Yes, we are back to brown food again! I promise this is the last one for a while. At least until next Winter. And besides, for those of you who watch “The Worst Cooks in America” (my not-so-guilty-pleasure), as Anne Burrell says, “Brown food tastes good.” This brown food comes from my daughter’s future Mother-in-law. Joe’s favorite dessert is his mom’s apple crisp. So much so that he asked for it to be served at the rehearsal dinner for their wedding. But the crisp the caterer gave us to taste was subpar so, good mother that she is, Donna has agreed to make it for the ...
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VALENTINE’S DAY MARGARITA
Valentine’s Day. Hearts and flowers and chocolates, and cards filled with sentimental and silly thoughts. This is great fun when your love life is going well but can be downright painful when it is not. What Valentine’s Day needs is a drink. Not champagne with its celebratory edge. Something with a punch: a little sweet, a little heat and a lot of flavor. Good for the lovers, the between-relationships, the lookers and the hurters alike. It just so happens that I know of such a drink: a Valentine's Day Margarita. This concoction was created by Chef Adrian Ortega at ...
PINK PEPPERCORN AND CHOCOLATE POT DE CRÈME: A VEGAN VALENTINE
Those of you who follow me on Instagram and/or Facebook know that I just spent a week at Miraval, a Wellness Resort in the Sonora Desert outside Tucson. For those of you who don’t follow me, you should! Click Here for Instagram and Here for Facebook. (And for more on the Miraval experience, check my post under Adventures of an Asheville Cook) Anyway, it is a beautiful resort with food which manages to be mindful and delicious at the same time. They aren’t dictatorial about it. We weren’t prohibited from things we liked. You could get bacon and Diet Coke but the alternatives ...
COOKING WITH FRIENDS: BUFFALO CHICKEN MACARONI AND CHEESE
It’s hard to believe that I am sitting at my desk in the library of my new home! In front of me is a huge window which looks out on the front of my house. It’s 4PM and the sun is pouring in the other window to my left while Peat, my cat, sleeps on the sofa behind me. It is almost a year ago exactly that I started working on the design and layout of the renovation, nine months since we started the demolition and one week since I met the movers at my front door. Three days ago this room was piled high with boxes. My daughter, Abby, and I spent most of Saturday opening, shifting, sorting ...
TOMATO STUFFED ROASTED RED PEPPERS
This is such an inadequate title for this dish! Firstly, properly roasted red peppers are filled with umami. They just melt in your mouth and they taste divine making any dish you use them in even better. Couple that with the best garden fresh tomatoes of summer, some garlic and basil and you have a super easy, super tasty side dish that just screams of summer. I discovered this dish when we lived in England. It makes me think of long summer nights, children playing outside and dinner with friends. I can remember the first time I served them to my father. He was a man who ...
GAD ZUCCHS! (Part 1): OLIVE OIL ZUCCHINI BREAD WITH CARDAMOM AND DATES
I have such a conflicted relationship with zucchini. I have read countless tales of neighbors passing off the excesses of their zucchini crop to one another. I have seen beautiful expansive plants in my friend’s gardens. I have lusted after their zucchini blossoms and loved the gifts of zucchini bread. How hard, therefore, can it be to grow zucchini? Harder than you would think, at least for me. The first year, my plants never made it past a few feeble blossoms before developing a mold that had them brown, shriveled and goopy. The second year I moved them into raised beds and watched ...
CRYING CHICKEN: PERUVIAN CHICKEN WITH GREEN CILANTRO SAUCE
How do you love someone who loves someone who is hurting? Twice removed from the source of the pain, how do you help the helper? You cook for them. Over the vast history of man and the evolution of cultures, bringing food to those in need, emotional or physical, has been a source of comfort to the giver and the recipient. On a purely practical side, people need to eat. Food gives us strength. The world is a darker place when one is hungry and emotions are more difficult to negotiate. It was not just a funny joke when someone coined the term “hangry”. From a loving and loyal ...
WATERMELON PUDDING
Somewhere, somehow, while I was living overseas, the watermelon of my childhood disappeared. You remember the one? It was red and juicy and sweet like today’s watermelons but the seeds were big and black and part of the fun (as a child) of eating the melon was spitting the seeds out, best to do it to the ground or a plate but on occasion at each other! The other thing about those watermelons? They were big, very big. So big that you could buy one whole or you could buy a portion of sliced melon at the store. I come from a large family so chances were the melon would get eaten, ...
HERB GRILLED SALMON WITH CAULIFLOWER RICE PILAF
Last year around this time I was in Greenlife (Asheville’s hippie supermarket which is actually a Whole Foods Market but we all pretend it’s not) and they had some salmon fillets on wood planks all ready for the grill. I really wanted to try it but at the time I had no grill and no place to put one. This year I have a place to put one and I have a grill so I went back to Greenlife and even though they had nothing prepared I managed to score an already soaked plank and some salmon. And when I got home I went to town on it! Truthfully, I wasn’t expecting much so I didn’t take many ...
TURN THE BEET AROUND: BLUEBERRY AND BEET MUFFINS
I like beets well enough. I am not someone who raves about beets but I enjoy them in salads. That sentence pretty much encapsulates my relationship with beets. Outside of a salad, what can you do with them? The last time I tried to do something different with beets I used them in a 1980’s British dish called “Ruby Beef”. It was not a success. My family (read children) took umbrage at being offered beef in a pale pink Play-Doh colored sauce and, bolstered by their father’s similar refusal, held a full-scale rebellion. And that is where my experimentation with beets ended. Until this ...
