I’m always looking for different ways to serve vegetables or sides for warm, summer barbecue dinners. I must have been watching Bobby Flay last summer when he prepared this. I made it right away and liked it a LOT. It’s not difficult to prepare, although you do have to bake (or cook somehow) the sweet potatoes, then you pare them, slice and grill them, along with the green onions, then make the dressing and toss it together. It can be served hot, room temp or chilled, and it keeps for about a week.
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If you haven’t ever had Panna Cotta, you’re missing a big treat. And, if you’ve never had it, it’s hard to describe: it’s not custard; it’s not like mousse either; it’s not clotted cream; nor is it like a pie filling. But it is creamy, yummy. I guess you’ll just have to try it to find out. I’ve had it out and I’ve made it before, although this time I made it in muffin cups. I wanted to use ramekins, but I didn’t have enough for the family crowd we had over. A shopping expedition to Target didn’t yield any ramekins, either. I wasn’t about to drive to Williams-Sonoma just for ramekins. So I bought this new-fangled kind of silicone muffin tin. Each of the silicone cups are removable and they slide easily into their custom muffin tray. Since they’re small, however, I filled them right up to the top, which yields one half cup. So because of that, the recipe made 12 pannas using this recipe.

Strawberries are at their peak and waning, so I wanted to use berries with it. In the past I’ve made a Joanne Weir recipe for panna cotta, but I thought I’d try Ina Garten’s recipe instead, which uses more yogurt. Dave and I are stuck on Fage yogurt (Trader Joe’s, $3.60 low fat). It’s a strained (thicker) yogurt. It comes in non-fat, low fat and full fat. Interestingly, I had a hard time getting the pannas out of the muffin cups – you might not know the difference if you’ve never had this – the blobs of panna aren’t as perfect as you’d have at a restaurant. But, it made no difference whatsoever in the taste.

It’s very easy to make (must be made ahead, though) and spends some time resting in the refrigerator. An hour before serving the berries were sliced and balsamic added and the black pepper. Actually, since I wasn’t sure people would really like the pepper, we added it as a garnish on the berries rather than adding it to the berries in the bowl.

A note about the balsamic – I’m embarrassed to tell you that I have at least 4 bottles of balsamic vinegar on my pantry shelf. One bottle is cheap. Not very good either, but I use it in salad dressings or marinades only. Another is a middle grade, a bit thicker in texture and much more tasty. I use it in cooking when I know I’ll be able to tell the difference. A third bottle is a very expensive one, an aged balsamic I bought in Italy from a unique little shop that only carried wine and balsamic – it’s the cream of the crop, is almost the consistency of a light syrup. You could sip it from a spoon it’s so good. That one is reserved for the occasions when a drizzle is truly a garnish on a dish that prides itself on the balsamic quality. And, I had a bottle of pear balsamic on my shelf too. I don’t even remember where I got it, but I took a tiny taste before using it to see if it was appropriate for this dish. Since this was a fruit dessert, I thought it would be ideal. Loved it. Will I make this recipe again? You betcha.
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The Los Angeles Times’ Food Section happens to be one of the better ones in the country. Maybe I should qualify that. It used to be one of the best. So few major newspapers are devoting money and staff to the sections anymore, but you can access the food sections of many newspapers on the net now (click on this link for a list of newspaper food sections available online). But this recipe was in the “good old days,” when the food section was quite large. The recipe comes from a restaurant in Los Angeles called Cha Cha Cha and was printed about 7-8 years ago. I’ve never been to the restaurant, but I guess they do a lot of highly seasoned Caribbean foods, this being one of them. Jerk seasoning was new to U. S. cooking circles back then, and having never had it, I was intrigued to try it. It’s been a summertime regular ever since. And I want you to read the nutritional analysis this time (a very good-for-you dish).

You need to have a sizable repertoire of herbs and spices in order to concoct the herb/spice mixture. I make it up in quantity. I think I’ve read that once you combine herbs or spices their lifetime diminishes considerably. My stash of this mixture is from last summer, so I hope it lasts a few more months.

The chicken breasts are marinated in a combination of the herb/spice mixture, canned pineapple juice, orange juice and Worcestershire sauce. Ideally for 24 hours, but I’ve done it in far less when I haven’t planned ahead to make this. It’s very simple once you have the dry mix ready; I always marinate meat/chicken/fish in a plastic bag – one of the freezer types so there’s no chance of puncturing it. Or at least very little chance of a chicken bone or something poking a hole in the bag. When I am unsure about how safe the bag is, I’ll put it into the bag, then in a large plastic bowl. Just in case.

The only other info about this chicken that is different is how it’s cooked. It is done on direct heat, but after grilling for a fairly short time on the grill, you remove the breasts and slice them into strips, dip in the marinade again, then finish cooking. The batch pictured above didn’t get that last step because the head griller had already turned the meat over and it was deemed “too late” to do the slice. So we just slathered more of the marinade on it and allowed it to cook that way. It’s very moist as long as you don’t overcook it. Remove the chicken when it reaches about 150-155 degrees, allow to sit a few minutes then slice and serve. Discard the marinade as it’s contaminated.

You could boil the marinade down if you wanted to and make it a sauce, but it might take longer than you have to devote to it since the chicken cooks in nothing flat. I’m going to try that sometime. The chicken is extremely low in fat because the marinade has no oil in it at all. None. So it’s just the fruit juices that help it retain moisture. Our family from Placerville was here, and they deemed it good. My daughter Dana has made this a few times and recommends buying the pineapple orange combination juice (Dole makes it) instead of using separate canned juices. Makes good sense to me. I may stock up on that, because I never have pineapple juice on hand.

The original recipe called for double the ingredients for the marinade, but I’ve been perfectly happy with a smaller quantity and if it’s marinated in a plastic bag, you can turn it over and back, and all the chicken is in contact with the liquid.
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On previous posts I’ve mentioned the cooking school in San Juan Capistrano, Our House, South County. It’s been in business several years now, but unfortunately the owners are planning (trying) to sell it. Perhaps it will remain a cooking school and event venue; perhaps not. I am very sad to contemplate the closure of Our House.

What’s unusual about it? It’s particularly charming for a variety of reasons. It’s owned by 3 people: Carole & Craig (a couple) and Sarah. Read more below about them, or go to their website (link above). Carole & Sarah try to serve people something to eat soon after arriving for the class. The room for the students (it’s all a demonstration class) is festively decorated, Carole and Sarah talk about the food, prepare some part of it, then the helpers whisk plates of food in front of us. One of these days I’m going to write up something about why it is I go to cooking classes, but that will be another day . . .

Carole is very talented, creative and fun. She MC’s the “show” so to speak, talking about the food. She knows how to stage tables and serving, and has quite a knack for decorating. And maybe more than anything, she buys lots of house kinds of stuff that are placed all over the house and the barn – items that are for sale. Things we never seem to see in other stores. Things I buy. Lots of things I buy.

Sarah, her cohort in crime, so to speak, is as cute as can be. Scottish by birth, Sarah was hired by Carole & Craig as a nanny, many years ago. The children are now grown and mostly gone, but Sarah has stayed. Sarah also became the family cook, chef, and bottle washer, most likely, but she’s a complete member of the family. She and Carole have a wonderful repartee.

The recipes they do are usually easy, but very high on flavor.

They serve plenty of food – you never go away hungry, that’s for sure. And usually they serve at least 2 desserts, sometimes 3, with one being a take-away one to remember them by.

The summer barbecue classes were great fun – Cherrie and I included our husbands, and we invited our son and his wife also. We all had a good time.

The subject here is salad dressings. I guess I’m a sucker for one more recipe. I don’t much like bottled dressings. Whether it’s the additives they have to include to give them shelf life, or something else, but they never seem to taste anywhere near as good as home made salad dressings. I do have one bottled one I keep in the refrigerator – Brianna’s Blush Wine Vinaigrette – but I only use it when I’m out of home made and don’t feel like making any. Carole & Sarah made this vinaigrette at the last class, and I enjoyed it very much. It has a little bit of honey, which makes it different than most totally savory vinaigrettes. That tiny amount of honey makes a big difference in the overall taste of the dressing. I’ve made it twice since then, and like it a lot. It’s not necessary to use the blender – I make it in a lidded jar and just shake it up. Just mush up the garlic well – you don’t want chunks of it, especially if it hasn’t been allowed to sit and mellow for several hours or overnight.
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The extra, beautifully ripe apricots were languishing in the refrigerator, so I needed to use them up. I made a small batch of ice cream using David Lebovitz’s recipe from his book, The Perfect Scoop. I’ve mentioned his cookbook before – click here for my previous post about his Roasted Banana Ice Cream. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful ice cream machine that doesn’t require you to freeze the bowl first – it’s a commercial style machine made by Cuisinart – but manufactured for the home kitchen. I’ve been in love with this machine since Dave bought it for me about 3 years ago.

I read several other recipes before I decided which to use. But, everything I’ve had and heard about Levobitz’s recipes led me to believe that his would be especially good. First you poach the apricots in a little water, add sugar, puree them in a blender, and add heavy cream, a hint of almond extract and another hint of lemon juice. I don’t think I’ve ever made a recipe that called for 3 drops of any kind of extract – food coloring yes, extract, no. Hence the almond flavor mostly disappears in the mixture. The same with the lemon juice. It calls for a few drops of lemon juice, but my recipe program doesn’t allow for “a few” as a measurement, so I changed it to 1/2 teaspoon, although I added more than that since I just squeezed a bit – probably more like 2 teaspoons at least. Then I poured it into the machine and 50 minutes later it was done. I didn’t even chill the mixture first as it says in the recipe. So, how is it? Sinfully delicious. The intense apricot flavor slides right on through in your mouth. We haven’t technically eaten it yet, although I licked the beater just to make sure it was okay (grin).
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I don’t suppose this looks all that appetizing, does it? I forgot the lemon zest and chives garnish, which really helps, but I’ll tell you, the recipe is very good. I attended a cooking class some years ago taught by Nicole Aloni. She’s a well-known caterer and cookbook author among the Hollywood set. She worked for many years as the catering director at the L.A. Music Center, then opened her own business. Her reason for writing cookbooks was a statistic: that 98% of people love the idea of giving a dinner party, but only 2 % of people enjoy doing it. So, she decided to write books about how to entertain.

Her first book, Secrets from a Caterer’s Kitchen ($12.89 on Amazon), is mostly about how to plan a dinner party. The logistics, the recipe decisions, the serving aspects, decorating ideas, and most importantly how to plan ahead so you aren’t cooking in the kitchen the entire day of the party. And there are lots of recipes in there too. Subsequently she published another cookbook, called Cooking for Company (also $12.89). It’s more along the food-only line, with over 200 pages of recipes for entertaining. All with the idea that you want to do as much advanced prep as possible.

So now, back to the cooking class. She prepared a meal that night that was relatively easy, but high on flavor, and definitely with the do-ahead factor. I like to entertain. Surely I’m not in the 2% of that statistic. And generally I enjoy the cooking too, although as I’ve gotten older I find that standing and prepping food for 7-8 hours the day of a party is getting harder. My feet hurt. My back hurts, etc. So I do try to make some things ahead. And I also try to buy store-bought something – usually the appetizer – rather than make it myself. So, this recipe is a good one for that.

This dish is an easy one to make, and I’d say this dish has Greek origins. The recipe didn’t say. You’ll notice a long list of ingredients. Don’t be put off by it – nothing in the list is a problem – except the preserved lemon. Most people don’t have that on the pantry or refrigerator shelf. I bought mine at Sur la Table, although other better grocery stores should carry it too. Or if you have a Middle Eastern market near you, they’ll surely have it at half the price. Preserved lemons are ones that have been packed in salt and left to sit for a couple of months.

Most Middle Eastern cooks make their own. I tried it once, but because I’d never had them before, I wasn’t sure if mine turned out correctly and have never bothered to make them since. If you’re interested, and you have a bountiful lemon tree, you might want to make them – they’re certainly easy to do – click here for a recipe. You never use much of the finished preserved lemon – they’re quite pungent and very tart. And salty. So it’s almost like a garnish, although this is put into the sauce itself. You wouldn’t want to use it as a garnish – for all those same reasons – too pungent, tart and salty.

You make a savory sauce – broth, balsamic vinegar, shallots, Dijon, tarragon, preserved lemon and kalamata olives. It has bitter overtones with the Dijon, balsamic, kalamata olives and the preserved lemon. That’s the part that can be done ahead. Be sure you use low sodium broths, though, because you reduce the broth to half and it will be very salty – way too salty – if you use regular sodium broths. Then you grill the chicken breasts that have been marinated in balsamic vinegar for a couple of hours, and once finished, you slice the chicken into strips. And serve it with some kind of carb – like linguine or rice – because you want something to soak up the sauce as well as what you spoon over the chicken. The recipe is also very low calorie and low fat, but as Nicole said that night – “it’s so good – you don’t need to tell anybody that.”
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This is the height of apricot season, folks. I bought a small flat of them at Costco last week, and I mean to tell you, they are perfect. I let them sit out on the kitchen counter for 3 days and they reached the peak of ripeness. Half I used in the above cake, and the other half are in the refrigerator and I may try apricot ice cream. In any case, I’ll cook those remaining apricots today or tomorrow before they’re over the hill. As you probably know, apricots have a short time of perfection. Too green and they have no taste. Too ripe and they’re mushy and they go downhill in rapid order from there. So, remember this recipe, either right NOW, or wait until next year.

Another cooking instructor who has provided me with any number of favorite recipes is Tarla Fallgatter. Here’s a blurb I found about her on the internet:

Tarla Fallgatter is a well-known Orange County caterer, chef, teacher, restaurant consultant and kitchen tool manufacturer. She trained at Paris’ Cordon Bleu, La Varenne, and Ecole Lenotre cooking schools, and was the first foreign woman to cook in the kitchens of Maxim’s. She has traveled to over 60 countries throughout the world, “sampling” the local cuisine. She markets her “Tarla” all-copper rolling pin in fine cookware shops.

Tarla used to teach at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (fairly elementary classes). She still teaches at A Store for Cooks, and she also teaches a private group of wives who live in Coto de Caza (a very upscale, gated neighborhood in south Orange County). My friend Cherrie was invited to attend one of those classes about 5 years ago through a friend of hers, and as a substitute, I’m invited too. I can choose to attend or not. This recipe came from one of the Tarla classes I attended.

So, I have a funny story to tell about almond paste. When I went to make this the other day, I knew I had some almond paste. I found 3 boxes. How about that. All imported from Denmark. All hard as rocks. (Now you also need to know that at the class about this cake, Tarla told all of us that we couldn’t substitute marzipan for almond paste – okay – got that – and she told us that almond paste doesn’t store well. It’s not that it spoils. It gets hard, and there’s no recovering it once it gets that way.)

Okay, so I have these 3 boxes in my pantry. No dates on any of them. Guess what? All hard. Uhm. What do I do. I really didn’t want to make another trip to the store, so I thought – maybe I can recover the almond paste. I’ll put it in the microwave with a bowl of hot water and let it steam a bit. Surely that would help, right? Wrong. Five minutes later all I got was hot, hard almond paste. My dear hubby saved the day – he said he’d go to the market for me. Here’s what almond paste looks like.

Ideally you bake the cake and the apricots at the same time (saves energy, obviously). So I got the apricots all ready to roast, then I went to work on the cake. Cautions about the cake:

1. make sure you use an 8-inch cake pan, not 9-inch (cake will be too shallow).

2. make certain you finely chop or tear off almond paste pieces – you don’t want little nuggets of almond paste in the cake.

3. don’t forget the parchment paper step in the cake pan – it needs it – even in a nonstick pan.

The apricots are easy to make and the sauce is delish. The cake is extremely moist and the almond flavor is not subtle – it’s right there – but that is what makes the cake so good. Try it.
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Doesn’t look like much, does it?
A chicken breast smothered with sour cream and crushed canned onion rings? Yuk.
A piece of white fish with grated carrot and sprinkled with toasted pine nuts? Yuk.
It’s actually a potato side dish that’s really flavorful. Really decadent.
And did I say easy? Oh, yes.

I had a similar dish at some friends a week or so ago (thanks, Penny, for the idea). I liked her casserole so well that I searched for it on the internet. Found a number of variations, and most of them contain a similar list of ingredients: frozen hash brown potatoes, defrosted, sour cream, chopped onion, cream of chicken or cream of mushroom soup, grated cheddar or sharp cheddar cheese, potato chips or corn flakes and butter.

I found several versions at http://www.cooks.com/ and finally selected this one because it suggested sharp cheddar cheese, AND it listed a half of a package of dry ranch dressing mix. I also added some fresh rosemary from my garden. I think this casserole needs the sharp cheddar, not mild cheddar, for the extra flavor boost along with the Ranch dressing mix.

Because I’d never made it before, I more or less followed the directions. I did add the rosemary. (We were having barbecued butterflied leg of lamb, so I thought the rosemary would be a nice complement.) I also cooked the onions first, which wasn’t mentioned in the original recipe. And I cut down on the amount of butter by about half.

The finished dish was wonderful. Next time I will try it with low-fat sour cream, the reduced fat soup, but I don’t think I’ll stint on the cheese. It took about 7-8 minutes to put together the ingredients. I finally used my hands to mix it up – it just seemed easier than fumbling with two big spoons. It’s a little awkward getting the soup and sour cream to mix in thoroughly. You don’t want clumps of condensed soup anywhere. Then you pour it into a casserole dish, add 45 minutes to bake, and it’s done. This may have been the first time in my life I ever bought frozen hash browns, but they sure did make it simple. I’ll definitely make this again for a big crowd. I doubled the recipe and it served 9 for one meal and probably would serve another 4-6 for another meal.
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I saw Ina Garten demonstrate this on her food network program, probably 2 years ago. It’s from her book, Barefoot Contessa at Home. Maybe the peas and spinach seem like an unlikely combination, but it sure works. Over the years I’ve used pesto in pasta dishes, of course, and to dollop on the top of certain soups, and as a dip, but never would have considered it as a salad dressing. I had some homemade pesto in the refrigerator, so this was a simple dish to throw together. Trader Joe’s carries a baby spinach, which is preferable here. Regular spinach is just too big for a salad – the pieces are too large without cutting them. I suppose you could do that, but the baby spinach just makes it so simple. I do tear off some of the larger stems, but most of them stay in the salad.

I find this salad goes so very well with a grilled dinner – chicken, steaks, pork chops, even fish. I hate to sound redundant, but this salad is SO simple. You just have to toast the pine nuts (I use a nonstick frying pan) and I caution you if you haven’t done this before – watch the pan very very carefully or they will burn. Pine nuts contain a high percentage of oil, so they burn very rapidly. I keep pine nuts in the freezer at all times, so just remove what you need for a meal.

And, the other thing I do is add more Parmesan cheese (that’s my addition to Ina’s recipe). Often, I believe, when you buy ready-made pesto, it doesn’t contain as much cheese as your own homemade variety, so I add some to the salad itself. It adds some color contrast too.
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When I was in Berkeley 2 weeks ago Cherrie and I went on a tour of the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory. It was just a few blocks from our hotel near the waterfront and my GPS drove us right to the door in the industrial section of town. The factory itself was a big surprise – it’s quite small. Having once visited the Nestle plant in Pennsylvania, I was expecting something dramatic, especially with the panache garnered by the Scharffen Berger line.

As I think I explained before, John Scharffenberger (spelling intentional) came to some reknown as a winemaker. After a couple of decades producing some very fine sparkling wine (a favorite of mine, his to be specific), he sold the business. Then he was approached by Robert Steinberg, a friend, and now his partner in Scharffen Berger, and they decided to start a chocolate manufacturing company, but only producing a high quality – European style – product. They purchased European, i.e. old, equipment. They wanted to capitalize on the known Scharffenberger name, but John had sold the rights to it with the winery. So, they merely added a space between the n and the b and made it into Scharffen Berger. It wasn’t quite building a business in a garage, but close to it.

They don’t make chocolate every day. Although likely some pieces of equipment are running most days. The roaster (the red thing right) was in a separate room (warm and if running, very noisy). The building probably isn’t 300 feet long and about 200 feet wide, and not only housed the factory floor, but offices, a restaurant and a store. Did I spend money in there? Well, to be sure. Did we taste chocolate? Oh yes, indeed. Probably the most important thing I learned there was about how to eat a piece of chocolate: put it into your mouth, hold it on the middle of your tongue, up against the roof of your mouth, and allow it to completely melt on your tongue. Don’t chew. Don’t move it around. You’ll savor the flavors far better, and it’ll last longer besides. Kind of like how you taste wine.

To the left is the photo of the cocoa bean crusher. A huge cauldron – I mean huge – of swirling, melting chocolate and the crusher rolling around in the middle. So, it was on a blog a few months ago that I read about a recipe in the new cookbook published by the Scharffen Berger partners, The Essence of Chocolate. Liking chocolate as I do, I made it and oh – my – goodness.
What flavor. Not all that difficult. I like bundt cakes, and this one doesn’t require anything but the cake itself. It does have a caramel sauce that is poured over the hot-out-of-the-oven cake, but otherwise, nothing else. No garnishes, although you could serve with a bit of vanilla ice cream. It’s rich enough, however, as it is. I will include the nutritional information about the cake, but for heaven’s sake, whatever you do, don’t read it. I’m going to put it in the smallest type available on this blog.
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