Continuing Monday’s theme of Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache mystery series, I thought I’d share some things from the publisher’s related blog.
There is a lovely selection of recipes and gorgeous photos to admire and to choose from for each of the books here.
There is also a PDF download of a short cookbook, The Nature of the Feast which includes a preview excerpt of book #12, The Great Reckoning.
My own Bistro-esque recipe below the cut:
Continue readingI’ve decided to share two recent family dinners, put together easily. The first one is a tiny bit more work than the second but they were both extremely satisfying. Give them a try.
Photos and recipes below the cut:
Continue readingExperimenting in the kitchen can be very freeing as well as inspiring. I sometimes feel very creative in other areas after making a great meal from scratch. For me, “from scratch” doesn’t necessarily mean a two-to-three-hour production. In the third photo below, the rice I used was Minute Rice. Both dishes can be made with leftover chicken. I used baby potatoes, but you could easily take the larger russets or reds and cut them into the smaller pieces, and again it’s a great way to finish your bag of potatoes.
Both meals used one pan and one metal bowl, and the second meal used a pot to make the Minute Rice. As I finished cooking something on its own, I moved it to the metal bowl until the next item was cooked and then everything was combined and simmered for a short time.
Continue readingI “met” Jamie Schler in the midst of the pandemic and through the former guy’s administration and our mutual resistance. She offered recipes from her home in Chinon, France and brought her followers along as she went (post-pandemic) to a family reunion stateside. I downloaded her free e-book, Isolation Baking, which along with Chef Jose Andres’ #RecipesForThePeople kept us creatively cooking while “trapped” in our own homes and kitchens. She makes an amazing assortment of homemade jams that she offers as part of her bed and breakfast at her Hotel Diderot in the beautiful Loire Valley. I’m looking forward one day to actually make her French Onion Soup, which is one of my favorite things to eat, and whose recipe I share below.
Jamie is generous with her time and love of food on social media and now on her Substack. She shares her techniques for making jam, which she does in abundance as well as recipes and insights. The jam is one of the highlights of the hotel’s breakfast and jam-making has been a hotel tradition since it’s early days of the 1960s. Each new owner has introduced new varieties of the jams, bringing the total to over 50 kinds.
The main building of the hotel dates from the 15th century. I can feel the history through the splendid pictures Jamie posts on her social media.
My family has made meatballs since I was small-ish. In time, I was expected to mix and cook the meatballs (and meatloaf) which my mother made with jar sauce. It’s okay – we’re not Italian. Her recipe is relatively simple (for either or both although I’ve changed up my meatloaf recipe cooking for my own family).
When I read Stanley Tucci’s 2021 book, Taste, I was a little astonished with how he described his family eating Friday night meatballs (his third favorite meal on Friday). In addition to his spices and bread, typical for his Southern Italian palate, they were rolled in bread crumbs, fried and eaten without sauce. That’s right. NO SAUCE. His family would add a green salad and crusty Italian bread with butter, and that was dinner.
Of course, they made many more meatballs than they needed for that dinner so they had plenty to add to Sunday’s sauce (ragu).
Fried meatballs with salad, no sauce, and Italian bread. Hmm. Okay, I thought to myself (and who else would I think to), maybe we’ll give that a try. And we did. My family wasn’t used to nude meatballs, as Stanley Tucci refers to them in his book, so we added a tiny, just a little bit of sauce for dipping, and they were happy. We’re planning on it again soon,
Other food things to enjoy:
The Kitchen Survival Guide by Lora Brody. I got this the first year I was married, and it was a lifesaver for someone who was a novice in the kitchen. Now that I’m a bit more advanced, I still use her recipes for perfect white rice, homemade cheesecake, cornbread, and other awesome and easy recipes. Ten out of ten would recommend.
Are You Hungry, Dear?: Life, Laughs, and Lasagna by Doris Roberts with Danelle Morton
And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend The Fresh Market‘s Big Little Meal. It is a full meal that feeds a family of four for $25. A great deal that we avail ourselves to often.
My husband put together a fabulous heavy-on-the-vegetables dish, and we had many extra vegetables, so I played around with what was left, and what wasn’t going to last much longer and this is what I came up with for one of our holiday dinners last month.
I heated up a wok with olive oil until hot. I would have preferred the carrots to be a bit thinner and longer, but with my daughter cutting them, she did them her way. They still tasted good. I threw in the rest of the snap peas, and then what was left of the grape tomatoes. I sprinkled in some lemon pepper and some chopped scallions to finish it off. 10/10 would make again.
Dinner included roast beef with gravy, potato slices roasted in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, rosemary, and basil, the above vegetables, and sliced challah bread.
The food pictured above, left to right by columns:
1. Caramel Cake for Mother’s Day, York Peppermint Patty, Rainbow Funfetti Cake Slice (just because).
2. Unicorn Cake Pop from Starbucks, York Peppermint Patty (yum), Tiramisu.
3. Chicken Paillard with Baby Potatoes and Blood Orange Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette (a cooking night on FB with my church, Brach’s candy egg (childhood memories of this candy, which is simultaneously the best and the worst candy ever), Homemade Meatball Sub.
It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to create in the kitchen, but having quarantine foisting Thanksgiving on us let me make the entire Thanksgiving dinner which I hadn’t done in years. Although to be fair, I do a similar meal for Easter, Rosh Hashanah, and Christmas.
This year we did a few things differently. For several years my sweet potato pie became sweet potato casserole, so I went back to the pie version, and it was really good and brought me back in time. We ate it both as a side dish and a dessert (on different nights).
Another dish I made was a new take on my mother’s candied carrots.
Here are the basics, but use your imagination.
The second dish I made just last week. We had cooked chicken tenders in the fridge and because my son cooked them, there was no spice whatsoever on the tenders.
I cut them each into threes or fours and threw them in a wok on medium, adding about half a small jar of Korean BBQ sauce.
I trimmed the ends off of fresh green beans and broke them in half, and added them to the wok, mixing the chicken and the beans until they were hot and incorporated with the sauce.
This was also a way to heat the cold chicken without the microwave. I spooned them over jasmine rice (although any type of rice that you like is the perfect rice).
One thing I noticed in looking back, I didn’t cook either dish with oil. Oil has its place in the kitchen especially in sauteeing, but I just used the juice for the first one and the Korean sauce for the second.
As the year comes to a close, start the new year with experimenting with your food. In January, I’ll have some basics to share with you – resources that everyone can use and adapt to their own style and family.
Being home in isolation has given many of us the opportunities to cook more, enjoying old favorites, trying out some new recipes, maybe experimenting a little. Before pork became less available, we had a delicious pork loin. For some reason, I like chutney with my pork. It works as a chunky sauce or spread on a sandwich, like that. We had some oranges that needed eating, so I made an orange chutney. It was lovely even if I was the only one who ate it.
A week or so later, we had some extra ground chuck, a blessing that is not happening this week, so I made some homemade meatballs for the next time we had pasta, an old standby for our family. After following the recipe below, I froze the meatballs, and will cook them as described at the end of the ingredient list after thawing them.
A friend of mine in Oklahoma is sending me (in about ten days time) a culinary chain letter. She’s making a starter, sending it to me, and I will be feeding it and then sharing it as well as making my own Friendship Bread. I’ve never worked with starter before, so I expect that I’ll be sharing the process with you once it arrives here.
Lastly, if you go on Twitter and follow the hashtag #RecipesForThePeople, Chef Jose Andres and his family cook very good, very simple recipes. Our family made the Angel Hair Pasta with Sauce that you can find in my COVID-19 Food post. On the Twitter hashtag, you will also see regular people like you and me (not internationally known, popular chefs) offering their own Recipes for the People.
One note: Cooking is not Baking. Baking is a science. The measurements of baking soda, powder, salt are specific for a reason. You really need to be a professional level of baker to experiment with baking in my humble opinion. I am not a baker. Cooking however can be very experimental. You’ll notice in the two recipes that follow that there aren’t any measurements. For something like these two recipes (and my meatloaf that I can share with any request at a later time) is generally a pinch, equivalent to a tablespoon. How much garlic do you like? Use a tiny bit less. If mistakes are made, it’s still good. You’ll learn what you like.
Enjoy!
Orange Chutney (see photo)
2 medium oranges, sliced, diced and crushed
Add juice from the plate to the bowl
Dried shallot powder
French peppercorns, ground
Ground cumin
Honey (about 1 TB, maybe a bit more)
1 TB Blackberry preserves
Nutmeg, grated on a microplane
Mix.
Serve over pork or chicken or spread on bread for a tasty sandwich!
Meatballs
Bread crumbs (about 1/2 cup)
Garlic
Pepper
Onion Powder
Penzeys Frozen Pizza seasoning (or use a mix of Italian spices)
In a ziploc bag, thoroughly mix these ingredients. Add fresh ground beef and mix it into the meat.
Saute meatballs in olive oil in a saucepan until brown. Add sauce (or ingredients to make your own sauce) and cook for twenty to thirty minutes.
Add to your pasta, then add a salad and a loaf of fresh bread, and you’re all set for dinner!
Chef Jose Andres, immigrant, restauranteur, activist, and advocate started a hashtag on Twitter during this quarantine: #RecipesForThePeople. He’s been posting recipes along with videos of he and his daughters cooking, showing how easy cooking for your family can be. It can also be fun, and a way to get closer to your family. One of the first recipes that I saw was Angel Hair Pasta with Tomato Sauce. According to Chef Jose, it takes less than four minutes to make, and so I got the ingredients I was missing (we already had most of these basic ingredients in our pantry) when I went to the grocery store for my next scheduled trip, and had my son help me make it, along with help from Chef Jose himself (through Twitter-video!)
It was amazing!
It was fast; it was easy.
The whole family loved it!
You can find the link (along with his and others’ recipes) as part of the Food, Isolation Style post, but I will also include the direct link to his Twitter here with a list of the ingredients.
Chef Jose Andres’ 3 1/2 minute Angel Hair Pasta
Ingredients:
1 box (16oz) angel hair pasta
1 bag fresh spinach
Olive oil
3-4 cloves of garlic
2 large cans crushed tomatoes
Salt, pepper, sugar to taste
A larger pan than I used initially – LOL
My version of Chef Jose Andres’ 3 1/2 minute Angel Hair Pasta with Tomato Sauce. (c)2020
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 