Happy Birthday Neighbor Dan

Neighbor Dan turned 40 this week and we welcomed him into the 40 fold with this dinner. It was a beautiful night with the Christmas tree glowing, the Happy Holiday Hearth crackling, Annick Goutal Noel candles, ice votives, and good friends.

Warm Black Bean and Chipotle Dip
Fine Cooking Appetizers

The first time I made this dip I followed the recipe completely. The second time I just made the pureed bean concoction and I added only one tablespoon of cider vinegar and I liked it much better. It is a great, albeit spicy dip, and is also amazing as a taco filling

2 Tbs. extra-virgin olive oil; more for the baking dish
2 medium tomatoes, cored and cut into medium dice
2 tsp. kosher salt; more as needed
1 large yellow onion, finely diced3 large cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbs. chili powder
2 15-1/2 oz. cans black beans, rinsed and drained well
2 canned chipotles en adobo, minced (about 1 Tbs.), plus 3 Tbs. adobo sauce
3 Tbs. cider vinegar
1-1/2 cups fresh or frozen corn kernels (if frozen, thaw first)
1-1/2 cups (6 oz.) grated sharp cheddar cheese
1-1/2 cups (6 oz.) grated Monterey Jack cheese
3/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
Freshly ground black pepper
Tortilla chips for serving

Heat the oven to 425ºF. Grease a 1-1/2 qt. baking dish with oil and line a baking sheet with foil. Set the tomatoes in a colander over the sink and sprinkle with 1 tsp. of the salt.

Heat the oil in a large (12-inch) skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering hot. Reduce the heat to medium, add the onion, sprinkle with 1 tsp. salt, and cook, stirring, until softened and translucent, 4 to 6 minutes. Add the garlic and chili powder and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Add half of the black beans, the chipotles and adobo sauce, and 3/4 cup water and bring to a boil. Cook until the liquid reduces by about half, 2 to 3 minutes.

Heat until shimmering hot. Reduce the heat to medium, add the onion, sprinkle with 1 tsp. salt, and cook, stirring, until softened and translucent, 4 to 6 minutes. Add the garlic and chili powder and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Add half of the black beans, the chipotles and adobo sauce, and 3/4 cup water and bring to a boil. Cook until the liquid reduces by about half, 2 to 3 minutes.

Transfer the bean mixture to a food processor, add the vinegar, and process until smooth. Let cool for a couple of minutes and then transfer to a large bowl. Add the rest of the beans, the tomatoes, corn, half of each of the cheeses, and 1/2 cup of the cilantro. Mix well and season to taste with salt and pepper.Transfer to the baking dish and sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Bake on the foil-lined baking sheet (to catch drips) until the cheese melts and browns around the edges, about 15 minutes (longer if refrigerated). Sprinkle with the remaining cilantro and serve with the tortilla chips for dipping.

Shredded Beef for Tacos

allrecipes.com

Start your roast in the morning before going to work it will be done when you get home. You don't even have to defrost the roast. If it is a defrosted roast, put it in around noon, it will be done at 5pm.

Serves 16

1 (4 pound) frozen rump roast
1 cup white wine
2 (7.75 ounce) cans Mexican style hot tomato sauce, such as El Pato
3 tablespoons crushed garlic
salt and ground black pepper to taste
1 bunch green onions, chopped
1 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Place the frozen roast in the slow cooker. Pour the wine and Mexican style hot tomato sauce over the top. Season with garlic, and salt and pepper to taste.

Cover, and cook on Low for 9 hours. When done, the roast should shred easily with a fork. Shred the roast into the juices, and mix in the chopped green onions and cilantro.

Reunited

Last night the usual Monday night crew at the yarn shop was together again after a long hiatus. To mark the occassion I brought this for dinner. Sarah was even able to choke down some plumped dried cherries. My husband once made the mistake of telling me these cookies were the best ones I make. I was offended because they are the least homemade cookies I make.

Wild Rice Salad


6 cups prepared wild rice
2 cups smoked turkey breast, such as Jennie-O, cut into ½ inch cubes,
1 cup diced or julienne sun dried tomatoes in oil (reserve oil for dressing), optional
¾ cup dried cherries, plumped in hot water for 5 minutes
6 scallions, white and light green parts, diced
1 avocado cubed
1-3 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

Dressing:

1/4 - 1/2 cup olive oil (use oil from sun-dried tomatoes for a portion of dressing)
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 teaspoonssalt
Coarse ground pepper


Prepare wild rice as per the instructions on the package. Allow to cool. Stir in turkey breast, sun dried tomatoes, the drained, plumped cherries and scallions. Reserve ¼ cup of dressing. Toss rice mixture with the remaining dressing. Gently stir in avocados. Garnish with parsley. Season to taste with pepper and reserved dressing.

Serve chilled or at room temperature.

Cake Mix Cookies

Add 1/2 cup of oil plus two eggs to one box of cake mix (German Chocolate works best). Add a handful of chocolate chips. Drop by tablespoonfuls on a cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes.

Baked Feta with Onion and Olives

My friend is on a quest for a progressive dinner appetizer so I threw out this one. It is simple, good and does not require spending exorbitant amounts of money on out of season produce. I think I got it from Bon Appetit but when I checked www.epicurious.com it did not come up. It must have been from the R.S.V.P. column of restaurant recipes.

Baked Feta with Onion and Olives

1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon caraway seeds, toasted

Nonstick vegetable oil spray

16 ounces feta cheese, cut horizontally in half to make four ½ inch thick squares
1/3 cup pitted Kalamata olives, quartered lengthwise
Crusty French bread slices
Fresh dill sprigs

Preheat oven to 450. Blend vinegar, olive oil, and toasted caraway seeds in blender. Season vinaigrette to taste with salt and pepper.

Coat nonstick rimmed baking sheet with nonstick spray. Place cheese on prepared baking sheet. Bake until heated through, about 5 minutes. Remove cheese from oven, Preheat broiler. Broil cheese until crusty and golden brown, about 5 minutes

Spoon vinaigrette onto platter; place cheese atop vinaigrette. Sprinkle with onion and olives. Surround with bread slices; garish with dill and serve.

Serves 6-8

My Notes:

Whisk the vinaigrette together, don’t bother hauling out the blender. The feta can be baked and broiled in a toaster oven. I coarsely chop the olives and skip the dill garnish.

Monster Mash

Here is a tale of two Monster recipes that for some reason I make in the fall. The first is from my friend Erika of Shanghai. They are amazing but being the math phobic that I am downsizing the recipe to a feasible size is hard. The second my son brought home from school two years ago and they have been in heavy rotation at my house this season.

Monster Cookies

12 eggs
2 pounds brown sugar
4 cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 tablespoon white corn syrup
8 teaspoons baking soda
1 pound butter
3 pounds peanut butter
18 cups oatmeal
1 pound M&M’s
1 pound chocolate chips

Mix all the ingredients together. Bake 12 minutes at 350. Do not overbake.

Monster Bars

3 eggs
1 ¼ cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
¾ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon vanilla
½ cup butter
1/1/4 cup peanut butter
4 ½ cups oatmeal
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup M&Ms
Mix exactly in order listed. Heat oven to 350. Spread in a 13x9 inch pan. Bake for 25 minutes.

The Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

This is my signature recipe. This is not a secret recipe. I feel strongly against the hording of recipes but there is so much history with this recipe that there was no way I could summarize it in an introductory paragraph. So here is the recipe first and the saga of my life with this recipe afterwards if you care to read it.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

2/3 cup Crisco Vegetable Shortening
2/3 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips or 1 ½ cups M&M’s

Preheat oven to 375°F. Mix shortening and butter, add sugars, mix until combined, then the eggs and vanilla, mix thoroughly. In a separate bowl combine flour, salt and baking soda. Add to creamed mixture in two additions, just until flour is combined. Mix in chocolate chips or M&M’s. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls 2 inches apart onto ungreased baking sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes. Cool slightly before removing from baking sheet.

Makes as many as are left after eating ample amounts of cookie dough.

Adapted from Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook

This is the first thing I ever made by myself from start to finish. I was in third grade and on a Sunday afternoon in late winter I asked my mother to bake some cookies. She was always very accommodating with such a request but on this particular Sunday she was in bed reading a book, a very rare occasion for a mother of four children ages 9, 8, 5 and 4 at the time. She told me that if I could read, and I was an avid reader, I could make the cookies myself.

I was not so sure. I do not remember possessing any self-confidence whatsoever until college. I ran up the stairs several times to ask a question about the recipe, to ask if my neighbor Susannah, who was at the back door could help me, to ask what to do about dropping all of the cookie dough on the floor. The recipe was patiently explained, I was told I needed to do this on my own and that I should put the dough back in the bowl and proceed. The cookies were terrible. Burned black on the bottom and as hard as doorknobs. My brothers for years called my cookies doorknob cookies. My second batch, which was prepared at my grandparent’s house a few weeks later was not much better. I had used all butter instead of the half margarine-half Crisco combination my mother adhered to and the cookies spread across the pan. With months of practice the cookies improved.

In college my friends and I trekked to the grocery store to buy the ingredients and prepared them in the kitchen off the lobby of our dorm attracting any number of willing taste testers. When I moved off campus my junior year I bought a hand mixer and would routinely leave my books at the library to go back to my apartment, make a batch of cookies and return to the library with cookies for my friends. They were still warm. A guy once came up to my roommate and I at a bar and said. “You live in the cookie house don’t you? I deliver for Rocky’s and we fight over who gets to deliver to your address because you always tip us with a bag of cookies.”

Cookies were a great flirtation device. I once made a batch to put in a care package for a scope who lived out of state. Several of my roommates, you have to love off-campus living, 6 girls, 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, asked for one and I said they could have the factory rejects. I cast a discerning eye over the cooling batch and declared them all perfect. K slammed her fist into the closest one and said, “That ones not perfect.” She and I even had a cookie bake-off one afternoon. The judges were afraid to vote. When I went to Scotland for a semester my roommates lost five pounds. My grandparents gave me a Kitchen Aid mixer when I finally graduated from college after five scenic years on the mighty Chip.

In Scotland I substituted Crisco for Cook-keen with marginal results. When I returned to Scotland for a year long position the cookies were renamed Body Purification Cookies because we always made a batch the night before the next big diet began.

I make these cookies often for my family. One of my favorite memories from growing up is walking through the door after school and smelling these cookies baking. My children are being raised on the same experience.

The Return

Hello again,

I know, I know, I did not post the whole summer through, and no one even checks anymore, but I will try to be better now that I have so much free time with the youngest in school, right.

I have an issue with temperature. There is a very fine line with me between too hot and too cold. Above 79 degrees becomes too hot, too hot to turn on the oven. Below 60 degrees becomes too cold, time to make hearty food. I think I need to move to San Diego.

That being said my favorite time of year to cook as arrived, Fall. Soups, stews, oven roasted vegetables. It has been a banner week of cooking in my house. Grilled vegetables and family steak with the neighbors on Sunday, Crock Pot Taco Chicken for the family on Monday with a Coucous Salad at the shop for me, Tuesday was meatloaf, Wednesday homemade pizza, and Thursday Seafood stew which I will share with you now. I have been making this recipe for almost ten years, which seems unreal. It was a Bon Appetit cover recipe in 1998, and a reader recipe, which means it is based in reality.

SEAFOOD STEW WITH TOMATOES AND BASIL

1/4 cup olive oil
1 1/4 cups chopped onion
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
4 teaspoons dried oregano
1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seeds
2 1/2 cups crushed tomatoes with added puree
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 1/2 cups bottled clam juice
1 cup dry white wine
2 6 1/2-ounce cans chopped clams, drained, liquid reserved
1 pound uncooked large shrimp, peeled, deveined
1 6-ounce can crabmeat, drained
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
Cayenne pepper

Heat olive oil in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, oregano and fennel seeds and sauté until onion is tender, about 8 minutes. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, clam juice, white wine and liquid reserved from clams. Increase heat and boil until slightly thickened, about 15 minutes. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Add clams, shrimp and crabmeat. simmer 2 minutes. Mix in fresh basil and simmer until shrimp are just opaque in center, about 2 minutes longer. Season stew to taste with cayenne, salt and pepper.

Makes 4 servings
Bon Appétit, February 1998

Faux Steak Salad

I traveled for work for the first time in eight years this month. It was fun. My material was fresh to everyone. My caffiene intake was way down so I was much more functional and I got to eat out everyday for lunch and dinner. Breakfast was Mega M&M's and a Nutrigrain bar on the way to the Columbus, Ohio Convention Center, lunch was at the amazing North Market , and dinner was at various spots within walking distance of the hotel ,including the Flat Iron Grill,thanks to Mary Lou's investigating our options via Chowhound.

At the Flat Iron the four of us all ordered the same thing, the steak salad. Mixed greens, grilled steak, carmelized onions, tomatoes, blue cheese and a light dressing. It was amazing. I did my best to recreate it this weekend substituting the steak with this grilled mushroom recipe, another recipe brought to my attention by neighbor Sherry. I made a simple dijon, red wine vinegar, black pepper and olive oil dressing, carmelized onions a la The Barefoot Contessa and added a handful of walnuts for good measure. It was very good.

Worcestershire Glazed Portobello Mushrooms

1/2 cup butter
4 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
1 pound portobello mushrooms, cut into 1/3-inch-thick slices

Melt 1/2 cup butter in large skillet over medium heat. Stir in Worcestershire sauce and vinegar. Stir in mushrooms. Sprinkle with salt. Remove from heat.

Grill mushrooms until soft and beginning to release juices, about 3 minutes per side. Divide mushrooms among the salad and serve. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Bon Appétit July 2004