My friends sometimes ask me, “how do you possibly come up with all the stories?” Or, “how can you write about every recipe?” Well, it seems that every recipe has its own story to tell. That’s what makes cooking unique to each of us. It’s how recipes are born. It’s how a recipe from a website, or a cookbook, your friend Linda, or your Grandmother, with a slight change here and there, becomes your own. A creation from your intuition (well, sometimes it’s just that you didn’t have any carrots, so you used butternut squash instead, and it totally changed the dish). That’s the start of a story.”You must spend hours and hours at your computer?” they quiz. Well, yes and no. I do spend many hours a day at my computer, but I’m not always writing my blog. The blog though – it doesn’t take that much time really, since I like to write.

Writing comes easily to me. I wrote for 20+ years in my career. Writing was a big part of the job – I wrote mostly newspaper and magazine ads for companies wanting to hire people. Those small, medium to huge ads you see in the help wanted section week after week. There are ad agencies out there that do just that. Not product marketing type advertising, but people hunters. Not head hunters, but ads to encourage and entice people to apply for jobs. A client, the advertiser, would give us, the ad agency, some sketchy phrases about the job requirements, and about what this person would do. It was our job to fashion those phrases into cohesive sentences and paragraphs. Make the words logical. And their sequence make sense. Sometimes we’d use some fancy graphics to make the ad stand out. Other times it was a simple 2-inch ad with very small type. There were times when the ads were very hard to compose, I’ll admit. Perhaps the client didn’t give us much to work with. But usually there was enough.

So, you see, writing doesn’t seem like drudgery to me. I always thought, years ago, that I’d find my inner voice – maybe a voice that would write a novel. But the reality is that my mind doesn’t dream fiction stories. My head writes food stories. When I began putting all of my recipes into the MasterCook software, in one of the text cells I find that it invites me to explain the recipe. No, it doesn’t ask that, but it seemed that with every recipe I entered, I had no difficulty at all writing up something about it. About when I’d served it. How I’d altered the recipe to suit a particular occasion. Or used the leftovers. Many of my recipes have long, evolved stories about their origin. Or who they came from. Like the Cold Green Pea Soup from our friend Pamela in England. Or the Bishop’s Bread I just posted early last month from my mother’s friend Mary. Or my mother’s Apple Crisp.

Spending hours at the computer isn’t hard work for me. (Hmmm. Just ask my DH how many hours a day I spend at the keyboard. Oh. No. Scratch that.) When I’m cooking, there are stages in most recipes when it needs to cook. So I flit over to my laptop that resides here in the kitchen and start a new story. Or finish one that’s in progress. Or input a new recipe. Or insert a photo. Or even take a photo. I usually have 3-4 stories in progress at any one time. It seems that there is a kind of a schedule we bloggers keep. Gotta write a story. Gotta write a story every day. Almost anyway. I do my best. Perhaps there will come a day when I will look at this screen and tilt my head a bit and say, I have nothing to write about. But so far, that hasn’t happened. I still have lots and lots of my own tried and true recipes to post here. It’s just that I haven’t made them recently, and I don’t like posting a recipe and a story without a photo. You know that adage, a picture speaks a thousand words. So true with cooking.

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So, now that I’ve waxed on for 500 words, it’s time to talk about this recipe. This one started when I read a new cookbook I received for Christmas. I think I’ve mentioned that I constantly update my Amazon wish list with everything from cookbooks to kitchen appliances, etc. So our son and his wife gave me a book I’d requested, Cooking with Cafe Pasqual’s, by Katherine Kagel, the owner and mind behind the fairly famous restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is Kagel’s second book, and it’s a nice addition to my library. I read it from cover to cover and put little flags on the pages I wanted to return to. One recipe that intrigued me was her version of Pork & Green Chile Stew.

Saturday, DH offered to go grocery shopping for me (he loves it, aren’t I lucky?), so my mind immediately flipped to the stew. I put together a list. Now, in order to make sense of this whole story, you have to know that her recipe calls for 2 pounds of pork butt, corn, potatoes and nothing less than 16 fresh New Mexican or Anaheim chiles. I wanted to double the recipe, so that’s 32 chiles. I thought – whew, that’s a whole lotta chiles. But oh well. So, off my DH went. At his second stop, 20 minutes later he phoned. They didn’t have pork butt. What would I like to do? Also, they had not one single Anaheim (California) chile pepper. He didn’t have time to go to yet another store, so I said forget it, I’ll make something else tomorrow.

Next chapter: that same afternoon I was doing some catching up on blog reading (I read a LOT of food blogs, which you can see if you look at the list down my right column). And when I’ve been away for 11 days, the catching up took me a long time. So, I was reading over at CooknKate, one of my favorites, and lo and behold, she was cookin’ a Green Chile. Wow. Really? I studied the recipe. It was completely different than the one from Katherine Kagel. She had found the recipe over at Homesick Texan, another blog I read. I printed it out and decided to try THIS recipe instead of the other one. This one calls for 4 pounds of pork butt, poblano peppers (aka pasilla), jalapenos, tomatillos and beer! So today my darling hubby went out on another shopping expedition for me. He’s so wonderful. This time he found pork shoulder, poblanos, jalapenos, tomatillos, cilantro and a fresh bag of masa harina. I was off and running (in the kitchen, that is).

The prep on this recipe did take more time than I’d thought. I mean – this is just a STEW for heaven’s sake. The chiles had to be roasted, the tomatillos shucked, onion diced, garlic chopped, jalapenos minced, meat cut up in chunks. But the browning of all the meat was the most time consuming, and you wouldn’t believe the state of my wood floors when I was done. My rubber-soled shoes slid along. Time out to wipe paper towels all over the floor. Reminder to have that carpet cleaned.

And when Kate mentioned about the heat from this stew making her eyebrows sweat, she was right. She cut down on the chiles from Homesick Texan’s version, I decided to do the same. I used all five poblanos, but I used just two very large jalapenos. I shudder to think what this would taste like with more, or with the serranos. Five alarm for sure. More like ten alarm. I like spicy and moderately hot food, but this was too hot still. I’ve altered my version accordingly, and have upped the masa to thicken the gravy a bit more. We liked putting the mixture IN a flour tortilla, and the stew needs to be thicker for that. And I had a larger bottle of beer, so used all of it (probably 2 cups worth).

So you see, recipes evolve and morph. What’s right for Kate, or Homesick Texan, becomes right for you when you make your own additions (or subtractions as the case may be). In either case, this pork green chile stew is a winner in my book. I’m looking forward to the leftovers. We each had just one cup in our bowls (ample) with a hot flour tortilla. Delish.
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The breakfast omelet with goat cheese and rosemary.

At least a couple of times a year my DH and I drive up to the Central Coast. That’s the term to describe the area along the California coastline and somewhat inland, starting at the southern end at Santa Barbara and ending up north near Templeton and Paso Robles. We’ve been enjoying that area for several years. The scenery is beautiful. Rolling and gentle hills. Covered in grassy green in the spring and summer months, but still full of character during the winter months with scraggly oak trees everywhere.

Our interest in the Central Coast began when we started wine tasting there at least 20 years ago. It was a relatively unknown area then, and the few wineries that existed were start-ups with very primitive structures serving as wine tasting rooms. But as the years have gone by, more and more wineries have opened, some with lots of money behind them, showing off fancy wine tasting rooms, tours, gift shops, etc. Others are still back in the 80’s, so to speak, with fairly lightweight tasting rooms, with more charm than the high style monied ones. DH loves to find some of the unknowns in the area, so we sometimes drive the back roads looking for new signs.

We began signing up for automatic shipments of wines from some of these wineries. Usually we get a package from each of them every 3 months, mostly reds, because that’s what we prefer to drink. The Central Coast makes some wonderful Pinot Noir (Pinots are the specialty of the Central Coast), Zinfandel, even some Chardonnay. One year we heard about one winery called Stephen Ross. DH searched him out and for several years we participated in Steve’s barrel adopter’s contract. For a fee you “buy” the right to sign a barrel, and you receive two cases of wine from the current vintage and a beautiful sit-down dinner at the winery too. Plus the ability to buy additional wine at a good discount. The dinners are a very fun event, lots of very good food and plenty of wine to go around.

DH subscribes to wines from FoxenVilla Creek, and Eberle. He tries others, and drops some off his list after a year or so, then adds new ones. We were particularly enamored with Villa Creek when we went to their restaurant in downtown Paso Robles last year. They offered a wonderful flight of their own wines with dinner, that was exceedingly reasonable. And we were very impressed with the dinner as well.

So, whenever we’re up in that area, we generally plunk ourselves down in a central place and take a couple of half days to go either north or south. We’re particularly fond of San Luis Obispo. The town itself is very quaint, with lots of fine restaurants, even some fun shopping.

Our friends, Cherrie and Bud (Cherrie, my cooking classes friend you’ve heard about here) told us about this bed and breakfast, and we’ve been staying there ever since, sometimes with them along too. If we can get in. The owners of the Bridge Creek Inn, Sally & Gene Kruger, are just the nicest people you’d ever want to know. We feel like they’re friends since we’ve been there so many times. Sally is a very good cook, and makes everyone welcome during the social hour when she offers local wines and appetizers to guests. Sometimes Gene is there too, as well as other guests. And Sally serves a lovely breakfast too, with the goat cheese and rosemary omelet one of her signature breakfast. They have a jacuzzi tub, a walking trail, and the location just can’t be beat. It’s way out of town, on a gentle country road, on a scenic 10-acre plot, with a fantastic view (see below) where you hear nothing but an occasional moo from a cow nearby, or a mew from one of the resident cats, Charlie or Tiger Lily.

I know a lot of people who read my blog aren’t interested in California travel, but if you ARE, I highly recommend the Bridge Creek Inn to anyone. San Luis Obispo is a perfect halfway spot when you’re driving from Southern to Northern California. It’s about 15 miles from the ocean, so enjoys lovely breezes in the heat of summer. Sally is very helpful and knowledgeable about activities in the area – she made dinner reservations for us on this trip at The Garden in Avila. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary at the Bridge Creek. Very fun. Sally keeps right on top of the latest and newest eateries. Thanks, Sally, for another lovely stay at the Inn.
The sign out on the road at the Bridge Creek.

The house of Bridge Creek B & B.

I could sit for hours with my cup of coffee staring out at this view from the deck at the Bridge Creek.

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Since I’d bought a Kosher chicken at Trader Joe’s the other day, I wanted to do something different. I mean, a roast chicken is a roast chicken, but we get tired of the same old sliced chicken. I wanted it to be succulent and juicy, not dry and stringy. What to do?

I turned to my America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. The recipes are never overdone. They’re not fancy. But they’ve worked out these little details to make something ordinary like meatloaf – or roast chicken – better. I’ve learned to trust this cookbook when I’ve used it. This time was no exception.

Just the title, Roast Lemon Chicken, grabbed me. I’m a sucker for anything lemon, and had one Meyer left. The recipe suggests you brine the chicken. Well, if you buy a Kosher chicken, it’s already brined. Yea! I didn’t follow the recipe down to the letter. I didn’t whisk in the additional butter to the sauce which is mentioned in the recipe below. The book recommends using a V-rack. I have a V-rack, but it’s for a turkey, and I didn’t feel like retrieving the large roasting pan to put it in either, for this small little chicken. I just used a regular rack and put it on a piece of foil. And since I had just one lemon, I had to put some of it in the cavity and the rest was squeezed for the juice called for in the pan juices. I knew the juice was a necessary ingredient for the sauce. The recipe suggests baking the chicken for 40 minutes at 350. Then you turn the pan around and hike up the heat to 450. Laziness had set in and I didn’t move down the rack in my oven, so the skin got a bit charred, but the meat underneath was still succulent, likely because of all that herb butter that seeped into it.

I also used my new little heat-resistant silicone bands (looks like a rubber band on the legs above) for both the legs and the wings. They worked like a charm. And the finished dish? Delicious! I’ll make this again.
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Highway 1, near Big Sur, with the unique Cypress trees that grace that area of California.

We who live in California often take its majestic beauty for granted. We’re used to the jokes made about the crazy people who live here, about our healthy food habits and our dislike for cigarette smoke. And about the air pollution in Los Angeles, the risk of earthquakes, and the occasional mudslide that can destroy homes in about 3 seconds. Oh yes, the fires. Those too. And the fact that we’re very spread out, so there’s little or no rapid transit in this state. We all insist on driving cars everywhere. But if you take all that out of the equation, we’re left with some spectacular scenery, unlike any other place on this earth. We have Mt. Whitney, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Redwoods way up north, plus just the incredible awe of the city of San Francisco. We have really big mountain ranges from north to south, including nine (yes, NINE) national parks, countless state parks and beach preserves.

In the south, we have more mountain ranges, deserts (actually southern California is mostly desert land, but because we hydrate it, it’s become more like one big oasis), the Salton Sea and Death Valley.

It isn’t often that anyone who lives here drives Highway 1, though. It actually goes from the Mexican border to Oregon, but when we Californians talk about “Highway 1” we’re usually referring to a section of it that goes from Morro Bay, about mid-state to Carmel. It’s about 100+ miles of very curvy, torturous roads. Takes about 3-4 hours, depending on traffic. People driving on this road are mostly tourists, there just to soak in the vistas. Or the myriad of people who actually live along that coast. Every time I’ve driven the road I wonder about these people who live there – what do they do for a living, so far from civilization (they probably like that aspect of it), how often they go to the grocery store (not often, I’d guess), or how they manage not having a restaurant nearby to go out to dinner once in awhile (there are almost zip-zero-nada restaurants along this stretch of road).

We headed south from Monterey. The day was absolutely perfect. Sky a sunshiny blue, water perfectly clear. No wind. Temps in the 50’s. The plu-perfect day to drive Highway 1. We stopped often to take some pictures.

South of Big Sur.

Don’t fall! That’s a couple of hundred feet down there. You can’t see them, but there are hundreds of sea lions swimming all over this stretch of rocky shore. They were  cavorting and barking to beat the band.

Just one look UP rather than down.

And one short glance back toward the north.

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Talk about a sensational soup! This is it. Maybe we were just in the mood for something different, and maybe it was just because we were with friends that this soup hit the spot. At around lunchtime, we stopped to visit our good friends Russ & Stacey (pictured down below with one of their two children) in San Jose. They’d just returned from a trip the night before, yet Russ, who loves to cook but so often doesn’t have time, made this great soup for lunch. It didn’t look difficult, as long as you have all the ingredients. That may be the tough part – finding the lemongrass, galangal and kaffir lime leaves. And the Thai chiles too.

There’s a photo of the chiles that I found on the internet – they can be both red or green. They’re HOT little devils, I’ll tell you. But they add a great punch to the soup. You likely could substitute other kinds of chiles in this preparation, but the red color definitely adds beauty to the finished soup bowl. Galangal is not something that’s stocked at my local grocery store, so will have to search it out. Same for the kaffir lime leaves and the lemongrass stalks. But I will be on the hunt. Soon. We have several Ranch 99 markets in our area (Asian foods), and I assume I’ll be able to find all of those items there. I’ll be making this soup and putting up a stock of it in my soup library. The recipe came from a cookbook I’m not familiar with – called Red Hot Chili Pepper. It contained lots of beautiful photographs, and a variety of recipes using chiles. Russ served this with a side of white rice, which you could add to the soup, or not. But the rice helped temper the heat.

When I make this soup, I may not add the little bit of hot chiles at the end, as they are so very hot. Burned my mouth and throat. But I think if they had been added to the soup earlier they would have dispersed some of their heat. I may consider adding just one chile. But heat is such an individual thing. I’m just warning you, in case you’re sensitive to chile heat, that these little guys pack a punch. Thanks, Russ (and Stacey), for the fun visit with you, and for this great recipe!

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