The Stinking Rose is one of my favorite restaurants, and the last time we were there, I bought their cookbook. So, I decided to recreate what I think is one of their best - Forty Clove Garlic Chicken.

First, garlic had to be roasted! I used two cups of peeled garlic cloves. Travis had to help peel the cloves, my hand started cramping. (I ended up using 6 heads of garlic overall, between chicken and the salad dressing that I made.

For the roasted garlic, mix 2 cups garlic cloves with 1 cup olive oil, cook for 40 minutes over low heat on the stove. Stir after 20 minutes. Then, use a slotted spoon to put the cloves on a cookie sheet and roast on 250 for another 25-30 minutes.

This picture is really just because I was so dang proud that I quartered a whole chicken by myself. Never managed that before.

The chicken was pretty dang tasty, if I do say so myself. The only thing I should've done differently was crisp the skin somehow. I probably should have cranked up the heat at the end or something. Or put it under the broiler for a minute? I don't know. So, here's the recipe!

Forty-Clove Garlic Chicken
from the Stinking Rose Restaurant Cookbook

1 large 2 1/2 - 3 lb broiler fryer chicken

Marinade:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons minced garlic
Leaves from 1 sprig rosemary, minced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Sauce:
1 cup dry red wine
1 shallot, quartered
4 cloves garlic, chopped
Leaves from 1 sprig rosemary, minced
Leaves from 2 sprigs thyme, minced
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup unsalted butter, cut into chunks
salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 1/2 cups roasted garlic cloves

1. Remove giblets from chicken. With a large, sharp knife, cut chicken in half lengthwise, then cut in half crosswise to separate the breast from the thighs.

2. To make the marinade: Combine all ingredients in a small bowl. Put chicken in a heavy resealable plastic bag, pour the marinade over the chicken, and seal the bag. Work your hands over the bag until the liquid covers all the chicken parts. Place bag in refrigerator for 1 to 3 hours.

3. To make the sauce: In a heavy saucepan combine the wine, shallot, rosemary, garlic, and thyme. Bring to a boil over high heat, then decrease heat to medium-low and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2-3 minutes. Gradually stir in the cream and cook to reduce the liquid by one-third, about 10 minutes. Add butter in batches, stirring to melt. (Note: Just try not to think about the amount of butter you just added. It'll come to no good.) Season with salt and pepper. Pass the sauce through a fine-meshed sieve, cover, and set aside.

4. Preheat the oven to 350. Put chicken in a heavy baking dish and bake for 20 minutes. Remove from oven, turn chicken, baste with pan juices. Return to oven, bake 20 more minutes, or until skin is crackly and golden brown and meat is opaque throughout (Note: this never happened for me.. although I'm not sure why).

5. Arrange chicken on serving platter. Pour warm sauce over the chicken and sprinkle with roasted garlic cloves. Serve immediately.

What? You still want more recipes from other Iron Chef Bloggers? Fine!

Banana Nut Bread
Eggplant Curry with Saffron Rice and Naan
and my personal favorite: Black Bean Brownies

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Black Beans!

2010-04-25T18:52:00.000-07:00

For this challenge, I really wanted to use dried black beans, but it just wasn't meant to be. I already had a can of black beans in the pantry, so I opted for this quick and delicious turkey chili. It makes a lot for just me, since Travis doesn't eat beans, so I plan to freeze some.

It turned out really well. If I do again, I'll probably let it simmer a while longer - I like my vegetables to a bit less crunchy than these were. But, the flavors are really good, and it really was incredibly easy to make. Nice for a bit of a blustery day.

You can find the recipe here.

And, here some other recent posts from the other Iron Chef bloggers:

Sicilian Grilled Eggplant (Yes, there was a whole week I missed - I was in Washington DC!)
Banana Cake
Ugli Fruit

Mt. Vernon Inn - Peanut Soup

2010-04-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

While we were on vacation recently in DC, we had lunch at the Mt. Vernon Inn. The Inn is located at Mt. Vernon (which was George Washington's estate, if you somehow don't know).

Lunch was actually really good. I ordered a spinach salad and one of the specialties, peanut soup. Apparently this is a old traditional recipe in the area. It was definitely interesting. I couldn't eat the whole mug. It had a very strong peanut taste and was really salty. But, I'm glad I tried it. Everyone seemed to enjoy their lunch, it was a nice restaurant.

Orange Cream Sherbet

2010-04-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

Decided to utilize my ice cream maker this weekend to use up some heavy cream that was in the fridge from Easter. So, this sherbet recipe seemed like just the thing. It was actually quite good, if a bit grainy. It tastes like an orange creamsicle.

Recipe (from cooks.com):

1 12 oz can Minute Maid frozen orange juice
1 1/2 cans cold water
3/4 cup heavy cream
4 tablespoons honey (or to taste)
1 scant tablespoon vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients in an ice cream maker. Freeze according to manufacturer's instructions.

Serve immediately when mixture begins to mound on a spoon, or place in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and scoop out and serve as you would use sherbet. May also be poured into pop molds before it has frozen solid for creamsicle-like treats on a stick.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Bananas!

2010-04-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

The challenge ingredient this week is bananas. This does pose a slight problem for me, which is that I don't like bananas. At all. Luckily, Travis loves them!

I didn't want to make banana bread, because I make that fairly often. The company I work for provides fruit for the employees, and sometimes when the bananas are starting to brown, they put up a "please take this fruit home!" sign. And with it, I make bread.

However, I also wanted something simple that I could make after work. So I found this Banana Spice Cake recipe on southernfood.about.com - I don't know if I've ever mentioned, but this is one of my favorite sites to find recipes on. I think about.com is really helpful for recipes in general, because they have these topic sites for particular ingredients and types of food. Anyway.

It was pretty easy. I don't think I did a good job mashing the bananas - I hate the smell and the way they look when mashed, so I may have thrown in the towel a bit early on that one. The batter smelled really good, like pumpkin spice cake only with different fruit. In the spirit of full disclosure, neither Travis nor I have tried this cake yet. I think I undercooked it a little, because the top looks a bit... gooey. One of the perils of baking after work is that sometimes I neglect to really pay attention to what I'm doing. But, you can take a look at the recipe in the link up there if you think it looks interesting! Maybe I'll add an addendum when Travis finally tries it.

A Busy Week

2010-04-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

It's been a crazy time here. Travis's first script to be made into a proper movie came out last week, which was super super exciting. His family came out to visit, we went to the premiere, good solid fun was had by all.

Then, a couple of days later, we had a big Easter/Zombie Jesus Day get-together at our apartment, which was also loads of fun.

But, all in all, it was an insanely busy week. And therefore, I missed another Iron Chef Blogger Challenge. It was about exotic fruit. I was going to get some cherimoya at the Farmer's Market (although in retrospect I'm unsure as to whether these are actually fruits or vegetables), but there really just wasn't time.

I was going to attempt to pawn off these strawberries as exotic fruit, but I didn't think anyone would fall for it. I did try to make a pie out of them. It turned to liquid. There are number of things or combinations of things that may have gone wrong. I'm leaning towards not cooling long enough before adding topping to filling and not draining the strawberries well enough after sweetening them. They didn't really even need to be sweetened, they were amazing as is.

I do have pictures of the Easter food, which I will post below. The roasted cauliflower is the best, you should really try it. Just cut up a head of cauliflower, toss with olive oil (2-3 tablespoons), sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast on 400 25-30 minutes. When done, grate some parmesan cheese over it. You'll thank me.

This week's blogger challenge is bananas. I'll try to do better.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge Fail

2010-03-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

The challenge this week was to make something for a blogger with food allergies that does not contain any of the following ingredients: wheat, corn, soy, nuts, sesame seed, potato, or rice.

So, that's harder than it sounds. If I had actually planned, I probably could've done it. However, as I'm deciding what to make for dinner tonight probably wasn't the best time to try to work this out. It turns out that a lot more things that one would think have wheat, corn, and soy in them.

To pass the time, here is another blog from Challenge Shallot from last week that sounds fantastic!

It's a big week this week, Travis's movie is premiering, and his family is going to be visiting. There probably won't be a lot of cooking going on, as I still have to work. But, I may try to make a pie tomorrow. We'll see how it turns out.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Shallots!

2010-03-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

The secret ingredient this week? Shallots. I like shallots a lot, although I wasn't too enthused about the ones at Ralph's today, and I wish I'd had time to go to the Farmer's Market.

I've been trying to get some cleaning done, and therefore trying to steer away from complicated dinner. I decided to make tilapia and a pan fried shallot and asparagus dish.

The asparagus was really easy. Slice a large shallot into thin slices. Slice your asparagus up into smaller pieces as well. Cook the shallot in a tablespoon of butter for a minute over medium high, add the asparagus and cook 5 more minutes. Season with salt and pepper and serve. It was tasty, but I always love asparagus. It's in season right now in this great state I live in. Probably other places as well.

For the fish, I cooked it on a bed of leek tops that I saved from last weekend, with some soy sauce, worchestshire sauce, pepper, and garlic powder. The picture above is before I put it in the oven. I thought it came out a bit under-seasoned, but it was still pretty good. Travis loved it, and pronounced that he could eat fish for dinner every day.

Bay Cities Italian Deli - The Godmother

2010-03-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

Bay Cities Italian Deli is a deli/grocery in Santa Monica. They have a lot of specialty foods, hot foods, meat and cheese, etc. They also make sandwiches. I'm sure they make many kinds of delicious sandwiches, but the one that I love the most is the Godmother.

The Godmother contains: Genoa salami, mortadella, coppacola, ham, prosciutto, and provolone cheese. You cannot make any substitutions. If you get it with The Works, this adds mayo, mustard, onions, pickles, tomatoes, lettuce, Italian dressing, and mild or hot pepper salad. (I hold the onions, peppers, and mayo.)

It is amazing, and so much more than I can/should eat in one sitting. I say should, because I came pretty close on Friday night, while Travis was at the press screening for Clash of the Titans. (The portion of the sandwich shown above is slightly less than half of the "small" sub. It comes in other sizes as well, which frightens me a bit.) Did I feel well afterwards? No. Was I completely and utterly satisfied with the deliciousness of what I had just consumed? Yes.

Bay Cities can get a bit crowded, but parking is usually pretty easy to find, and you can call your order in ahead of time and pick it up too, or so I hear.

Malibu Seafood and Patio Cafe

2010-03-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, Travis and I went to Malibu. It's really one of our favorite things to do on the weekend. We went to Point Dume, saw a crane, some dolphins, some whales (no kidding!), and some wildflowers. Then, when we're good and hungry, we head to Malibu Seafood.

I usually get the fried scallops, which are the best I've had anywhere. This time I decided to try the fried squid. It was a bit chewy but still delicious. The fries are pretty good as well. Travis gets the fish and chips (you can see those in the back). In my cup? Why, that's RC Cola.

You order at the counter and eat at patio tables, with a gorgeous ocean view. Saw more dolphins there too. I really couldn't have asked for a nicer Sunday.

India Jones Chow Truck

2010-03-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, I pretty much stayed at home cleaning all day instead of going out to find wildflowers, which made me sad. But, I did step out at lunch because the India Jones Chow Truck was in Santa Monica, which made me very happy indeed.

It was definitely worth the trip out. Above, you can see a picture of my Frankie, which is the specialty of this particular truck. It's a rolled up roti (Indian flatbread), with your choice of meat (lamb, beef, chicken, shrimp, or a paneer/mushroom vegetarian variety) and onion, egg, and tamarind chutney. I asked the guy at the window which was the best. He said lamb, which was totally the answer I was hoping for. And it was SO GOOD. It was really crispy on the outside, and the lamb sort melts in your mouth. Amazing street food - easy to hold, not very messy, and utterly delicious.

I can't quite rave as highly about the other item I tried, which was a samosa spring roll. It sounds so promising - I love both samosas and spring rolls, so I really didn't know how this could go wrong. It was just a bit too dense, the first bite felt like it was just sitting, whole, in my stomach. It was also a little spicier than I like as well. And, it was more difficult to eat, the sauce in the wee little cup spilled everywhere on my way home.

But, I will definitely track down the India Jones Chow Truck again. They also serve curries, which I'd like to try, and mango baby back ribs, which sounds pretty fantastic.

Fried Green Tomatoes

2010-03-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, I skipped the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge this week. The secret ingredient was pears. I just don't love pears, at all really. I was contemplating making fritters (using one pear, to get in the ingredient, and then making apple fritters with the rest of the batter), but I just wasn't really feeling it.

I went to the Farmer's Market, halfway looking for a pear, but really looking for romanesco (which I apparently missed, but may keep looking for today). What I found, were green tomatoes. They were begging to be fried.

Below are my sliced tomatoes, sprinkled with kosher salt, and sitting in a colander trying to draw out the moisture. Part of the key to frying tomatoes is to be sure they are as dry as possible - otherwise your coating will slide right off. This method (which is Paula Deen's) didn't work that well for me, probably because of my lack of patience (I want to fry tomatoes NOW!). So, I later switched to Alton Brown's method of putting the tomato slices between paper towels to dry.

Dredged the tomatoes in a mix of flour (you can also use cornmeal or a combination of the two) with some black pepper, and a dash of cayenne pepper. Then fried in vegetable oil until brown on both sides.

At this point in the recipe, Alton Brown said the oil should be 350 degrees. I don't have an oil thermometer, but apparently I need one. I don't think my oil was hot enough, so mine didn't really get crispy. The photo below was the best looking one of the bunch. They did taste pretty good, but I think I need more practice frying.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Butternut Squash!

2010-02-26T15:21:00.000-08:00

This week, in the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge, we had a choice in our secret ingredient: spaghetti or butternut squash.

I've never used either, but I did previously have an unfortunate run-in with a butternut squash, so I decided to tackle that one again. About a year ago, I picked up a butternut squash at the Farmer's Market. It was so pretty, and I had this recipe where you just half it lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, sprinkle some cinnamon and brown sugar or something, and roast. Sounds fantastic, right?

The only problem is the instruction "just half it lengthwise", as if butternut squash were not built like someone was hiding secret treasure inside them. After some time had passed, the squash rolling around on the counter every time I went to cut it like we were in some sort of slapstick comedy, and me coming dangerously close to slicing my hand open on several occasions, I threw the damn thing away and made something else for dinner.

It was definitely time for a rematch.

This is absolutely the point in my story where I would now proceed to make the greatest butternut squash recipe known to man and emerge a hero. That is not what happened at all. I did make something. The cutting went much better this time, possibly because the squash I used was a bit smaller. The recipe I used was for Candied Butternut Squash, which is squash roasted, then cubed, then cooked longer with honey, nuts, and probably something else that I'm forgetting. But, after the squash was roasted, it wouldn't cube properly, so it was more like a mash. And I thought the ingredients involved were just too much (although there is a definite possibility that my squash was just too small).

All in all, while the squash was not terrible, it was not great either. The picture looked really unappetizing, so I just decided not to post it. I do think there are good uses for butternut squash though. It has a nice texture, and I'd really like to try making ravioli with it.

There are other good blogs out there, some with actual pictures. Carrie at Two Friends Cook opted for the spaghetti squash, which looks pretty good (even though the extent to which it looks like spaghetti still freaks me out a little). There are also some blogs from last week's peanut butter challenge that I didn't link to previously: Becky's Indonesian Peanut Chicken and Sara's Peanut Butter Brownie Cupcakes. I'm definitely planning to save both of these recipes, they look fantastic.

That's it for now, can't wait to see what the next ingredient is, although I won't be doing much cooking this weekend. We're headed to Anza Borrego Desert State Park!

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Peanut Butter!

2010-02-20T20:34:00.000-08:00

This week, it was my turn to select the ingredient for this week's Iron Chef blogger challenge. I turned to Travis, who unfortunately rarely eats the things that I make for the challenge. His request? Peanut butter.

I had planned to make peanut butter bars, but we have so many sweets still laying around from Valentine's Day, I decided to go with a more savory peanut butter dish instead. So - chicken satay! You may notice my chicken is not on skewers. I was having a time... didn't feel like messing with them.. so I just grilled it. I know. That probably makes it not actually chicken satay or something. But, you know? I just don't care.

I served it with rice and some stir fried garlic asparagus. It all came out nicely, and I managed to find a nice looking piece of chicken to take a picture of. I cooked it on a cast iron grill plate, and the chicken stuck really badly. Most of the pieces sort of shredded. But, as long as it still tastes good, I don't think that matters.

I really need to work on my food photography. I bet that green place mat would have looked much nicer under the dish than off to the side.

In other peanut butter news, Carrie has made this delicious-looking Tofu/Noodle/Peanut Sauce combination over at Two Friends Cook.

Chicken Satay

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
6 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1/4 cup hoisin sauce
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Pound each chicken breast to 1/4 inch thick between two pieces of plastic wrap. Cut into 1 inch strips.

Whisk together the garlic, peanut butter, coconut milk, sesame oil, hoisin sauce, lime juice, ginger, salt and pepper in a small mixing bowl. Move at least 1/2 cup of mix to a large ziploc bag. Add chicken and seal the bag, squish it around until the chicken is coated. Refrigerate 2 hours. Hold the remaining sauce at room temperature until serving (if you're serving the same day).

Remove the chicken from the marinade, thread each piece onto a bamboo skewer. Throw the leftover marinade away. Heat cast iron griddle. Place the satay onto the griddle, cook for 1 1/2 to 3 minutes per side, depending on size of piece of chicken. Serve immediately with reserved sauce for dipping.

Chocolate Strawberry Shortcake

2010-02-14T17:15:00.001-08:00

This was the dessert that I decided to make for Valentine's Day. It turned out well, although the cake was a bit dry, at least before I added the strawberries and whipped cream. I had some issues with ingredients again on the way. I didn't have enough shortening and had to add some butter (only ended up using margarine instead, because I needed it to be softer). I don't think it was a huge deal, as I was pretty close to the right amount of shortening to begin with. In retrospect, I should've just softened some butter, the flavor probably would have been better. But, all in all, a successful Valentine's Day dessert.

My original plan was to cut the cakes in heart shapes. But, the cake ended up thicker than I thought. Also, when I pulled out the heart cookie cutter, it was sort of rusty, and that's no good.

CHOCOLATE STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE

2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 whole eggs or 3 egg whites
1 quart fresh strawberries, rinsed and sliced
1 cup whipping cream, whipped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a mixing bowl, combine all ingredients in order listed, except strawberries and whipping cream. Beat with mixer on low speed, scraping bowl constantly for 30 seconds. Beat on high speed, scraping bowl occasionally, for 3 minutes. Pour into greased and floured 13x9-inch pan.

Bake for 30-35 minutes. Cool cake completely.

Cut into squares. Place 2 or 3 squares in dessert cups and layer with small amount of strawberries and whipped cream. Garnish with a whole berry.

Makes 15-20 shortcakes

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Turnips!

2010-02-14T17:15:00.000-08:00

I'm sort of cheating with this blog, because while I did make a turnip recipe, I didn't like it that much. I made a turnip puff, which is basically a bunch of boiled mashed vegetables mixed with bread crumbs and egg to make sort of a casserole. The recipe I liked to is actually to make a parsnip puff. However, you can replace the pound of parsnips with a pound of turnip. Be sure you peel the turnip, and you just cut into cubes before boiling. The texture was sort of weird, and I wasn't crazy about the nutmeg involved either.

I'm also going to link to a turnip recipe that I actually like: The Lady's Pork Stew. (The recipe is a ways down the page.) It's really good, but don't listen when she says to leave the skin on the turnips. I think they're way too bitter. The downside is that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the turnips from potatoes in the finished product; which is better stressful for any vegetables haters you may have in your life.

I also roasted some new potatoes, and the most exciting bit - I fried chicken! I've never really done that before, except to make oven-fried chicken. But, I was very proud. It didn't quite get done and I had to finish it in the oven, but it was so delicious. And, I'm going to list that recipe today instead, because I recommend it much more highly than weird turnip puffs!

As a side note, I had the most amazing mac and cheese for lunch today, after Travis took me to the aquarium for Valentine's Day. It had cremini mushrooms, chicken, smoked bacon, and truffle oil. What a lovely day! Now, I'm taking some chocolate shortcake out of the oven (for chocolate strawberry shortcake later) and preparing to sear some duck breasts for dinner. In retrospect, this place might be cleaner if I didn't cook so much... oh well!

Southern Fried Chicken (from the Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook)

3 eggs
1/3 cup water
2 cups self-rising flour
1 teaspoon pepper
One 1 - 2 1/2 pound chicken, cut into pieces (I just used thighs and drumsticks)
Crisco shortening for frying (I didn't have enough, so I used peanut oil as well)

Season chicken and return it to the refrigerator for at least 2-3 hours. I used some seasoning salt a garlic powder/salt/pepper mixture that I keep in a little tupperware container.

Beat eggs with water. To just enough self-rising flour to coat all the chicken, add black pepper. Dip seasoned chicken in egg; coat well in flour mixture. Fry in a dutch oven (or I guess a fairly deep cast iron skillet) in moderately hot shortening (350 degrees) until brown and crisp. (I used about an inch of oil... I don't know if that's right, but internet research led me to believe it was reasonable.) Remember that dark meat requires longer cooking time - about 13-14 minutes, compared with 8-10 minutes for white meat.

Note: My chicken was not done after the allotted time, so I put it in a 400 degree oven for a few extra minutes. (It was already pre-heated from the turnip puff. Is it just me, or does just the name turnip puff sound strange? Ah well.)

Easy Coffee Cake

2010-02-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

This coffee cake is very, very tasty. It actually is pretty much exactly like this amazing cream cheese bread that my friend Jennifer used to make, back when I worked at DSS in North Carolina. I made it for breakfast on Sunday. Even after trying to slim it up as much as possible (using neufchatel cheese instead of cream cheese, etc.), it is still definitely not a healthy breakfast. After the first day, I switched it to a dessert. Travis liked it as well, enough to take it out of the fridge for more during the week (which doesn't always happen).

The recipe is from the Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook, by Paula Deen.

2 (8 ounce) cans refrigerated crescent dinner rolls
1 cup sugar
2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg separated
1/2 cup whole pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread one can of the crescent rolls in the bottom of the 13x9 pan. Pinch all the edges together to make one sheet. Cream together 3/4 cup of sugar, cream cheese, vanilla and egg yolk till creamy and smooth. Spread over crescent rolls. Top with the second package of crescent rolls. Again, pinch together all the edges to make it one sheet. Beat the egg white until it is frothy, spread on top. Sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup of sugar and pecans. Bake 30-35 minutes until golden brown.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Alcohol!

2010-02-01T18:26:00.000-08:00

This week we finished a full rotation of the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge! It was back to Sarah to pick the ingredient, and she chose alcohol. It could be any variety, as long as you didn't just pour and drink it.

I had been planning on making Chinese food for Sunday dinner anyway, so it worked out well. I decided to make these Soy Sauce Fish Fillets, from Simple Chinese Cooking by Kylie Kwong. You can pick from a lot of different types of fish, I chose salmon. The fish is poached in a Red Master Stock, which is primarily sherry and soy sauce. I had never poached anything before, so it seemed like a good choice.

You can see my ingredients below. The recipe calls for both light and dark soy sauce. I bought some dark soy sauce at a nearby Asian grocery store. I had read online that Kikkoman is all light soy sauce. If we're all being honest with each other, I'm not sure I could tell a color difference, so I may have used all one or the other.

I had to do a lot of ingredient substitution... you have a choice of shao hsing wine or sherry (I already had sherry). The recipe calls for sesame oil, which I didn't have (I threw some sesame seeds in the stock though) as well as star anise and a cinnamon quill, which I couldn't find (I used Chinese five spice powder and a pinch of ground cinnamon instead).

All in all, it turned out great. I'm not sure the bok choy was really necessary, especially since I had also made some sweet and sour tomatoes for an extra vegetable. The salmon had a really fantastic texture, and so much flavor from the stock. It seemed to be a big hit with Travis as well. Also, it turns out that poaching really isn't that hard. Who knew!

Soy Sauce Fish Fillets
4 fish fillets (about 3.5 ounces each)
1 bok choy, core removed

Red Master Stock:
6 cups cold water
3/4 cup shao hsing wine or dry sherry
1/2 cup dark soy sauce
1/4 cup light soy sauce
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1/4 cup ginger slices
2 spring onions (scallions), trimmed and cut in half crosswise
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil
2 star anise
1 cinnamon quill
2 strips fresh orange zest

Place all stock ingredients in a wide, deep pan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 40 minutes to allow flavors to infuse.

Lower fish into simmering stock and cover with parchment paper to be sure it is fully submerged. Poach fish gently for exactly two minutes; there should be no more than an occasional ripple breaking the surface. Immediately remove pan from the stove and allow fish to steep in the stock for 5 minutes to complete the cooking process.

Meanwhile, separate bok choy leaves and wash thoroughly. Add bok choy to a saucepan of boiling salted water and blanch for 30 seconds or until almost tender. Drain immediately.

Using a slotted spoon, gently remove fish from stock and transfer to a serving bowl. Spoon 2/3 cup of the master stock, along with some whole spices and aromatics, over the fish. Top with bok choy and serve immediately.

Applesauce Cupcakes

2010-01-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

I was a little nervous about this recipe before starting it. The applesauce bread I made last weekend was pretty tasty, but also a little strong. And, there was no icing listed in the recipe to go on the cupcakes. At first I did some research and found that other people have made this recipe and then added a caramel icing/glaze on top. But, I also read that the cupcakes were delicious without anything on them, so I decided to give that a shot.

I realize they don't look like much, but they were actually really good. There's a lot of sugar, and it sort of crystallized on the outside, giving them something almost like a shell. The batter looks awkward while you're making it - before you add the applesauce, it looks more like a really thick cookie dough. But it will all work out, I promise.

Before I add the recipe, here is one more from the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Cream Cheese. Carrie made an Artichoke Bread, and it looks delicious!

So, here it is. It's originally from the Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook. I left out the cloves (because I apparently didn't have any and don't like them that much anyway) and the raisins (because I think they're gross).

Applesauce Cupcakes
1 egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1/4 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 sticks butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chopped pecans
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup raisins
1 1/2 cups hot applesauce, with 2 teaspoons baking soda added

Preheat oven to 350. Mix above ingredients in a bowl by hand, except for applesauce. Last, add hot applesauce and baking soda. Pour batter into paper-lined cupcake pans. Bake for 25 minutes or until done. Yields about 2 dozen cupcakes.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Cream Cheese!

2010-01-24T16:09:00.000-08:00

It all started off so wonderfully, with an email yesterday that the secret ingredient this week was cream cheese. "Amazing!", I thought - "I'm already planning to make cream cheese brownies tomorrow!" I've had everything to make cream cheese brownies for a couple of weeks now, and I promised a co-worker that I'd bring them to work on Monday. Everything was coming together, or so I thought...

My first indication that all was not well was that I somehow managed to crack an egg inside the egg carton. I wish I'd taken a picture, it was actually sort of amazing. Looked like I was trying to separate it.

The second problem was that the recipe started on one page in my cookbook, then finished on the back of another page. So I wasn't paying quite as close attention as I should. When I finished the brownie dough, I thought it looked oddly thick. I flipped back, only to discover that I had put an entire extra cup of flour into the batter. I tried adding some more water to thin it out a bit, that was probably a bad move.

Finally, instead of layering my brownie mixture with cream cheese mixture, I accidentally put all the brownie mixture in the pan first, then had to just dump the cream mixture on top of it.

I don't know which part of this catastrophe led to the poor cooking, but something caused my brownies to still be partly liquid after their 25-30 minute cooking time. I ended up cooking them for 20 or 25 more minutes to try to get them cooked in the middle. This resulted in a brownie that is very overcooked on the bottom and a bit too gooey towards the top, as you can see below.

It is mostly edible, but a bit funny tasting. I will definitely not be taking these to work tomorrow. However, I will post the recipe anyway, since if they were made properly, I think they'd be quite delicious. There also 2 new Iron Chef Challenge (1 nutmeg, 1 bacon/mushrooms) that I forgot to link to last time: Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips and Walnuts and Stuffed Mushrooms/BLTs.

Cream Cheese Brownies (Paula Deen)

Brownie Mixture:
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs
6 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cup self rising flour
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Cream Cheese Mixture:
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened
1 8oz package cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat oven to 325

For brownie mixture: blend together sugar, oil, eggs, cocoa, and vanilla. add flour; mix. add nuts.

For cream cheese mixture: Cream together butter and cream cheese. Add remaining ingredients; blend well.

Pour 1/2 brownie batter into greased pan. Layer with this cream cheese mix then top with remaining batter. Swirl into brownie batter with knife edge. Bake 25-30 minutes.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Nutmeg!

2010-01-23T14:16:00.000-08:00

I was a little bit at a loss for what to do when the secret ingredient this week was nutmeg. The only thing that really jumped to mind was eggnog, then pumpkin pie. So, I flipped through my cookbook and came across this recipe for Applesauce Bread. The only problem is that when I make bread it ALWAYS burns on the top. I mean always.

So, I did a little bit of research to try to get some tips. However, apparently no one else in the world has ever burned the top of bread, everyone else burns the bottom. Whatever, I found a suggestion to turn the oven temperature down 25 degrees, and it worked.

The bread is okay, it's really dark and probably could have used a bit more sugar (or maybe a bit less nutmeg? - the spices are really strong). I don't totally love it, but I will probably eat it for breakfast this week.

Applesauce Bread

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened
1 cup applesauce
2 eggs
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine all ingredients except nuts. Mix well until blended. Stir in raisins and nuts. Pour into greased and floured 8 x 4 x 3 inch loaf pan. Bake for 60 to 65 minutes.

Not About Food

2010-01-16T15:40:00.000-08:00

This is not food related, just something I thought was interesting. I planted marigolds last year. I planted them in the planter to the right (see picture below). Last month, a marigold came up (and is now blooming) in the planter to the left. Amazing!

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Bacon!

2010-01-16T15:17:00.001-08:00

I am eating the most delicious thing right now. It's a Bacon Wrapped Date. You can see the photo, right up there. To be fair, the Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook called it a Pecan Stuffed Date. Both are accurate, ingredient wise. However, I think the latter doesn't call enough attention to the fact that it is WRAPPED IN FREAKING BACON!

As you can probably tell, I really like bacon. I try not to eat a crazy amount of it, for health reasons, but man it's yummy. So, I was super pleased to find out this week that the secret ingredient for the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge was bacon.

I always sort of assumed that I didn't like dates. Pecan Stuffed Dates is the 1st recipe in the Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook. I always just skimmed over it, thinking that it looked weird. I've been cooking out of this book for years, flipping through it quite often, and I only noticed a couple of months ago that the dates were also wrapped in bacon. Still.. dates.. I was unconvinced. Then, at a holiday party this year, bacon wrapped dates were served, and I was instantly won over.

The dates are sweet and a little chewy.. the bacon wrapped around it is salty and crispy, which is a lovely textural difference. And the pecan in the middle gets toasted and crunchy. All in all, it's a really delightful recipe - I highly recommend it.

You just get an 8 ounce bag of pitted dates (they're by the raisins. I learned this the hard way in Ralph's today), pecan halves, and bacon. The recipe says it yields 30, so I assume that is how many are in the bag. You'll need that many pecan halves (possibly less actually) and 10 slices of bacon.

Stuff a pecan half in each date. Sometimes I couldn't manage to fit a pecan half into each one, so I broke them into quarters. Cut a piece of bacon into 3 sections, wrap each section around 1 date. Secure it with a toothpick (I didn't do this, but I'd recommend it to help move them later). Bake it at 400 for 12-15 minutes. You should probably turn them part way through so the bacon can brown on both sides.

Below is a picture of the little guys wrapped up, ready to go in the oven. It's so easy I decided to only cook what I wanted to eat right now. The rest I'll make later this week. That was probably a wise decision, as I'm pretty sure I could eat several more right now if they were available.

There's been one more bacon recipe so far, and it looks amazing. Carrie made Spinach Bacon Potato Mille Feuille. Just click over and look at the picture, you'll want to try it even if it has an intimidating name.

Blogger Challenge: Brie!

2010-01-09T18:55:00.001-08:00

For the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge this week, our secret ingredient is brie!

I have to admit, brie isn't exactly my favorite cheese. But, I decided to make a variation of Brie en Croute, a recipe I made once before with Sarah, and that she has previously blogged about as well. The first variety I made had raspberry jam in it. I thought I would like this one better, with walnuts, brown sugar, and cinnamon topping. But, it was a bit too sweet. I think that reducing the amount of topping the recipe calls for would certainly help.

This is what Brie en Croute looks like fresh from the oven! I love things wrapped in pastry.

And here is the gooey delicious (if a bit too sweet) interior.

All in all, the recipe is really simple. The process of getting the brie into the pastry sounds complicated, but it really wasn't. I didn't even tear the puff pastry!

Brie en Croute

1 sheet frozen puff pastry
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 small wheel of Brie (8 ounces)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg, beaten

Preheat oven to 375. Defrost puff pastry for approximately 15-20 minutes and unfold. Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Saute walnuts in butter until golden brown, approximately 5 minutes. Stir in cinnamon, coating nuts well. Place mixture on top of wheel of Brie. Sprinkle brown sugar over the mixture. Carefully place pastry sheet over wheel of Brie (make sure it is centered). Gently pick Brie up with pastry hanging over the edge and fold the pastry under the Brie. Trim excess pastry with scissors so Brie lies flat and seal all the edges to prevent leakage. Brush beaten egg over top and sides. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes until pastry is golden brown. Serve with top-quality crackers.

Oyster and Mushroom Cups

2010-01-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

The actual name of this recipe in the Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook is Oysters in the Patty Shell. However, I frankly have no idea what a patty shell is; so henceforward I will call it Oyster and Mushroom Cups. They are so delicious! I used fresh oysters in a jar that the seafood department at Ralph's had in stock. They were from California, so I felt pretty confident in their freshness. They were a vast improvement over my attempt at using canned oysters.

I definitely recommend this recipe. Between the mushrooms and the oysters, it has this great earthy flavor. I have a tip as well. I would not try to chop oysters in a food processor. It's all fun and games until you end up with oyster paste.

Since I don't know what patty shells are, I used some pre-baked phyllo dough cups that were on sale at Ralph's for $1 a pack. Since the recipe calls for a 3-inch shell, I needed a lot more cups than the 8 that the recipe suggests. On the side is just some lettuce with a honey mustard dressing that I made earlier that day. The dressing is okay, but not spectacular.

Oyster and Mushroom Cups

1/2 pound mushrooms chopped (I used a mix of white button and cremini)
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon celery salt (I don't have celery salt, so I used some seasoned salt)
Pepper to taste
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 cup shelled fresh oysters, drained and chopped
Eight 1-ounce prebaked mini-piecrusts or patty shells, approximately 3 inches in size
Fresh parsley for garnish (I also used some shredded parmesan instead of parsley)

Saute mushrooms in butter until tender. Blend in flour and cook until bubbly. Gradually add milk; cook until smooth and thickened, stirring constantly. Add salt, celery salt, pepper, lemon juice, and oysters. Cook over medium-low heat until oysters start to curl up (about 5 minutes), stirring constantly. Serve in mini piecrusts or patty shells. If desired, garnish with parsley.

Blogger Challenge: Grapefruit!

2010-01-02T19:58:00.000-08:00

I missed a week of the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge, what with traveling and Christmas and all. But now I'm back! The secret ingredient this week was grapefruit.

This was tricky for me, considering that I don't like grapefruit. At all really. But I did a bit of research online and decided that a pink grapefruit sorbet might be nice. I found some lovely looking pink grapefruit at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market this morning.

Made a syrup with 1 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup light corn syrup, 4 cups water, and 3 long pieces of grapefruit peel (only the zest, not the pith). Once it comes to a boil, cook for 2 minutes. You have to stir it. A lot.

The recipe said to get 2 cups of grapefruit juice from 3 large grapefruits. This did not work for me. I got 1 1/2 cups. I topped off the juice by squeezing 2 satsumas and a lemon that I had, then finally just adding bottled orange juice for the last quarter cup. You do have to strain out the pulp from the juice.

You have to let the syrup mixture get completely cool. I didn't cool it enough, and my sorbet would never freeze quite properly. So leave it in the fridge for a while. It should probably already be cold when you put it in the machine, so if you have time, maybe overnight? Once it's cool, mix it with the juice, then you can put it in the ice cream maker!

I left the mixture in the ice cream maker 35 minutes, and it was still not frozen. I just took it out and put it in the freezer for a few hours. Even after that, it's still more like a grapefruit slushie, as you can see. But, it is quite good. Maybe I've been thinking too poorly of grapefruit all this time. The recipe website describes it as palate cleansing, which I guess could be accurate. It's not too sweet but not too bitter. Turns out grapefruit makes a good slushie!

Whoa, it's 2010!

2010-01-02T10:40:00.001-08:00

The beginning of 2010 has caused me to review the things I said I would do in 2009. A refresher:

1. Send more cards/letters to people. I have already sent my first birthday card of the year!

2. Start a cooking blog. Still trying to think of a name (for the last six months or so, actually). All I've come up with is 'Food and Thought'. Travis likes 'The Bitchin' Kitchen", but I'm just not as enthusiastic about that one as he is. If you'd like, he'd be glad to go into more detail about all the ways this is awesome, just let him know.

3. Use Alton Brown's "Food + Heat = Cooking" as sort of a cooking class.

4. Organize my kitchen more efficiently, and possibly get rid of some of the crap I don't use (to be replaced with even awesomer crap! Ha!)

I have actually done some of these things! I sent more cards and letters, I communicated more with people through Facebook, and I feel much more in touch with the world. It's nice to keep in touch with old friends, and I'm most happy about keeping this particular resolution.

I also starting the cooking blog! Obviously, as that's the blog I'm posting on right now.

The Alton Brown thing.. I didn't even start. I was pretty focused on the Paula Deen cookbook and, in the latter part of the year, the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge. I may still try this year, but I'm also focusing on cooking with the ingredients in my pantry so they don't go bad. It's seriously crammed full of stuff.

But, I did start organizing the kitchen some. I got rid of a few things, but I'm in the middle of a 60-day test to see what I actually use. The idea is to clean off a shelf or a cabinet or something in your kitchen, then for 60 days put everything you've used on that shelf. Anything that is left, get rid of (sell, give away, whatever). There is an exception for big stuff (like my ice cream maker) that you then have to commit to using every 6 months if you want to keep it. I'm almost a month in, and it's made me open my eyes already to things that have been sitting in my kitchen for years without really being touched.

All in all, I think I'm doing pretty well. I don't plan on making any new resolutions, but there are some things I want to be mindful of. I will continue to stay in touch with people and not isolate myself. I'll try to be calm and not get so stressed out or anxious. And I'll definitely keep cooking!

Holiday Food and Fun

2010-01-01T19:37:00.001-08:00

So, I think this is going to be one giant blog covering the cooking that I did over the Christmas week. It was a really great holiday. Went to Tennessee, it was cold but not miserably so (although I was still glad to get back home to the sun and 65-70 degree winter days). I got a lot of cooking done and a lot of eating too.

I'm missing a picture of the eggnog pound cake that I made. It was just a pound cake mix with some eggnog added, but oh man it was tasty.

This is some herb cornbread that I made to go with the amazing beef stew that my dad makes. It was really good, nice and fluffy. Generally bread that I make doesn't come out very well, but this one was tops. I definitely recommend it.

For Christmas dinner I made a pumpkin praline pie. I thought the pie was just okay, the Thanksgiving Pie that I made back in November was much, much better. The highlight of this was honestly the meringue. I love meringue. So much. But I had never tried to make it, it's always scared me, like pie crust. But I decided to suck it up for Christmas. The only problem was that my dad doesn't have any type of electric mixer. So I used a whisk. My mom and dad both helped a little, because my arm got tired, but I did a considerable amount of whisking. And it come out beautifully! So now I know that I can make meringue any time I want.

It is a Christmas Eve tradition that we have sausage balls, along with a meat and cheese plate. Most of the time the sausage balls are frozen, but this year I made them. It's just 1 pound of ground sausage, 2 cups of grated cheddar cheese and 3 cups of Bisquick mixed together. Roll it into 1 inch balls, bake it at 350 for 15 minutes, and you're done. They were really really yummy. They can be a little tough to mix - if you add some water, that will help.

My mom made some beautiful yeast rolls!

And finally, this was our Christmas spread. Ham, deviled eggs, sweet potatoes, broccoli and mushrooms, and yeast rolls. It was delicious! I hope everybody had as fantastic a holiday as I did!

Minor Food Update

2009-12-23T17:53:00.000-08:00

Since I am busy enjoying the holidays, I am not sure I will be able to post actual blogs this week, but I am still cooking!

So far this week, I've made an eggnog pound cake and herbed corn bread. Still to come are sausage balls and pumpkin praline pie.

The secret ingredient this week in the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge is pickles. Yes that's right, pickles. Haven't decided what to do yet, I'm really not sure I'll even be able to do anything. There is a recipe in the good old Paula Deen cookbook for pickled okra sandwiches, but it sounds a little scary even for me. We'll see what happens, I'm undecided at this point.

Blogger Challenge: Chipotle

2009-12-14T18:29:00.000-08:00

I'm just going to tell you up front. I cheated on this blogger challenge. I learned about cheating from Sarah and her "Bok Choy" Stir Fry.

This recipe, in spite of having chipotle in the title, has only a tiny amount. The recipe website claims "The secret is the mixture of the chipotle chile peppers and paprika which gives a flavorful kick to the chicken."

However - it's only a quarter of a teaspoon of ground chipotle. (Not even whole chiles!) And, as if all of that weren't bad enough, I didn't even use ground chipotle. I used Mexican Chile Powder. (The only ground chipotle at Ralph's was $10 a bottle! That's ridiculous!)

I will pause for a moment while you judge me.

Are you done?

Okay.

Even though it didn't technically include the secret ingredient, this chicken was delicious! It's very lemony with just enough spice. Also, you get to pound the chicken breast with a meat mallet, which is always an activity that I enjoy.

I'm just going to link to the recipe, because I got it off of about.com, and I'm feeling a little lazy to type today.

Before I head off for the night to watch Christmas specials and the Closer, here are some other links.

This is another mushroom recipe from last week's mushroom challenge. It is not only for a delicious sounding mushroom ravioli, but the blog is hilarious.

And this is some chipotle chili. Yum! (It has actual chiles in it, in case you felt cheated by this chicken).

Southern Tea Cakes

2009-12-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

I felt the need to make Christmas cookies yesterday, and it was a lot of fun. It probably would have been better if I'd had any sprinkles or anything else to decorate them with, but oh well. The cookies were delicious anyway!

I must say though, I have an awful time trying to roll out dough. I had the same problem with the biscuits I made last weekend. I put flour on the rolling pin, but the dough keeps sticking to it and tearing apart.. it's just a whole mess.

Anyway, this recipe is from Paula Deen's "The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook". I halved it, because it said it would make between 6 and 8 dozen cookies. The halved recipe did not make anywhere close to 3 to 4 dozen though, so I'm not sure that was accurate. However, it could also have a lot to do with my dough-rolling issues and the size of the cookies that I made. I did some tree shaped ones that were sort of large.

So, here it is:

Southern Tea Cakes

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350. In a large bowl, sift flour, baking soda, and baking powder together.* Add remaining ingredients and blend well. Dough should be soft. Roll dough out onto a floured surface until approximately 1/4 inch thick. Cut dough into desired shapes and bake on a slightly greased sheet for 10 to 12 minutes.

*If you don't have one of those flour sifter things, just use a mesh wire strainer. It works just as well. I actually compared the two, because I recently bought a flour sifter. I honestly shouldn't have wasted my money, the flour looks almost exactly the same either way.

Blogger Challenge: Mushrooms!

2009-12-12T18:30:00.001-08:00

The secret ingredient this week for this week was mushrooms. I was so so excited to make these cheese and spinach stuffed mushrooms, but they were ultimately really disappointing.

I wasn't incredibly pleased with the way the mushrooms looked at the store, the cheese I used didn't really melt properly, the spinach was too stringy, and I think I let them sit too long before I ate them. I uploaded a picture anyway, but I think for the time being we can just classify this one as misadventure. I'm not really going to bother uploading the recipe, since I don't recommend it. It's okay though, I'm sure I learned a valuable lesson somewhere along the way!

Here are some links to other Iron Chef Blogger's recipes that look much more delicious than mine:

Stuffed Mushrooms with Bacon
Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

And finally, the photo of my stuffed mushrooms:

Basic Biscuits

2009-12-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

As you can tell from the picture, these biscuits did not exactly turn out beautifully. They do taste pretty good, which I suppose is what really matters.

This recipe is also from Paula Deen's "The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook", but I find the title misleading. To me, a basic biscuit recipe does not require yeast. This is my second sort of unsuccessful try at baking with yeast. There are so many things I could be doing wrong, I don't even attempt to guess what they are. Maybe someday I'll work it out.

You may have better luck, so I'll add the recipe anyway. Like I said, they did still taste good and didn't take me that long to make. It just made a bit of a mess on my counter that I still need to clean up (in spite of using wax paper to roll out the dough). Also, I skipped greasing my baking pan and just put down some parchment paper instead.

Basic Biscuits

1 package yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water
5 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
3/4 cup Crisco shortening
2 cups buttermilk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Dissolve yeast in warm water; set aside. Mix dry ingredients together. Cut in shortening. Add yeast and buttermilk and mix well. Turn dough onto lightly floured surface and roll out to desired thickness. Cut with small biscuit cutter and place on greased baking sheet. Bake for 12 minutes or until golden brown.

Rum Cake

2009-12-06T10:12:00.000-08:00

This was my first bundt cake, as well as my first time cooking with alcohol (or attempting to cook with alcohol, as we'll see shortly).

It was pretty easy to make. I'm easily fascinated with things like putting nuts at the bottom of a bundt pan (when you flip it out of the pan, the nuts are on top!). I had some trouble getting all the glaze to absorb into the cake, but I think it turned out well in spite missing a bit of glaze.

The main stumbling block I faced was not wanting to spend between 12 and 15 dollars on rum. Apparently Ralph's does not sell rum in small bottles, and I didn't need the whole thing. I ended up using a rum extract instead (the entire bottle, as it turned out), but I saved a bit of money by doing this (rum extract was only $3), and I don't think the cake really suffered for it. If you're curious, for every 1/4 cup of rum, I used 1 tablespoon of rum extract and 3 tablespoons of water.

My favorite thing about bundt cake is that it doesn't require a pan to transport, so you can transport it easily without having to worry about getting your pan home again.

I thought it was delicious. I made it for a friend's birthday, and it seemed to be well-received. It didn't taste as strongly of rum as I was afraid it might (maybe because I didn't use actual rum?), and it actually reminded me of eggnog a little for some reason.

Rum Cake
from Paula Deen's "The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook"

1 cup chopped walnuts
One 18 1/2 ounce package yellow cake mix
One 3 1/2 ounce package instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup dark rum

Preheat oven to 325. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan.* Sprinkle nuts over bottom of pan. Mix remaining ingredients together. Pour batter over nuts. Bake for 1 hour. Cool. Invert on service plate. Prick top with fork or toothpick. Drizzle and smooth glaze evenly over top and sides. Allow cake to absorb glaze. Use all the glaze.

GLAZE

4 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup water
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark rum

Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in water and sugar. Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat; stir in rum.

*I used a fluted bundt pan instead of a tube pan (which is straight-edged). Didn't seem to make a difference, and the cake was prettier. I suppose the cake shape might have made it more difficult to glaze, but I don't think so.

Blogger Challenge: Bok Choy!

2009-11-30T19:16:00.000-08:00

I'm totally getting ahead on the blogger challenge this week. This week's secret ingredient is bok choy. I was very pleased with this for two reasons.

The first is that I have been absolutely in love with Chinese food since our trip to China this past summer. I ate SO MUCH bok choy while we were there, I wanted to try to recreate it.

The second reason is actually connected to the first reason. Because all I want to do is eat Asian food since we returned, my dad got me this Chinese cookbook I'd been wanting for my birthday. It is called 'Simple Chinese Cooking' by Kylie Kwong. One of the first things that caught my eye in it was Bok Choy with Oyster Sauce.

And it was delicious. It tasted just like the dish I ate during at least two meals a day during my ten days in China. I like the flavor of bok choy. It's leafy but thicker than most greens.. I don't quite know what to compare it to. The oyster sauce was strong than I expected but still tasty. As an added bonus, it was amazingly easy to make.

This could very well be all the blogging I do for the week. I've been cooking like mad for the last week. It's time for a break to finally get all the dishes washed!

Bok Choy with Oyster Sauce

1 bunch bok choy, cores removed
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
dash of sesame oil
1 tablespoon peanut oil

Separate bok choy leaves and wash thoroughly.

Fill a large saucepan with water and bring to a boil. Stir in vegetable oil, add bok choy and simmer until bok choy is bright green and tender - this should take about 1 minute. Using tongs, immediately remove bok choy from water and place on a platter. Drizzle with oyster sauce and sesame oil.

Heat peanut oil in a small frying pan until moderately hot and carefully pour over bok choy. Serve immediately.

Cranberry-Apple Pie

2009-11-29T21:10:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is finally it for the cranberries! After this, it's on to bok choy - this week's secret ingredient.

This might be my favorite cranberry item so far. Although, I must confess now - I still did not make homemade pie crust. I actually quite like the Pillsbury refrigerated ones, and they're so easy.. it's sort of addictive. They make pie happen so much faster. Someday I will make a homemade pie crust. I just get scared.

This pie is delicious. It gets Travis's stamp of approval as well, and he's pretty picky. It's very simple, the cranberries are tart and the apples are sweet. It requires more sugar than a standard apple pie would, probably to be sure that the cranberries don't end up too bitter. The instructions call for "tart apples".. I always use Granny Smith, but I suppose there are probably other variations of tart apples as well. The recipe comes from Betty Crocker's New Cookbook.

Cranberry-Apple Pie

Pastry for Two-Crust Pie
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
dash of salt
5 cups thinly sliced peeled tart apples (5 medium)
2 cups fresh or frozen (thawed) cranberries

1. Heat oven to 425. Prepare pastry.

2. Mix sugar, flour and salt in a large bowl. Stir in apples. Turn into pastry-lined pie plate. Dot with margarine.

3. Cover edge with 3-inch strip of aluminum foil to prevent excessive browning. Remove foil during last 15 minutes of baking. Bake 40-50 minutes or until crust is brown and juice begins to bubble through slits in crust. Cool in pie plate on wire rack. Serve warm if desired.

Blogger Challenge: Cranberry!

2009-11-29T09:43:00.000-08:00

This week, it was my turn to pick the secret ingredient! I wanted to do something related to Thanksgiving, and cranberries just seemed like the thing to do. It's so easy to find fresh ones right now, and it's an ingredient that I've grown to like a lot more in the last couple of years than I did as a kid. I still have fresh berries left, so I'm planning a cranberry-apple pie later today. (I'm on a spree of trying desperately not to waste any food.)

I settled on making cranberry-orange muffins. The original recipe was for a streusel muffin, but I left off the streusel topping in the interest of making them slightly healthier. The recipe is from Betty Crocker's New Cookbook (the 1996 edition).

The muffins are really yummy. The cranberries are a little tart, but it blends nicely with the sweetness of the muffin. I'm not sure I ended up with quite enough orange zest, but there is still a hint. The orange smell is stronger than the orange taste, if that's possible. Also, the recipe calls for the cranberries to be halved. I chopped mine up a little smaller, because I don't really like big chunks of fruit in my muffins.

Cranberry-Orange Muffins

1 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1//2 teaspoon vanilla
1 large egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup cranberry halves
1 tablespoon grated orange peel

1. Heat oven to 400. Grease bottoms only of 12 medium muffin cups with shortening or line with paper baking cups.

2. Add orange zest to milk. Beat milk, oil, vanilla and egg in a large bowl. Stir in flour, sugar, baking powder and salt all at once, just until flour is moistened. Batter will be lumpy. Fold in cranberries. Divide batter evenly among muffin cups.

3. Bake 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Immediately remove from pan to wire rack. Serve warm if desired.

I also had leftover canned cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving, so I made Paula Deen's Berry Steak Sauce. It was delicious on pork chops! It can be served either hot or cold (mine was cold) with pork, beef, or chicken. The recipe calls for jellied cranberry sauce, but I had whole berry. It was still good - the only problem with using whole berry is that there were still some berry bits in it. I think it would be slighly better with jellied sauce, just because it would be smoother.

Berry Steak Sauce

1 16 oz can jellied cranberry sauce
1/3 cup bottled steak sauce
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 teaspoons prepared mustard

Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat with an electric mixer until smooth.

Finally, here are some other cranberry recipes that the Iron Chef bloggers have made this week!

Cranberry Cinnamon Muffins
Cranberry Sorbet

Thanksgiving!

2009-11-28T15:20:00.000-08:00

Another successful Thanksgiving has come and gone. I've moved onto Christmas decorating now, the tree is up with lights and just needs ornaments. Today is also my last day to finish my recipe for the Iron Chef Blogger challenge, the secret ingredient is cranberries. Actually, I'm making two different cranberry dishes today, which should be fun.

I didn't host Thanksgiving at my apartment this year, but I did make four different things. It was really fun! The fourth was a lemon gooey butter cake, but I somehow neglected to get a picture of it. It was pretty tasty though.

This is Paula Deen's broccoli salad. It is: a head of broccoli, chopped up into small pieces, some crumbled bacon, halved cherry tomatoes, cheddar cheese cubes, and red onion. The recipe also calls for 1/2 cup of raisins. I swapped this out for 1/2 cup of chopped almonds. The sauce is mayonnaise with some sugar and vinegar. It doesn't sound amazing, but it was really good.

I finally managed to make some cornbread dressing with sausage. It was not quite as good as my mom or dad's, but it was still pretty tasty. It just got a little dry, I wasn't really paying enough attention to it. With the addition of some gravy, it was scrumptious.

And who doesn't love sweet potatoes with tiny marshmallows? Tiny marshmallows don't take 10 minutes to brown, don't believe Food Network Magazine!

Thanksgiving was amazing, as always. Michele F makes a mean maple-bacon turkey and fantastic mashed potatoes. Not to mention the sweet tea, mmm!

No time for full recipes today, I've got muffins to bake and a tree to decorate! Travis just brought in the cut pieces from the tree, they smell so wonderful. Happy holidays, hope everyone had as wonderful a Thanksgiving as I did!

Maggie's Blogger Challenge: Coconut Milk!

2009-11-22T18:34:00.000-08:00

My friend Maggie is also participating in the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge. Since she doesn't have a blog, I'm posting her blog for her. I've known Maggie since we both were going to school in Knoxville. She's super fun and lives in Huntsville now with her husband, Michael, who is also pretty great. So, I think that's enough bio for now, onto the curry!

Chicken & Vegetable Curry

1 can coconut milk
Like 14 thousand tbs of green curry (because I made the mistake of buying tyling from the grocery store)
3 chicken tenderloins (cubed)
1 small onion
2 small potatoes (parboiled for 4 minutes)
½ cup green peas
At least 2 tbs brown sugar
1 tbs fish oil
Chili paste
Lime juice
Fresh basil
Salt to taste

In one saucepan, combine the coconut milk, green curry, fish oil, and brown sugar. Bring to soft boil and stir occasionally for 10 minutes. Season additional curry, sugar, & optional chili paste & lime juice to taste.

In a small amount of oil, sauté the chicken, onions, and parboiled potatoes. When browned, add the sauce and simmer whole dish for additional 5-10 minutes.

Garnish with fresh basil & serve on jasmine rice.

This was just okay – I’ve made curries before but bought the paste from asian grocery stores. I mark against this recipe based on my chosen ingredients. It really needed the chili paste, lime juice, sugar, and salt desperately.

- Maggie

Pumpkin Pie + Variation

2009-11-22T12:44:00.000-08:00

I made two pies yesterday, one pumpkin and one from Paula Deen's The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook called a Thanksgiving Pie.

I beat the pumpkin shortage by having had a giant can of pumpkin in my cabinet for the past several months. There is really no keeping me from my pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. It turns out that for Thanksgiving dinner I'm actually making a lemon gooey butter cake, and it seemed a shame not to make pies at some point.

This is the pumpkin pie. I made it from a recipe in my beaten up and broken copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. It actually needed a bit more evaporated milk, but I'm assuming that adding whipped cream will solve this just fine (it's just a smidge to "spicy" for me - by this I mean full of spices rather than spicy-hot). Then it was on to the Thanksgiving Pie!

Ingredients:

3 eggs
1 cup dark corn syrup
1/2 cup sugar
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, melted
1 cup canned pumpkin
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chopped pecans
1 9-inch unbaked pie shell
Whipped cream

Preheat oven to 350. With hand beater, beat eggs well. Beat in corn syrup, sugar, butter, pumpkin, and vanilla until well blended.

Arrange pecans in bottom of pie shell.

Slowly pour egg mixture over them. (As I learned, if you are using an aluminum pie plate, it would really be best to do this on the oven rack.)

Bake for 1 hour or until knife inserted 1 inch from edge comes out clean. Served with whipped cream.

I didn't even use the whipped cream, and this pie was amazing. It might even be better than regular pumpkin pie. It's like all the best parts of pumpkin pie and pecan pie combined into one. Has a texture sort of like custard. I'm trying to wait until after dinner tonight to eat another piece, but I might not make it! I was planning to take both pies to work tomorrow, but I may hold onto this one out of selfishness...

Also, I did not burn either pie crust! This is unusual for me, because I almost always burn my crust. I remembered to put foil around them before putting them in the oven. I think it also may be because I followed Alton Brown's advice and used aluminum pans instead of a glass pie plate.

I still used the refrigerated dough that you unroll for these, but the next time I make a pie, I'm hoping to be brave enough to try homemade crust. We'll see how that goes.

Finally, the secret ingredient this week for the Iron Chef Blogger Challenge is cranberries! It was my week to pick, and I wanted to do something with a bit of a Thanksgiving theme. I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Blogger Challenge: Coconut Milk!

2009-11-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

I was so excited when Carrie picked the secret ingredient this week and it was coconut milk. I've actually had a can in the cabinet for a few weeks, with the intention of making this Thai Coconut Soup. I love Thai food, but I've never actually cooked it. It was really quite exciting!

Squirrels love Thai Coconut Soup. You have to watch out for them.

As a side note, this is also my favorite pot to cook in - it's an enameled cast iron dutch oven.

Recipe:

Saute 3 sliced garlic cloves, 3 tablespoons grated ginger, 1/4 cup chopped lemongrass, 1 teaspoon each cumin and coriander and a Thai chile in oil.

Add 1 sliced raw chicken breast and 1 sliced onion, cook 5 minutes.

Add shredded bok choy, 4 cups water, 1 can coconut milk, cilantro, and two tablespoons fish sauce. Simmer 8 minutes.

Notes:

This was really delicious. I didn't use the Thai chile, because I was concerned that it might be too spicy. Fish sauce smells really strong, but it was pretty mellow when cooked into the soup. It was really fast to make, with the one exception being that it me forever to grate the ginger. I'm going to call this my most successful week yet!

Here are some of the other coconut milk recipes from this week:

At Two Friends Cook: Indonesian Coconut Chicken, Coconut Scones, and Chicken Satay

Brazilian Soup and Pan de Coco

Pumpkin, Sweet Potato, Leek, and Coconut Milk Soup

Basil Chicken in Coconut Curry Sauce

Blogger Challenge: Rhubarb!

2009-11-14T21:32:00.000-08:00

The blogger challenge begins with: rhubarb! I settled on rhubarb crisp after a few missteps, since pies were ruled out. This is my first time having ever tasted, much less cooked with rhubarb, and it was an interesting experience.

This morning at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, I considered myself quite lucky to be able to find fresh rhubarb, since it seemed like everyone else had to get it frozen. After wandering about the market a little longer, I headed home. Only when I get there, I realized I no longer had any rhubarb. So, back I went, only to find it at the bagel stand.

Then, as I was getting to start on the glaze for a rhubarb-glazed pork roast, I discovered I had only purchased enough rhubarb for 2 cups chopped, when I needed 4. So, off to Ralph's to supplement with frozen, only by then it was too late for glaze. Hence, the crisp.

So... the crisp is... okay. I don't love it, but I wouldn't say that I dislike it either. The topping is made of oatmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and butter. The rhubarb is more tart than I expected. I think I might like to try making a pie with it someday, but certainly not tonight. I have had way too many rhubarb adventures for one weekend.

Over at Two Friends Cook, you can see Carrie's Wild Blueberry Rhubarb Pork Chops and Sarah's Rhubarb Pudding Cakes (which look beautiful... my food photography skills are still a bit lacking). Can't to see what everyone else has made.

That's all for this week, but keep an eye out, because the next week? It's time for Blogger Challenge: Coconut Milk!

Paula Deen's Luscious Lime Cheesecake

2009-11-14T17:58:00.000-08:00

This is the cake that I made for Travis's birthday. His review is "a perfect cake". I think it could probably use a bit more lime, it was awfully sweet. I actually had the same issue with Paula Deen's lemon bars when I made those. There just isn't quite enough citrus flavor.

I didn't cover the full cake with whipped cream as the recipe called for, because Travis is vehemently opposed to whipped cream in both principle and practice. And, after all, it was his birthday. But I did add some to my slice and thought it was good.

Ingredients

1 (18 3/4 ounce) package yellow cake mix
4 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, at room temperature
1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
2 teaspoons grated lime zest
1/3 cup fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 (8 ounce) container Cool Whip, or 2 cups heavy cream, whipped with 1/2 cup sugar until stiff
lime slice, for garnish

Directions

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Reserve 1/2 cup dry cake mix. In large bowl, combine remaining cake mix, 1 egg, and oil. Mix well (mixture will be crumbly). Press evenly in bottom and 1 and 1/2 inches up sides of greased 13x9 inch pan.

In same bowl, beat cheese until fluffy. Beat in condensed milk until smooth. Add remaining eggs and reserved cake mix and beat 1 minute at medium speed. Stir in lime zest, lime juice and vanilla. Pour into prepared crust. Bake for 50 - 55 minutes or until center is firm.

Cool to room temperature. Chill thoroughly. Spread Cool Whip over top. Cut into squares to serve. Garnish with lime slices.