After I baked these brownies, I went to my recipe files to make a comparison of this recipe (from Culinary Concoctions by Peabody blog) to my old standby, Heavenly Cream Cheese Brownies, a recipe that dates back to the 1960’s. Sure enough, they’re really similar except for the Baileys. Peabody’s recipe has more bar chocolate and chocolate chips, the Bailey’s, of course, and she added a Bailey’s glaze on top too.

We had invited friends over for dinner because Bob is renovating their kitchen, and Peggy just struggles to create things to cook when the kitchen is in such a mess. They were SO happy to go out. So, even though we had a 5-hour power outage at our house yesterday (some kind of maintenance thing), as soon as the power was turned back on I quick-like-a-bunny started dinner. Made a slow-cooker tamale pie, which had just enough time to do its thing. I had some leftover veggies from the other night which were sufficient for nibbling before dinner, made a big green salad with everything but the kitchen sink in it, and I had just read Peabody’s post about these brownies. I had the cream cheese, had the Bailey’s, so quick-like I made them too.

The swirled brownie batter in the pan

You make two batters – the vanilla and Bailey’s one, and a larger amount of chocolate/brownie one. They’re layered in a pan, then lightly swirled with a knife to mix them up a little. Oh-so very pretty, I think. Then once they’re baked and cooled a little, you add a Bailey’s glaze on top, cool completely, cut and serve!

These are RICH. And SWEET. As I said, they have more chocolate than in the older recipe, so I’ve reduced the amount of sugar in both batters below. But overall they’re delicious. If you’re a Bailey’s fan, you’ll adore them. I served them with just a little slurp of Bailey’s on the side. Yum. If I’d had vanilla ice cream I’d have served that with it too.
printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: Potato & Onion Cakes (a side dish)

Tweet

When I grew up, as I’ve mentioned here before, casseroles were the “rule of the day.” Nearly everyone made them. Even for entertaining. And because my parents were products of the Great Depression (unlike the nearly-great-depression we’re on the brink of right now), frugality was the name of the game in my mother’s cooking. And she frequently made tamale pie. I hunted through my mother’s recipes trying to find her version, and did find a couple, but can’t tell if they are hers. Both are very similar to this one, just baked in a casserole for an hour at 350, instead of made in a slow cooker.

But, since I’d just read a recipe over at Al Dente (a blog), made in a slow cooker, and with a tube of that ready-made polenta, I thought aha. I’ll make that version. Ever since I read the recipe a week ago, my mouth has been watering.  The recipe is from a new cookbook: Slow & Easy: Fast-Fix Recipes for Your Electric Slow Cooker by Natalie Haughton. I don’t own the book, but may need to because this was really good.

This recipe is really quite simple – the only cooking you have to do is to brown the ground beef and onion. The rest is merely layering the ingredients in the slow cooker and setting it to simmer on low for 4 to 4 1/2 hours. Done.

Since there isn’t any chemistry involved in making a casserole (like there is with baking a cake) I, of course, had to change things just a bit. The necessary ingredients are all there – ground beef, corn, olives and cornmeal (polenta). Oh, and tomatoes too. I added some celery flakes (a Penzey’s product I had to try) and some dried red bell pepper (I didn’t have a green pepper on hand). I opened a can of what I thought were yellow tomatoes, only to find they were yellow peppers, so I added some of those to the mix as well. And I had to add a bit of garlic too.

What makes this so easy is that you layer the polenta slices in the bottom of the slow cooker, pour in the meat mixture and add more polenta slices on top (my slow cooker is wide, so there were only a couple of them to go on the top. At the end of the slow-cook time, you add a whole mound of grated cheddar cheese, mostly cover the slow cooker to melt the cheese, then serve it with sour cream and chopped cilantro on top as you spoon it onto a plate. A VERY easy dinner, and it was delicious, that’s all I can say. Reminded me of my childhood. My mother’s version had cornbread on the top, as I recall, but I think I liked this polenta-on-the-bottom-style better. More moist, for sure. This would make a GREAT family meal. It’s got kid-friendly food in it, I think.
printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: Warm Bean Brie Dip

Tweet

The other night I took a veggie platter to the home of some friends, Lucy & Wayne, who live in Pasadena (an hour’s drive from where we live). Lucy is the penultimate hostess – with the most exquisite table settings, and glorious food. Maybe when I grow up I’ll entertain as seamlessly as she does. She’s never flustered. I admire that.

The dinner the other night was a belated Valentine’s celebration. All couples who know one another well. Each person was asked to bring a poem, short story, (joke, perhaps), or some personal story to tell about love. We also shared the stories about how each couple met, which was very fun. Lucy’s dinner was based around food in poetry. There were 3 courses served at the table (my veggies were served in the living room with glasses of champagne prior to sitting down at their beautiful table). With each course, Wayne read a bit of poetry.

The first one was a children’s poem which included something about mincemeat. So Lucy served a delicious, warmed pate with her homemade mincemeat and a phyllo dough “purse” sitting on top (along with a really special apple cider ice wine from Quebec). And it was all topped with watercress and a tasty vinaigrette too. The second course was a poem about pigs, so it was a fabulous stuffed pork roast with baked cabbage and golden raisins, nestled on a mound of fluffy mashed potatoes and a clear gravy drizzled over it all (along with an Oregon Pinot Noir). The third course (dessert) was a poem about blackberries, so we had an incredible 5-layer blackberry cake with blackberry curd (Lucy made that too) and fresh blackberries (that served with 28-year old Port from Portugal). All through the evening, then, the different couples shared stories, jokes, wedding photos. It was a very fun evening. We all had some good belly laughs.

For us, I’d found a little poem in our local paper, which I gave to Dave to read. It’s ever-so-cute. Our newspaper had requested submissions of romantic text messages from readers. Be sure to read it all the way through, and forget about the fact that it’s corny . . .

When you and I are far apart,
Can sorrow break our tender hearts,
I really love you, yes I do,
Sleep is sweet when I dream of you,
All you are is a blooming rose,
Night is here so I must close.
With care read the first word in each line
You will there a question find . . .

Get it, huh, huh, huh? Above published in the Orange County Register, February 14, 2009, and submitted by Donna Johnson, from Long Beach.

When it was MY turn to share, I read a poem from a favorite book of mine: Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant To See. It’s a precious book, although most of the letters in it could not be repeated here as they’re a bit too risque. The letters, notes and email messages covered a wide range of years (as early as World War II), and are reproduced in the book on whatever they were written on. Lined paper, pink paper, brown paper bags, all myriad of writing surfaces. What I read was a long, LONG list of things a woman loved about her husband. Very sweet, poignant, heartfelt, adorable. Little everyday things, but a very special list. In the addendum to the book, the editor, Bill Shapiro, shared that a few days after the Valentine list was given to her husband, she was killed in an automobile accident. If you’re intrigued by the book idea, go to the Other People’s Love Letters website.

So, let’s get back to food, shall we? Usually when I make this dunk/dip, it’s made with mayo plus the tomatoes, green onions and bacon, but I decided to make a modification – since this was going to be served with veggies instead of crackers or pita chips, I thought the ratio of mayo to tomatoes was too high. So I made it with some light sour cream added. I used some mayo, but added a bit more sour cream to the mixture. And now that I use my alligator chopper so much, I decided to make this without using the food processor. The finely minced tomatoes out of the chopper were the perfect size. So everything was just hand minced, combined and chilled for a few hours before serving.

I served everything in ramekins, standing up as best I could make them. The asparagus and haricot verts were in short, clear glasses. And I put the dunk/dip in a ramekin on TOP of another ramekin turned upside down so the dunk/dip was elevated (looked nicer and made it easier for people to dip the veggies into it). On my huge platter I served fresh asparagus (those spears were eaten first, I think), cucumber slices, haricot verts, radishes (the dip was hard to scoop with them, I must admit), fennel slices, celery, sugar snap peas and carrots. I also served jicama, but I’ll write a separate post about that.
printer-friendly PDF

If a BLT combination is a favorite for you, check out this recipe for BLT Salad that’s one of my favorites.
A year ago: Armenian Parsley Walnut Salad

Tweet

When we were out at our desert house last week we were invited to some friends and I offered to bring soup (they did all the rest). I have a cookbook collection at our desert house, but they’re mostly my not-so-favorite ones. With hundreds of cookbooks in my collection I surely should stock the other house with a bit more variety. But anyway, I have a couple of soup books there, and I turned to Lee Bailey’s Soup Meals. Sure enough, found a recipe that would work – fairly low carb and healthy to boot.

Here's the escarole, barely cooked at this point

This soup is a beef brothy kind of one – redolent with oodles of onions (too many, actually, so I’ve altered the recipe), mushrooms, escarole, and boosted with beef concentrate. We liked the soup. Very flavorful. We bought a pack of New York steaks at Costco – for that’s the only way I’d consider using such beauties in a SOUP, for goodness’ sake! I doubled the recipe and used three. You could easily use stew beef in this (and cook it much longer, of course), but don’t add the escarole until the last couple of minutes. If you did use a tougher cut of meat, I’d also add some more carrots, celery and onions in the last 10 minutes so you’d have some veggies that are still toothsome.

The first night we ate this we just sprinkled the top with grated Parmesan (not in the recipe). The soup was good, but not sensational. Our friends served some fresh bread right out of the bread machine. I had divided the soup in half, so with the leftovers I broiled some Parmesan on baguette slices and floated them on top of the soup. Also added some more Penzey’s beef soup base. What a difference! The Parmesan is absolutely that umami taste – it made this soup really, really good. If you don’t remember about umami, click HERE for my post about it. The toasts also gave the soup added texture.

The steaks, cut into cubes, are just browned in a separate pan and only added to the soup during the last 2-3 minutes. Having learned with the first serving of it, the second time around I cut up the browned (only) steak cubes even smaller (each 1-inch cube in about 4 pieces) and dropped them into the soup a mere minute or two before serving. If you add it earlier the steak definitely goes from tender to tough. And you certainly don’t want to do that with New York steak! Don’t be put off by the number of ingredients – it really comes together fairly easily. The most tedious part was slicing and chopping the mushrooms and onions.
printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: White Lady (a fancy drink)

Tweet

I know, I know, I know. This blog is mostly about food. But I read an interesting piece in the PC Magazine Digital (the first subscription mag that I’ve started receiving in digital format only – no longer mailed to me in hard copy).

The article, written by John Dvorak, was just riveting. What caught my eye first was the title – about Error 404. Now to you who read this blog for its food content, you might never know what a 404 is! It’s when a link on a website doesn’t work. When it doesn’t work, most websites have a built-in page that announces to you that it’s a error 404. It’s a page template that pops up if anybody accesses something where the chain is broken. So, okay, what’s that got to do with anything, you ask?

John Dvorak was citing some examples of how 404 is going to plague our lives in coming decades (or whatever further error code, that’s currently called a 404). He told the story about reading a very interesting editorial on the London Times’ website within days of 9/11, and had sent the link to lots and lots of people. Was still sending the link to people recently. Then, boom, suddenly the link is an error 404. The Times (one would assume) finally thought it was time to take off lots of stuff from their server. It’s 7+ years later, so why not? John lamented that he’d never printed a hard copy of that editorial. Then, he also mentioned trying to contact a book publisher (I presume, about the use of some quote) from a particular book printed in 1964. The company, the publisher, is no longer in business. Who owns the rights to the book? He doesn’t know. Nobody seems to know. (Quoting from that book could be an iffy situaion if he’s an ethical writer, and I think he is.)

So, taking this one step further, he projects that in 10 years school children (at least here in the U.S.) will be reading all their course material, textbooks, etc. on a Kindle. Books, as a hard copy, won’t even exist. Will those books, or other digital books even be accessible 10 years later? How would people in 2050 quote from a digital book written in 2009, or 2019? Will people be ABLE to access any of the digital media currently in use? My question, how will the Library of Congress keep digital books, I wonder? If you’re interested in the general subject, I think you can get to Dvorak’s editorial – at least I was provided with the link to it.

That got me to thinking about the archiving of so MUCH material that exists only on the internet. Who is keeping all this stuff? (In actuality, it exists on servers and computers ’round the world, computers that will age, deteriorate and die at some point, or are stored with companies that will fold, or go out of business.) In the year 2109, will there even be a record of what was on the internet today (probably not – only things deemed “important” by some people). Printing out hard-copy pages from the internet today – – – in 100 years those pages will be disintegrating. Saving files to a CD – well, will computers in 100 years be able to read a CD? Probably not since people can’t even use 5-inch floppies anymore. Remember those? When I’m gone, my blog will be nothing but internet dust. Even for my great grandchildren who will likely be the only people interested in reading it.

Tweet

This is not a new recipe to this blog. But I finally got around to taking a photo of it. I’d posted this back in 2007 when I had a fractured foot and was posting recipes, with internet photos or no photos at all.

So, my hubby and I are out at our house in the California desert (it was about 65 yesterday, gorgeous sunshine), and last night after a very light dinner of leftovers, I was craving something sweet. Since we’ve been renting our house here some this season, I knew there wasn’t much in the cupboards, but aha, there WAS a German chocolate cake mix. Sure enough, a few chocolate chips, and pecans in the freezer (the recipe calls for walnuts, but pecans work too). And yes, I had cinnamon, eggs, oil. Took all of about 10 minutes to mix it up (well, maybe 15 since I spilled nearly the whole bag of pecans all over the kitchen floor) and I popped it in the oven.

You can go to the post I did back in ’07 for the full recipe. This is EASY! REALLY EASY! Cake mix, oil, eggs, chocolate chips, nuts, cinnamon and sugar. Done. Makes a 9×13 pan full, great for taking to a potluck. Or camping. Or a picnic. A family favorite I’ve been making since the 1960’s. Nothing like the typical German Chocolate Cake with coconut, etc.

Here are some photos of our desert yesterday when my DH and I toodled around in our golf cart within our complex (1 mile square, 2 18-hole golf courses).

A view toward the west, of snow-covered San Gorgonio peeking through the clouds.

Another view – lantana in the foreground, an ocotillo just beginning to bloom on the right edge, ponds in the background just begging to swallow your golf balls

Would you believe petunias are in full bloom here? The risk of frost is past, so they’re safe.

Tweet

I included a TV remote control in the picture, just so you can see the approximate shape. It’s about the same size as a larger paperback.

It’s been some months now that I’ve had a Kindle. I bought one when Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO, and the Kindle’s maker) was on Oprah last Fall, and offered a discounted price if you bought one then. I’d been contemplating buying one anyway, so that was all the impetus I needed.

Why did I buy one?
1. I hate to give away my books. I have hundreds. And hundreds. And I keep buying more. Even though I never (almost) re-read a book. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of books. So, I figured if I read books on the Kindle, I’d not be adding to my collection, my home book footprint. None of our kids read like I do. What are they going to do with all my books, for goodness’ sake, except give most of them away?
2. Whenever we travel, I always have to allocate precious suitcase space to books, since we read a lot when we travel. As we’ve gotten older, we’re not quite so active at every destination – we rest some in the late afternoons. And we read. So I saw the Kindle as a perfect solution. Ten (or dozens) more books, all in the space of one. Except for the charging cable, which isn’t all that big.

The advantages:
1. The small (footprint) space, lots of books (several hundred) can be loaded, you can make notes and bookmarks (there’s a small keyboard on it), you could read 5 books at the same time for that matter.
2. The dictionary – is amazing. You merely scroll to the line where the questionable word is, click, go to Dictionary and the Kindle defines all the major words on that line. There’s a tiny little roller button that is sort of like a mouse. That’s what you use to navigate around.
3. Buy a new book anytime. Right through the Kindle. Or you can do it from your home computer too. Or somebody else’s computer – just log on to your Amazon account. Takes just seconds to download it. You can also subscribe to newspapers and magazines too (I don’t, but lots of people do). For business travelers, that would be a very good deal. Supposedly you can access the internet on the device, although it’s not really a computer, as such. You can get to the Kindle bookstore easily and select new books. If you have an amazon account, it’s a simple matter of pressing a button and the book downloads in about 60 seconds. Bingo.
4. The price of books. Most books were $8.99 when I bought the Kindle. They’re now $9.99, but still a good deal. And a few books are more.
5. The screen – it’s not backlit – you can’t read it with a light. For some this might be a disadvantage, but for me it’s easier to read this way. And the print size can be adjusted to suit your eyes. (In the photo below you can see the print – it’s adjustable to 5 sizes, I think it is.)

The disadvantages:
1. The battery. It’s only as long-lived at each sitting as the battery. If you don’t use the Kindle (and charge it) regularly, it goes into a power-down thing and it’s a bit of a hassle to get it back to running again, but that’s a minor thing. It does have to be charged often (about 4-5 hours of use, is my guess). I now have the charging cable right next to my bed, so it’s easy to plug it in after every 2-3 or 4 days of use.
2. It is a computer, after all. If something were to go wrong with it on a trip, it might be difficult to get it fixed. That hasn’t happened to me yet (except the major battery down thing which was easily fixed after talking with a Kindle customer service person). You can buy an extended warranty.
3. The Kindle 1 case that came with it was not good. I’ve since purchased another one, built especially for the Kindle, but fixes all the little problems with Amazon’s case. It was $50, and it does keep the Kindle securely in the case. If you’re interested, you can search on the internet for “Kindle covers,” you’ll find many manufacturers of them). I understand that the Kindle 2 is shipping without a case.
4. It’s too easy to accidentally advance or backup a page. The bars on both sides of the Kindle take you ahead one page (top right and lower left), back a page (top left) or to the beginning (bottom right). They’ve made this user friendly for both righties and lefties. Clever planning, I’d say. Overall, though, I’m saying it’s worth buying – I LUV my Kindle – but it’s a bit of a nuisance sometimes when you accidentally hit the Next Page bar. Usually it advances just the one page, but occasionally if the Kindle falls out of its case, in righting it, picking it up, etc. you may advance the pages by several. Just a little bit of a pain to have to back up to find the page you were on. But then, that’s really no different than dropping a regular book and losing your place. It’s just different on a Kindle.
5. I won’t be buying any cookbooks on the Kindle. And I do buy new cookbooks with some frequency. Those books I want to hold, be able to see the color photo (the Kindle just has B & W), glance at the whole recipe at once. All things the Kindle can’t do for me.
6. Some people don’t like the millisecond of time when the pages turn – the screen flickers once (blips to black momentarily) with each page advance. At first it was annoying to me, but quickly I got used to it.
7. If you like to loan or give books to friends – well, you can’t loan a Kindle book you’ve read. The book lives only on your Kindle, and unless you want to loan the actual reading unit, it’s only yours. Supposedly Amazon offers a family plan (up to 3 units) and within that “family,” you can share all the books. You don’t have to be an actual family – but the units and books have to be purchased from the “head” of the group only.

And just because I listed more disadvantages than advantages, doesn’t mean I don’t LUV my Kindle, because I really, really do. In case you haven’t heard, they just announced a second generation Kindle at the same price – $359 (what I paid 6 months ago). Longer battery life, thinner package. More books can be loaded. And the blip at page turns is vastly improved, I’ve heard. It will read TO you, if you’d prefer (good for the sight-impaired). I won’t be buying a new one since mine works just fine, but now I’ll try to convince my DH that he needs one, then I can give him mine and get the new one 😉

A year ago: Coriander Lime Shrimp (an appetizer)

Tweet

I’m simply a sucker for more food blogs. I follow so gosh-darned many of them now, it takes me hours sometimes to get through them all. And since I rarely delete any of them, there’s nothing but more and more and more in my RSS reader.

So, when I read at somebody’s blog today that they’d been chosen as one of the 50 best in the world food blogs from the Times (London), I had to go look at the list. (My blog is a very small fish in a big pond, so NO, I wasn’t expecting my blog to be on the list at all.) But I assumed many of my favorites would be on it (about 30 of the 50 were), and that there would be a bunch of new ones (yes, there were). And so, I’m now going to be watching about another 6 new blogs. From places all over the world. I luv finding a new blog (in English) from some foreign land. I added one from Istanbul, another from London (although the author is South African), and one from Colorado, and Sydney, well, and on and on.

If you’re interested in checking out the London Times’ list, maybe you’ll find some you’d like to follow too. And oh, by the way, thanks to all of you who ARE regular readers of my blog. I appreciate that you come to read about my cooking, or travel, or see the photos or the stories.

A year ago: Pear & Chocolate Tart (one of my favorites)

Tweet

Likely you’ll look at this and think – uh – ho-hum ham and cheese. Nope. Not cheese, and not ho-hum, either. The middle layer is pear. And that little golden nugget on top is crystallized ginger.

These appetizers are really easy, except for assembling them. Not that assembling is hard, just a bit time consuming. My DH, Dave, did it for me, moments before our guests arrived.

The ham cubes are soaked in port wine. (And if you don’t want to imbibe, just eliminate that step – they’ll still be awesomely good.) That’s it. Nothing all that unusual. You can use canned pears if that’s easier. We used fresh, just because we had them. The crystallized ginger I had was in small pieces. The bite (toothpick) might have handled two small pieces of ginger, but I advise you taste first. You do want about equal sizes of pear and ham – that we’ve learned from the years of making these. I was supposed to grate some nutmeg on top – oops, forgot. The nutmeg does add just a little scent of something different, so when YOU make them, do add it.

I found this recipe – years and years ago – in some English cookbook I have (or had). And have been making them ever since.
printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: Pear & Chocolate Tart (a favorite)

Tweet

Another Carolyn favorite coming your way. This cake. Oh yum. That’s all there is to say about it. For me there’s nothing much better than chocolate and whipped cream, and this is a really lovely presentation – and taste – of those two things.

I began making this cake in the 1960’s. It came from one of my military wives’ cookbooks (From Mrs. Louis P. Hodge, “Recipes on Parade Desserts,” 1965) I bought at the time, and the page in the cookbook is smudged and spattered from frequent use. This used to be one of my top desserts of choice when I entertained back then, and as my daughter Dana grew up, this was one of her most favorite requests on her birthday as well.

If you don’t like to make a sponge cake (in a jelly roll pan) with the work accompanying it, you might want to pass on this. But if you pass, you’ll be missing out. The cake isn’t an overwhelming dark chocolate taste – it’s on the mild side, actually, and the cake itself is almost milk chocolate colored. I used bittersweet chocolate shavings in the filling and sprinkled on top. And I used Penzey’s 24% Fat Dark cocoa for added flavor.

The only tough part about this dessert is rolling, unrolling and filling, then rolling up the cake. I’ve rarely made it when it didn’t crack somewhere. I never seem to know the exact time to unroll and fill this. But, even with the cracks, you just do the best you can, and trust me, nobody will care once they taste it. When you roll it up, put the break on the underside, if possible. You can actually see a break in mine (in the photo at the top) – along the front right. Did it affect anything? Not at all.

When dessert time came the other night, I brought the platter to the table and cut and sliced each piece and put them on a pretty heart-shaped red plate.
printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: Almond Bar Cookies

Tweet