A very brief update: I am free to walk SOME. The broken bone is mostly healed, but not entirely. But the doctor gave me my “walking papers,” so to speak. However, I can barely stand up, let alone walk. The foot and muscles and tendons have all forgotten what to do and it hurts to put weight on that foot – just because it hasn’t had to perform that function for 7 weeks. And my left foot (the good foot) has developed tendonitis from all the extra work it’s had to do in recent weeks, so it hurts more than the broken foot does. I’m nowhere near trying to cook. Or really walk more than about 20 very-slow-paces and that with a cane. Hopefully this will improve with practice in the next week.

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There’s maple syrup in this salad dressing. Sounds way too sweet, doesn’t it? Well, it is on the sweet side for a green salad, I’ll admit. But there is something seductive about the mixture of mayo, maple syrup and champagne wine vinegar. You counter the sweet with the vinegar, and it’s sublime. Usually I serve this in the Fall, and we’re steamy here in So. California these days, so I’m waiting for the new crop of apples to come in before I make this again. Although Granny Smiths are good year around, I know. This is kind of reminiscent of a waldorf salad, except there isn’t any celery in it. So think of this as a waldorf-ish green salad maybe.

This came from a cooking class with Phillis Carey, a cooking instructor I’ve mentioned before on this blog. She has such a creative culinary mind. I’m not that inventive – sure, I can put something together if the ingredients are plopped down in front of me, but I’d never have thought to make a salad dressing with mayo and maple syrup. And the combo of the apples, dried cherries and walnuts too.

I think there are too many apples in this salad, although maybe Phillis wanted the apples to be predominant. I prefer to make the lettuce the star (I use more greens than noted) and the dressing shines through. Then the fruit comes in as secondary. The recipe below is exactly as Phillis made it, with my notes in parens. But, as you start thinking about apples, maybe you’ll think about this salad. It’s excellent in whatever proportion you choose to use!
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(photo wholefoodsmarket.com)

Maybe I’ll have a photo of this special dessert this summer. But only if I can still find apricots in the market by the time I’m able to walk again.

Several years ago I attended a cooking class taught by Susan Hermann Loomis. She’s an American woman who took a left turn in her life and went to Paris. Attended culinary school, found jobs here and there cooking for wealthy families, met a Frenchman, married, bought a home in Normandy, settled down, had two children, then wrote a cookbook. And opened her home for cooking classes. And no, I didn’t attend a class at her home in Normandy. Maybe one day.

Susan’s a fun personality, and her cooking is quite straightforward. She cooks rustic. Country French. Seasonal. But oh, so delicious. This was the one recipe from her class that I made as soon as it was apricot season. I bought her cookbook and memoir On Rue Tatin and read it cover to cover as soon as I brought it home from the class. It’s not currently in print, but you can find used copies. But, I very much enjoyed her breezy style, and learning more details about her life. I can’t say that I’ve made very many of the dishes (you know, so many cookbooks, so little time, especially with a broken FOOT!), but I loved reading about them. I tagged the book in many places to remind me of the things I want to make.

I don’t cook with apricots very often. They have such a short season, after all. But they’re very much a celebrated fruit in Normandy, the region where Susan lives. She obviously subscribes to the Slow Food movement, using only local and seasonal ingredients. Some apricot varieties cook better than others – if you’re not careful they become mush. But if you have a good source, and they are full of flavor, by all means, this would make a super end to a meal. Be sure to make this in a baking dish that’s got at least 1/2 inch of space once you add all the ingredients, or it may bubble over in your oven. My notes remind me that it’s the topping that makes the dish. Otherwise it would be a fruit with a custard on top, I suppose. But this has a simple eggy topping that adds a piquant taste to it. Goes very well with those perfectly baked apricots.
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Thanks to my DH, he managed to make a nice chicken dinner the other night. Albeit, we only had one chicken thigh and some frozen asparagus each, but it worked. The freezer-burned asparagus was over the hill – but the chicken was scrumptious. We have leftovers, which is a good thing, and I would definitely make this again. The recipe came from Elise, over at Simply Recipes. I’ve made several of her recipes in the last 6 months, and have enjoyed them all. This one is a stand-out, for sure. The marinade and sauce (one in the same) is just delicious. You could eat it right out of the bowl it’s so tasty. Her recipe was adapted from an article in the New York Times, she said. The recipe is very simple – you make a cashew-based marinade in the food processor, with cilantro, garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar, lime juice and some fresh chiles. Some of this is reserved to scoop on top at serving time, but you marinate the chicken in this stuff for at least an hour, then grill or broil or bake and serve. Even my DH, who doesn’t cook, found this fairly easy to make. That’s saying a lot from him!

This marinade kind of resembles pesto, except rather than basil and pine nuts, this is cilantro and cashews. My recipe will include a few changes: (1) next time I’ll use boneless, skinless thighs (because I don’t like to eat the fatty chicken skin and most of the thick marinade sticks to the skin); (2) we used one small jalapeno and a part of a poblano chile, and I’d definitely do that again; and maybe if baking these (3) I’ll pat a bit of Panko crumbs on top of the chicken (I like the crunch of Panko); (4) I’ll make more of the sauce since it’s just so unbelievably yummy (I’d like to try it on other things – like a grilled pork chop – or as a spread on a sandwich, maybe even as a salad dressing – we both just l-o-v-e-d the sauce; and (5) I substituted brown sugar Splenda for the brown sugar just because we try to limit sugar in our diets. Although the recipe says to marinate just an hour or two, most likely it would be fine up to 24 hours. No more, though, or the chicken will begin to “cook” with the lime juice in it.

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It’s the capers, of course, that make this uniquely Sicilian. Whether the Sicilians were the first to utilize the little buds, I don’t know. I buy a giant economy sized bottle of capers at my local Italian market. A large jar isn’t cheap, but I’ve had this jar for about 5 years, I think. Caper berries are also available – they’ve just been allowed to mature to a bigger size, hence they’re berries, rather than buds. I do like capers a lot, but only in small quantity. I once ordered chicken piccata at some restaurant and it had so darned many of them, and probably a bit of the pickle juice, I couldn’t eat it. But in moderation, they add a kind of piquant character to any dish in which you choose to use them. Just be sure to rinse them a little before using them.

I think capers are not common in tuna salad, but when I had this, it was just really, really good. There’s nothing else in it that is that unusual. I’ve never been able to put my finger on why this combination is so darned good, but maybe it’s the capers and lemon juice together that bring something different to the equation. And the fact that you use imported tuna packed in oil. And there’s no mayo in it. There’s just lots of flavor there.

Sicily abounds with lemons. There are lemons on trees obviously, lemons in the market, lemons in art, lemons in ceramics, lemons even in the ancient carvings. If you buy dinnerware, often it will contain pictures of lemons. The early people obviously found every possible way to utilize the citrus. Sicilians use lemon juice in lieu of vinegar, so it’s found in every avenue of their cuisine. And how could I forget Limoncello? Oh, so good is that liqueur.

But we’re talking about a pasta salad here . . . this came from a Joanne Weir cooking class some years ago. I’d have gone right on by this recipe had I not tasted it, figuring what’s one more cold pasta salad with tuna. But this was just different. Better. Tastier. Tangier. Every time I’ve made this it has renewed my enjoyment of it.
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(photo from thatsanice.com)

We went to an Italian restaurant the other night – Vessia – in Irvine. One of the chefs from Prego opened it a couple of years ago. Good food. We’d been there when it first opened and were disappointed, but last night was a big improvement. My DH ordered their Braesiola.

When I looked at the word on the menu I wondered if it was something similar to the Braciole that I’ve made for years. Or if it was a completely different dish. Reading the fine print it sounded very similar. Why the different spelling, I wonder? Maybe some reader of mine who is Italian, or knows Italian cuisine can tell me why a dish can have so many different spellings? I did an internet search and found several also. Confusing to me! I think the meat roll is Sicilian in origin, but it’s claimed by all Italians, now.

So, I decided to take a look again at my version of this standby, Braciole – I think it’s pronounced brah-jol. Our Mexican waiter butchered the word big time as well as every other Italian word he tried to pronounce. I think I previously asked an Italian how to pronounce it.

Anyway, today I read online of many variations on the braciole theme. I liked reading about the addition of pine nuts, garlic, Pecorino-Romano cheese, parsley too. Here’s one version I liked. And I also like the option of cooking it on a bed of tomato sauce. I may have to try some of those options next time I make this. My recipe dates back to the 1960’s.

Because refrigerators with large freezers were a new fangled thing back then, there were lots of books and articles in magazines about how to use your freezer. Hard to imagine but I even bought a small BOOK about how to freeze. It seems like second nature now. But back then we didn’t have plastic bags. And initially we didn’t even have plastic containers (boxes) to store or freeze in either. You just used the ceramic (lidded Pyrex) or metal containers things were cooked in. Hard to believe, I know.

Because I still have the original clipping from this recipe, it was from an article about freezing meals ahead. About buying a larger amount of meat, prepping it, then fixing half and freezing half. Seemed like a logical thing to do. Have done it every since when I make this dish.

At the time I’m sure the refrigerator manufacturers probably paid marketing writers to punch out lots of material about why we needed to have these new-fangled refrigerator-freezers so they’d have umpteen more customers. Freezers had been around for awhile, but they were tiny little cubby-holes nested inside the top of the refrigerator. And they weren’t frost-free. Far from it. I remember many a time on a weekend putting bowls of hot-hot water inside the freezer unit trying to hurry-up the process of defrosting the thing. Using an ice pick to pry the chunks of ice off the sides. The opening was so clogged with ice and frost that you could hardly store anything in it. Or what was in it was completely enveloped in ice so you couldn’t remove it to use it. Then there were the piles of towels you needed to use to mop of the dripping water. And sponges and bowls to mop up the water on shelves below the freezer. It was an awful process. I hated it. Hated it. Hated it. But do it every homemaker did; otherwise the freezer was a useless feature.

But then they came out with frost-free. I wasn’t exactly first in line because such refrigerator/freezers were pricey and beyond the budget, but I do remember, in about 1967 finally getting one. Oh, was I excited! I can hardly believe it now, but my former husband, always pinching pennies, gave me a choice (I was a stay-at-home wife) of getting an old used car of my very own OR a new frost-free refrigerator freezer. We had one car only and he used it to go to and from work. Twice a week I took him to work and used those days for errands, shopping, etc. Then I had to pick him up from work too. The other days of the week I was at home all day. Baking, cooking, cleaning, writing letters, reading, etc. Anyway, I chose the refrigerator/freezer. I was greedy: I wanted both. But both I could not have. It was probably 5 more years before I finally had a car of my own.

So, back to freezing food and braciole. However you pronounce it, it’s a very simple stuffed meat roll. You start out with round steak, cut 1″ thick, then you butterfly it to make a big flat surface. Then it’s filled and rolled with Italian sausage, red bell pepper strips, some cheese and a bit of bread stuffing. You tie it, bake it, adding some additional cheese near the end. Remove, let sit briefly, then slice to serve.
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(photo from hormel.com)

Sometimes when I entertain I don’t have a whole day to devote to preparing dinner. But then, when I entertain I always serve an appetizer, a salad, a vegetable, usually a carb of some kind, and a protein, maybe even with a sauce or salsa or something alongside. And dessert. That’s a whole lot of food prep.

I’d like to say that as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten wiser about the work and stress of entertaining, but my DH would heartily disagree. I still do a too-ambitious menu. I choose things that require too much work. Once in awhile I either buy an appetizer, or sometimes buy a ready-made dessert. Or, I cut out the carb. But most often I think I can do it all and still be full of energy at 6 pm. But more often than not I’m still working furiously 5 minutes before the guests arrive. My DH loves to entertain (and he does deal with the wine, the wine glasses, and he even sets the table AND does all the dishes). I can’t complain at ALL that he doesn’t help. He just doesn’t help with any of the FOOD unless it’s a grilled meal we’re having. So when I start working up a menu I forget to think about the hours of work. I often underestimate how much time it will take. And I must not work at the frenetic level I used to. So I’m normally at work in the kitchen all day. One of these days I’ll learn. Maybe.On occasion I start working on my entertaining menu several days ahead and do some of the work a day or so before.

This is one of those recipes to do ahead – it’s not all that difficult, but you do have to make the chutney. It’s easy enough – just takes about 45 minutes total time, with a bit of chopping and mincing before you start. Then when the guests arrive, you can just whip this out and heat it up.
Poblano chiles are a favorite of mine. They have some kind of deep, complex flavor. They have character. That’s it. I don’t think I’ve ever had them and not liked them. This recipe came from a cooking class with Tarla Fallgatter. And the chutney is just wonderful. On my notes from the class I wrote “fabulous.” That means it’s a “must fix this” dish. And I have. You’ll have some leftover chutney, but it’s also delicious served with a pork chop or chicken breast popped on the grill.

The picture at the top – of the cheese – isn’t actually the right kind of cheese – you want the plain chevre or montrachet. A fresh and plain goat cheese log. Then you make the chutney, have it warm. Heat the log of cheese for 5 minutes, then plate it and mound the chutney over and around it. Some crackers, and you’re done. I think you’ll get raves.
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(photo from wildoats.com)

When I watched Phillis Carey make this sauce at a cooking class, I thought, piously, oh, I won’t eat but a bite of that, it’s just got too much fat in it. Hmmm. Yea. Sure. I tasted it and my resolve went right out the window – my mouth went into a heavenly state. Well, why not, with that much butter in it? But the combination of the butter, the pickled ginger and the basil. Oh my.

I really considered not posting this recipe because of the quantity of butter. But this is just so darned good, I just had to. If you want to watch fat grams, then reduce the quantity of sauce. I think you could. As I recall a lot of the butter sauce drizzles around the plate anyway – you don’t get it all right ON the salmon. The calorie and fat content assumes you consume all that sauce, which you won’t. So that makes it better for us, right? Sure.

Previously I’ve mentioned Phillis Carey, her cookbooks, and her creativity with chicken. I mean, the woman is a magician and an Einstein all rolled into one when she invents new dishes using chicken. Plus, she makes them really flavorful and moist. Phillis applies the same ingredient creativity to salmon. I mean, she can’t do chicken at every cooking class, right? But, who would have thought to use pickled ginger with salmon? My mind just doesn’t work in those tangents, I guess. But I’m glad Phillis’ does. And so will you if you try this. This makes a wonderful company meal. I have a scale I use to “rate” recipes at cooking classes I take – a “grade,” if you will, and this one merited a “fabulous.” That means it’s a MUST FIX. And I did. And I do. And I will.
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I was trying to put away a stack of miscellaneous recipes yesterday. I’m an inveterate recipe collector. I even have a sort-of-a furniture piece where I now store all of my clippings and miscellaneous food related paper. It’s a sort of file cabinet, but looks more like furniture. Sort of. Since I’ve been doing this recipe-collecting for about 45 years, there are a LOT of recipes and papers in there. I rarely purge. I have, but not much. I’m always certain that as soon as I do so, I’ll decide I really wanted that recipe.

These are rattan-type baskets inside a kind of 3-shelf stand in a wrought-iron frame. Doesn’t look like a file cabinet, exactly, and isn’t too unsightly. It sits in a hallway about 15 feet from my kitchen. When I file, I have to take a chair there and sit and sort. Because it’s not very convenient, I tend to pile up recipes and other filing (restaurant reviews, and a little bit of other food trivia stuff) until I have a bunch to go through. There are frames inside each basket which allow you to hang Pentaflex folders, so then I have pocket file folders for lots of food categories. You can see one pocket folder sticking up there. In case you’re interested, you can buy this piece at FurnitureFind. That’s not where I bought it, but since I couldn’t remember where it came from, I did a search and they do have it for $218.

So, I got distracted there. I was going through my stack of recipes to file. I was really trying to find a cauliflower and bacon soup I’d made awhile back (we had some from the freezer the other day and it was just wonderful, but I can’t find the original recipe . . . I’d like to make it again). But while sorting I ran across this recipe for asparagus. Brought back a pleasant mouth-watering memory.

I really should be posting this in about March when asparagus hits the markets in abundance. We can buy it year around, but surely it’s at its peak in the late spring. Some years ago I bought a Dacor oven. I L-O-V-E my Dacor oven. It has convection and regular baking options. I’d had a convection oven before, but never seemed to figure out, exactly, the best ways to use it, or when NOT to use it. So I was delighted to know that I could attend a cooking class at the Dacor headquarters, which are here in Southern California. In fact they’re only about 15 miles from our house. My friend Cherrie, who also owns a Dacor full range, and I have been to 2 or 3 Dacor classes. They’ve been great fun. Some are for Dacor owners; others you can attend for a fee.

Twice now she and I have been to the convection class. We keep needing refresher courses. I probably should have some kind of cheat-sheet I use to help me decide whether to use convection or not. Even with classes, I don’t always know. But this recipe was by far the standout recipe for convection use. And it was served both times, and I’ve made this innumerable times myself. It’s super easy. And scrumptiously delicious. I could make an entire MEAL of this asparagus. Don’t overwhelm the piquant flavors with a complicated or highly spiced entree. Allow the citrus flavors to bloom and predominate. The first time I made this, for a company dinner, I bought 3 pounds of asparagus, assuming we’d have lots of leftovers. At least that was my plan. Ha. Gone. All gone.
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This is about chiles. You want a bit of chile heat in your meatballs? This is your recipe, then. Usually I make these during cool weather, not in the summer, as the spicy heat seems to taste better when the rain is falling or the wind is blowing. But, there’s no reason why this couldn’t be eaten any time of year. We’d been on a hiatus from eating beef when I made this some years ago. The recipe was in Bon Appetit, and just hit a taste button with me and I promptly went out to buy the ingredients. I made a moderate batch of them and froze the remaining in dinner-sized portions. I freeze the rice in a separate quart-sized Ziploc bag but put it with the meatballs in the gallon sized bags. Then my meal is all together.

This could be made with ground turkey or chicken, or a mixture. It’s the little bit of capers in the middle that make the meatballs unusual. And the chipotle chiles. Then the fresh tomato sauce is also different. Fresh Tomato Sauce merely means you use fresh tomatoes and you don’t cook it very long. So the sauce retains some semblance of a “fresh” taste. It’s easy and delicious. Summertime is a good season to use up your abundance of home grown tomatoes.As I mentioned, the recipe called for rice (I use brown basmati), but it could also go over mashed potatoes just as easily. Or pasta for that matter. But you might want some kind of carb to soak up the good sauce. Generally I make more sauce than the recipe says, but it’s truly not necessary unless you like sauce like we do.

Chipotle chiles are an ancient condiment, I’m sure, with all the Mexican or South American cuisines that include hot chiles. They’re merely jalapeno chiles that have been smoked and canned or bottled in an adobo tomato sauce. They’re spicy. Very spicy. I’d open a can and use a mere teaspoon or two, put it in the refrigerator and months later would discover this moldy messy gunk in there. So I was overjoyed when at one of the cooking classes I attended, the instructor suggested piling the chipotles into a plastic bag and freezing the leftovers. Then when you need some, you just use a spoon and scrape out whatever you need. Very easy, and certainly a better use for the contents of the can. I don’t cook Mexican food very often – we have such wonderful restaurants here in our part of the world that I don’t need to make it. But I use lots and lots of Mexican food products in my cooking. And this meatball dish certainly isn’t Mexican particularly.

Are any of you enjoying Rick Bayless’ cooking program on public television? I’ve been Tivo it for awhile, and have enjoyed it immensely. Rick is a famous American chef from Oklahoma, although he lives in Chicago now, where he has two very popular Mexican restaurants. He’s a very unassuming kind of guy – I don’t detect a bit of ego in his style. He just adores Mexican cuisine, particularly from the Yucatan. He uses copious amounts of chipotle and other chiles in nearly everything he makes. Some I’d never heard of. Rick has published six cookbooks. (Just an aside here for those of you who follow my cookbook obsession, I own not one single Rick Bayless cookbook . . . aren’t you proud of me?) This series, with the recipes from the PBS series is from his book called Mexican Everyday, although the series is called Mexico One Plate at a Time.My hands are particularly sensitive to chiles. No matter how careful I am with cutting up a chile, I always manage to feel some heat from it – usually underneath my fingernails. Not everybody has this problem, so this is just a friendly warning. I use plastic gloves. The staff in my dentist’s office has been kind enough (thanks Joan and others) to give me a box of their gloves every couple of years. They’re a must for me. Particularly with the chipotles. Getting a little bit of that spicy chipotle sauce under my fingernails can be so painful for hours and hours.So, if you’re looking for something a bit different, give this a try. Use gloves.
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