Autumn

 
So, I'm still wearing shorts and short sleeves, but I was making plans for well into October and November, and then it struck me that autumn is one week away. The tomatoes in my garden are way past their prime. While it's not cool by any means, it's certainly not 100+ degrees anymore.

 

I believe it has something to do with the orbit of the earth.

The seasons march on, bringing us cooler weather, a whole different palette of flavors and vegetables, and wonderful holidays centered around eating.

So while I have a few autumn recipes built up already, I'm always looking for more. What are your favorite recipes to make in cooler temperatures? Put a link or a recipe in the comments.

It's been exactly one year . . . I know, don't tell me

Seriously, don't even tell me. I know it's been a year. One whole year (to the day) since last time I blogged about anything. I actually was going to blog about something last week, but then noticed it's been almost a full year, and wanted to get exactly to the day, because I thought that would be more poetic.

It's not that I forgot about you. It's more that I've been primarily eating spoonfuls of extra-crunchy peanut butter (thank you, Costco, for having mercy on us poor graduate students). And while I know there are plenty of things you can do with peanut butter, I haven't been doing anything that requires a recipe that I can give you. I've just been eating it straight from the jar. 

I have also been just a little busy: writing a dissertation; updating my house one agonizingly slow piece at a time; trying to be a good son / brother / uncle / cousin / grandson to my very large family; form meaningful and lasting relationships; running a stupid marathon, two half-marathons, and subsequently giving up distance running forever (I'll probably come back eventually, but we're taking a little break from one another right now); serving in my church responsibilities; planning for the future (this grad school thing has to end eventually, right?); traveling; developing my faith; and doing lots of other things with my life. 

So don't get me wrong, I love to cook. I love having dinner parties for a few friends. I love cooking-themed dates. I love getting in a big kitchen and presiding over a 4-course dinner for 55 (4th year in a row, coming up). However, the vast majority of my life is spent doing things of great or not-so-great importance away from my stove. While I love experimenting on and developing new recipes, it's just something I haven't spent a lot of time doing lately.

So here's the deal. I'm gonna' keep writing on this thing, sharing the good that I have found. Some of it may be newly developed recipes. Some posts may just be good recipes found elsewhere passed right along to you. Some may be commentary on life from the food's perspective (I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds kind of cool). So look forward to a new little twist on this blog, and hopefully some good eats in the future.

Here is just a little glimpse of some things that happened in the last year. I'm not even going to try to catch up, so this is all you get.

This wasn't that good, and now that I look at it more closely, it doesn't look that good, either. What a waste of perfectly good pine nuts. Sad.

Special thanks to AP for this amazingly fresh (straight from the CSA box), amazingly good little summer number. Go grab some fresh mozzarella and make this a part of your life.

I tend to buy spinach by the bushel, so I tend to try different things to do with it. Sometimes it's pretty good. Sometimes it's not.

I have been told that I have an uncanny talent for ruining perfectly good, traditional, Southern recipes. As I've said before, I care much less about tradition and much more about awesome, but not all southerners agree.

In all honesty, I don't even remember what's under that shell. Maybe chicken pot pie? And what on earth was I thinking with that design?

Warning: if you're going to start making Indian food, you need to own about 17 different spices that you've never heard of before. However, once you have them, you can make awesome things.

Why yes, there is a skull and crossbones made of puff pastry in this picture, thanks for asking. There's a story behind it, too, but I'm not going to tell you about it. I'm trying to let the mystery build.

Lessons learned from my mom

My mom may not be what you would call a gourmet chef (although after the kids all moved out, she has been producing some seriously impressive meals--her homemade pasta nowadays is amazing), but I have learned some very special lessons about food and life from watching my mom cook for my family. On Mother's Day, I thought I'd share some of them with you.

1. Use real whipped cream. Special occasions call for special food, and real whipped cream is just better than the fake stuff. Mom believes this. While she is one of the healthiest eaters and cooks I've ever met, that blessed dollop of home-whipped love is pure joy for Mom. It makes special occasions special. It makes fresh strawberries sing. It made her children very happy. You, too, can make your life better by using real whipped cream.


2. Like everything. I have never heard my mother give a blanket statement like, "Oh, I don't like _____" (except once she said she didn't like okra, but I think it's only because she hasn't tried this). With this fact in mind, I really don't understand how she produced the pickiest eaters in the world. Each one of us had long lists of things we didn't like, which we made very clear: no mushrooms, onions, peppers, squash, zucchini, green beans, cucumbers, asparagus, fish or any seafood, spinach, tomatoes, pickles, olives, and I'm sure lots of other things. However, Mom kept making it anyway, telling us that someday we would like them. You know what, she was right (I still think Lin will come around and eat onion one of these days).


3. Sacrifice for people you love. We had seven people in our family, and inevitably any sort of treat or dessert would come in packages of six. You guessed it--Mom never got one. The doughnuts or cans of soda or cookies or whatever would go to everyone else, with Mom hoping that maybe she could just get a bite from one of her often unappreciative children. I'm sorry to say that often, we didn't even notice. However, Mom ate the brown bananas after everyone else took the new ones. She ate leftovers for lunch when everyone else turned their noses up at them. And you know what, I never heard her complain. Ever. That woman is a saint.

4. Eat together. Imagine this battle: 5 children with entirely different schedules + business executive husband with constantly fluctuating hours vs. Mom's shear will. Mom wins. We ate dinner together as a family just about every night (Mom once told me that it wasn't even worth it to cook for only 5 people). We may have fought to the death to be out playing with friends or watching TV or any number of other things, but we ate together as a family. However, those moments at the dinner table together remain one of the strongest forces that built the love and unity we have in the family. Those precious moments with rice pilaf or orange roughy and brussel spouts showed me how much Mom loved us and was committed to us as a family. We belonged together, and she wanted us to know it and eat like it.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you.

What lessons did your mothers teach you from the kitchen?

From the earth, with love

There are a few little seedlings I call my own thanks to a community garden at church.

Come this summer, look forward to recipes with squash, zucchini, basil, red peppers, and heirloom tomatoes.

Does anybody know anything about convection ovens?

I hear convection ovens are amazing for baking and roasting, but that newbies will inevitably burn everything their first few times. The "learning curve" as they call it.

Any suggestions for a beginner?

Best Birthday Present Ever

Why use 3 utensils when you can use just one? That question was posed to me in the unexpected form of a recent birthday present from my brother.


My brother, the master gift-giver and chili maker, surprised me with this one. I opened the box and saw a gleaming, new, matching set of 8 stainless steel sporks. Yep. Sporks. The curious utensil chimera of junior high cole slaw fame. But wait; they have a serrated edge. It's a knife, too. Sporf? That just doesn't sound right.


But let me tell you that this things are right. They are perfect for potato salad, eating peanut butter right from the jar. Eating peas (they are perfect for peas). And they're even nice enough for company. I laughed, thinking they were a joke, but let me tell you, if you get invited over for dinner at my place, I'm probably setting the table with these bad boys.

Every now and again you just want a big slab of meat

You know those recipes that always say, "Have your butcher prepare the roast . . ." in any of 20,000 strange preparations that you're not really sure what they mean? I don't know about you, but I have plastic-wrapped foam cartons of meat. I don't really have a butcher.

Until now.

www.themeathouse.com

Instead of long, refrigerated bins of prepackaged meat, there are really, honest-to-goodness humans to will cut your meat for you however your recipe says. Heck, they may even have slab bacon which proved so elusive a recipe ago.

I have recently been on a kick trying to find more knowledgeable, dedicated food vendors (like farmers markets) in my area. Any favorites for local, high-quality food where you are?

I will never catch up

I am sorry I have neglected you for so long. It's not like I've forgotten you or wanted to neglect you. It's not like I've stopped cooking.

What has been stopping me from posting is this: the list. Every time I make something and get really excited about it, I say to myself, "Self, let's post this right away so everyone can make it at their homes and their lives can be better." And then I take pictures and I get excited, and then I look at the list.

It's the list of all the other things that I've made and taken pictures of but still haven't posted yet. In some cases, I have wanted to give them one more whirl to tweak some final proportion. In others, I just don't remember the recipe that well. In some, I barely even remember the event. In most, I just haven't written a witty introduction yet.

So with the New Year and all (sure, my resolution is a month late, but that just proves my overall point even more, doesn't it?), I have decided to just skip the list. Maybe someday I'll dig them out and give them to you, or if anyone really wants one of them, let me know, but I'm just moving forward now: not back.

So here are the ones that y'all missed. Some were pretty good. Some were only going to be filler anyway.

Cashew baklava. Non-traditional. Good.

NY strip steak will shallot apple cider reduction. This one has actually been mentioned a time or two on this blog, but it just hasn't been written down yet.

Shrimp and asparagus pasta with lemon garlic sauce (we needed something to do with the leftover shrimp)

Goat cheese with cranberry and roasted garlic. This is actually a guest post that I've just never gotten to. Sorry.

Honey hoisin blackened pork loin with Thai salad. Seriously good. Seriously a lot of work.

Almond-crusted chicken breast with lemon-ginger sauce.

Spinach-stuffed shells. Pretty good, but nothing to write home about.

Edamame with mint, lemon, and Parmesan. Really, that's all there is to it. Let's do the recipe right now. Take some edamame, add mint leaves, Parmesan cheese curls, drizzle with a little olive oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper. Done. Glad I got that one off my chest.

Braised shortribs on buttery grits with horseradish cream.

Bean and summer vegetable salad.

Grilled vegetables with pineapple, coconut, lemongrass sauce.

Do the prep first. That's why they call it "prep."

Life lesson learned: make sure all your ingredients are ready to go.  I have a great big band-aid on my finder right now reminding me that when the onions and garlic are sizzling on the stove, the moment for chopping tomatoes is past.  A very brief glance to the pan in the midst of my frantic, last-minute tomato dicing led to my beautifully sharp Wusthof knife slicing a nice little gash into my left pointer finger.

Seriously, people.  Just chop the tomatoes, then put the pan on the stove.  Your fingers will thank you. 

Tunes

What do you listen to when you cook? Do you have a jammin' out in the kitchen sing-along session? Do you just turn on whatever's on the radio? Do you have a set culinary playlist? Do you just let the simmering sauce sing to you?

I probably put too much thought into what the iPod plays as I cook away, but sometimes I am very particular. The other day, I needed my angsty love, Ingrid Michaelson. A week or so ago, (I'm embarrassed I'm even writing this down), ABBA was all that would do (if you tell anyone about that, I'll lie and deny it).

Tonight I came home to binge cook; I had three different meals going at the same time, outfitting myself with leftovers for the next week, and for the life of me, I couldn't decide what to listen to. It gnawed at me. So I just put the thing on random and let it go. It just wasn't right.

Tunes are crucial. What do you listen to in the kitchen?

New Toys

Williams and Sonoma was having a sale.

Hurray for me.

I haven't forgotten about you

I know it's been a long time since I've posted, and I promise it's not because of you. It's me (this sounds like a bad break-up, doesn't it? Perfect for valentines day).

I have just failed to come up with anything original and good lately, although I have had some catastrophic failures. Such as:

• Beef spareribs which tasted like they were braised in grape soda. Now mind you, I didn't use grape soda, but somehow that's what it seemed like. The poor cow died in vain.
• Butternut squash and blue cheese tortellini, which ended up a disaster. The skins fell apart, the vinaigrette was too sour, and it was all around depressing. However, I haven't given up on this combination yet. The mashed butternut squash with caramelized onions, blue cheese, and rosemary wasn't half bad. It's going to become soup this weekend, and I'm excited about that. I'll let you know how it goes.

• Brussels sprouts which should have been so good, because they had bacon in them (and bacon makes everything better, right?), but they just ended up being greasy and not good. I still don't know what went wrong.

• I don't even want to talk about the chicken curry.
  
• I am convinced that pear cobbler is impossible. Completely impossible. Under no circumstances (and trust me, I've had it under many circumstances, now) can I make it taste good. Nature has forbidden it.

So, that's the list of things I was excited about telling you about, but none of them turned out well. However, here are positive things in the future I hope will turn out:

• Tomatillo alfredo sauce with cilantro pesto. I'm really close to cracking the jackpot ont his one, and boy, is it good. Look forward to that.
• Grilled NY strip with shallot sauce
• Pear and asiago salad with winter greens
• Jumbo sea scallops with blood orange and sea beans
  

So don't feel neglected. I'll be back, soon.

Failure

Alright kids, I seriously don't know what went wrong. The picture looked so promising:


But the result was so bad:

That one little slice was the only thing eaten by a group of about 8 people. Truth be told, I didn't even want to offer it to them, but they insisted. No one ate more than a crumb, really. I am in no way knocking the recipe at all; it's from one of my favorite food blogs and I trust her entirely. I took a few liberties--none of which seemed immoderate at the time--and the result was bad. You win some, you loose some. This one lost.

If there's anything I've learned from cooking, it's simply to take failures in stride. They happen sometimes, and you just have to live with it. When dessert fails (as it has with me several times: this oh-so-appealing-in-the-picture clementine cake, the cantelope gelato--it was so good in Italy, but so bad here--and others), but whip up something else. If the vegetable ends up gross, just leave it out. Sometimes things are bad, and your guests deserve better than that.

Purple Potatoes

So, there really isn't a recipe here, just an awesome little kick I've been on lately. I love foods that aren't the color you expect them to be. Small disclaimer: it has to be natural, food coloring is cheating, big time--white asparagus = cool, green ketchup = sketchy.


I have recently discovered a new joy in life: purple potatoes. They sound ridiculous, but they are awesome. I just saw them in the store, picked up a few, and roasted them with some red potatoes, yukon golds, and carrots. It was a pretty amazing-looking side dish, if I may say so myself.


It just adds so much interest and depth to an otherwise rather boring dish or an otherwise drab-looking plate (it really perked up a plate of braised turkey breast and roasted potatoes, which would have otherwise been quite brown).


So now I'm on the prowl for other multi-colored amazing feats of nature. I've heard rumors of red carrots, but I haven't found them yet (if you see them, let me know). I've also seen white and purple bell peppers, yellow tomatoes, white asparagus, and yellow green beans (that doesn't really make any sense). Any favorites out there?

Raw Eggs

Life lesson learned: too much batter can be a bad thing.

One time I made a lot of chocolate chip cookies. Well, there would have been a whole lot of them had they actually all made it to the oven, but they didn't. I literally ate about half the batter (that's a lot). It's not like I pulled out a fork and just dug in, mind you. Things like this slip up on you unexpectedly. Just a little pinch there, licking the beaters, scraping out the very last of the bowl, that cookie that you thought would fit on the sheet but in the end it doesn't, etc.

Well, right quick my body let me know that it did not appreciate the sudden assault on it. Working in the public health field that I do, I have taken a lot of microbiology classes and read a lot of case studies on food poisoning, so of course my find immediately goes to raw eggs, salmonella, food poisoning, and death. I became concerned.

So, I did the first thing any rational person would do: I called my sister, a nurse. I asked her how long it usually takes for symptoms of food poisoning to occur. She listened intently like the compassionate health care professional she is, assured me that it usually takes several hours minimum for symptoms to appear. "You know, I really think that what you're feeling is just a result of having eaten half a batch of cookie dough. In all honesty, that's pretty gross."

Words to live by.

Menu: Formal dinner for 50

So, it went like this: it started as a pleasant conversation with my roommate. He asked a little favor of me. "Sure," I responded. "I'll throw together a little dinner for the ladies at church." Boy howdy, did I not realize what I was getting myself into. Cooking a 4 course dinner for 50 is a little different than making a pot of soup which would last me all week long. I made sure I had some good help, a lot of very large pans, and away we went.



There were a few trial runs, a few miserable failures (The coconut pumpkin soup sounded so good, but it was so bad; I still don't know what went wrong). There were many a batch of homemade vegetable broth made, 2 gallons of onion soup consumed in a week (I just couldn't bring myself to even look at it, much less make it again for 50 people), and more hours than a reasonable person would consider prudent spent surfing cooking blogs.



I must say, I am proud of the menu. I think the courses balance each other well: a little spice in the soup, a little citrus tang in the salad, a very herby, earthly presence in the main course, and then a not-overly sweet chocolate and berry homerun for dessert.

It was fun putting it all together, planning, experimenting, etc., but I don't know that I would go out and volunteer for these opportunities, if I were you.


Relief Society General Broadcast Dinner for 50
(pictures will definitely follow)

Course 1, Soup: Black bean soup

• I multiplied the recipe by 3, planning on rather small servings (it's a hearty soup). I served them in 9 ounce tumblers with a long breadstick and dollop of sour cream

Course 2, Salad: Mixed greens with carrot, radish, mandarin oranges, and French vinaigrette

• I had to remember here, this salad is just a cleanser to go from the spicy to the herby. Keep the dressing light and the serving size somewhat on the smaller end. No one wants to get full on course number 2.

Course 3: Entree: Herb braised chicken breast with a side of autumn risotto with caramelized apples

• The two of these pair very well together with similar flavors. Make sure you put on some parsley at the end, or some other colorful thing, or else you'll get a very bland-looking plate (and the food tastes too good to be bland looking).

Course 4, Dessert: Baked Chocolate Tart
This dessert is my old-faithful standby. I love it, and it loves me. This time I made a topping out of mixed berries (blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries). It's a romance that keeps getting stronger with age.