I’m a fan of Heidi Swanson’s blog, 101 cookbooks. In fact her blog was one of the first ones I began reading about 4-5 years ago. She stresses healthy cooking, forsaking meat for vegetarian fare, and rarely does she include desserts. Especially ones without some kind of whole grain inclusion or healthy ingredient. So, I was surprised when she posted this gluten-free (no flour) meringue-like cookie that not only contain pure sugar (albeit powdered) but chocolate. I suppose the saving grace here is that the cookies contain almost no fat (no butter, no egg yolks, no solid chocolate either). And as is often the case, when I read the write-up about the cookies, she had me hooked. I still have cookies in the freezer from the last two small batches I’ve made. Both the Triple Ginger cookies and the (chocolate) Midnight Crackles aren’t edible from a frozen state – they nearly break my teeth. Yes, yes, I know, why can’t I defrost them? Because then I’d eat too many. And when I’m craving just one cookie, I want it right now, and that means eating from a frozen state. So, the other cookies are still in the freezer and I’m left “wanting.” What to do except try these.

The ingredients are certainly different from a traditional cookie containing flour – this has chopped, toasted walnuts, powdered sugar, dry cocoa, a pinch of salt and egg whites (not whipped, mind you) and vanilla. That’s it. Took no time at all to stir these up. Heidi cautioned that these cookies spread out. And that every batch could come out a bit differently. Mine didn’t exactly look like hers (hers were flatter). Mine didn’t spread as much as hers either. Heidi says to bake these for 12-15 minutes. She mentioned that it may take a batch or two – using your oven, pans, etc. – before you find your groove. The first 2 pans I baked for 12 minutes. Too soft in the middle even after cooling for 15 minutes. Second batch I baked 3 minutes longer, and they were just perfect! And I got 36 cookies from mine (hers made 18 – much larger cookies, obviously), using a cookie scoop that was about 2 tablespoons. So perhaps her scoop was about 3-4 tablespoons each.

So, how are they? SO chocolate-y. Light as a feather. But the interior is kind of like slightly soft fudge – or not quite as loose as a lava cake ooze. I think Heidi mentioned they were something between a meringue and fudge. Yup. And they ARE sweet. Actually sweeter than I prefer a cookie to be. But the crunchy texture (from the toasted walnuts) helps balance the sugar. I wouldn’t begin to know how to make them less sweet without altering the chemistry of dry to wet ingredients. Do drink a glass of ice-cold milk with it. Or a nice cup of hot Earl Gray tea on a cold afternoon as I did, writing up this post.
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A year ago: Valentine Dinner Planning
Two years ago: Adobe Stew (my version of a local restaurant, the Gypsy Den’s, spicy vegetable soup)

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My DH requested some fish for dinner the other night. We had some in our freezer, some we’d purchased recently from a home-delivery meat company. I’m usually skeptical about frozen fish, always preferring to buy fresh, but this fish looked so good and everything else we’ve had from this company has been exceptionally good (premium price, too, of course). We were not disappointed.

I needed to prepare the sole in some special way, so I looked through oodles of recipes before deciding to try a Julia Child French method. From her book From Julia Child’s Kitchen. What I will tell you first off is that this requires more than a moderate amount of food prep – more than usual – and I don’t usually shirk from kitchen detail. It also dirties a whole bunch of dishes. And I decided to get everything in place first (that’s called mis en place) since I could tell by reading the recipe that everything kind of comes together at the end and I needed to be ready, not off at the chopping board mincing something. So here’s what I did:

On the left is the ALMOND FLAVORING/SAUCE: clockwise from the left at 8:00, minced shallots, butter, almond meal, flake salt, ground white pepper and fresh lemon. On the right the FINISHING SAUCE from 8:00, minced shallot, all-purpose flour, heavy cream, fish stock, white wine, butter, toasted sliced almonds, and minced parsley.

So, you get my drift – there’s a bit of food prep here. I should have added more lemon juice over on the right combination, too. I suggest you get out the dish you want to use, have the waxed paper buttered and sized to fit the pan, have the oven preheated (and your second oven – if you have one – heated at 200 to keep the fish and serving plates warm later on), and get all of the above ready. AND, I’ll also suggest you have all the rest of your dinner ready to go too, as you’ll have no time to do that once the fish comes out of the oven. I asked Dave to help me at the end because our vegetable needed reheating in the microwave (cauliflower prepared like mashed potatoes that I had made half an hour before), and I had an avocado ready to slice for our salad. He did those things while I whisked, stirred, poured, thinned and garnished.

So, how was it? Fabulous. Dave mmmm-d all through dinner. A good sign. I savored every bite, but then with all the butter in it, how could it not be good? (Actually, I have reduced the amount of butter in this recipe because the sauce could not hold the amount called for.) The only thing I’d change is to pulse the almonds myself next time, rather than use almond meal. I think the almond meal is too finely ground for this. Once I made the finishing sauce it was too thick. I really didn’t want to add more cream (it already had enough fat in the sauce already – so I added  bit more lemon juice). But in the big picture, it didn’t matter – it was good even if it was too thick! Will I make it again? I might. Perhaps not for guests only because it’s such concentrated cooking at the end. I think it’s hard to make this kind of dish for guests when you need to be on top of everything at the last minute.
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A year ago: About Penzey’s, the herb store (also online)
Two years ago: Crunchy Shrimp on Couscous with Sauce (a real winner, a favorite)

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The other day, when I was writing up the post all about oranges, the simple recipe Russ Parsons included in his book How to Pick a Peach- The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, sounded so easy. I had a Cara Cara orange on hand. Even had a pink grapefruit (bottom left in the photo above). It took about 1 minute to measure water, add sugar and a vanilla bean. I worked on peeling and slicing the oranges while the vanilla syrup simmered for 10 minutes. I removed the vanilla bean, allowed the syrup to cool down to room temp and poured it over the oranges, then chilled them for awhile. Meanwhile my DH grilled some thick pork chops and we enjoyed these slices after dinner. With a few sprigs of mint from our garden. The recipe makes more syrup than you’ll need, so you could halve it and there will be plenty to pour over 3-4 oranges.

They were so refreshing. Loved the color of them. Loved the ease of making them. I felt virtuous while enjoying a very nice dessert. With one of the triple ginger cookies I made last week.
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A year ago: Chicken Bamako (a family favorite)
Two years ago: Peas with Pancetta

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The day I made this soup it rained nearly all day. Last Saturday. A kind of day when we lit the fireplace, turned the thermostat up, and kept watching the drain lines around our house. We managed to get by without any flooding in the house, but we stayed on top of it all day. And I stayed close to the kitchen nearly all day too, working on this soup.

A hearty meat-laden and vegetable soup was what appealed to me. With a big chunk of pork shoulder from the freezer and cabbage as the mainstays, it wasn’t hard to make this, although it does take some chopping and mincing. And some slicing and sautéing. The recipe started from James Peterson’s book, Splendid Soups: Recipes and Master Techniques for Making the World’s Best Soups. Really making this began with the fact that I had not one, but two cabbage heads in the refrigerator. I had onions, celery, carrots and sauerkraut. From that, though, I weaved a bit off track with a few extra additions.

The pork (actually the original recipe called for beef, but Peterson said in his after-notes that he often makes it with pork instead) I cooked up in the crockpot for about 5 hours, until it was fall-apart tender. Once that was done I used the broth from the pork (strained of all its now spent vegetables) to start the soup. It comes together in a jiffy – you just have to chop everything (mushrooms, more onion, celery, carrots, turnips, and the cabbage). And at the end you add in some fresh sauerkraut, the cubed pork and some spicy sausage of some kind. I happened to have some imported Spanish dry (salami-type) chorizo which I cubed up to add flavor. But you do NOT want to put the sausage in earlier because it will give up all of its flavor to the soup and not have any taste.

The recipe is based on an old-world everyday soup from Russia. It’s called shchi in Russian. I went online hunting for how to pronounce the word. Some say it’s something like she, others sh-chi. But any way you want to say it, it’s a cabbage soup. With sauerkraut added in at the end too. And full of flavor. And healthy with all the veggies. It is mostly veggies. The pork I used was very lean and produced almost no fat whatsoever. You can see some of it in the photo, but I probably didn’t have 2 1/2 pounds as I’ve indicated in the recipe. Probably more like 1 1/2 pounds. But, you know, soup is very forgiving that way. I needed to add more liquid to the soup, so I added water and a dollop of Penzey’s pork soup base (a broth concentrate). You may remember that I’m a big fan of Penzey’s soup bases (I have small jars of beef, chicken, turkey, pork, ham, seafood and vegetable) that I use very frequently. You could substitute chicken broth granules or canned broth too. The soup can be made ahead – maybe even tastes better the next day.

What I will tell you – beyond the fact that the soup is downright scrumptious –  is that you don’t want to omit the sour cream (I used light) and fresh dill for the garnish. As good as the soup was, it made it over-the-top, as far as I’m concerned, with the dollop of sour cream and a bit of dill in every bite. Eventually, as we ate the soup, the sour cream dissipated throughout the broth, and the dill floated on top. So, for me, just remember the sour cream and dill, okay?  I think this likely serves more than 10 people – more like 12 – in 2-cup servings. I froze dinner-size portions (two of them), gave away another two-portion container, and still had enough for us for another 2 meals. So, however you pronounce shchi, just make this, okay? Hearty, healthy and comforting.
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A year ago: Chicken a l’Orange
Two years ago: Borscht with Andouille Sausage

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Wanting to take something to friends who had invited us over for dinner, I grabbed the December issue of Bon Appetit and decided to make these cookies that contain ground ginger, fresh ginger and crystallized ginger. They’re easy to make, requiring only that you make small balls and roll them in granulated sugar before baking. When they bake they get that wonderful crackly edge, yet the interior remains soft. Even when they’ve cooled, they’re still soft in the center. Yummy. Obviously, you need to like ginger. These are good. And since they were in a holiday issue, I’d say they’d be perfection for Christmas. Our friends insisted that I not bring something to help with dinner, so these made a very nice little gift.

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Pictured left, two Navel oranges in the back, a blood orange front left, and a Valencia at far right.

When you live in an agricultural area, you tend to take fruits and vegetables for granted. We certainly do. And oranges might be the pivot for that since where I live, in Orange County, California (oranges, Orange County?) we used to be THE center of orange growing. For a long, long time. But now more of them are grown in Riverside County, the next county over (east) from Orange County. There’s still lots of rural land in Riverside County. Not so much here in Orange County.

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As part of the lore of baking, I had always heard or read that once you combine the baking leavening agent (baking powder or baking soda) with any wet ingredients, you’ve got to bake it right away. Because the leavening will do its thing and die otherwise. Well, there’s something wrong with that reasoning, because this recipe, for a make-ahead coffee cake – WITH both baking powder and baking soda contained in it, can sit overnight in the refrigerator and in the morning it bakes and rises just fine. How come? I don’t know. Maybe somebody with more of a cooking chemistry background can answer the question!

Over the years that my DH has been in his men’s Bible study group, whenever it’s his turn to host, I scramble to find something that will work. Usually I have to bake something the day before and Dave reheats it in the oven for a short time in the morning, or I’ve gotten up at some really unreasonable hour in order to prepare and bake something so it’s ready to serve by 6:45 am. But neither option has been ideal. So when I saw this recipe online recently I knew I’d make this the next time Dave hosts the group.

This makes two 9-inch (round or 8-inch square ones) pans of coffeecake. You can halve it, as I did, but the other option is to freeze one of them in batter form (up to a month) and just add 10 minutes to the baking time when you bake it from a frozen state. I mean, is that easy, or what?

Leave it to the folks at Cook’s Illustrated (aka America’s Test Kitchen, Cook’s Country) to develop a make-ahead bakery item that works. I subscribe to an email from Cook’s Illustrated (although I don’t pay for an online subscription, just the magazine) and it was sent out with one of them, and the recipe was available then. Not now. I printed it out back then, but did find it online at another site also. But, back to how the make-ahead part works. I pulled out my favorite reference book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. It says that using cream of tartar releases 2/3 of its leavening power within 2 minutes of mixing. But if the acid (whatever it is in the batter that provides acid – like buttermilk, yogurt, brown sugar, molasses, fruit juices, vinegar and even chocolate) is not very soluble (so that would likely be yogurt, brown sugar, molasses – not the more liquid of the acids), then it can be held for awhile and only when it’s baked does the leavening begin to work.  Baking powder, on the other hand, is called “double-acting” because it does have some part of it that activates when you mix the batter together, but the other part doesn’t release until it’s in the oven. The book also says that in the restaurant business there is a type of baking powder that contains slow-release acids just so the leavening action doesn’t dissipate while the batter sits, before it’s baked. I’ll have to look at Surfas, the mostly pro cookware and foodstuffs store in Los Angeles, to see if they carry such a thing. Probably in 10 pound boxes. Uhm, no thank you.

So, back to this coffee cake. It was simple enough to prepare, really. I made half a recipe because my freezer is full to the brim. I found the batter to be stiffer than expected, so had a hard time spreading it. In the picture at left – the dough layer in the left-hand photo – you can see where I had to use my fingers to kind of spread it out. On the right side shows the nut streusel on the top. I ended up using my finger to kind of chop off  little globs of batter all over. Then I dampened my fingers with water and spread it out (the water helps the batter from sticking to your fingers). Then you spread the non-nut streusel in the middle. Then the other half of the batter goes on top. I did the same thing with dampened fingers to spread it out. Then the nut enhanced streusel goes on the top and it’s refrigerated. My DH got up at 5:30 so he could bake this. He just had to take the foil cover off the top of the cake pan and pop it in the oven for 45 minutes. It does need to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. One interesting note about the streusel – the recipe has you make the sugar-flour-cinnamon combo and divide it in half. Half of it gets nuts, which goes on the top only. The info says that in their testing of this recipe they found that the steam the nuts produced in the oven made the batter/dough around them soggy. Interesting, I thought.

And the taste – really good! There are crusty parts on it (from the streusel), which made for good taste contrast. Next time I think I’ll add some cocoa powder in with the streusel – just because I like it. The cinnamon was subtle and I think it could be pumped up a bit. The cake rose perfectly in the oven – amazing! It didn’t look like it was in any way stunted because of overnight refrigeration. Yes, I’d make this again if only because of the ease of it!
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A year ago: Leek & Turnip Puree
Two years ago: Shiitake-Crusted Chicken

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In December my former investment club members met at my home for a potluck dinner. We’ve known for years that we have some great cooks in the group, and the food is always wonderful when we have such get-togethers. The club disbanded a few months ago, but we’ll still gather now and then for conversation and most years we have a December potluck dinner.

Anyway, one of the gals, Linda C., brought this salad to the potluck. It was SO good. It’s a curry flavored rice (cold) salad, and I just needed to have some cold chicken to chop up to make this. It also has bottled artichoke hearts in it (maybe not something you’d always have in your pantry) and a box of chicken flavored rice mix. The one I used was a 6-ounce package from “Farmhouse.” But any such rice mix would likely do. The other thing you might not stock in your pantry is pimiento-stuffed olives. As it happened, I didn’t have any of those, so the salad may have lacked something. I had red bell pepper instead of green, too. And since I only had 2 green onions, I added some finely minced red onion. So, you see, this salad can be adaptable to what you have on hand. But to be true to the recipe, you need two of the small jars of marinated artichoke hearts. And just a handful of the stuffed olives. And the green pepper too. I garnished the salad with some minced Italian parsley from our garden.

Just so you know, there’s only a teaspoon of curry powder in the salad, so it’s not overwhelming in the slightest. It could be omitted if you aren’t a curry fan, but I liked the light hint. Linda said this is an old standby, one she used to fix for her family when her children were young. Thanks for the recipe, Linda!
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A year ago: Butternut Squash Soup (crockpot)
Two years ago: Coconut Banana Bread (a Cooking Light recipe – very good)

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Maybe you don’t need another breakfast idea. Maybe you always – every day – make time for a balanced breakfast, so if so, you don’t need to read this post. Most mornings we eat the same breakfast. But on an occasional morning Dave is out and I don’t usually feel like “cooking,” so if I have the ingredients, here’s what I make: Read the rest of this entry »

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I was looking up a recipe on my own blog the other day. Since my computer is right here in the kitchen, it’s easier for me to pull up my blog and find the recipe than it is to find it in the recipe program I use. And I was astounded to find that THIS recipe had never been posted to my blog. My goodness. Can hardly believe it. I’ve done a bunch of salad dressings, but this is one of my favorites.

It does have a bunch of ingredients in this. But as I’ve mentioned before about a couple of my garlic-enhanced salad dressings, the first thing I do is combine the fresh garlic (I always use the fresh stuff from a bulb) and salt in the blender. I whiz it up for about 30 seconds and just let it sit. Then, I leisurely find all the other ingredients needed for the dressing. Once they’re at hand, then I begin adding them to the blender jar. In this case, all the other ingredients (olive oil, canola oil, blue cheese, Parmigiano cheese, salt, pepper, celery seeds, dry mustard, are piled into the jar. Then you whiz it up until it’s thoroughly combined.

Oh, I forgot about the lime juice – from fresh limes, please. I happened to make a double batch, because when I make it, I might as well make a bunch. It keeps for weeks in the refrigerator.

There is no cream in the dressing. I call it “creamy” because once you whiz up the blue cheese, it makes it creamy colored. This is really a vinaigrette type – that’s why I included the photo of the dressing in the blender before I homogenized it. It uses just 2 ounces of blue cheese – so this isn’t like a creamy blue cheese dressing. The blue provides a nice undertone; it’s not the star of the show.

In the photo at right I made it and didn’t whiz up the blue cheese as much as usual, so it has small chunks of blue. I like it that way sometimes, although the recipe indicates to blend it thoroughly. Your choice.

Sometimes after it’s been in the refrigerator for awhile the dressing does separate. But I just shake it well and it’s fine. Because it contains some olive oil, when it’s refrigerated it solidifies, so just take it out of the refrigerator about 10 minutes before you need it and shake it. It should be of a thick pouring consistency.

I’ve been making this dressing for so long I don’t know it’s origin. It really isn’t “mine.” There are no notes on the page in my ancient recipe binder. It’s a family favorite, though, and worth making.
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A year ago: Apple Pear Upside Down Cake
Two years ago: Scott’s Broccoli Salad

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