It wasn’t completely Ann’s fault as her pesto refused to come together in the blender. She just needed to add a bit of pasta water, which Lidia tells her…eventually.
Lidia was on Today to show 4 different pestos, but these were far more interesting than my usual variation of parsley and walnuts. I was just thinking about pesto recently after reading Rachel’s post.
Ann was first up with a mixture of garlic, cheese, ricotta, oil and walnuts. Lidia should have known she was in for trouble when Ann started to add BUTTER to the blender. Lidia was so concerned she asked Ann if she knew how to close the blender.
Next is a slinged Matt and a mixture, made in a mortar and pestle, using peas and mint and basil.
Al has a neat one with anchovies, raisins, basil, garlic while Ann is stripping the gears of the blender. BTW, it was Al who brought up the Lucy reference. His pesto sounded fantastic.
Natalie does a Sicilian pesto – garlic, tomatoes, almonds, basil and peperoncino.
Lidia moves on to having them dress the pasta. First they each mix their different pasta with a bit of butter (interesting, I don’t usually do that). Then they toss it with their own pesto. As they finish up, Lidia moves down the line hugging each one (she’s adorable); THEY hug each other; Al makes a move on the stage manager. It was a delicious segment…and the food looked good too.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Sisterhood Is Powerful
The wonderful Rachel from The Essential Rhubarb Pie gave me a Sisterhood Award a bit ago. How great, because I do think of her as a Sister Blogger. We started blogging less than two weeks apart and somehow, and luckily for me, we found each other. I take these things very seriously, so it took me some time to think about who I wanted to pass it on to.
I have some pretty great bloggers on this list, with some newish and some oldish blogs. Each blogger lets us into her cooking and real life in a way that’s interesting and often encouraging and inspiring. That's true for Rachel too!
The award is for our blogging sisters who show great attitude/gratitude.
These are my choices for The Sisterhood Award:The Rules for the recipient:
1. Put the logo on your blog or post.
2. Nominate up to 10 blogs which show great attitude and/or gratitude
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog, or sending them an email.
5. Remember to link to the person from whom you received your award.
Believe me when I tell you that Michelle is a darling gal and gives wonderful reports on lots of NY eateries on Taste As You Go. I love hearing what she has to say as she goes to lots of different fun events with her young (to me) friends. She never holds back if she’s disappointed, but she’s not overly snarky either. (I guess I’m trying to learn from her.) She has some lovely recipes, as well.
Bakerella is an inspired baker and a fantastic blogger. She went WILD with Easter treats, including many varieties of Easter lollypops. The sheep ones are the cutest things I’ve ever seen outside of real sheep. She did a series of riveting blog posts on visiting the the Pioneer Woman , which showed such admiration and, yes, sisterhood that she’s a natural for this award. I love that during a problem with her doughnut making, she wrote HELP in the flour.
Laurie’s blog, Dalla Mia Cucina, is a wonderful resource for original recipes. If we ARE what we eat, we also ARE what we cook. Laurie seems to be a really nice person from the way she writes about her recipes. Plus she must spend tons of time on her beautiful pictures, which make you want to jump right into the page and taste her food.
You can tell that Deeba Rajpal, Passionate About Baking, isn’t just passionate about baking. She’s passionate about blogging too. Her pictures, her baking projects and other cooking, as well, are imbued with an enthusiasm that she loves to share. She enjoys being part of the blogging community and I really enjoy her blog. You can find many of her pictures here too.
I love Catherine's blog, The Dish. She is a grand cook, contest-enterer and winner, and slightly kooky all-around fun blogger. Her pictures of hunky males compete with her food pix. I’m not sure which are more delicious.
Tracy is awesome. Maybe it’s her Rock ‘n Roll experience that equips her for success in cooking contests, but she seems to know how to put dishes together and make what people want. Her stage presence probably doesn’t hurt. She’s also a very caring mom and friend, which comes across beautifully in her blog, Rah Cha Chow.
Friday, April 24, 2009
One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor Or Cocktails With Giada
(Sorry, I just love that George Carlin quote...Giada didn’t even serve tequila.)
Giada At Home with Giada De Laurentiis
Cocktails With Couples
Spiced Cocktail Nuts
Cheese-Stuffed Dates with Prosciutto
Crispy Zucchini and Potato Pancakes
Blueberry-Limoncello Cooler
Gosh, Giada looks good in purple. Is that a bit of lilac on her eye lids? No, maybe not.
Giada is having a get-together for the engagement of friends John and Corinne. She’s making a few snacks and one special drink before they all go out to dinner. I think cocktail entertaining is particularly well-suited to Giada. She’s such a gracious hostess.
She starts with spiced cocktail nuts, which will be cooked in a low oven for 45 minutes. Giada whips 2 egg whites until frothy. Interesting. I wonder if the egg whites are a substitute for fat. That’s a good idea as long as they don’t come out gummy or gluey.
Giada mixes together 2 cups of roasted, salted almonds, 2 cups of roasted, salted cashews and 2 cups of regular walnuts. If she’s cooking them for so long, why is she starting with roasted nuts and why not do her own salting? Giada likes the “crunch” that the egg whites give to the nuts. Heh? I don’t quite get that. She says it’s more like a brittle that you have to break up.
To the nuts, G adds 2 tablespoons curry powder, 1 tablespoon cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, cayenne pepper - as much as you like - garlic salt (ick) and ¾ cup granulated sugar. OH, adding the sugar makes the egg whites more understandable. She stirs that all together and spreads the nuts onto a Pam-ed baking pan with Pam in one layer. She puts them in a 250°F oven for 45 minutes.
For her jazzed up potato pancakes, she substitutes some zucchini for the potatoes. She peels 2 lbs. of potatoes, halves them and grates them in a flash in the food processor. She grates the zucchini right on top of the potato. She transfers that into a kitchen towel.
Wait, where’s the onion? The potato has already turned a bit brown and every good potato pancake maker knows that the acid from the onion help to prevent that. You can also soak the grated potato in water to prevent the discoloration, but then there's a lot more liquid to squeeze out.
Giada squeezes the towel really tightly around the vegetables to get all the liquid out. She adds the vegetables to a clean bowl. Still no onion? She adds 2 egg whites to keep it light because they’re going out to dinner. I would just throw in an entire egg.
BTW, a standard egg is 2 oz. - the white is one ounce and the yolk is one ounce. That’s why it’s okay to substitute a whole egg for 2 whites. That’s helpful to know if you ever freeze the whites. One egg white is 2 tablespoons. 4 egg whites will measure half a cup.
Giada adds store-bought seasoned bread crumbs, salt and pepper. Onion? Giada! She DOES add 3 cloves of garlic and chopped rosemary. She reminds us that fresh garlic has tightly closed cloves and is sticky. She likes to chop it fine, so that no one gets a big hunk of garlic.
This is where I would absolutely use a garlic press. (And I would do my recently arrived at, but probably OLD wife’s tale, thing of getting rid of that center stalk in the garlic clove. I’m convinced that causes its bad rebound effects.) She stirs in the garlic. Nope, she is definitely not adding onion.
She heats a skillet on high and adds a bit of oil. Giada adds PRE-GRATED (where is Aunt Raffi when we need her?) Parmigiano-Reggiano to the mixture. Of course, she bought very high quality cheese, but that’s a pretty big container and I’m not sure she’s going to use it all up anytime soon.
Until I learned that Parmesan cheese didn’t come out of the brightly colored, big-holed container in the door of the fridge, I used to HATE it. Cheese is expensive, so I want to get my money’s worth. If that means having to grate it fresh, so be it. I often use pecorino when I can’t stomach the price of Parm, but NEVER pre-grated.
She stirs in the cheese and, THIS is different, she pours out the entire (onionless) mixture into the heated sauté pan and then she pats it down into one giant pancake (still onionless). WELL! I have to say I didn’t see that coming. Giada covers it with cheese and drizzles over a bit of olive oil and cooks it on the burner for 8 minutes and then bakes it at 450°F for 20 to 25 minutes.
Interestingly, Giada used this same recipe in a holiday special. Although in THAT recipe, she DID use onion instead of garlic. I have no problem with her recycling a recipe. When I come across a great recipe, I use it for years…for decades actually.
The Giada at Home kitchen is quite gorgeous.
Giada checks the bottom of the pancake and sees that it’s browned and then she turns it out upside down onto a Pam-ed baking sheet. Oh! That’s new too. She’s not just throwing the sauté pan in the oven.
She takes out the nuts, they look good.
Giada starts her dates. She mixes a ¼ cup goat cheese with a ¼ cup mascarpone. Both should be at room temperature. She chops basil really finely and adds that to the cheese with salt and pepper. She unwraps thinly sliced prosciutto.
She grabs a date. They’ve been pitted already and they have a slit in them. Did she buy them like that? I have some FANTASTIC dates from the Shields Date Gardens in Palm Springs, which I keep in the freezer, but they have pits.
Giada spoons some of the cheese mixture into the big Medjool dates. She wraps a half slice (cut lengthwise) of prosciutto around each one and stabs it with a toothpick or “cocktail pin”. I guess they have fancy names for things in LA. Hers ARE reusable, though.
She breaks up the nuts and puts them in a bowl. The dates are plated. After the potato pancake has cooled, she cuts it into little squares with a serrated knife. G dollops a bit of mascarpone cheese on top and finishes it with a few spikes of rosemary. Pretty. This is a nice recipe and you could add different things to the pancake mixture. Maybe prosciutto (if you weren’t serving the dates and the potato pancakes weren’t a religious tradition), bits of smoked salmon to garnish, or even a fine dice of red pepper would look good IN the pancake or on top.
Everything is in clear glass bowls or on clear glass plates. That’s her theme, she says.
Oh darn, sorry to all you college guys, the cameras don’t follow her upstairs to change. She comes back to the kitchen in that gorgeous purple dress (she is stunning beyond words…) and gets started on the cocktail, which is a thing of beauty on its own. I think that IS lilac eye shadow.
She puts fresh blueberries in a (clear glass) pitcher. She adds lots of torn mint on top and then pours an entire bottle of Limoncello into the pitcher. She pours in a cup of sparkling water. (I’m guessing Fresca isn’t the way to go here.) She stirs it gently. THAT is lovely. She takes a large (clear glass) “bucket” filled with crushed ice and jams her glasses into it to get and stay cold. (Can you even buy crushed ice?). Her friends have arrived.
She pours the Limoncello cocktail into the glasses. Everyone is impressed. She toasts to the engaged couple. They chow down. No one falls in the pool after all that limoncello. The sun sets.
Giada At Home with Giada De Laurentiis
Cocktails With Couples
Spiced Cocktail Nuts
Cheese-Stuffed Dates with Prosciutto
Crispy Zucchini and Potato Pancakes
Blueberry-Limoncello Cooler
Gosh, Giada looks good in purple. Is that a bit of lilac on her eye lids? No, maybe not.
Giada is having a get-together for the engagement of friends John and Corinne. She’s making a few snacks and one special drink before they all go out to dinner. I think cocktail entertaining is particularly well-suited to Giada. She’s such a gracious hostess.
She starts with spiced cocktail nuts, which will be cooked in a low oven for 45 minutes. Giada whips 2 egg whites until frothy. Interesting. I wonder if the egg whites are a substitute for fat. That’s a good idea as long as they don’t come out gummy or gluey.
Giada mixes together 2 cups of roasted, salted almonds, 2 cups of roasted, salted cashews and 2 cups of regular walnuts. If she’s cooking them for so long, why is she starting with roasted nuts and why not do her own salting? Giada likes the “crunch” that the egg whites give to the nuts. Heh? I don’t quite get that. She says it’s more like a brittle that you have to break up.
To the nuts, G adds 2 tablespoons curry powder, 1 tablespoon cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, cayenne pepper - as much as you like - garlic salt (ick) and ¾ cup granulated sugar. OH, adding the sugar makes the egg whites more understandable. She stirs that all together and spreads the nuts onto a Pam-ed baking pan with Pam in one layer. She puts them in a 250°F oven for 45 minutes.
For her jazzed up potato pancakes, she substitutes some zucchini for the potatoes. She peels 2 lbs. of potatoes, halves them and grates them in a flash in the food processor. She grates the zucchini right on top of the potato. She transfers that into a kitchen towel.
Wait, where’s the onion? The potato has already turned a bit brown and every good potato pancake maker knows that the acid from the onion help to prevent that. You can also soak the grated potato in water to prevent the discoloration, but then there's a lot more liquid to squeeze out.
Giada squeezes the towel really tightly around the vegetables to get all the liquid out. She adds the vegetables to a clean bowl. Still no onion? She adds 2 egg whites to keep it light because they’re going out to dinner. I would just throw in an entire egg.
BTW, a standard egg is 2 oz. - the white is one ounce and the yolk is one ounce. That’s why it’s okay to substitute a whole egg for 2 whites. That’s helpful to know if you ever freeze the whites. One egg white is 2 tablespoons. 4 egg whites will measure half a cup.
Giada adds store-bought seasoned bread crumbs, salt and pepper. Onion? Giada! She DOES add 3 cloves of garlic and chopped rosemary. She reminds us that fresh garlic has tightly closed cloves and is sticky. She likes to chop it fine, so that no one gets a big hunk of garlic.
This is where I would absolutely use a garlic press. (And I would do my recently arrived at, but probably OLD wife’s tale, thing of getting rid of that center stalk in the garlic clove. I’m convinced that causes its bad rebound effects.) She stirs in the garlic. Nope, she is definitely not adding onion.
She heats a skillet on high and adds a bit of oil. Giada adds PRE-GRATED (where is Aunt Raffi when we need her?) Parmigiano-Reggiano to the mixture. Of course, she bought very high quality cheese, but that’s a pretty big container and I’m not sure she’s going to use it all up anytime soon.
Until I learned that Parmesan cheese didn’t come out of the brightly colored, big-holed container in the door of the fridge, I used to HATE it. Cheese is expensive, so I want to get my money’s worth. If that means having to grate it fresh, so be it. I often use pecorino when I can’t stomach the price of Parm, but NEVER pre-grated.
She stirs in the cheese and, THIS is different, she pours out the entire (onionless) mixture into the heated sauté pan and then she pats it down into one giant pancake (still onionless). WELL! I have to say I didn’t see that coming. Giada covers it with cheese and drizzles over a bit of olive oil and cooks it on the burner for 8 minutes and then bakes it at 450°F for 20 to 25 minutes.
Interestingly, Giada used this same recipe in a holiday special. Although in THAT recipe, she DID use onion instead of garlic. I have no problem with her recycling a recipe. When I come across a great recipe, I use it for years…for decades actually.
The Giada at Home kitchen is quite gorgeous.
Giada checks the bottom of the pancake and sees that it’s browned and then she turns it out upside down onto a Pam-ed baking sheet. Oh! That’s new too. She’s not just throwing the sauté pan in the oven.
She takes out the nuts, they look good.
Giada starts her dates. She mixes a ¼ cup goat cheese with a ¼ cup mascarpone. Both should be at room temperature. She chops basil really finely and adds that to the cheese with salt and pepper. She unwraps thinly sliced prosciutto.
She grabs a date. They’ve been pitted already and they have a slit in them. Did she buy them like that? I have some FANTASTIC dates from the Shields Date Gardens in Palm Springs, which I keep in the freezer, but they have pits.
Giada spoons some of the cheese mixture into the big Medjool dates. She wraps a half slice (cut lengthwise) of prosciutto around each one and stabs it with a toothpick or “cocktail pin”. I guess they have fancy names for things in LA. Hers ARE reusable, though.
She breaks up the nuts and puts them in a bowl. The dates are plated. After the potato pancake has cooled, she cuts it into little squares with a serrated knife. G dollops a bit of mascarpone cheese on top and finishes it with a few spikes of rosemary. Pretty. This is a nice recipe and you could add different things to the pancake mixture. Maybe prosciutto (if you weren’t serving the dates and the potato pancakes weren’t a religious tradition), bits of smoked salmon to garnish, or even a fine dice of red pepper would look good IN the pancake or on top.
Everything is in clear glass bowls or on clear glass plates. That’s her theme, she says.
Oh darn, sorry to all you college guys, the cameras don’t follow her upstairs to change. She comes back to the kitchen in that gorgeous purple dress (she is stunning beyond words…) and gets started on the cocktail, which is a thing of beauty on its own. I think that IS lilac eye shadow.
She puts fresh blueberries in a (clear glass) pitcher. She adds lots of torn mint on top and then pours an entire bottle of Limoncello into the pitcher. She pours in a cup of sparkling water. (I’m guessing Fresca isn’t the way to go here.) She stirs it gently. THAT is lovely. She takes a large (clear glass) “bucket” filled with crushed ice and jams her glasses into it to get and stay cold. (Can you even buy crushed ice?). Her friends have arrived.
She pours the Limoncello cocktail into the glasses. Everyone is impressed. She toasts to the engaged couple. They chow down. No one falls in the pool after all that limoncello. The sun sets.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Happy Earth Day As Ina Picnics...Plus Salt In Batter And Obsessive Cookie Shaping
The Barefoot Contessa with Ina Garten
Pack And Go Party
Pita Stuffed with Tabbouleh and Shards of Feta
Roasted Shrimp Salad
Ultimate Ginger Cookie
What could be more fun than going on a picnic with Ina? AND in her own back yard. (Do you think she and Jeffrey might set up the tent later?)
I can’t wait to see what she’s making. And I really hope TR is one of the guests. Just imagine him all stretched out on the picnic blanket…
I like how she often counts things off at the beginning of an episode. This time it’s what picnic food should be:
Simple
Portable
Always Delicious
I LIKE the music. It’s jazzy.
Ina asks if anyone REALLY likes fancy parties. SHE prefers casual get-togethers. She starts with her Ultimate Ginger Cookies. (I guess Tyler hasn’t gotten around to these yet.)
She measure 2¼ cups flour into a sieve over a bowl. She stirs it lightly first. Ina tells us as not to tamp down the flour as we measure. Good point.
If you pack the flour into the cup, you’re increasing the amount of flour - possibly even by spoonfuls. So handle the flour gently as you measure. As I think about it, the only ingredient you ever want to pack into a measuring cup is brown sugar. Oh, chocolate chips too, so you don’t have to feel bad about sampling them on their way to the mixing bowl.
To the flour, Ina adds 1 teaspoon baking soda, 2 teaspoons “really good” cinnamon. 1½ teaspoons cloves, ½ teaspoon ground ginger, (this is going to be some spicy meatballs, I mean cookies) and ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg, WHICH SHE DOESN’T GRATE FRESH…which I will never understand.
Ina says the balance of spices is important and you don’t want one spice to overwhelm the others. She adds ¼ teaspoon salt, which she says brings out the flavor in sweet things the same way that it does in savory. Ina sifts all the dry ingredients together.
I KNOW that noone else on the planet agrees with me and that I’m the only one in the universe who doesn’t add salt to sweet things, but I don’t care. I can TASTE it and I don’t like it. Actually, now that I think about it, it is funny because I love sweet things with savory stuff. I could eat a prune in any stew or orange juice in any reduction. But I cannot abide salt in sweet baked goods. Yet when I taste others’, I’m not as bothered as when I add it to my own…Go Figure!
In another bowl, Ina adds 1 cup of brown sugar to ¼ cup of flavorless oil. I would use safflower oil here, which I always keep in the fridge to prevent it going off. In fact, the only oil I DON’T keep in the fridge is my tasteless light-colored supermarket-quality olive oil that I use when I want to extend my beautiful Spanish olive oil.
Ina adds 1/3 cup of unsulfured molasses and beats that together. She breaks an egg onto the counter (uck! egg all over the counter) and then into a separate little bowl. She pours that into the running mixer. Then, on low speed, she adds the flour and spices. Ooh, she’s adding a surprise in the middle – crystallized ginger. She chops it into a small dice. She’s using 1¼ cups of crystallized ginger! She beats it into the batter.
Ina scoops out the dough with an ice cream scoop and rolls it into a ball and then into sugar. She places the balls on the cookie sheet and presses them flat. They will bake at 350°F for 12 minutes. I always use an ice cream scoop too. It ensures that each cookie is the same size.
I have a lovely friend, who takes a much more casual approach than I do to cooking – and life. HER kids don’t run screaming from the room when asked if they want to help with the baking. She keeps cookie dough in the freezer and can’t be bothered to defrost it. I was present one time when her kids hacked off pieces of the frozen dough and threw them on a baking sheet. (And not a proper baking sheet either – it was the bottom of a broiler pan that comes with some ovens.)
There were blobs of cookie dough; there were triangles and misshapen lumps! They were all different sizes and shapes. I had to put my fist in my mouth to keep from exclaiming over the haphazard nature of the baking that was going on! And when they came out, some were crisp, some were chewy, some were a bit burned and…the kids just loved them!
I understand the need for freezing cookie dough, but I approach the whole thing a little differently. I would scoop the dough into identical balls, open-freeze them and then pack them into a plastic bag to be used as needed. Um, I better stop now, because I know I’m sounding more and more like Martha Stewart every minute. (The bad parts of Martha Stewart, not the good ones.)
Back to Ina, she calls her friend Barbara (on her blackberry) and asks if she can pick up some peaches from the farm stand, which will go perfectly with her cookies. (Conveniently, there is a camera standing by Barbara when her phone rings.) Oh, she’s bringing individual bottles of champagne too.
Ina takes out the cookies. Gorgeous. AND every one is perfect. She has a little taste. Hmmm.
Ina grates orange zest on her microplaner for the shrimp. She adds that with 2 tablespoons of orange juice to a bowl. She adds a cup of “good” mayonnaise. It’s not necessary to make your own, Ina says. IF you are serving this outside, I would NEVER use a homemade mayonnaise. Few things are as perishable. You need something that has a few stabilizers and, yes, preservatives.
Salt (I would add less) and pepper go in with a tablespoon of white wine vinegar. She stirs that all together. Next, she adds prepares a ¼ cup of chopped red onion and ¼ cup of chopped dill with 2 tablespoons drained capers and sets that aside.
Barbara had found the peaches. They’re HUGE.
Ina thought to roast shrimp for shrimp salad after they began roasting chicken for the chicken salad at the Barefoot Contessa shop. Good thinking!
She peels and deveins the shrimp. (She has nice hands.) Ina puts 2½ pounds of 16/20 count shrimp on a baking sheet. (It’s just as well that she’s having a picnic in her backyard, because after buying all that shrimp, she won’t be able to afford a vacation.)
She “drizzles” over olive oil and sprinkles over salt and pepper. She mixes that together well and spreads the shrimp out in a single layer and roasts them at 400°F for 6 to 8 minutes until pink and firm and barely cooked through.
Ina puts the shrimp in a big bowl while still warm (not hot). She spoons over most of the sauce. She notes that she always adds the sauce to the shrimp not the other way around. That way she can moderate the amount of sauce she uses. And it’s good to have a bit of extra to add just before serving.
Using an enormous spoon, she mixes the shrimp with the sauce and then adds most of the vegetables. She “holds a little bit of the vegetables back” to sprinkle over the top before serving. She tastes for seasoning - “The best shrimp salad I ever had.”
For her tabouli, Ina chops an English cucumber, leaving on the skin. She calls them hothouse cucumbers. She chops one cup of scallions. She uses the white and green parts and adds that to the cukes. She halves 2 cups of cherry tomatoes. (Remember Rachael’s tip?)
Ina says she likes the idea of each person having his own picnic bag. It’s the same as when kids prefer individual cupcakes at a birthday party. I get that, but I think it’s just because Ina doesn’t like to share.
Ina loves that her friend is bringing individual little bottles of champagne, so each person has his or own. “Now that’s a party!” Barbara has no problem getting them. Those are HALF BOTTLES of Veuve? They’re big. That’s a lot of champers for each person. I really do hope they’re going to camp out after and not get behind the wheel.
To finish the tabouli, Ina puts a cup of bulgur wheat into a bowl and pours over 1½ cups of boiling water. She stirs in 1/4 cup of lemon juice, ¼ cup of olive oil and salt and just lets it sit for an hour. She adds it to the chopped vegetables with 1 cup of fresh chopped mint and parsley. She adds more salt and pepper and stirs everything together. Yum!
To package the tabouli, she cuts pitas in half. (White ones. I didn’t know anyone still eats the white ones.) She spoons the salad in with big pieces of feta cheese. Fantastic. Plus her nails look sensational.
The shrimp salad looks luscious and AMAZING. She has a glossy orange mini-shopping bag for each person. She packages the shrimp salad in Chinese takeout containers. The tabouli pita goes into parchment paper and the cookies – THREE each - into glassine bags.
This is such an UN-GREEN presentation that it’s striking. I have no doubt that everything would taste just as good from a single big platter. If she were traveling even a mile or two, I could understand all this. But she basically could throw the food out of her back door into her guests’ mouths, so the need for all this trash eludes me. That goes for the HALF bottles of bubbly as well.
She adds a “good” napkin. I think they’re paper. Ina festoons each bag with a perfect piece of parchment paper, billowing from the top. It DOES look festive and grand, but, if it were me, I would grab those pieces of parchment paper 3 seconds after the guests removed them and run them back to the kitchen to be used again...and not as wrapping. (I don’t actually use parchment paper, but I would still try to rescue it.)
We learn that she’s packing 6 bags total. Ina puts them all out as Barbara and the other guests arrive. Everyone unpacks his bag – at the table, not on a blanket…no TR in sight. Jeffrey tries to steal some of Ina’s shrimp and she fends him off. I KNEW she didn’t like to share. Then they click champagne bottles (with straws) and the feast begins.
Adorable Jeffry says this is the greatest picnic he’s ever had and HE’S going to do the dishes. (Harhar).
Maybe I’ll count off a few things I loved about this episode myself:
Flawless food.
Incomparable Ina.
Great pals to share it with.
But Leo needs to have a talk with the Contessa…or more likely her producers.
Pack And Go Party
Pita Stuffed with Tabbouleh and Shards of Feta
Roasted Shrimp Salad
Ultimate Ginger Cookie
What could be more fun than going on a picnic with Ina? AND in her own back yard. (Do you think she and Jeffrey might set up the tent later?)
I can’t wait to see what she’s making. And I really hope TR is one of the guests. Just imagine him all stretched out on the picnic blanket…
I like how she often counts things off at the beginning of an episode. This time it’s what picnic food should be:
Simple
Portable
Always Delicious
I LIKE the music. It’s jazzy.
Ina asks if anyone REALLY likes fancy parties. SHE prefers casual get-togethers. She starts with her Ultimate Ginger Cookies. (I guess Tyler hasn’t gotten around to these yet.)
She measure 2¼ cups flour into a sieve over a bowl. She stirs it lightly first. Ina tells us as not to tamp down the flour as we measure. Good point.
If you pack the flour into the cup, you’re increasing the amount of flour - possibly even by spoonfuls. So handle the flour gently as you measure. As I think about it, the only ingredient you ever want to pack into a measuring cup is brown sugar. Oh, chocolate chips too, so you don’t have to feel bad about sampling them on their way to the mixing bowl.
To the flour, Ina adds 1 teaspoon baking soda, 2 teaspoons “really good” cinnamon. 1½ teaspoons cloves, ½ teaspoon ground ginger, (this is going to be some spicy meatballs, I mean cookies) and ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg, WHICH SHE DOESN’T GRATE FRESH…which I will never understand.
Ina says the balance of spices is important and you don’t want one spice to overwhelm the others. She adds ¼ teaspoon salt, which she says brings out the flavor in sweet things the same way that it does in savory. Ina sifts all the dry ingredients together.
I KNOW that noone else on the planet agrees with me and that I’m the only one in the universe who doesn’t add salt to sweet things, but I don’t care. I can TASTE it and I don’t like it. Actually, now that I think about it, it is funny because I love sweet things with savory stuff. I could eat a prune in any stew or orange juice in any reduction. But I cannot abide salt in sweet baked goods. Yet when I taste others’, I’m not as bothered as when I add it to my own…Go Figure!
In another bowl, Ina adds 1 cup of brown sugar to ¼ cup of flavorless oil. I would use safflower oil here, which I always keep in the fridge to prevent it going off. In fact, the only oil I DON’T keep in the fridge is my tasteless light-colored supermarket-quality olive oil that I use when I want to extend my beautiful Spanish olive oil.
Ina adds 1/3 cup of unsulfured molasses and beats that together. She breaks an egg onto the counter (uck! egg all over the counter) and then into a separate little bowl. She pours that into the running mixer. Then, on low speed, she adds the flour and spices. Ooh, she’s adding a surprise in the middle – crystallized ginger. She chops it into a small dice. She’s using 1¼ cups of crystallized ginger! She beats it into the batter.
Ina scoops out the dough with an ice cream scoop and rolls it into a ball and then into sugar. She places the balls on the cookie sheet and presses them flat. They will bake at 350°F for 12 minutes. I always use an ice cream scoop too. It ensures that each cookie is the same size.
I have a lovely friend, who takes a much more casual approach than I do to cooking – and life. HER kids don’t run screaming from the room when asked if they want to help with the baking. She keeps cookie dough in the freezer and can’t be bothered to defrost it. I was present one time when her kids hacked off pieces of the frozen dough and threw them on a baking sheet. (And not a proper baking sheet either – it was the bottom of a broiler pan that comes with some ovens.)
There were blobs of cookie dough; there were triangles and misshapen lumps! They were all different sizes and shapes. I had to put my fist in my mouth to keep from exclaiming over the haphazard nature of the baking that was going on! And when they came out, some were crisp, some were chewy, some were a bit burned and…the kids just loved them!
I understand the need for freezing cookie dough, but I approach the whole thing a little differently. I would scoop the dough into identical balls, open-freeze them and then pack them into a plastic bag to be used as needed. Um, I better stop now, because I know I’m sounding more and more like Martha Stewart every minute. (The bad parts of Martha Stewart, not the good ones.)
Back to Ina, she calls her friend Barbara (on her blackberry) and asks if she can pick up some peaches from the farm stand, which will go perfectly with her cookies. (Conveniently, there is a camera standing by Barbara when her phone rings.) Oh, she’s bringing individual bottles of champagne too.
Ina takes out the cookies. Gorgeous. AND every one is perfect. She has a little taste. Hmmm.
Ina grates orange zest on her microplaner for the shrimp. She adds that with 2 tablespoons of orange juice to a bowl. She adds a cup of “good” mayonnaise. It’s not necessary to make your own, Ina says. IF you are serving this outside, I would NEVER use a homemade mayonnaise. Few things are as perishable. You need something that has a few stabilizers and, yes, preservatives.
Salt (I would add less) and pepper go in with a tablespoon of white wine vinegar. She stirs that all together. Next, she adds prepares a ¼ cup of chopped red onion and ¼ cup of chopped dill with 2 tablespoons drained capers and sets that aside.
Barbara had found the peaches. They’re HUGE.
Ina thought to roast shrimp for shrimp salad after they began roasting chicken for the chicken salad at the Barefoot Contessa shop. Good thinking!
She peels and deveins the shrimp. (She has nice hands.) Ina puts 2½ pounds of 16/20 count shrimp on a baking sheet. (It’s just as well that she’s having a picnic in her backyard, because after buying all that shrimp, she won’t be able to afford a vacation.)
She “drizzles” over olive oil and sprinkles over salt and pepper. She mixes that together well and spreads the shrimp out in a single layer and roasts them at 400°F for 6 to 8 minutes until pink and firm and barely cooked through.
Ina puts the shrimp in a big bowl while still warm (not hot). She spoons over most of the sauce. She notes that she always adds the sauce to the shrimp not the other way around. That way she can moderate the amount of sauce she uses. And it’s good to have a bit of extra to add just before serving.
Using an enormous spoon, she mixes the shrimp with the sauce and then adds most of the vegetables. She “holds a little bit of the vegetables back” to sprinkle over the top before serving. She tastes for seasoning - “The best shrimp salad I ever had.”
For her tabouli, Ina chops an English cucumber, leaving on the skin. She calls them hothouse cucumbers. She chops one cup of scallions. She uses the white and green parts and adds that to the cukes. She halves 2 cups of cherry tomatoes. (Remember Rachael’s tip?)
Ina says she likes the idea of each person having his own picnic bag. It’s the same as when kids prefer individual cupcakes at a birthday party. I get that, but I think it’s just because Ina doesn’t like to share.
Ina loves that her friend is bringing individual little bottles of champagne, so each person has his or own. “Now that’s a party!” Barbara has no problem getting them. Those are HALF BOTTLES of Veuve? They’re big. That’s a lot of champers for each person. I really do hope they’re going to camp out after and not get behind the wheel.
To finish the tabouli, Ina puts a cup of bulgur wheat into a bowl and pours over 1½ cups of boiling water. She stirs in 1/4 cup of lemon juice, ¼ cup of olive oil and salt and just lets it sit for an hour. She adds it to the chopped vegetables with 1 cup of fresh chopped mint and parsley. She adds more salt and pepper and stirs everything together. Yum!
To package the tabouli, she cuts pitas in half. (White ones. I didn’t know anyone still eats the white ones.) She spoons the salad in with big pieces of feta cheese. Fantastic. Plus her nails look sensational.
The shrimp salad looks luscious and AMAZING. She has a glossy orange mini-shopping bag for each person. She packages the shrimp salad in Chinese takeout containers. The tabouli pita goes into parchment paper and the cookies – THREE each - into glassine bags.
This is such an UN-GREEN presentation that it’s striking. I have no doubt that everything would taste just as good from a single big platter. If she were traveling even a mile or two, I could understand all this. But she basically could throw the food out of her back door into her guests’ mouths, so the need for all this trash eludes me. That goes for the HALF bottles of bubbly as well.
She adds a “good” napkin. I think they’re paper. Ina festoons each bag with a perfect piece of parchment paper, billowing from the top. It DOES look festive and grand, but, if it were me, I would grab those pieces of parchment paper 3 seconds after the guests removed them and run them back to the kitchen to be used again...and not as wrapping. (I don’t actually use parchment paper, but I would still try to rescue it.)
We learn that she’s packing 6 bags total. Ina puts them all out as Barbara and the other guests arrive. Everyone unpacks his bag – at the table, not on a blanket…no TR in sight. Jeffrey tries to steal some of Ina’s shrimp and she fends him off. I KNEW she didn’t like to share. Then they click champagne bottles (with straws) and the feast begins.
Adorable Jeffry says this is the greatest picnic he’s ever had and HE’S going to do the dishes. (Harhar).
Maybe I’ll count off a few things I loved about this episode myself:
Flawless food.
Incomparable Ina.
Great pals to share it with.
But Leo needs to have a talk with the Contessa…or more likely her producers.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Padma And Katheee Leee Sex Up The Today Show
Padma was on Today this morning…WITH her clothes on. Hoda and KL asked her about her nude photo shoot. She said she was a model for so many years and had to wear clothes she didn’t like that going without them was fine.
They showed Padma's Carl’s Jr./ Hardees ad...
You know, the one where she’s French-kissing a hamburger.
I won’t be making that anytime soon...
They showed Padma's Carl’s Jr./ Hardees ad...
You know, the one where she’s French-kissing a hamburger.
Now HERE’S something I bet you didn’t notice from that ad. She was wearing her own yellow gold jewelry line.
And she was today as well. Padma showed off a $375 ring and $600 earrings. She tried to make it sound okay by saying that in these hard times, she’d rather spend her money on something real. That’s great, except these days something real is food, shelter and health insurance!
The gals taste her White Sangria. Ooh, you know I love that, except hers has some (ick) star anise. I did like the cut-up mango and kiwi, though.
Padma shows them how to make a lobster salad canapé. She mixes lobster with mayo, chives, parsley and Serrano chilies. (You can use shrimp too.) Padma says if you have lobster as the beginning of the meal, you don’t HAVE to have it as main course(!!!)
Why is Padma being so grossly out of touch with the not-cheap jewelry line and LOBSTER hors d’oeuvres? I’m not even sure what she’s promoting. I suppose it’s her Allure interview and the jewelry, but she’s coming off as really elitist.
Luckily, Hoda saves the day asking about substitutes for the lobster. Padma says you can use white fish or even white beans. THAT would have been the way to go at the start, and then say, if you’re feeling flush, you could use lobster.
Then KL insisted in tasting the lobster the way Padma ate the hamburger.
The gals taste her White Sangria. Ooh, you know I love that, except hers has some (ick) star anise. I did like the cut-up mango and kiwi, though.
Padma shows them how to make a lobster salad canapé. She mixes lobster with mayo, chives, parsley and Serrano chilies. (You can use shrimp too.) Padma says if you have lobster as the beginning of the meal, you don’t HAVE to have it as main course(!!!)
Why is Padma being so grossly out of touch with the not-cheap jewelry line and LOBSTER hors d’oeuvres? I’m not even sure what she’s promoting. I suppose it’s her Allure interview and the jewelry, but she’s coming off as really elitist.
Luckily, Hoda saves the day asking about substitutes for the lobster. Padma says you can use white fish or even white beans. THAT would have been the way to go at the start, and then say, if you’re feeling flush, you could use lobster.
Then KL insisted in tasting the lobster the way Padma ate the hamburger.
I won’t be making that anytime soon...
Monday, April 20, 2009
A Tale Of Two Cakes – Anne Burrell’s Olive Oil Cake and Gina Neely’s Flourless Chocolate Cake
Anne Burrell’s Olive Oil Cake with Blueberries and Mascarpone
Gina Neely’s Flourless Chocolate Cake
I actually said Gina Neely in the same breath as the fabulously gifted Anne Burrell. Both made pretty rockin’ cakes this weekend on the Food Network’s Saturday lineup.
Anne Burrell’s was from her Spaghetti Carbonara show.
Anne learned how to make this cake while in cooking school in Italy. She begins by adding sugar to egg yolks. How much sugar? How many egg yolks…she doesn’t say. Anne beats her whites separately. How many? She won’t say. Oy, let me look! It’s ¾ cup of sugar and 5 yolks and SEVEN whites. That might have been worth mentioning.
She adds salt in her whites. NO! I know Ina does that and lots of other folks too. But, on this, I will have to go with Rose Levy Beranbaum, who after all, wrote The Bible on these matters. No salt with egg whites. It only dries them out.
Anne is going too fast. She zests a Meyer lemon over her egg yolk and sugar bowl. She describes it well as a lemon with the aroma of a tangerine. It’s actually a cross between a lemon and an orange. It looks like she has about a dozen egg yolks in there, but it’s only 7.
Anne beats the whites on the second speed of her KitchenAid and the yolks to ribbon-stage by hand. This is where a second mixer bowl could come in handy. She checks her whites by removing the beater and bowl from the stand. She dips the whisk straight into the whites to get some on the end of the whisk and then holds it over the bowl sideways. If the peaks keep their shape and don’t flop over, they are firm enough.
She thoroughly whisks in ¾ cup high quality olive oil and Vin Santo (or you can substitute sweet sherry) to the yolks. Anne stirs in one cup of flour and tells us we can make this in a regular cake pan, if we don’t have a spring-form one. She doesn’t tell us to be sure to line the cake pan with waxed paper or parchment, but be sure you do.
Anne folds her egg whites into the batter in 3 parts. I guess that’s her substitution for beating in a quarter of the whites at the beginning to lighten the mixture. I still would do that.
Anne is great at showing us the straight-in-and-over folding technique with the spatula and then showing us how to “draw lines” in the batter to “bust through” the egg whites. This is important.
You don’t want huge globs of egg white left in the batter. After folding for a bit, you hold the spatula straight down (as if you were inserting a skewer) and move it back and forth through the masses of whites almost in a scissoring motion. That breaks them down without deflating them.
Anne greases the pan with olive oil, which makes sense, since she’s using it in the cake. She lines the springform pan with parchment paper. How is THAT going to work? Unless she turns it over to remove the paper, you risk papery slices. So then why not just use a regular cake pan?
The batter goes into the pan and the cake gets baked at 350°F for 45 minutes…That was fast. She takes out the cake. It’s beautiful. Anne tests it with a skewer. It comes out clean, so it’s done.
For a topping, Anne rinses and goes through blueberries. They go in a pan with a cinnamon stick, sugar, ¼ cup water and the sieved juice of half a Meyer lemon. As she discards the lemon half in her garbage bowl (which bears no resemblance to this one), Anne smiles and says – to the lemon - “Thanks for coming.” She really is adorable.
The blueberries get cooked for 20 minutes. Oh, I don’t watch her enough to know that she says “Thanks for coming” to every ingredient that she’s finished wish. I love chef-to-food communication.
Anne unmolds the cake and reminds us that there’s paper on the bottom. (I still don’t get why. Just grease and flour it and it should be fine. BUT I ALWAYS line cake pans.)
The slice goes on a plate and she tops it with some berry compote. Luscious. She spoons a little mascarpone over in a quenelle shape. She practically inhales the cake. It’s pretty great and so is she.
But may I ask you a question? Would an olive oil cake ever - in a hundred years - be as good as one made with butter? This cake looks so darn good, but I’ll be honest, I kinda want to use butter. That would be sacrilegious, though, wouldn’t it?
I must have been born with butter running through my veins, so I just can’t help thinking that I would taste this cake and think, okay, but I’d prefer butter.
But what if I kept to the spirit of the cake and used OIL, (I LOVE my carrot and apple cakes with oil), just not olive oil?
Remember, that my olive oil comes straight from Spain and, while I do use it liberally, I never use it without thought.
How about safflower oil? I’m sure that’s against the entire spirit of the recipe and I’d be excommunicated from the church of Italian Food Aficionados. Is it possible that we sometimes just have to admit, “You know what? I’m just not sure I’d love that”? But I do love everything about the recipe…except the olive oil.
Strangely enough, I had no such dilemma with this Flourless Chocolate Cake from Gina Neely. Imagine her in the same post as Anne!!! But I think this recipe could become a standard in your kitchen…and mine.
Pat chops 8 oz. semisweet chocolate while Gina melts two stick of butter on the stove. He stirs the chopped chocolate into the butter.
Do you ever really bother with chopping the chocolate? I almost never do...I find it good fun to jab a fork right into the chocolate bar in the pan. Then I stir it around the bottom, mixing it with the melting butter as I go. Yup, THAT is truly what I do for fun.
Gina beats 1 of cup sugar and 6 eggs in a mixer until light and fluffy. Pat reminds us to continually stir the chocolate.
I’m also reminded of Ina’s trick. She holds back a bit of chopped chocolate and stirs it into the melted mixture off the heat to ensure that she doesn’t overheat it.
Gina whisks in ½ cup of cocoa, vanilla and 1/3 cup of brandy to the egg mixture. Pat’s deep blue polo shirt matches the deep blue mixing bowls that Gina was using earlier.
Gina lines her springform pan with parchment paper. Too? What’s going on here? Am I completely out of it?
THEN Gina sprays the pan with Pam. Never! Not with this cake. Butter and flour the pan properly. Pat pours the melted butter and chocolate into the batter and Gina mixes it together. Pat pours it into the lazily prepared pan. It bakes at 350°F for 50 minutes.
Gina tells us to have the bowl and beaters cold as she beats 1 cup of cream. See, Gina? You don’t need Cool Whip! She beats in ¼ cup of powdered sugar and 1 tablespoon of brandy. Gina cuts a piece, then tops it with the whipped cream and then some raspberries.
This is a really nice serviceable recipe and it would freeze beautifully too. You could also top it differently. How about chocolate whipped cream spread over the top and chocolate shavings to finish it off? Or a raspberry sauce with Grand Marnier garnished with rosettes of Grand Marnier-spiked whipped cream and fresh raspberries? Or top it with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. Ooh la la! OR just a bit of powdered sugar. You could also cut it into rounds and make little individual cakes. Those trimmings would have to be disposed of somehow…I guess.
Anyway, Gina did good and I HAD to acknowledge it.
Gina Neely’s Flourless Chocolate Cake
I actually said Gina Neely in the same breath as the fabulously gifted Anne Burrell. Both made pretty rockin’ cakes this weekend on the Food Network’s Saturday lineup.
Anne Burrell’s was from her Spaghetti Carbonara show.
Anne learned how to make this cake while in cooking school in Italy. She begins by adding sugar to egg yolks. How much sugar? How many egg yolks…she doesn’t say. Anne beats her whites separately. How many? She won’t say. Oy, let me look! It’s ¾ cup of sugar and 5 yolks and SEVEN whites. That might have been worth mentioning.
She adds salt in her whites. NO! I know Ina does that and lots of other folks too. But, on this, I will have to go with Rose Levy Beranbaum, who after all, wrote The Bible on these matters. No salt with egg whites. It only dries them out.
Anne is going too fast. She zests a Meyer lemon over her egg yolk and sugar bowl. She describes it well as a lemon with the aroma of a tangerine. It’s actually a cross between a lemon and an orange. It looks like she has about a dozen egg yolks in there, but it’s only 7.
Anne beats the whites on the second speed of her KitchenAid and the yolks to ribbon-stage by hand. This is where a second mixer bowl could come in handy. She checks her whites by removing the beater and bowl from the stand. She dips the whisk straight into the whites to get some on the end of the whisk and then holds it over the bowl sideways. If the peaks keep their shape and don’t flop over, they are firm enough.
She thoroughly whisks in ¾ cup high quality olive oil and Vin Santo (or you can substitute sweet sherry) to the yolks. Anne stirs in one cup of flour and tells us we can make this in a regular cake pan, if we don’t have a spring-form one. She doesn’t tell us to be sure to line the cake pan with waxed paper or parchment, but be sure you do.
Anne folds her egg whites into the batter in 3 parts. I guess that’s her substitution for beating in a quarter of the whites at the beginning to lighten the mixture. I still would do that.
Anne is great at showing us the straight-in-and-over folding technique with the spatula and then showing us how to “draw lines” in the batter to “bust through” the egg whites. This is important.
You don’t want huge globs of egg white left in the batter. After folding for a bit, you hold the spatula straight down (as if you were inserting a skewer) and move it back and forth through the masses of whites almost in a scissoring motion. That breaks them down without deflating them.
Anne greases the pan with olive oil, which makes sense, since she’s using it in the cake. She lines the springform pan with parchment paper. How is THAT going to work? Unless she turns it over to remove the paper, you risk papery slices. So then why not just use a regular cake pan?
The batter goes into the pan and the cake gets baked at 350°F for 45 minutes…That was fast. She takes out the cake. It’s beautiful. Anne tests it with a skewer. It comes out clean, so it’s done.
For a topping, Anne rinses and goes through blueberries. They go in a pan with a cinnamon stick, sugar, ¼ cup water and the sieved juice of half a Meyer lemon. As she discards the lemon half in her garbage bowl (which bears no resemblance to this one), Anne smiles and says – to the lemon - “Thanks for coming.” She really is adorable.
The blueberries get cooked for 20 minutes. Oh, I don’t watch her enough to know that she says “Thanks for coming” to every ingredient that she’s finished wish. I love chef-to-food communication.
Anne unmolds the cake and reminds us that there’s paper on the bottom. (I still don’t get why. Just grease and flour it and it should be fine. BUT I ALWAYS line cake pans.)
The slice goes on a plate and she tops it with some berry compote. Luscious. She spoons a little mascarpone over in a quenelle shape. She practically inhales the cake. It’s pretty great and so is she.
But may I ask you a question? Would an olive oil cake ever - in a hundred years - be as good as one made with butter? This cake looks so darn good, but I’ll be honest, I kinda want to use butter. That would be sacrilegious, though, wouldn’t it?
I must have been born with butter running through my veins, so I just can’t help thinking that I would taste this cake and think, okay, but I’d prefer butter.
But what if I kept to the spirit of the cake and used OIL, (I LOVE my carrot and apple cakes with oil), just not olive oil?
Remember, that my olive oil comes straight from Spain and, while I do use it liberally, I never use it without thought.
How about safflower oil? I’m sure that’s against the entire spirit of the recipe and I’d be excommunicated from the church of Italian Food Aficionados. Is it possible that we sometimes just have to admit, “You know what? I’m just not sure I’d love that”? But I do love everything about the recipe…except the olive oil.
Strangely enough, I had no such dilemma with this Flourless Chocolate Cake from Gina Neely. Imagine her in the same post as Anne!!! But I think this recipe could become a standard in your kitchen…and mine.
Pat chops 8 oz. semisweet chocolate while Gina melts two stick of butter on the stove. He stirs the chopped chocolate into the butter.
Do you ever really bother with chopping the chocolate? I almost never do...I find it good fun to jab a fork right into the chocolate bar in the pan. Then I stir it around the bottom, mixing it with the melting butter as I go. Yup, THAT is truly what I do for fun.
Gina beats 1 of cup sugar and 6 eggs in a mixer until light and fluffy. Pat reminds us to continually stir the chocolate.
I’m also reminded of Ina’s trick. She holds back a bit of chopped chocolate and stirs it into the melted mixture off the heat to ensure that she doesn’t overheat it.
Gina whisks in ½ cup of cocoa, vanilla and 1/3 cup of brandy to the egg mixture. Pat’s deep blue polo shirt matches the deep blue mixing bowls that Gina was using earlier.
Gina lines her springform pan with parchment paper. Too? What’s going on here? Am I completely out of it?
THEN Gina sprays the pan with Pam. Never! Not with this cake. Butter and flour the pan properly. Pat pours the melted butter and chocolate into the batter and Gina mixes it together. Pat pours it into the lazily prepared pan. It bakes at 350°F for 50 minutes.
Gina tells us to have the bowl and beaters cold as she beats 1 cup of cream. See, Gina? You don’t need Cool Whip! She beats in ¼ cup of powdered sugar and 1 tablespoon of brandy. Gina cuts a piece, then tops it with the whipped cream and then some raspberries.
This is a really nice serviceable recipe and it would freeze beautifully too. You could also top it differently. How about chocolate whipped cream spread over the top and chocolate shavings to finish it off? Or a raspberry sauce with Grand Marnier garnished with rosettes of Grand Marnier-spiked whipped cream and fresh raspberries? Or top it with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. Ooh la la! OR just a bit of powdered sugar. You could also cut it into rounds and make little individual cakes. Those trimmings would have to be disposed of somehow…I guess.
Anyway, Gina did good and I HAD to acknowledge it.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
And You Thought I Went On And On Only On MY Blog...
I had a wonderful opportunity, thanks to darling Em, to have an (electronic) conversation with the lovely Kate from A Merrier World in a series she’s doing on food bloggers. She asked questions and I answered them. And, boy, did I!
She was concerned about not being able to follow my blog, because she doesn’t have a television (!!!), PLUS she lives in England and wouldn’t have our same food shows anyway. But what she was really interested in was the process of food blogging. Somehow in her typed words, she just drew me out, which, admittedly, ISN’T like getting blood from a turnip. Still, she has an impressive way of posing things and I just ran with it.
If you have some time, a LONG time, take a look at her post here, as well as the rest of her blog, which features some great recipes, thoughts and beautiful pictures.
Kate, thanks so much for listening. As you learned, I can talk about blogging almost as much as food and food television.
She was concerned about not being able to follow my blog, because she doesn’t have a television (!!!), PLUS she lives in England and wouldn’t have our same food shows anyway. But what she was really interested in was the process of food blogging. Somehow in her typed words, she just drew me out, which, admittedly, ISN’T like getting blood from a turnip. Still, she has an impressive way of posing things and I just ran with it.
If you have some time, a LONG time, take a look at her post here, as well as the rest of her blog, which features some great recipes, thoughts and beautiful pictures.
Kate, thanks so much for listening. As you learned, I can talk about blogging almost as much as food and food television.
The Latest Newbie At The Food Network And What’s New Is Old And What’s Old Is…Boring
5 Ingredient Fix with Claire Robinson
Cozy Sunday Supper
Sunday Roast Beef and Gravy
Thyme for Yorkshire Pudding
Baby Carrots with Sweet Ginger Butter
Millionaire's Shortbread
Steakhouse Dinner
Blue Cheese-Stuffed Fillets
Roasted Grape Tomatoes
Creamed Spinach
White Chocolate Mousse
I wanted to check out this new 5 Ingredient Fix show. Not surprisingly, it took me ages to find it on the FN website and to get to the new host’s profile. I opted NOT to Google (or Yahoo) it, because I really want to see if the FN website is as bad as I always say it is. It is.
I was greeted by this pesky screensaver (don’t you dare click on that) popup. HOW in the world did they ever think that wasn’t annoying?
I found a pulldown menu of shows and, get this, it’s NOT in alphabetical order. It’s just a random list. Unbelievable!
I found the Hungry Detective - never heard of it; Party Line with the Hearty Boys – isn’t that the show with those TNFNS winners? Yeah, they were the next FN stars for about 15 minutes; and then I saw Guy Off The Hook, which my powerful intuition tells me that must be Guy Fieri’s 20th show on the Food Network. BUT where is 5 Ingredient Fix in the “Find Recent Episodes on TV” list? Oh wait, there it is…after the Barefoot Contessa and before Quick Fix Meal With Robin Miller. Go figure.
I also checked “Show A-Z”. This should be good… Hmmm, 5 Ingredient Fix is between $40 Dollar Meals and 30 Minute Meals. How did they decide on THAT order, I wonder?
I did finally get to the profile of Claire Robinson, the young host I was looking for. I was happy to read that Claire was a culinary producer for Easy Entertaining with MC. I’m not sure what that means, though…did she think up dishes for him to make? Did she make duplicates? Well, whatever. Let’s see how she does.
The show has been only been on for seconds and already something is really gnawing at me. WHO does Claire remind me of? I can’t quite put my finger on it. But when a tiny picture of RR pops up in a 30 Minute Meal box, it’s clear who I was thinking of. That same big wide grin… dark eyes and hair…Yup, that’s it. Claire looks like a younger, longer-haired version of Rachael. I’m really hoping the resemblance ends there.
What I don’t like is the gimmick of 5 ingredients. I have no problem with 5 ingredient recipes, in fact, one of my favorite cookbooks is by Rozanne Gold. It’s called Recipes 1-2-3 and she uses only THREE ingredients. (BTW, her polenta is a revelation and if you come to my house for dinner enough times, you will definitely get her Salmon and Zucchini sauce. It is sensational and, yes, has 3 ingredients – not including water or salt.) But do we really need another gimmicky food show?
To the action…This show is called Cozy Supper. Hold on, I’m sure this isn’t Claire’s fault, but - have I told you this before? - I hate the word SUPPER. It makes me nervous, because it implies that it will be a small casual affair with NOT ENOUGH TO EAT! Give me dinner every time. Claire seems to be providing hearty enough food, so I’m not sure why the “Supper” moniker applies.
This is what we learn:
Claire loves to cook for Bailey (sp?), her husband.
She cooks with regular olive oil. My Spanish olive oil producing friend tells me to use my beautiful extra virgin olive oil for ALL cooking. He does and so do I…now.
Claire doesn’t consider salt or pepper as one of her five ingredients. That’s fair. She salts and peppers her bone-in meat and adds it to her really hot (inferior) oil.
Oh gosh, there really is a generation gap here. Claire is telling us about Yorkshire pudding as if we’d never heard of it. Is she cooking for 10 year olds? She likens it to a replacement to mashed potatoes. She says she thought it was a dessert when she first heard of it. Don’t admit that! She compares it to a popover, which is legitimate.
Claire sifts 1 cup of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt together. She breaks 3 eggs into a bowl, cracking them on a flat surface first. I know a lot of folks do that, but I find it disgusting. Sorry, but I do. I don’t want raw egg in dribs and drabs around my countertop. It’s not necessary to do it that way.
She beats the eggs, adds them to the flour, adds the milk and beats that all together.
There ARE recipes that use that method, but the classic way is to make a well in the flour; add the egg and half the liquid; and beat while gradually drawing in the flour. Then you beat it until smooth and THEN stir in the rest of the liquid.
Claire runs over to turn the meat and then she adds some freshly chopped thyme to the Yorkshire pudding batter. She does let the batter sit for 30 minutes, which is crucial. The other crucial thing, which she DOES, but doesn’t talk about AT ALL, is to pour the drippings into the pan and heat the pan until smoking BEFORE you add the batter.
Where’s her accent from? Slightly southern.
Have you noticed that new hosts have to make more than one dish at a time? But Ina and Giada, for example, have a separate segment for each recipe. There are exceptions to that, but they’re not running all over the kitchen trying to gets tons of stuff done. Of course, that is how we cook in the real world, so it doesn’t bother me too much. Except…a new host is less likely to handle that running back and forth as well as a more experienced performer, sorry, I mean cook.
She starts her "Millionaire's" shortbread. I personally do not like shortbread, whether it’s Millionaire’s or not; and the fact that one of the layers is MILK chocolate interests me even less.
Claire is cute and well-spoken, but I haven’t been enchanted by any of her recipes yet. Let’s skip a bit.
Oh, there’s a Sunny commercial. All I can say is that Claire should study her. Sunny is so natural and more fluid. She IS more experienced at this point, but many times I think it just comes down to the concept of the show. Luckily, for some reason, they just let Sunny be Sunny. Danny they kind of screwed with on that dumb show. I have to admit I did think the 5 ingredients idea would get in Claire’s way, but THAT’S not really the problem.
More recipes, rib eye, Yorkshire pudding in oven. Each time an ingredient is introduced (one of NO MORE than five, in case you forgot), there is an annoying PING!!! along with a big #1 or 2,3, 4 or 5 to let us know THERE ARE ONLY FIVE OR FEWER ingredients in each dish.
Claire is using muffin cups for the Yorkshire pudding. My mother used to make it in a hot roasting pan and it would come out looking like a landscape from Mars with lots of hills and valleys. The inside part would be just barely doughy and the top and bottom would be crispy. I fear that with the batter poured into a muffin pan - which I know a lot of people do - the pudding will be mostly crispy and you won’t get that nice difference of texture.
There are a lot more PINGS!!! and Claire completes her recipes. I shouldn’t have worried about the Yorkshire puddings. They DO look very good and very craggy.
Claire serves it all up. It’s nice, it’s okay, it looks good. The best thing is the Yorkshire pudding. They show bloopers at the end. Not a good idea. They’re no different than the actual show.
RR follows quickly. They DO have a resemblance. Okay, I really have to go now…fast…
I’ll try a sample of Claire’s next show. I taped it early and I get the last few moments with TF.
Oh! Oh!! OH!!! Tyler is serving up his gnocchi as if he’s making love to the plate. Tyler! Don’t go!
Claire’s show starts. It IS kind of unfair to make her follow THAT. Why is she doing beef again? Why is there nothing fresh, nothing seasonal? There’s Rach in the corner again. They really shouldn’t remind me that her show is on next.
Claire starts with a white chocolate mousse. She tells us that the first ingredient she needs is White Chocolate. Well! I would hope so.
She buys bulk white chocolate. She loves white chocolate because “it’s more mild” than dark chocolate. Yeah? That’s kinda because white chocolate isn’t even chocolate.
Oy, this is not starting off well. I’m not trying to be mean. She’s a nice kid, but I want to learn something new.
The #2 ingredient is egg yolks. WAIT! Where’s the PING!!! There it is.
Claire explains the beating of the hot cream into the egg yolks well. She says to cook it until it coats a spoon and I DO appreciate that she strains the custard. I ALWAYS do that regardless of the recipe.
She says, “This is so easy, you’re never going to buy mousse again”. That’s a little confusing. Where exactly do you buy mousse? Maybe she's talking about Pudding Snacks or Kosy Shack.
She uses a hand mixer to beat cream. I hate that. They really couldn’t spring for a stand mixer? I like how she lightens the base of the mousse with a bit of cream before the rest gets folded in. She does know her stuff.
But then she says, “Can you believe that we made white chocolate mousse with only four ingredients?” Actually, I would have been surprised if you’d needed more. She repeats only 4 ingredients. Claire! That’s just not that earth shattering.
Claire moves on to creamed spinach. Boy, do I hate that. Maybe I just hate the IDEA of it, because I can appreciate the creamy flavor, but who needs it? I’d rather save the cream for dessert.
Next Claire adds 4 cups of grape tomatoes to a roasting pan.…It’s good that there are so few ingredients in that dish, because that’ll probably cost 12 dollars alone.
She adds 3 cloves of peeled garlic. We SO did not have to see her pound and peel that garlic clove. The only thing that showed us was that she has quite nice hands.
She drizzles over extra virgin olive oil…only 3 ingredients (PING!!!). It’s not like she’s making things that USUALLY have tons of ingredients and shaving them down and coming out with an amazing dish! This is the equivalent of Frito saying there's no cholesterol in their chips. Well, why would there be? They don’t fry them in beef fat, do they? Cholesterol is only found in animal products. Roasted tomatoes or any other vegetables are COMMONLY cooked with only oil, garlic salt and pepper. I just don’t see the revelation here. Okay, the concept IS getting in the way. It’s dumb.
The tomatoes go into a 400° F oven for 20 minutes.
Butter and blue cheese get mixed for a topping for steak. The only interesting thing about this is that Claire is young and cute and she’s making food that is rather stodgy and fuddy duddy.
There’s nothing fresh or new. And I mean fresh in both ways. Where are the vegetables? Where are the salads? I know this is only show #2 (PING!!!) so far, but both featured heavy, rich beef with little emphasis on plant life.
Whatever. She finishes up. Let's see. Anything noteworthy?
The liquid, which is left in the pot after cooking the spinach, looks positively brackish. Claire squeezes a lot of it out and then throws it into the cream and that’s it. The spinach is sitting in stringy, straggly big leaves with cream seeping out of it. How about processing it?
The meal is okay, but it’s one I would expect a 60 something bachelor with a comb over to produce for a young thing he is trying to seduce.
Claire is fine, has good skills, knows stuff, but there is nothing modern or new about this 5 ingredient show. Let’s brighten and sharpen it up.
Cozy Sunday Supper
Sunday Roast Beef and Gravy
Thyme for Yorkshire Pudding
Baby Carrots with Sweet Ginger Butter
Millionaire's Shortbread
Steakhouse Dinner
Blue Cheese-Stuffed Fillets
Roasted Grape Tomatoes
Creamed Spinach
White Chocolate Mousse
I wanted to check out this new 5 Ingredient Fix show. Not surprisingly, it took me ages to find it on the FN website and to get to the new host’s profile. I opted NOT to Google (or Yahoo) it, because I really want to see if the FN website is as bad as I always say it is. It is.
I was greeted by this pesky screensaver (don’t you dare click on that) popup. HOW in the world did they ever think that wasn’t annoying?
I found a pulldown menu of shows and, get this, it’s NOT in alphabetical order. It’s just a random list. Unbelievable!
I found the Hungry Detective - never heard of it; Party Line with the Hearty Boys – isn’t that the show with those TNFNS winners? Yeah, they were the next FN stars for about 15 minutes; and then I saw Guy Off The Hook, which my powerful intuition tells me that must be Guy Fieri’s 20th show on the Food Network. BUT where is 5 Ingredient Fix in the “Find Recent Episodes on TV” list? Oh wait, there it is…after the Barefoot Contessa and before Quick Fix Meal With Robin Miller. Go figure.
I also checked “Show A-Z”. This should be good… Hmmm, 5 Ingredient Fix is between $40 Dollar Meals and 30 Minute Meals. How did they decide on THAT order, I wonder?
I did finally get to the profile of Claire Robinson, the young host I was looking for. I was happy to read that Claire was a culinary producer for Easy Entertaining with MC. I’m not sure what that means, though…did she think up dishes for him to make? Did she make duplicates? Well, whatever. Let’s see how she does.
The show has been only been on for seconds and already something is really gnawing at me. WHO does Claire remind me of? I can’t quite put my finger on it. But when a tiny picture of RR pops up in a 30 Minute Meal box, it’s clear who I was thinking of. That same big wide grin… dark eyes and hair…Yup, that’s it. Claire looks like a younger, longer-haired version of Rachael. I’m really hoping the resemblance ends there.
What I don’t like is the gimmick of 5 ingredients. I have no problem with 5 ingredient recipes, in fact, one of my favorite cookbooks is by Rozanne Gold. It’s called Recipes 1-2-3 and she uses only THREE ingredients. (BTW, her polenta is a revelation and if you come to my house for dinner enough times, you will definitely get her Salmon and Zucchini sauce. It is sensational and, yes, has 3 ingredients – not including water or salt.) But do we really need another gimmicky food show?
To the action…This show is called Cozy Supper. Hold on, I’m sure this isn’t Claire’s fault, but - have I told you this before? - I hate the word SUPPER. It makes me nervous, because it implies that it will be a small casual affair with NOT ENOUGH TO EAT! Give me dinner every time. Claire seems to be providing hearty enough food, so I’m not sure why the “Supper” moniker applies.
This is what we learn:
Claire loves to cook for Bailey (sp?), her husband.
She cooks with regular olive oil. My Spanish olive oil producing friend tells me to use my beautiful extra virgin olive oil for ALL cooking. He does and so do I…now.
Claire doesn’t consider salt or pepper as one of her five ingredients. That’s fair. She salts and peppers her bone-in meat and adds it to her really hot (inferior) oil.
Oh gosh, there really is a generation gap here. Claire is telling us about Yorkshire pudding as if we’d never heard of it. Is she cooking for 10 year olds? She likens it to a replacement to mashed potatoes. She says she thought it was a dessert when she first heard of it. Don’t admit that! She compares it to a popover, which is legitimate.
Claire sifts 1 cup of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt together. She breaks 3 eggs into a bowl, cracking them on a flat surface first. I know a lot of folks do that, but I find it disgusting. Sorry, but I do. I don’t want raw egg in dribs and drabs around my countertop. It’s not necessary to do it that way.
She beats the eggs, adds them to the flour, adds the milk and beats that all together.
There ARE recipes that use that method, but the classic way is to make a well in the flour; add the egg and half the liquid; and beat while gradually drawing in the flour. Then you beat it until smooth and THEN stir in the rest of the liquid.
Claire runs over to turn the meat and then she adds some freshly chopped thyme to the Yorkshire pudding batter. She does let the batter sit for 30 minutes, which is crucial. The other crucial thing, which she DOES, but doesn’t talk about AT ALL, is to pour the drippings into the pan and heat the pan until smoking BEFORE you add the batter.
Where’s her accent from? Slightly southern.
Have you noticed that new hosts have to make more than one dish at a time? But Ina and Giada, for example, have a separate segment for each recipe. There are exceptions to that, but they’re not running all over the kitchen trying to gets tons of stuff done. Of course, that is how we cook in the real world, so it doesn’t bother me too much. Except…a new host is less likely to handle that running back and forth as well as a more experienced performer, sorry, I mean cook.
She starts her "Millionaire's" shortbread. I personally do not like shortbread, whether it’s Millionaire’s or not; and the fact that one of the layers is MILK chocolate interests me even less.
Claire is cute and well-spoken, but I haven’t been enchanted by any of her recipes yet. Let’s skip a bit.
Oh, there’s a Sunny commercial. All I can say is that Claire should study her. Sunny is so natural and more fluid. She IS more experienced at this point, but many times I think it just comes down to the concept of the show. Luckily, for some reason, they just let Sunny be Sunny. Danny they kind of screwed with on that dumb show. I have to admit I did think the 5 ingredients idea would get in Claire’s way, but THAT’S not really the problem.
More recipes, rib eye, Yorkshire pudding in oven. Each time an ingredient is introduced (one of NO MORE than five, in case you forgot), there is an annoying PING!!! along with a big #1 or 2,3, 4 or 5 to let us know THERE ARE ONLY FIVE OR FEWER ingredients in each dish.
Claire is using muffin cups for the Yorkshire pudding. My mother used to make it in a hot roasting pan and it would come out looking like a landscape from Mars with lots of hills and valleys. The inside part would be just barely doughy and the top and bottom would be crispy. I fear that with the batter poured into a muffin pan - which I know a lot of people do - the pudding will be mostly crispy and you won’t get that nice difference of texture.
There are a lot more PINGS!!! and Claire completes her recipes. I shouldn’t have worried about the Yorkshire puddings. They DO look very good and very craggy.
Claire serves it all up. It’s nice, it’s okay, it looks good. The best thing is the Yorkshire pudding. They show bloopers at the end. Not a good idea. They’re no different than the actual show.
RR follows quickly. They DO have a resemblance. Okay, I really have to go now…fast…
I’ll try a sample of Claire’s next show. I taped it early and I get the last few moments with TF.
Oh! Oh!! OH!!! Tyler is serving up his gnocchi as if he’s making love to the plate. Tyler! Don’t go!
Claire’s show starts. It IS kind of unfair to make her follow THAT. Why is she doing beef again? Why is there nothing fresh, nothing seasonal? There’s Rach in the corner again. They really shouldn’t remind me that her show is on next.
Claire starts with a white chocolate mousse. She tells us that the first ingredient she needs is White Chocolate. Well! I would hope so.
She buys bulk white chocolate. She loves white chocolate because “it’s more mild” than dark chocolate. Yeah? That’s kinda because white chocolate isn’t even chocolate.
Oy, this is not starting off well. I’m not trying to be mean. She’s a nice kid, but I want to learn something new.
The #2 ingredient is egg yolks. WAIT! Where’s the PING!!! There it is.
Claire explains the beating of the hot cream into the egg yolks well. She says to cook it until it coats a spoon and I DO appreciate that she strains the custard. I ALWAYS do that regardless of the recipe.
She says, “This is so easy, you’re never going to buy mousse again”. That’s a little confusing. Where exactly do you buy mousse? Maybe she's talking about Pudding Snacks or Kosy Shack.
She uses a hand mixer to beat cream. I hate that. They really couldn’t spring for a stand mixer? I like how she lightens the base of the mousse with a bit of cream before the rest gets folded in. She does know her stuff.
But then she says, “Can you believe that we made white chocolate mousse with only four ingredients?” Actually, I would have been surprised if you’d needed more. She repeats only 4 ingredients. Claire! That’s just not that earth shattering.
Claire moves on to creamed spinach. Boy, do I hate that. Maybe I just hate the IDEA of it, because I can appreciate the creamy flavor, but who needs it? I’d rather save the cream for dessert.
Next Claire adds 4 cups of grape tomatoes to a roasting pan.…It’s good that there are so few ingredients in that dish, because that’ll probably cost 12 dollars alone.
She adds 3 cloves of peeled garlic. We SO did not have to see her pound and peel that garlic clove. The only thing that showed us was that she has quite nice hands.
She drizzles over extra virgin olive oil…only 3 ingredients (PING!!!). It’s not like she’s making things that USUALLY have tons of ingredients and shaving them down and coming out with an amazing dish! This is the equivalent of Frito saying there's no cholesterol in their chips. Well, why would there be? They don’t fry them in beef fat, do they? Cholesterol is only found in animal products. Roasted tomatoes or any other vegetables are COMMONLY cooked with only oil, garlic salt and pepper. I just don’t see the revelation here. Okay, the concept IS getting in the way. It’s dumb.
The tomatoes go into a 400° F oven for 20 minutes.
Butter and blue cheese get mixed for a topping for steak. The only interesting thing about this is that Claire is young and cute and she’s making food that is rather stodgy and fuddy duddy.
There’s nothing fresh or new. And I mean fresh in both ways. Where are the vegetables? Where are the salads? I know this is only show #2 (PING!!!) so far, but both featured heavy, rich beef with little emphasis on plant life.
Whatever. She finishes up. Let's see. Anything noteworthy?
The liquid, which is left in the pot after cooking the spinach, looks positively brackish. Claire squeezes a lot of it out and then throws it into the cream and that’s it. The spinach is sitting in stringy, straggly big leaves with cream seeping out of it. How about processing it?
The meal is okay, but it’s one I would expect a 60 something bachelor with a comb over to produce for a young thing he is trying to seduce.
Claire is fine, has good skills, knows stuff, but there is nothing modern or new about this 5 ingredient show. Let’s brighten and sharpen it up.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Aaron Makes Burgers Inside Out With Love
I love the idea of the Inside Out Burger that Aaron did on the Today Show this morning. I’m just not sure I liked the execution.
Aaron’s been off my radar for awhile, but I was happy enough to see him. He begins his presentation with, “It’s all about the love first.” I know it’s his stock line, but making hamburgers on morning television really doesn’t lend itself to spiritual one-liners, for me anyway.
He puts a number of ingredients in the meat itself – Worcestershire sauce, shallots, salt and pepper. Then because folks were having a problem with the fillings falling out - I DO understand that problem - he came up with this idea. He takes an uncooked burger and tops it with any number of fillings and then presses another uncooked burger on top. He grills it for 2 minutes on each side and then puts it in an oven for 4 to 6 minutes at
350°F.
Great idea, but what if you don’t want to eat two burgers squashed together to make one giant one? I would have preferred two skinny ones with the fillings in between and cooked for half the time.
Apparently he made this burger on his FN show. It would have great to see the reviews of the recipe, but there’s a glitch on the Food Network website…or maybe they just didn’t want us to see them.
Aaron’s been off my radar for awhile, but I was happy enough to see him. He begins his presentation with, “It’s all about the love first.” I know it’s his stock line, but making hamburgers on morning television really doesn’t lend itself to spiritual one-liners, for me anyway.
He puts a number of ingredients in the meat itself – Worcestershire sauce, shallots, salt and pepper. Then because folks were having a problem with the fillings falling out - I DO understand that problem - he came up with this idea. He takes an uncooked burger and tops it with any number of fillings and then presses another uncooked burger on top. He grills it for 2 minutes on each side and then puts it in an oven for 4 to 6 minutes at
350°F.
Great idea, but what if you don’t want to eat two burgers squashed together to make one giant one? I would have preferred two skinny ones with the fillings in between and cooked for half the time.
Apparently he made this burger on his FN show. It would have great to see the reviews of the recipe, but there’s a glitch on the Food Network website…or maybe they just didn’t want us to see them.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Are You Ever Too Old For An Easter Basket?
I had a deal with my mother. If she would continue to make Easter baskets for me and my siblings, I would make them for her and my father. Happily, that lasted long into teenagehood.
No child of mine has ever made me such an offer. But if either of them is home, they get an Easter basket. I admit this year’s was pretty low-rent and I was horrified to notice, early this morning, that the tiny boxes of jelly beans I had bought were SUGAR-FREE!!! Egads!
I did put them into the bunny-shaped egg, but then reevaluated the situation after tasting them. They were worse than bad. So I filled the egg with jelly beans from an opened (but tightly closed) bag of high quality JB’s that had been in the pantry for no more than a year…or two. They were better, much better than the sugar-free ones.
Happy Easter! Eat a lot of chocolate and carry around some chocolate eggs if you see any kids around (no matter how old they are).
Ina Makes Dinner And So Do I
Barefoot Contessa with Ina Garten
Fast And Fabulous
Mustard-Roasted Fish
Parmesan-Roasted Broccoli
Dill Fingerling Potatoes
Honey Vanilla Fromage Blanc
Raspberry Sauce
After I saw this show, which was on a week or two ago, I ran into the kitchen to try some of the recipes. And THAT’S why I watch the Food Network. I live for that kind of reaction – to be excited by the food and want to try it…immediately. I used to have that feeling a lot more when MC was on the FN’s prime viewing (for me) Saturday schedule.
These dishes of Ina’s were fabulous and really fast, just as advertised. I made the mustard-crème fraiche sauce with chicken, instead of fish; I subbed asparagus for the broccoli; and I skipped the dessert. But here’s how it went down on the show:
Frank is coming for dinner. Ina is making a fast and fabulous dinner. Start the clock, she says. She’s "cooking in the fast lane". I love her black and white, tiger-striped scarf.
Ina runs to the store to pick up a few things. She uses a little basket.
Her two rules for making a fast dinner are:
1) Easy Recipes
2) Ingredients she can find in any grocery store.
She gets all she needs into a little basket. She buys red snapper from Matt. (BTW, the fish was $11.49/lb.)
Ina sticks to her one store rule and picks up flowers from the same grocery store. She gets flowers in all one color.
(Honestly, I almost NEVER buy flowers. If someone brings them, great. If not, I use the food as the centerpiece, plus I have so much other crap on the table - by crap, I mean candles, glasses, runner and what have you - that I don’t miss them.)
Ina tells us almost in a whisper (okay, I'll only tell you guys…) that one of her tricks is a quick dessert with a REALLY quick raspberry sauce. She places half a pint of fresh raspberries with 1/2 cup of sugar and ¼ cup of water into a pan. Thank Goodness! I thought she was just going to melt raspberry jam and call THAT a sauce. She simmers it for 4 minutes.
Hold on! She DOES add 1 cup of seedless raspberry jam into the food processor. Well, at least it’s not the ENTIRE sauce. She adds a tablespoon of framboise and says you can use the clear stuff or not.
She takes the raspberries and sugar off the heat and adds that into the food processor and purées it. I sure hope she’s going to sieve it. She tastes it and loves it. She doesn’t sieve it, but I WOULD and so should you!
Ina stirs together 2 cups of fat-free fromage blanc with 2 tablespoons cream, 1/4 cup honey and 2 teaspoons vanilla.
Oh, THIS was the other place I saw someone else (besides Giada) using honey and not mentioning anything about GOOD honey. Ina adds “good vanilla” and always talks about adding “good” wine, but as far as honey goes…she’s happy with the honey bear. Sorry, but the honey bear is 3rd rate honey (fine for kids and colds) and I’m surprised the Contessa didn’t pick up some fancy honey when she had the chance.
She adds some lemon zest AND the seeds from a vanilla bean to the fromage blanc and stirs until smooth. She tastes it for flavoring and it’s good.
THIS is bad. In a commercial to promote Share our Strength and Reader’s Digest, they actually misspell the word “receive” as in: “To vote for your school or community to recieve a garden log on to reader’s digest.com.” PLUS there should have been a comma after garden, because I puzzled for a long time over what a garden log was.
Ina cuts up fresh strawberries to go with the fromage blanc. She spoons fromage blanc in a shallow bowl. I’d prefer a clear wine glass or footed dish. She adds strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. She drizzles over the (unsieved) raspberry sauce and serves the rest of the (unsieved) sauce separately.
Ina sets two places at the counter. She puts a bowl of green apples, some white votives (odorless, so as not to compete with the food) and the white, grocery store flowers. It’s just lovely, but couldn’t she have shoved all that onto a table, so they could be a bit more comfortable?
I have the feeling that some producer said why don’t you show how informal this meal is by serving it at the kitchen counter? I don’t think it’s what Ina really would have done on her own.
She makes a bouquet with huge flowers and then adds smaller flowers around them. She has about 3 bunches of flowers.
To accompany the fish, Ina starts her potatoes. She adds 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter into a Dutch oven with a pound of fingerling potatoes and 1 teaspoon Kosher salt and ¼ teaspoon black pepper. She covers them and shakes the pan a few times while they’re cooking. She cooks them for 20 minutes. She doesn’t say how high the heat should be. I would start them on high until I hear a sizzle and then turn them down to medium low. (The recipe says low. You could go a little higher.)
She cuts off the ends the broccoli, leaving some stem on and cuts them into florets. There are about 2 cups of broccoli. She places them on a baking tray in one layer. Ina slivers garlic and adds that with a drizzle of olive oil “to help the cooking” and lots of salt and pepper. She tosses that together with “clean hands” and roasts the broccoli at 425°F for 25 to 30 minutes. (You can play with the temperature here. If you have something else in the oven that needs 400°, don’t worry about it. You may just have to cook the broccoli a few minutes more.)
For the very easily put-together entrée, Ina puts two snapper fillets in a baking dish and sprinkles them with salt and pepper. She stirs together crème fraiche (but can you really find that just anywhere?) with 1½ tablespoons Dijon, ½ tablespoon whole grain mustard and 1 tablespoon each of chopped shallots and drained capers.
Half a tablespoon is a weird measurement, especially for mustard. It’s actually 1½ teaspoons. Just make sure you have MORE Dijon than whole grain mustard and you’ll be okay.
She seasons the mixture with salt and pepper and pours it right over the fish. This gets cooked at 425 F° for 10 minutes. You know what? I am really loving these dishes.
She tests the potatoes, they’re firm but tender. She turns them off, leaves them covered and lets them steam in their juices. She chops plenty of dill and adds that with salt.
Commercial with Bobby. He’s looking very trim. Did you know he
started running marathons? I learned that from the second copy of my Food Network Magazine. I’ll get into that another time.
Ina says there WAS a time when she could spend a week making dinner for 2 people, but no more. I really do identify with that. I spend way longer than I need to, or probably should, cooking, but it’s not as much time as it used to be.
Ina makes a topping for the broccoli. Is this the same recipe she uses for Roasted Asparagus? Oh, not quite. She zests a lemon and grates 2 tablespoons of “good” aged Parmesan Reggiano. She mixes together with 6 leaves of julienned basil and 1½ tablespoons toasted pine nuts. (There’s that half a tablespoon measurement again.) The broccoli comes out and looks a bit burned, but Ina is delighted. (Maybe cooking it at a lower temperature wouldn’t be such a bad idea.)
Ina tosses the broccoli with the lemon zest, cheese and nuts and adds more olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. It goes into a serving bowl.
Ina serves the potatoes, just as Frank knocks on the door. Dinner is all ready, she says. He says we JUST talked an hour ago, she must be a magician. She says she’s been cooking all day…NOT!
WHO DOESN’T LOVE INA? Really, she’s just a big dab of joy. I LOVE HER. Easy, breezy Ina.
Frank pours the wine as she serves the food. I’m dying to try those recipes. Well lookie here, I did.
I admit I did a double take when I looked at the calorie content on the crème fraiche container AND noted that Ina calls for using the entire thing. But it was amazingly good AND amazingly simple. (I added some tomatoes for garnish.) This is a great dish on a day when you don’t have a lot of time to cook – Christmas or Christmas Eve maybe or when you just need to get dinner in the oven quickly.
The potatoes were yummy. I used cut up Yukon golds instead of fingerlings. I just couldn’t see paying nearly 4 dollars for a bag of fingerlings. And I parslied them up, instead of using dill. The asparagus was on sale, so I used that instead of broccoli. I skipped the nuts and didn’t miss them.
Fast And Fabulous
Mustard-Roasted Fish
Parmesan-Roasted Broccoli
Dill Fingerling Potatoes
Honey Vanilla Fromage Blanc
Raspberry Sauce
After I saw this show, which was on a week or two ago, I ran into the kitchen to try some of the recipes. And THAT’S why I watch the Food Network. I live for that kind of reaction – to be excited by the food and want to try it…immediately. I used to have that feeling a lot more when MC was on the FN’s prime viewing (for me) Saturday schedule.
These dishes of Ina’s were fabulous and really fast, just as advertised. I made the mustard-crème fraiche sauce with chicken, instead of fish; I subbed asparagus for the broccoli; and I skipped the dessert. But here’s how it went down on the show:
Frank is coming for dinner. Ina is making a fast and fabulous dinner. Start the clock, she says. She’s "cooking in the fast lane". I love her black and white, tiger-striped scarf.
Ina runs to the store to pick up a few things. She uses a little basket.
Her two rules for making a fast dinner are:
1) Easy Recipes
2) Ingredients she can find in any grocery store.
She gets all she needs into a little basket. She buys red snapper from Matt. (BTW, the fish was $11.49/lb.)
Ina sticks to her one store rule and picks up flowers from the same grocery store. She gets flowers in all one color.
(Honestly, I almost NEVER buy flowers. If someone brings them, great. If not, I use the food as the centerpiece, plus I have so much other crap on the table - by crap, I mean candles, glasses, runner and what have you - that I don’t miss them.)
Ina tells us almost in a whisper (okay, I'll only tell you guys…) that one of her tricks is a quick dessert with a REALLY quick raspberry sauce. She places half a pint of fresh raspberries with 1/2 cup of sugar and ¼ cup of water into a pan. Thank Goodness! I thought she was just going to melt raspberry jam and call THAT a sauce. She simmers it for 4 minutes.
Hold on! She DOES add 1 cup of seedless raspberry jam into the food processor. Well, at least it’s not the ENTIRE sauce. She adds a tablespoon of framboise and says you can use the clear stuff or not.
She takes the raspberries and sugar off the heat and adds that into the food processor and purées it. I sure hope she’s going to sieve it. She tastes it and loves it. She doesn’t sieve it, but I WOULD and so should you!
Ina stirs together 2 cups of fat-free fromage blanc with 2 tablespoons cream, 1/4 cup honey and 2 teaspoons vanilla.
Oh, THIS was the other place I saw someone else (besides Giada) using honey and not mentioning anything about GOOD honey. Ina adds “good vanilla” and always talks about adding “good” wine, but as far as honey goes…she’s happy with the honey bear. Sorry, but the honey bear is 3rd rate honey (fine for kids and colds) and I’m surprised the Contessa didn’t pick up some fancy honey when she had the chance.
She adds some lemon zest AND the seeds from a vanilla bean to the fromage blanc and stirs until smooth. She tastes it for flavoring and it’s good.
THIS is bad. In a commercial to promote Share our Strength and Reader’s Digest, they actually misspell the word “receive” as in: “To vote for your school or community to recieve a garden log on to reader’s digest.com.” PLUS there should have been a comma after garden, because I puzzled for a long time over what a garden log was.
Ina cuts up fresh strawberries to go with the fromage blanc. She spoons fromage blanc in a shallow bowl. I’d prefer a clear wine glass or footed dish. She adds strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. She drizzles over the (unsieved) raspberry sauce and serves the rest of the (unsieved) sauce separately.
Ina sets two places at the counter. She puts a bowl of green apples, some white votives (odorless, so as not to compete with the food) and the white, grocery store flowers. It’s just lovely, but couldn’t she have shoved all that onto a table, so they could be a bit more comfortable?
I have the feeling that some producer said why don’t you show how informal this meal is by serving it at the kitchen counter? I don’t think it’s what Ina really would have done on her own.
She makes a bouquet with huge flowers and then adds smaller flowers around them. She has about 3 bunches of flowers.
To accompany the fish, Ina starts her potatoes. She adds 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter into a Dutch oven with a pound of fingerling potatoes and 1 teaspoon Kosher salt and ¼ teaspoon black pepper. She covers them and shakes the pan a few times while they’re cooking. She cooks them for 20 minutes. She doesn’t say how high the heat should be. I would start them on high until I hear a sizzle and then turn them down to medium low. (The recipe says low. You could go a little higher.)
She cuts off the ends the broccoli, leaving some stem on and cuts them into florets. There are about 2 cups of broccoli. She places them on a baking tray in one layer. Ina slivers garlic and adds that with a drizzle of olive oil “to help the cooking” and lots of salt and pepper. She tosses that together with “clean hands” and roasts the broccoli at 425°F for 25 to 30 minutes. (You can play with the temperature here. If you have something else in the oven that needs 400°, don’t worry about it. You may just have to cook the broccoli a few minutes more.)
For the very easily put-together entrée, Ina puts two snapper fillets in a baking dish and sprinkles them with salt and pepper. She stirs together crème fraiche (but can you really find that just anywhere?) with 1½ tablespoons Dijon, ½ tablespoon whole grain mustard and 1 tablespoon each of chopped shallots and drained capers.
Half a tablespoon is a weird measurement, especially for mustard. It’s actually 1½ teaspoons. Just make sure you have MORE Dijon than whole grain mustard and you’ll be okay.
She seasons the mixture with salt and pepper and pours it right over the fish. This gets cooked at 425 F° for 10 minutes. You know what? I am really loving these dishes.
She tests the potatoes, they’re firm but tender. She turns them off, leaves them covered and lets them steam in their juices. She chops plenty of dill and adds that with salt.
Commercial with Bobby. He’s looking very trim. Did you know he
started running marathons? I learned that from the second copy of my Food Network Magazine. I’ll get into that another time.
Ina says there WAS a time when she could spend a week making dinner for 2 people, but no more. I really do identify with that. I spend way longer than I need to, or probably should, cooking, but it’s not as much time as it used to be.
Ina makes a topping for the broccoli. Is this the same recipe she uses for Roasted Asparagus? Oh, not quite. She zests a lemon and grates 2 tablespoons of “good” aged Parmesan Reggiano. She mixes together with 6 leaves of julienned basil and 1½ tablespoons toasted pine nuts. (There’s that half a tablespoon measurement again.) The broccoli comes out and looks a bit burned, but Ina is delighted. (Maybe cooking it at a lower temperature wouldn’t be such a bad idea.)
Ina tosses the broccoli with the lemon zest, cheese and nuts and adds more olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. It goes into a serving bowl.
Ina serves the potatoes, just as Frank knocks on the door. Dinner is all ready, she says. He says we JUST talked an hour ago, she must be a magician. She says she’s been cooking all day…NOT!
WHO DOESN’T LOVE INA? Really, she’s just a big dab of joy. I LOVE HER. Easy, breezy Ina.
Frank pours the wine as she serves the food. I’m dying to try those recipes. Well lookie here, I did.
I admit I did a double take when I looked at the calorie content on the crème fraiche container AND noted that Ina calls for using the entire thing. But it was amazingly good AND amazingly simple. (I added some tomatoes for garnish.) This is a great dish on a day when you don’t have a lot of time to cook – Christmas or Christmas Eve maybe or when you just need to get dinner in the oven quickly.
The potatoes were yummy. I used cut up Yukon golds instead of fingerlings. I just couldn’t see paying nearly 4 dollars for a bag of fingerlings. And I parslied them up, instead of using dill. The asparagus was on sale, so I used that instead of broccoli. I skipped the nuts and didn’t miss them.
Frank had a really nice dinner and so did we.
Friday, April 10, 2009
GMA’S Revamped Food Website And A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words…IF It’s The Right Picture - Plus I Think TODAY Does It Better
Emeril was on GMA this morning, touting their newly revamped website, which he called the food engine of ABC news. Emeril says his recipes on the site go back to 1995. He acts as our webmaster/guide to the upgraded page and he's particularly thrilled about being able to print the recipes in different formats. Uh, Emeril, that IS mind-blowing, but it's kinda been around for AGES. But I am all for an easy to use, easy to navigate websites.
I decided to look around. I clicked on a Sandra Lee video (I needed a laugh) and, for some reason, she had 2 straight-backed chairs sitting next to the dem bench. It looked like she was going to start doing squat thrusts right there and then, but no.
She was giving us a “decorating” tip. I still don’t know what the tip was, except that she took a pillow case, put it over the back of the chair and tied the corners. Maybe that’s what you do if you accidentally spill (or throw up) some of her food down the back of a chair…
Almost as annoying as the fruitless decorating advice was when Chris
handed out samples of Aunt Sandy’s Ham and Cheese Casserole and made a big fuss in the audience WHILE she was talking...not that I usually mind the focus being taken away from a Sandra Lee recipe.
Anyway, what I was trying to discover was if every recipe has an accompanying video. The Today Show seems to, for current ones anyway, but I don’t know how far back the videos go. Here’s a really cool recipe from Today, by the way, that I just found. The answer? No, and GMA videos by themselves aren’t that easy to get to.
Another slightly annoying thing on the GMA recipe site:
While searching for a flourless chocolate cake, I came up with this. Great, I thought, and it’s in 3 layers with icing in between, which I thought would be good to serve lots of people.
Well, NO, that’s a stock photo that has NOTHING to do with that recipe, which is made in a single 9 inch springform pan and served with confectioner’s sugar or cocoa powder and NO ICING.
I guess I should have realized what was going on when I saw the same chocolate cake picture for several chocolate cake recipes. The reason is probably because, as Emeril told us, they have recipes going back to 1995, and obviously they don’t have picture for each recipe. But NO picture is better is than the wrong picture.
One suggestion – have a chocolate cake drawing icon type of thing next to recipes for which they have no picture. That way there’s no confusion and we know instantly it’s a cake recipe. Or simply have a sweet and savoury icon to indicate those types of recipes. On closer inspection, that's exactly what they did do! Those two identical chocolate cake photos turn out to be from the same recipe just listed more than once. Are you confused? That makes two of us.
To compare the search functions of the two morning shows, I looked for the same thing on both sites. GMA came up with 208 results for the flourless chocolate cake, including many multiple listings of the same recipe. They also had other recipes like Lemon Lovers White Chocolate Cake , which has plenty of flour from the cake mix in the recipe, and an Incredible Melted Ice-Cream Cake, which has NO chocolate and again included plenty of flour in the form of a white cake mix.
The Today Show’s search function bears much better results. They only came up with three recipes, but each one was spot on.
To be fair, a second search for “Butterflied Chicken” wasn’t quite as successful on the Today Show site. The third recipe (of five) was Slow Cooked Fish (with a non-working link) and number five was lamb, but the other three were indeed chicken and they WERE butterflied.
GMA gave me 220 recipes and there was ONE authentic butterflied chicken. (Okay, I only checked out the first page, but if that’s not accurate, the other 22 pages won’t be either, although the VEGETARIAN Pumpkin Orange Soup with Parmesan Toasts, page 10, looks good.) I wonder if I searched for pumpkin soup, I’d come up with more butterflied chicken recipes.
The truth is, though, that both sites are still heads and tails above the Food Network website, which continues to be a source of such frustration that I really loath EVER going to it. Just finding the recipes connected with each show is often an exercise in futility. So…good for GMA! Congrats on the upgraded website! And if you find a few more flourless chocolate cake recipes, that actually have chocolate and no flour, let me know.
I decided to look around. I clicked on a Sandra Lee video (I needed a laugh) and, for some reason, she had 2 straight-backed chairs sitting next to the dem bench. It looked like she was going to start doing squat thrusts right there and then, but no.
She was giving us a “decorating” tip. I still don’t know what the tip was, except that she took a pillow case, put it over the back of the chair and tied the corners. Maybe that’s what you do if you accidentally spill (or throw up) some of her food down the back of a chair…
Almost as annoying as the fruitless decorating advice was when Chris
handed out samples of Aunt Sandy’s Ham and Cheese Casserole and made a big fuss in the audience WHILE she was talking...not that I usually mind the focus being taken away from a Sandra Lee recipe.
Anyway, what I was trying to discover was if every recipe has an accompanying video. The Today Show seems to, for current ones anyway, but I don’t know how far back the videos go. Here’s a really cool recipe from Today, by the way, that I just found. The answer? No, and GMA videos by themselves aren’t that easy to get to.
Another slightly annoying thing on the GMA recipe site:
While searching for a flourless chocolate cake, I came up with this. Great, I thought, and it’s in 3 layers with icing in between, which I thought would be good to serve lots of people.
Well, NO, that’s a stock photo that has NOTHING to do with that recipe, which is made in a single 9 inch springform pan and served with confectioner’s sugar or cocoa powder and NO ICING.
I guess I should have realized what was going on when I saw the same chocolate cake picture for several chocolate cake recipes. The reason is probably because, as Emeril told us, they have recipes going back to 1995, and obviously they don’t have picture for each recipe. But NO picture is better is than the wrong picture.
One suggestion – have a chocolate cake drawing icon type of thing next to recipes for which they have no picture. That way there’s no confusion and we know instantly it’s a cake recipe. Or simply have a sweet and savoury icon to indicate those types of recipes. On closer inspection, that's exactly what they did do! Those two identical chocolate cake photos turn out to be from the same recipe just listed more than once. Are you confused? That makes two of us.
To compare the search functions of the two morning shows, I looked for the same thing on both sites. GMA came up with 208 results for the flourless chocolate cake, including many multiple listings of the same recipe. They also had other recipes like Lemon Lovers White Chocolate Cake , which has plenty of flour from the cake mix in the recipe, and an Incredible Melted Ice-Cream Cake, which has NO chocolate and again included plenty of flour in the form of a white cake mix.
The Today Show’s search function bears much better results. They only came up with three recipes, but each one was spot on.
To be fair, a second search for “Butterflied Chicken” wasn’t quite as successful on the Today Show site. The third recipe (of five) was Slow Cooked Fish (with a non-working link) and number five was lamb, but the other three were indeed chicken and they WERE butterflied.
GMA gave me 220 recipes and there was ONE authentic butterflied chicken. (Okay, I only checked out the first page, but if that’s not accurate, the other 22 pages won’t be either, although the VEGETARIAN Pumpkin Orange Soup with Parmesan Toasts, page 10, looks good.) I wonder if I searched for pumpkin soup, I’d come up with more butterflied chicken recipes.
The truth is, though, that both sites are still heads and tails above the Food Network website, which continues to be a source of such frustration that I really loath EVER going to it. Just finding the recipes connected with each show is often an exercise in futility. So…good for GMA! Congrats on the upgraded website! And if you find a few more flourless chocolate cake recipes, that actually have chocolate and no flour, let me know.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Happy Passover!
Jess, my husband’s late grandmother, also know as Big MomMom (to go along with her hubby - Big PopPop), had a warm and loving way about her AND a heavy, very heavy, hand with pepper. Her gefilte fish recipe is a great way to doctor up the jarred variety. It features lots, and I mean lots, of freshly ground black pepper.
It’s interesting that with the profusion of hot sauces and different chili seasonings that folks forget the heat that can come from everyday black pepper, freshly ground.
Jesse’s Gefilte Fish (serves 3)
1 large onion, chopped
2 tsps. olive oil
1 jar (24 oz.) gefilte fish
2 carrots, sliced thinly
lots (maybe 1 to 2 tablespoons) of freshly ground black pepper
optional: ½ cup vegetable stock
horseradish for serving
Sauté onion in olive oil until completely soft, at least 15 minutes.
To the onion, add the fish, the juices and the carrots from the jar of gefilte fish, plus the additional sliced carrots. Stir in plenty of freshly ground black pepper. (Add that additional ½ cup of stock to get more juice, if desired.) Simmer, covered, for 45 minutes.
Cool and refrigerate until ready to serve. Place 2 fish pieces on each plate with some sliced carrots. Spoon some juice over. Grind more pepper over the top. Serve horseradish separately.
Note: You can also heat up the fish juices and add broken up pieces of matzoh and serve it alongside the gefilte fish.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Lasagna - Sunny Does It Her Way
Cooking For Real with Sunny Anderson
Recipes are Made to Broken
Latin Lasagna
Spring Goddess Salad
Pomegranate Margaritas
Sunny seems like one of those gal pals you always like to stop by and see and on whom you can always count for good eats.
Today, she’s doing classics that break the rules, but not “the laws of flavor”. She’s starting with a Latin Lasagna. Interesting.
She adds 2 pounds of Roma tomatoes to the food processor with half a red onion and one seeded and ribbed jalapeño pepper and one poblano pepper. She adds some fresh lime juice (to add some Latin flavor) and some oil. She’s using precooked lasagna noodles and reminds us that we’ll need some extra moisture.
I would say half the time I use precooked noodles and the other time I use regular ones. I do think the result is always slightly better with the conventional pasta. But there’s not enough difference to ignore the convenience of the precooked ones.
Sunny seasons the mixture (heavily) and pulses it until coarsely chopped. Sunny adds oil to a pan and a bit of butter. Ooh, she has one of those cool glass-doored refrigerators. What kind IS that?
Moving on to her spicy cocktail, she tells us she loves to infuse her simple syrups with something. She’s funny, she says why not make something complicated out of something simple? I have certainly been known to follow that rule in my kitchen.
She adds water and sugar to a saucepan. She pokes holes in a habanero pepper, adds that to the saucepan and puts it on the heat. The habanero is so hot that you don’t need to slice it to get its flavor.
That’s very clever. I don’t know why you couldn’t that in a tomato sauce or even with a salsa too. Just poke a few holes in the habanero, cook it in the tomato sauce or let it sit in the salsa and then remove it before serving. I’m going to try that.
Into her oil and butter, she adds ground pork to brown. Using pork, instead of beef, “latinizes” her lasagna. She reminds us that the tomato sauce she’s making is really a salsa. She adds lots of sliced mushrooms to the pork with cayenne pepper, salt and pepper. She stirs quickly and sets it aside.
I like her riff on why she’s not cooking the mushrooms for long. Because she’s using precooked noodles, she WANTS the mushrooms to give off some of their liquid as they cook…to soften up those lasagna sheets.
Sunny’s quite right about that. Have you ever been a bit lackadaisical about spreading the ricotta to the bitter end of each precooked noodle and maybe not having the sauce cover ever inch? Those little bits never get soft and they taste dry and brittle, so I’m glad she’s emphasizing the juicing up of those noodles.
She squeezes out thawed frozen spinach really, really well and gathers up her other ingredients. She mixes the spinach with one egg and ½ cup of already grated parmesan. (I’m definitely not with her on that. I’d rather use a cheaper pecorino romano and grate it myself.) Sunny does say it’s okay to buy it grated, because she’s going to use it right away. She squeezes in a tub of ricotta and adds cumin, salt and pepper. She loves cumin as much as I do. She mixes that altogether. It looks yummy.
I would do one thing a little differently. Just to pump up the flavor a tad more, I always soften an onion in oil (for this recipe I would then add the cumin, cook it on low heat for 2 minutes) and add the spinach to cook for a couple of minutes to get rid of any moisture. After cooling it slightly, I add that to the ricotta and other ingredients.
Sunny doesn’t grease her 9 by 13 dish (I would) and she spreads 1/3 of the tomato mixture from the food processor on the bottom. She places over 4 lasagna par-cooked noodles, overlapping them. I never do and then I end up having to break the 4th one up to fit in the dish. I will try that next time. (I just looked at my box of precooked noodles and it says, in tiny print, that you SHOULD overlap your noodles. How did I not know that? Thank you, Sunny, for alerting me to proper noodle handling.)
To assemble the lasagna, Sunny spreads over half the ricotta cheese and spinach mixture. She spoons over the pork and mushrooms and covers that with thick slices of mozzarella and another 1/3 of the salsa; then more noodles, the rest of the ricotta mixture and the rest of the meat mixture. More noodles, more tomato sauce and mozzarella slices and finally some extra Parmesan goes on top with a drizzle of olive oil.
Sunny covers the lasagna with foil and cooks it at 350°F for 30 to 40 minutes. She’ll uncover it to finish the cooking. I’m thinking Sunny covers it to aid in the production of steam, but I don’t like to. It takes way too long to heat up. I’d rather it got too brown too fast and THEN cover it.
One other thing I would add. I am incapable of making a lasagna, WHICHEVER recipe I'm using, without a béchamel sauce. Even if I think I can live without it, as I’m about to put the top layers of stuff on, I quickly whip up a two cup quantity of white sauce. I spread it over the top layer of noodles and then cover the top with cheese and bake as usual.
Sunny warned us that her lasagna suffered from “drippage”, so she put a sheet pan underneath, If you add an extra layer of béchamel, that may well happen, so be sure you secure the battlements with a sheet pan to catch any juices getting loose.
There’s a commercial for the new season Dinner Impossible with the once disgraced Robert Irvine. Frankly, I’m not bothered about the whole thing…anymore. Apparently, I WAS when I first wrote about it, but time and distance have softened me. He was superb on the show and his amplifying his resume was a dumb mistake, but had no bearing whatsoever on his qualifications for producing a great meal in the most extreme of circumstances.
Sunny gets started on her salad. She washes romaine and breaks it up into little pieces. She’s making a Green Goddess salad dressing. She adds ½ cup mayonnaise, ½ cup sour cream, 1 anchovy, cilantro (THAT’S is a different spin) and ¼ of a cucumber WITH skin. Hmmm, interesting. She says that's what makes this a SPRING Goddess dressing. Sunny finishes the dressing with a little clove of garlic, a splash of red wine vinegar, salt and pepper. She says it’s also good as a vegetable dip. She processes it until it’s smooth.
She takes out the lasagna after 40 minutes and uncovers it. She turns the oven up to 425°F for 15 to 20 minutes and returns it to the oven until the top is brown and crunchy.
Sunny slices a red onion to add to the romaine lettuce. (I might add a bit of cucumber in there to mirror the dressing as well.)
For the Pomegranate Margarita, Sunny adds lime juice to a shaker with ice and a splash of triple sec and then tequila and pomegranate juice. She adds the spicy infused simple syrup and shakes it all up and pours it into a lowball glass, ice and all. She loves it.
Sunny pours the dressing over the lettuce and red onion. She tosses it together.
She spoons some salad on to her plate with a beautiful piece of lasagna. Sunny reminds us to let it sit for a bit before serving, so it comes out in a nice slice. She tastes it and raves and has a bit more margarita. She’s even happier now. “You get to break the rules without breaking the flow of the flavor.” Good show, good recipes, great host.
Recipes are Made to Broken
Latin Lasagna
Spring Goddess Salad
Pomegranate Margaritas
Sunny seems like one of those gal pals you always like to stop by and see and on whom you can always count for good eats.
Today, she’s doing classics that break the rules, but not “the laws of flavor”. She’s starting with a Latin Lasagna. Interesting.
She adds 2 pounds of Roma tomatoes to the food processor with half a red onion and one seeded and ribbed jalapeño pepper and one poblano pepper. She adds some fresh lime juice (to add some Latin flavor) and some oil. She’s using precooked lasagna noodles and reminds us that we’ll need some extra moisture.
I would say half the time I use precooked noodles and the other time I use regular ones. I do think the result is always slightly better with the conventional pasta. But there’s not enough difference to ignore the convenience of the precooked ones.
Sunny seasons the mixture (heavily) and pulses it until coarsely chopped. Sunny adds oil to a pan and a bit of butter. Ooh, she has one of those cool glass-doored refrigerators. What kind IS that?
Moving on to her spicy cocktail, she tells us she loves to infuse her simple syrups with something. She’s funny, she says why not make something complicated out of something simple? I have certainly been known to follow that rule in my kitchen.
She adds water and sugar to a saucepan. She pokes holes in a habanero pepper, adds that to the saucepan and puts it on the heat. The habanero is so hot that you don’t need to slice it to get its flavor.
That’s very clever. I don’t know why you couldn’t that in a tomato sauce or even with a salsa too. Just poke a few holes in the habanero, cook it in the tomato sauce or let it sit in the salsa and then remove it before serving. I’m going to try that.
Into her oil and butter, she adds ground pork to brown. Using pork, instead of beef, “latinizes” her lasagna. She reminds us that the tomato sauce she’s making is really a salsa. She adds lots of sliced mushrooms to the pork with cayenne pepper, salt and pepper. She stirs quickly and sets it aside.
I like her riff on why she’s not cooking the mushrooms for long. Because she’s using precooked noodles, she WANTS the mushrooms to give off some of their liquid as they cook…to soften up those lasagna sheets.
Sunny’s quite right about that. Have you ever been a bit lackadaisical about spreading the ricotta to the bitter end of each precooked noodle and maybe not having the sauce cover ever inch? Those little bits never get soft and they taste dry and brittle, so I’m glad she’s emphasizing the juicing up of those noodles.
She squeezes out thawed frozen spinach really, really well and gathers up her other ingredients. She mixes the spinach with one egg and ½ cup of already grated parmesan. (I’m definitely not with her on that. I’d rather use a cheaper pecorino romano and grate it myself.) Sunny does say it’s okay to buy it grated, because she’s going to use it right away. She squeezes in a tub of ricotta and adds cumin, salt and pepper. She loves cumin as much as I do. She mixes that altogether. It looks yummy.
I would do one thing a little differently. Just to pump up the flavor a tad more, I always soften an onion in oil (for this recipe I would then add the cumin, cook it on low heat for 2 minutes) and add the spinach to cook for a couple of minutes to get rid of any moisture. After cooling it slightly, I add that to the ricotta and other ingredients.
Sunny doesn’t grease her 9 by 13 dish (I would) and she spreads 1/3 of the tomato mixture from the food processor on the bottom. She places over 4 lasagna par-cooked noodles, overlapping them. I never do and then I end up having to break the 4th one up to fit in the dish. I will try that next time. (I just looked at my box of precooked noodles and it says, in tiny print, that you SHOULD overlap your noodles. How did I not know that? Thank you, Sunny, for alerting me to proper noodle handling.)
To assemble the lasagna, Sunny spreads over half the ricotta cheese and spinach mixture. She spoons over the pork and mushrooms and covers that with thick slices of mozzarella and another 1/3 of the salsa; then more noodles, the rest of the ricotta mixture and the rest of the meat mixture. More noodles, more tomato sauce and mozzarella slices and finally some extra Parmesan goes on top with a drizzle of olive oil.
Sunny covers the lasagna with foil and cooks it at 350°F for 30 to 40 minutes. She’ll uncover it to finish the cooking. I’m thinking Sunny covers it to aid in the production of steam, but I don’t like to. It takes way too long to heat up. I’d rather it got too brown too fast and THEN cover it.
One other thing I would add. I am incapable of making a lasagna, WHICHEVER recipe I'm using, without a béchamel sauce. Even if I think I can live without it, as I’m about to put the top layers of stuff on, I quickly whip up a two cup quantity of white sauce. I spread it over the top layer of noodles and then cover the top with cheese and bake as usual.
Sunny warned us that her lasagna suffered from “drippage”, so she put a sheet pan underneath, If you add an extra layer of béchamel, that may well happen, so be sure you secure the battlements with a sheet pan to catch any juices getting loose.
There’s a commercial for the new season Dinner Impossible with the once disgraced Robert Irvine. Frankly, I’m not bothered about the whole thing…anymore. Apparently, I WAS when I first wrote about it, but time and distance have softened me. He was superb on the show and his amplifying his resume was a dumb mistake, but had no bearing whatsoever on his qualifications for producing a great meal in the most extreme of circumstances.
Sunny gets started on her salad. She washes romaine and breaks it up into little pieces. She’s making a Green Goddess salad dressing. She adds ½ cup mayonnaise, ½ cup sour cream, 1 anchovy, cilantro (THAT’S is a different spin) and ¼ of a cucumber WITH skin. Hmmm, interesting. She says that's what makes this a SPRING Goddess dressing. Sunny finishes the dressing with a little clove of garlic, a splash of red wine vinegar, salt and pepper. She says it’s also good as a vegetable dip. She processes it until it’s smooth.
She takes out the lasagna after 40 minutes and uncovers it. She turns the oven up to 425°F for 15 to 20 minutes and returns it to the oven until the top is brown and crunchy.
Sunny slices a red onion to add to the romaine lettuce. (I might add a bit of cucumber in there to mirror the dressing as well.)
For the Pomegranate Margarita, Sunny adds lime juice to a shaker with ice and a splash of triple sec and then tequila and pomegranate juice. She adds the spicy infused simple syrup and shakes it all up and pours it into a lowball glass, ice and all. She loves it.
Sunny pours the dressing over the lettuce and red onion. She tosses it together.
She spoons some salad on to her plate with a beautiful piece of lasagna. Sunny reminds us to let it sit for a bit before serving, so it comes out in a nice slice. She tastes it and raves and has a bit more margarita. She’s even happier now. “You get to break the rules without breaking the flow of the flavor.” Good show, good recipes, great host.
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