The most wonderful thing about making a salad is….well, it’s a salad!  It’s like building a sandcastle, pretty simple and really hard to mess up.  You must almost try to mess up in order for a mess up to occur.  Also, what’s more fun, building the sandcastle or enjoying it once it’s built?  It’s like that with salad too.

I love cutting up fruit and vegetables to make a salad.  It’s my Prozac.  The weight of a great knife in my palm, the repetitive and relaxing motion, the crunching and chopping and slicing sounds.  I love the sense of accomplishment I feel.  Look at the huge pile of carrot disks!  What great pepper strips those are!  It’s as therapeutic as building sandcastles, with the added benefit of a meal ready to eat when I’m done.

And like sandcastles, salads are just begging for you to express your inner child, but with food.  Put in what you like, like what you put in.  Experiment a little to see what tastes good.  There are no mistakes.

I’ll often walk down the beach imagining the personalities responsible for each sandcastle I see.  The rambling, quirky sandcastle built by an unsupervised five year old, or maybe a ninety year old with a five year old’s love of play.  The perfectly balanced, precise masterpiece built by the engineer on vacation.  The tallest one you see as your eyes scan the horizon, built by an overachiever with his mellow on.  Each one is just perfect.

I loved hearing from everyone who roasted their first ever whole chicken after reading my last post, Roasted Chicken with Lemon, Garlic & Rosemary.   Want to use the prepared roasted chicken in your fridge for a dish?  You must try this chicken salad.  Use my recipe as a guideline, but don’t be afraid to experiment.  It’s called kitchen sink chicken salad because it’s all about using what you have on hand and what you love.  Anything of course but the kitchen sink!

 

When I make chicken salad, I try to include a crunchy vegetable (like celery, radishes or water chestnuts), fruit (apples, grapes and pineapple work great), roasted nuts (walnuts, pecans, cashews or even pistachios) and onion (diced red, sliced green onions or chives).  It’s always fun to put add dried fruit like cranberries.

I love all the tastes and textures bursting in your mouth every time you take a bite.  Chicken salad can be served by itself on a bed of lettuce as shown, or scooped up with crackers or used as a sandwich filling for a croissant or toasted multigrain bread.

Enjoy!

Preparing dishes using pre-roasted chicken is one of my go-to strategies in the ongoing journey of feeding the family on weeknights.  My quest to put a relatively hassle free, fresh and simple dinner on the table depends heavily on my repertoire of quick soup, salad and casserole recipes using pre-cooked chicken.  For years I bought the ubiquitous rotisserie chicken available almost everywhere I frequented.  (Just recently I saw a row of the merry little maidens rotating away on a rotisserie spit at a local quick trip gas station.)  However, the problem with the store bought chicken is, although very convenient, it doesn’t taste very good.  Kind of unnatural and chemical tasting.  And it’s dried out.

I became disenchanted a couple years ago and decided to switch to roasting my own.  It’s not often in life making such a little change garners such huge results, but this is one of them.  First of all, roasting the chicken at home is so stinking simple and easy.  Even if you do nothing but rub the bird with a little olive oil and season it with salt and pepper before sticking it in the oven to roast, the resulting meat is juicy, tender and eons ahead of any purchased rotisserie chicken.  I can also show you a couple of quick prep steps which will pump up the  flavor factor even more.  These birds are so tasty!

Best of all I use the leftover roasted bones to make a killer homemade chicken stock.  I’ll show you how in an upcoming post.

Since this recipe is so simple, the quality of the chicken used really effects the outcome.  Get a great, fresh organic bird to roast.  Costco has a two pack of organic roasting chickens I often use.  On most winter Saturday mornings you can find me sticking a couple of  these birds in the oven to roast (after a quick ten minute prep time).  After they are cooked, I slice the meat off the bone and store it to use during the week.  It’s so nice to get a head start on the upcoming week.

I’m not making any assumptions here on your previous encounters with a whole chicken.  First of all, this is what the whole chicken looks like when you grab it at the store.  After you take the plastic off, fish out the organ meat (liver, heart and gizzards) usually wrapped in paper and stored in the cavity of the bird.

Save the organ meat to makes terrines and pates later, or just toss them if these culinary adventures are not on your horizon.

Rinse the bird and pat dry with paper towels.  Rub the outside of the bird with olive oil and season it generously with salt and pepper.  It’s perfectly OK to stick it in the oven to roast at this point.  However, I like to add some extra goodies to pump up the flavor.

You can place any aromatics like lemons, herbs and garlic in the cavity of the bird to enhance the flavor.  I used one lemon cut in half, a sprig of fresh rosemary and one whole garlic head sliced in half.  After adding them to the large cavity of the bird, I tie the legs together for even cooking.

Place the bird in a roasting pan and cook at 425 degrees for 30 minutes.  This step caramelizes the skin and locks in juices.  At this point, turn the oven down to 350 degrees and roast until juices run clear.  The internal temperature taken with a thermometer should read 160 degrees.  Depending on the size of the bird this should take about an additional hour or so of roasting time.

Remove from oven, cover with tented foil and let stand for twenty minutes before carving.  This ensures the juiciest, tastiest chicken ever.  The leftover juice in the pan is perfect for making gravy too.  Good luck!  Leave a comment below and let me know about your adventures in roasting a chicken at home.  Enjoy!

It’s the time of year for winter vegetables; parsnips, rutabagas, potatoes, turnips, carrots and of course…..brussels sprouts!

Brussels sprouts….ewwwww!

Most people make an icky face when I mention brussels sprouts.  The poor little vegetable that looks like a miniature cabbage just doesn’t get enough respect.  I can’t figure out why.  We love them in season and gobble them up around our house.  If you ask my kids, they will tell you it’s their favorite vegetable.  The nutty, woodsy flavor is interesting and satisfying.  Give ‘em a try sometime.

Brussels sprouts didn’t actually originate in Belgium, but were named after the capital city since the country is the epicenter of world sprout production.  Hmmm….maybe one of the reasons I love the sprouts so much is because I have a bit of Belgium (Belgish?) in me.

As a kid, there was always quite a bit of bantering in our family regarding our cultural roots.  We had many light hearted argumenst speculating on the preponderance of our Irish vs Belgium vs English inherited personality traits.  My Dad was 100% Irish, extremely proud of it and always claimed us kids were 100% Irish too.  Of course this was impossible given my Mom’s Belgium and English DNA.  Rumor has it my Mom’s grandmother was a young Belgium girl hired as a cook on an English estate, later eloping to America with her English butler from the same estate, living happily ever after on the dairy farm they owned together in the midwest.  So, my culinary chops were probably inherited from my Belgium side, along with my love of chocolate and brussels sprouts. (Sorry Dad)

My favorite technique for cooking sprouts is steam and sauté, which by the way is also a great technique for lots of winter vegetables.  I cut the core off the end of the brussels sprouts and steam them in a sauté pan in water, olive oil and a little bit of butter.  Just when the sprouts turn a bright vibrant green and are almost cooked, the water has magically evaporated and the sprouts begin to sauté in the leftover olive oil and butter.  At this point it is time to salt and pepper to taste.  If there happens to be a bit of water still left over when the sprouts turn bright green and are cooked to the firmness you desire, just drain the excess water off to get the sauté started.  Cooking too long in the water makes for mushy sprouts….ewwww!  The sauté step caramelizes the outside of the sprouts and makes them oh-so-wonderful to nibble on.

Another favorite technique is roasting.  After cutting the core off the end of the sprouts, toss them in a little olive oil, salt & pepper.  Spread the sprouts on a sheet pan.  Roast at 400 degrees for about 35-40 minutes.  Toss and serve immediately.

I frequently julienne my sprouts and quick sauté them in olive oil and butter.  Delish!

I have a fab raw brussels sprouts salad that is to die for, but I will save that for another post.  I can’t wait to hear about all your adventures with the sprouts.  Enjoy!

Hello 2012.  We are all snuggled in today. The wind is howling outside and I am thankful to be curled up in front of the fire, reflecting on the wonderful holiday season just passed and musing about what’s in store for this upcoming year.

I’m chuckling remembering the conversation I had with my very witty niece right before Christmas.  She just turned thirty and loves her job as a professor of sociology at a small midwestern university.  She bought her first house but hasn’t spent much time yet cooking in the kitchen.   When I told her to check out my blog, her quick retort to me was “What, so I can discover new ways to heat up Hot Pockets?”

I think she’s pretty representative of a generation that no one taught to cook.  We rely so much on convenience food, not realizing how simple it would be to make things from scratch instead.  Although there is an abundance of great, fresh ingredients at our fingertips and we are inundated with media images of food recipes and cooking instruction, it’s still pretty intimidating to walk in the kitchen and pick up a knife.  My wish this year is to inspire you to maybe make a soup from scratch, or whisk up a vinaigrette, or serve a fresh pasta sauce in lieu of opening a jar or roast a whole chicken at home instead of grabbing the rotisserie from the grocery.  I promise you you’ll never want a Hot Pocket again.

I think this soup is a great start.  Once you make it, you won’t believe how simple it is.  You can use any number of winter squashes, I just happened to pick butternut and acorn.  The squash makes the soup so creamy and velvety and decadent, it’s hard to believe it’s actually quite healthy!

I roast the squash first to add a layer of flavor dimension to the soup.  Plus, it’s so much easier to scoop the cooked squash flesh out of the skin after roasting as opposed to peeling the skin off the raw squash and then chopping it up.  You can also roast the squash ahead of time, scoop out the flesh and save it in the refrigerator until you are ready to make the soup.  Once the squash is ready, the soup is a snap to make.

This is the soup right before I puree it with an immersion blender.

 And after it’s pureed.  Enjoy!

Beef Bourguignon was the first dish Julia Child showcased on her pioneering PBS television cooking series The French Chef which debuted in 1963.  Julia was 40 at the time, standing six feet two inches tall and possessing a signature style and joie de vivre still unmatched by any food network star today.  She was fun, entertaining and real.  Her enthusiastic and somewhat breathless delivery of instruction became the fodder of many a satirist.  The show was produced live to videotape from start to finish all in one take, creating an opportunity for us to see her occasional mishaps and bloopers.  Chickens got dropped on the floor, omelets split in half when flipped and mashed potatoes were flung through the air.  She laughed and cooked through it all, always managing to the get the dish on the table.   More than anything I appreciate how much fun she had cooking, reminding us “if I can do this, anyone can”.  Look at this picture from the set of the cooking series:

Ok, wouldn’t you be a bit giddy and breathless if you had all those people looking up your skirt while cooking on live television?  Bon Appetit Julia!  Here is a link to the first The French Chef episode, be sure to relish Julia’s robust pronunciation of  ”BOOF BOOR GEN YON”

Beef Bourguignon episode on The French Chef

As much as Julia encouraged us not to be intimidated when cooking, many of us are when tackling Beef Bourguinon.  Don’t be!  Well, it’s OK to be a little intimidated when spelling it, but don’t be when cooking it.  It’s a simple peasant dish originating from the Burgundy (Bourguignon) region of France, where the namesake Burgundy wine is produced using the pinot noir grape.  The rustic beef stew is slow braised in Burgundy wine for hours and finished with glazed carrots, pearl onions and sautéed mushrooms.  The peasants would assemble the stew at lunchtime with ingredients from the larder, put it on the fire to slowly simmer away the afternoon, and be welcomed by the wonderful aroma when returning home to dinner.

I’m always a little astonished when someone mentions they’ve spent the whole afternoon (or day!) preparing beef bourguignon.  Let’s unpack and demystify it a bit.  Look at the recipe as two separate endeavors.  The first is to make a simple stew, which follows the classic steps of browning and searing the meat, sautéing the aromatics (onions, carrots and garlic), deglazing the pan (with burgundy wine) and setting it to simmer with wine, stock and herbs.

Sear and brown the meat in a big pan in small batches, setting the finished batch aside to wait on a paper towel while the other batches cook.  Don’t try to brown the meat all at once or it will crowd the pan and steam instead of sear.  Costco has a great package of precut stew meat (usually chuck roast) perfect for this dish which is a great time saver.

After the meat is seared, pour off any remaining fat.  The caramelized brown goodness left on the bottom of the pan is called frond and is irreplaceable in creating a tasty stew.

Add the onions, carrots and garlic and sauté until translucent.  I love to dice all the vegetables by hand, but if I’m in a hurry I’ll throw the vegetables in the Cuisinart to dice.

The classic herb addition to Beef Bourguignon is bouquet garni, basically a bay leaf, 2 sprigs of thyme and three sprigs of parsley tied in a bundle and dropped in the pot to flavor the stew.  It is retrieved from the pot before serving, hence the string to make fishing it out easier.  If you don’t have fresh herbs, toss in a teaspoon or two of dried herbs de provence instead.

Add the seared meat back to the vegetables along with bouquet garni, wine and stock.  Sprinkle a little flour on top to thicken the stew.

The second step is preparing the delicious extras which accompany the stew once it is served, sautéed mushrooms, caramelized carrots and glazed baby onions.  The stew tastes absolutely delicious without the extras, but if you have time it’s fun to add them.

I can spend hours researching, shopping and cooking for a special family dinner or a night entertaining friends.  I get lost in cookbooks and food magazines.  I love the feeling of anticipation as I turn the page, wondering what is out there next to discover.  It’s what really jazzes me.  Do I feel that way about utilitarian weeknight dinners?  Um, maybe not so much.

My confession is I sometimes struggle getting weeknight dinners on the table.  Don’t we all?  In a perfect world I have a plan for the week, the right ingredients in my coffers and the time to cook.  On a daily basis my world is far from perfect.

That’s why I love this soup.  It’s in the arsenal of recipes I pull out for just those nights when my family is hungry and ready to eat, but I have not spent a second thinking about what’s for dinner yet.  It has a flavor punch that belies how quick and easy it is to make.  It uses staples from my pantry and refrigerator,  so no trip to the grocery store is required.  It gets gobbled up and leaves my family with smiles on their faces and a warm and full belly.  Saved by the soup.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you probably already know I am a minimalist when it comes to letting equipment come into my kitchen.  I’m a little disorganized by nature, so I don’t like tons of fancy gizmos and gadgets cluttering up my kitchen drawers.  A piece of equipment has to be a workhorse if I let it have a home in my home.  I do love telling you though about the equipment I have and use and can’t do without in my kitchen.  One of my favorites is the stick immersion blender.

I can’t imagine making soup without it.  The black bean soup today gets pureed.  Before I had the stick immersion blender, pureeing required transferring hot soup to a blender, blending it and then transferring it back into the soup pot.  Really messy and time consuming.  But now I can stick the immersion blender right into the hot pot of soup and give it a few whirls.  Presto!  Scrumptious made from scratch soup.  The blade quickly twists off the motor assembly and goes right in the dishwasher.  No mess, no fuss, just the way I like it when cooking weeknight meals.

This is the soup assembled, before pureeing.

After the puree.  Presto!  That looks much better.

Enjoy!

If you want a sweet potato dish for Thanksgiving, but don’t want the standard “go to” recipe (melting marshmallows on top of cooked sweet potatoes chunks), then this is the blog post for you.  To make this dish, cooked and peeled sweet potatoes are combined with a batter made from butter, whipped eggs, buttermilk and sugar and then spread into a casserole.  The sweet potato batter is then topped with a decadent praline mix of pecan chips, brown sugar and butter and baked.

When you take a bite, the creamy, dreamy sweet potatoes contrast with the crunchy praline topping and melt into deliciousness in your mouth.  I call this sweet potato dish “famous” because once you bring it to your holiday gathering, it will become famous and then you will have to bring it back again every year.  (At least that’s what happened to me!)

Print

Famous Sweet Potato Dish

Rating: 51

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour

Yield: 6-8 servings

Ingredients

Ingredients for base

2.5 pounds sweet potatoes, cooked in boiling water until tender

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup buttermilk

5 TBSP melter butter, cooled

2 large eggs

1/4 tsp salt

Ingredients for praline

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup pecan chips

1/3 cup flour

additional 5 TBSP melted butter

Instructions

Cook potatoes in boiling water until very tender. (No need to peel skin first) Let potatoes cool. Peel the skin off the potatoes. The skin will slip right off.

In a mixer beat two eggs on medium until frothy. Gradually add the sugar. Beat for about one minute. Add the melted butter, buttermilk and salt. The batter will look like this:

Add the cooked, peeled sweet potatoes to the batter. Beat on low until blended.

Spread the sweet potato mixture in a greased 8X8 casserole dish

For the praline, measure the brown sugar, the pecan chips and flour in a bowl.

Stir together and then drizzle the additional 5 TBSP of melted butter into the mixture. Stir again until butter is blended and the mixture is crumbly.

Sprinkle the praline mixture on top of the casserole and bake at 325 degrees until center is firm, about 30-35 minutes.

Enjoy!

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While I was growing up, like most of America at the time, my family embraced convenience foods.  I’ve enjoyed watching the escapades of Don Draper on the Mad Men televisions series.  The series depicts how Madison Avenue seduced us with witty jingles and bright packaging, evoking feelings of “sexy” newness every time we grabbed the box or jar off the shelf.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane, throw out some word association phrases and see what images we conjure up:

“Macaroni and Cheese”  

“Spaghetti”

“Chocolate Pudding”

“Cheese”

“Cupcakes”

“And of course… Pancakes”

Growing up, the chubby dough boys were always around when we turned on the griddle at home.  But guess what?  I never really liked pancakes until I tasted my first batch of pancakes made from scratch instead of out of the box.  Ditto with the other convenience foods.  The box pancakes looked and smelled good, but always disappointed once I popped a bite in my mouth.  No matter how much butter and syrup I poured on, they still tasted like cardboard.

Pancakes made from scratch are in a league of their own.  They rise until they are light and fluffy on the griddle, but they still deliver some substance and depth when you take a bite.  The tangy bite of the buttermilk teases against the sweetness of the maple syrup and creaminess of the butter to create a satisfying wonderfulness in your mouth.  They taste like…..well, what I always imagined pancakes should taste like.  Once you make these pancakes from scratch,  it will be hard to go back to anything else.

I believe I’ve revisited and cooked most of the boxed and jarred foods from my childhood, but this time making them from scratch with real food.  I am never disappointed.  A lot of these experiences I’ve already featured on my blog.  I hope I can inspire you to try the same.

Pancakes made from scratch are easy to make and foolproof….almost.  I did have a little “made from scratch” pancake debacle in Italy this fall mostly related to “Italian to English” translation issues at the grocery store while buying baking soda.  But I’ll leave that story for another day.

In the meantime, let’s put our thumb on the end of our nose, wiggle our fingers at Don Draper and try these absolutely delicious buttermilk pancakes – made from scratch!

This recipe is adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman 

Method

Sift dry ingredients together and set aside.

Separate the eggs

Whisk the egg whites until stiff

Assemble the wet ingredients

Put the dry ingredients in a big bowl.  Put the wet ingredients including the egg yolks and egg whites in a separate bowl.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until just combined.  Don’t over-beat.  The batter will be lumpy.  Once the dry ingredients hit the wet ingredients, the baking soda activates and should be used quickly if you want light, fluffy pancakes.

Pour 3/4 to 1 cup of batter on a piping hot griddle for each pancake.

Cook for a couple of minutes until batter starts to bubble and bottom is golden brown.  Flip pancake and finish cooking the other side.

Serve piping hot off the griddle with butter and syrup.  Enjoy!!

The summary of cranberry consumption over the course of my life is as follows:

1%        fresh harvested whole cranberries!

10%     dried cranberries – usually in harvest salads

89%     cranberry juice in cosmopolitan martini’s

Let me explain.  I love everything about whole fresh cranberries – the bright vibrant red color, the intense, acidic pop in your mouth when you eat them and let’s not forget they grow in BOGS!!

Freshly harvested, whole cranberries are always my first choice.  I wish these delightful, refreshing, sour nuggets of deliciousness were available more often.  But alas…..the only time I see fresh, whole cranberries in our produce section is around the Holidays.  The rest of the year I am relegated to Cosmo consumption.

When fresh whole cranberries arrive each autumn I always make this sour cream streusel coffee cake first.  This light, fluffy sour cream laced coffee cake topped with contrasting bright, acidic, whole fresh cranberries and pecan caramel streusel makes your mouth water.  It’s great as a morning coffee cake, but is so satisfying and rich it makes a great dessert too.

From Nantucket’s Sarah Leah Chase

Method

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.  Butter and lightly flour a 9 by 13 inch baking pan.

To prepare the coffee cake, cream 1 stick of butter in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until light and fluffy.

Add 1 cup sugar and beat again until light and fluffy.

Beat in the eggs one at a time.  Add the vanilla and freshly grated orange zest.

On the side, sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt together.  I like to sift my dry ingredients together onto a sheet of parchment paper.  Then when it is time to add the flour mixture to the batter, I pick up two sides of the parchment paper, position it over the mixer and pour the flour mixture in.  Flour can compact and become dense when it sits in the storage container, that’s why it is important to sift.  Sifting makes it light and fluffy again before using it in the batter.

The flour mixture and sour cream are then added to the batter in alternating stages, mixing after each addition.  This is another essential step to ensure a light and fluffy coffee cake.

The easiest way for me to remember how to add them to the batter is in this sequence:

1/3 of the flour mixture, then 1/2 cup of sour cream, then 1/3 of the flour mixture, then 1/2 cup of sour cream, then 1/3 of the flour mixture.

After each addition mix on medium speed for a few seconds until it is incorporated into the dough.

The batter will now be very thick and creamy.

 Spread the batter evenly into the prepared pan.

Sprinkle the fresh whole cranberries on top of the batter.

In separate bowl, prepare the Streusel Topping next.  Slice 4 TBSP of butter into pats.  Toss the butter, brown sugar, flour, and cinnamon together in a small mixing bowl.

Cut in the butter with two knives or a pastry blender until the mixture is crumbly and the butter pieces are the size of a small pea.

Stir in the chopped walnuts or pecans.

Sprinkle the Streusel Topping over the cranberries on the coffee cake.

Bake the coffee cake for about 45 minutes until a knife inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.  Cut into squares.  Enjoy!

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