The Oscars are just a few hours away and in the spirit of the evening, I whipped up a few treats to make it painfully clear to my friends who I think should win best picture.
Chocolate coconut bird nests. In honor of Kevin from UP…
Now I’m off to watch the show.
This Tuesday was my father’s birthday. Sixty-five. A “big one” he tells me. So I invite the family over for dinner, on a week-night, which I know is a mistake.
But this is the least of my worries. What worries me are the varied palates that I have invited to my table.
I know my father’s food habits well. Nothing spicy, no bell peppers, no olives, no tofu. My sister is easy – no cake. For the most part, everyone else will eat anything that’s hot and put in front of them.
The only question left is my four-year-old nephew. Making something that passes his taste tests is more stressful, and might I say, more unpredictable, than a visit from a New York Times food critic.
I started my grocery list with a text message to my sister:
“Do you think Kai would eat chicken?”
“He’ll eat it but only if there is no yucky stuff on it. Yucky stuff includes anything and everything. I’ll bring a bottle of wine.”
Later in a phone call, she added peeled cucumbers to the ok list. I saw visions of a candlelit table with plates of unseasoned chicken, white rice and cucumber slices with candles stuck in them. Yumm.
As a general rule I try to make birthday dinners more exotic than the likes of the early bird special at the retirement home, but things were looking questionable.
At the store I scanned the isles for white food. Potatoes are white. Eggs are white. White cheese is white. But potatoes are boring if you can’t do anything to them and eggs have yolks, and those are yellow. I grabbed the cheese, a box of cous couse (it’s off-white, right?)
In the produce department, I went crazy. An eggplant, red onions, portabello mushrooms. It’s not a grown-up dinner if there isn’t at least one thing on the menu that gets rejected – so I decided to funnel all my crazy cookery into that.
Back in the meat department, it was cornish game hens. This because, (1) it is impressive to give everyone their own bird, (2) they’re easy to cook and (3) it’s just like a tiny chicken.
Home from work at 5:30 and dinner at 7:30 – I ran, literally ran, into the kitchen and turned on the oven. A gentle dusting of salt and pepper, and off they went to cook while I multi-tasked hiding unfolded laundry in my bedroom and washing dishes.
As the witching hour arrived, I sliced the veggies and threw them in a bag with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Grill, on. Off I went to set the table.
All told, dinner was ready 15 minutes late. In my mind it was a miracle. More of a miracle was that my nephew left with a tummy full of apples, “chicken” and, as he said, kookoo (this is cous cous in English).
As for my 9-year-old niece. Well, that is a different story. When you’re a bit older, old enough to know that chicken isn’t supposed to look like that and balsamic glaze isn’t exactly a regular in your lunchbox, cous cous seems like the only safe thing on the plate.
Oh well. You win some you lose some. As for the vegetable stack. It got hot praises from the adults at the table. Some even asked for seconds. If you’re interested, here’s the recipe:
Slice one eggplant and two red onions about 1/2 inch thick. Place the slices, along with 6 portabello mushrooms (stems removed) in a Ziploc bag with a cup of balsamic vinegar and 1/2 cup olive oil. Allow them to marinate on the counter for two hours.
Grill the vegetable slices and mushrooms on each side for approx. 3 minutes. Just enough to caramelize the vinegar mixture and soften the veggies.
While the veggies grill, mix a small container of ricotta (10 oz.) with 1 tbl. basil and two gloves of minced garlic.
Arrange the mushrooms bottom-side up on a plate, place a dollop of ricotta on top. Add a layer of eggplant and another dollop of ricotta. Finally, add a layer of onion and a final dollop of ricotta.
You can continue to stack these as high as you like, but I stuck with one round of each vegetable.
I rarely find it as a harbinger of good things when I begin a story by saying, my fridge smells like a small furry creature curled up in the corner and died.
But this is only about half right. The dead things in my fridge are not, nor were they ever fuzzy, small yes, but not fuzzy. And they didn’t crawl into my fridge on their own accord. No, in fact, they arrived from the local asian grocery in a gallon-sized bag. Dried shrimp. Thousands and thousands of baby dried shrimp.
Happy Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the Tiger and I’ve decided to mark the occasion by blockading my fridge as a bio-hazard smell zone until I have time to cook something both fabulously Chinese and New Yearsy.
Until then, I am haunted by the millions of tiny beady eyes starring out at me, trapped behind a curtain of Ziploc plastic. This is why Americans don’t eat things with the heads still attached. We don’t want our food staring at us. Especially as we stick a fork full of it into our mouths. I just want to say “sorry” every time I open the door and there they all are… Watching me.
Also, the peanut butter I put on my toast this morning didn’t have the lid on tight and now tastes like a nutty ceviche. Which is never a good way to start the day. So, long story short, it’s time to use up my fishy little friends and welcome in the Tiger.
In addition to the dead baby fish in my fridge, I decided I should try my hand at making egg rolls. This is a food that can be found on the menu at not only Panda Express but also Jack In The Box, so I assume this will not frighten my culturally repressed friends. It is also a dish that is actually very easy to make but seems to inspire awe in the eyes of the average dinner guest.
A few greasy egg rolls, some shrimp artfully disguised amid some Chinese sausage and shiitake mushrooms. LOTS of rice, and it was a meal.
I had great plans of making turnip cakes as well, but if I had read the recipe all the way through, I would have realized that you need more than the two hours I had allotted my self to make up a batch of those. Something about grating, straining, seaming, simmering, and marinating… no, two hours was definitely not enough time to make those.
Back to egg rolls. I am saddened to say that I posses only a small hand grater that was acquired at a dollar store during college. Why I have not remedied this situation yet is beyond me. It seems weird to buy a new one when this one still works, and I have a Cuisinart for when I need to get down and dirty, so alas, the sad little grater remains in my collection.
Three carrots and half a cabbage of grating later, my arm was tired but my dried mushrooms were done soaking. Time to cook up some ground pork and get this party started. It’s important to remember here that when preparing exotic food stuffs for friends you must use extravagant hand motions and employ flipping action whenever possible, especially when using a wok. Also, I suggest using many more spatulas then necessary as well as many, many little bowl full of different ingredients – like on the Food Network. This ads to the Merlin like mysticism of the meal as a whole.
When the pork and veggie filling is all sauteed together, drop a spoonful in the corner of those store-made egg roll skins, fold it like an envelope and roll. Literally, it is that easy.
For the final touch, I added some fumi furikake to the rice. This essentially is Japanese for rice seasoning and is little more than sesame seeds and dried seaweed, but you will want to use the fancy name to further entice your friends. Also, use lots of the little bowls here too… for the various rice toppings. This will also make it look like you tried harder than you actually did.
For dessert, I wanted something Valentine’s Day-ish, so I went the red/purple forbidden rice route, cooked it in some coconut milk for added flavor, mixed in some stevia and cooled it in the fridge. Dropped in a shiny martini glass with a splash of cream, it was the perfect combination of creamy sweetness, if I do say so myself.
And this, my friends, is how you make a fancy-shmancy dinner in under two hours. Rachel 30-minute Ray would be proud.
There was a recipe that ran in the New York Times in the mid-1880s. It was for a recipe known simply as Chocolate Caramel.
“Take of grated chocolate, milk, molasses and sugar, each one cupful, and piece of butter the size of an egg …”
Hardly New York Times material these days, but at the time the recipe was a novelty. Like a 21st century duck confit, the use of chocolate in this dish was something that the ordinary housewife would have made a special trip to the store for – perhaps even ordered specially from the grocer.
Fast forward a century or two and the presence of chocolate has become a mainstay in our daily diet (well, at least in mine). Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Christmas. Take a trip to Costco this week and you can find an isle devoted entirely to chocolate – five pound heart-shaped boxes of the stuff to be exact.
Like a metaphor for love itself, chocolate is both bitter and sweet. And for me, when I want it sweet, I want it artificially-flavored mouth numbingly sweet and when I want it dark, I want it as bitter as an unripened lemon.
Tonight I will be attending a fundraising dinner for the Chamber of Commerce in my hometown. As with most small towns, Friday night gatherings are more like family reunions and the food plays second-fiddle to the people. Conversation will be hearty, pictures of children and grandchildren will surely emerge from many purses and most of all a sense of community will be fostered during an economic time when extra shoulders need to be leaned on.
Everyone was asked to bring a treat for the bake sale table in hopes that enough money will be raised to replace the city’s aging Christmas decorations – and with Cupid’s big day just hours away, it seemed only fitting to break out the chocolate and the red food dye.
Something about this holiday causes a gravitational shift in the universe that seems to draw Hershey’s Kisses to my mouth like a chain-smoking European, so it seemed only right to make sure whatever I made had a heavy dose of cocoa.
You can find the recipe for the brownie topped velvet cupcakes with buttercream frosting to the right under the recipe section. I hope it makes your Valentine’s day as sugar-induced as mine.
Utter exhaustion is the only thing I can think of to describe how I felt this morning. I haven’t felt that way since finals week my junior year of college when my Japanese final got moved up three days.
I got a call last night from one of my vendors for a last minute holiday order of my soaps – in a scent I was entirely out of – which meant many many hours of unplanned melting,stirring, mixing, drying, cutting …rather than running to the closet to grab some of my pre-made stuff.
It wouldn’t have been as bad if I hadn’t stayed up till the wee hours the night before (and I do mean wee, like 3 a.m. wee) and if this order hadn’t been needed by 9 a.m. the next day. Days like today are why I could never be one of those oh-so-healthy folks who refuse to drink coffee. I heart coffee. I heart it very very much. And I heart Starbucks for opening at 5 a.m. even on the weekends.
I tinkered with the idea of taking 15-minute naps while each batch set but I thought better of it in the end. The only thing worse than being tired is then sleeping just long enough to remind your body how great sleep is. Anything under 2 hours is usually always a dangerous proposition for me.
By 8:30 I’d packaged the last of the bars and loaded them in the car when, in one of my most brilliant moves ever, I ran back to the house to turn on my electric blanket. I was so tired that when I got to the store it was still 5 minutes till opening and I didn’t even wait to hand the product over in person. I just wrote a quick note, said I would give a call later, and tucked them in the front door alcove.
Pulling back into my driveway I actually toyed with the idea of just turning off the car and sleeping in the driver’s seat for a few minutes instead of running in the rain all the way to my front door and then my bedroom. Those 50 feet felt like 5 miles!
But I am oh so glad I decided to muster my strength and go inside because I cannot possibly describe what a beautiful thing it was to kick off my shoes and crawl into the warmth of my buttery-soft flannel sheets. Nothing, and I mean nothing, feels quite as good as being tired and knowing you have nothing to stop you from sleeping for as long as you want.
I think it was somewhere around 1 p.m. when I final emerged from my cave. The day already sufficiently shot, I decided to stay in my pajamas and make myself an exquisite dinner to make up for my calorie-free coffee breakfast and lunch. I perused my cookbook collection but the only thing that seemed right for the occasion was my new copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking – my latest must-have purchase after watching Julie and Julia.
I decided on the beef bourguignon from the recipe that was so predominately featured in the film. All in all, the recipe is not that bad as far as guilty eating goes in the world of french cooking. A tablespoon of butter here and there, a couple slices of bacon, but the dish serves 6, so it didn’t seem all that bad.
What really caught my eye was the part that called for a 3 cups of wine. A whole bottle when you count the glass I poured for myself. A whole bottle! How could this recipe go wrong?
In all it took 5 hours to make. There was boiling of bacon (have you ever heard of such a thing?), then frying of bacon, followed by browning of beef in said bacon fat. Then browning of vegetables in – you guessed it – the bacon fat. But after that things straightened up and it was time to add the wine! A little of this, a little of that, and the whole thing went into the oven for 3 hours.
I thought I could use that long reprieve to wrap presents or do something productive, but a closer look at the recipe had me browning onions for an hour and sauteing mushrooms for 40 minutes and by the time I had done that and washed a few dishes the beef was ready to come out.
The smell in my kitchen was indescribable. It was the smell of developed flavor that only comes from an evening of laboriously preparing a meal. There were about 8 more steps to finish off the dish after it came out of the oven, but I will save you the trouble of reading through all that. Suffice it to say that the dish turned out like perfection, just like Julia Child said it would.
I served it up with some Le Sueur peas. Peas because that’s what Julia recommended and Le Sueur because that’s the brand Samantha describes in Sex In The City, season 4 as “the best” – so naturally, I’ve been curious since. All I can say is, they tasted like peas.
Dessert was a deliciously sweet and fresh pomegranate. The perfect ending to a perfect evening.
As I’ve said before, the holidays are a difficult time to try maintain any sort of waistline. It’s not just all the great food, or the re-allocation of gym time to mall shopping – It’s the season as a whole.
Before the turkey is in the fridge, the Christmas spirit (or Hanukkah, for my Jewish friends) falls upon us and no sooner have we dished that second slice of pie than we are planning seasonal get-togethers. Friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors will soon be conspiring to meet for drinks, dinner and general debauchery. Which is great. How fantastic it is to have an excuse to see those you haven’t connected with in months! What’s not so great is the two-week time frame it falls in.
Inevitably you find yourself double-booking cocktail hour parties with dinner plans, luncheons and potlucks. All these are smooshed together in the 20 or so days between the pilgrims and St. Nick.
Today happens to be just such a day for me. At noon it was lunch and a catch-up session with old co-workers and at 7:00 it’s drinks and dinner at Purple Cafe for my best bud’s birthday.
Lunch was at a fantastic little Mexican restaurant buried in the heart of Seattle – fantastic food and great ambiance. I haven’t been in nearly a year, but I remembered the place as one of the best in the city. Clean, simple dishes, fresh ingredients – none of that greasy bean/cheese slop you usually imagine when Mexican comes to mind.
So I felt confident in ordering the fajita salad. I’d never had it, but with the prospects of an indulgent, rich dinner just a few hours off, I felt queasy at the idea of ordering a burrito.
The description read as this: “Strips of chicken grilled to perfection, topped with sauteed onions and fresh peppers atop a bed of crisp lettuce.”
Yummy right? In my opinion anything with sauteed onions can’t be half bad. I was excited at the idea of fitting in two great meals in one day with only one serving of caloric guilt. But when the dish came my hope took a nose dive. Just one look at the plate told me that this was about to be one of those barely-satisfying meals that offered up more in the way of chewing than flavor.
Now I’m sure this is the place where someone like Richard Simmons would say to just back away, just eat the lettuce and tomatoes, have the rest boxed up and munch on the emergency protein bar in your purse instead. But what Richard doesn’t know is that I woke up late, got stuck in traffic and had only had a bad cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube at 9:00 this morning.
I was starving! And all the empty calories and grease-laden chicken in the world wasn’t going to stop me from eating this “salad.” What else could a girl do? Order something else? But who wants to pay for two meals and hope that the second one would fit the bill … So I ate the fajita salad – and yes the chicken was covered in some sort of indescribable ketchup-ish sauce and yes, the lettuce had gone wilty under the strain of so much oil atop it. But life’s a gamble, and this sore loser says, next time put your bets on the tortilla soup.
Great hopes for an amazing dinner tonight …
