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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That’s sliced pot roast in the foreground, laid partly on pasta, and the sort-of red sauce that got whizzed up in the food processor after cooking the meat in the pressure cooker.

I’m on a kitchen mission. A mission to work more diligently to clean out my freezer. I not only have a huge full freezer in my kitchen, but I have a second lower-drawer freezer in the refrigerator/freezer in our garage. That latter freezer holds mostly meat. And it holds a LOT. Enough that, were we to have a catastrophe of major proportions, I think we could live (with a generator, mind you, keeping the meat frozen) for at least 3 months without buying any meat. At a guess, 3 months. Veggies – well that’s a different matter. I have some canned stuff and a few frozen bags, but mostly my freezer is full of meat products, at least 5 pounds of different kinds of nuts, a few oddball things like frozen limeade, squeezed lemon juice from our Meyer lemon trees, chutneys of a few varieties, and some ordinary things like chili, soup (lots), bread, bacon, sausage that we have for breakfast most days, a few cookies, one dessert I made a couple of weeks ago, and some chipotle chiles.

My DH, darling that he is, often tells people how much meat we have in our reserve freezer, and that all he must buy is a Coleman stove and we’d be in business. We could set up a local soup kitchen. But we’d need that stove first, which we haven’t purchased. We should. All part of earthquake or emergency preparedness. We don’t have a generator, either. So, the next best thing is to start eating up the meat.

Therefore, I defrosted a 3-pound chunk of boneless chuck roast a few days ago. It was nicely sealed up in plastic (I have one of those FoodSaver things that seals foods of all kinds so they don’t get freezer burn). My guess is that there are other people out there like me – who really know how to pack a freezer. Right? We’re almost to the point that our kitchen freezer door must be opened carefully – like Fibber McGee’s closet, for fear something will fall out and break your toe. Most of you readers are too young to remember Fibber McGee and Molly, a long-running radio program (1935 – 1959), where one of the long-standing jokes was about somebody inadvertently opening the hall closet to a long, noisy crash of stuff. I vaguely remember the program because my parents loved the show. Once we got a television (about 1946, when I was 5) we didn’t listen to much radio anymore. But the joke about the closet lives on and it always ended with Fibber’s comment: I’ve gotta clean out that closet one of these days. My freezer, therefore, is my Fibber McGee’s closet!

The last few days I’ve been more than a bit under the weather. But I’d defrosted this roast before I got my cough/cold thing I have, so on day 3 of my cold I dug out my Fagor Duo Stainless-Steel 6-Quart Pressure Cooker and fired it up. Referring to a recipe in one of my 3 pressure cooker cookbooks, I settled on an Italian style roast because I knew my DH would enjoy having just a little bit of pasta on the side. We don’t eat much pasta because Dave’s a diabetic, but once in awhile we celebrate and always savor every bite!

The pot roast took about 20 minutes of prep (browning the meat, cutting up all the veggies and cooking them briefly), and about 1 1/4 hours to cook it all under pressure. Then I removed the meat and tented it with foil while I prepared the sauce. All of the stuff left in the pan, the veggies (except the fat I was able to spoon off the top) went into my food processor and I whizzed it up to a smooth puree. I tasted it for seasonings, then poured it out over the sliced beef and the pasta. With a green salad, that was a complete dinner.

Bottom line: it was good. Certainly not as good as my tried-and-true French Pot Roast a la Mode that I’ve used for years. That takes innumerable hours to make and bake. But since I was in sort of a hurry, it was very good. My DH loved it – really loved it. And it was on the table in about 2 hours.

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A year ago: Stacked Chicken Enchiladas
Two years ago: A list of travel websites
Three years ago: Chocolate Scones (fantastic!)

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What you are seeing in this picture: scallops nestled in the middle, drizzled with a blood orange juice and sugar caramel reduction, both blood orange segments and regular Navel orange segments in a fruit relish on top with some shredded Brussels sprouts in the background. Over on the right is the potato and celery root mash with some of the blood orange sauce drizzled on top.

Rarely do I cook scallops. We eat them out, certainly, but for whatever reason, I rarely make them myself. From what I read, you can hardly buy fresh scallops anymore – they’re all “previously frozen.” Day boat scallops are rare (you know what that means? the scallops were brought in that day from the local fishing boats). These weren’t day boats. I’d had my DH buy six of the premium ones (read: expensive – $18 for six) from a local upscale market, then I promptly came down with a cold and cough that’s kept me down. I knew these scallops needed to be eaten, though, so with my DH’s help, we made dinner.

My only caution about this meal: it takes time to make. Reading the recipe in this month’s issue (February 2011) of Bon Appetit, I really didn’t think it would. The recipe said prep time was one hour. With two of us working on it (I enlisted my DH’s help because I knew I couldn’t get it done in an hour otherwise, what with making the potato and celery root mash too – plus, I wasn’t feeling all that great). So first I did the potatoes and celery root. Peeled and chopped up, they simmered together for about 20 minutes. I couldn’t get the mixture to go through the ricer, so I did it in the food processor, and even that wasn’t a thorough puree – there were a few chunks left in the mixture. I added some butter and a little cream, salt and pepper, and that was all. Generally you never put regular potatoes in a food processor – they turn to glue (this I also know from experience many, many years ago) – but in this case because I was using both celery root and potato, I hoped it would whiz up in a hurry and not be a glue situation. It worked.

Cutting the citrus segments (they’re called supremes) from the whole oranges was the most time consuming project. I cut this recipe in half, and I had two small blood oranges and a regular orange. I also couldn’t find any mint in our kitchen garden (found out later my DH pulled it all out recently!), and didn’t have any tarragon, either. But we did have parsley. Good Italian parsley that thrives in one spot in our garden. It was dark when I went herb hunting, so I had difficulty locating things as it was. I pulled what I thought was mint, only to find out once I got inside that it was nothing but weeds! Ha! Anyway, the supremes are combined with herbs and set aside. The gastrique (a reduction, or sauce) did take a bit of time. Sugar is melted and caramelized (for two people, this took 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar). A caution: do make this in a regular sauté pan, not a (black) nonstick pan – you just cannot see when the sugar has turned color. Take it from someone who tried this, okay? I knew better, but I actually have just one good All Clad regular frying pan – everything else I use is nonstick, and black. And I was using the large, regular pan for the scallops.

So anyway, I made the sauce – adding sherry wine vinegar, the blood orange juice and chicken broth. It was reduced down to just a tablespoon or two by the end (for our two servings). I wish I’d had a bit more, so keep that in mind when you make it. Once the sauce was made I turned off the heat and set it aside; I warmed it again just before drizzling it on the scallops.

Prepping the Brussels sprouts was not difficult, but it was time consuming. My DH was set on that task, and it took a couple before he got into the rhythm of it. Cutting out the core of a raw, tiny Brussels sprout is not exactly easy. I think next time I might cut each sprout in half, then cut out the core and pull the leaves off from there. Would be a whole lot easier, although you wouldn’t get any whole leaves that way. I should have taken a photo of the mound of leaves before we started, but we were home chefs in the weeds (you know that term? that’s when you’re cooking in a restaurant kitchen and you’re slammed with orders and needing to cook like a mad woman).

Now for the scallops. Don’t overlook the little muscle flap on each scallop – remove it and throw it out. It’s painful, I know, especially if you paid a premium price for those scallops! But throw that little muscle away. The headnotes to the scallop recipe said not to be afraid of over heating the sauté pan. That you must have a super-hot burner and pan to cook them. So I used my very large All-Clad Stainless-Steel Fry Pan (not a nonstick, because I knew I needed the extra searing heat from the untreated stainless surface), heated it on my largest (highest BTU) gas burner and got the grapeseed oil smoking hot. I also turned my overhead fan up to high long before I started. The recipe calls for olive oil, but I know that grapeseed oil has a higher flash point, so I used that gladly. The carefully paper-towel dried, then salted and peppered scallops went into the hot oil and sautéed like crazy for about 2 minutes. I turned them over and did the same on the other side, and they were done. If the cooking took 4 minutes, I’d be surprised. Probably closer to 3 or 3 1/2 minutes. I tenderly pressed my spatula on each scallop to test the firmness. I could tell when they were done, but not overly done.

Meanwhile I’d plated the other food – the Brussels sprouts were merely flash fried in grapeseed oil before I started the scallops and they were pushed out onto plates (ideally, heat the plates first so the veggies will hold their heat once plated). The scallops went out, the reheated drizzle went over the scallops, then the citrus relish went on top. We sat down immediately while the red hot frying pan was still sizzling on the back burner. Do eat this while it’s hot. I hated even taking time for the photographs!

The bottom line: just delicious. Dave even mentioned it to me the next morning what a fabulous dinner he thought it was. The combo of the celery root/potato mash with the scallops was also great. It makes a very attractive plate too. I might make this for guests – it’s certainly a beautiful presentation and delicious, but you must do the Brussels sprouts and the scallops at the last minute, so know that when you start. The celery root/potato mash can be made ahead. The gastrique can be made ahead too. Just get everything mis en place (everything you need set on trays all prepped and ready to go an hour or two before you start). We have leftover Brussels sprouts and ample of the mash, so I’ll have to prepare something to go with them.

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A year ago: Almond Buttermilk Cake
Three years ago: Mashed Potatoes with Mascarpone

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See all those shallots? And all the bacon. And the tender filet mignon underneath? And the gravy flooding the plate. Oh my goodness. Is this ever delish! Over the top. I wanted to lick the plate that sauce is so gosh-darned good.

Phillis Carey made this at the bacon cooking class several months ago and I just hadn’t gotten around to posting about it. The combination – bacon, shallots and port just are a match made in heaven. You combine them and put them over a tender filet, and oh yes.

This takes a whole lot of shallots. At the cooking class they buy already peeled, fresh shallots from Sysco (a wholesale food company). Shucks. We can’t buy from them. So, you and I will have to trim our own shallots. Just buy large ones, which will make the process a bit easier. They are roasted for half an hour. Then you reduce (boil down) a mixture of beef broth and port. Phillis talked to us at length in the class about the tawny port needed in this recipe. You can buy domestically bottled port (mostly from here in California), but it’s premium stuff, with a steep price tag. Phillis suggested Trader Joe’s Portuguese tawny port. (Real port is all made in Portugal.) She thought it was about $8 a bottle. You do use a good amount of it, so don’t use an expensive bottle in this case. Generally I follow the adage that you don’t want to use any wine unless you’d drink it yourself, but in this case, Phillis assured us it was really just fine! Anyway, the steaks are browned in the bacon-fat laden skillet, then roasted in the oven for about 8-10 minutes (depending on thickness and your preference). You make a butter/flour roux and add that to the port gravy to thicken it a bit. Allow the steaks to sit for about 5 minutes before serving, with the sauce. Decorate with some watercress if desired.

If you really want to be decadent, serve the filets with Yukon Gold potatoes with bacon and Parmesan (also from this class). But whatever you do, DO serve this filet mignon dish for a special dinner.

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A year ago: Italian Chicken Sausage and Peppers
Two years ago: Crockpot Chicken Paprikash
Three years ago: Hot and Spicy Tofu Dip (it’s really good – you don’t know it’s tofu)

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Oh yes. Oh my. Decadent. Comforting, especially if you’re a chocolate lover like I am. A chocolate high, so to speak. About 321 calories each (not as bad as you might think). Made with Dutch process cocoa, so it’s not as full of fatted chocolate as you might think, either. The whole recipe contains a cup of chocolate chips, so not all that much per muffin. All that to justify why you need to make these.

This recipe comes from the files at King Arthur Flour. I read their blog regularly, and it was a post sometime last year. I printed it out at the time and it went into my to-try file. The particular morning when I needed to make these, it just jumped out at me. You know how that is.

Easy to make, really, as long as you have all the ingredients. There’s nothing special about these unless you don’t usually have espresso powder on hand. My daughter-in-law gave me a small jar of King Arthur’s granulated espresso powder for Christmas, so I got to use my first 3/4 teaspoon of it in this recipe. And it does call for Dutch process cocoa, as I mentioned above. I had some of Hershey’s “Special Dark,” which is a combo of Dutch and regular cocoa. But you can use one or the other, really.  Dutch process cocoa is a slightly muted flavor, that’s all.

The batter is mixed up in a bowl – you don’t use a mixer – which makes it a tad easier to put together. You mix up the dry ingredients separately, then the wet ingredients separately, and combine them, also pouring in the melted butter at the same time. I used my big cookie scoop to blob batter into the 12 muffin cups and after sprinkling the top with raw sugar, into a hot oven they went. The recipe indicated 20-25 minutes, but mine were done in 20. I’d recommend you check them no later than 20 minutes. You don’t want to over bake them. They cool for 5 minutes before you remove the muffins from the pan, cool slightly, and serve warm, if at all possible! They won’t last but a few minutes if you have hungry eaters in your house. I took them to my morning Scrabble group and we all devoured one apiece. They are rich and very satisfying. A keeper. If you have leftovers, do freeze them so they’ll be as fresh as possible when you need them a few days later. These can be served as cupcakes – I noticed that a few readers of King Arthur’s website recipe said they’d reduced the sugar a bit. They are just the best when they’re still barely warm.

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A year ago: Creamy Broccoli Cheddar Soup with Croutons
Two years ago: Curry Pasta Salad (from Namibia)

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This couldn’t be easier. Truly. Chop up some broccoli, put it on a Silpat-lined baking sheet, drizzle with some olive oil and toss it around with your hands, slice some fresh garlic, pop it in a hot oven and bake for about 20-25 minutes. Drizzle with lime zest and juice and serve. Broccoli, when roasted, takes on this delicious nutty flavor and light texture. Because the oven heat draws out a lot of the moisture in the broccoli, it’s light and almost fluffy. A minor warning, though – be sure you take it out when it’s done. If it goes much further in the oven, you’ll have burned crumbles. Not even edible that way!

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Oh, EASY. So EASY. Love these kinds of dishes. As with many families, on some nights (for us, Thursdays, choir practice night) I need to get dinner on the table in a timely manner. And I never seem to get started with making something until I’m under the gun for time. I’d defrosted some boneless, skinless chicken breasts, grabbed a recipe in my to-try arsenal and it was on the table in about 45 minutes. The recipe came from Homesick Texan, a blog I read regularly.

I made a couple of adaptations – I used chicken breasts instead of drumsticks – and I didn’t add the cayenne since I thought the chipotle gave the chicken enough heat already. Oh, and I didn’t add any additional salt, since mayo, I think, has ample. The blogger reminded her readers that even if you don’t like mayo, you  never taste it in the dish as it cooks off. All it does is keep in the moisture.

Top picture is the chicken just out of the oven. The mayo bathes the chicken, but it drains off, leaving the chipotle and other flavorings on top of the chicken. Having baked for 35 minutes, I sliced into the chicken, in the below picture, it was dripping in moisture. Perfectly cooked. I served this with roasted broccoli (which went in the oven along with the chicken) and a sliced avocado with a cilantro dressing. Delicious. I’ll be making this again.

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Three years ago: Carrot-Ginger Slaw

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In the years since I started writing my blog, I’ve made this chili a few times – the first time in early ‘07 before I started writing a blog. I’d left a comment on Joe’s website about how great this chili tasted. All the credit goes to Joe at Culinary in the Desert (blog), or maybe to Cooking Light, since he says that’s where he got the origin of it. Joe’s recipe uses just ground turkey. I decided to add some pork, but it’s up to you – whatever you’d prefer. Pork is very lean these days, so using half and half is what I did.

What’s different about this chili?

1. black beans;
2. making a home made sausage mixture (using ground turkey and ground pork) with a lot of unusual ingredients in it that marinates in the refrigerator overnight before you make the chili;
3. whizzing up some of the black beans in a blender or food processor to give the chili a kind of black bean gravy consistency. The chili just has a thicker consistency – not that you can see the black beans in the sauce.
4. it’s also quite healthy – there is almost no added fat, and it isn’t missed.

Otherwise, it’s an ordinary chili. But I wouldn’t call the taste ordinary at all. I don’t think I made this in 2010 – I just forgot about it. I don’t know that I even made chili last winter for some reason. We went out to eat one day last week and the cafe had black bean chili on their menu. I ordered it and it got me to thinking about Joe’s black bean sausage chili.

You do need to plan ahead by one day when making this. There is the one unusual step – marinating the turkey/pork mixture with wine, sherry vinegar and all the spices overnight – before you start cooking. Besides which, I don’t keep ground pork in my freezer stash. Or ground turkey either, for that matter. This time I made a huge batch (I quadrupled the recipe, so I could freeze numerous dinners for two, allowing 2 cups per serving) and needed to use freshly prepared meat, not defrosted stuff, which would only get frozen a second time (not good for the taste molecules).

So, once the meat has marinated overnight you cook it with onions, garlic, cumin, oregano, some chipotle chiles, ample black beans, some chicken stock or broth, and at the end you add some freshly squeezed lime juice and top it with cilantro. I added a little blob of sour cream too, but that was just for show. All I can say is yum. When I made it in ‘07, my notes say I topped some English muffins with shredded cheddar cheese, broiled it, and served that alongside the chili.

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A year ago: Beef & Biscuit Casserole (with sweet potato biscuits)
Two years ago: Radicchio Salad
Three years ago: Chinese Meatloaf

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Does that photo make you want to prepare this cake? Sometimes I get the best photos when I hardly try! Then when I try, they don’t turn out all that well. Since this wasn’t a hot dish that I needed to zip to the table, I was able to take time to set it up with reflective light. The contrast of dark and light works too. Sorry folks, you’ll just have to bear with me as I pat myself on the back!

Anyway, this cake. Well, it’s just delicious. Rich. Decadent. Chocolate. Almost truffle-like. Thick. Sensual almost. Wicked. All of the above. I didn’t get a photo of a served slice of the cake with the accompanying ice cream (with cinnamon and Kahlua added in) since we were at our son and daughter-in-law’s home, and the ice cream was melting fast. You’ll just have to trust me that the ice cream was delish, and that you NEED to make that part of it. Don’t NOT make the ice cream – you really do need it to cut the sweetness of the cake. Did I mention it was rich? Uh, yes it was.

The cake is easy to make. Honestly, it is. It’s a Phillis Carey recipe – one she notified her subscribers about – she sends out emails once in awhile with added recipes on her website. You have to sign up at her website to be notified. Anyway, this was one of those recipes. She probably taught it at a class, but I didn’t go to that one – she just said this cake was sensational. My changes: I’ve made two: (1) I reduced the amount of sugar in the cake, by just a bit; and (2) I added in the Kahlua to the ice cream. Why? Just because it sounded good. I bought vanilla ice cream and the children present had the cake with plain ice cream. The adults got a dose of liquor and a bit of cinnamon with theirs. I’d softened the ice cream to put in the additions and re-froze it (although 2 hours in the freezer was not enough time to totally re-freeze it, so allow more than that when you make it, okay?).

The cake can be made the day before, and I think it will feed 12 people. Phillis said 8-10, but with the richness of this cake, small pieces were in order. This recipe below is my slight adaptation of hers. Be sure to use the right sized pan (an 8-inch, not a 9-inch). If you DO use a 9-inch, it will bake in less time, probably by about 5 minutes.

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A year ago: Joanne Weir’s Mom’s Chocolate Cake
Three years ago: Refrigerator Bran Muffins

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Oh my goodness. As if we didn’t have enough to deal with right now, we’ve discovered we have a water leak below the slab of our 2 1/2 story home. Found out when we got our most recent water bill. Our trusty plumber put a pressure gauge on the main line and sure enough, we’re leaking 70-75 gallons a day. The very next day they started working on re-plumbing the house. Fortunately the leak is below the cement foundation, not in it or above, or we’d have water damage. Houses of the age of this one (38 years) have these kinds of problems. Much of home construction in the 70’s used methods and materials now considered inferior, so it’s no wonder. Much of California home construction even today is done with a foundation rather than crawl space.

Re-plumbing means tracing the existing copper pipe coming up through the foundation, opening those areas up (they’ve had a very hard time finding some of the pipe) so they can cap those off. Some exterior walls must also be opened, and our patio must accommodate a new pipe to a hose bib. The other two outside hose bibs won’t be too difficult. Then they are deciding how to re-lay new copper pipe in ceilings and walls throughout. We have two hot water heaters (one tankless, one not) and they must install pipe for both. It’s been 2+ weeks, and our house is nothing but a mess. They saw, pound, swear, saw, pound and swear many hours a day. Making a mess everywhere. They clean up as best they can at the end of every day. But it’s never enough! My kitchen island, no matter how frequently I clean it off, gets another fine layer of dry wall dust in a matter of an hour or two. Mostly I’ve given up. Even though they’ve installed plastic sheeting plenty of places, that fine dry wall dust gets through somehow.

These are photos of just SOME of the areas in our house where they’ve opened up ceilings or walls to lay in the copper pipe. They’ve put down paper on the floors to protect the travertine tile and carpeting. We’re looking at at least another week, if not two, until completion. Today they’re turning off the water for the entire day. I just hope they finish that part today, but based on what we’ve been through so far, I’d say they won’t. It’ll probably include tomorrow as well. I want my house back!

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