Lately I’ve been on a roll with salsas. There’s no question, I enjoy salsa of most varieties – except canned and ready-made grocery store types. We have one independent market near us, Pacific Ranch Market, which makes fabulous homemade salsa every day. Usually we rely on theirs – it’s so good – and already prepared.

But this time, we were going out for the evening on a Duffy Boat. You know of these things? Cute little electric-powered boats that hold oh, 8-12 people mostly. The driver sits in the rear seat and everybody else kind of sits around the edges. This one had clear plastic windows, but the cool evening breeze flowed in the front as we maneuvered all around Newport Harbor for two hours. From the picture at the right, you can see Cherrie and Joan, as we were cruisin’ and talkin’. We had lots of fun. My DH drove the boat most of the time – as he was the most experienced on the water, since he’s owned a sailboat since he was 7. There were eight of us – I may have mentioned this group before – we call ourselves the HGG – Healthy Gourmet Group. Initially we were eating really, truly, healthy food, but the group decided to think this again – so we try to choose lower-fat ingredients if we can. If we can’t, well, so be it. But we still call ourselves HGG anyway.

I was the front-man on this – I made the arrangements – so I suggested we bring heavy appetizers or finger food. The menu came together so fast I couldn’t believe it. Cherrie said she’d make some wraps (both turkey and ham). Joan would bring skewers of fresh fruit. I’d make some other kind of hearty appetizer, and Sue would bring dessert (brownies with Chambord in them) and coffee. Each couple brought a bottle of wine (one white, three reds). We tootled around the harbor for two hours, ate good food, drank good wine, and had hilarious fun talking.

Going through my appetizer repertoire (that I haven’t already blogged about, that is) I spotted this recipe for avocado and shrimp salsa. Very hearty. And absolutely delicious. I have no recollection where this recipe came from, but I’ve altered so much over the years that it no longer resembles the original version anyway. So it’s as good as “my” recipe. And note, there’s not a single bit of oil or fat in this except what little natural fat there is in some foods, provided by Mother Nature.
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Here in California, eggplant can always be found, year around, at our local markets. Probably because of our close proximity to Mexico, where the bulk of the eggplant crops are raised. Several states in the U.S. also grow it, but it’s a minor crop. The information here comes from Russ Parsons’ book, How to Pick a Peach, a definitive tome all about the more popular fruits and vegetables we eat here. I found the book so fascinating, I’m sharing chapters of it with you when I have time to write it up.

Lots of people apparently think eggplant is bitter; hence it’s not an overly popular vegetable. Parsons debunks that – says eggplant isn’t bitter. I’d agree. Technically, it’s a fruit. Did you know that? I didn’t.

What I learned:

• The sponge-like texture of its pulp will absorb whatever you cook with it, whether it’s oil, garlic, broth, or?

• Salting eggplant does nothing to remove any bitterness (which really isn’t there, but people think it is), but it does pull water out of the fruit, collapsing the cells, which then absorb oil more easily during cooking.

• It’s a myth that salting will prevent the eggplant from absorbing as much oil in frying.

• There are over 56 varieties of eggplant out there, and its origin is in Burma. It’s a staple food in India, China, Southeast Asia, much of Africa and the Mediterranean.

• Eggplants vary in how thick their skin is and how seedy they are (the big globe ones are the seediest), and they vary in the exact texture of the flesh.

How to choose them:

• They’re fragile – they bruise easily.

• Buy them heavy for their size, and the skin should be taut and almost bulging.

• Eggplant HATE cold. They should NOT be stored at lower than 45 degrees F (most refrigerators are between 35-40 degrees).

• Keep them as dry as possible (moisture will cause water damage) – ideally put them in a plastic bag with a paper towel. They’ll keep up to a week that way.

• Eggplant can be peeled or not. And only salt it if you’re going to FRY it.

Russ Parsons included four recipes in his book: Smoky Eggplant Bruschetta, Silky Eggplant Salad (a steamed version that he says produces a really smooth flesh), and Grilled Eggplant with Walnut Cilantro Pesto. He also details a quick grill version: cut the eggplant lengthwise into 1/2-inch thick slices. Brush both sides with garlic-flavored oil and continue brushing during the cooking. Grill just until tender – trying not to char it. When done, transfer to a heated platter and as its subsequent slices are done, stack them on top of one another.

I’ve posted about eggplant a few times here, notably one of my very favorite appetizers: Layered Hummus and Eggplant. And a few months ago I posted a recipe for a Sweet, Sour & Spicy Eggplant.

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Eating good-old ground beef isn’t something we do very often anymore. Just because it’s higher in fat, I guess. I grew up eating beef – ground, chopped, roasts, stews, liver – often. My Dad didn’t like chicken, turkey or lamb. So we ate a lot of beef and pork. When we’d go out to dinner my mother and I would frequently order chicken. We also ate almost no fish. Back then (this was in the late 1940’s and 50’s) you couldn’t buy fresh fish in the markets. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Tuna was available in cans, and shrimp, I think. And here, I grew up in San Diego which has a very large Portuguese population – many of them were deep sea fishermen by trade. But they caught tuna – for canning. That was it. Then. How things have changed!

The story of my dad’s chicken aversion is a sad but interesting one. Growing up, my dad was in charge of the farm chickens. It was part of his chores, to clean out the coop, gather the eggs, feed them, water them, etc. And he kind of got attached to the young rooster. His name was Sammy. My dad thought Sammy was very bright, as chickens go. And Sammy would come to my dad whenever he went into the coop. Anyway, my dad was about 10-11 years old at the time, his parents were helping out a man who needed work. If he’d do some chores around the barn, he could eat dinner with the family at the end of the day. The man had finished his chores and came to the house and asked the missus (my dad’s mother, Bessie) if there was anything else he could do. She said yes, go get one of the chickens and kill it, remove the innards, the feathers, etc. and she’d be fixing it for dinner. So, the worker went out to the chicken coop and killed and dressed a chicken. The family sat down to dinner and everybody was marveling at the delicious chicken. The day worker said, “you know, it was the funniest thing, when I went into the coop, this chicken just came right up to me, so I just killed him then and there!” My dad started to gag. Uh, yes, the worker had killed my dad’s pet rooster, Sammy. And from that day on, my dad could barely eat chicken. As a kid, the thought that he’d already swallowed some of Sammy’s flesh was abhorent. Bessie felt terrible about what had happened – she’d forgotten to tell the man not to kill the young rooster! Even telling that story in his 70’s, my dad would get teary. So, from that day forward whenever chicken was served, if it was all there was, my dad might eat a bite, but that was it. It just wouldn’t go down. And my mother never served chicken unless my dad was away on a business trip.

Well, there, another bit of trivia about my family. So, back to ground beef. I think I’ve mentioned it here before that during the 1960’s and 70’s, when I was a young woman, a housewife, ground beef was a real weekly staple. I made ground beef casseroles by the dozens. When I was young, my mother used to make tamale pie every couple of weeks. My dad particularly loved that. And a half a pound of ground beef could feed our family for at least two dinners.

This recipe is one I found in Sunset magazine, back in the 1970’s, based on the age of the lined paper I typed it on. Over the years I’ve changed it just a little bit – some different proportions of things, but the basic recipe hasn’t changed much, so all the credit goes to the magazine. It’s the onions that make this. Unfortunately, you can’t make this dinner in 30 minutes, quite. The onions alone take 20-25 all by themselves.

First you slice up the onions. The recipe calls for one onion apiece, which is about right. You sauté them in some oil and butter and set them aside. You form normal ½-inch thick beef burgers, dip them in some flour, then you sauté the burgers in the same pan – you want them to still be pink in the middle if possible. Once they’re done, you remove them and cook up the sauce (a bit of cream and Worcestershire sauce). You pile the onions on the burger and drizzle some of the sauce on top. My DH just about licked the plate. That’s always a good sign. I hadn’t made this in probably 25 or more years. They’re really quite easy. So if you’re tired of chicken, and enjoy ground beef in many guises, this might be a new version for you.
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Here it is, toward the end of summer, and after the nice Asian-influenced dinner the other night, I wanted to serve something with a slight Asian flavor. Ginger ice cream came to mind. Immediately I went to my favorite ice cream cookbook – The Perfect Scoop, by David Liebovitz. If you’re interested in other food blogs and want to read a very entertaining one, you might check out David’s blog. He’s an American, worked for some years at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ famous restaurant in Berkeley, California. Then he moved to Paris, and it’s from his small apartment there that he wrote this most recent ice cream cookbook.

This ice cream has more cooking steps than many – certainly more than my very favorite lemon velvet ice cream that I make now and then. And it took longer to make everything than I’d hoped. But in the big picture, it was worth the effort, to get that very smooth and subtle ginger flavor without adding the straight stuff into the custard.

After performing all the steps (blanching the ginger, steeping it in milk, thickening it up with the egg yolks to make a custard, chilling it in an ice bath, then freezing it in the ice cream machine) I thought it needed just another little boost of ginger flavor. It was not in Liebovitz’ recipe, but I added crystallized ginger to the finished product. Providing the crystallized ginger is minced into itty, bitty pieces, it freezes nicely, providing a little ginger burst. I also substituted some of Trader Joe’s fat-free half and half for the milk and cream. Not only does it lower the richness, but it makes the scooping of the hard-frozen ice cream easier. There must be something in that product that makes a softer finished product. I don’t know what it is, but every time I do that, it’s easier to scoop. Home made ice cream has that fault – if you will – that with using the pure, unadulterated cream and milk, when it’s frozen, it’s f-r-o-z-e-n. Hard. Normally I have to leave the container out for 10 minutes or so to even begin to scoop a serving.

When you serve this, don’t overwhelm it with other prominent flavors (like a chocolate chip cookie) as the ginger flavor really is very subtle. You want to savor it. Enjoy.
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When I think South Seas, I think Caribbean, not Asia. And yet, this salsa is titled South Seas. Maybe Hugh Carpenter, the creator of this recipe, was thinking more of South China Seas. That would be more logical since it contains ingredients that might be more Vietnamese or Thai-like. But, whatever it is, I was blown away by its flavor. I liked it a lot. It’s very similar to a traditional Mexican salsa, but it has some elusive tastes (probably the fish sauce, the basil) that blend in beautifully with the regular ingredients (tomatoes, onions, cilantro, garlic, lime juice). Our son said I should have served this with rice crackers (do they make rice chips?). But I had tortilla chips. And hey, we’re Southern California. We can serve this with corn-based chips! That’s fusion, right?

My daughter Dana was helping in the kitchen, so I assigned her this task. It came together quickly, especially if you have an Alligator Chopper to mince the tomatoes. But it can be made in the food processor easily enough too. I’ll be making this again, to go along with the right meal. The recipe comes from Hugh Carpenter’s book Chopstix – his take on quick Asian food. If you aren’t enamored with fish sauce, substitute soy sauce. I liked the fish sauce in it. When you smell bottled fish sauce, it’s nothing short of awful. But I’ve learned over the years that it’s a necessity for several Asian cuisines, and it pops up now and then in other recipe places. So I always keep it on hand. I recently bought my second bottle of it – it’s taken me over 15 years to use up the first bottle, so you can see I don’t use it all that often. And, you never use very much of it anyway.
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Now don’t get all squirrely on me – some of you may read that title and think – oh no – that sounds awful! Not so. This is actually a cold side dish with an Asian influence. It’s healthy (lots of spinach) and can stand in as a pasta or a salad. So, don’t just delete this and move on. Read through and at least see what’s in this!

It had been some years since I’d made this salad. Well, actually, the dish is supposed to be a hot side, but with ribs and a green salad on a warm summer evening, I wanted a cold salad. So I took a recipe I’ve made before, adapted it a bit and made it a cold dish. Hugh Carpenter is a master of combining Asian condiments and making them into deliciousness for salads or side dishes. I perused my pantry to make sure I had the necessities (spaghetti, pine nuts, garlic, basil, cream and hot chili sauce). Onto my grocery list went the rest: fresh spinach, chives, and cilantro. My daughter, Dana, made this for me, for a family dinner the other night.

This recipe comes from Hugh Carpenter’s book Pacific Flavors, his first cookbook. He was on the cooking school circuit, as I recall, and I bought the book at one class he taught in Pasadena in 1988. Everything he prepared in the cooking class was outstanding. I’ve mentioned him before in some of my recipes – particularly the New Wave Garlic Bread (relatively traditional garlic bread but with an Asian twist), the fabulous Baby Back Ribs with Peanut Butter Slather (I mean, that explains it all, doesn’t it?), another great side dish of his called Tex-Mex Jicama Salad. And then, my all-time favorite Carpenter dish, the Grilled Ribeyes with Amazing Glaze. And I just blogged about the other pork ribs, the All-Star Asian Ribs. So, I suppose you could say I’m a fan of Hugh Carpenter’s cooking style. I own three of his cookbooks – the one mentioned here, also Hot Barbecue (a more recent one) and Chopstix (his take on “quick” Asian food). All of his dishes, though, are untraditional Asian. They’re Pan-Asian, or Pan-Californian, or Fusion. Whatever you want to call it. He uses all the different condiments and spices from multiple Asian cuisines and combines them into fresh foods with a California kind of flair.

So, this dish . . . it’s nothing but cold noodles tossed with a garlicky spinach sauce. The spinach is whirred (liquified) in the food processor along with a few other ingredients and poured over the noodles before serving with a generous amount of toasted pine nuts on top. That’s it. All of it can be done ahead except combining the noodles and the sauce. If you like a hint of Asia and want something a tad different, this is your ticket.
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Knowing that we’d have family around this past weekend, I knew I needed some more cookies in the freezer. And, knowing that the grandchildren coming to visit vote for peanut butter as their number one favorite cookie type, I combined a bit of their likes, with a bit of mine.

Anna, over at Cookie Madness, as I’ve mentioned before, makes oodles of cookies. And I mean oodles. But when she wrote up this one recently, and mentioned that it is reminiscent of peanut butter cookies from long ago, they appealed to me. AND, they’re a refrigerator cookie. Even better. Mix it up and chill.

That’s exactly what I did – I mixed up the dough – a very soft dough – slathered the melted chocolate on the inside of the flat rectangle of dough – rolled it up and chilled it. Then later that day I took them to our kids’ house locally and baked them up for dessert that evening.

There is nothing difficult about these cookies – they’d make great ones for Christmas, even – although I found the dough to be quite soft. A little hard to handle. It required more flour than I wanted to add to the board, but there was no hope of rolling it up unless I did. It was a very humid day, so perhaps that was the reason why. Next time I may add a tablespoon or two of extra flour to the cookie batter. And then, I used chocolate chips. I think that might have been a mistake. Nestle’s chocolate chips do contain some minor amount of wax or some substance that discourages melting in cookies. So when I sliced these (after they’d chilled for several hours), it took some wrist action to slice through the cold chocolate. And it sometimes roughed up the cookies. So that’s why my cookies pictured are kind of oblong. I couldn’t keep them in a circle. But none of those things were any “nevermind” when it came to the taste. I thought they tasted like Reese’s peanut butter cups in a cookie. The grandchildren and family all ranked them as wonderful. Just what a cookie-bakin’ Grandma wants to hear!
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Probably like many of you, we had lots of family around over the Labor Day Weekend. Our kids & grandkids drove down from Northern California, and our kids and grandson who live near us were around too. On one night I made (with help from lots of family, thank you, thank you) a big California Asian dinner. We had some Asian salsa that I’ll blog about. We had Asian Baby Back Ribs (this recipe), a Jade Noodle salad that’s sauced with pureed spinach and a bunch of other Asian ingredients. We had a big green salad that wasn’t all that Asian – just added some Cara Cara orange segments to it and sugar snap peas. And then I made Ginger Ice Cream to round off the meal. In coming days you’ll read about all but the salad.

The star of the meal was the ribs. Since we’d done American BBQ style food recently for all these family members, I wanted to do something different. Hugh Carpenter has never failed me with his Asian-inspired items. So I went to his book titled Hot Barbecue and found these ribs with an Asian barbecue sauce. That does not mean teriyaki. Not one bit teriyaki. You could buy that at the grocery store. Not for me. All of our ribs weren’t baby backs (more tender), so we had ribs of all sizes.

The sauce was quite simple – providing you have the ingredients. I did – but, didn’t realize I was short on hoisin sauce. So, I added some bottled chili sauce instead. Maybe not quite the same, but good enough. This is very garlicky. I suppose if you don’t like garlic you could eliminate it, but it would lose a lot of its character depth by doing so. To feed four people, it calls for 10 cloves of garlic. I tried to about 1 ½ times the recipe, and I used about 12 cloves.

The trick to ribs, I think, is to have the heat high enough to cook, but not so high it burns. The Asian ingredients in this sauce do have some sugar in them, so put that with heat and you’ll get caramelization – or burn if it’s overdone. A word to the wise, that’s all. Grill the ribs until the meat starts to pull away from the bone. If it’s not doing that, continue grilling/baking/smoking. The recipe below includes directions for all three methods.
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What’s that, you ask? A galette? Pronounced gal-LET. It’s a French term with more than one meaning (it could contain a savory filling, or be a buckwheat crepe, actually), but in this case it’s just a rustic piecrust, not necessarily housed in a pie tin, but merely placed on a sheet and the filling placed in the center with the crust pulled up loosely around the edges.

Now, it’s confession time here. I’ve never been very good at pie crusts. I’m still not. Even by my mother’s side, I couldn’t seem to wield the right kind of pressure on the rolling pin to make the perfectly flaky crusts my mother would turn out with Crisco and ice water. And this time, I forgot to read the instructions at a critical point. Read on. Part of the crust was torn and a good part of the juice seeped out before I’d even put it in the oven). At the point when the crust cracked and the juice began to ooze, I had a choice. I could have started over, but the fruit was already IN the crust, for goodness’ sake. How could I? So, I just kept moving it on over to the paella pan I used (good thing there were edges, since that sugary ooze oozed some more as it baked).

The verdict? OMGosh. It was scrumptious. Absolutely scrumptious. Even with the ooze in the pan. Even with the filling having leaked out all of its juice (the fruit seemed to give up some more, since it was certainly moist). Even with the mess it left in the pan.

So, let me tell you all about this galette. What got me started was reading Rose Levy Beranbaum’s blog last week about her peach galette. I saw the photo of it (and all the lovely stages she went through to get it perfect – she is a far better crust-maker than I am) and since I had four gorgeously ripe peaches awaiting something, I decided to make this. Now Rose is a paramount baker. She’s written several cookbooks, so I’ve learned to trust her.

You could use any old pie crust for this, I suppose, but Rose used her cream cheese one. Rose’s Perfect Flaky & Tender Cream Cheese Pie Crust. Go there and you can see all the lovely photos, and the recipe appearing in strict columns by ounces and grams. With a very long bit of instruction.

First you freeze the dry ingredients (yes, really). And you freeze the butter in small cubes (yes, really). When they combine in the food processor it comes together nicely, but in crumbles. At least I was doing well up to that point. You put the dough into a plastic bag, seal it, then kind of mash it together into a disc. That gets refrigerated for awhile. Okay so far. Now came my test of skill. Ideally you have a large round pastry cloth you use to roll out such pastry. I don’t. So I used the granite countertop instead, dusted with ample flour. I rolled, and turned, sprinkled more flour, etc. You know, the usual drill. I thought I was doing fine. Was quite pleased with myself. (Reminder to self: don’t get cocky!)

Meanwhile you’ve peeled and sliced the peaches and allowed them to drain (juice saved) in a colander with the sugar and lemon juice. All that juice gets reduced by half. I didn’t have as much juice as Rose indicated I would, but I carefully simmered it until it was reduced and poured it into the peaches and poured it onto the nearly completed piecrust. Quick-like you bring the edges up around the fruit and try to sort-of pleat them into nice looking folds if you can. My problem was I was supposed to put the crust into the tin BEFORE I added the filling. My usual difficulty – I didn’t read the recipe at that point. As I mentioned, I’d decided to use my big paella pan (she calls for a pizza pan with sides), knowing that I might have a peach-leak. I used flour-sprinkled spatulas to try to lift. Next time I’ll do it right.

Rose recommends chilling the completed pastry for half an hour before baking, but since I already had an oozy mess, I decided to go ahead and bake it then and there. It took exactly 40 minutes, as her recipe indicated. I let it cool for about 30 minutes and served us a slice, with some vanilla ice cream. There was nothing but quiet as we both savored the bites. Absolutely stupendous. The cream cheese pie crust is flakier. more tender. More tasty. And it was not soggy one bit, either, despite my peach-leaks. Even the next DAY, and the day after that, the bottom crust was still flaky and tender. No sogginess. So, I’d highly recommend this recipe. I will say, I made a regular recipe of the dough (she recommends a 1 ½ times recipe for 3 pounds of peaches. I had 2 ¼ pounds of peaches, so thought the single recipe would work. It did, and I didn’t roll the pastry as thin as Rose did, I don’t believe. Have peaches? Make galette! And yes, I’ll be making this again, but carefully read the instructions first!
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I am such a happy camper when we’re entertaining a group and someone offers to bring something. It’s always such a big boon to the hostess. And in this case our friends Penny & Scott brought just the most delicious appetizer. I can’t believe I’d never had this – as Mediterranean as it is, and since I simply l-o-v-e Feta cheese with just about anything. When Penny unveiled it from her basket, it just looked so beautiful – the bright red tomatoes with little squiggles of basil scattered all over. And when you scrape a bit onto a toasted pita chip? Sublime. Really. Too many of my recipes are labor intensive. This one isn’t, yet it’s scrumptious. You will want to make this again and again, especially when you have good tomatoes like we do now.

There are times when I look at a recipe – a simple recipe – and think there just aren’t enough ingredients in this to make it good. Know what I mean when I say that? I enjoy complex flavors, and I have a varied palate. And yet, the freshest of ingredients, simply prepared, are sometimes just the best. This will become a regular. Penny got this from Sandy. So, thanks to both for this great new recipe.
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