Food and Recipes
Food and Recipes
- Corned Beef and Cabbage
From the recipe archive, for St. Patrick's Day, enjoy! ~Elise
Last year for St. Patrick's Day, my friend Suzanne had me over for dinner with her family and served the tastiest corned beef and cabbage dish. Usually we prepare corned beef and cabbage boiled, but Suzanne had baked her corned beef in the oven, slathered with sweet hot honey mustard, and sautéed her cabbage with onions on the stove top until they were nice and caramelized. I begged her to show me how she did it and recently we spent the day cooking together, making corned beef and cabbage both ways - oven baked and boiled. We did a taste test with the whole family that evening and the baked version won, hands down. Here I present to you both the baked and the boiled recipe versions.
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- Moqueca - Brazilian Fish Stew
It seems like every culture with a coastline has their version of a seafood stew. The French have bouillabaise, the Portuguese bacalhoada, New England "chowdah" and San Francisco cioppino. In Brazil, they make moqueca (pronounced "mo-KEH-kah"), a stew made with fish, onions, garlic, tomatoes, cilantro, and in the northern state of Bahia, coconut milk. My first encounter with moqueca was a salmon version of the stew prepared by Brazilian blogger Fernanda of Chucrute com Salsicha. So good! We love making fish stew, but had never thought to use a base of coconut milk. Since then, every Brazilian I've met, when the conversation turns to food (as it invariably does), their eyes light up at the mention of moqueca.
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- Caraway Soda Bread
One of the things I love about making soda bread is that it is just so darn easy. With yeast breads you have to proof the yeast, knead the dough, let the dough rise, etc. But with soda breads, there's no proofing, kneading, or waiting. In fact, because the leavening comes from mixing the base of the baking soda with the acid in the buttermilk (remember those fascinating-at-the-time childhood experiments of sprinkling vinegar onto baking soda?), you pretty much pop it in the oven as soon as you put the dough together. The trick is to use a light hand, just work the dough barely enough to bring it together. It looks like a sheep-doggy shaggy mess, but it bakes up beautifullylightly browned and crusty on the outside, while soft and tender on the inside.
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- Lemon Chicken
Overheard at the market, "I'm a breast girl." "Really? I'm definitely a thigh girl," pause..."dark meat, so much more flavor." Had to laugh, I'm so so so much a thigh girl myself. Here is the secret to fabulous lemon chicken - use bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (or legs, but thighs are easier to eat). Lemon is acidic and greatly benefits from the balance of the stronger flavor of the dark meat in thighs and legs, and the fat from the chicken skin. You don't have to eat the skin (my father doesn't, he gives them to me, score!), but cook with them on for the flavor.
What we most love about this recipe is that it is a classic American lemon chicken recipe without being too lemony. In other words, it doesn't make your lips pucker, it has just the right amount of lemon flavor to it.
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- Beet Hummus
For those of you out there who cannot fathom even the idea of beets, fine. Truly, I'm a-okay with it. That only means there is more of this beet hummus for me. I ate this entire batch, save one teaspoon that my mother caught just in time, before it was all finished off. (In this family, you snooze, you lose.) Seriously, if you like beets, and you like hummus, you'll love this beet hummus. The ingredients are beets, tahini, garlic, lemon, cumin, and salt and pepper. Use as a pretty topping for cucumber rounds, scoop some up with pita triangles or celery ribs, or just dive in, like oink-oink here, with a spoon, and eat it up before anyone knows what they're missing. Many thanks to neighbor, pastry chef, and friend Evie Lieb, for sharing this terrific recipe with us.
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- Orange Bread
Unlike much of the country, Sacramento isn't blanketed in snowy white in the dead of winter. We are blessed instead with plenty of green, with flowery shows of red and pink from camellias, and displays of bright orange and yellow from the grapefruit, lemons, kumquats, and oranges decorating the citrus trees that grow everywhere around here. Citrus season is the winter, and when nothing else seems to want to grow, we have an abundance of fruit. In fact, many of the boulevards in downtown Sacramento are lined with Seville orange trees, which anyone can pick, and which produce a sour fruit perfect for zest, marmalade, orangeade, and for baking. For this recipe I used a couple navel oranges from our tree, but truly any orange will do. It's the zest that has the highly flavorful orange oil that you need for this quick bread.
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- Curried Squash Soup
One of the things I love about butternut squash, or any winter squash for that matter, is that they're practically indestructible. They last for months. You can harvest one in November and still find it perfectly good to eat in February (as long as you store it in a cool, dry place). For the last month I've had a hankering to make curried squash soup, and for the last month the squash I picked out for this purpose has been greeting me from the kitchen counter every morning. Well, the stars finally fell into proper squash soup making alignment and the result was this lovely curried squash soup. The trick is to brown the cubed squash bits first, in a little oil and butter. That really brings out the squash flavor. The trick to that, of course, is effectively cutting a very hard squash. For this you need a large, sharp knife (current favorite is this Shun),
and a sharp vegetable peeler (I recommend using one with a carbon blade).
Some stores sell butternut squash already cut up too.
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- Peppery Garlic Prawns
My friends are so very patient with me. BFF Steve-Anna first emailed me this spicy, peppery shrimp recipe, a favorite of hers, four years ago. And then again, at least two or three more times, when I declared I couldn't find it, and would she please-pretty-please send it again. Hey Stevie, we finally made it! Just in time for Lent. Dang, what took us so long? Love the shrimp. It certainly packs a punch though, with all of the black pepper the recipe asks for. Feel free to cut back on the pepper to tone it down a bit. The recipe also calls for a tablespoon of brandy. This I think is an essential ingredient for the recipe. (Actually with so few ingredients, they're all essential.) There is no substitute. If you simply cannot cook with alcohol, add a dab of butter to the olive oil. It will change the flavor of the finished dish, but it should still taste great.
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- Cheddar Cheese Puffs
To make cheese puffs, first you make a pâte a choux dough (pronounced "pat ah shoo"), which, if you've never made it before, can seem a little weird. Weird because most of us who bake are used to mixing dough ingredients together and then plopping them in the oven. With a pâte a choux dough, you essentially half cook the dough first, by adding flour to boiling water and butter, and stirring like a madman until you have a ball of dough the consistency of playdough. Then you mix in eggs and then the dough goes in the oven, where it puffs up as the water in the dough turns to steam and expands into air pockets. The dough is used for making cream puffs, eclairs, cheese puffs (gourgères), beignets, and even churros. David Lebovitz has a recipe for making a French tart crust with what looks to me to be essentially a pâte a choux dough, that has been getting raves. So, it's a useful technique, and pretty easy, though the dough can be a little stiff to work by hand.
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