If you’re a foodie, and have an interest in France (and French cooking), you’d likely enjoy reading Patricia & Walter Wells’ new memoir, We’ve Always Had Paris . . . and Provence: A Scrapbook of our Life in France. Now in their 60’s, the Wells have lead a charmed life, in my opinion. Not without a lot of hard work, however. They’ve now been there for over 30 years. Both from journalistic backgrounds (New York Times), they decided to take a risk and move to Paris. Their story doesn’t quite fit the romanticized vision of such a move – I assumed they lived high, in the toniest of digs. But, the reality was a small rented apartment, with minimal space and furniture. However, they managed that way for years and years. Meanwhile, Walter worked hard at the IHT (Int’l Herald Tribune) and Patricia was eventually hired by the New York Times to write a column about Paris/France from a food point of view. Both of them are “driven,” to keep working, to improve, to learn, to grow, but it’s all fueled by their utter love of life.

When exactly Patricia arrived on my foodie radar, I don’t recall, but it was a long time ago. She used to free lance articles in Gourmet, I believe, so I knew Patricia was linked to Paris somehow. I read her first Bistro Cooking cookbook, published after she’d lived in Paris for some years. Last year I bought Vegetable Harvest, a lovely book of every imaginable vegetable recipe. With this newest book, though, Patricia and Walter trade off telling the story of their lives, their jobs, learning French, cooking in their small Parisian apartment kitchen, their neighbors, the telephone system, and a lot about restaurants. The difference with them vs. us, the average joe, is that Patricia WAS on an expense account much of the time, so they were able to eat at some of the finest restaurants in that city, night after night, for free. I suppose, given those circumstances, when I might cook at home it would likely be simple food.

Eventually they bought an apartment and there were interesting tidbits about the renovation, which took nearly a year. Then they bought a farmhouse in Provence, and began going from one to the other place nearly every weekend. The Wells know/knew some very impressive people, (like Paul Bocuse, Joel Rubichon, Julia Child, even James Beard), but entertained them with relatively simple food when they visited in Provence. Patricia has a real willingness (and a competitive nature) to learn and make some very difficult food (more than I do, for sure). They raise a varied garden at their Provencal home. Eventually Patricia rented a Paris loft too and outfitted it as an office and cooking school. I’ve always thought it would be great fun to take a class from her. However, her Provence classes are $5,000 for 3 ½ days, not including lodging. Her entire cooking classes schedule for 2009 is full, as of this writing anyway.

With each chapter there are one or two recipes. Sometimes they were related to the chapter subject, or a recipe received from a local chef. The recipes are not particularly complicated except for the ones around foix gras. A few looked interesting: peach wine (homemade), dried cranberry and apricot bread, lemon chicken and scrambled eggs with black truffles. I didn’t buy the book for her recipes, though, but for the charming stories of their lives in France. They love it there and it shows. Highly recommended read.

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Well, no, Martha wasn’t there. But one of her big fans was the hostess, who prepared a dinner using four of Martha’s highlighted recipes from the Martha Stewart’s Living July ’08 issue. Kathleen invited us to her home for dinner, and we had such a fun evening. We had wine (of course) and I helped just a little bit in the kitchen with the aioli sauce. Other than that, Kathleen had done all the work ahead.

Each magazine always includes a four-recipe perforated card in the issue; color pictures on one side, recipes on the back. The recipes are designed to go together to make a full meal. Here’s the delicious menu. Click on each title to link to Martha’s website for the recipes:

Grilled Lamb Shoulder Chops with Herb Aioli

The lamb shoulder chops were grilled briefly (perfectly) and served with the cold herb aioli on the side which took but a couple of minutes to whiz up in the food processor. It was delicious – the hot meat and the cold sauce were great together since it was a warm evening.

Couscous Salad with Cherry Tomatoes

Israeli couscous is different than ordinary (fine-grained) couscous. The Israeli version is more like the size of the large round tapioca grains. Traditional couscous is kind of irregularly shaped, but the Israeli are perfectly honed little globes. They make for a very pretty bowl. This is prepared just before serving (it can sit at room temp for awhile, so the recipe says). And this is an extremely low fat dish – only one tablespoon of oil for the entire salad for four people.

Minted Watermelon Salad

In Martha’s version, you use ricotta salata cheese. Kathleen couldn’t find it, so she used feta instead, which was wonderful. I’d never have thought to pair watermelon with feta. It was delicious, especially with the fresh mint too. I’d probably use more mint, but then I like the stuff in lots of things.

Raspberry and Lemon Sorbet Floats

Kathleen couldn’t find sorbet, so she used sherbet instead. These were just delicious with Vernors ginger ale poured over the sherbet. I mean it – so easy – and so refreshing on a hot summer’s night. She served them in brightly colored glasses, and we just sipped away. I looked up some info about Vernors – they claim to be the first American soft drink. The story is interesting – James Vernor went off to fight in the Civil War, leaving behind an oak cask in the pharmacy where he worked. It was filled with ginger, vanilla and spices. When he returned 4 years later, the cask was still there and ginger ale was born. And even more interesting to me, was that from 1866 to 1991 Vernors ginger ale was sweetened with stevia, but when stevia was banned by the FDA in 1991, they began using corn syrup. An even more obscure factlet, being the English nut that I am, is that in 1950 the company decided to drop the apostrophe from Vernor’s.

Thanks, Kathleen, for a very tasty Martha dinner and an altogether lovely evening.

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What fun . . . as I was reading through my July issue of Bon Appetit, there was a recipe for choc chip cookies (CCC’s) with tart cherries AND Cherry Heering. What a combo, I thought! Took less than 24 hours for me to decide I had to try it. As luck would have it, though, I didn’t have (and didn’t want to use) white choc chips, so I substituted some macadamia nuts instead. My cherries also weren’t the tart type, so I reduced the sugar by a little instead. My bottle of Cherry Heering is at least 20 years old, but it tastes just fine, thank you.

On my choc chip cookie rating scale, this one ranks right up there. If Tollhouse cookies are a 10, this one might be an 8.5 at least. They’re already in the freezer. The recipe isn’t even up on epicurious yet, so can’t provide a link.
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Over the year+ I’ve been doing this-here blog, I’ve learned a lot. Not only about how to run a website (blog), about software that runs stuff behind the scenes (I know, you’re likely not interested in that part, are you?), but also a lot about food. No, I don’t have a culinary degree (when I went to college I didn’t know I’d be so interested in cooking and the culinary arts as an adult), but over the years my head has filled with a whole lot of varied knowledge about food and cooking. My daughter Dana and two of my friends phone me every now and then to ask questions. Usually it’s about a cooking technique (Can I freeze raw artichokes? Answer no, only cooked ones. Can I freeze heavy cream? Answer yes, but it may separate once it defrosts and doesn’t seem to whip up very well, so basically no. Do you use raw egg yolks – like in Caesar dressing? Answer yes, I do, as long as the eggs have come from a grocery store where I know they’ve kept them refrigerated.) I don’t always know the answer. Thank goodness for the internet. It’s such an huge mass of information. The only problem is you don’t really know what’s true and what isn’t. You need to search several sites to see if you get a consensus. Or refer to some reliable sources. Even Wikipedia, a site I refer to often, isn’t always correct, so I’ve read. It’s only as reliable as the sources from which THEY got the information.

The problem is: I have a curious mind. I like to understand the “why” of things. Which is the reason I often refer to Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking. He’s more like a chemist, but he loves cooking and everything related to food. My cousin Gary gave me the book for Christmas one year, and it’s been a great source of food chemistry fact and lore. McGee debunks the lore part and gives you a lot of info (maybe more than some people want to know) about food chemistry. I’m fascinated by it. It is written for the home cook, but it’s almost like a textbook – fairly heavy reading even for someone interested in food from the get-go.

So, today we’re talking about Steak Diane. When I went online to look up about Steak Diane, I found differing information. Elise, a blogger I read regularly, had an entry awhile back about Steak Diane in which she says that the name Diane comes from Diana, the Greek goddess of the hunt. Yet, when I went to the Practically Edible website it says Steak Diane has nothing whatsoever to do with Diana (the goddess) because there are no hunted animals (like venison) involved. I don’t know who’s right, and mostly it doesn’t matter. All we really care about here is whether the sauce on the steak is GOOD. Or not. I hereby proclaim it’s good. And not hard. Your guests will be impressed, I guarantee you. Be sure to serve these steaks with some kind of comfort carb (Monterey Scalloped Potatoes, plain mashed potatoes or buttered rice or noodles) as you’ll want to slick up every morsel of this sauce. I’ve changed the recipe to serve 8, not 4, meaning each person will eat a half of a 1 1/2 inch thick New York steak.
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I’m a regular reader of the Brilynn from Jumbo Empanadas. And I’ve tried several of her recipes over the year I’ve been monitoring her blog. So when this recipe popped up the other day my taste buds went into zing mode.

Probably about 20 years ago my DH and I and our good friends Bud & Cherrie used to go to San Diego on an occasional Saturday and have a wonderful wine tasting lunch at the Wine Sellar and Brasserie.  You can go for just the wine tasting, but for a nominal fee, you can have their pre-set light lunch (very gourmet, I might add) to accompany it.

Anyway, at one of those tastings, the dessert was home made vanilla ice cream with strawberries, balsamic vinegar and cracked black pepper. Yes, you read that right. Since then I’ve seen it served at other places, but at the time my taste buds just went into overdrive. It was about the cracked pepper, but the combination of strawberries and balsamic vinegar is simply a match made in heaven.

You can see why, then, the Jumbo Empanadas’ recipe title put me into strawberry-balsamic nirvana. Just had to try it. And since strawberries are definitely on the wane here, I needed to do it right NOW if I was going to do it this season! My kitchen freezer is nearly chock-a-block full, but I just had to find room somehow. Even if I had to defrost something else to make room. I’m embarrassed to tell you how big this freezer is and it’s absolutely full to the brim.

The idea of roasting the strawberries with the balsamic seems like such a novel idea, and makes this luscious juicy mash of fruit and juice. And you can get yourself a little spoon to slick up the very last little droplets around the pan. It’s that good.

And don’t forget to reserve a bit of the fruit to drizzle on the top of the ice cream when it’s served. That’s a really nice touch. The taste: oh my goodness. Rich. Sweet. Delicious. Over the top. Fabulous. Wanna have it again SOON!
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Doesn’t everybody need one more recipe for preparing zucchini? I really like the stuff, and this recipe was so easy to make and my DH nearly licked the pan. I’m sorry I didn’t buy more zucchini so I’d have leftovers. The recipe that gave me the idea was from a 2003 issue of Gourmet magazine. But I doctored it up some (adding thyme, lemon juice, Italian parsley and fresh mint the second time), so I suppose it’s really my own recipe now. My DH said next time I should add even more lemon juice. Guess that could be at your own discretion. In any case, I liked this a LOT and will definitely make it again. I have an Oxo brand mandoline and wrote up a post some time back about how much I like the thing (besides the fact that it was only $70 rather than $250 for the fancy French models). I set the dial for 1/8 thick and sliced away. It was done in no time.

The only caution: don’t overload the sauté pan. Reason: because the slices are thin and a bit more awkward to turn (not like using a spoon to just stir it around) the ones at the bottom would get done too quickly and the slices on top would still be mostly raw. Use tongs and a spatula to turn them over about every 30-45 seconds. If you’re in a rush, do two pans at the same time. When the zucchini is still raw, they’re kind of like thin planks and it’s just a bit more time consuming to rotate and turn, that’s all. I made these again last night for guests – I used a combination of zucchini and yellow crookneck squash – and added the mint to the mixture, which was very nice and eliminated the zest. This recipe (and variations of it) will become a regular member of my veggie repertoire.
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Isn’t this thing cute? It belonged to my mother, and is one of the few things that I kept from my mother’s kitchen stuff. It’s a fairly flimsy chopper for walnuts. It won’t chop almonds or hazelnuts, or brazil nuts (because they’re too hard) but it will cut walnuts and pecans. You just pile a few into the top and turn the crank. Most likely the blades on this are getting dull, because it’s not exactly easy to do. And I question sometimes using it, that the flimsy arm will break off. I use it rarely because it seems so easy to just use a big chef’s knife and chop. But this little gadget brings back memories of when I was a young thing and helped my mother in the kitchen. Chopping nuts was a job she could give me to do – with this little contraption rather than using a big knife, or stirring a hot pot. I’m not sure why my mother even kept it, but she did, even when they moved into a retirement home and had a miniscule kitchen hardly worthy of the title of “kitchen.” So I keep it and use it occasionally. The poor thing has chipping paint, the decal is still visible (kind of corny, but typical of designs of the day) and the blades, well they’re over the hill. But it whelms me with nostalgia nevertheless. Do any of you have one of these?

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There are still these few recipes to post from the luncheon tea my friend Cherrie and I did a couple of weeks ago. All of these fillings are delicious – I can personally attest. I’m including three recipes, although we only prepared two of them (actually Cherrie made these). But I’m not likely to be posting recipes from another tea anytime soon, so I’ll give you the additional recipe now. Two are for chicken salad, and the other is a buttery ham mousse. Both chicken ones can be made the day before – the ham must be made within an hour or so of your tea, but it’s not difficult in the least.

HAM MOUSSE: this recipe came from Sarah at Our House South County Cooking School (now closed). The class was all about serving a tea, and this recipe was a standout. I must admit, though, that when I first saw the list of ingredients I thought – oh no, we’re not going to like this – it has butter and whipped cream in it. But, I’m here to tell you, it’s fabulous. You won’t eat many of these, of course, as they’re quite rich, but the flavor is delicious, and the texture goes down smooth! PDFs are down at the bottom of the post.

CHICKEN SALAD WITH SMOKED ALMONDS: Cherrie found this recipe on the net, but it’s from a Gourmet article in 1994. What’s different about these are the chopped smoked almonds on the outside of each sandwich. The actual recipe calls for you to cut each sandwich into two 2-inch rounds (discarding what’s left of each square sandwich) but we thought that was such a huge waste, so just made them in traditional triangles. After filling the sandwiches, you carefully smear a bit of mayo on the outside of the crustless sandwiches, then press them into a small mound of minced smoked almonds. The nuts add a really nice touch and a delicious crunch as we ate them.

CURRIED CHICKEN SALAD: About 10 years ago I threw myself a luncheon tea on a milestone birthday. Since my birthday is in August, it was a very hot day, and not one where we really wanted to be all gussied up with gauzy dresses and floppy hats, but we did it anyway and I merely cranked down the A/C to about 70 degrees. It was fun, as these kinds of events always are. I tested several recipes for a curried chicken salad filling, and this one was, by far, the best of the bunch. I don’t think I’ve made it since, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be served as a dinner salad atop a bed of lettuce on a hot summer’s evening. The recipe started out from an old Palo Alto (California) Junior League cookbook.

Separate PDF printer friendly recipes: ham mousse,   chicken salad w/almonds, curry chicken salad

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Both of our granddaughters appear to have the food gene. Both are interested in cooking and have helped in the kitchen from a young age. One of them, Taylor (10) stayed with us for a part of a week recently. I asked her what she’d like to cook. She thought about it for a day and said pizza and cookies. Well. Okay. We didn’t get to do the pizza (because she spent a lot of her time babysitting and playing with her new cousin, 10-month old Vaughan) but we squeezed in some cookies. Her choice: peanut butter.

Since I’d already made some peanut butter cookies with Taylor (and her older brother Logan) last summer, I turned to my newest cookie book, Martha Stewart’s Cookies, for a different variation. These are very, very similar to the ones we made last summer from America’s Test Kitchen, with the addition of peanuts and peanut butter to the dough. They came together quickly, and Taylor was tickled to scoop and flatten the cookies just so. I outfitted her with an apron and one of my small cloths I always loop over the apron ties. She thought she was quite the chef.

If you’re a fan of peanut butter cookies, then you’ll like this recipe. They’re not my favorite cookie variety, but they are tasty. When I crave cookies, it’s usually chocolate chip. So, in the second half of the batch I insisted we add chocolate chips. Whichever version, they’re good, right out of the freezer. Miss Tay took some home with her on the plane, but they were in crumbs, unfortunately by the time she reached Sacramento. These cookies are quite fragile and crumbly, just so you know.
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I’m still trying to empty out the garage freezer in preparation for the quarter of a pig coming soon from the 4-H auction. So, what did I find but a pork tenderloin in there. And oh, was this preparation ever delicious. It’s from Cooking Light, but I don’t know when. I followed the recipe to the letter. I’ve never really met any mango salsa (or sambal) that I didn’t like, and this was no exception. I had some frozen mango chunks in the freezer (Trader Joe’s has them). Fortunately I looked at the recipe before I left for the market and bought the serrano chile. Otherwise I didn’t need anything else for this dish.

Here’s what the creators of the dish described: Sambal is a generic name for any paste-like condiment made with chiles. Authentic versions tend to be extremely hot. This Malaysian-influenced mango sambal works well with the Southern-style barbeque spice rub. The vinegar gives the condiment a flavor that’s reminiscent of a North Carolina mop sauce.

It’s so terrifically easy. You make a dry rub which took about 2 minutes to round up and combine; you rub it all over the meat, roast it in a 425 degree oven until it reaches 155 degrees internal temp (remember, use the meat probe). The recipe says 160, but it will not have any hint of pink if you wait that long. At 155 degrees, it was done to perfection with just a bit of pink in the middle. Meanwhile I tossed together the mango mixture, prepared a zucchini side and a mixed green salad, and dinner was done. This pork would be lovely for a company meal, but it was great just for a dinner for two.
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