These ribs were just awfully-darned good. Especially with that sauce you can see there beside them. This is another recipe from the cooking class I took earlier this week. All about pork. These were Berkshire ribs – so delicious. But I’d eat these with just regular pork just to have them. The sauce is SO easy; I kid you not. The time consuming thing is baking the ribs for 2 hours before you can grill them or brown them a bit. At the very last minute (no more than 5) you can slather them with the sauce, and serve the sauce on the side as well.

Each of us got 2 ribs to enjoy. Not nearly enough, although everything served to us that night was  pork, and there were no sides. No salad. No veggies. Nothing. I craved something to go with it, even some cole slaw or salad. But, these were good nonetheless. This recipe may be the first one I make.

The ribs are patted heavily with a dry rub – in this case the chef used one called “Butt Rub,” from Bad Byron. It’s salt, pepper, granulated onion, granulated garlic, paprika, chipotle powder, and a non-caking agent. Nothing else, so you could try to make it yourself. I just don’t know the proportions, but what I wrote here is the order listed on the label. Anyway, then the ribs were placed in a disposable pan and ordinary root beer was added, about 1/2 inch deep. They were covered well, then baked for 2 hours in a 325 oven. Meanwhile you make the sauce in the blender (or food processor) and simmer it for 20-30 minutes. Easy. It contains sweet onions, garlic, red bell peppers, canned tomatoes, some bottled hot sauce (not Tabasco, but some other kind of bottled spicy red sauce), brown sugar and lemon juice.

We still have some baby backs in the freezer from our 4-H pig from 2008. I think this would make an outstanding dinner for two. We have just about enough to share between two of us. No, you can’t have any!
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A year ago: Mexican Chicken Salad Take Two

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I know, I can hear you already. . . that’s not a pork chop. You’re right, it isn’t. But in the cooking class I attended the other night, all about pork, the butcher and chef decided that it would be too difficult to cut and serve stuffed pork chops to a class of about 50 people. So they used the whole boneless pork loin (roast), cut a slender slit in the center and pushed the stuffing mixture in there, then browned it and roasted it just like you would with chops. So the taste would be about the same.

The two men teaching the class, Stan Glenn, a master meat cutter, and Chris Brill, executive chef, are part of Iowa Meat Farms and Siesel’s (pronounced like cecil’s) meat markets, both live and work in San Diego. They’re fervent advocates of Berkshire pigs. As am I. Do you remember the story about Berkshires (aka Kurobuta)? Berkshire pigs come from England. A long time ago the Earl of Berkshire gave two of his prized black-skinned pigs to some visiting Japanese dignitaries after he’d served them a meal using his pigs. Hence, the Japanese went on to nurture and breed the Berkshire, and called them Kurobuta (means black skin). Here in the U.S. we started an association of Berkshire breeders, and they have been purebred (registered, like lots of purebred livestock) since 1875. But it’s just in the last 4-6 years, I’d guess, the meat has made it past the counties (mostly Midwest) where the Berkshires are raised. Now there are hundreds of small farm operations (all family owned) who raise Berkshires. And what treasures they are.

A year ago we purchased a 4-H pig that was a Berkshire. This was before Berkshires became recognized nationwide as a far superior meat. I knew. And I wanted that pig! Now people know about it – more people. So when we tried to buy more Berkshire pig from the same 4-H kid a few months ago, we were outbid by nearly double the price. So somebody else knew about it and was willing to pay.

It was about 2+ years ago I purchased a Kurobuta ham direct from a farmer. It was absolutely sensational. If you want to read the story about it, there’s a link there for how to buy it. It’s expensive. As is any Berkshire pork meat. But it’s so much more flavorful and tender. Worth it to me. I’ll have half the amount if I can have Berkshire.

This pork loin meat was so juicy and tender. And I really, really liked the stuffing. A lot. So, you can make stuffed chops (pictured right on the monitor in the classroom), or you can also make this to serve a larger number of people by using a boneless loin of pork, cutting a tunnel in it and stuffing it. In either case, you want to bake it until it reaches 155 internal temp. And for this you really ought to have a good meat thermometer. No overcooking allowed!
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A year ago: Pickled carrots

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You’ve heard of Thomas Keller by now. Yes, surely you have. If you’re into food, then Thomas Keller is a beacon in today’s foodie world. Renowned for his restaurants (The French Laundry, Per Se, Bouchon, and Ad Hoc), Keller just looks at food differently, and always has some different take on things. Including cookies.

He has made quite a name for himself in the baked good department, with the Bouchon Bakery. Dave and I stopped there a couple years ago and sat out on the patio, in relative freezing cold weather, to enjoy some piping hot coffee, an almond croissant (probably the very best one I’ve ever eaten in my life!), and macarons. Oh my. All to die for. And most likely these cookies were there too, but my homing instinct was on croissants and macarons that day.

I read about this CC cookie over at Food Gal’s blog. What’s different about them is that you start with cold, cold butter, cut up in little pieces. Then you add all the other stuff, with the freshly chopped up chocolate (heavy-duty, good quality chocolate bars) at the end. One of the secrets to this is to sift the chocolate chunks in a sieve (to eliminate all the fine chocolate dust from coloring the cookies). It also has dark brown sugar in it. And one other helpful hint was to spray the cookies with water before baking – if you want softer cookies. I made some of both. The recipe indicates 33 cookies (large ones). I used a standard cookie scoop and got 44. Just so you know. . .

Good? Yes! Different textured cookies. I can’t exactly describe it, but they are softer in the middle than any traditional chocolate chip cookie. Other than the cookie dough I sampled, I’ve had a total of two cookies so far. Yummy. I’ll make these again. They may not be as spectacular as my favorite ones, the One Bowl CC Cookies, but they’re pretty darned good.
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A year ago: Tea

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When we arrived home late yesterday I had nothing much in the refrigerator. Not even enough lettuce types to make a big green salad. So I turned to the freezer’s soup library. Fortunately, we’ve had a few days of cooler temps here in the California southland. Unseasonably nice. Usually September is our hottest month. Shhh. I don’t want to say it too loud. So, soup even sounded good. I looked through the stack of frozen soups. . . lentil, no. It’s not THAT cool. Pork chile verde? No, we had pork for lunch. Ah, some Red Thai curry shrimp, butternut squash and pumpkin soup with spinach. I remember it well. I concocted the recipe myself from several I found on the internet. It was sensational when I made it last year, and I had just enough for us to have for dinner. I microwaved the flat Ziploc bag for about 75 seconds, broke up the frozen chunks, dumped them in a big pot and heated it over a very low flame for about 20 minutes.

Recipe? Yes, indeed. Thai Pumpkin Shrimp Curry Soup

We spent the weekend singing and singing and singing. At our church choir retreat in the California mountains. Tahquitz Pines, in Idyllwild. My voice is very out of practice, but I didn’t get hoarse, which means I restrained myself some. It feels so good to be singing again.  At the church camp, well, not the spiffiest of accommodations, I will say. Five meals, two nights for $150 each. Oh yes, and provide all your own bedding (sheets, blankets, pillows) and towels. I won’t be advertising that as the newest budget weekend getaway, though. The food was relatively awful. Dave and I had an individual cabin. I use the word loosely, though. Don’t go thinking cute, homey, country, etc. This is just plain spartan. But the scenery was gorgeous, what we saw of it, because we were singing from early morning until late night. The board-hard bed was barely sleep-able. Our home beds felt so good. Just molded for us! Anyway, here are a couple of pictures.

There’s Dave sitting on the front stoop in the late afternoon on Friday. I did not take any photos of the room. Too awful. The places are clean – I don’t mean that – they’re just primitive. The camp is affiliated with Wycliffe Bible Translators – a Christian organization that translates the Bible into mostly obscure languages. Many of the translators and their families live and work here (briefly) immersing themselves in a new language and culture before flying over yonder, where they live and work for several years translating.

There’s Dave with 3 other choir guys. Music folders in hand. Ready for a long day of singing. I think I mentioned we have 113 members in our choir.

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No recipes today. We’re actually away for the weekend, at a retreat for our church choir. Dave and I have decided, after a 10-year hiatus, to return to singing in our church’s magnificent choir. We’re members of Trinity United Presbyterian Church and have been for about 26 years. So we’re at a church camp in Idyllwild (a quaint town nestled in the mountains between where we live and Palm Springs) singing our little hearts out with the other 111 choir members. Meanwhile, I thought I’d give you a little view of Dave’s “dishwashing station.” I’m SO lucky to have a husband who enjoys washing dishes. So when we remodeled our kitchen 3 years ago, he chose the sink – a massive one-bowl, very wide kidney shaped model.

The main, and more expansive, view from our home is off to the left; this is the mostly NW facing view with a somewhat obscured vista of palm trees in our neighbor’s yard, and some very large Pride of Madeira plants (with the cone-shaped spiky things sticking up) that are in our yard. This photo was taken a few months ago before the cones had bloomed with their unique purple blossoms. If you could see beyond the shrubbery, on a clear day you might be able to see the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. We’ve lived in this house for 6 years, and have only seen L.A. twice in that time because of haze (or summer smog) in the air.

A year ago: Tasting Spoons (photos of the spoons for which my blog is named)

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Did every cook make these back in the 1960’s? I sure did. And I have no recollection whether I read some recipe for it, or if I just made it up. It might have been when Reynolds began marketing foil. You young-uns out there won’t realize we didn’t always HAVE foil. My recollection is that baking food in foil packages (particularly fish and chicken) was so very popular because we were introduced to this fabulous new product that you could throw away after using. No mess. Little or no cleanup.

Since I was new to cooking back then, I doubt this recipe in its original incarnation was my own invention. I tweaked it, changed the ingredients a bit. And I made it very often. I did start adding dried thyme to it somewhere along the line, and the butter which makes everything succulent. When I was researching this recipe online I found several recipes at the Reynolds’ website, and some included adding an ice cube to the top of the veggies just before sealing up the packet and baking at 450 for 20-25 minutes. I wouldn’t, because the squash makes sufficient liquid, along with the butter.

You can also add mushrooms, corn, green onions, sweet potatoes, even celery, green peppers. Let your imagination fly – or just refer to whatever resides in your vegetable bin. Though I highly recommend you include some onion – it perfumes everything in the pouch. Add garlic if you’d like, and grated cheese can be sprinkled on the top as soon as you open the pouches (I.e., don’t cook the cheese inside the pouch). If you grill it on the barbecue, it will take much less time, like about 20 minutes or less  – be careful it doesn’t scorch if you put it directly over the heat/coals. The oven provides a more gentle heat. And the fragrance here in my kitchen was delightful – the onion and the thyme, I suspect.

Here’s the first layers – some canola oil spray first, then potatoes, onions and carrots.

The next layers – zucchini and some yellow crookneck squash.

Here I’ve added the butter, thyme, salt and pepper.

Here are the little pouches when they went into the oven.

You want to seal them well – definitely don’t want any fluid to leak out. When the butter melts inside, it coats all the veggies.
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A year ago: Creamed Spinach & Basil
Two years ago: Cape Cod Meatballs (appetizers)

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‘Tis the season for watermelon. And if you haven’t tried one of the salads mentioned here on my blog, with watermelon and Feta, well, here’s another one. If I had to rank them, I still think the plain one with just watermelon and Feta is the best, but this was good too. Different.

It’s just a combo of watermelon cubes or balls, Feta (the recipe calls for ricotta salata, but I wasn’t going to drive 10 miles to get it), red onion slices, arugula, walnuts and a citrus dressing. The most time consuming was cutting the watermelon. Once that was done, it was fairly quick work preparing the rest of the mixture. The recipe is Sardinian. Can’t say that I’ve cooked much from Sardinia. Have you? I assumed not. Anyway, this was written up in Food & Wine Magazine in 2007. The recipe come from a gentleman named Efisio Farris, and I think he owns a winery there. What he said about this is that in his country watermelon and arugula grow next to one another, so putting them together in a salad was a natural combination.

The original recipe called for orange juice. I didn’t have any, so used pineapple juice instead. Farris said that raspberry vinegar is a regular staple in his region, and that we’d find the dressing (orange juice, raspberry vinegar, lime juice and a little olive oil) a never-to-forget combination. Uh, well, okay. Maybe I’ll need to try this with the orange juice to verify that statement. Anyway, everyone liked the salad. It’s refreshing, perfect for a warm summer evening. I will tell you, though, don’t plan for leftovers because the dressing just kind of mutilates the salad after sitting in it for a couple of hours – what was left the other day was mostly mush, so had to toss it out. I suppose I could have whizzed it up in the blender and called it watermelon soup, but I didn’t. Anyway, I’d make this again, but I’d likely use MUCH less dressing. It doesn’t need hardly any, anyway. And, I think this serves far more than 4 people – there must be a typo in the recipe – each person would be eating nearly a pound of watermelon. Noooo. Too much. I didn’t weigh the watermelon, so I really don’t know how much of 3 pounds I used. I served 10 people with a double recipe and had leftovers. So judge it yourself and definitely taste as you add the dressing and use less . . . rather than more.
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A year ago: Shrimp Avocado Salsa
Two years ago:Baked Brie & Apples

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Thank goodness for the internet. Otherwise I’d have made Dorie Greenspan’s rice pudding recipe straight out of the cookbook and not known it contained two typo’s. And I’d have been very disappointed to have made a sweet rice and milk soup rather than a more solid rice pudding. Years ago there was no way to ever know about typographical errors in cookbooks.

My friend Norma was ready for another dessert, and after going through some ideas she decided rice pudding sounded the best. I have several recipes for it, but knew Dorie Greenspan’s ought to be the best out there. How chagrined she must be to have such major typo’s appear in her wonderful cookbook. Whatever happened to proofreaders at publishing houses? I’ve made a couple of errors on my recipes here on this blog, but I don’t have a proofreader (except for moi), so you get what you get when you read it here! This recipe is from her book: Baking: From My Home to Yours.

Anyway, this recipe is different than some. My mother used to make rice pudding. I’m sure yours did too. I don’t know what recipe my mom used, since I didn’t find one in her recipe box. But because Dorie used Arborio rice (the type used to make Italian risotto), I was intrigued with it. Then in reading her recipe I discovered that you parboil the rice in water first. Parboil means to cook briefly, partially – it’s a culinary technique that can be used for other things – like vegetables. To parboil means to partially cook something, for continuing to cook it later. It’s just a method of submerging the item in boiling water and cooking it for a minute or two. In this case the rice is cooked for ten minutes (the parboil part). So here, you simmer the rice in water first. Then it’s drained and rinsed (the rinsing of cooked rice was something I’d never done) before combining with the milk and sugar and simmering it for nearly an hour. 45 minutes to be exact. Then you add vanilla, or the chocolate, or divide the batch in half and do both, as I did.

This rice pudding is not a firm pudding – it has no eggs or cornstarch to thicken it – just milk and rice. That’s it. Even after chilling overnight, the pudding is not firm. I liked it this way. It’s also not overly sweet, either. I liked that part of it too. Most of the others who have made Dorie’s rice pudding agreed that both the chocolate and the vanilla types were good. Neither one was better than the other. Combining them – as I did for the photo above – looked pretty – but I’m not sure I’d actually serve it that way because the chocolate version overpowered the vanilla. But this way you could easily make 2 chocolate puds and 2 vanilla puds. Or 3 and 1. Whatever. I used more rice, and I added some half and half instead of milk for part of it (I made a triple quantity), and I cooked the milk-rice mixture for about 45 minutes before cooling it; all of these alterations are included in the recipe below.
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A year ago: Eggplant – everything you always wanted to know
Two years ago: Herbed Biscuit Ring (an easy, but delish biscuit made from tube biscuits)

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It’s been a year or so since I made this salad. It’s SO darned good. And SO darned EASY. My DH loves it besides! He was a very happy camper that we had this for dinner the other night. I’m fortunate that Dave enjoys and relishes having a salad for dinner – a dinner with nothing BUT salad. Usually the salad has some kind of protein in it – in this case a small amount of bacon – but any way I make it, he likes it. I had a fresh baguette, so I made some garlic croutons to go with it. Enjoyed the bit of crunch.

In case you didn’t read it when I posted this recipe back in 2007, I highly recommend it. This recipe is in my “Carolyn’s Fav’s,” one of the tabs at the top where I’ve listed my very favorite recipes.

A year ago: Wellesley Chocolate Chip Cookies
Two years ago: Lumpia (a Filipino appetizer)

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Since I made Melissa d’Arabian’s salmon cakes, I also made her recipe for orzo risotto. Now she calls it Orzo with Thyme & Lemon Zest, but during the 30-minute Food Network segment, she mentioned more than once that it’s kind of like risotto except it’s pasta, not rice.

The cooking of this is just a tad different than usual. Instead of using a big pot of water, and cooking the pasta in it and draining out the water when it’s done, you cook the pasta in just enough chicken broth (and water) to reach that peak of just-barely-done al dente, but also creamy enough to make you think it’s risotto. Throw out that old-school thinking that says you have to cook pasta in a whole lot of water and that bit of starch in the water must be tossed out. All the starch stays IN the pot and helps make the pasta sticky.

There’s nothing fancy about this. In fact, I’ve made a similar dish even recently, but not prepared this way which uses twice the amount of liquid as pasta and no draining needed or desired. This one is flavored with red pepper flakes, garlic, lemon zest (I used lime because I didn’t have any lemons) and some thyme. I used dried thyme, not fresh, only because Ina Garten explained recently that she thinks fresh thyme is too strong, so she prefers dried. Or was that about oregano. Oh dear,  I don’t remember now. I also added in a bit of butter at the end, too, but it probably wasn’t needed. I liked this, and it certainly was EASY. All made in one pot.

If you go online to read about the recipe at the Food Network, you’ll find lots of comments from people that there was too much water in the recipe. I agree – I used just the chicken broth and added about another 2 tablespoons (not 2 cups) of water at the end because the pasta wasn’t quite done and the broth was all gone. So, you need to watch it very carefully at the end so it doesn’t burn and stick in the pan. I used a nonstick pan because there really isn’t any oil or butter in this to keep it moving around the pan without sticking. My recommendation is that you make it more soupy than you think it should be because once you put it on the plate, it’s still absorbing liquid. By the time we ate it the first time it was too dry. I’d whisked it over to my kitchen photo location and snapped a couple of pictures and by the time I put it on the table about 60 seconds later – well, it was a bit too dry – too dry to be called risotto-like, anyway. But the taste was good. Certainly good enough for a weeknight dinner. My recipe reflects the changes I made – click on the link in the first paragraph if you want to see Melissa’s original (with too much water) recipe.

If you make this with the salmon cakes like I did, just have everything else ready before you start cooking everything, because you need to pay attention to both the orzo and salmon almost constantly at the end. I will make this again just because it’s SO easy. So quick.
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A year ago: Ginger Ice Cream
Two years ago: Siciliana Sauce

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