Oh my goodness, is this soup fabulous. You’d almost not know its base is cauliflower.

There’s a story to go along with this post. Last month before the virus had ramped up, I took a one-week trip to our California central coast. I had a fabulous time – by myself – visiting wineries, window shopping, used book stores, stopping at coffee shops here and there. I thoroughly enjoy driving and I meandered – I was in no hurry to get anywhere so I could enjoy the views. Visiting with old friends in San Luis Obispo, we went to a local hotel (the San Luis Obispo Hotel) for lunch. Cauliflower soup was featured that day – I quizzed the waitress if it was good. She waxed glorious about it – whenever the chef made it, she said she had some – and that I wouldn’t be disappointed.

So here’s what the restaurant’s soup looked like, at right. I think the menu said it was garnished with a sage leaf, but that wasn’t a sage leaf – looked like basil to me. But on top was plenty of the balsamic glaze, toasted almonds, capers, some plumped up raisins (can’t really see those) and a few little pieces of caramelized roasted cauliflower.

Upon my first sip, I swooned. It was SO good. I insisted my friends needed to try it – they agreed it was sensational. My thoughts as I ate it – the golden raisins added so much – they were plumped for sure. The nuts added great texture, and so did the few little pieces of cauliflower. There was no discernible cauliflower flavor to the soup itself. So I decided it probably wasn’t made with caramelized cauliflower. Plus, the soup was super smooth. When the waitress returned I quizzed her some more about the soup – she knew it contained cream (check), and yes, it was balsamic glaze (check), and toasted almonds (I used pine nuts, check) and she knew the raisins had been cooked in something (check). And yes, they used a Vitamix to puree it until very smooth (check).

Soon after returning home I went online to google such a soup. No soup came up, but a bunch of results showed a vegetable dish (from the New York Times, I think it was, plus epicurious) of roasted cauliflower with toasted pine nuts, capers, golden raisins and balsamic glaze drizzled on top. My first thought was that the chef had perhaps made a monstrous batch of that for the dinner service, didn’t serve it all so he created the soup with the leftovers. I don’t know, of course. And it doesn’t matter – I created the soup with what little I could discern.

As I’m writing this post, I’m going to have it for the 2nd day, for my lunch. I have all the garnishes except the roasted cauliflower pieces. And I used pine nuts, as I mentioned. No basil or sage leaf, either. I added more parsley. I tried to make the soup with white onion, but my neighbor who is doing my shopping couldn’t find white onions. So yellow it was. I added celery for flavor, chicken broth, cream, and thickened it a little bit with flour. All of it was whizzed up at length in my Vitamix. I let it whiz for a long, long time  – and truly it resulted in a silky-smooth texture. I added a drizzle of sour cream (not on the restaurant soup), but you could easily use a little drizzle of EVOO for appearance or a tiny drizzle of heavy cream.

Lunch at my house is often soup of some kind. There’s a photo of my bowl sitting in the microwave soup cozy (several artisans make them on Etsy). The soup bowl is sitting off center only because I wanted to show you the cute fabric on the back side of it. I have flat bags and bags of various soups in my freezer. I think this one will get eaten in total with none for the freezer. It’s that good. Do try to make this a day ahead of serving – as with all soups, they taste better once they’ve chilled overnight.

What’s GOOD: all the flavors produce an outstanding soup. The garnishes absolutely “make” this soup. Don’t skimp on them – in my opinion they’re all needed.

What’s NOT: a bit more prep with all the garnishes, but really it’s not a difficult soup to make.

printer-friendly PDF and MasterCook 15/16 file (click link to open recipe)

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The prettiest little dessert ever. Chocolate.

At a cooking class awhile back, Phillis Carey made these gems. Would I ever make them? Probably not – I think they’re a bit too fussy for my dessert-making tastes, but Phillis assured us they weren’t that difficult. However, she’d made the meringues that morning, and prepared the chocolate cream filling the night before. She’d put the meringues in a sealed container. So, really, all she had to do at the class was assemble them. That part’s really easy. But, if you don’t mind the making of meringues, or the chocolate cream, then go for it.

The recipe down below looks more than intimidating, I’d wager, for even the more experienced cooks out there. Some folks get turned off by anything more than about 5 ingredients in a recipe. Definitely more complicated than that.

Making meringues can be off-putting to some, but Phillis’ instructions are quite straight forward. You do have to make 4” circles on a big piece of parchment paper, then you turn it over so you don’t absorb graphite into the meringues, but you can still SEE the circles through the other side of the parchment. And, you’ve got to whip the egg whites for at least 8 minutes. Advice: set a timer when you begin, because you’ll think you’re done at about 5 minutes. No, a full 8 minutes.

The chocolate cream is easy enough, although  you do need to prepare an ice-water bath for it. Once made, and it’s hot, of course, you set the bowl into the ice water to cool it down until it’s fully cold. So, do make the meringues the day ahead (store at room temp, sealed up in a plastic, lidded box) and make the filling up to 3 days ahead. Then it’s only a matter of whipping the cream, shaving some chocolate curls and assembling it. That part’s very easy.

What’s GOOD: loved having chocolate pavlova – that was a new taste treat. If you want to make it a bit more decadent, make MORE of the chocolate cream – the chocolate flavor really comes from that and as the recipe is now, it doesn’t give any serving very much of it. I think I’d double it.

What’s NOT: only that you’ll want to plan ahead – make meringues day before – make cream at least a day or 2 ahead of time. A little bit fussy to serve, but not overly so. If everything IS made ahead, it’s not difficult in the least.

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This recipe has such an interesting story. I hope you’ll read it to learn why it’s called “Stop Trying So Hard” Broccoli Spaghetti.

Reading other blogs is a favorite pastime for me. And Food52 is one of them, with the staff there posting sometimes 4-6 stories a day. And perhaps because I had so much time on my hands the day I read this story, I read more of them than usual. I might have breezed by it just because I don’t eat much pasta. But I did click through (and am so glad I did, as the story is just so fun) and read the short saga of a young chef, James Park, who moved away from his home in South Korea to New York City. Some years had past and he hadn’t made the time to fly home to visit his family. Finally, his family decided to visit him. He went into semi-panic mode. He lives in a tiny, tiny Manhattan apartment and he needed to house them (his mother, father and brother) in the space. And he needed to cook for them. As the arrival became closer he mapped out what he would do with them, partly being tourists and he thought he’d take them to some of his favorite restaurant haunts, assuming they’d be impressed not only with the food, but with his now-prodigious knowledge of food. Uh, no. It didn’t happen that way. They didn’t want American food at all. They wanted to eat Korean food.

The chef never mentioned how difficult it must have been to sleep everyone in his small home space, but he did mention the various restaurants he took his family to, encouraging them to order particular dishes that were his favorites.

But I’ll back up. Arriving at his apartment from the airport with his family in tow:

“. . .per my mother’s request for pasta, I made my signature dish of penne, rosemary-infused oil, charred Italian sausage, and lots of Parmesan cheese—a weeknight go-to for me. This pasta was, in many ways, a reflection of various flavor-building techniques I had learned in culinary school. I wanted them to taste it, to see what their new chef son had learned during our years apart. Aiming to impress, I plated the pasta with extra Parm and garnished with fried rosemary, a flourish of freshly cracked black pepper.”

Her response (he obviously wanted, desperately, to impress his mother) was that this certainly wasn’t what she had been hoping for. She took a bite and said this is good, but she wanted that “other thing.” The one that was white and creamy. She said, you were eating it once when we were FaceTiming.

“. . . To many older Koreans, especially those of my mom’s generation, “pasta” is a dish with long noodles, pretty much always spaghetti, drenched in either tomato or cream sauce. Koreans love their cream pastas. Now that I think back on it, oil-based pastas, like the one I had just made, were not something my family would’ve ever associated with pasta.”

So, on their last morning there, he dug into his memory and tried to recall what he might have been eating during that long-ago phone call and pulled ingredients from his pantry and frig. His mother took a bite and made a satisfying sound of contentment. Yes, this is it, she said. It rated a 10 out of 10 in his mother’s eye. So Chef Park named this Simple Stop-Trying-So-Hard Broccoli Spaghetti, obviously referring to his wanting so hard to impress his family (mother) and finally resorting to something he threw together.

With that kind of story, the recipe had been percolating in my head for the last 2 weeks or so. I had a big bunch of broccoli. I had some thin linguine (my fav). I had milk. And I had lemons. (My Meyer lemon tree is absolutely drooping from the weight of so many lemons.) This recipe is kind of incongruous – adding milk into a pot full of broccoli and onion? Doesn’t even sound good (oh, but it is).

Really, the only change I made was to double the amount of broccoli, and I also cut some of the stem to add in as well. So mine had more broccoli per serving. Not a bad thing.

What’s GOOD: how easy it is to make as long as you have broccoli. This is a dish you could throw together in less than 30 minutes. I don’t buy frozen broccoli, but I’m sure you could make it with that as well. Good flavor, although it’s somewhat bland (just know that if you make this) – with the only highlight the red chili flakes that give this a little zip. I think I’d try to make more “sauce” if you can call it that. When you add in a bit of the pasta water, usually it helps thicken some of the liquid, but mine didn’t do that very well. Since I’m into comfort food these days, this definitely filled the bill, so to speak. The milky consistency was actually quite good. Next time I might add just a tetch of chicken broth granules to the milky broth, but it wouldn’t be a necessary thing. It’s good just the way it is.

What’s NOT: not a thing as long as you have broccoli, pasta, lemon zest and milk. Everything else will likely be in your pantry already (onion, red chili flakes, Parm, garlic powder, butter, oil, fresh garlic). I noticed the leftover pasta had soaked up all the remaining milk, so I may need to add a bit more for reheating.

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This recipe was a winner of some kind of contest. A good reason to try them.

Whenever I input a recipe into my MasterCook software, and it has some kind of special accolades, I usually write it into the title so I can see it easily when I’m scanning through the list of recipes to try. In this case I wrote after cookies – “Sunset winner.” It’s been a few years ago, I think, but this cookie did win something. It might have been for Christmas cookies? I don’t recall. They contain an inordinate amount of crystallized ginger – plus ground ginger – so yes, these really have a ginger pungency. Not overwhelming by any means. I used every bit of crystallized ginger I could find in my pantry, and I’m not even sure I had quite enough. But it was close enough.

The making of the cookies was exceedingly easy – it got mixed up in the food processor – not my normal bowl of choice for making cookies and I will say, I had to remove half of it (I made a double batch) in order for the food processor to mix it sufficiently. Then remove that to do the second half. Then the dough was refrigerated – for me it was overnight. It would be best if you chilled it overnight if you took it out for about 30-45 minutes before trying to roll them in sugar. If the dough is cold, it’s harder to do that part.

I used my cookie scoop, but with that, I made them smaller than the scoop. I think the double recipe was supposed to make 72. Uhm, no, it didn’t. It made more like 48, but perhaps I made them much bigger. They were supposed to be 1-inch balls. I’m sure mine were a tad bigger than that. I have offered to bake cookies for a memorial service reception – as I write this, it was supposed to take place tomorrow, but with the Covad-19 overwhelming our country, the service has been indefinitely postponed. But I made them now and will just store in the freezer until they’re needed.

The only alteration I would make – and I did make in the recipe attached – was to reduce the amount of sugar. I thought the cookies were overly sweet. So, if you make these, taste the dough (note: the dough has raw egg in it) to see if you think it’s sweet enough with the reduced sugar amount. The original recipe called for 1/3 cup sugar to mix with the ginger, and 1/3 cup sugar mixed with the dough. You could also use 1/4 cup rounded on each measurement. I’ve not included this information in the pdf recipe attached. The difference could be the amount of sugar used in the crystallized ginger. Every product could be different.

What’s GOOD: lots of gingery flavor, crisp. Chewy. Love the craggy, crackled tops. Very sweet. I changed the amount of sugar in the attached recipe – read the above paragraph for more information.

What’s NOT: nary a thing that I can think of, unless you don’t like ginger!

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In my travel recollection, the crunchy brown bread I had in Ireland in about 1987 was some of the best wheat bread I’ve ever eaten. It wasn’t quite as dark as this bread, and I’m pretty sure it was a yeast-raised bread, but it used a type of milled wheat and grains that was unlike anything I’d eaten up to then, or since. I went to the grocery store with our friends we were staying with and they had rows of warm brown bread.

When I came home from that Ireland trip I looked in my various bread cookbooks for recipes. We didn’t have the internet to research with back then! I tried a couple. Nope. Didn’t measure up. Then someone told me the milled wheat produced in Ireland is different than anything we can buy here. Ah, well, that explained it. So I’d never tried making it since.

My Tivo records any new Ina Garten shows, and when they pop up in my Tivo menu, I’m sure to be watching her show. And this last week she did one on this bread. I was instantly interested and decided to try making it. So glad I did.

Ina used a brand of wheat flour called Heckers. I’d never heard of it before, but I learned it’s an East Coast label and is milled in the U.S. It’s carried at some Wal-Mart stores in the East, but I just went online and they’re out of stock (probably because of Ina Garten’s show). I bought an organic, non GMO whole wheat flour which is a finer mill than others – at least finer than ones from regular store shelf brands anyway.

What’s different about this bread is how it’s made – the texture. The dry ingredients are stirred into a large bowl, then the wet ingredients are poured in and you use your fingers to lightly – very lightly – stir it together, pulling with 2-4 fingers from the center outward, until the batter (it’s more a batter than it is a dough) is mixed through and no dry streaks are visible. It’s very sticky and wet. Just know this is not like anything you’ve ever mixed before as a quick bread. The batter actually pours. No kneading could be done in any case.

Meanwhile you will have buttered a loaf pan and the batter is poured into the pan and the top sprinkled with some more oats. It goes into a 450°F oven, and immediately you turn the oven temp down to 400° and it bakes for about 45-55 minutes. Use an instant read thermometer – bread is done at somewhere between 195° and 205°F. I took the bread out at 200°F. At 45 minutes my loaf wasn’t done and it took another 10 minutes to reach that temp.

I cooled it for about 5 minutes in the pan, then upturned it and cooled the loaf on a rack. I served this to a group of friends alongside a bowl of soup, with Kerry Gold butter.

SERVING: you will want to slice this bread thicker than a regular yeast bread because the structure of a quick bread is just different – it doesn’t have the glue (gluten) to hold it together. So hold your hand over the loaf, using your 4th and 5th fingers to keep the far edge from breaking off, and use a serrated knife and saw slowly.

What’s GOOD: love-loved the bread. So easy to make – truly. The only oddball thing was buying Guinness stout beer! Loved the flavor and warm flavor from the wheat flour and Guinness. Was this as good as I remembered from Ireland – well, no, but it was close.

What’s NOT: nothing at all.

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Are you really tired of reading another chocolate chip cookie recipe from me? My apologies, but I guess I’ll be forever on the quest for the perfect one.

I’m assuming most of you are on house arrest, aka shelter-in-place like I am. Social Distancing. What a phrase – we’ll remember that word forever, won’t we? As I write this, I’m on day 17 of being at home all day, all night, with not a single trip out of my driveway. In many ways, I’m lucky – I live in a big house, and I use most of the rooms  – living room for my phone calls on my cell – dining room table for a project now and then – kitchen all the time because I’m cooking a lot more than usual – my kitchen dining table is where I eat most of my meals – and my family room with TV (on from about 8am to 8 pm every day) and the gas fireplace nearby. Master bedroom of course, my big bath and dressing room area gets daily use, and my very comfortable library/study up there where I watch TV in the  evenings.

My report? I’m fine – feeling fine, no symptoms. My next door neighbor, Josee, has been a lifesaver for me – she goes shopping for me about once a week or every other week. The high school kids at my church are also available for shopping – all I have to do is send a list, put out some cash and shopping bags and they bring it back an hour later. I stay busy enough, I guess. I do watch the TV more than usual – tuned into news most of the hours, then in the late evening I go upstairs to my comfy study and start watching some of my recorded shows that take my mind off coronavirus. Have you seen this picture?

That’s my neighbor’s very well-trained standard Doberman. I was sent a similar picture of a little Chihuahua with similar wording but had an acronym on the photo that wasn’t nice language – I sent it to my neighbor and she took a picture of Batman and added the same lingo but with the word “heck” instead of the f word.

Anyway, I belly-laughed so hard over this picture. Laughing is good for us, you know?

In my normal life I’m so busy I rarely have enough time to read or go up to my studio (an unused room in my house at the moment) to draw or paint. Reading I’m doing (see sidebar on my web page for what I’ve read recently). Cooking, I’m doing. But most everything else has fallen by the wayside. Have I cleaned my house? Nope. I’ve paid the two women who come clean my house for me, but I told them not to come in. I’ll do that again next week when they’d be due to come again. And I’ll pay them anyway as I know they need the money. I can’t seem to concentrate on doing other things. A couple of days earlier this week we had really beautiful weather here in Orange County and I went outside and sat in my nice outdoor furniture, under the umbrella and read for awhile, always conscious of the fresh air, the birds singing and the butterflies flitting.

What I crave is comfort food. What I really want is a pasta casserole (haven’t made one). Or things like mashed potatoes (haven’t done that either). Soup has been a mainstay on my table and you’ll have another recipe up soon – a delicious creamy chicken poblano chile from Joanna Gaines. Delicious. Most nights I have a big green salad. My neighbor is bringing me fresh salmon today from her shopping run, so I’ll have that with some fresh asparagus tonight.

Comfort food: [from wikipedia] The term comfort food has been traced back at least to 1966, when the Palm Beach Post used it in a story: “Adults, when under severe emotional stress, turn to what could be called ‘comfort food’—food associated with the security of childhood, like mother’s poached egg or famous chicken soup.”

I can’t say that I turn my mind to poached eggs. Or chicken soup either as my mother didn’t make chicken soup (my dad wouldn’t eat chicken). It might be better for me if I indulged in pasta or potatoes – rather than chocolate chip cookies! I don’t know about you, but I have a favorite brand of chocolate chips. I grew up on Nestlé’s semisweet, but oh no, since the advent of dark chocolate chips, I’m all over those, and Ghiradelli Bittersweet are my favorite. They’re very hard to find these days – have you noticed? I even considered ordering a 25 pound bag from amazon, but it was semisweet and I want bittersweet. So I’m figuring that lots of other households are baking chocolate chip cookies just like I am. My neighbor took a photo of the shelf at the grocery store – empty of Ghiradelli’s bittersweet. Sigh. So, since I’m nearly out of them in my own pantry, I dug into my chocolate stash and found a bag of Callibaut very bitter chocolate chips. They’re fine – I like them. So I’ll certainly have a couple more recipes’ worth before I’m desperate for Ghiradelli. Now that I’ve alerted my neighbor to look for them, she’ll probably hunt for them whenever she’s shopping.

Turning to a cookbook I’ve had for awhile (I think I bought it just before Dave passed away) I found several cc cookie recipes that would suffice, but this one, Alice Medrich’s favorite, seemed to leap off the page. When I began I didn’t realize how different the batter/dough would be. This recipe uses melted butter  – certainly a variant that was not something I’ve ever done for cc cookies. The butter is combined with the regular and brown sugars, eggs, then the dry ingredients. The dough has a totally different look – it’s wet. See photo. I’m not sure you can tell from the photo  – it really does LOOK wet, although the dough is handle-able and pliable. It’s not sticky in the least.

The only other variant was that it recommended at least an hour or two of chilling (even overnight if time permitted). I did an hour. Then used my scoop for 1-tablespoon sized mounds. My baking sheets don’t require foil or parchment – they baked up perfectly.

What’s GOOD: gee, I really like these cc cookies. I want to try them with Ghiradelli, but other than that, they’re a perfect complement to a hot cup of coffee or tea. Or a mid-afternoon snack.

What’s NOT: nothing really. My problem is that I know they’re in the freezer . . . .

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My recent trip – photo is looking south toward Morro Bay, fog is over the ocean

Waaaaaay back in late February, I took a driving trip. At the time we’d heard that coronavirus was in China and while I was on the trip the first cases appeared in Washington State, but there wasn’t even a whiff of quarantine or even much concern. How times have changed. But anyway, I took an 8-day driving trip, in my new car (I’ve been a BMW fan for most of my adult life) and love driving back roads and highways behind the wheel.

Here in California we know the phrase “Central Coast,” meaning it’s the central part of California, and mostly on the coast, although it also includes coastal hills and dales. In the summer it’s often hot there, so I went in spring-like weather and it was lovely. The hills were beginning to green-up.

My goal was just to drive, enjoy the scenery, stay in a few nice B&Bs or boutique hotels, walk, shop, wine taste and devote an hour or more each day to reading. I did all of those things. Only one night did I spend on the coast, in Cambria, and the weather wasn’t very nice – foggy and cold, so I didn’t hardly walk much and it was the only place I stayed that I’d not return to – the motel wasn’t special in the least. The first two nights I stayed in Ojai (oh-high), a small inland town in the foothills almost east of Santa Barbara. The town is tiny, but my friend Cherrie and her husband often stay near there with their 5th wheel and Cherrie had told me for years about an old-fashioned department store in Ojai called Rains. They were having a sale on some items and I took my time and went to every department. Bought some cute t-shirts and my big purchase was a Patagonia top. I’ve never owned one and was so tickled to find one that fit and was 50% off. The B&B, called The Emerald Iguana, is as cute as a bug. I highly recommend it. I stayed in a large suite that included a kitchen and great room with dining table and separate bedroom. Breakfast was enjoyed on their sweeping patio each morning with excellent coffee and a varied breakfast. The photo above is the centerpiece of the inn – a mosaic iguana.

There’s a photo of the main living room of my suite. It was really nice. It was a beautiful couple of days there. I shopped, had lunch at a quaint little coffee place (with a limited menu) and dinner at a recommended restaurant there. I had enough to take home and enjoyed it for my dinner the following night – only because I had a refrigerator to keep the food! I also spent several hours sitting out on the veranda of my suite, looking at the view (picture below). It was dark enough that the glare wasn’t too bad to read. There were plenty of birds and buzzing bees and pretty butterflies flitting. Ojai also has a place called Bart’s Books. It’s an Ojai institution – an old, dilapidated house that holds thousands of books. Do I need more books? Nope. But that doesn’t ever stop me from browsing in used bookstores. I think it’s something in the blood of anyone who likes to read, to meander into used bookstores. I bought 3 books – haven’t yet opened any of them, so can’t report yet about them. I bought a Louise Penny mystery, a memoir by Joyce Carol Oates and an essay book by Elizabeth David. All hardbacks.

Driving again I headed north and breezed through Santa Barbara. I drove over the mountains to look at Lake Cachuma (sometimes dry in drought years, but currently it has some water). It’s an iffy road to drive because it’s a 2-lane highway with just a few passing lanes, so if you happen to get stuck behind a truck and trailer, it can be miles before you can get around them. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I tried not to get annoyed. I think that picture was Cachuma – if not it was some other lake I passed on my trip.

Along the way I stopped and had an In-n-Out burger. So very good – a rare treat for me. Then I continued on to Paso Robles (technically it should be pronounced pass-oh robe-less but most people say pass-oh-ROH-bulls). I passed through San Luis Obispo along the way, which is one of the hubs of winemaking in the central coast. My DH Dave and I often stayed in SLO, it’s called, when we were on a wine-buying trip. I’ve begun enjoying Paso more than SLO (that’s how the locals refer to both towns), and I had reserved a room at the Hotel Cheval. Oh my goodness, was that ever special. On any future trip, I’m going to book 3 nights at this hotel – it was just extra special. They call themselves unique, and certainly it qualifies. Luxury but not ostentatious. Rustic, yet elegant. Hard to describe. If you walk 150 feet to the right in the picture above, you’d be on the town square. I did a lot of walking all around the town, shopping, just enjoying being outside. On my 2nd day there I did a round about drive to several wineries (Still Waters, Cass). The drive was so pretty. Rural for sure. Love the landscape in and around Paso. Yes, I bought wine – a case altogether. The next day I visited Kiler Ridge Olive Oil and two more wineries before heading toward the ocean to Cambria (mentioned above).

The day after that I meandered along Highway 1, drove through Morro Bay, had lunch, then on to Los Olivos (actually Ballard) a town not too far away, where I stayed in a very pretty boutique hotel, the Ballard Inn. The only thing wrong with it was they don’t have TVs in the rooms (one only in the sitting room area near the lobby). I discovered that in the late afternoon I enjoyed my rooms, wherever I was, and wanted to listen to the news and later in the evening I wanted the “companionship” if you can call it that, of having the TV on before I went to sleep. Yes, I could have tried to stream something on my iPad, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. Ballard is a tiny, sleepy town with nothing to do – a great place for a romantic (couple) weekend away – but not so much for a widow. Had dinner in their lovely restaurant (great food) then the next day headed back toward home. I spent 2 nights with my son Powell, his wife Karen and grandson Vaughan near Pasadena. And then home. Loved my own bed – don’t we always? I swear hotels all buy some kind of padded top thing when the mattresses have seen better days, trying to eke out another year of use, and I’m not a fan. I complained at one place about it. It was so thick I felt like I was sinking into a deep feather pillow. But not comfortable.

My trip was great – it taught me a very good lesson – stay in nicer places – eat well – and I did. I wasn’t sad being by myself – enjoyed plotting out my trips each day – stopped to take pictures here and there – did plenty of window shopping and walking. I’d make this trip again but I’d leave off Cambria and Ballard and just stay in Ojai and Paso.

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Roasted asparagus with a butter Dijon sauce poured on top.

Asparagus is one of my very favorite vegetables. And they’re just coming into season about now, though the ones I’ve seen have been quite thin. I prefer them a bit more matured rather than pencil thin. So, this recipe, from a class with Phillis Carey, was so simple to make. The trimmed asparagus was tossed with some olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted at 450°F. That’s one HOT oven. These were done in 8 minutes. So, in the interim, you make the buttery sauce – with garlic, Dijon and thyme. Once the asparagus come out of the oven you pour it over and toss well. Finished. How easy is that?

The only suggestion is to make sure you spread the asparagus out in a single layer – no overlapping. They roast better that way. I love spearing an asparagus with my fork and munching it down to the base. I’ve been known to pick them up in my fingers too, butter and all, to munch them. Not according to Emily Post, for sure.

What’s GOOD: how easy these are to make – just get the ingredients for the sauce out before you put the asparagus in the oven. Delicious.

What’s NOT: not a thing.

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A great combo of flavors – all tasty by themselves, but tossed with a light balsamic dressing, it takes it to a tastier level.

When this veggie bowl was served to me I was certain I wasn’t going to care for it. I was at a cooking class, and often this instructor includes a vegetarian entrée at her classes. Then I took a bite, and decided it was really quite wonderful. I don’t eat very many beans (carbs) and I definitely don’t eat hardly any potatoes, either (more carbs) so I ate a bite or two of those things and devoured the rest of the bowl. It’s the dressing that pulls it all together.

Truly, I love sheetpan dinners – and this one is very easy – it’s just done in stages – pine nuts first (and removed), then potatoes and garlic, and zucchini last. Meanwhile, you make up the dressing – adding the roasted garlic to it once you take the sheetpan out of the oven. The arugula adds a lovely texture to this – making it equally a salad rather than just roasted vegetables, and as I mentioned, the dressing just enhances it all. When I make it myself, I’ll probably use sweet potatoes since they are healthier for me.

I’ve adjusted the recipe to use fewer potatoes (and added the sweet potato option). Do chop up the arugula – if it’s mature arugula it can be quite unruly to eat – easier to eat if chopped. The cold halved tomatoes also add a nice textural contrast. Making it for myself I’d add more zucchini and fewer beans, but that’s totally up to you. I don’t think you can buy half cans of cannellini beans!

What’s GOOD: for me the dressing brought all the various ingredients together and made it more of a salad than a sheetpan dinner, exactly. Loved the dressing element. Liked the contrast using chopped arugula and fresh tomatoes.

What’s NOT: only that it helps to have everything out and ready when you start – you make this in stages, but still, all on one pan. Yeah!

printer-friendly PDF and MasterCook 15/16 file (click link to open recipe)

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Comfort food needed.

In this post I’m addressing the current state of self-quarantine from COVID-19. Today is day nine of my staying at home. Completely. Although I have gone out to take walks. And I delivered documents to my CPA. Otherwise it’s day after day of being at home. I’ve been glued to the TV, having it on from early morning  until bedtime. Kind of depressing. I love my home, but my daughter Dana said to me yesterday (on the phone) that it’s one thing to be content staying at home when it’s your own idea. Not so when someone else tells you you have to stay at home. Yes, I agree. It’s been too cold to sit outside – only walking. And we’ve had a lot of rain besides.

There’s been plenty of cooking going on in my house – and I have posts set up into mid-April. My young next door neighbor, Josee, has declared herself my own personal shopper. God bless her!! I give her a grocery list by text and off she goes, disinfecting everything before she sets it on my front step. Although – lots of things are in short supply or in NO supply (blueberries, for instance, and TP of course). No white onions. Huh? All this hoarding is crazy.

I’m about to start a to-do list – things I want to accomplish during this forced quarantine. Like wipe down all the cupboard shelves in my kitchen that are open or glass fronted. My cleaning gals don’t clean those and it’s been a year or so since I’ve wiped them down. Like working in my garage – cleaning shelves and “stuff” that’s accumulated there. I have a 3-car garage, so there is plenty of space to accumulate stuff. One of the car bays stores my outdoor furniture, but once the weather warms up, that will all go outside. Otherwise, I could still get 3 cars into my garage, but things are encroaching on the ease of doing that. I have one car, of course.

My DH Dave used to be the person who handled the garage – periodically cleaning it out, brooming out detritus, getting it neat again. Since he’s been gone I’ve not done much of that – a bit here and there. And by the way, tomorrow is the 6-year anniversary of his death. I’ve shredded thousands of pages of things that could be tossed, but that’s an ongoing project. I’ve tossed out about 90% of my many thick travel files – with clippings and pages from magazines, newspapers, etc. over the course of about 40 years. Most of it isn’t up to date, so why keep it? My desk in my upstairs study needs to be neatened up. That’ll take about 2 hours at most, but it always gets shoved down the list of things to do. I’ve never been good about keeping a neat desk. Filing has never been my forte! Why haven’t I worked on my painting? I don’t know. Can’t seem to motivate myself to. In time, perhaps.

So yesterday I was feeling kind of blah. Physically I’m fine – I mean mentally. So I did what lots of people do – I decided I needed a food reward. And it needed to be chocolate! I went searching in several cookbooks, and settled on Maida Heatter – her book about chocolate. Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts. (The book is no longer in print, but used copies are available for a very inexpensive price if you’re so inclined.) She’s a legend, and all of her books are very interesting reading. I own two I think. I’ve never prepared any recipe of hers that hasn’t been perfect – spot on. Nearly every recipe has a paragraph of explanation – who gave her the recipe, where she first ate it – what chef, friend, relative or neighbor prepared it – why it’s special or why she developed it. Lots of recipes contained things I don’t have in my pantry (almond paste, sweetened condensed milk, a lot of cream or milk, or half and half – I have a bit of those, but not enough). I eliminated dozens upon dozens of possible recipes that required a filling or icing. I wanted easy. A chocolate carrot cake intrigued me, but I don’t have enough carrots at the moment (yes, they’re on the next grocery list).

Above: note the cherries kind of buried under the chocolate cake batter, touching the edges.

What I did have in my pantry was a jar of Trader Joe’s Morello (more or less sour) cherries. Perfect for this recipe. And Maida even mentioned that there is a natural marriage between chocolate and cherries. The cake was made with semisweet chocolate (had that), eggs (had the 3 needed), flour, sugar, almond flour (yes), butter, vanilla, almond extract. Yes, I had it all. The cake is made in a springform pan (a 9” one) and Maida wanted you to butter it and dust it with bread crumbs . . . I used almond flour instead.

There is flour in this recipe, so it’s not GF. The batter is made. The cherries are drained and blotted dry with paper towels (yes, I still have ample of those for now). Half the batter is poured into the prepared pan, then you carefully place the cherries all over the batter, even touching the pan side if needed, then the rest of the batter is poured on top and carefully spread. 50 minutes baking time  later it was done, then it cooled. After dinner last night I cut myself a slice, whipped up some cream with kirsch and had myself a slice. I think I’ll freeze at least half of it so I can bring out a piece now and then.

What’s GOOD: yum. The chocolate wasn’t overwhelming – you wouldn’t want it to be, so you could taste the cherries. Loved the moist cherries kind of hidden inside. And the whipped cream with kirsch? Oh yes. If you don’t have it, not to worry, but do serve with the whipped cream.

What’s NOT: nothing really, except you’ve got to have sour cherries (not dried type) on hand.

printer-friendly PDF and MasterCook 15/16 file (click link to open recipe)

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