All the Ingredients

Back in the Saddle with The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier

I have a confession to make. I judged a book by its cover. Considering I sell books for a living, this is not a good thing.

I refused for a very long time to even open Ree Drummond's first cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, because on the cover she is holding a $300 Le Creuset Dutch oven. An "accidental ranch wife" doesn't find herself on the prairie cooking out of anything this expensive! But then when I did open the cookbook, I loved it. I have recommended this book over and over as a wedding present or first cookbook for someone who is not really comfortable in the kitchen. By the time you have followed all the photographed steps for a recipe, your Cheese Grits will look and taste just like Ree's. 

So I have been happily anticipating the second volume: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier, which came out last month. I decided to jump right in and make the Spicy Dr. Pepper Pulled Pork. I love making pulled pork in the crockpot. I put the ingredients on, go to work, and come home to a fragrant dinner. This recipe could not have been any easier. 

• 2 onions, peeled & quartered
• 1 whole pork butt (it was on sale!)
• salt & pepper to taste
• one 11-ounce can of chipotles in adobe sauce
• two 12-ounce cans of Dr. pepper
• 4 tablespoons packed brown sugar

First, you put the quartered onions in the bottom of the crockpot. Then you put in the pork butt, layer on the rest of the ingredients, and pour the Dr. Pepper over the top. Cook for at least 6 hours on high, flipping the meat several times during the process. It makes your house smell like smokey-sweet, meaty goodness. Then you remove the meat, shred it with forks, and add it back to the juices until ready to serve. 

This pulled pork was fabulous! Sweet with lots of heat. Too much heat, in fact, for my husband. I went back and fished out the chipotles, which had stayed surprising whole, so he wouldn't get them in a mouthful, and he liked the pork much better. If you aren't a fan of really spicy food, I would suggest either using half the can of chipotles, or seeding them first before adding them to the crockpot. 

The other thing I love about making pulled pork in the crockpot? All the leftovers. Ree has great suggestions at the end of the recipe about what to do with the leftovers, and we tried several of them. After eating the meat on buns with crunchy dill pickles, we made nachos, and used the meat as a pizza topping. I dug out a package of wonton wrappers, and made another version of my baked wonton cups with the pulled pork and mozzarella cheese. I also froze some of it for sandwich filling for dinner on another busy day.

I look forward to trying other recipes in this new cookbook. As always, Ree's photographs are meticulous and stunning. I know how long it takes me to set up and get one photo. Each recipe in Food from My Frontier has at least nine or ten photos. I worry about the Drummond children. I imagine them, pining away in the background, waiting for the photos to be snapped, starting to whine--just a little--"Can we eat yet?" Next time Bacon Boy is home, I'm making the Ranch-Style Chicken--yummy grilled, marinated chicken breasts topped with crispy bacon and cheddar cheese. But I'll only take one or two pictures!

Cooking from the Books: Good Eats: Volume 1: Baby Back Ribs

I had a week off in October. One of the things I did that week was to cook food in large quantities so that I would have things in the freezer to get me through Holiday Retail Exhaustion. After spending nine hours on my feet helping customers, I want to come home to a hearty dinner that is already thawed and ready to heat. 

This week, however, I discovered that I had a rack and a half of baby back pork ribs left from a big bundle I had bought at Sam's Club in July. With snow on the ground, it is too cold to grill them slowly over charcoal like we prefer. But in all the Cooking Channel's reruns of Good Eats, I remembered seeing an episode where Alton cooks ribs in the oven. I dismissed this idea as nonsense, but decided that that would be the recipe to use for these ribs.

The recipe comes from his Episode 27: Pork Fiction, and was easy to assemble. I took the thawed ribs, and covered them with my SECRET dry rub recipe. This is a rub recipe I adapted from a Cook's Illustrated recipe that I have followed for years to grill my famous pork back ribs. (Yes, they are famous because my father-in-law talks about them to all his friends in Texas.) I also use this dry rub to cook my son, Bacon Boy's favorite bacon, but I digress. Alton includes a recipe for a dry rub if you need one.

Then the ribs are bundled into heavy duty foil pouches, meat side down, where braising liquid is poured into one end of the foil pouch. Alton's recipe uses white wine, white wine vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, honey, and garlic. I am all about using what's on hand, so I made my braising liquid with:

• 1/3 cup apple cider (fresh pressed)
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 smashed and chopped clove or garlic

And since I had cooked some of my dry-rubbed bacon for BLTs at lunch (the very last garden tomato--sadness), I added about a tablespoon of the seasoned bacon fat.

I divided the liquid between the two pouches of ribs, and put them on a cookie sheet. I baked them in a 250 degree oven for 3 hours. This allowed me time to get the Christmas tree in the stand, get the lights on it, and go to the gym. This time of year, I am all about dinner that doesn't need tending.

After three hours, I opened the ends of the pouches, and poured out the braising liquid into a skillet (I used the one from cooking the bacon that I had drained the fat out of), and simmered it until the suce thickened. While the sauce was simmering, I baked a bag of Alexi Onion Rings in the oven. If you have never tried Alexia Onion Rings, they are crunchy and wonderful, and hidden in the healthy frozen foods section at the grocery store.

When the onion rings were done, I opened the pouches and put the ribs, meat side up, onto the cookie sheet. Then I painted the thick rib glaze on the creepy looking gray ribs, and broiled them for about five minutes. They came out of the oven looking like they had been grilled, low and slow, over charcoal. The whole house smelled of porky goodness.

I served the ribs with a salad (Marzetti's Champagne dressing), a choice of Famous Dave's barbecue sauces, and the Alexia Onion Rings. I thought the ribs would be good, but they were excellent! The meat was tender and juicy, and the flavor off the glaze was a sweet amalgem of the braising liquid ingredients.

Once the snow falls here in Iowa, summer favorites like garden tomatoes and grilled baby back ribs fall off the menu. Alton's oven rib recipe has put the baby backs back!

 

Cooking from the Books: Good Eats: Volume 2: Swiss Steak

Alton Brown makes my short list of food personalities that I admire. After all, the man convinced me that brining is a necessity for the Thanksgiving Turkey, and I have a permanent Post-It on that page in I'm Just Here for the Food. But I have to confess that although I have all his cookbooks (including the newest, Good Eats: Volume 3), I have not cooked around in them very much. Maybe it's because I consider him a sort of foodie older brother. Need to know why high-gluten flour works better for homemade pizza dough? Check Alton. The answer will be there in one of those volumes--probably accompanied by a cute diagram of gluten molecules. Alton has all the answers.

My husband and I recently had the pleasure of hearing Alton speak in person at a benefit for the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A flood two years ago laid waste to the main branch of the library, and soaked many of its volumes. Alton came to speak at a fund-raising benefit, and donated a number of books to help rebuild the Library's collection, including some rare and odd cookbooks, and all of the ones he has authored. He was just as charming and funny in person as he appears in all of his television venues.

The Cooking Channel is rerunning all of the Good Eats episodes, and there are many that I have never seen. I was intrigued by the episode about Swiss Steak and how it belongs in the Museum of Food Horrors. I was born in Atlanta, but spent most of my formative years in Phoenix. I learned how to cook South, and Southwest. Swiss Steak was not on either of those menus. Then when I moved to Iowa to go to graduate school, I entered a new food arena and learned that many people in the Midwest ate breakfast, dinner, and supper (instead of breakfast lunch, and dinner), often consuming "hotdish" at some of those meals (instead of "casserole"), and drank pop instead of soda. And suddenly I was dining in restaurants that had pork tenderloin sandwiches instead of tamales, and Swiss Steak instead of fried chicken, biscuits, and gravy.

I ate Swiss Steak once in a well-known restaurant because my husband likes it, and recommended it to me. It tasted like the sole of an old shoe floured, fried, and swathed in white gummy gravy. Nasty! It quickly joined the list of things I never order in a restaurant like beef stew (no one ever makes it as well as I do) or tuna sandwiches (they should not be half dark tuna, half mayo and onion).

So I was intrigued by Alton's tear down and reconstruction of this midwest favorite. The rules emerged: you should buy your own good quality meat, slice and tenderize it yourself, and after flouring and searing the steaks, cook them low and slow in a broth in a Dutch oven. Alton set the bar pretty high, but I don't have time to buy, slice, and tenderize my own meat. Plus I shop at a small-town grocery that has a beautifully run meat department. In their meat case, I found lean, high-end,
tenderized "cube" steaks. I bought four.

Then I floured them lightly in seasoned flour. I am big fan these days of Mrs. Dash's Table Blend--no salt (and I don't miss it), but lots of pepper and other spices with a nice zing. Then I browned them in olive oil, and layered them in my Dutch oven. I strayed outside the suggested recipe here: I used organic beef broth, but added about half a cup of mushrooms and onions that had been left over from a batch I had sliced and sauteed for another recipe. I also threw in a little chopped sage, fresh from the garden. Then the covered pot went into the oven for about two hours. Halfway through, I rotated the meat layers. 

Instead of making mashed potatoes which seem to be the standard accompaniment to Swiss Steak, I again took the fast route and put half a bag of Ore Ida Golden Fries on a cooke sheet in the oven. My mother always made real Beef Stroganov over shoestring potatoes, so I piled my fries on the plate and topped them with Swiss Steak and the now thick and creamy mushroom and onion gravy. My husband pronounced the combo fabulous, and rechristened the dish "Swiss Steakanov." He said that this take on Swiss Steak is a new creature entirely, moist and tender in a way that most midwest Swiss Steak is not. 

I think it's time for me to cook around a bit more in the Good Eats cookbooks. Thanks, Alton!

Cooking from the Books: 300 Under 300

The fame of Hungry Girl, a.k.a Lisa Lillien, is spreading throughout the diet food universe. I have watched her show on the food channels (this season it bounced from one to the other), and there is much to recommend. Hungry Girl cooks meals herself, mostly from scratch, but does so in a way that makes her recipes easily adaptable to cooking for one or six people. She takes common ingredients, such as toaster waffles, and makes them into turkey bacon and egg waffle sandwiches, or a low-cal take on chicken and waffles. Hungry Girl uses lots of fresh fruit and veggies, and is not afraid of new and unusual ingredients. Would you know a shiritaki noodle if you met one? I didn't until Hungry Girl introduced me to them.

I finally took the plunge and bought 300 Under 300: 300 Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner Dishes under 300 Calories because I prepare breakfast for just myself six days a week. Tired of all the old stand-bys, I decided to give Hungry Girl a try. The first 123 pages of this book's 542 pages are about breakfast alone--lots of ideas for me to try. And I fell in love with Hungry Girl's Egg Mugs. The basic recipe for any Egg Mug is easy. You take a large mug (low, wide-mouthed ones work well), microwave your veggies and other add-ins, pour in the eggs, and microwave in stages until done. 

For my first attempt, I took diced some onions and peppers and microwaved them in my mug for few minutes until they had sweated and were starting to get soft. Then I blotted them dry with a paper towel (Hungry Girl recommends this so you don't get runny eggs from the extra moisture), and then added some leftover, cooked turkey breakfast sausage that I had. Then I poured in half a cup of liquid eggs (you could scramble your own), and added some shakes of my favorite egg seasoning, Mrs. Dash's Table Blend. I microwaved the mixture for one minute. The egg was starting to set up around the edges of the mug, so I stirred it well, and microwaved for another minute. I repeated this process until the egg was cooked through and looking scrambly. Then I added some cheddar cheese on top, and gave a last 15 seconds in the microwave to melt. 

With this one cooking technique, you have endless possibilities. Any combination of your favorite veggies and pre-cooked meats will work. I tried these out one Sunday morning on my husband, who didn't care that his veggie-laden, cheese-topped scrambled eggs had not come out of a skillet. The only thing you have to remember is to soak your eggy mug as soon as you are done eating, or the microwaves hiding in the mug will permanently bind the egg bits to the surface, making sand-blasting necessary.

Next I am off to work my way through the Oatmeal Parfait recipes. Give Hungry Girl a go!

 

Cooking from the Books: Quinoa 365: The Everyday Superfood

The first time I saw the word "quinoa," pronounced "keen-wa," I had to look it up. I had no clue what it was: a high-protein, whole grain grown mostly in South America. Okay. It sounded funky, and NOT like something I could serve at my dinner table.

Then I cam across the book Quinoa 365: The Everyday Superfood by Patricia Green and Carolyn Hemming. It explains the history and nutritive value of this "superfood." Quinoa is a South American grain, that I found in the health food section of my local grocery store. It's expensive at $3-$4 a pound, but a little goes a long way when cooked up, and it provides more protein and nutritive value than the same amount of pasta or meat. It's also a complex carbohydrate that digests slowly and has staying power, and is gluten-free.

You can buy quinoa in red, black, or golden colored "seeds." In my recipe trials, I found that the golden cooks the quickest, and that there is no noticeable taste difference among the colors. It is also available as quinoa flower and flakes, useful for baking. It cooks like rice--you put the quinoa in water, boil, and simmer until the quinoa puffs up slightly and has absorbed the water. Buy quinoa that has been rinsed during processing--this removes a bitter flavor from its natural coating. Cooked plain with a a little salt in the water, I think quinoa has a slightly nutty taste, milder than wild rice. It works well as a base for either sweet or savory recipes.

The first recipe I tried out of Quinoa 365 was "Apple Strudel Breakfast Cereal." I followed the recipe exactly as written the first two times, and then streamlined it slightly. My version calls for:

• 1 cup quinoa
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 cup dried apple slices, cut into 1/2-inch wide bits
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1 6-oz carton vanilla greek yogurt
• 6 tablespoons sliced almonds

Combine the quinoa, water, apples, raisins, and cinnamon in a heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil, cover and reduce to  simmer for 30 minutes. This is almost twice the cooking time recommended by the original recipe, but I found that I prefer the quinoa a little softer after it absorbs more water. I stir it occasinally since the dried apples tend to float, and the raisins tend to sink. Once the quinoa has finished cooking, take it off the heat and stir in the vanilla extract.

 

I then divide it among six small round Gladware containers and freeze it. To reheat it, I pop the lid and microwave the quinoa and fruit from 2-3 minutes, depending on the microwave. Then I top it with a tablespoon of the vanilla Greek yogurt and a tablespoon of the sliced almonds. The original recipe added a tablespoon of brown sugar when the vanilla is put in, but because I use vanilla Greek yogurt, that sweetens the quinoa enough for me.

If you don't freeze the quinoa after it is cooked, the book says that it will keep for a week in the refrigerator. I am all about make-ahead and freeze meals, and love to be able to have a power-packed breakfast ready to go that just needs a few minutes in the microwave. I can eat the "Apple Strudel Breakfast Cereal," and then go to my hour-long spin class and have energy to burn!

In taste tests that I did with family and friends, my husband didn't care for the breakfast cereal version of quinoa, but he is not really a grains person unless it's oatmeal in a cookie. My more adventurous friends liked it, and thought it was a nice change from steel-cut oats cooked with dried fruit. I also tried the "Pumpkin Pancakes" where cooked quinoa is added to a pumpkin and spice pancake batter, cooked, and served with pecans and maple syrup. This was NOT a low-calorie breakfast option, but the pancakes were moist and yummy--the perfect breakfast for a snowy morning. And they also froze and reheated well. This book has other recipes for main dishes, cold salads, and soups. Now that I have found quinoa flour at the grocery store, I plan to jump from the breakfasts in the front of Quinoa 365 to the cookie and dessert recipes at the back! 

What's for Dinner: Leftover Bacon Ovation Meets Cooking from the Books: Around My French Table

When I was growing up, my mother reigned over dinner. Inside or out, she was in charge. My father simply "ruined" meat on the grill, so he came out on the patio with the platter to put the meat on the grill, and then escaped poolside with his "toddy" while my mother finished things off. However, my mother was never an early riser, so my father was in charge of breakfasts and school lunches. He packed a mean peanut butter and honey sandwich, even if it did leave me sticky the rest of the day. In high school, friends with cars would try and trade their McDonald's for my meatloaf sandwiches. His creation consisted of a thick slab of my mother's meatloaf between two slices of Pepperidge Farm white bread (the only kind of bread I ate until I went away to college) doused liberally with  French's yellow mustard--my father's condiment of choice after hot sauce. I love meatloaf sandwiches. So, when faced with about half of the lovely bacon-wrapped meatloaf left over, I immediately longed for a sandwich.

I bought Dorie Greenspan's new cookbook, Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes From My Table to Yours because I wanted to eat the cover. It shows a lovely chicken cooked in a pot with garlic and vegetables, that has had the lid sealed to it with dough. This cover makes me want cold and snow because it is not a dish to make on a 95-degree Iowa summer day. But with other recipes in this lovely cookbook that don't demand the dead of winter, I started flipping the pages. "Savory Cheese & Chive Bread" sounded good, but the alternate flavor options of" Bacon, Cheese, and Dried Pear Bread" sounded even better. After all, I had half a pound of crisp, cooked bacon left over from making the meatloaf, and lots of cheddar. And although I had dried pear in the house (a favorite of Daisy, the guinea pig), I decided that I didn't want to complicate the sandwich with yet another flavor.

The recipe is easy:

• 1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper (the recipe called for white, I had mixed colors in the grinder)
• 3 large eggs, room temperature
• 1/3 cup whole milk (I only had skim in the house)
• 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 cup grated cheddar
• 5 slices bacon, cooked crisp, chopped/crumbled into bits
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh sage

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and generously butter a Pyrex loaf pan. Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, and  pepper together in a bowl. Put the eggs in a small bowl and whisk for about 1 minute until they are foamy. Turn the thick dough into the buttered loaf pan, and bake for about 45 minutes, or until the loaf is golden and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool the pan on a rack for a few minutes, and then run a knife around the sides, and turn the bread out onto a rack to cool.

I over-mixed my loaf, and it was flatter than I wanted it to be. But that worked out okay because the slices were the same height as my slices of meatloaf.

For the sandwiches, I cut 1/2-inch slabs of meatloaf and put them between slices of the cooled bread with a slice of cheddar on one side, and, instead of mustard, a smear of the Famous Dave's Texas Pit Sauce on the other. Then I put the sandwiches in a metal pan covered with foil in a 350 degree oven. I turned them over after ten minutes, recovered them with the foil, and let the sandwichs bake another ten minutes or so. That way the meat was hot all the way through, and the bread crisped by the metal pan. Served with crisp, green grapes, it was a sandwich ever my father would have loved!

Wonton Maddness--A New Look at an Old Wrapper

A friend loaned me a cookbook early last November that included a recipe for Wonton Cups. The premise is simple. You take a muffin pan, spray it with non-stick cooking spray, and then lay a wonton wrapper down into each indentation to make a cup. This particular recipe called for a filling of what was basically the hot cream cheese artichoke dip that I love to eat with wheat crackers or celery. With the dip already in a wonton cup, the skin crisped up and the appetizer was a self-contained bite. I made them for Thanksgiving dinner, and they were a big hit.

In her book Pretty Delicious: Lean and Lovely Recipes for a Healthy, Happy New You, Candice Kumai goes one step further. In her recipe for Chinese Chicken Salad Chop Cups, she puts the wonton wrappers in the muffin tins, paints them with a light coating of sesame oil and salt, and bakes them in a 350 degree oven for 5-7 minutes until they are crisp. Then she makes a light Chinese chicken salad, dresses it, and  puts a tablespoon in each wonton wrapper. This way the wrapper and the salad are cold and crispy.

I like this idea, but I really liked the idea of a hot bite of food. And my husband prefers hot foods to cold salads. So I began to experiment with meat fillings for the wrappers, using whatever I had in the refrigerator.

I started with chorizo. I keep reading recipes that call for chorizo. One day my small-town grocery store had some in the meat case. I bought half a pound not knowing what to do with it. I sauteed it and tasted a bite. Spicy. Pretty fatty. Porky in a good way. I drained the meat on paper towels, and put it in a bowl. Next I went through the refrigerator and stirred 1/4 cup of a tomato-basil sauce left from a pasta dish, 1/4 cup salsa, and four ounces of grated pepper jack. Then I spooned this into 24 wonton wrappers sunk into my muffins tins, sprinkled a little bit more grated cheese on top of each cup, and  baked them for 10-12 minutes at 350 degrees. I served them with a plain green salad dressed with balsamic vinegar. The acidic greens cut the fat of the chorizo. My husband raved about them!

We only ate half of them (chorizo is not really a low-fat meat option, even when it's drained on paper towels), and froze the rest in a Gladware tub with the two layers separated by wax paper. Then I experimented some more. I went for a more straightforward Italian wonton bite with ground beef and diced mushrooms instead of chorizo, and grated mozzarella instead of the pepper jack. These I topped with a little parmesan cheese. "Nice," my husband said, "but not as good as the chorizo ones." I agreed that these were more mellow, although the snap of the wonton wrapper was still a nice contrast to the filling.

"They need to be crispy all over," my husband said. So next I tried a ground turkey version with grated cheddar and more tomato sauce. I precooked the wonton wrappers this time, but when I heated them with the filling inside, the bottoms got soft again from the filling. You can either have a cold, crispy wonton cup with cold filling, or a mostly crispy wonton cup with hot filling. I have been making them in batches and freezing them. To reheat, I just place the frozen wonton cups back in a muffin tin, and bake them at 350 degrees until they are hot all the way through--a quick meal with a salad after a long day at work. Next I am going to try Kumai's chicken salad and see what my husband says.

Cooking from the Books: Pretty Delicious: Lean and Lovely Recipes for a Healthy, Happy New You

So. The new year started off full of promise. Plenty of cookbooks and time to cook from them. Then February and March happened. Plagues and pestilence hit our house. Okay, everyone really just had the same cold over and over. But when family members are sick and their tastebuds are out of commission, no one wants to try that new cabbage a la orange recipe I found in a cookbook on my shelf. April was taxes (Bad!) and a long-awaited foodie trip to Vegas that my husband and I were long overdue for (Very good!). May was my daughter's high school graduation, and the visit of her gluten-free grandma. By now I have recipes from great cookbooks stacking up like airplanes in a fog and no time to write about them. Son moves home briefly between dorm and summer housing plans. House looks like Filene's Basement after a big sale--sweaty boy-clothes everywhere. He moved out yesterday, the washer is churning in the basement, and, at long last, I am here!

I work in a bookstore. Every fifteen minutes a new book comes out: "How to Eat Right and Lose Weight Without Trying!" "The Fast Food Diet" "The Carb-Lovers Diet" "The Carb-Haters Diet" "The Raw Diet" "The Eat Cardboard and Thrive Diet." Seriously, they make my head spin. Some of the changes I have made slowly in my life over the last three years are that I no longer eat fast food (except Orange Flavored Chicken and Chow Mien once a month), I have cut way back on the processed food I buy and eat (I am not yet to the point of making my own crackers), and I gave up Boxed Healthy Cuisine microwave meals for my lunches at work. Prepackaged microwave meals are expensive, and have too much salt and not enough food to keep me going. I do still buy frozen vegetables because there is such a fabulous variety now, and since I am the only person in my house eating four-to-five servings of fruit and veggies a day, it's just easier. I LOVE the Green Giant Veggies for one. They are already portioned and seasoned and play well with others.

I always look through these new diet books because I have to know them to sell  them. One of the problems I find is that a number of these diet cookbooks require you to have box mixes that you use 1/18th of for a single-serving cake. Or the recipe will begin: "Take a container of Cool Whip Free and add...." Now I am not above using box cake mixes or Cool Whip (although I prefer the Cool Whip Lite because it doesn't taste like patent leather). But I use them to supplement what I am making, not basing my entire food plan on boxes, mixes, and tubs of stuff.

And this is why I really like Candice Kumai's newish cookbook, Pretty Delicious: Lean and Lovely Recipes for a Healthy, Happy New You. Kumai is a professionally trained chef who is an alumni of Top Chef and was one of the co-hosts for Cook Yourself Thin. She is a cheerleader for what she calls "Foods With Benefits" (FWBs). Since we are what we eat, she recommends going old-school and cooking your own food--thinking outside the mac & cheese box. The first part of the books explains her code of eating, and gives list of FWBs, and what they can do for you. Then she divides the rest of her book up into meals like breakfast and lunch, and food types like seafood and sweets.

At one brief point between winter illnesses, I tried her "Creamy" Tomato Soup. This  is a very simple tomato soup to make using garlic, onions, dried herbs, canned diced tomatoes, chicken broth, and tomato paste. The "creamy" part comes from the addition of almond milk and greek yogurt--two foods that have become staples in my diet over the last year. Served with grilled cheese sandwiches, this soup packs a fresh tomato flavor. And during the February plagues, it made a nice break from chicken noodle soup. We also loved her Hollywood Burger which is a turkey burger with carmelized onions and sauteed mushrooms added to the meat with other seasonings before the burgers are grilled--excellent! Both of these meals used ingredients I had on hand. Starting with canned organic tomatoes and canned organic broths makes a soup that tastes much better than the tomato soup in a can that I was served as a kid.

So take a look at this book! It also changed the way I look at won ton wrappers...

 

 

New Year's Resolution: Cooking from the Books January

After I finished tidying up the spice rack and the kitchen cupboards, it was obvious that next I had to sort and reorganize my cookbooks. They inhabit two spaces in our house: my basement office where the majority are shelved, and my son's room. Ten minutes after he left for college a year and a half ago, I put in two new bookcases which are completely full. I like to say that I don't collect cookbooks, they collect me.

My husband had reason to be in my son's room over the holidays, and remarked to me that I have a lot of cookbooks that I have never cooked a single recipe from. He used the half shelf of Alice Waters/Chez Panisse cookbooks as an example. Actually, I have used recipes out of a number of those cookbooks, but since my husband--who eats almost everything I put in front of him--is not the first to dive into a dish of vegetables, he had not paid attention to the lovely beet salad or brussel sprouts and walnut dish that have adorned our Thanksgiving table for the last three years--both recipes courtesy of Alice. But he made a fair point. There are a number of cookbooks that I own that I have never cooked from.

I have several friends who made pronouncements the first of the year about how their new year's resolution was "to not make any resolutions!" Well, I am always trying to eat right and move more, so I took a different approach. I want my new year to include new things. So my 2011 New Year's Resolution was to pick one cookbook every week that I have not cooked from, and cook at least one recipe from it. I figure that with my work schedule, one recipe a week was possible. My son is at school, and my daughter prefers food in a paper sack from a drive-through window, so I am really cooking just for my husband and I. A main dish serves us twice with some lunches left over. (My 2010 New Year's Resolution was to give up frozen meals and make my own for work  lunches & dinners--that worked out really well.)

So here's what was cooking in January:

Week 1: Bobby Flay's Burgers, Fries, & Shakes by Bobby Flay with Stephanie Banyas & Sally Jackson

I gave this cookbook to my husband for Christmas, and somehow I ended up as the one cooking from it on New Year's Day (although my husband picked the recipe: Bolo Burger, a popular burger from Flay's Bolo Restaurant.)  This is a wonderful cheeseburger, topped with Serrano ham (I had to use prosciutto since it was the closest I could find), Manchego cheese, and a fabulous Piquillo Pepper-Smoked Paprika Aioli. I had never made aioli before since my husband tends not to like strong garlic flavor, but this sauce was a hit. Once the burger is assembled, it is grilled in the bun like a grilled cheese sandwich. The nice thing about this is that the bun is warm all the way through and the burger layers don't slide apart when you bite into them. I liked this cookbook. There is a full-page photo of each burger opposite the recipe, and they all look mouth-watering. The directions are clear, and easy to follow, even if I can't always find the exact ingredients in my corner of Iowa. My husband and I had the burgers twice, and we will have to try some of the fries and shake recipes.

Week 2: In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart by Alice Waters

Since Alice inspired my New Year's Resolution, it seemed only right that one of her cookbooks appear early on. This one focuses on basic techniques such as dressing a salad, cooking rice, and steaming vegetables. I chose a recipe out of the "Simmering Stock" section. I had the meaty bone left from the Christmas ham, and I wanted to make a soup with it. I made the lentil soup, adding my ham bone to the simmering ingredients. This was a straight-forward lentil soup with carrots, onions, celery, garlic, chicken stock and lentils. I though the one unusual ingredient was rosemary. I had never added it to a bean soup, but I liked the way it brightened the flavor of the soup. Even though the soup had bits of ham in it after I took the bone out, my husband didn't care to try it. I had almost a week's work of lunches from this batch. The cookbook is beautifully laid out as all of Alice's cookbooks are, but this one is very tightly bound, and hard to keep open on the table as you are trying to follow the recipes.

Week 3: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl by Ree Drummond

I confess I love buying cookbooks that spring from blogs. Maybe someday my blog will become wildly popular and grow up to be a book. Ree Drummond's book is an inspirational model. It has a warm and friendly tone, and the recipes are clearly laid out and tempting. I love the fact that she took all her own photos and includes pictures from her life on a working ranch, including pictures of her family and friends, cowboys, cattle, and wild mustangs. This book would be a fabulous gift for a new cook because the step-by-step photos make following these recipes a snap.

We had company one Sunday morning for brunch, and I made Ree's Breakfast Bowls--basically potatoes, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, onions, and seasonings in oven-proof bowls, topped off and baked with scrambled eggs and cheeses. I served them with French Puffs--a light and airy muffin that is dipped in melted butter and rolled in cinnamon sugar after they are baked--like fancy doughnut holes.  These recipes were such a hit, that later in the same week I made her meatloaf recipe. It was a pretty standard meat/bread/egg mixture made extra special by being wrapped in bacon and topped with a "tomato gravy," a blend of ketchup, dry mustard, and brown sugar. This put the meatloaf over the top, and my husband and I each ate two pieces. Every time we reheated the leftovers, the meatloaf got better as the "gravy" caramelized a little more. Yum!   

Week 4: Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson

I have quite a few of Nigella's cookbooks and cook from them regularly. (She provided the recipe for the Christmas ham mentioned above.) Nigella Kitchen is her newest, with a series on TV by the same name. I had a pound of ground beef that I needed to use up, so I checked to see what recipes Nigella had in this new book that would use it. I chose her Barbecued Ground Beef. This is Nigella's version of Sloppy Joes, that she recommends serving in a bowl as a dip for tortilla chips that have cheddar melted over them. I served them Sloppy Joe style in buns.

I must confess that I don't usually spend this much time and energy making Sloppy Joes. I brown the meat, squirt in some ketchup, sweet barbecue sauce, and some honey mustard, and am done with it. This recipe called for celery, carrots, onions, and garlic to be made into a paste in the food processor with 6 slices of bacon and some brown sugar. Then you saute that slowly in a pan until it's cooked through, and add the raw meat and seasonings and cook it again, finally adding tomato paste, water, and my friend, Worcestershire sauce. The final zinger that sets these Sloppy Joes apart from any others you may have eaten, are Nigella's spices: cloves and allspice. I have never used either of these spices in a meat dish, and they gave it a bit of heat. The recipe is definitely a keeper since my daughter ate two of them and called dibs on the leftovers!

Now I am off to think about what books to tackle in February....

 

Our Twenty-Fifth Wedding Anniversay

Last week my husband and I celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Sometimes my children seem to regard us as relics. From my daughter I hear: "All of my friends have four parents. You and Dad are still married." It is an accomplishment to be married this long, but we know other couples who have done it.

When we got married, the only thing I got to choose was the groom (which seems to have worked out). My mother was in charge of everything else. She hated my dress from a store she had picked. (I went with simple lace rather than the Scarlett O'Hara ball gown she had wanted.) She hated my veil made by hand by a woman she had hired. She picked a florist shop run by two older women with a 1950s design sense, instead of the trendy local florist I wanted. I had dreamed of a loose bouquet of bright flowers and roses. I got a perfect round circle of roses and mums, squeezed tight into an unnatural orb. I wanted chocolate cake. I got a  three-tiered white cake with white frosting and frosting roses on top from the caterer she picked.

It was a 110 degrees the morning we got married in Phoenix. We had a small breakfast brunch under a tent in my parents' backyard because my father was ill and this way, he could lay down in bed when he needed to. We had to stop eating in the middle of brunch to cut the cake, because, perched on its plastic pillars, it was starting to list to one side, Pisa-style, as the frosting melted. My husband has always said that the heat was the best thing about our wedding reception because no one dawdled after breakfast, and we got to leave on our honeymoon only three hours later.

So when my husband asked how I wanted to celebrate our 25th anniversary, I said that I wanted some kind of fabulous chocolate cake, a colorful armload of flowers, and some friends in for champagne.

First, I went to my favorite family-owned florist and ordered the flowers: a dozen yellow roses (my favorite) surrounded by other, colorful flowers. Then I ordered the cake.

I used to have a bookseller who worked for me at the Big Box Bookstore who also decorated cakes. Now he is so busy with his cake business that he is only in our bookstore cafe to meet and discuss cakes with his mostly-bridal clients. I had already been to his web page, http://www.tiptopcakes.com/, and knew Adam would make a fabulous cake. When he asked what I wanted, I said, "It will be easier for me to tell you what I don't want: white cake, white frosting, with frosting roses." I picked chocolate raspberry cake from his flavor choices, and let him go from there.

I was surprised and delighted by the cake Adam made for us. Two layers of moist chocolate cake with whole raspberries in it. Amaretto cream separated the layers, and there was a lovely base frosting over which Adam had poured rich chocolate. The top of the cake was crowned with an arrangement of fresh fruit: raspberries, blackberries, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. It was perfect! With a bottle of my favorite prosecco, a gift from our son, we had a lovely time sharing dessert with our friends, and laughing at our wedding pictures. We looked "much younger and thinner," according to our daughter.

I am sorry that my mother didn't live long enough to celebrate this day with us. Perhaps if she had been invited to an event that she didn't have to plan in perfection to the last detail, she would have settled down on the couch with a slice of cake, a chocolate- covered strawberry, and had a second glass of prosecco. And shared in the joy that has been twenty-five years of marriage.