Recipes
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Ode to Sancerre
I adore California Chardonnay, and haven’t found a lot of French Chardonnay that I enjoy. I wish this were not true, because I feel less sophisticated for preferring a big oakey wine to one that is more subtle. But I live in California, and buttery and oakey wines are very popular here. While we were in France this summer, I decided to steer away from French Chardonnays, and instead went with a lovely Sauvignon Blanc, Sancerre. When we came home and found ourselves longing for France, we stated looking for Sancerre around here. You can find fairly decent selections of wine at your local Safeway, and even CVS and…
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Cooking with Aunt Flo
My Great Aunt Flo (Florence) has a hoarding problem. She LOVES recipes, and has them all over the front of her house. They cover the dining room table, the coffee table in the living room, the card table in the living room (where my Grandma used to do puzzles), and the coffee table in the family room. She sorts them and looks at them and worries about them. It is her overwhelming passion and hobby at this stage of her life, when she doesn’t have my Grandma to look after anymore. It has taken me awhile to figure out that she loves them and wants to keep them. I had…
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Pomegranate, Orange, and Avocado Salad
Ted and I were out walking the spaz (aka, Mulder the Puppy Boy) the other day, and we passed a house we often pass, and I happened to notice that an ordinary looking bush that borders the sidewalk is a pomegranate bush. How did I know? Because I happened to spy a beautiful pomegranate buried deep inside from the corner of my eye. See how lovely it is, hidden in there? Backtracking a bit, Ted’s mom came to visit last weekend, and she brought me a beautiful pomegranate and some avocados. So for Halloween, I was trying to decide what to make, and found a recipe for stuffed peppers where…
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Good Eats / Birthday Weekend / Bloody Mary recipe
Thursday was Maya’s birthday, and we celebrated by going to our favorite Dim Sum restaurant in San Francisco, then we did some shopping near Union Square with her gift cards. At some Dim Sum restaurants, you order off of a menu (like the place we went last year). At others, the staff bring food around to the tables, either on carts or on trays, and you say yes or no to each item as they bring it around. So they come by and say, “shrimp dumplings?” and you say yes or no, and if you say yes, they give you the shrimp dumplings and mark your check to show that…
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Chicken with Wine and Shallots
I came across this recipe, I think on Facebook, which should be evidence that Facebook is not entirely useless. You can find the recipe (and picture) here. I made this for dinner one night, and it is delicious. I generally read comments on online recipes, and one person in the comments said they added peas at the end. That sounded good to me, so I added a bunch of peas at the end, when you add the cherry tomatoes. Really good. I buy bone-in, skin on thighs, because I think they give flavor to the dish. I cook with the skin, and then remove it when we eat it. Give…
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Meatless Monday
Photo and recipe from Ambitious Kitchen I was talking to our next door neighbor the other day, and the conversation turned to Thanksgiving. These neighbors are vegetarian, but their family that will be in town visiting are not, so I asked what she is planning to make. She said they would make a turkey for the meat eaters, and she was thinking about a recipe she saw online, for stuffed acorn squash. We have Thanksgiving with Ted’s family, and his mother is vegetarian (really, pescatarian), so I thought perhaps I would look at this recipe and see if it seemed like something she would enjoy. The neighbor sent me the…
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Roasted Branzino
A few weeks ago, OK, maybe 6 weeks ago, I was lazily watching cooking shows on PBS, and a French chef who has restaurants in Las Vegas, Hubert Keller, was making a poached Branzino. It looked really good, though to be honest, I didn’t have the equipment to poach it, and thought I might prefer to roast it instead. So I poked around the Internet, and found a recipe that looked good on a blog, Girl and the Kitchen, here. It looked delicious, and I decided to give it a try the next time Maya would not be home for dinner (she’s not a big fan of fish). I followed…
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Winter Squash Soup
I have a fondness for cooking shows, especially those where they show you how to cook something interesting. Most of the cooking shows I watch currently are on PBS, but I also enjoy watching Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa. A few weeks ago, she made a delicious looking soup, with butternut squash and canned pumpkin. I thought it looked like a good dinner to have on Halloween, considering it was orange, so I made it. It was delicious, and I will definitely be making it again. I made a couple of changes to Ina’s recipe. First, I cut up the butternut squash, then roasted it in the oven until it was…
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Cooking for One
Later this month, Ted and Maya will be in the UK, with a brief trip to Paris, visiting Ted’s extended family. His mom and brother are going as well, and aside from the time in Paris, they will be staying with family. I elected to stay home and hold down the fort, take care of the dog, etc. I would like to go to Europe sometime in the not-too-distant future, but I think I’d prefer it to be just the three of us, though I do adore my MIL and BIL. I hope they have a fabulous time. I was thinking about it, and I realized that I don’t think…
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Blueberry Pancakes
(Gorgeous photo and recipe found here) It’s ridiculous how long I’ve been gone, I know. When you’re in the blogging rythem, and you blog often, everything seems like good blogging material. When you’re not, nothing seems like it would be interesting to your readers, so you don’t bother. Don’t bother often enough, and the next thing you know, it’s been over 10 weeks since your last post. Ugh. So I decided that I would just find something in my brain, and bring it here. So what you get is yet another recipe. I’ll try to come up with something NOT recipe related soon. Ted’s schedule varies a lot, which means…
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Birthday Cake
Maya requested carrot cake for her birthday party. She loves carrot cake and chocolate cake about equally. Last month was her Uncle Steve’s birthday, and as Steve had chocolate cake, she wanted carrot. I thought about buying one at the bakery, but decided the best way to go was going to be homemade, because there is THE family carrot cake recipe. This is what we call “Mother Thomas’s Carrot Cake”, because it is the carrot cake made by Ted’s Grandmother Thomas. It’s from a cookbook, which I believe was part of a woman’s auxiliary, and that’s all I know. My ‘chili relleno’ recipe is from the same cookbook. I was…
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Bitter
These were supposed to be our victory cookies, based on a recipe from the 1992 Presidential election, when Hillary Clinton made a comment on the Today show that she supposed she could have stayed home and baked cookies, but instead she continued her law career. She was slammed, with the assumption being that she held contempt for stay-at-home moms, that she thought their life was simply baking cookies and drinking tea. She quickly fell in line, doing the politically expedient thing and entering a cookie recipe in the Family Circle baking contest, a First Lady challange that survives to this day. I decided it would be symbolic of how far we’ve…
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Eggs in Pepper Boats
One of my Christmas gifts this year was a lovely cookbook, Heart and Soul in the Kitchen, by Jacques Pepin. I’ve tried a few recipes from it, with various levels of success. This recipe I consider an unqualified success, because it’s super delicious and relatively easy. You cut a poblano pepper in half, simmer it a bit to soften it, then fill the cavity with a little cheese and an egg, and cook it (covered) until the egg is set to your liking. It’s really good. Depending on how hot the peppers are, it’s either spicy or not. Poblano peppers are not terribly spicy anyway, but I’ve made this twice…
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Failure and Success
Tuesday was Maya’s 20th Birthday, and also Spring Break for the elementary school where she works, so she didn’t have work that day. Spring Break at her college was last week, so she did have school, but she decided to play hooky and spend the day with us, her loving parents. I love this kid. (Not a kid at 20, but still MY kid) We recently watched the movie “Chef” on HBO. Have you seen that movie? It’s really cute, about a chef in Los Angeles who is working for a restaurant that is uninspired and doesn’t allow him to showcase his creativity, and he ends up quitting his job,…
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Braised Short Ribs
Two recipes in two days. Sorry. I like to keep a lot of recipes here, in addition to printing them up, so I can find them when I need them. The thing with America’s Test Kitchen recipes is that only the current season episodes are free. For past seasons, you have to pay for a subscription. So there’s a time limit on them. Best to write it down somewhere. For me, that’s here. I saw the cooks on ATK make this beef stew the other day, and I was intruiged. I am not a big fan of beef bourgenion, or coq a vin, so I don’t know why I wanted…