A Bachelor's Weblog to Urban Cooking where speed and simplicity comes before taste!

These days when I step outside, I just want to turn around and go back in the house. Sacramento makes up for its blazingly hot summers with foggy, gloomy, dark, dismal, chilly winters, perfect weather, come to think of it, for hearty stews such as this one. Root vegetables rule the season, sweet carrots and parsnips, turnips, and the happily named rutabaga. (Rutabaga. Rutabaga. Sounds like it could be the name of a latin dance, doesn't it?) This stew is loaded with flavor. Don't forget the gremolata (parsley, lemon zest, garlic garnish which I forgot to photograph in the stew); it gives the stew a great zip. For those of you lamb-non-eaters, if you try it with beef (use chuck), let us know how it goes. I imagine it will be just as good.

Continue reading "Lamb Shank Stew with Root Vegetables" »

Whenever I make ice cream from scratch, we usually have lots of leftover egg whites to use up. Meringues (or as my nephew calls them, "little pavlovas") are little cookies made with basically just egg whites and sugar, with a little vinegar and salt added to help the mixture hold its structure when whipped. In this recipe we've folded in some crushed peppermint sticks, leftover from Christmas. Mini chocolate chips can be added as well. What I love about making these meringues is that you just put them in the hot oven, turn off the heat, and walk away for a few hours. Come back to sweet little meringue cookies, light and airy that practically melt in your mouth.

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Looking for a last minute New Year's appetizer? From the recipe archive.

Brie wrapped in pastry and baked until it has thoroughly melted inside is one of the world's easiest yet tastiest appetizers. In this recipe the brie is topped with raspberry jam, surrounded with pastry and drizzled with maple syrup.

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From the recipe archive. Happy New Year!

Being a quintessential Swiss dish, cheese fondue conjures up images for me of alpine ski huts, deep snow and 20°F weather. Well, we don't get much snow or cold weather in the California central valley, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a good fondue party.

The trick to a successful fondue (other than the obvious one of having wonderful people around with whom to share it) is to ensure that the cheese dipping sauce stays smooth. Cheese has a propensity to get stringy or to "seize up" into clumps, the fat separating from the proteins. Food science author Harold McGee suggests several things in his book On Food and Cooking to ensure a perfect fondue.

Well-aged or moist grating cheeses work well in sauces. Don't heat the cheese beyond its melting point, cheese tends to ball up at higher temps, and don't let the cheese cool down too much before serving, as it tends to get stringier and tougher as it cools. Don't over stir the cheese, doing so will encourage stringiness. Coating the grated cheese with a starch such as flour or corn starch will help stabilize the sauce. Also,

The combination of cheese and wine is delicious but also savvy. The wine contributes two essential ingredients for a smooth sauce: water, which keeps the casein proteins most and dilute, and tartaric acid, which pulls the cross-linking calcium off of the casein proteins and binds tightly to it, leaving them glueless and happily separate. (Alcohol has nothing to do with fondue stability.) The citric acid in lemon juice will do the same thing. If it's not too far gone, you can sometimes rescue a tightening cheese sauce with a squeeze of lemon juice or a splash of white wine.

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Please welcome guest author Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen as she treats us to fabulous shrimp coated with panko and coconut flakes. ~Elise

In my kitchen, there are a handful of Asian ingredients that I’m never out of. There’s the usual like soy sauce, oyster sauce and ginger, of course. But, there’s the other category of foods that are so versatile, they can be used in any style of cooking, whether Asian, Italian or Greek.

And at the top of that list is panko bread crumbs. Panko is a Japanese breadcrumb that really shouldn’t be named “crumb” but rather bread “flakes.” It’s incredibly light, airy and crisp/crunchy when fried.

What I like about panko is that it doesn’t absorb as much oil or grease as regular breadcrumbs and its super-thin flakes create an airy, lacey coating that you can’t achieve with regular breadcrumbs.

Continue reading "Coconut Shrimp with Sweet Chili Mayo" »

Admission, I love eggnog. When I was a kid my parents would get a couple cartons at a time, which they still had to ration, because I, like my 5 siblings, could easily drink a carton apiece. These days I make my own eggnog, and sadly must submit again to rationing, self-imposed this time, for the sake of my not-so-girlish-anymore figure. A reader suggested that eggnog would make a good ice cream, and once that idea lodged in my brain it never let go until the ice cream was made. Three cheers for all things eggnog! This recipe is similar to the eggnog recipe, but with a couple more egg yolks, and a slightly different milk to cream ratio. You could probably easily use already prepared eggnog, even the store-bought stuff. But if you've happened to spike it to the point of tasting the alcohol, it won't churn into ice cream because the alcohol won't freeze.

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Every year food bloggers around the world get together and produce the Menu for Hope raffle, hosted by Pim of Chez Pim. Fabulous prizes for the food lover are raffled off, and the proceeds go to charity. This year, like last, the beneficiary is the Lesotho school lunch program of the United Nations World Food Program.

Check out the prizes, and especially one in particular, the prize of Wild Game Charcuterie, prepared by my favorite hunter, our neighbor, and Simply Recipes guest author, Hank Shaw.

Continue reading "Menu for Hope V" »

D'Oh! I forgot to pick up parsley!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from our house to yours. May you remember everything you went to the grocery store to get. (While you're still at the store, not on the way home.)

May you stay warm, and well fed. May you be surrounded by family and friends. May the peace of the season be upon you.

:-)

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The texture of a Yorkshire pudding is nothing like a pudding in the modern sense of the word. Not a custard, it's more like a cross between a soufflé and a cheese puff (without the cheese). The batter is like a very thin pancake batter, which you pour into a hot casserole dish over drippings from roast beef or prime rib. It then puffs up like a chef's hat, only to collapse soon after you remove it from the oven.

Given that it's loaded with beef drippings (read fat) or butter, or both, Yorkshire pudding is probably not the thing you want to eat regularly if you are watching your waistline. But for a once a year indulgence, served alongside a beef roast? Yummmmm.

Yorkshire pudding is traditionally made in one pan (even more traditionally in the pan catching the drippings from the roast above). You can also make a popover version with the same batter and drippings in a muffin tin or popover pan.

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Continue reading "Holiday Cookies and Treats" »

Crown roasts to me have always seemed rather intimidating. So when my father decided that he wanted to make a crown pork roast for the benefit of any of our readers who actually might want to tackle it one day, I happily went along.

Here's the deal. A crown roast of pork is nothing more than a bunch of pork rib chops nicely formed into a circle and tied up by your butcher. The butcher does most of the hard work (which is why this roast must be special ordered.) Yes there is stuffing to be made, and your butcher should give you the little paper hats that go over the exposed rib bones for the final presentation (I preferred them without the hats, though Sean of Hedonia's homemade crown roast booties look pretty cool). You need a minimum of 13 ribs to tie up, and that makes for a rather compacted roast. A better size is 18-20 ribs. The general guideline for planning is 2 ribs chops per person, though we, proud meat eaters, could barely finish one each, so it depends on the size of the ribs. Because of the variability of the rib sizes and the overall shape of the roast, timing is a bit hard to gauge. You must use a meat thermometer, we recommend a Polder, or one like it, where the probe stays in the roast the whole time while the roast is cooking, and the read-out unit is outside of the oven.

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Updated, from the recipe archive

These smoked salmon goat cheese toasts are among my favorite appetizers to prepare as they are so easy to put together, and taste fabulous. Always a huge hit with guests. One ingredient that makes a difference is the sliver of lemon peel on each piece of salmon. It's that added zing from the lemon peel that perks up and completes each bite.

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Please welcome my dear friend, guest author Ashley Teplin, who made for me the best breakfast potatoes I've ever eaten in my life. They take a little more time, but are oh, so worth it. ~Elise

I won’t lie; I have a bit of a potato problem. French Fries, Roasted Potatoes, Baked Potatoes, Scalloped Potatoes, the list is never ending. I could never stick to a carbohydrate free lifestyle with this potato infatuation of mine. And with my favorite meal of the day, breakfast, you are almost always given a side of this delicious starchy vegetable. It depends on my mood, but I typically prefer the roasted and perfectly crisped home fries. This recipe is my version of that classic breakfast accompaniment. Have you ever had purple potatoes? These little Peruvian potatoes are becoming more and more popular in grocery stores for their creamy texture and vibrant color. Cook them like you would new potatoes.

Shiitake mushrooms (pronounce shee-TAH-kay) are more expensive than standard button mushrooms, but they are so much more flavorful; you only need a few to make your dish sing.

Remember that patience is key when browning your potatoes, shiitake mushrooms, and caramelizing the onions. Trust me, it is well worth the wait.

Continue reading "Purple Potatoes with Caramelized Onions and Shiitake Mushrooms" »

Here is the kitchen that my parents have cooked in since the mid 70s. The house was built in the early 60s. Not one bit of touch up or improvements have been made in over 30 years.

For the last 15 years my mother and father have been planning a kitchen remodel. By planning I mean having a discussion that would within minutes devolve into a War of Wills, with my father storming off in a huff, and my mother retreating into passive aggressive silence. If you wanted to drop a bomb in the living room, all you had to do was say the words "kitchen remodel". Tensions would rise, past unproductive actions would be revisited, the noise volume would increase, and finally all discussion of the prospect would be tabled, so the arguing parties could recover before the next idiot kid brought it up with them again.

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Please welcome guest author and cheese fiend Garrett McCord of Vanilla Garlic as he walks us through how to put together a fabulous cheese plate. ~Elise

Whether served as an elegant appetizer, a palate cleansing course between courses, an impressive tray at a holiday party, or as a sophisticated dessert the cheese plate is always a welcome sight at the table. While there is no rule book on how to put together a cheese plate this post should help give you a bit of guidance on how to best prepare an interesting and flavorful selection of cheeses for your next social event.

Continue reading "How to Prepare a Cheese Board" »

First published in 2005, from the recipe archive. ~Elise

No cookie says Christmas more than a gingerbread man cookie. It's been thirty years since I last made gingerbread men, and it took all weekend to get this recipe right. After starting with a truly terrible recipe from a 1974 edition of the Joy of Cooking (1/4 cup of butter for 3 1/2 cups of flour? - had to throw the whole batch out), I settled on this recipe, which makes some rather tasty cookies.

After running around to several stores looking for the perfect gingerbread man cookie cutter, and getting nowhere, I created my own stencils (see links below). To use them, print them out and fold them in half lengthwise to make it easy to cut along the lines (don't worry if the lines don't perfectly match up, I drew them freehand.) Place the stencil over the rolled-out dough and use a small sharp knife to cut along the inside of the stencil.

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From the recipe archive. Happy Holidays! ~Elise

We grew up with eggnog, the kind you buy in a carton, and every Christmas holiday we kids drank up as much of it as we could. I didn't even know that eggnog was a "spiked" drink until well into my adult years. So this recipe is only lightly spiked; feel free to increase the rum and bourbon to your heart's delight, or omit altogether if it's for the kids. Is eggnog part of your family holiday tradition? If so, how do you like it - spiked or virgin? with whipped egg whites or without?

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Guest author Garrett came over to make this cranberry sorbet for us the other day, so good! Even in bone-chilling weather. ~Elise

I've gone a bit cranberry crazy at the moment. Plain loco. Off the deep end. You see, it's 35°F outside and I have my ice cream machine running. Now before you roll your eyes at me and and simply pass me off as simply lunatic fringe, please, hear me out.

I love cranberries. Adore them, in fact. I horde them come November and December because I just can't get enough of their sweet-tart taste that just nibbles at your tongue. Cranberry sauce, tarts, bread, cookies and chutneys get turned out here like I'll win a prize at the end (maybe more cranberries?). I always wanted to try making cranberry sorbet but let's face it, there be no cranberries in July when the weather is hitting triple digits.

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The trick to quickly prepared meals is just a little foresight and planning. In this case you marinate the chicken pieces overnight, but once you take them out of the marinade, they take less than 20 minutes to cook. My father found this recipe on a local sausage maker's calendar, of all places. We futzed with it a bit, pounded the chicken thighs for more even cooking, used olive oil instead of vegetable spray, and served it with some of my mother's awesome Spanish rice. Loved it.

Continue reading "Orange Marinated Chicken" »

Chocolate. Bourbon. Cake. I think the moment my father spied this recipe in the New York Times he was a goner. ("You had me at chocolate.") Nothing was going to stop him from making this cake. When he found out I possessed a 10-cup bundt pan, that was it, he was half-way to the store getting chocolate and instant espresso for the recipe. Reading Melissa Clark's recipe we both decided that 1/2 cup of Bourbon, instead of the full cup she used, would do. We were both wrong. With 1/2 cup we could barely taste the bourbon. Next time, and there will be a next time soon, we'll use the full cup. This is a great cake. Fine crumb. You can slice it beautifully thin and it still holds its shape. Great for us gals who like to take a very thin slice. And then another one. And then another. (Drives my dad nuts.)

For those of you who would want to substitute out the alcohol I apologize in advance, and suggest that you consider one of the other recipes on this site for chocolate cake that do not use alcohol. This is a whiskey cake; it requires whiskey. And chocolate. Yum.

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