For those of you who printed out the PDF or copied the recipe in the post, there was a little mistake. I forgot to add the cocoa in my recipe write-up. Apparently in David Lebovitz’ blog version (which I went online to copy and paste when I wrote up the post) he didn’t include it, but in his book, he did. The book version is the recipe I followed – and it’s a big, whopping 1/2 teaspoon, I think. But it did make a subtle difference – I do believe. Click HERE to go back to that post. Thanks to my reader, Donna, who noticed the error! Thanks, Donna.

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Photo taken with my iPad. From the B and B where we stayed in Cripple Creek, an old town deep in the Rockies. This was the view from our room.

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Road trip the last two days. This picture was taken of Twin Lakes. Beautiful sunny day, about 80 degrees.

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Hopefully I’ll have some photos up in a day or two. As this is posted we’ve just arrived in Colorado, where we’re visiting with our friends Sue and Lynn who moved there last year.

I’m taking my new iPad with me, and I hope I’ll be able to upload photos and write a bit while we’re there. My trusty camera will be with me everywhere, so I’ll have some scenery to show you.

Years ago, I lived in Denver. It’s a beautiful city. Our friends live in Morrison, a foothills suburb SW of Denver, in the pine trees.

So, stay tuned for some travel photos.

A year ago: Mini-Appetizer Wontons (from Trader Joe’s)

Four  years ago: Chicken with Artichokes & Olives

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Ugly, ancient wallpaper hidden behind a mirror

It was several months ago. . . I walked into the guest bathroom upstairs and once again, I was reminded how much I hated the very old brown and gold tile on the floor. Clearly it was popular back in the 60’s when this house was built. It was probably a kind of Mediterranean design. Positively ugly now! Several tiles were cracked.  When we bought our home 7 years ago, I was more charmed by the house and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the bathrooms, although I knew they hadn’t been remodeled. Updated with décor, but not remodeled at all. In this particular bathroom, the grout was gone, mostly where the tile butted up against the tub. The cabinet was old, with sink tops that dated the room. Brass fixtures were everywhere. The grout in the tub and shower was chipped. The shower head we knew was barely usable for guests. A few hours later I walked into our small powder room (downstairs) and was reminded that the cabinet (small) in that room was also very old. The big, oval mirror on the wall had, at some point, fallen down and chipped a big gouge in the white and brass (oh, ugly, ugly) center faucets. The cabinet had obviously been painted ten times over the years and it showed it with uneven and some chipped paint, etc. The next day I had reason to go into the other full bath on our ground floor (fondly called Dave’s bathroom, or the “men’s” room by my DH) and looked at all the brass fixtures, the shower door there that was a bit rickety, although it did work. Houseguests had told us that the shower head in that bathroom wasn’t working right, either.

The day after that I was in our master bathroom – a combination bath and dressing area – which is quite large, actually – where we have a shower (brass and glass trim) and a single, traditionally shaped jacuzzi tub. A tub neither of us uses – partly because it’s very awkward to get in and out of it. Dave would never use it because of being a double amputee – he could get in there – but he’d never be able to get out of it. I’ve used the jacuzzi tub maybe twice in the 7 years. The tub was obviously installed when the home was built back in the 1960’s. So it’s old. It still works, but it’s got huge brass fixtures in the tub. And because it’s so large it really hogs the room.

My DH and I have talked about remodeling bathrooms a few times over the years, but always he convinced me it would be just too much money and that everything was “good enough.” Well, this time, I just said I’d “had it.” We think we’ll probably stay in our home for a good long time – we have no plans to move again unless it was to go to a retirement home at some point – and I merely said to my DH that if and when we ever do sell this house, we’d just have to remodel the bathrooms if we expect to get a fair price for our home. So, why wait until then to remodel the bathrooms – we should remodel them now so we enjoy it. He agreed.

So, to cut to the chase here, we’re in the process of having our 3 1/2 bathrooms remodeled. It’s been about 4 weeks now and to say that it’s loud and noisy here every weekday is an understatement. The first few days it was the jackhammers. And lots of pounding. Day in and day out there is pounding from the 2 1/2 bathrooms they are working on currently. There’s the hot mop (tar) wagon that has been here twice so far. Oh, we just had to get out of the house those days. It was awful – the smell. Some days there are two teams of worker bees here – working on two bathrooms at a time. Compressors run part of the time too. Our master bath is untouched at this point – so that’s the bathroom we must use currently. (After they finish the other 2 1/2 bathrooms, they’ll start on the master bath, which will likely take longer to do.) We have no privacy, hardly, for 8-9 hours a day. The workers are very nice, and they clean up everything impeccably every single day, but people stream in and out of the front door, the back door, trooping up and down the stairs and into and out of the garage all day long. Tile saws are buzzing. And more hammers pounding. We have very limited parking behind our house (we live on a buttressed hill) so some days it’s difficult even getting our car(s) out of the garage because there are workers’ cars here and there.

There’s not much to show yet in this process. But here’s a photo I took this morning showing the guest bathroom downstairs (we have one guest bedroom on our ground floor), and it’s where most of our houseguests stay. We have a king bed in that room, and the bathroom is across the hall.

I was standing in the doorway to take the photo – a 4 foot cabinet and sink will go in on the left. The toilet is behind the door you can see on the right. Ahead is the new shower. A walk-in shower which will have a barely discernible lip on the right edge so it could be accessible by wheelchair if necessary. The floor you see isn’t wet – it’s just the dried hot mop. And it was just to the left where I took the photo of the wallpaper at the top of this post. Who knows how old that wallpaper is. Probably from the late 60’s or maybe early 70’s. Horrid. There was a large mirror on the wall, so we never knew, of course, about the wallpaper behind it. This bathroom was painted a bright brick red color in its most recent style. It will be more neutral now.

There’s a picture of the upstairs guest bathroom. Shower, obviously, on the left. There will be granite on the countertops and pony wall, and glass from the pony wall up. A sliding shower door on the far side. I love the horizontal green glass tiles in the middle of the shower.  Toilet front left. Sinks on the right. New tile floor (hooray – the brown and gold stuff is gone). We also will have a pocket door into the bedroom (front right) that will allow privacy for guests staying in that room. That was my idea.

We have been very fortunate over the last 15 years to have a decorator – now she’s a very good friend – help us. Darci completely remodeled our previous home and worked with us when we moved into this house 7 years ago. She took about 2 days to create a vision for all of these bathrooms, and with very little discussion, we’d agreed on colors, tile, granite concepts, cabinet styles, sinks, toilets, etc. We’ve learned to trust her judgment! We did have to visit a granite yard to pick out two slabs that will be used for the various rooms. With our kitchen remodel I did most of the design myself, but with bathrooms I’m glad to let her do the hard part. Actually we’re not changing the layout of the rooms. Just updating everything within each one. The jacuzzi tub is going, but we’re replacing it with a free standing tub that will be tucked into a corner. Every home does need a tub somewhere (I’ve learned that from watching all the HGTV shows over the years).

There’s a pix of the copper vessel sink that will be installed in the powder room. This is the only vessel sink we’ll have – all other rooms will be more functional, traditional. But I wanted a vessel sink (relatively inexpensive, as vessel sinks go) in this small powder room to make it a bit more stylish. The countertop here will be marble, with a neutral granite backsplash. This room is wallpapered with a rustic brick design showing tufts of little plants growing between the bricks.

This project probably won’t be completed for another 2 months. That’s a guess. Maybe they’ll surprise us and be able to do it faster than that. Tile was backordered, so there have been delays already. And doing the templates for granite takes at least 2 weeks. The cabinets require the most time. We’re also having a closet guy build in our master closets too. The two closets have built-ins now, but they’re old and were probably a DIY (read: cheap) to begin with. Add another $2800 to the job! Whew, remodeling bathrooms is one very expensive proposition! Little did I know that bathrooms are the most expensive interior real estate to remodel. Most of this house originally had popcorn ceilings, and Dave’s walk-in closet still has it. That’s going, obviously.

Fortunately, our kitchen, living room, dining room and family room are all untouched by this project, so we stay there most of the time during the daytime hours. My upstairs office is fine too, although the noise is often very loud. But, plenty of cooking has gone on during this process. Stay tuned. Pound . . . pound . . . pound.

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Over the last 6 weeks or so I’ve been doing a lot of “undercover” work, sort of. No, not that kind of undercover. But under the covers of my blog pages. Most of you likely don’t care what makes a blog work, or why any web page looks the way it does, but when you’ve seen something that didn’t work, you noticed. A few of you have emailed me (thank you) to tell me a link was broken, or pointed to an incorrect recipe.

For awhile I was having a huge problem with the website where I stored all of my pdf files. Well, actually they were having the problem. A type of security issue which gave some of you (and me) a message that the website was not to be trusted, etc. So, after wrestling with it (mentally) for many weeks, I decided to move all of my pdfs to my own website. YOU may not think that’s a big deal, but the unfortunate side effect of that is that over the course of the 4 years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve included links (that little line near each recipe that says “printer-friendly pdf” in most posts), so when you clicked it to get the pdf – it directed you to that other website. The other part of it is that using my own website requires me to upload using ftp, which is kind of like going back to DOS procedures. Not quite that archaic, but almost. It requires a separate complex login and procedure all on its own.

So, first, all the files were copied and re-organized into categories (like vegetables, beverages, chicken, whatever). They’d been that way before, but they weren’t in alphabetical order, which annoyed me all the time. Then, I started the project of changing all the links. That took me hours and hours a day for weeks on end. I had to go back into every single recipe post I’ve ever done and insert the correct link. About 25% of the pdfs had incorrect names (there’s a protocol for naming files and it worked fine at that other website, but not through ftp protocol) so that had to be done too.  While I was at it I verified – I hope – every other link I might have had in my blog posts (like a link to an Ina Garten recipe at the Food Network). A few were no longer valid links, so had to research those, fix them or remove them.

All that said – I know – you probably don’t really care about all that stuff – I THEN created a brand new set of index pages. I’ve never been happy with my index before – it was a little program that automatically generated an entry every time I did a post. It was wa-a-a-ay too long and awkward to read. I couldn’t format it myself. Couldn’t change how it looked or how it worked as it’s a copyrighted program. No other program exists out there to do this, so I just had to create a new index myself. It requires me to update the list myself every few days when I have new recipes to add to the index. It’s just a nuisance to do, that’s all. But I have somewhere between 800-1000 recipes on this blog, so how else can you find things (other than word searches)?

So, I hope you’ll go to my website (for those of you who read this in a blog reader) and check out the RECIPE INDEX (a tab at the top), then click on the separate categories which will take you to lists of my recipes. I highlighted my favorite recipes in red. Some are duplicated in more than one category or sub-category. Two sections probably don’t overlap enough – salads and soups. If a soup contains chicken it’s probably only under soup. But a few of them make it in both places. Same with salads – any salad that contains some meat – like chicken – probably exists only on the salad page, not under chicken. Although a few are there. Best thing to do is check both places! If you try it and if you have any problems whatsoever, do let me know. I don’t have a proofreader, so it’s always possible that my nimble fingers made mistakes!

So, excuse me, I need to get back in the kitchen. Two desserts are in process in my kitchen. I’m baking Teddie’s Apple Cake today, the #2 requested and favorite recipe from my new The Essential New York Times Cookbook. That link (for the cake) goes to the New York Times’ website. I’ll post all about it in a few days. Am also making the Dark Chocolate Almond Tart too which will post tomorrow. If you’re in a hurry to read that one, just click on the link and you’ll see it before it’s officially “up.”

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A week or so ago we spent the weekend up in San Luis Obispo (we stayed at our favorite B&B, the Bridge Creek Inn outside of town) and met up with friends of ours, Russ & Stacey, who live in the Bay Area. San Luis Obispo (SLO for short) is about half way for us and for them. It was a rainy weekend – perfect for sitting inside the Inn’s big living room with a fire going in the fireplace nearly every waking moment. We all had ample time to visit and catch up. The last time we saw them was over three years ago and Russ made a delicious Thai soup for us at their home. This trip we attended a special event wine cave dinner at Eberle Winery. That was fun and tasty.

Russ got interested in cooking some years ago – he credits me with it because I got him hooked on reading Cook’s Illustrated. Russ is an engineer by education, so the magazine was a sure fit for his kind of interest in the chemistry of cooking. Back then he was a single guy and was game for anything I set him to in our kitchen. We laugh now, but risotto was kind of the in thing back then and I was so happy to set Russ up at the kitchen stove – stirring! Meanwhile, in the ensuing years, he married Stacey and then moved away. We’re still sad about the last part because we don’t get to see them very often! Now, Stacey does most of the day to day cooking for their family, but Russ has very eclectic tastes when it comes to kitchen equipment.  When Russ does cook, he goes all out. He was regaling me with stories about his new set of copper core All-Clad (oh, am I envious about that!), and his complete set of Shun knives.  And the 2nd green egg (a Japanese hibachi) he bought recently – that’s bigger than the original sized barbecue.

But his passion at the moment is about sous-vide cooking. That’s pronounced sooo-veed. In case you haven’t heard about it – this from wikipedia: it’s a method of cooking food sealed in airtight plastic bags in a water bath for a long time—72 hours is not unusual—at an accurately determined temperature much lower than normally used for cooking, typically around 60 °C or 140 °F. The intention is to maintain the integrity of ingredients. (And therefore it has better, fresher flavor.)

Russ didn’t bring the unit itself, but brought one of the cookbooks which had a lengthy explanation about how sous-vide works and why the food you eat is so extra tasty. To do the cooking you can start with a Food Saver (the food sealing home machine), which is what he did. But then he really got into it and decided to do it right and bought a VacMaster VP210C Dry Piston Pump Chamber Machine, Metallic’ target=_blank>chamber vacuum sealing machine. The Food Saver is great for dry-type foods, even fish or meat, but it doesn’t work well for foods in sauces, for instance. In the chamber vacuum, though, the pouched food sits upright and allows the pouch to be sealed without sucking out any of the sauces or fluid. And it removes all of the air from the food itself and from the pouch.

That now gets us to the focus of the pictures you see here. Several days earlier Russ bought some lovely summer fruit (cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon and another honeydew-type melon).

And he bought some limes. What you see in the packages and on the fruit is an ample sprinkling of lime zest. He didn’t use any of the juice – just the zest. And he chamber vacuumed all of the different fruits.

The top photo shows the cantaloupe still sealed up in the plastic. Once opened, he used his fancy Shun knives to cut the fruit into a variety of shapes.

Then there’s the honeydew. Cut up in different shapes too.

The watermelon, though. Oh my goodness, the watermelon was so delicious.

It’s hard to imagine eating watermelon (or any of this fruit) where some of the air has been sucked out of it. You don’t realize how much air there is in fresh fruit, but you can perhaps imagine the watermelon. Each piece of fruit lost about 25% or so of its size once the chamber vacuum had pulled out most of the air. That’s what gives the fruit a kind of translucence. So pretty!

There you can see the lovely compressed fruit being sliced.

Oh, was it ever delicious!

Russ made a salad for us of all the fruits (see picture at top) which came from the Thomas Keller sous-vide cookbook he brought along. He made a dressing of olive oil macerated with hot paprika. He added some lovely tiny onions (the recipe called for cippoline, but he wasn’t able to find any, so used boiling onions). Those were prepared sous-vide and added to the salad. We had fresh arugula around the edges, and some little slivers of nicoise olives. Oh my. Fabulous flavor.

I don’t know that I’m going to buy sous-vide equipment! It’s ferociously expensive. Russ promises me that next time we go to visit them he’ll fix us a complete sous-vide dinner. That should be interesting.

A year ago: French Hamburgers

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A few of my readers have been having problems downloading the pdf files I create for all of the recipes on my blog. I contract with a website called FileDen to store all of my files, and according to what they’ve told me, some bad folk out there managed to upload and store some malicious software on some part of FileDen’s servers. You can upload for free to FileDen. I have a premium (paid) account.

Anyway, these bad folk went about trying to infect websites and wherever else they could. My website is hosted someplace else and is not affected. And the pdf files that I have stored at FileDen are not affected. But because there ARE some malicious files somewhere on FileDen’s servers or have been, some of the antivirus software, and Google have put up warnings about not accessing anything at FileDen. I’ve emailed FileDen with a “trouble notice,” but my guess is they’re scrambling right now trying to fix things. No one has responded yet.

I have been able to access my FileDen files using Internet Explorer. But I can’t access them using Firefox. Your own antivirus software may be trying to block your access to FileDen as well.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do about this. Since I have links in every blog post I do, to move those 900+ files will require a gargantuan amount of work to re-direct all those links. I’ve been using FileDen since 2007 with relatively few problems, although my server and files were “down” for two weeks in January because they had a fire in the server storage facility where my files are stored.

For now, if you’re concerned about using FileDen, email me and I’ll be more than happy to email you back with the pdf. Those files, pdf’s, are not inherently dangerous – they’re more like a photo of a recipe. And all you do when you click on the link is VIEW a copy of the recipe and you ask your own printer to print it out. You aren’t downloading the file to your computer, you’re merely viewing it. They don’t contain any viruses. So, I apologize for the problem and will hope to figure out what I’m going to do about it sooner rather than later. . . thanks for your patience . . . carolyn t

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A couple of weeks ago my DH and I threw a dinner party for a large group of friends. On February 14th to be exact. There were 14 of us (7 couples), a larger group than we would normally invite to dinner, but it needed to be so. We asked each couple to bring a bottle of wine and I/we did the rest. My DH set the table (with some coaching about which mats, which dishes, etc.). We stretched out our dining table as much as possible and squeezed in all 14. Dave washed dishes off and on all day long. We had houseguests (not part of the 14) and Sue helped me in the kitchen – oh, did she ever help! She made both desserts and one of the vegetables. Sue and her husband Lynn have moved to Colorado, but were here in Southern California on vacation, visiting friends and attending one of the choir concerts we did that weekend.

We also asked each couple to bring pictures of their wedding and to tell some kind of fun or interesting story about their romance or nuptials. We laughed and laughed at some of the antics. It was very fun to see wedding pictures of each couple.

I created a very ambitious menu. Probably more ambitious than I should have. I’d intended to make a couple of the items a day or two ahead, but because of our choir concerts and rehearsals, I simply ran out of time. I ended up doing just one a few days ahead, so on the day, I was slammed with work. I managed to rest a couple of times with my feet up, but otherwise I was standing, prepping and fixing food all day long. In case you’d like to know what I served – I’m giving you the entire menu. All the items are on my blog, so you can click on over to each recipe if you’re interested. Those of you who are regular readers of my blog will recognize all of these recipes – they’ve all appeared on the blog within the last year, and most within the last 3 months.

Muhummara, the red bell pepper and walnut dip that goes so well with pita chips, kalamata olives, marinated artichoke hearts and some cubes of Feta.

Green Bean and Garlic Frittata, what looks like a veggie, is served as an appetizer, cut into serving-sized squares on plates with a fork. It’s topped with Parmesan and paprika.

Tuscan Sangria – an extra-flavorful version made with red wine, Tuaca, Limoncello, red vermouth and some 7-up.

Grilled Rack of Pork with Rosemary, Garlic and Sage – oh, so delicious with fresh rosemary, dried sage and garlic patted all over it. It was grilled on the barbecue for about an hour before cutting into ample servings with a bone to chew on.

Chunky Cider Applesauce (with walnuts) – a really tasty side to go with pork. It has a smidgen of heavy cream in it which adds some lovely rich undertones, and toasted walnuts are sprinkled in at the last minute. This was the dish I made several days ahead.

Corn, Sugar Snap Peas and Bacon Sauté – I’ve served this 3-4 times in recent weeks, it’s so darned good. Frozen corn, fresh sugar snaps, bacon. What’s there not to like about that?

Sweet Potato Gratin – an unbelievably delicious (and rich) side dish. The flavor is beyond good, and next time I make it I’ll use half and half instead of cream. Because I’d like to enjoy this more than once every 5 years!

Orange and Belgian Endive Salad with Maple Chipotle Vinaigrette – a really attractive salad with a bit of sweet (orange slices), spice and smoke (from the chipotle chiles in the vinaigrette) and made so pretty with the Belgian endive leaves.

DESSERT – Very few of my dessert recipes make enough to serve 14 or more people. So I made two – a chocolate one to satisfy the chocoholic and Valentine-traditional in our group, and one without. Both delicious. As it turned out, everyone wanted to taste a little bit of both, so I served mini-slices of each one with some whipped cream on top.

Countess Toulouse-Lautrec’s French Chocolate Cake – an ultra-rich chocolate cake that almost tastes more like cheesecake. Yet it isn’t one, so it’s hard to describe the texture. Very delicious.

Ginger Apple Cake Torte – my favorite, new go-to dessert. I make this every opportunity I can because it’s so darned tasty. It’s reminiscent of gingerbread, and has an apple layer in the middle, walnuts on top, and a crispy turbinado sugar topping.

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The middle of winter often provides us with the most stunning of sunsets. That is a view from our backyard looking out to the ocean, 15 miles off. In the far distance, those hills way out there, are Catalina Island, which are 25 miles from the coastline. The pale color between the dark land and the hills is actually the ocean. It’s only on rare occasions when we can actually SEE the ocean.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of cooking going on in our house because I’ve been down with a really awful cold (upper respiratory infection). I seem to get one of these every single year. As I write this, I’ve been sick for 7 days. That’s in down. Sick. Three of those days I lived in my pajamas, I was so sick. As I write this, I think I’ve begun to turn a corner, so I’ll be back in the kitchen soon. Actually I did walk out to the edge of our back patio to take that picture the other night. We had been having a very balmy summer-like few days (temps in the 70’s).

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