In our family we usually share hints from family members, even from the giftee, about what he/she’d like for a birthday gift or for Christmas. Two of our immediate family had been notably silent about asking me what I wanted this year for my birthday (it’s today). Usually I refer them to my Amazon wish list for ideas. Or I’ve even sent an email to family members a month or two ahead, when I knew about something I really, really wanted.

Sara, our daughter, and Karen, our daughter-in-law hit a home run with the gift this year. A beautiful tray. Inscribed with the Tasting Spoons logo. When I opened the gift I was totally surprised, overjoyed – and nearly cried – and then I noticed they’d even managed to get the logo type too. They’d had a back and forth email going with the gal who made the tray, and she was able to figure out the font by sleuthing on my blog site, in the header.

To say that I luv this gift is an understatement! I luv-luv-luv it. Thank you, Sara! Thank you, Karen!

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With blueberries in season, I’m trying to find ways to use them. They’re so inexpensive right now. Even if I freeze them, I should buy more! For my DH’s men’s Bible study group this week I made these old-time favorites. But it’s been years since I made them the last time, I think. The original recipe came from an ad for Libby’s pumpkin. Decades ago. It’s not on Libby’s recipe website, although I found it on several other blogs.

The only change I’ve made to this was substituting unsalted butter instead of shortening. That’s it. Otherwise, the recipe below is true to the original.

The batter is a simple and ordinary batter – except for the addition of pumpkin, of course. It uses brown sugar for sweetening it, which always gives baked goods a deeper flavor. And the only spices used are cinnamon and allspice. The blueberries are tossed with a tablespoon of flour to help keep them intact. The muffins are very moist – so you either need to use the paper liners, or use a silicone pan (like the one above) which makes for an easy removal.

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A year ago: Peach Pudding Cake
Two years ago: Artichoke Bruschetta

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Oh, was this ever delish. I’d bought some fish (lingcod) for dinner, and needed SOMEthing to go on top of it. With cauliflower as a side dish, I definitely required a colorful something to go with it. I have a cookbook I don’t refer to very often – Pike Place Public Market Seafood Cookbook. With recipes and advice regarding everything fish and seafood. I was going to lightly slather the top of the fish with some mayonnaise (gives it moisture), so under the mayo section I found this recipe for the blueberry ginger salsa. It comes from Ray’s Boathouse, a paragon of Seattle cuisine. A trusted name. And, happily, I had all the ingredients!

Once again I grabbed my fabulous little mini-chopper. The white chopper you see pictured at left is about 6 inches long, and the grid in the middle is tiny – itty-bitty tiny – blades. It makes SUCH quick work of mince. Luv this thing. Although I will tell you, it’s a bit tedious to clean. It has an insert that helps pull out the stuck-in pieces in the bottom of it, but it doesn’t get the tiny residual miniscule things that get stuck in the blades. But it’s oh-so worth it if you need to finely mince something to a uniform size. I don’t use it for onion because it just doesn’t cut it all that well.

It took little time to make this salsa. Half the berries are pureed, the other half left whole. It has fresh ginger in it, garlic, balsamic, a little sugar (I used agave nectar), some red bell pepper (that’s what’s red in the pictures), fresh lime juice, MINT and salt and pepper. See, I told you. Easy. Once it sat for about an hour it made some lovely-colored juice, and here’s what it looked like on the fish:

I’d make this again anytime. My friend Donna raved about it. The only thing I might change is to add just a little bit of heat – minced jalapeno, for instance. This salsa would be great on chicken too, I think. And pork. Maybe even lamb. And salmon for sure! With blueberries in season right now, this would be a great way to use some of them!

The next night I baked some fresh Alaskan salmon for dinner, and used up the remains of the salsa. It was great on this fish too – maybe even better than on the white fish. Make this, okay?
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Two years ago: Peppered Pecans (a favorite in salads, as an appetizer)

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Most people probably think cauliflower only cooks up – basically – one way: steamed. Bland. Blah. But if you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you know that I really discovered cauliflower (and its myriad of preparations) a couple of years ago. I was thrilled to find that I really LIKE cauliflower. A lot. Now you’ll have another way to make it with this recipe.

We’d invited a friend over for dinner. After Donna arrived, I asked her: “do you like cauliflower?” She said: “Uhm. I’m not sure.” Uh-oh I thought. It was too late. The cauliflower was already in the oven roasting at 500. Too late to find another side dish for dinner! Fortunately, she discovered she likes it this way for sure. Whether she’d ever make it, I don’t know. We liked it a lot, though. And it’s low-fat too.

The recipe came from a Cooking Light issue. I followed it fairly closely, although I don’t believe I used as much milk as the recipe indicated. And the cauliflower wasn’t as “mashed” as I’d expected. We found the cauliflower still a bit too firm to make the mash. So, the baking time may need to be lengthened just a tad. I also added a bit more olive oil on the florets before baking, but I used less butter at the end. So, I’m giving you my proportions.

Shopping at a local ethnic grocery store I found some really nice spring onions. The kind that have a more bulb-like onion at the base. Like baby onions almost. I really like their flavor. Those went into these. Plus ample garlic that is tossed with the cauliflower during the roasting process. Then you add just ordinary stuff: milk, butter, salt and pepper. Simple, huh?

You can make this up ahead and just reheat in the microwave if you’d like. Be sure to taste it just before serving to make sure you’ve got the right balance of salt and pepper. It took more salt than I expected.
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Other cauliflower recipes on my blog: Tandoori-Style Cauliflower, Cauliflower with Bacon & Mushrooms, Kalyn’s Twice-Baked Cauliflower, Twice Baked Cauliflower Take 2, Cauliflower Soup with Seared Scallops, and lastly A Bowl of White

A  year ago: Earthquake (we had one in our area that day)
Two years ago: Marinated Brussels Sprouts (a favorite of mine)

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These probably look just like the bowl of cherries I showed you a couple of days ago. But they’re NOT. Well, same cherries, but cooked. Same set-up (background, still left “up” in my mini kitchen studio area, but different bowl. I know, they don’t look cooked, do they? They’re not stewed for very long, but oh do they have flavor, big time.

In Russ Parsons’ book, How to Pick a Peach, he mentions a simple recipe of his. This one. It’s just pitted fresh cherries, mixed with some sugar (pictured left at the macerating stage), then with some red wine, some spices, briefly simmered on the stove, a splash of balsamic vinegar added and you’re done.

Good for spooning over vanilla ice cream. Because they still had some shape to them I decided to cut them in half. They also didn’t have much juice left to them, but that’s the way Parsons makes them. I’d prefer some juice to it, so you might add a bit more red wine and sugar to it. The flavor is elegant. Deep. Complex (especially with the balsamic added at the end). Really good – true cherry flavor. With backbone. I made these a couple of days ago, and once they’d rested in the refrigerator, they’d softened up a lot more than the photo at top indicates – you can see them better below with the ice cream. Soft cherries, the way they ought to be on top of ice cream.

I did end up adding just a bit more red wine to the compote during the cooking stage than the recipe indicates, but OH, is this ever piquant. I’ll be making this again. And again. But only when Bings are in season.
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A year ago: Irish Cream Brownies
Two years ago: Normandy Apricot Custard

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Our 11-year old granddaughter Taylor, who was visiting recently, has become quite the green thumb. She’s growing lots of things in her home garden, including these squash above. Home grown yellow crookneck sometimes get oodles of knobs on them. Funny looking, but they disappear in the cooking. Yellow squash is probably my favorite in the squash family. I like zucchini, but the yellow squash is somehow more tender, more delicate maybe? I can’t exactly say why I like them better, or what’s different about the taste.

This recipe, I’m almost embarrassed to say, is so simple I hardly could CALL it a recipe. It’s how my mother used to make squash. We had it often. I’ve made a couple of little changes over the years (adding thyme and olive oil). The secret, if you could call it that, is merely in cutting the squashes into relatively small pieces, and adding the thyme. I also add just a little smear of butter before serving it. And I give the squash a goodly jolt of pepper and a light sprinkle of salt. It’s so easy.
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Two years ago: Meatloaf with Sweet & Sour Sauce (a family favorite)

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My friend Norma (for whom I’ve been making puddings and custards for a few months) thought maybe she was improved enough that she could tackle some peach cobbler. As long as the topping wasn’t too bready, too dry. Swallowing is still an issue for her. No problem for me to find something to fill that request. I don’t like cobblers with lots of topping either.

My America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook has a full-page chart for making fruit cobblers. It suggests 9 different fruit variations, with how much fruit to start with, always using a 9-inch deep dish pie plate, how much sugar to add, how much cornstarch and what flavorings to use. Very helpful. I’ll be referring to this chart again. One of the things I like the best about this cookbook (and Cook’s Illustrated, and America’s Test Kitchen recipes in general) is that they explain why they do some things in recipes. Things that might be contrary to established practice.

In this case it was about baking the peaches for half an hour before adding the biscuits. They found that if you put the biscuits on top of the peaches from the beginning, the bottom part of each biscuit didn’t get baked sufficiently (not enough heat from underneath). So, they completely heated the peaches first by baking them for 20-30 minutes, THEN placed the scoops of biscuit dough on top. Ideally, I suppose, you would eat this all at the first sitting. I don’t know what the biscuits will be like refrigerated for a day or two. Maybe a bit soggy. The recipe also said they’d tried adding oatmeal to the biscuit mixture, and definitely eliminated that option. The oatmeal was too distinctive (overpowering flavor).

This recipe recommended 4-5 peaches. I wanted more peach to cobbler ratio, so I upped it to about 7. I used a tad more cornstarch too, the lower amount of sugar (it mentioned 1/4 to 1/3 cup). Then it suggested ground cloves, vanilla and brandy. I knew my friend Norma wouldn’t want the brandy, so I made hers without. Since I doubled this recipe, I was able to add the brandy to the one I made for us. As it turned out, the one I made for Norma just happened to have a lot more fluid in it – hopefully just what Norma will like. You may need to flex the cornstarch ratio – if the peaches are really ripe and juicy, the cobbler likely needs a bit more cornstarch.

The cookbook recipe also suggested a variation with ground and crystallized ginger added to the biscuits. I threw caution to the wind and added the ginger AND the vanilla (and there were ground cloves in the peaches too). Why not, I thought? We liked this a LOT. The sweetness was at a moderate level (I don’t happen to like overly sweet desserts anyway). The buttermilk biscuits? Yum. I liked them a lot. Tender and tasty with the ginger inside. I like that variation a lot, actually. And the little sprinkling of sugar and cinnamon on top? Liked that part too. There wasn’t anything I didn’t like about this cobbler. It may become my new go-to recipe.
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A year ago: Barbecued Beans
Two years ago: Crisp Apple Pudding (my mother’s recipe, one of my very favorite recipes ever)

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On our recent driving trip through California, Oregon and Washington, we saw a multitude of roadside stands hawking cherries. Bings. A few Rainiers. The season is short, as we probably all know. It wasn’t always that way, apparently. Back in the day (probably the 1800’s) a plentiful variety ripened at different times. But somebody, in their infinite wisdom (?) decided it would be better to choose one variety and have them all harvest at the same time (more efficient . . . they decided). Hence the Bing. Our favorite national cherry.

Well, except in Michigan, where they grow about 240 MILLION pounds of sour cherries. But would you believe that 239 million of them end up in cans? Yup. Only about a million of them end up being eaten fresh, and only in Michigan.

Most cherries are grown on the West Coast (Washington, Oregon and California), and they make up about 65% of the marketable cherries in the U.S. I like how Russ Parsons (all this data comes from his book, How to Pick a Peach) describes the flavor:

• [A Bing] “is about as good as any cherry variety that has ever been grown – crisp on the outside, with a melting center that saves it from being crunchy; dark and sweet, with a nice tart backbone.”

It’s the “tart backbone” that I like. But anyway, so the legend goes, the Bing variety was found in 1875 on the farm of eastern Washington agricultural pioneer Seth Lewelling – by a Chinese workman named Ah Bing. Isn’t that just too cute? Now, there are 4 cherry categories (Bigarreaux (or Black, of which Bing is one), Dukes, Hearts and Sours. Hearts and Dukes are very soft cherries (can’t be shipped) and exist mostly in home gardens. Blacks (Bing, Royal Ann and Rainier) dominate the fresh cherry market. Royal Ann & Rainiers are the ones used to make maraschino cherries.

Interestingly, the Japanese are huge consumers of American cherries. And the “gold rush” of cherry farming is getting the first fruit of the season to the Asian market – jet-freighted to Japan and Hong Kong, where they charge 10x as much as they do here. And marketers, doing what they do, have begun growing Bings further south where the weather patterns aren’t always cherry partners. You see, cherries need at least 700 hours of winter temps at or below 45 degrees. Now THAT is a little factlet you can pop out at your next dinner party, right? But because of the more temperate climate in California, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Without the winter nap, Parsons calls it, the cherry trees simply don’t have enough energy to produce fruit. The other factlet is that cherries don’t like rain (they crack and split). And because winters in California can be rainy, more risk is involved each winter when California farmers attempt to get an early ripening.

In 1988, though, the University of California developed a new cherry – the Brooks (a cross between a Rainier and a Burlat, an heirloom variety). It is more resistant to warm weather flaws and can be picked about 10 days earlier than Bings. As a result of many California farmers shifting to the Brooks, California now grows more than a third of fresh cherries in the U.S.

One of Russ Parsons recommendations is that if you have a batch of cherries that are just barely past their prime, add a nip of balsamic vinegar to them when cooking. That will balance out the flavor. Don’t overdo it, though.

Choosing Cherries: sort through them if you can and choose the darkest – mahogany red – if possible. Make sure they’re shiny. A matte color means they’re over the hill. No shriveling or wilting, of course. Doubles and spurs mean they’ve had too much heat on the tree.

Storing: Plastic bag, coldest part of the refrigerator. Don’t wash until ready to eat. They’ll last 2-3 weeks.

In Parsons’ book he includes 3 recipes: Cold Spiced Cherry Soup, a Red Wine-Poached Cherry Dessert, and Cherry-Almond Cobbler.

A year ago: Supposedly a rendition of KFC’s Cole Slaw (not one of my better recipes)
Two years ago: Sicilian Tuna Salad (a real favorite of mine)

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Our grandkids’ entourage left yesterday (4 of them). After breakfast. We did a bunch of cleanup all around. Dave did about 4 loads of wash (including 17 towels, he made a point of telling me) and he was ambitious enough to polish all the granite in our kitchen (bless him!). Me? I did almost nothing. Checked email. Did some re-arranging around the house. Sat in front of the TV catching up on some of my favorite Tivo’d shows that I haven’t watched for a month. Took a nap watching older “CBS Sunday Morning” shows.

So when dinnertime came, what to fix? We had leftovers – ribs from our favorite rib joint (Scottie’s, a local place). Had more fresh tomatoes from friends’ gardens. Had fresh mozzarella and fresh basil. And we had just enough left of my favorite green beans – the Garlic Green Beans. They’re briefly cooked, then briefly sautéed in olive oil and garlic. Even the grandchildren ate more than one serving of them when I served the beans the night before last.

Before dinner last night I made myself a drink – a cocktail type drink with Aperol, some apricot brandy and Squirt. Dave had a glass of wine. We sat out on our patio enjoying the sunset, relaxing. Enjoying the summer flowers rimming our patio. And the view. And the pink/red sky. Being thankful for the life we have, and saying it was wonderful having the No. California family with us, but it was nice when they went home, too. Maybe there will be some more inventive cooking going on in Carolyn’s kitchen in coming days.

A year ago: Cucumbers (everything you ever wanted to know about them)

Two years ago: Buttermilk Scones (my all-time favorite buttery scones)

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Our granddaughter, Taylor (at right in the picture), asked: “What’s for dinner, Grandma?”
I said: “A ground beef casserole with biscuits on top.”

Logan, our grandson (center in the picture) said, after a long pause: “Grandma . . . what’s a casserole?”

We all chuckled that Logan didn’t recognize the word. It’s not that he hasn’t had one – Taylor even reminded him of the last casserole I made a couple of months ago when they visited – he just didn’t know it by that name. Even Mikayla (Taylor’s friend, also in the picture at left, who came along for this visit) knew about casseroles.

To say that this casserole was a roaring success is visible in the very few sticky remains in the deep casserole. The kids were all over it. Wanted seconds and thirds if they could have had them. Most of the adults at the dinner had seconds also. My DH was limited only by the fact that his first serving was large enough. Good thing since the kids wanted more and more of it.

This recipes goes w-a-a-a-y back in my repertoire. I’ve tweaked it over the years, and this time I tweaked it some more. Now, this isn’t anything gourmet. And you really can’t make it ahead of time because of the biscuits. But you can make the meat mixture ahead, then just reheat it before you compose the casserole.

The meat is ground beef (and you could just as easily use ground turkey), with onion, garlic, green chiles (canned), a bit of corn (I used canned because I had an open can), tomato sauce, and chili powder. Then you add some light sour cream and a goodly amount of shredded Jack cheese. The trick to this casserole is the biscuits. Now my guess is this recipe may have come about when Pillsbury first came out with the canned (tube) biscuits. The original recipe is in lots of places on the internet. And that’s the way I used to make this (and you can too if you choose). I might have this time except I didn’t want to make another trip to the regular grocery store for the biscuits, so I made them from scratch. Took very little time since I had the buttermilk on hand. I simply went to my own blog and found my favorite recipe for Drop Biscuits and made them – but I rolled them out instead.

The casserole has a bunch of horizontal biscuit halves on the bottom of the casserole. Then you spoon in all the meat mixture, top that with the other half of the biscuits, sprinkle with some Jack cheese and you’re ready to bake. All I did was divide the biscuit batter in half and rolled out each half to make about 12 thin biscuits – half goes on the bottom, the other half of the batter makes more to go on the top. It was really very easy. But if you want to make it super easy, then use the tube biscuits (with this recipe you’ll likely need 2 tubes) – the kind with visible layers, so you CAN separate them into thin halves.

What’s different about my recipe? I add fresh garlic. I also add corn. Sometimes I add shredded Cheddar if I don’t have Jack cheese. I also eliminated an egg in the meat mixture that was in the original recipe. Didn’t seem to be needed as far as I was concerned. So, if you haven’t ever made this, it’s a crowd pleaser. Especially children. For me, it’s the biscuits.

What’s GOOD: this dish is just comfort food at its finest. When you crave something ooey, gooey, cheesy, and you don’t mind the casserole concept, well, this is the one! All of our grandkids just love-love this dish. Me too.

What’s NOT: not one single thing. It’s certainly not low calorie, though. But it’s not wicked, if you understand what I mean. Definitely worth making for a big crowd.
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MasterCook 5+ file and MasterCook 14 file

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