Provence Week: Two Food Network French Menus

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Jennie

Anchovies. I love them but many people want to “list them.”

Apparently I’ve been watching too much HGTV while I clean my house. I can’t decide if I love or hate Love It or List It. I’ve also been watching lots of Food Network since I can’t abide the thematic approach HGTV is taking with daytime programming. I miss Joan Steffend. Remember her?

Anchovies figure large in the recipes of the Provencal region because they are fished from the Mediterranean and are commonly used in bouillabaisse, pasta dishes, salad dressings, and toppings for breads.

The Food Network loves French cooking (or what purports to be French cooking).

Just this week there were two segments showing Ina Garten and Melissa Darabian making French meals. Although I haven’t yet made the full meals, they look relatively easy and something that I might attempt.

On the Ten Dollar Dinners show, Melissa Darabian presented a Provencal meal with a pizza, salad, and grilled pineapple. With the exception of the poached egg (I don’t do runny eggs), this menu seems doable. And the pizza has anchovies on it, but I saw several different versions of Pissaladiere online, including this one which may also be vegan. I’m hoping that some of my friends actually want to eat this with me when I make it — will they love it or list it?

I couldn’t find a photo of Darabian’s pissaladiere, but this photo (Image Credit) is part of a blog story about a young man going to culinary school. Gorgeous photos of the food!

Our favorite Barefoot Contessa also created a French Bistro lunch in a segment airing this week. Her menu seemed within my ability to recreate and includes Roasted Butternut Squash, a French apple tart, and Sole Meuniere. No anchovies in these recipes, though. What initially caught my eye was how she set the outside table in anticipation of her French-inspired party.

So this gets us back to anchovies.

One of my summer goals is to learn how to make my favorite salad dressings at home with ingredients I can control. I watched Ina make Caesar Salad with Pancetta in another episode, but it got me thinking about cooking with raw eggs. It seems like there has been an awful lot of food scares recently so I researched alternates for the raw egg in the Caesar Salad Dressing. There are a lot of opinions on this issue, including that only raw eggs are appropriate, but this one by Alton Brown looks promising. It uses tofu instead of egg for the thickening agent. And this one just flat-out subs the egg with egg substitute. Will I “love” any of these recipes or want to “list them” down the garbage disposal?

Still no anchovies.

I’ve always bought my anchovies in the tin, but Costco had anchovies in the seafood case that actually looked like fish instead of sun-dried tomatoes with fur. Has anyone tried them? Do they actually have the “anchovy flavor” or is the flavor we expect from anchovies actually coming from the salt-curing process? I’m feeling as though I’m probably going to stick with the basic tin of salty goodness — and I can get them in a six-pack from Costco practically for free. 🙂

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Adventures in Home Cooking continues next week — catch up with me then to see if any of these recipes actually worked — or try them yourselves and let me know what happened!

Food Cult: Pasta Bake in the Grill

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Jennie

This going back and forth between my two blogs is feeling kind of incestuous already…

On Saturday, my first full day of retirement, I made a nice dinner for Music Man (he actually did the grilling) and blogged about it here. Today’s post is to talk about using up the leftovers in our refrigerator for Sunday supper.

I decided to make a baked pasta dish using the leftover chicken from Saturday and some fresh mozzarella that was at the end of its useful life. I also had a pesto container that had a crack in it and I needed to get rid of the pesto. Voila! I had the beginnings of a really good supper.

Now that I’m on the cooking with the grill kick, I decided to try baking the pasta in the Weber. I remembered I had a cast iron skillet in the shed and cleaned and seasoned it. I put together the pasta dish, put it into the iron skillet, covered it with aluminum foil and baked it at 350 degrees for about an hour. Since the pasta and the chicken were already cooked, I was just melting the cheese and heating it all up. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of how cute the dish looked when served in the cast iron skillet. I was just hungry!

We also needed to use up a lot of bits and pieces of veggies, so I made a chopped salad and added the last of the spring mix. Finally, we topped off dinner with a mixed fruit salad.

Easy peasy once again! The whole meal took a little more than an hour to put together including pasta boiling time, and we enjoyed sitting outside feeling the breeze come through after a scorcher of a day. We also got two meals out of that lovely $5 chicken and used up stuff in the fridge that needed to be eaten. All in all, a win-win day.

Baked Pasta with Chicken and Fresh Mozzarella

1 bag whole wheat pasta (any shape will do)

1-2 cups cubed cooked chicken

1 onion, caramelized (I used the leftovers from the roasted chicken)

8 oz. fresh mozzarella cut into cubes

4 tbs. basil pesto sauce

1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/2 cup chicken broth

Directions

Cook the pasta to al dente and drain. Combine all ingredients in a baking pan, cover with foil, and bake for about 1 hour at 350 degrees. Remove aluminum foil for the last 15 minutes if you want a crispy top. Recipe serves four with good-sized portions, but we split it into two halves and froze the rest for another meal in the empty nest.

I’d also be forever grateful if you also stopped by Retirement 365 and give me some follow and comment love! Since I get about 80 hits on Got My Reservations every day because of this photo which I did not even take myself, my poor new blog is feeling very lonely over there. 🙂

The Irony of the Muffins

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Jennie

Over the weekend, I decided to make a batch of mini muffins, using a recipe featured by my niece on Vanderbilt Wife. I already had frozen zucchini and some leftover chocolate chips, as well as amaretto cocoa that came in a Christmas gift basket. Woot!

Image Credit

Unfortunately, the first batch I baked got too crispy on the edges because I baked them a tad too long. You should have seen Music Man’s face when I dumped them into the trash bin. I decided I HAD to make another batch, since we were entertaining a Cordon Bleu trained chef for dinner. I mean, really! How embarrassing to serve crispy muffins.

The next batch got the addition of wild dried blueberries, so we ended up with zucchini-blueberry-chocolate muffins and they were delish! I was careful about the time in the oven, and I had enough batter left over from the mini muffin trays to create three full size muffins. From thence comes the irony.

Tonight, as I opened the oven door after turning on the broiler for the chicken breasts, I discovered the pan of three muffins that had been forgotten in the frenzy to make a second batch of mini-muffins and then get on with our dinner. I had turned off the oven when I took out the minis, and the big muffins were only a little bit the worse for wear for a couple of days in the oven and a blast from the broiler. They were only a little crispy on the outside and still moist on the inside — a welcome treat with our dinner tonight.

In the words of the immortal Alanis Morrissette —

Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
Life has a funny, funny way of helping you out
Helping you out

Saturday Linky Love

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Jennie

I’m pretty excited that my niece, known out there in the blogging world as Vanderbilt Wife, is the new moderator of a Saturday link-up. I’m proud of her and of the success she has had as a writer, so I’ll be supporting her efforts on Saturdays.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, my goal is to connect you with some bloggers and writers that you might have missed, and will share stories that I think are worth reading.

For the word-lovers and haters among you, this post from The New Yorker discusses words that should be eliminated from the English language. Of course it’s witty and beautifully written; it’s The New Yorker! There’s also a warm tribute to Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys here that is quite touching.
I ran into Tracy at iOS Affairs this week when she visited my blog. I was entranced by her concept, All Apple, All Apps, All the Time. There’s a lot to be learned from Tracy (and a lot of time you might waste playing with her recommendations!).
Although I’ve been teaching English for fifteen years, I used to be a music teacher. I really enjoyed this look at student motivation and what we can learn from it in our classrooms.
If you’re not up on your Australasia news, you might not know that there is a Marmite crisis going on. Apparently a factory that makes Marmite was damaged in an earthquake and it’s big news that for the moment, stores are on their last jars of Marmite. The blogger made it REAL with her photograph.
I was really excited when I found that my friend Tricia has launched mini-meal planning at Once a Month Mom. With just two of us in our empty nest, the once a month bulk cooking isn’t really necessary, but I can make a recipe and freeze it in smaller units that we revisit twice in a month. Another thing I can try when I retire!
Finally, whenever I have a chance, I encourage people to visit my friend Michelle. Her gentle way of looking at the world of reading at The Great Read never ceases to inspire me.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Who do you think we should have read this week?

Food Cult: Thai Food in Vienna!

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Jennie

It was a nasty rainy night in March, and the restaurant was close to our hotel and close to the Opera house. Unfortunately, I can’t remember its name, but this is probably the restaurant. Whether it’s the right one or not, there’s nothing like a spicy satay and some Thai egg rolls to warm the cockles of my heart.

I’ve never actually been to Thailand, but in my somewhat limited experience, Thai food is pretty much Thai food, no matter where you go. If you’d like to try to make these luscious little morsels, here’s a recipe from Temple of Thai where you can also buy the makings if you can’t get the Thai ingredients where you live. Actually, I imagine you could probably live without the dried tree ear mushrooms and sub them out with some other kind of fungi. 🙂

I could barely type up this post without ordering out — we have a favorite Thai restaurant nearby and thankfully I don’t have to go to Vienna or Thailand to satisfy my egg rolls and satay cravings. Do you have a favorite Thai restaurant to share?

Book Club: A Table in the Tarn

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Jennie

France is probably going to be on my mind a lot during the next year; we’re planning another trip in 2013. That means it will probably be in my blog as well, since I mostly write about what I am thinking about. Not too much space between my thoughts and my fingers, actually. To paraphrase my favorite movie, Under the Tuscan Sun, “It’s my process.”

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Given that we’re going to France and I love food, I put my name on the list at the library for what appeared to be a very cool book — A Table in the Tarn: Living, Eating, and Cooking in Rural France. I mean, really? How could this be bad? I read all of Peter Mayle’s books about his experiences living in southern France and reviewed a couple of them here and here. Oliver Murrin’s book looked like it was worth waiting for at the library.

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I was right. It was a wonderful book, packed with personal stories of giving up the city life and starting up a bed and breakfast in southern France. It was also packed with recipes; about two-thirds of the book is mouth-watering ideas for fabulous eats. I was drawn to the Roquefort Tart pictured above — the recipe is here at what appears to be a blog on hiatus.

Imagine my surprise when I actually went to find the web site for Manoir de Raynaudes to see if we could stay there. It’s gone. Well, not actually gone, but sold to the highest bidder!

It appears that Oliver Murrin and his partner Peter Steggall went back to their British roots, bought a very old manor in southwestern England’s Somerset Levels, and operate it as a bed and breakfast. I’m pretty sure we’ll stay at Langford Fivehead when we do our southwestern England trip, which will of course include my pilgrimage to Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall.

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But that’s another set of books and another year of traveling. 🙂

How Many Degrees of Separation Are You From Me?

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Jennie

Last fall my nieces made this beautiful cake for my grandniece’s birthday. I was so impressed that I saved the photos for a blog post.

In my niece’s post (she writes as Vanderbilt Wife) she references her source for this gorgeous cake.

Image via vanderbiltwife.com

After I saw the photos of the birthday cake for my grand-niece, I ran across this photo either on Pinterest or on a link from my Facebook page.

Image via iheartbaking.blogspot.com

Since it was so similar to the other cake, I investigated where this recipe originated. I Heart Baking’s original post was about this gorgeous roses cake.

Image via http://i-heart-baking.blogspot.com/2011/10/roses-cake.html

Lo and behold, eventually everyone referenced back to I Am Baker, who posted the tutorial on how to do the rose frosting.

Image via http://iambaker.net/vertical-layer-cake-tutororial

She also posted a tutorial on how to do the vertical layers. Amazing.

This nest of link-ups is an example of the ethical dilemma we bloggers are presented with daily. Do you always cite your sources for both text and photos? Are you labeling your photos? If someone wants to steal your work, they will find a way, but I’d like to think that we have an obligation to each other to protect our craft.

Each of these ladies shared their talent and creativity with the world. I was happy to find that everyone involved in this degrees-of-separation scenario eventually linked back to their source. Talent, creativity, and ethics. I’m proud to be one of you.

24 Days of Christmas 2011: British Christmas

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Jennie

Having enjoyed many Christmases with our English friends over the years, we have begun to include some British customs and food into our Christmas celebrations. Mince pies, Christmas pudding with brandy butters, the Queen’s Christmas Message, and Christmas crackers are all fun ways to shake up your family’s customs. Crackers can be found at most home goods stores, such as Crate and Barrel, and good groceries carry Christmas pudding, mince pies, and brandy butters during the Christmas season. We have a wonderful British store near us in Long Grove called British Accents which carries many British foodstuffs and gifts all year long.

I might even try to make the mince pies myself from this supposedly easy recipe, and this recipe for Christmas pudding is made without the traditional suet. If you’re going to try Christmas pudding, it’s time to make it so that it can age. Here’s a quick version if you don’t get around to making it until the last minute. Don’t forget to buy the brandy so that you can set it on fire when you serve it!

While you’re cooking or driving around in your car buying all of your British Christmas items, I suggest listening to some traditional British music. These were all available at my library.

Adeste Fidelis! Christmas Down the Ages was recorded in 1996 and features the English soprano Emma Kirkby, who specializes in early music. I was surprised to find that Amazon actually has a Westminster Abbey Choir “Store” where you can purchase both compact discs and MP3 recordings by the choir.

Although it is not strictly a British box set of Christmas music, The Baroque Christmas Album is a compilation of recordings from important early music performance groups. This album is also available in MP3 versions from Amazon.

Musicians from the Academy of St. Martins in the Fields under the baton of Neville Mariner – what’s not to like? Christmas with the Academy is a listener’s delight and is also available in CD and MP3 formats. If you’re in London by Trafalgar Square, stop in to see what’s going on at St. Martins in the Fields. There’s a nice cafe downstairs in the old crypt and you might catch a concert or a rehearsal as we did the day we visited.

All on a Christmas Day is a collection of Irish Christmas music performed by Jimmy Keane and Robbie O’Connell, so I suppose for the Irish purists out there, this album doesn’t belong with a post entitled British Christmas.

If you are a history buff, I encourage you to watch this video of Queen Elizabeth’s first Christmas Message in 1957. It’s fascinating. The Anglophiles among you may also be interested in the videos at The Royal Channel. Who knew?

Just in case you haven’t had enough, here’s last year’s 24 Days of Christmas post.

Food Cult: Oyster Dressing

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Jennie

As we enter our week of Thanksgiving and gluttony, I would to pause and give thanks for the many creatures that give up their lives for us at this time of year.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/for-the-moment-finding-pearls-in-paris/

Insert. Silent. Pause. Here.

My little family band gets together with my brothers and their families on the day after Thanksgiving. We have been doing this since 1976; I have not prepared a Thanksgiving meal in my own home since then. Every year, we drive the 600 miles round trip to be with our family to celebrate both Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year we decided to forego our gift giving to each other and donate to Heifer International instead. We’ll still be giving gifts to the young ones, and it will be fun to see them open their presents. We also sing Christmas songs — we are THAT family that could make our own Trapp Family Singers — and I’m looking forward to hearing three-year-old Libbie sing her part in The Twelve Days of Christmas.

For me and some of my family, it just isn’t Thanksmas without oyster dressing. It’s unclear where our family recipe comes from, but my mother started making oyster dressing for our holiday gatherings a long time ago. In fact, I can’t remember when she didn’t make it. It was just always there.

My mom passed away in June, and as the eldest child, it has become my job to bring the oyster dressing. I’ve been making it for events here in our Chicagoland home for a while, but no one loves oyster dressing as well as my brothers and I do. My niece Jessica wrote about our family recipe on her Vanderbilt Wife blog, calling our treasured oyster dressing our “grossest family recipe.” I beg to differ, but as she is allergic to clams, I wouldn’t want her to get sick on oysters. I do, however, want to share the recipe for what I consider to be the crowning glory of our holiday buffet table.

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Another recipe can be found here: http://whatscookingamerica.net/Seafood/OysterDressing.htm

Grandma’s Oyster Dressing

Cooking spray

Four cans frozen or canned oysters (fresh would be fine, but not necessary)
Four ribs finely chopped celery
Four cans mushrooms
One box saltines crushed
one pound butter pats
About two cups of milk

First spray a 4.8 quart (15″ x 10″ x 2″) rectangular casserole dish with cooking spray, and then add a layer of crushed crackers. Begin layering the ingredients. After each cracker layer add some milk and the juice from the mushrooms and oyster cans. You should have about four layers of crackers and three of “goodies.”

Cover it with foil so that it doesn’t dry out and take the foil off for the last 15 minutes so the top gets a little crusty. Bake at 350 degrees for at least an hour until the texture is puffy like a souffle. It is okay to prepare it in advance and let the liquids sink in.

A large Pyrex casserole dish will serve eight people comfortably as a side dish.

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And just we’re clear about the popularity of oyster dressing, even the fabled Ree Drummond published a recipe for Oyster Dressing on her Pioneer Woman blog this week. I’m not alone in my love for this succulent awesomeness. Ree’s is a little different from ours; hers is more like traditional tossed bread-cube dressing. Grandma’s Oyster Dressing is more of a souffle-like scalloped oysters. It might be fun someday to make both recipes and see which one we like better!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’m going to take a week off and enjoy my holiday with friends and family. Safe travels to you.

P.S. I’ve been collecting ideas for 25 Days of Christmas — I can’t resist doing it again this year!

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Provence Week: Two Food Network French Menus