This snapshot is just part of a wedge - for the class we didn't get an entire one.

Every time I go to a Phillis Careycooking class I learn something new. That alone keeps me going back to her classes. But heading the list of good things about Phillis’ classes is the taste of the food. She is just a wizard with a spatula, a pounder, a stovetop grill and chicken! As I’ve mentioned here before, she has several cookbooks to her name (I own them all) and she’s working on another one, about entertaining.

Grilling Romaine lettuce isn’t exactly new. I’ve ordered it twice – out at a restaurant – but had never seen it done before. It’s easy. I may make this salad later this week because our daughter Dana positively loves-loves Caesar anything. So do the grandkids. And I thought this dressing was simply fab – and easy. I mean – it’s nothing more than mayonnaise with Caesar-type ingredients added to it. How easy is that? Phillis used capers (she doesn’t like anchovies), which was delicious in this rendition of salad.

The Romaine heads – use smaller ones if you can find them – or remove the outer leaves of a bigger one and use those leaves for something else – are cut in quarters (including the root end – which holds the salad together while it grills. Some of the dressing gets slathered on the two cut halves of the lettuce and it’s put on an grill for just a minute – all you want to do is get some grill marks if you can – on the cut sides, so you grill for just a minute on each of the two cut sides. If you happen to have really small Romaine heads, you can serve each person a half of one, in which case the lettuce might only need a minute on the grill. Any more than that and you might get lettuce mush.

Once off the grill you add some more dressing, then top it with the already grilled chicken, tomatoes, croutons and big wide Parmesan shards, shaved off of a block of good cheese. Simply delicious.
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My friend Yvette is always on the lookout for interesting tidbits of foodie info – for me to use here on my blog. She sent me this list of movies many months ago. Movies with the focus around food. So fire up your Netflix queue or visit your local video store. If you click on the title, you’ll go to Netflix.

Babette’s Feast (1987), subtitled: This Danish/French production and Best-Foreign Language Oscar winner connects religious themes with gastronomical delights as the heroine pours lottery winnings into a magnificent banquet.

Big Night (1996): With mouthwatering footage of Italian dishes, this Indie dramedy centers on two immigrant brothers who gamble on a huge feast to save their struggling New Jersey restaurant.

Chocolat (2000): partially subtitled. Desserts takes center stage in this multi-Oscar-nominated English/French film about a single mom who opens a chocolate shop in a conservative Catholic town.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1992), subtitled: Ang Lee nabbed a best foreign film Oscar nom for this affectionate exploration of Taiwanese gastronomical and generational dynamics through the story of a master chef and his three daughters.

Like Water for Chocolate (1992), subtitled: In this Mexican family drama, home-cooked cuisine does strange and mystical things to the characters.

Mostly Martha (2001), subtitled: “No Reservations” was inspired by this German tale of a top chef whose headstrong 8-year old niece comes to live with her.

No Reservations (2007): Based on the previous movie above, about the romance between a top restaurant chef and her sous chef with the complication of the 8-year old niece who comes to live with her when the child’s mother dies.

Ratatouille(2007): This Pixar comedy is about Remy, a young rat who lives in the walls of a fancy Paris restaurant and aspires to be a chef.

Soul Food (1997): The 40-year long ritual of a family’s Sunday dinners of sumptuous soul food is interrupted by the matriarch’s hospitalization.

Tampopo(1985), subtitled: This Japanese comedy centers on efforts to make a humdrum ramen bar into a three-star noodle restaurant.

Waitress (2007): Keri Russell plays a Southern pie-maker with pastry-centered daydreams and hopes of leaving her control-freak husband to start her own pie shop.

– – – most of the above information from the San Diego Union Tribune, Beth Wood, Staff Researcher

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It was about 25 years ago that Ranger Cookies hit my cooking radar. Aunt Harriet and Uncle Orville used to make them and store them in tall coffee tins in the freezer. Orville became the expert at making them, and when I’d visit them in Eugene, Oregon, they were able to convince me that because they contained some wheat-type cereal and oatmeal, therefore they were HEALTHY. Yeah, right. But every now and then I crave them.

After years of not making them, I looked up Epicurious’ recipe and decided to try theirs. My friend Debbie was visiting for a couple of days, so I asked her to be the cookie maker and baker. She gladly obliged. We both stood at the cookie dough bowl and needed to do several general taste-tests to make sure the dough was good enough (she and I both are fans of cookie dough . . .). Lots of quality control going on, you see. You know about that kind of rationalization?

The dough is nothing but easy. We used corn flakes (organic –  see – more healthy stuff), rolled oats (more organic healthy stuff), dried flaked coconut (unsweetened) and chopped walnuts. But then we fell off the health wagon and added chocolate chips. If you bake these on the lower side of the 8-11 minutes, they’ll still be very, VERY soft when you try to use a spatula to move them to a cooling rack. But they continue cooking and dry/cool to perfection. These took 8 minutes on the convection bake setting. If you want crispy cookies, by all means bake a bit longer. Actually I reduced the oven temp to 360 because they got a bit too brown before they were cooked through. I also reduced the sugar quantity in this recipe, and it’s just right to me. Even using unsweetened coconut too.

This recipe makes large cookies – next time I’d reduce their diameter to about 2 inches. We made 40 HUGE cookies, so a smaller size would make maybe 55? A guess.  Most of these went to my friend Norma, whose potassium has come down to a normal level, so she’s able to have nuts and chocolate again.
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If I’d had my druthers, I’d have made the real thing – fried chicken. But no, that’s not so healthy these days, so I opted for oven-fried instead. Turning to the technique-enhanced cookbook, The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, sure enough, they had one that required relatively few steps and would be baked in about 45 minutes. The grandkids like fried chicken, so they ate a couple of pieces each.

According to a sidebar to the recipe, the Test Kitchen cooks tried 25 different coatings (everything from flour to bread crumbs) and finally settled on melba toast (crumbs). Who wudda thunk it? Not me! The melba toasts are whizzed up in the food processor until they’re about the size of small pebbles. I had a bit of difficulty getting some of the toast shards (you kind of break them up by hand before you put them in the food processor) to reduce to the necessary size. Some of them were really hard little kernels, even returning the larger ones to the processor for a second go-around. In the photo above you can see some of the larger pieces. Gives the chicken a nice crunch, though.

The chicken pieces are dipped in an egg mixture (with Dijon mustard, fresh thyme, dried oregano, garlic powder and cayenne) first, then rolled around in the melba toast crumbs that have been mixed up with some canola oil. The process is certainly different, I’ll give them that.

They’re baked at 400 for about 45 minutes (recipe said 30-40, but mine took 45) on a foil-lined large baking sheet – ON A RACK. That way the heat gets to the bottom sides too. The only soggy sections I ended up with were the areas where two pieces were touching one another. So when you do it, make sure none of the pieces are touching at all. Use an instant-read thermometer to check the chicken temperature in the middle of the breast or thigh pieces. The results? Good. Tasty. Moist. Maybe not off the charts, but good. Next time I’d probably add more thyme. And I’ll probably take my small hand mallet to the remaining melba toasts (put into a heavy-duty plastic bag first) to break them down to the required size. But the recipe certainly satisfied my craving for crispy chicken.
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A stuffed rooster eyes the fresh eggs.

This is our oldest grandson, Logan, 15. He, his sister Taylor, and our daughter Dana arrived Friday  from where they live in Placerville, California. They usually come to visit for a week or so every summer. Lots of swimming in the pool and spa, visits to friends, and visits with the newest young cousin, another of our grandsons, Vaughan, who is about 22 months old. Logan brought along the latest batch of eggs from his chickens. He’s taken up raising them, and is enjoying it a lot. He has 2 laying hens, 4 chicks, and one tiny baby chick. They’re a variety of types: 2 bantys (bantam), 1 baba rock (a layer), 2 reds stars (one of them a layer), and 1 banty rooster. The baby chick is an unknown variety so far.

We had lovely scrambled eggs and cheddar cheese. Delicious. Thanks, Logan.

Posted a year ago: Syrian Pita Bread Salad (oh, yummy, a regular around my house)

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Whenever our grandchildren come to visit I rack my brain trying to find family-friendly recipes that both the kids and adults will enjoy. And recipes that are relatively easy. I have several casseroles that have been favorites over the years (Chili Spaghetti, for instance). For this dinner, I wanted something, well, similar, but different. All of our grandkids really savor pasta, so I turned to a 1970’s recipe given to me by a friend (also named Carolyn). It may be much like lots of other casseroles – pasta, ground beef, onion, garlic, tomato sauce, corn, thyme, oregano, Worcestershire and a bunch of grated cheddar cheese on top. Along with a green salad, this was dinner. The kids liked it – enough to have seconds. I didn’t have any ranch dressing, though, so they had to make do with my homemade blue cheese mock Caesar vinaigrette.

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A year ago: Zinfandel Sausage Sauce for Pasta (a family favorite, made with Italian sausage)
Two years ago: Grilled Sweet Potato Salad

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You like this one?

Or this one?

There’s a whole lot of picture-taking fun going on at my house these days. What with my new camera and all. We had friends over for dinner and I set the plate on the corner of our island with the evening sunshine glowing through the window. Perfect shot (the second one above). I still have to work on the focus – the front edge of the bread was not where I wanted the focus to be. I’ll get it eventually.

This recipe is so different. I had this at a charity cooking class a few weeks ago, but wasn’t able to get a photo of it because it was dark (we were outdoors) by the time they served it. But it was SO good. The dish is not all that hard to do – you marinate the meat overnight (olive oil, red wine, oodles of garlic, lots of lemon zest and juice, some fresh oregano and rosemary sprigs), buy some raw pizza dough (Trader Joe’s sells it that way if you don’t want to make your own), and make the cheese slather (Feta, mayo, yogurt, sour cream and a bunch of garlic).

Now is where the story of this dish gets funny – do as I SAY, not as I DID. I forgot to re-read the recipe. Forgot to re-read the part that says you bake the lamb in the oven for 12 hours (yes, really, 12 hours) at 200. Covered in olive oil. So as it approached dinnertime, our friends had arrived, and I’ve removed the meat from the marinade and I’m thinking we’re grilling the meat. Then I glanced at the recipe. Oops. Wrong! Oh well, we’ll just have to grill it anyway. It took about 20 minutes to grill the meat to 125 internal temp and while it was allowed to rest on the cutting board, my DH put the pizza dough ovals on the grill. I’d rolled and pressed them out into about 8-inch long pieces, using my rolling pin. The ovals were spread with some olive oil on both sides, then onto the hot grill they went. Took about 2 minutes to be softly grilled, then they’re turned over and you spread on the Feta cheese slather on top. Cook another minute just so the cheese slather is heated through and you’re done. Remove to a piping hot plate. Meanwhile, slice thin pieces of the lamb leg and pile it onto the flatbread, garnish with some red chile flakes if you’d like (I used Italian parsley instead), maybe some salt and pepper, and it’s ready to serve.

So that’s what I did the other night. But, a few days later, with the leftovers at hand, I decided to try to do the long baking of the meat, per the recipe. Since the meat was already cooked and pink in the middle, I figured half as much baking would do it. What was left fit into a Teflon-coated bread pan, and it was covered with olive oil as directed. So I ended up baking it at 200 for 6 hours. You pour off the olive oil after baking. The meat was so tender you could cut it with a fork. Not a bit of the oil had really penetrated the meat, but it insulated the meat from drying out during the long time in the oven, I suppose. I sliced the meat into thin pieces while Dave grilled some more of the pizza/flatbread on the barbecue. We were a bit more careful with how thick the dough was (a little thicker this time and obviously smaller – about 4 x 8 inches), added more of the Feta cheese slather than we did the first time, then sprinkled the meat all over it.

This time, though, I made a bit of a detour – I mixed up a small arugula salad (just an oil and vinegar dressing on it) and arranged it on top, sprinkled on some fresh diced tomatoes and a bit of fresh basil. And served it. Oh my goodness yes, it was delish. Definitely better than the first round. Since the marinade was still okay I stuck it in the freezer and can probably re-use it a second time. It was never left out at room temp, so it should be safe to do that. I probably could have saved the oil from the baking too (it took more than I’d thought) if I filtered it, but I tossed that out. The hardest thing about this dish was rolling out the pizza dough. Darned, but it can be resilient, not wanting to spread out. I certainly haven’t perfected tossing dough in the air.
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It was a couple of years ago I bookmarked a recipe over at A Year From Oak Cottage, Marie’s blog originating from the south of England. This one, for little savory sage muffin with some crumbled goat cheese and grated apple. The apple (one, whole) is almost invisible – you can’t see it, nor could I taste it. But it adds some moistness to the crumb, for sure. Marie had suggested having these with soup, so that’s exactly what I did. With some delicious creamy tomato soup.

You mix these up by hand, the dry ingredients, then adding the wet stuff, lastly stirring in the goat cheese. A bit of Parmesan cheese sprinkled on top and you’re done. Bake for about 18 minutes until golden brown. I liked these a lot – they’re made in the small mini-muffin tins, and the recipe makes exactly 24.  It just happens that I have a sage bush in our kitchen garden, so am always on the lookout for other ways to use them other than roasts and chicken. I used a lot more sage than Marie’s recipe indicated (about 2 T.) but even at that, the sage flavor wasn’t overpowering at all. I also added an additional pinch of cayenne and just a tetch more sugar. Thanks, Marie!
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A year ago: Frosty Strawberry Squares (an old, old Sunset recipe from the 70’s)

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I don’t get very many comments left on my blog. To those of you who do leave them occasionally, a thank you is in order. But when I read other people’s blogs, and write a comment there, some people have 30-80 comments on each one. Some of the comments don’t say a whole lot (like “looks good,” or “great photo,” or perhaps the most common . . . “can’t wait to make this.” But I get the feeling that those people aren’t really going to make the recipe, whatever it is. They’re just saying something nice.

Some people, I assume, are scared to leave comments – they’re not very savvy about blogging, and want to protect their anonymity. Comments left here on my blog go nowhere but here on my blog. No one tracks them, sells email addresses or anything like that. It’s just little-old-me. And you can leave a comment without your name appearing, although your email address is required to submit a comment. But it doesn’t get published with the comment. Lots of people have screen names they use like “cookiebaker,” “grillerman,” “sadiesmom,” etc. That’s fine. Some bloggers and commenters use their real names, others don’t.  I guess it’s up to you. I do approve/screen all the comments, so I won’t get any crackpot messages. Spam is something you don’t see on my blog – I get somewhere between 60-100 a day left on various posts on my blog. Fortunately some free software called akismet runs in the blog background and captures those, which I delete every few days. I don’t even look at them anymore, just do a global delete.

So all that rhetoric is a preface to say that last week I was absolutely thrilled to receive a comment from Joanne Weir. She’d read my write-up about one of her recipes (stewed eggplant & tomatoes) from one of her cookbooks. Although I’ve attended numerous cooking classes with her, she doesn’t know me at all. Her classes were always very full, and I was just another face in the crowds. I’d drive miles and miles to go to a Joanne Weir cooking class, if she’d ever have any here in Southern California. She lives in San Francisco, and you can see her PBS TV series (filmed in her own kitchen) if you hunt for it in the listings. She has her own website – and does offer culinary tours in Italy and France, but they’re very pricey. Two or three of my friends and I keep up with anything-Joanne-Weir. We tell one another if we’ve made another Joanne recipe from one of her books (I don’t own her newest book Tequila).

So, I was very presumptuous and sent her a private email. Thanked her for leaving a comment, told her I was a huge fan of hers, owned most of her cookbooks, and that my all-time favorite recipe of hers (and expected her to laugh) is Sicilian Tuna Salad. I also asked about her fiancé (she’s recently engaged). I follow her own blog too. She was kind enough to respond back, and said “Sicilian Tuna Salad?” What cookbook of mine is that from, she asked? Well, it’s not in any of her cookbooks that I can find. But it was at one of her classes. Or perhaps it was one of the Sur la Table’s group recipe classes – where the staff combed through and demonstrated their favorites from all the cooking classes that year from various chefs. But the recipe was credited to Joanne. Unless the folks at Sur la Table made a mistake. Well, it’s still a favorite anyway.

I do have some other favorite Joanne Weir recipes – some of them I haven’t posted here on my blog – note to self – make the warm chocolate cinnamon and coffee tart sometime soon. Also the white peach belllinis. Check out the fiery Feta & pita bread appetizer. Maybe the escarole salad too. Nevertheless, it’s still the tuna pasta salad that trumps them all. It’s just so simple, really. I decided to fix the salad, because I haven’t made it in a long time. I posted about it in 2007, but I’m going to repeat it here since I know I have new readers who likely haven’t read through my ancient posts.

If you like tuna and pasta, but don’t like the usual mayonnaise-based gunk that goes on it, you’ll enjoy this salad. It’s full of herbs (basil, cilantro and Italian parsley) and a bit of capers too. And lemon juice. All those kinds of things that make it Sicilian. It’s a relatively dry pasta salad, so if you prefer a wetter one,  add some more olive oil just before serving it. I make it with pennette (little penne) as my first choice of pasta.
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A year ago: Apple Buttermilk Scone Round

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It occurred to me to stop yesterday as I was driving to my friend Norma’s house (to deliver 6 of these little babies) to take a photo of a stop sign, or a red light. Something startling to make you, my readers, stop everything and make this recipe. In lieu of that, I hope the photo above will make you salivate. It should, because once you’ve tasted this divine pudding, you may never have any other pudding. Bar none. Ever.

The recipe came from Dorie Greenspan, from her book, Baking: From My  Home to Yours. And I think the bloggers out there who call themselves TWD (Tuesdays with Dorie, where the entire group makes a single recipe from this very cookbook each week) made this a month or so ago. I read countless blogs about a butterscotch pudding, so I just assume it was Dorie’s recipe. Nothing, though, prepared me for the sublime taste of this pudding. What’s in it? Milk, some cream, butter, brown sugar, some regular sugar, vanilla, egg yolks, cornstarch and . . AND . . . single malt scotch. That’s the best part. And believe it or not, there’s less than a tablespoon of Scotch in the entire recipe, but it permeates everything. Every, single, solitary, bite. Oh, my.

It just so happens that many years ago, my DH and I did learn to enjoy single malt Scotch. We were in Scotland, staying at a lovely inn, and before dinner we visited a pub, where the bartender suggested we both try about 4 or 5 single malts. He poured about a tablespoon into each glass, had us taste each of them, and decide which one we liked best. He didn’t charge us for the tastings, which was very nice! My husband chose one of the more peat-y ones. I chose Dalwhinnie, a smooth honeyed elixir of a single malt. At Heathrow en route home I stopped into the duty-free and bought a bottle of Dalwhinnie. I’ve had it ever since. There is about a cup left in the bottle, and it’s been at least 20 years. But, my readers, there will be less and less because it’s gonna get used up making this pudding. Soon.

Dave and I had two of the little ramekins after dinner last night. Dave said, uhm, can I have another one? No, you can’t, the rest are going to Norma & Mike. Oh darn, he said. But, then, maybe you could make another batch tomorrow? Maybe? It wasn’t that hard, was it, he asked? Well, it’s not exactly like stirring up a boxed pudding mix, that’s for sure, and there were more steps in this version than in many, many puddings. But now that I’ve done it once, it wouldn’t be so hard to repeat it. And, I DO have the Dalwhinnie.
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