Homemade Fine Dining

Mom and I love to cook for other people. Before the pandemic, we would have dinners every so often that we would plan elaborate menus for and cook amazing food to share with loved ones. Obviously, that isn't really happening. Scooter is considered an essential worker, so he's been going to work everyday and missing out on our twice-weekly lunches in the garden. He's been hearing me talk about what we enjoy at lunch, and I know he's been feeling a little left out. He needed to work on my parents' RV this last weekend, so Mom and I decided that we would give him a fancy lunch to enjoy after he was done working.

We planned a multi-course Italian luncheon with dishes that we could incorporate ingredients from the garden into. We used fresh herbs, different textures, different flavors, and made everything from scratch. Mom and I wanted to especially highlight our tomatoes, which are starting to arrive in earnest. We delved into our wine inventory to find perfect wines to pair with the meal. I carefully chose the silverware and flatware, the glasses, and the napkins with everything color-coordinated. To make it even more like a fancy restaurant, I used a Canva template to create a menu--in Italian of course. Collectively, it was an homage to the meals Mom and I had planned and shared when things were still "normal."

For the food enthusiasts, I'm posting pictures of all of our food. We like to pull out all the stops. If you are interested in a specific recipe, mention it in the comments and I can include it in a future post.

Bruschetta made with zucchini, shallot, and tomato (all from the garden),
topped with basil and fresh-grated parmigiano reggiano

Tuscan melon with prosciutto di parma

Black Krim heirloom tomatoes from the garden with fresh mozarella
and basil, with olive oil from family olive trees and balsamic vinegar

Squash blossoms from the garden stuffed with ground beef, chard from the
garden, fresh herbs, breadcrumbs, and parmigiano reggiano

Chicken cooked in Marsala wine with fresh garlic, shallots from the
garden, and mushrooms

Peaches from my aunt's tree drizzled with French peach liqueur

Starting in the upper left and moving clockwise: sheep's milk gouda
with truffle, honey-soaked goat cheese, cow's milk cheese soaked in
balsamic vinegar, and a sheep's milk cheese from the Basque region
in France

Homemade biscotti from my great-grandmother's recipe

Mom has dubbed this a "Super Saturday" and wants to do something like it once a month. The menus and "look" of the table and food will change, but it will continue to be a chance for us to enjoy each other's company and good food during these crazy times.

Buon appetito!

Not Your Average Garden Lunch

Mom and I have settled into a routine. Two or three days a week, we go out and work together in the garden. The whole garden is quite large, so the work is never-ending. There's always a pot with a plant we need to replace, or a long branch that needs to be tied up or removed. This has been a fantastic year for roses, so there's always more faded roses to remove. There's herbs to trim, and fountains that need to be refilled because the kitties keep drinking out of them. We weed, we talk about what we'd like to do, we rearrange pots, we water plants, we tackle small garden projects, we harvest, and then...we cook. 

Cooking from the garden has become almost a religious experience. There's something spiritual about picking tomatoes that you then go and use in a salad or a sauce only minutes after they were still attached to the plant. It has become a never-ending source of satisfaction to incorporate the literal fruits of our labor into the food we enjoy at lunch. Cooking has become more experimental, which has added even more joy to the process. The results have been exquisite explosions of flavor and texture that any restaurant serving haute cuisine would be envious of. Today was no exception.

We needed to make a trip to the nursery to get some more colorful flowers and a couple of herbs we wanted to add, so we started the morning by prepping the pasta sauce for the pasta we planned on for lunch. A good pasta sauce is layered. You shouldn't dump all the ingredients in the pot at once because the aromas and flavors will never fully open. Fresh ingredients are a must, and the old-fashioned methods are sometimes better than the modern ones. In my family, any good cook has a wooden chopping bowl for chopping herbs and garlic; my mother and I both have our own. The scent of the garlic and herbs wafting up as you chop is a heady perfume, a sign of good Italian cooking about to happen. 

Our pasta sauce started with olive oil and loose mild Italian sausage meat. We wanted a hearty sauce, hence the meat. If you're looking for something lighter, stick with just herbs and veggies. After the sausage cooked through, in went the diced onion. Next came the chopped garlic and herbs, including basil that we grow ourselves. In went chopped San Marzano tomatoes from our garden; this is a great tomato for cooking. Once those flavors opened up, it was time to get serious. And by serious, I mean wine, a cabernet sauvignon. The wine helps to deglaze the bottom of the pot and adds amazing body and flavor to the finished product (pro tip: don't use any wine in your cooking that you wouldn't drink by the glass--trust me!). Once the wine cooked down, we added the last ingredient: tomato sauce Mom made herself from a previous year's San Marzanos. We brought it to a simmer, covered it, and left it to slowly cook while we went to the nursery.

When we returned, we planted the few things we purchased, then went to work on the rest of our lunch. By the time we sat down, we had bruschetta, salad, porpeta (essentially patties made from ravioli filling), penne pasta with the sauce, and biscotti. As Mom is so fond of saying, "this is all we have." Each dish had something from the garden. The pasta had tomatoes and basil we grew. The bruschetta had our own tomatoes, shallots, and zucchini. The salad had our own cucumber and vinegar. The porpeta had our own herbs and swiss chard. Each bite had us in ecstasy, almost like some illicit form of dining. "This is soooo goooood!" "Oh my god, did you taste this?" And when we paired it with the wine that had gone into the sauce...absolute perfection. Food tastes so much better when you grow it and make it yourself. 

And for today's garden surprise, we discovered the parsley we thought we bought is actually celery. Looks like we'll be growing that too now! We've been gardening for years and were so confident at the nursery. I guess this is proof that even "experienced" gardeners can still be surprised. It'll be perfect in the box that currently has the last remaining sprigs of lettuce...

Cooking Librarian Remix

Day 1 of the veggie garden

My last post was made over 5 years ago. At the time, it didn't feel like I needed this blog anymore. So I started another one with a different focus, but that one didn't last long either. I wasn't feeling inspired anymore. I didn't feel like I had anything to say, anything worth sharing. Things felt...stagnant. Well, many things have changed since then.

As a cook, the source of my food has become more important to me as I get older and more experienced with cooking (and eating). To me, the connection between the garden and the kitchen table has never been more evident. Scooter and I make weekly trips to the local Farmer's Market, where I've found more aromatic herbs, juicier peaches, fresher lettuce, and tastier strawberries than I've ever been able to find in our local chain supermarket. To be fair, the supermarket has fine produce; what the Farmer's Market has is just better. As a bonus, I can also support the smaller farms and businesses in my area.

But relishing such delectable organic food got me thinking. My mother and I had always wanted to do a big vegetable garden that we would cycle crops through so we could harvest year-round. The thought of tomatoes, string beans, zucchini, lettuce, root vegetables, and others that we could grow and harvest ourselves was so very tempting. Since we both love to cook, it seemed like a no-brainer. The problem was finding the time to get the garden going and established. She was always doing something church-related, or chores around the house, or running errands with my dad. I had a full-time job, plus a year ago I started a teaching credential program. Neither one of us had the time or the energy to attempt such a project.

And then in March the world fell apart. The schools closed, so I suddenly found myself with some unexpected time on my hands. Everything else closed, so there was nowhere for us to go: no picnics at the park, no camping (or travel of any kind), no eating out. Everything. Stopped. It was a particularly difficult time for me. I missed my students dearly, I was worried about my dad (not related to COVID, but a story for another day), I was worried about Scooter who still had to report to work, shopping for food had suddenly become A Big Thing, and my mental health was starting to decline. Mom and I decided that now was the time for the garden. We needed something therapeutic, something positive we could do in the middle of all this negativity, and we would become more autonomous with sourcing some of our food. So we sketched out a plan, called up our local nursery--who was thankfully doing deliveries--and put in an order of veggies.

Back in April when we planned out the raised beds and planted all of our new, tender plants, we could not have foreseen the amazing things that have come out of this project. Every day in the garden has become a much-needed refuge, a chance to step back from the world and take a breath to regroup. We have poured hours and hours into our little oasis, and it has responded in kind. Our garden has become the perfect compliment to our mutual love of cooking, so my blog will be used to record our gardening and cooking "experiments." I don't work from a recipe much anymore, so I don't know if I'll be posting many. But I promise to share what I can on what I do in the kitchen and in the garden. 

Step into my oasis. A ogni uccello il suo nido è bello. Home sweet home. 

Making Magic with Julia Child

It's been awhile since my last new recipe. Scooter and I have been using a lot of repeats lately simply because both weeknights and weekends have been busy. And when you're busy, it's a lot faster to whip up something you've made before than to try out something new. But this last weekend, I decided to try a new recipe for Sunday dinner. When looking at my line of cookbooks, I grabbed one I hadn't turned to in awhile: Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And the recipe I chose was her "Roasted Chicken Steeped with Port Wine, Cream, and Mushrooms." This was truly an experience for the palate. So much so that I couldn't help but exclaiming "Oh my God!" after I tasted the sauce and making Scooter come to the kitchen to taste it too. He got this dreamy look in his eyes and just stood there with a smile, savoring the flavor. We licked up every drop (in my case, literally) from our plates when we sat down to our meal. I don't know how she is able to do it, but decades after writing her recipes down Julia still inspires cooks and gives them the steps to make magic in their kitchen. Turning basic ingredients like the ones above into something so incredible can't be anything but a kind of magic. So without further ado, here is my slight variation on Julia's recipe.

What you'll need:
3 lbs. meaty chicken pieces (thighs worked really well)
olive oil
1/2 lb. cremini mushrooms
1/4 lb. white mushrooms
1 pkg. dried porcini mushrooms
1/4 c. water
1 1/2 Tbs. butter
1/2 tsp. lemon juice
1/4 tsp. salt
1 c. heavy cream
1 1/2 tsp. cornstarch, mixed with 1 Tbs. of the cream
1 shallot, peeled and diced small
1/3 c. port
1/4 c. brandy or cognac
salt and pepper to taste

What you'll need to do:
1. Put the dried porcini mushrooms into a small bowl and add enough water to almost cover them. Set aside.
2. Rinse and dry the chicken pieces. Place them on a flat rack in a roasting pan. Baste with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast at 375 degrees for about 50 minutes or until juice is clear. Remove and set aside.
3. While the chicken is roasting, clean and trim the other mushrooms. Cut into quarters or thick slices. Set aside.
4. In a large saucepan, add the water, 1/2 Tbs. of the butter, lemon juice, and salt. Bring to a boil and add all of the mushrooms, including the porcini mushrooms' water. Cover and simmer for 8 minutes. Pour out the cooking liquid and reserve.
5. Add the cream and cornstarch mixture. Simmer for another 2 minutes. Add salt and pepper as desired and set aside.
6. When the chicken is done roasting, remove from oven and set aside to rest.
7. In a small saucepan, add 2 Tbs of the fat from the roasting pan. Stir in the shallots and cook slowly for 1 minute. Add the port and the reserved cooking liquid from the mushrooms. Boil rapidly until mixture has reduced to about 1/3 cup.
8. Add the contents of the small saucepan to the large saucepan and simmer for 2 to 3 minutes until sauce starts to thicken.
9. Smear the inside of a dutch oven or casserole dish with the remaining butter. Add the chicken pieces and arrange. Put the dutch oven over medium to medium high heat until you hear the chicken starting to sizzle.
10. Pour in the brandy and use a long-handled match or lighter to light the alcohol. **BE CAREFUL and LEAN BACK FROM THE DISH when you do this** Remember, safety first! Tilt or shake the dutch oven until the flames disappear. If you get too nervous, put the lid on the pot to instantly put out the flame.
11. Pour in the mushroom mixture, cover and turn down to low heat for 5 minutes. Serve hot with rice or roasted potatoes.

This recipe suggests a white wine, but I'm so much more partial to red. We decided to try one that I bought at the store on a whim. It was of a winery I had enjoyed in the past (I like their Merlot), but a particular type that I hadn't yet sampled. Oh. My. God. It was fantastic! It was like the icing on the cake--a perfect way to round out the chicken. You can see the label here. If you ever come across this wine, do yourself a favor and buy it! Scooter and I finished the bottle. It's already on my shopping list for this weekend.

Between the outstanding food and the wine we fell in love with, it was a truly amazing meal. And the leftovers (sans wine) were just as good.

Go make some magic in your kitchen and bon appétit!

Sharing Sunday Dinner

I made roast chicken Sunday night for dinner, perfect comfort food for the cold weather. I used a slightly different recipe than the one I shared here. This time, it was like my mom makes at home with onion, garlic, and herbs stuffed inside. The veggies sharing the roasting pan are onion, carrots and yams. I had to share pictures because it looked so good. Here's a "before" and "after" of the bird of honor.

Before the roast

Ready to eat :)

Roasted vegetables are sooooo good! I'll be making chicken soup (recipe to come) with the leftovers tomorrow night, so stay tuned.

Bachelor Surprise and Refrigerator Soup

I was able to spend a good part of my weekend with K and her husband (and my adorable godson of course), and once again they so generously invited me to stay for a meal. Saturday was pulled pork tacos (the pork was made by K, and very well done I might add) on homemade corn tortillas (a la Z), and Sunday was Bachelor Surprise. K doesn't like to cook much, even though she can and does make good food like awesome red velvet cake; most of the tasty food in the household can be attributed to her husband Z. Z is very much a do-it-yourselfer in the kitchen; he comes from the same school of thought that homemade from scratch is best. He even roasts his own coffee (something Scooter hopes to try after we move); it's because of Z that I discovered and have come to love the "city roast," a roast of coffee that I can't find in the store since it has a much shorter shelf life than the whole bean or ground coffee you can buy. I wish I could accomplish some of what he's able to do, but alas with a shoebox-sized kitchen (that is to say a "galley") cooking everything from scratch is not always possible because I don't have enough workspace or can't fit the appliances into my (microscopic) kitchen. I love eating over there because even if I don't recognize the dish, I know it will be good.

On Sunday when we were eating his latest batch of Bachelor Surprise, he explained what it was and how he made it. He started making it years ago to use up leftover food. It's an amalgamation of the leftovers in the fridge--whatever they might be--seasoned with complementary spices. Because leftovers inevitably change (and the spices he then chooses do too), the dish is different every time he makes it, and sadly there's no real recipe for it. K fondly remembers him meeting her at the airport with a bowl of Bachelor Surprise many a time before they got married.

When she was alive, my grandmother would do something similar with soup. In her house, soup was a staple every day for lunch, except on Sundays when she would make brunch. Every few days, Gramma would make Refrigerator Soup. She would start with a soup starter (a brand that you can no longer find around here) and add leftovers from the fridge: sauteed zucchini and squash, giblets she saved from a chicken she pan-fried, leftover chicken, cut-up cooked string beans, sometimes even pasta, anything that needed to be used before it got too old was fair game. Despite the hodge-podge of ingredients, the end result was always a thick, hearty soup that she was well-known for among family and friends. Her Refrigerator Soup was relished any time of the year regardless of the weather, usually with a small sandwich or two on the side.

Both Z and Gramma didn't work from a recipe--the mixing of ingredients and spices is done by inclination, by feel. And even though no version of Bachelor Surprise or Refrigerator Soup is ever the same, it's still really good. It is the measure of a true cook to be able to create something delicious by just throwing things together sans recipe. Z and my grandmother have/had the idea down, and I would like to think that Scooter and I are coming along with that kind of cooking too. We'll get in a lot more practice once we have a bigger kitchen to work in.

Do you have something you make that you just "throw together?" Feel free to post about it in the comments.

Cooking With Julia Child

This last weekend, I made my first Julia Child recipe. It sounds almost sacrilegious, loving to cook and not using Julia Child until now. But I can tell you, it was worth the wait.

As you may know from reading my blog, my grandmothers are my muses in the kitchen. Both my dad's mom and my mom's mom were excellent cooks, very different in style but experts in their styles nonetheless. As a result, a lot of the food at mealtimes was and is heavily influenced by Scandinavian and Mediterranean fare. I grew up loving good food thanks to them. My grandmothers are always with me in the kitchen. But on Sunday, I added another great lady to my cooking muses. Julia Child--a woman revered by cooks all over--has gotten another devotee. No, I'm not going to erect a statue or a shrine for her, but she has a lot to teach me about cooking and I am ready to learn.

As I recently posted, my aunt passed on her Mastering the Art of French Cooking book to me. It's an older printing of the title and dates back to 1965. It's not a first version, but it's an early version. The pages have tanned over time, and I found an old newspaper clipping about one of Julia Child's recipes hidden among the pages. The words, even in the recipes, read almost like a story. And I suppose one could say that cooking is like telling a story, as well as an art. It's a story of the cook's journey, and for me it has become a very personal journey because of my cooking as a tribute to my grandmothers. But it's a journey that I'm happy to share, especially since it's much more fun to share good food than eat it alone!

So which of Julia's recipes did I choose to try? No, it was not the beef bourguignon. I decided on the coq au vin. This is actually a dish I made a long time ago in high school (though not from Julia Child's recipe). It was a rather failed experiment. I was not a good cook back then, although I liked being in the kitchen. I was in the French Club, and for our end-of-the-year event, we had a dinner at the school. We watched a really bad (read cheesy) 1980s French movie ("La Boum") and ate French food. The main course was coq au vin, and to this day I don't know what happened. Perhaps we were dancing too much in the kitchen and not paying enough attention to the food. Long story short, while it was edible the coq au vin did not taste even close to how it should.

Fast forward to this last Sunday. With a few years of good cooking under my sleeve, I felt compelled to try again. So Scooter and I bought what ingredients we didn't already have. I pulled out my wonderful dutch oven--a perfect cooking vessel for coq au vin--and started cooking. A couple of hours later, Scooter and I sat down and took the first bite. It was culinary bliss. I didn't even try to improve on the recipe; it didn't need it. It was perfect as it was.

And since I'm not improving on the recipe or changing anything about it, I am not going to post it here. But you can find Julia's coq au vin recipe all over the Internet. A quick Google search will give you many variations. The recipe on WGBH's website and on What's Cooking America are almost identical to the 1965 version I was working off of (apparently Julia kept modifying and improving her own recipes). Give it a try and taste for yourself the work of a master.

Bon appétit!

A Dinner to Remember

I turn 30 this week.

A year ago, I knew that this day would come (as long as the world didn't end on 12/21/12), and I knew I didn't want a big party. I don't have a large circle of friends that I could invite anyway. I wanted something small and intimate, something special that I would remember for the rest of my life. And I figured out what that would be: a formal French dinner.

This story actually has roots older than last year. My mother once (and only once--it was a LOT of work) cooked this elaborate traditional French dinner as part of a church charity (someone won a silent auction item that included a French dinner). I'm not a member of my parents' Church community, but I do know how to cook, so my help was enlisted. That dinner--the food, the wine, the ambiance--looked so wonderful. And although I was in the kitchen and didn't get to enjoy the dinner the way the guests did, I knew one day I would want a dinner like that.

So last year, I decided that for my 30th, I would like a traditional formal French dinner. When I made mention of this to the family last fall, my older brother, who not only teaches French but has many ties to the country and the culture, offered to help plan and cook it. (As a side note, my older brother had a tradition for several years that he would host a French dinner for his senior French class at the end of the school year as a celebration.) I feel compelled to note that my older brother is such a francophile that he is assumed to be French when he travels in France. He has so completely embraced the language and the culture; and so he was very well-suited to planning the menu, knowing where to look for ingredients, and cooking the food.

So fast forward to last weekend. My brother and my mother planned for me an exquisite 12-course dinner in true traditional French style. Wine accompanied nearly every course and paired with the food in such a way that my mouth is watering just thinking of it. My mother pulled out all the good dishes that almost never get used, the silver, the crystal--basically all the stuff that she hides away that we maybe get to see some of at Christmas. My older brother was a magician in the kitchen, creating flavors I wish I could copy but fear I won't taste again. He was a general too, keeping things organized and synchronized (with some help from two friends of his), sending out each dish with a flair. One of his friends was our sommelier and did a presentation for each wine, explaining a bit about its history, the strain of grape that goes into it, and its flavor (I had no idea he knew that much about them!). We would take a bite of food and a sip of wine and exclaim over it--it was almost too good to be reality. We made a kind of chorus with our praises of "The food!" "The wine!" "The flavor!" "It's so good!" "I can't believe it!" It was like a movie dinner. You know, one of those lavish course-after-course dinners you might see in a scene in a movie and dismiss with a thought because that's Hollywood and would never actually happen. Except it did.

You know what? Better than keep talking about it, I will show you:

This is only one place setting for one person -- and we reused silverware for multiple courses!

Champagne with black current syrup was the cocktail that started us off.

Pureed butternut squash soup -- this had an especially amazing and delicate flavor.

Foie gras -- very much a French food, and not illegal to consume in California, although it is now illegal to produce or sell in the state.

These prawns and scallops were cooked perfectly and served with a white champagne sauce.

This lemon sorbet was served right before the "Intermetzo" or intermission -- at this point, we certainly needed it! Incidentally, I was getting in some serious baby time at this point of the meal.

The highlight of the meal: a beef tenderloin with a reduced sauce made of ruby port, black trumpet mushrooms, and foie gras (no, of course we weren't gilding the lily).

Anyone familiar with French cuisine would recognize the cheese course. All but one of the cheeses we had were from various regions of France.

A cream puff for each of us was the dessert -- and my mom makes excellent cream puffs!

If we were sticking to true tradition, the coffee would have had its own course. Here it was served with some local candies (aka See's chocolates).

By the time we got to the coffee and candies, I could not eat another bite. I ended up passing on the cognac as it made its way around at the very end. There was actually another course in this line-up after the champagne cocktail at the beginning, but in my moment of tasting food ecstasy, I forgot to take a picture. This was certainly a very special dinner--the most incredible I've had to date--and one I'll remember for the rest of my life. I'm so lucky that Mom and Brother were willing to do this for me. I don't think this post and the pictures do it justice.

And I couldn't believe that I was actually hungry the morning after.

Cooking Italian

I got another new cookbook. This one is very special, as it has recipes that all include salame, prosciutto, and other Italian meats. My parents gave it to me for my birthday and I love it. Going through it and looking at all the recipes was like feeling my grandmother leaning over my shoulder and talking about the food she had growing up. I can see her and Nonni (my great-grandmother) making things like these recipes all the time. I would love to get more Italian cookbooks. I wish there was an Italian equivalent to Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking; if there is, I've never heard of it (then again, my Italian family cooked from the mind and the heart, not from a recipe in a book).

This 144-page cookbook has inspired me. I currently don't have the time or the kitchen space to do as much cooking as I now want to. School unfortunately has to come first, which is why I treasure my cooking time on the weekends. And my kitchen isn't conducive to all the cooking  from scratch that I want to start doing. My sister actually has the best term for my kitchen: galley. No dishwasher and little counter space means that making one meal results in an odd dance with Scooter and I competing for a flat surface and a disaster of dirty dishes--all of which we have to clean by hand--after the meal is ready. I've put up with this set-up for almost three years, but I'm hoping that we can get a bigger place (with a dishwasher!) by the time I finish my program. Because once that I happens, I plan to spend a year cooking almost nothing but Italian food--including homemade pasta--like my mother, and her mother, and the other Italian women in my family have done.

But in the meantime, I continue as I have done and cook on the weekends and experiment with different recipes. And with that, I have two recipes to share: pasta with lamb shanks (from my crock-pot cookbook) and "melting moments" (from my English tea book). Let's start with the lamb.

What you'll need:
3 Tbs. olive oil
4 lamb shanks (4-5 lbs total)
2 large carrots
1 medium red onion
4 cloves garlic, sliced (or 1-2Tbs. garlic powder)
1 14.5-oz. of dark beer (Guinness works well)
1/2 c. tomato paste
2 14.5-oz. cans chopped tomatoes, with their juice
2 Tbs. fresh rosemary, chopped
2 tsp. fresh oregano, chopped
salt and pepper to taste
1 lb. penne pasta

What you'll need to do:
1. Heat the olive oil in a large skilled over medium-high heat. Add two of the lamb shanks and cook until browned on all sides. Remove and place on a plate. Repeat with the last two shanks.
2. While the lamb is cooking, slice the carrots into 1/3-in slices. Cut the onion into small chunks. Once the lamb has finished cooking, add the vegetables and the garlic to the skillet and saute until softened. Remove from heat and add to a medium or large crock pot. Lay the meat on top.
3. Over medium heat, carefully add the beer to the skillet. Bring to a boil and scrap up any bits stuck to the skillet. Add the tomato paste and the cans of chopped tomato. Bring the skillet to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-low and let everything simmer for 5 minutes. Pour the sauce over the lamb and vegetables and cook on the LOW setting for 6-8 hours. Meat should be tender and almost falling off the bone.
4. Boil a pot of water and cook the pasta as directed. Remove the lamb from the crock pot and pour the sauce into a large saucepan. Bring it to a boil, lower the heat, and let it simmer to thicken (the original recipe had less sauce so the recommended time was 10 minutes--if you follow this version of the recipe, I would increase it to 15 or 20).
5. Serve the lamb and sauce over the pasta with a red wine or a dark beer.

Once you've eaten as much lamb as you can, finish the meal with some fresh fruit and these light cookies.

What you'll need:
5 Tbs. lard (Crisco shortening works well)
6 Tbs. sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 c. self-rising flour*
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
dried coconut

What you'll need to do:
1. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees and grease a baking sheet.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, beat the lard and the sugar together with an electric mixer. Add the egg and mix completely. Add in the flour and vanilla extract, using a spatula to fold it together.
3. Once you have an even batter, roll the mixture into small balls. Roll in the coconut, and place finished balls on the baking sheet.
4. Bake for only 10 minutes. Cookies will be soft. Let cool for a couple of minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.
*can substitute with 1 1/4c. all-purpose flour, 1 1/4 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1/4 tsp. baking soda

Enjoy!

Tea Time

Before classes start getting hectic, I wanted to do some baking. I haven't done much lately and I've missed making yummy treats to have on hand for a quick snack. I rediscovered a tiny book on my shelves titled "A Little English Book of Teas" which has a lot of recipes one can make for tea. I thought it would be fun for me to make something for Sunday Tea for myself (it ended up being me and Scooter).

The book is a really cool little collection. Recipes include tea sandwiches, biscuits/scones, cookies, and cakes--even ice cream and jam. I experimented with three recipes--all of which I liked and two of which could make an appearance at this year's Mother's Day Tea (if we have one). (K, you'll be getting some fresh-made samples this weekend--I wanted to test the recipes first!)

It's funny how this tea tradition started. K (my best friend) and I found a tea shop that served high Victorian tea down the street from where she used to live. The tea shop has all kinds of tea-related supplies--including many beautiful pots and tea cups--as well as the tea room. K and I spent many weekends there having tea and looking around at all the goodies, so much so that the owner got to know us on a first-name basis. K and I got inspired and we started doing an annual Mother's Day Tea for the ladies in my family. I've been hooked on tea time ever since.

I know this is not "on topic" for this blog, but it stands as an intro for the recipes I'm going to post today and tomorrow. The first one is banana pecan loaf, from my wonderful little tea book. The other two will follow tomorrow.

What you'll need:
1/2 c. margarine
3/4 c. dark brown sugar
2 eggs
2 ripe bananas
1/2 c. chopped pecans (can also use walnuts as the original recipe calls for)
2 1/4 c. self-rising flour*
1 tsp. baking powder
2 Tbs. milk

What you'll need to do:
1. Grease an 8-inch loaf pan and preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large mixing bowl, use an electric beater to cream the margarine and sugar together. Peel and mash the bananas, add to the mixture and blend in.
3. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each egg is added.
4. Fold in the flour and baking powder, stir in the nuts and milk, and mix until well combined.
5. Pour into prepared pan and bake in the oven for 1 hour or until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out almost clean. Cool on a wire rack.
*Can substitute with 2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour, 2 1/4 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp + pinch baking soda, 1/2 tsp. salt

This recipe will create a loaf that is more like the consistency of bread, rather than the cake-like loafs that many banana bread recipes create. A little margarine spread on a slice with a cup of tea is the perfect tasty snack!

Finally...another recipe!

Happy Belated Halloween! I sincerely hope everyone had a safe and fun holiday. My apartment complex celebrated with our own get-together potluck. My contribution was the edible pumpkin patch to the right. This project idea was from the Hello Cupcake! book I've mentioned before in other posts. If you like being creative, definitely pick this book up! I will take credit for the presentation idea. The plate is my pizza pan and the "grass" is coconut colored with a little bit of green food coloring--perfect for making a "home" for the pumpkins. Since I am known in the complex as the one with the vegetable garden, making a pumpkin patch seemed like a cute idea.

I've also acquired another cookbook recently. My aunt and uncle got Scooter and me a slow cooker cookbook to help us save time since we're now both working full-time. We've already tried two recipes (both a success), and I'll be putting another one to the test tomorrow. If you want to check out the book for yourself, it can be found here on Amazon. We made the Chicken with Golden Raisins recipe this last weekend, and of course changed it up a bit. Here's our version (and it was soooooooo good!).

What you'll need:
1 lb. thick-cut bacon
3/4 c. flour
8 bone-in chicken thighs, with the skin
1 c. dry red wine (we used the Clos du Bois Cabernet Sauvignon)
1 c. heavy cream
1/2 c. golden raisins
salt and pepper to taste
4-qt. slow cooker

What you'll need to do:
1. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, fry up the bacon. I suggest a cast-iron skillet if you have it, as it will cook the chicken evenly and crisp the skin nicely. You can cook the bacon in batches, pouring the excess bacon fat into a coffee mug. Bacon should be cooked until slightly soft. Set the bacon aside for later.
2. Keeping the skillet over medium-high heat, add a thin layer of retained bacon grease to the bottom of the pan. Put the flour into a flat dish or pie pan. Take each piece of chicken one at a time and dredge in the flour, then add it to the skillet skin-side down (don't crowd the chicken--you may need to cook it in batches). Cook the chicken until it is brown on each side and the skin is crispy, about 5-8 minutes per side.
3. Move the chicken to your slow-cooker. Once all the chicken is cooked, add the wine to the skillet a little at a time. Be very careful!! Adding the wine to the hot grease all at once could cause the hot liquid to splash or the wine to ignite if you're using a gas stove! After adding the wine, scrape the bottom of the pan to get all of the drippings. Once the wine has cooked down--after about 2-3 minutes--add the liquid from the skillet to the slow cooker. Season with salt and pepper. Note that the bacon will be adding salt to the recipe, so you may want to hold back a bit with the salt.
4. Cover and set the slow cooker setting to LOW and cook for 2 1/2 to 3 hours.
5. Stir in the cream, raisins, and bacon. Cover and set the slow cooker to HIGH and cook for 1 hour. Serve hot over rice or noodles.

The wine you use to cook with is a nice accompanyment to the dish itself, especially if you get one you like to drink. Enjoy!

My favorite recipe: quick and easy

I admit that it's hard to do complex cooking when working full time. It's even harder during a semester when my evenings are taken up by schoolwork. It's one of the reasons I always take advantage of my time on the weekends and get as much cooking time in as I can.

However, sometimes even then I don't have the time for a complex meal. I have a few projects going on right now: getting my garden going (I'll post pictures for sure this weekend), finally getting the shelving into the apartment that Scooter and I have been wanting, and various projects that family and friends ask for help with (mom's garden improvements, aunt moving to a new house, etc.). For times like these, it's really nice having a repertoire of recipes that I can use that involve 1) little prep, 2) few ingredients, and either 3) cook relatively fast or 4) don't need me to watch the food. A couple of years ago, my best friend K gave me a book called The Four Ingredient Cookbook. This week's recipe is taken from there. Here's a fast and easy way to make honey mustard chicken.

What you'll need:
1/2 c. Miracle Whip dressing (I used the Light)
2 Tbs. dijon mustard
1 Tbs. honey
4 skinless/boneless chicken breasts

What you'll need to do:
1. Set oven to the "Broil" setting and raise rack if necessary.
2. Mix together the Miracle Whip dressing, dijon mustard, and honey until it's well combined.
3. Brush the chicken breasts with about half of the dressing mixture and place in a pyrex or metal pan to broil.
4. Broil 8-10 minutes on each side, longer if the pieces are thicker. After turning the chicken, brush on the remaining mixture. Serve with risotto.

I know that there are some people who don't like the taste of Miracle Whip, and I have to say that by itself it would not be my first choice of condiment. However, when mixed with the dijon and honey, the flavor of it is definitely diffused. Those who are not fond of the dressing may still like this recipe.

Catching Up: Part 3 of 3

So I mentioned something about balsamic vinegar in my last post. If you were to strike up a conversation about this particular condiment, it likely would not include “ice cream” or “cheese” as items to serve with the vinegar. Before now, I would never have thought that either item would go well with balsamic vinegar. Today, I am a changed woman.

There was a booth at the festival selling various kinds of balsamic vinegar. Now being a good Italian girl, I know the value of a good oil and vinegar, especially to dip fresh bread into or serve on top of a green salad. This is not that kind of vinegar.

First of all, it’s much thicker. Regular vinegar is akin to water in fluidity and texture (though not taste of course). This type is more like runny syrup. Second, this vinegar has been aged—and I don’t think the average vinegar is aged much. Third, this vinegar has added flavors from things that have been added to it, like raspberries or black currents. This creates a wonderfully flavorful, sweet (but not too sugary), and tangy food that now has so much more flexibility with foods and flavors it can be paired with. I’ve already snacked on some with bread and brie, and the combination was really good!

Being the food lover and cook that I am, the vinegar has inspired me to create a meal around the two types I bought (which were the raspberry and vanilla fig). I’ve already figured out how many courses I will have (five), each of which will include one of the two vinegars in some way. Mom, if you’re reading this (which I know you will at some point), you and Papa will be coming over to share this experimentation in the culinary arts.

And since I have a lot of catching-up to do in regards to recipes as well, I will finish this post with two recipes, a dinner and dessert if you will. We’ll start off with the main part of the meal: beef stroganoff.

I know that I have posted a beef stroganoff recipe before, but what makes this one different is that it’s “low-fat.” It can be made on the stove or in a slow-cooker, and it doesn’t sacrifice flavor in its effort to be more healthy. The original recipe comes from Fix It and Forget-It Lightly.

What you’ll need:
1 ½ lbs. round steak
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. salt
½ tsp. fresh ground black pepper
1 lb. fresh mushrooms
1 can 98% fat-free cream of mushroom soup
1 c. water
1 c. fat-free sour cream

What you’ll need to do:
1. Cut the steak into strips about 1 inch long and approximately half an inch wide.
2. In a skillet over medium-high heat, brown the meat on all sides. Add the onion and garlic. Cook until the onion is softened, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the mushrooms and add the salt and pepper. Cook for another 3 to 5 minutes.
3. Mix the soup and water together. Turn the heat down to medium-low and add the soup mixture to the skillet. Cover and cook until mixture simmers, about 15 minutes.
4. Add the sour cream and cook for a few more minutes until heated through. Remove from heat and serve.

To use a slow cooker, put all the ingredients except the sour cream into the slow cooker and cook on low for 6-8 hours. Add the sour cream at the very end and cook on high until it's heated through. This is a good recipe to serve over egg noodles or rice. For those who are interested, this recipe is only 7g of fat per serving (six servings total).

Once you’ve filled up on beef stroganoff, you can top it off with dessert: easy sticky buns. I caught this recipe on an episode of The Barefoot Contessa. I ended up substituting half of the light brown sugar with dark brown (because I unexpected ran out of the light), and the flavor was still really good. My only warning would be to eat these as soon as they are cool enough to handle—they don’t taste as good if they’ve cooled and been reheated. The original recipe can be found here.

What you’ll need:
12 Tbs. unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/3 c. brown sugar (I did half light, half dark brown)
½ c. pecans, chopped in very large pieces
1 pkg. frozen puffy pastry, defrosted*
2 Tbs. unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/3 c. light brown sugar
1/3 c. dark brown sugar
3 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 c. raisins

What you’ll need to do:
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put a 12-cup muffin tin onto a baking sheet. This will keep any melted butter and sugar from spilling and dirtying your oven (I know this from personal experience).
2. In a medium mixing bowl, add the 12 Tbs. of butter with the 1/3 c. mixed brown sugar and mix until thoroughly combined. Distribute evenly into the 12 cups of the muffin tin. Add the pecans to each cup on top of the sugar and butter mixture.
3. Lightly flour a wooden board and unfold 1 of the puff pastry sheets. The folds should be going left to right. Brush the sheet with the melted butter. Sprinkle half of the 1/3 c. light brown sugar over the sheet while leaving a 1-inch border at the ends. Repeat with half of the 1/3 c. dark brown sugar. Sprinkle 1 ½ tsp. of the cinnamon and ½ c. of the raisins.
4. Start with the end closest to you and roll up the pastry like a jelly roll. End with the seam side facing down. Trim about ½ inch from each end of the roll and discard. Slice the roll into six equal pieces.
5. Put each slice with the spiral side up into half of the prepared muffin cups. Press gently on the top.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 with the second sheet of pastry.
7. Put in the oven and bake for 30 minutes or until the buns are golden brown on the top and firm to the touch. Cool slightly (only enough to handle them), then scoop each out of the muffin tins and flip them over so the pecans are on the top. Serve warm!

*Do not let the puff pastry defrost up to room temperature. This will make the dough stick together and it will be a hassle to separate. I would recommend putting the frozen puff pastry into the fridge the day before to defrost but keep cold—this should allow it to keep its shape and not stick together.

Enjoy!

A Taste of Greek

Budgeting time is not easy, especially when you have a lot to do and time is limited. If you're planning on going into a education program and you have a full-time job (which you intend to keep during the duration of your program), you may find yourself in some difficulty if you normally have problems with budgeting your time. You can still have problems even if you're good at budgeting your time.

I currently find myself in a Catch-22 that's rather unfortunate. Student loans are paying for my program, which is good because I can't afford it out-of-pocket on my own. However, in order to qualify for student loans, all students must be "half-time" students. For a graduate, that translates to taking no less than 4 units at a time. Sadly, all of my graduate course are 3 units each, meaning that I have no choice but to take two courses if I want financial aid. The problem? It's becoming increasingly more difficult to budget my time in a way that allows me to dedicate enough time to the full-time job I have, plus give enough attention to the two courses I'm taking. Work in both arenas seems to be building towards a future peak, and I'm left feeling like I'm barely able to stay afloat. I offer this story as a cautionary tale to those interested in pursuing degrees while staying in the workforce. Make sure you understand ALL costs that your program may have--it's important to identify any monetary costs of course, but also figure out possible time, stress, and work output costs. Ironically enough, these types of costs are all subjects I've been learning about and discussing in the management class I'm taking--I'll have to let my professor know that his teaching has already found some real-world application in my life.

What this also means is that I've had to sacrifice some things for the sake of work and school--one of which is this blog. I'm not getting rid of it, I simply mean that my ability to make regular posts has become severely limited--at least for the present. I do have a few recipes to share (one is below) that I've tried in the past couple of weeks. Since this week is lighter on school work, my goal is to post and share these recipes one by one before the weekend. Keep your fingers crossed.

My older brother also likes to cook (mostly French-style cuisine) and he has found a few cooking shows on the public broadcasting station on TV that are more "down to earth" and less gimmicky than those on the Food Network tend to be. One of them is "Cook's Country," a program put out by America's Test Kitchen. I find their recipes interesting and unique, and lucky for me they publish a bi-monthly magazine (which I now subscribe to) called Cook's Country, named after their television show. The best part about the magazine aside from the recipes? No advertisements. The magazine is literally all recipes, articles taking about the "science" of cooking and how the best version of a recipe is reached, reviews of equipment and ingredients, and tips and questions that people write in. It is the true cooking magazine--and their most recent issue contained today's recipe: pastitsio.

Before this recipe, I had never heard the term before so I'll briefly explain it. It is a Greek adaption of lasagna. There is a red sauce and a white sauce and pasta, but the flavor is different from an Italian lasagna. It is a bit labor-intensive, but the result is well worth it. So here we go.

What you'll need:
1 Tbs. olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped*
3 Tbs. tomato paste
9 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tsp. dried oregano
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/2 lbs. ground lamb
1/2 c. red wine
1 can (15-oz.) tomato sauce
2 c. grated Romano cheese
8 oz. elbow macaroni
5 Tbs. unsalted butter
1/2 c. flour
5 c. whole milk
3 eggs
1/3 c. Greek yogurt
salt and pepper

What you'll need to do:
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook about 5 minutes until they are softened.
2. Stir in the tomato paste, 6 cloves of the garlic, dried oregano, and cinnamon. Cook until the paste begins to darken--about 1-2 minutes--then add the lamb and salt to taste. Cook the mixture until the lamb is no longer pink, about 5-7 minutes.
3. Stir in the wine and cook to reduce the wine to about 1 Tbs. Add the tomato sauce. Bring to just bubbling and simmer until the mixture is a little thickened. Take the skillet off the heat and stir in 1/2 a cup of the Romano cheese. Season with salt and pepper (if desired) and set aside.
4. In a large saucepan, bring 4 cups of water to a boil (add about 1 Tbs. of salt to the water to make it boil faster). Add the macaroni and cook for 3 to 4 minutes until nearly al dente. It will not need to cook completely--it will finish cooking in the oven. Drain the macaroni into a colander and rinse it with cold water until it is cool to the touch. Drain any excess water and put macaroni into a bowl. Set aside.
5. Melt the butter in the macaroni saucepan over medium heat. Add flour and the remaining 3 cloves of garlic. Cook and stir constantly. (As an aside, this mixture of butter and flour is called a roux and is often used to make gravy.) Once it is golden--which takes about a minute--whisk in the milk and bring the mixture to a low boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until thickened, about 12-15 minutes.
6. Remove the saucepan from heat and whisk in 1 c. of the remaining Romano cheese. Add salt and pepper as desired.
7. Stir 2 c. of the white sauce into the cooked macaroni until thoroughly combined. Transfer the pasta to a 13x9-in baking dish.
8. Beat the eggs in the empty bowl used by the macaroni. Slowly beat 1 c. of the white sauce to the eggs. Don't add it all at once or the egg whites will cook and solidify. Slowly whisk the combined eggs and white sauce back into the remaining cup of white sauce. Add the yogurt and mix thoroughly.
9. Spread the meat sauce over the macaroni in the baking dish. Pour the white sauce mixture on top and sprinkle with the last of the grated Romano.
10. Bake on the middle rack of the oven for 30-40 minutes or until the top is golden brown and the sides are bubbling.

*You can use a food processor to get the right consistency.

It is a complicated recipe, but the flavor is so unique and wonderful that the work going into this dish is well-rewarded. This goes really well with a Greek salad recipe I'll be posting tomorrow. This recipe has made me want to try cooking more Greek food. Discoveries like that are definitely fun for me!

Enjoy!

Valentine's Day Not Just Commercial (At Least In My Case)

I am a girl lucky enough (at least I think so) to have been born on Valentine's Day. And while many people shake their heads at the excessive-ness of our society on this day, for me it's extra-special because it's also my birthday.

So forgive my segueway into something non-library or cooking related, but I couldn't let the day go by without a little mention about it--and a big thank you to my family and friends who have helped to make my day (and this last weekend) special. Scooter has really gone all out to spoil me. The flowers in the picture were delivered to work this morning for me from him.

One really good thing that has come of all this is that I was blessed to receive some very wonderful cookware and baking items--including a bunch of Wilton colors and icing tips to allow me to be really creative with my cake and cupcake experiments. I told Scooter this means I have the go-ahead to make lots of treats and sweets--which I can continue to post as I make them. Mother's Day this year may turn out some very creative desserts for my family's annual tea.

This week's recipe is one that Scooter and I created ourselves (and ate last night). It's relatively simple: foil-baked salmon. I would recommend a green salad and a good loaf of sourdough bread to go with it!

What you'll need:
2 large salmon fillets
2 tsp. garlic powder
1 lemon
2 Tbs. white wine
1/4 c. finely chopped onion
salt and pepper to taste

What you'll need to do:
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Wash the salmon under cold water. Tear off two pieces of aluminum foil and lay them down, turning the top piece 45 degrees. Place a piece of salmon in the center. Repeat for the second piece.
2. Bring up the sides of the aluminum foil so the salmon is inside a little "bowl." Cut the lemon in half and squeeze one half over each piece of salmon, watching for any seeds (remove those if necessary). Add 1 Tbs. of white wine to each fillet. Sprinkle 1 tsp. of garlic powder and salt and pepper over each piece. Add half of the onions to each portion, sprinkling evenly over the top.
3. Gather up the ends of the aluminum, and fold and twist together to seal everything. Place into the oven directly on the rack (or on a baking sheet if you prefer). Cook for 30 minutes. Fish should be pale into the center and flaky.

Serve with rice or potatoes on the side, or keep it simple with salad and bread. The juices can be easily soaked up with a piece of sourdough. A nice citrus sherbert isn't too heavy and tastes really good after this light meal.

Enjoy!

Update @ 12:19pm: I found this while poring over Terry Pratchett's website for an update for the Reading Corner section of my blog. I couldn't resist adding it in.

I'm a Terry Pratchett Fan

The World of the Miscellaneous

Prior to this semester, the term "miscellaneous" heralded ideas of things "left over," things that don't really have a place in which they belong. A particular book required by one of my classes has brought new meaning to the term and really changed my previous world-view (perhaps "refined" is the better term) of information.

Online information has exploded. New content is being created every day. There is no way to organize it all--too much information is out there for any concerned cataloging effort to ever catch up. However, David Weinberger's book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder is showing me that organizing it really isn't necessary. Part of the power of how interconnected things are is being able to start on a page about a food item's nutrition facts, bounce to pages of recipes, and end up at a restaurant at a vacation destination that specializes in dishes of that food. We become our own gateways into the vastness of available knowledge.

One thing Weinberger talks about is a third-order organization. This particular organization seems best explained through examples of sites that allow users to place tags on digital objects--like Flcker. The third-order introduces the idea that digital items, because of their lack of limitations with physical space, can be classified and located in an infinite number of places. A picture of a sunset in Hawaii could be labeled as "Hawaiian sunset," "Hawaii," "sunset," "tropical locations," "romantic beaches," "2007 summer memories," "wedding destination," "ocean view," etc. There is no limit to the number of tags that can be put onto a picture, which makes it meaningful and more accessible to more people--since not everyone would classify it as the same thing. That one picture could then be used in just as many collections with pictures of similar tags. A user could make a collection of "2007 Summer Memories" including that picture and a number of other pictures from the rest of the vacation; or the user could create a "Romanic Places" collection that includes that picture and a number of other pictures that are all tagged with "romanic." The possibilities are now endless. Information has truly become miscellaneous, but in doing so its accessibility has infinitely increased.

I know that I owe a recipe post, but unfortunately I haven't been doing a lot of experimenting lately. Class has required a large amount of reading, and I've been using every spare minute for keeping on top of all the reading I need to do. As a result, I've been sticking to well-known and quickly-made recipes, most of which I've already posted. I will however take some time for a couple of tips for things I discovered in the past couple of weeks.

1) If you need shredded chicken for any recipe (I use it for making enchiladas), cooking it in a crock pot with chicken broth, onions, and spices (and a can/bottle of beer if you're feeling really adventurous) is a good way to add flavor. Just put everything in the crock pot in the morning, set the crock pot on the low setting, and it'll be ready by the time you have to make dinner. For an added bonus, you can save the broth to use for making soup later. Just freeze in a container until you need it.

2) Add a surprise to your cupcakes by adding candy. You can chop up chocolate mints and mix in to chocolate batter or add candy-bar minis to cupcakes before you bake them for a yummy little something extra.

3) For frosting details on cakes or cupcakes, ziplocks are a easy replacement for professional icing bags.

Adventures with Cupcakes

This last weekend was my last big cooking hurrah before the start of the semester (which is tomorrow). I went all out: cassler florentine (a Swedish dish), scones, and cupcakes (seen to the left). I got to finally inaugurate the stand mixer that Scooter got for me for Christmas, as well as the cupcake book that the sunflower cupcakes how-to comes from. The book is filled with all kinds of fun ideas, including gardening-themed cupcakes which I will have to do at some point this spring. One of the really spectacular designs (in my opinion) was a recreation of Van Gogh's Starry Night on the tops of a couple dozen cupcakes. Seeing that made be think of other artists I could emulate by using frosting on cupcakes the same way they use paint on canvas.

If anyone is interested in the book, here's the information: Tack, K. & Richardson, R. Hello, Cupcake! 2008. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. You can find it on Amazon, at most major bookstores, and even in some craft supply stores. I would definitely recommend it for anyone who likes being creative in the kitchen, and many of these recipes would make excellent projects for parents and kids to do together.

The cassler florentine was for my uncle's 70th birthday, which my parents, Scooter, and I were able to celebrate with him. Nini (my aunt) was a little hesitant about having me come to cook for them simply because she didn't want to put me out, and she knows how busy my days tend to be. It was considerate of her, but I let her know that cooking is a joy for me and I was more than happy to cook for them simply because I love making good food. I wonder if I don't have a little of my great-grandmother in me too, since I've heard many times about her wonderful cooking and how she loved to cook. I guess cooking could be considered a family tradition, as much as getting the family together for each major holiday is a tradition.

I know I've been a little lax on librarianship and issues going on in the profession, but I've been unable to read my ALA weekly newsletters lately, something I hope to rectify at the end of this week. Perhaps Friday I'll be able to post about some of the interesting bits of news I find.

For this week's recipe, I would like to share the cake-mix recipe from Hello, Cupcake! that I used to make my sunflower cupcakes. I'm not going to explain what to use for or how to make the sunflower cupcakes (I'll let the book do that since it does it so well!). So here we go: best cake-mix cupcakes ever.

What you'll need:
1 box of devil's food cake mix (a non-pudding mix)
1 c. buttermilk
1/2 c. vegetable oil
4 eggs

What you'll need to do:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put paper liners in 24 cupcake tins (I like boldly-colored liners).
2. In a large mixing bowl, add the cake mix, buttermilk and vegetable oil and mix together using an electric mixer. Add in the eggs one at a time, until each one has been fully incorporated. Increase the speed of the mixer and mix for 1-2 more minutes until you have a thick, smooth batter.
3. Fill the lined cupcake tins 2/3 of the way full. The recipe will make 24 cupcakes, but I tend to overfill them just a bit, so I always end up with fewer.
4. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into a cupcake comes out of the center clean.
5. Remove the cupcakes from the pans and let them sit on racks to cool. If you plan on frosting them, let them cool completely before you start.

The book gave tips on getting the job done neatly (like getting batter into the cupcake tins without spilling), frosting, and creating different effects, but I couldn't find mention of the one thing I discovered in my "experiment": use two bags when frosting and put the one you're not using in the fridge to keep the frosting firm. When you're creating designs, the heat from your hands can make the frosting soft and bad for doing special effects (like flower petals). If this happens, you put the first bag in the fridge and switch to the second bag.

I hope you have your own fun adventures with cupcakes!

Back in Action

 I've been gone from my blog for awhile. It wasn't intentional by any means; I do enjoy posting about school, issues in librarianship, my family, and of course the weekly recipes. But it's hard to feel the motivation when you are sick and just want to lie in bed nice and quiet and stare at the wall, hoping that swallowing chicken broth won't be so painful next time. All last week, I was effectively put out of commission because of strep throat. I've had it before (I had it a lot when I was a child), so I know what to expect. That doesn't make it fun, just bearable.

Anyway, I'm back in action and a lot has happened in the last few days. I had the exhausting but exhilerating experience of helping my mother cook a grande dîner for some important church dignitaries. It's a very big deal for her, as she's a very devout member of the Church (and she mentioned how happy Nonni--my great-grandmother--would be to have them there as it was her house many years ago and she also loved the Church). I have chosen a different path than my parents (at least in terms of religion), but that doesn't change the fact that I know my duty to my parents and my family. She needed the help, so I offered mine.

Now, about this dinner. It was a ten-course formal French dinner (although we pushed the last three courses together because it was getting very late at that point and us poor folks in the kitchen were getting exhausted). French dining is very different from American dining, even formal American dining. A formal French dinner can easily take 4-5 hours, especially if the courses aren't rushed (something which Americans tend to do). And the French have made a sort of religion of eating--there is a ceremony to the way the courses are planned to allow a person to fully enjoy and appreciate the flavor of every course. Here's a break down of our menu:

Course 1: two kinds of paté with toast points and fig preserves, all served with a black muscat (a wonderful sweet wine)
Course 2: a potage, a type of soup that's made with vegetables in a very specific way that really brings out all the subtle flavors of the vegetables (I'll see if I can convince my mom to let me post this recipe!)
Course 3: bouché à la Reine, which was shrimp and scallop in a white wine sauce over puff paste
Course 4: lemon sorbet with a few drops of brandy over it. The sorbet is to cleanse the palette between the fish and meat courses; the brandy helps to make the flavor of the sorbet pop out even more.
Course 5: the main course (the meat course)--pork with a creamy sauce of wild mushrooms, served with beets and roasted potatoes
Course 6: a simple salad of butter lettuce tossed with oil/vinegar and salt/pepper
Course 7: a selection of 4 French-style cheeses including chevre, a bleu cheese, a Saint Andres, and a hard cheese (I forgot the name of it)
Course 8: whole pears cooked in red wine
Course 9: coffee
Course 10: cognac and port with chocolate truffles

One big difference you may notice between this and American cuisine is that the salad is served after the main course. I don't remember the reason the French do it this way, but my older brother--a true francophone and French culture expert--would know. I will ask him. Another difference is that coffee traditionally gets its own course--it's served solo without any dessert to accompany it. Also, the reason that cheese is served after the majority of the meal is to "close the stomach," as my brother puts it; the cheese helps with digestion after a big meal. A dinner like this is something that many French would only have a few times in their life; Americans probably never have a meal like this presented with the ceremony and ritual of formal French dining. It is a wonderful experience; I would recommend that you try it once.

For the cooking crew, it is a lot of work. With the guests that we had, I don't think that they realized what was coming. I don't think any of them had any idea what a formal French dinner is before now. Regardless, they very much enjoyed it, and one of the dignitaries (a bishop) called it Babette's Feast. So it was a very special night for all.

The other thing that has happened is that a wiki I helped to inspire is up and running. One of the topics that had come up in my class is homelessness and librarians' de facto role as social service providers, which led to my comment on a reading that said no list of social services resources being used in libraries yet exists. My question was "why not?" So my instructor talked to someone she knew who started work on getting a wiki up to act as a resource where people can post those services, resources, and information about social responsibility in libraries. I'll post the link after the semester since we're not advertising it quite yet; right now, there's not a lot up, but as more information is added it will continue to grow. I'm so excited that it's up; I've already made several contributions and plan to continue to do so on an ongoing basis. I really hope that it can grow into a valuable resource for all public libraries (and even academic or school libraries). The people that can benefit from these services and resources are the ones that are most often shoved under the carpet by society, and it's horribly cruel and degrading to them that it should be this way. Libraries should be the leading force behind helping these people to feel valued especially since many libraries are seen as and behave like community centers; this wiki is another step towards that goal. Please don't disregard this part of the population; they are people just like you and me. I'll step down off my soap box (for now).

I'll be posting a recipe for the cheesecake I'm making for Thanksgiving later today or tomorrow (I don't have the recipe with me right now).

A taste of the garden

I'm currently pleased with the progress I've made in my first class. I've been able to maintain a steady pace with my studies, and have found a (tentative) balance with school and work. However, I realize that this is a one-unit class, so it's not a real test of my skills. That will come in exactly nine days when my regular three-unit class starts. My hope is that I will be comfortable enough with this upcoming class and be able to balance well so that I will be confident enough to take on a slightly heavier load during the spring semester. I'll know soon enough.

I did have a bit of a cooking adventure this last weekend. I found not one, but two recipes that I wanted to try (one sweet, one savory) for dinner. I ended up cooking over at my parents' house where I was able to take advantage of the fresh zucchini in my mom's garden for my savory dish. In fact, the bounty of her garden was able to grace virtually every dish of the very delicious dinner. Aside from the two recipes I used for the meal, my mom also decided to make stuffed zucchini flowers. Only recently has some of the more elite restaurants in California wine country started serving this particular dish. What does my mom have to say about that? "They think that's so new and interesting. I've been eating these since I was a little girl."

I have to say that there is something so incredible, almost magical, about being able to go out to the garden, pick fresh vegetables that you planted with your own hands, and use them in your cooking. It really underscores the "homemade" in good home cooking. Currently, my mom's garden is rife with tomato, cucumber, zucchini, lettuce, artichoke, beans, onion, and garlic (all of which I planted for her). We hope to get the beets in soon too. Our peppers and squash didn't do so well this year, but everything else has taken off--especially the beans (we picked 3-5 lbs of string beans yesterday afternoon!).

Okay, so now to this week's recipe: sweet and smoky salmon kabobs. These were really good and had a nice little kick to them from the spices. They were also very easy to make, and they are healthy too!

Here is what you'll need:
12 metal or bamboo skewers
2 1/4 lbs. salmon fillets (skinned and cut into 1 1/2 in chunks)
2-3 medium zucchini cut into 1/4-in. slices
2 Tbs. brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp. paprika
1 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper (optional)

Here's what to do:
1. Combine sugar, paprika, chili powder, red pepper, and the salt and pepper (if desired) into a large zip lock bag. Zip closed and shake the bag to mix up all the spices, and use your fingers to break up any chunks of the brown sugar. Open the bag and add the salmon and zucchini. Zip the bag closed (don't deflate the bag before closing). Shake the bag to coat the salmon and zucchini with the spices, using your hands to move things around through the bag as necessary until everything is evenly coated. You can do this well ahead of time (a few hours or so) and leave the bag in the fridge until you're ready to skewer and cook.
2. If you're using bamboo skewers, soak them in hot water for at least 30 minutes before you put on the salmon and zucchini. When they have been soaked, thread on the salmon and zucchini in any pattern you desire until you have no more of either. Try to assimilate any leftover pieces onto the skewers you've already made.
3. Grill on a barbecue for 9 to 11 minutes, turning the skewers occasionally, until salmon turns light pink in the center. Enjoy with something tasty on the side!

The original recipe can be found here. I also made fried peach pies (as well as helping with the zucchini blossoms). I have to say that the pies are a little more involved than the other recipes I've posted, and I don't want to scare away any new cooks. Please leave a message if you would like these other recipes posted.

If anyone has any recipes they would like me to try, please let me know! In the words of Julia Child, "Bon appétit!"