Normally I leave the sweets to my sweet. But every once in a while I venture down the avenue toward a dessert. This one turned out pretty tasty. I was sort of flying by the seat of my pants, as I often do, and I managed to turn out a tart-like crisp that I could be proud of. I had planned to make this for the Royal Foodie Joust, but I had not been feeling very well over the past few weeks and I didn’t get a chance to enter it. I made it nonetheless for our enjoyment and enjoy it we did.

There is nothing really special about it, just some mangos, raspberries, a crunchy topping, and viola…add the obligatory scoop of ice cream and you’re in business!

Read more »

I want to be very clear about this, I don’t know a thing about Asian cuisine. Not one thing. I do know that when I spoke to a coworker who went to China for a graduate school trip, she told me that the food that we are used to eating at our local take-out is not what she experienced in country. Wow! No General Tso’s chicken? Um, no… She told me that it was really different.

Now here in the Atlanta area, we have an area which is predominantly culturally Asian. For those who are familiar with this area, I am speaking of the Buford highway area; or at least a small part of it. That area also has a rather large Latin community as well. It isn’t like it was for me when I lived back home in Philly where we had a Chinatown. I guess this area is similar, just not nearly as large or as pronounced as Chinatown in NYC, Philly, or San Francisco. I do know that the food I have experienced in all of those places is very good, but I really have no idea just how authentic it is.

That being said, I still have the good fortune of having a really, really, good Chinese restaurant just around the corner from my house where my favorite dish is their House Egg Foo Yung. This comes to me piping hot with pork, shrimp, chicken, in a really tasty omelet smothered in a really tasty gravy. Oh, how I love this dish. You know, you know, I plan to make it.

Well, this past week has been filled with pain. I had an attack of gout which left me sleepless for 42 out of 48 hours. My ankle swelled too the point that I call it a “Hobbit foot", and I am still having a horrible time walking. I worked from home for 6 days, then gimped into work for one day this week. I tell you, I would not wish this “King’s disease” on anyone!!!

I did manage to make a nicely tasty stir-fry dish using a throw together of vegetables, chicken, and a handful of cashews. I would call it “cashew chicken", but I am pretty sure that since I made the sauce from a variation of a Moo Goo Gai Pan recipe, it wouldn’t be appropriate. No, this was simply my putting a bunch of stuff together into my new wok and enjoying the result. It was indeed, not authentic, but very, very good. Better than any take-out, in my opinion. Feel free to try my recipe and call it authentic; as in an authentic take on what we believe to be Chinese food. At least it was cooked in a wok. I would have fried some ice-cream if I knew how. Is that even authentic?

Read more »

Well, we’ve dumped our ISP. They came back on line on Tuesday with a really, really weak apology, something to the affect of “we’re sorry for any inconvenience the outage has caused…” What?! They went dark with no notice and there was no way to contact anyone. Their business office is about a mile from my house and there was no one in the office, the doors were locked, and no communications, even to their parent company’s home office in California. Oh, the irony of that was, their parent company, Next Phase Wireless, answered the sales extension with a human who had no information, but the technical support extension was greeted with, “all circuits are busy"!!!!

In any case I am able to post again. My blog is hosted elsewhere which is why the blog was still up, but I had no Internet access except from work and I could not do blog work there. That could be trouble.

This post has me most proud though, especially after Claudia busted my chops for the lasagna rolls. You see, I had poked her at her site about making her own pasta and then here I was using dried noodles. Methinks me a hypocrite. I got pasta attachments for my KA mixer at Christmas and have yet to use them. Until now that is. Let me tell you, it was extremely easy and the pasta was noticeably different, and by that I mean much better. The texture and the flavor were definitely superior to that of my normal 12 year-shelf-life dried pasta I buy in the super market. A huge difference! I am not just drinking the do-everything-yourself Kool-Aid here people, I mean it, it is much better. And so very easy.

It took, all total, about thirty minutes to make the dough, roll the dough, cut the spaghetti, and get it on the drying racks. Thirty minutes! It is worth it.

So what better way to inaugurate my attachments than to relieve them from their garage captivity, and make a classic dish that I have never made before; spaghetti alla carbonara? It seemed like a fairly easy dish to compose. Since I had recently purchased a nice sampler package from La Quercia which included some really nice guanciale, the traditional meat in carbonara, I figured this had to be done.

So, please try your hand at making pasta. If I can do it, most anyone can. I give you my interpretation of spaghetti alla carbonara con pasta fresca.

Read more »

Greetings readers. I try to post at least twice a week, hopefully delivering something worth while in the process. I really appreciate all of you who stop by and offer your thoughts and critiques; I really mean that.

No, I am not signing off; however, my what-used-to-be-wonderful Internet service provider has gone dark with no explanation. All of the sudden, last week, while Beck, who works from home, was working, there was nothing. “Page cannot be displayed.” It has been that way for several days. The company is local and their doors are locked! No explanation! We cannot get through to their support line because they have VoIP. Needless to say, I am a bit miffed at this business practice.

I have been reading a thread at DSLReports, and it seems that SpeedFactory.com, my provider, has a billing dispute. Hmmm, that translates to they didn’t pay bleeping their bill! This really burns me up.

In any case, I will be scurrying to get a new provider despite the fact that my old one may come back online. I have been cooking up and photo-ing up so I should have some decent culinary experiments to share with you all in the near future.

Thanks!

Ah…ubiquity; allow me to perpetuate it. So perpetuate it I shall! It really isn’t copying, copy-cat-ing, or stealing, or whatever. What this is, is, depending on what your definition of is, is, is, cooking a dish that, in one way, shape, or form, has been spotted all over the blogosphere. It is, in my mind, similar to the eloquently described traffic reports on the radio by the late Keith Kalland, the “ubiquitous ladder in the road", for our Atlanta rush hour. No matter what day your are traveling, no matter where you are on the road, if it is morning in the ATL, there is a friggin’ ladder in the road somewhere! And, believe me, there was.

The thing is, about this dish, despite its appearance in many a blog, the dish itself was as uniquely created as the blog owners themselves. I found at least five or six really good looking renditions, and then some that were not so good looking. That doesn’t mean for a second that they were not tasty though.

Here is the deal, I saw this post and my obsessive foodie brain kicked into devilish mode; how can I make that, how can I make that my way? Now I have made a mean seafood lasagna several times in the past, but the idea of the rolls of the lasagna pasta was a true calling this day.

So I gathered some really good, fresh, hot Italian sausage, some fresh spinach leaves, and the lot of really decadent cheese and butter to assemble this rich, rich, dish. Despite the size of each roll, Beck could only eat one. And I, having a mere two, immediately fell asleep following the devouring session; which is not so uncommon for me. I rate this dish a 5 on the sleepy scale of 0-5!

Read more »

I have heard about it. Pad Thai. Traditionally it’s a street food. I’ve seen it in restaurants. I’ve eaten what seemed to be it, but was more of a sweet, brown, gloppy mess of it. Pad Thai. So I wondered, what does this dish really taste like. Is it a brown sugar, sour, gloppy mess of noodles and seafood or chicken? Actually after reading about it at Chez Pim’s blog, I thought better of this crappy dish that I had eaten at the cheap franchised restaurant. This dish can be elegant and quite the thing of beauty. Although, after I read Pim’s method and recipe, I again, got a bit intimidated. How was I going to do this.

You see, I have a wok, yes. My baby sister(well grown now, but still a baby to me), gave me a wok for Christmas several years ago and I was determined to use the thing. It isn’t that large, only a 12 incher, and I had to make at least two servings of the Pad Thai. I have never stir-fried anything, believe it or not. I tried to make fried rice once and that’s when I learned that the rice is better the next day; I can’t just make white rice and then throw it in the wok with an egg, NO! I mean, it can be done, but it is better the next day.

With this dish, I had to hunt down tamarind paste. WOW! I have no idea what it would have been like to hunt down actual tamarind! I found the paste at Whole Foods where I also found palm sugar. It was coconut palm sugar, but that was just fine. The sauce turned out perfectly. I also embellished on the proteins, I used tofu, shrimp, and chicken. I cannot express how impressed I was with myself with the end result. Beck and I were discussing buying a pizza as the sauce was simmering because it really didn’t taste like anything that we wanted to eat. So we pondered the pizza and the sauce simmered. Beck said, “give it a try, see what happens.” I concurred and proceeded to make the Pad Thai. What turned out was a new family favorite and is now in the regular rotation. I give you my version of Pad Thai.

Read more »

So I’m reading this post over at Blue Kitchen and as I was salivating over the duck fat roasted potatoes, I decided that I was going to have to have some. And since the pictures weren’t edible, I was going to have to make them myself. First, obtain duck fat! Well, of course, it isn’t to be found in the super market. I logged to Amazon.com and found a jar. Yeah, $14 for 8 ounces! Please! Of course there was a better way. Cook a duck. I mean, I like duck. I pan roast breasts all the time. How hard could roasting a whole duck be right?

Well…

I had to do some research. I bought the duck from Whole Foods. My WF only carries Pekin duck. So that’s what I went with. During my research, I found a lot of head spinning, confusing, methodologies and opinions about roasting a duck. Then, despite my initial optimism, I began to feel a bit intimidated. Some roast high and fast, some boil the duck first, some pour boiling water over the duck to tighten the skin, some will not roast a whole duck, they cut it up into parts and find uses for it that way. Some say the best way to roast a whole duck at home it to not. Some say to roast the dusk until the breast are done, then serve them, and return the duck to the oven for the legs to finish. Are you getting all of this? All I want is to get some duck fat, and in the process, have duck! This was becoming information overload.

I settled down, had some wine, and decided to think about it. It’s a bird that needs to roast for a while. It is full of good fat, but fat nonetheless. People burn up the home roasting them. (don’t fact check me on that) So I concluded that I would use a low temperature and slow roast it. The thought of rendering fat at 400+ degrees sorta makes me uneasy.

Well, my method was a success. My oven immediately need cleaning when it was all said and done though. It sounded like mortar rounds exploding every now and then in the oven as the coveted fat was rendering. Next time, I will periodically siphon out the fat during the roasting process. At one point I opened the oven and POW! Fat at-cha. Despite the fat combat zone, this duck yielded me almost 13 ounces of fat!

I also used my convection roast option. I read that convection would dry the bird out. It did no such thing. After about 2 1/2 hours, I had crispy skin and juicy duck. Oh and that broccoli you see in the picture is Francois’ Sicilian Drowned Broccoli from FX Cuisine. It was delicious as well; I highly recommend it.

Read more »

Ranch Gordo Good Mother Stallards are the beans that you see there. They were unlike any beans I have ever eaten. The pot liquor alone was worth the price of admission. They were tender but not mushy and really, really buttery. I soaked them for about 4 hours and then let then simmer for 3 hours with a ham hock. These ain’t no ordinary bag’o beans from the supermarket. The folks over at Rancho Gordo call them their “come back” beans. Now I can see why. If you try any of the RG beans, let them be the these.

Oh yeah, and I made some pork chops…

I wanted to try the method that I read about at Cooks Illustrated. They illustrated the results of cooking the chop quickly starting with a hot pan and cooking the chop slowly starting with a cold pan. The hot - quick method yielded 5 tablespoons of juice left over in the pan whereas the slower - cold pan method yielded only two. If the juice is in the pan, well, it ain’t in the chop. Since I am not a fan of this so called “enhanced” (read: injected with salt, water, and who knows what else) pork, I used natural pork chops. When I buy pork, I don’t think it should come with an ingredients label with more than pork as the ingredient. I can enhance them myself. In an effort to make them even more juicy and flavorful (read: enhance them) I brined them in a maple syrup mixture. Topped with a quick Dijon mustard pan sauce, these were some juicy, tangy, chops.

Read more »

There are plenty of items that I love on a Mexican retaurant’s menu, hard tacos de carne, burrito supremo, taco loco, queso fundido, and a bunch more. But there is nothing I like more than a chimichanga. It is really quite basic yet I understand that in Tuscon Arizona, the “chimi” has reached celebrity cult status. It is simply a burrito filled with beans, beef or chicken, and deep fried. Restaurant after restaurant in Tucson have their own variation of the chimi and naturally each claiming to have the best.

Where chimichangas were invented is impossible to pinpoint other than to say it was probably somewhere in a Tucson restaurant. Legend has it that either Monica Flin or Cameron Strukoff, circa 1922, accidentally dropped a burrito (some say pastry, but burrito fits better here) in the deep fryer and uttered a swear word aloud. With young family members around, she changed the word to “chimichanga” which is supposed to be the Spanish equivalent of “thing-a-ma-jig.” Other restaurants claim to have invented it in the 1950s. To me, it’s only curiosity as to the chimichangas historical origin; I mean I never researched a taco.

This is another one of those things I usually only have in restaurants that I decided I can make at home. I have a deep fryer, why not give a chimi a try. Well, you can tell by the pictures that it was a success. I teamed the chimi up with the usual suspects, guac, sour cream, and pico de gallo (salsa would be great here as well). I also made tortilla chips and re-fried beans. The beans went into the chimichanga and were enjoyed as a side dish along with Spanish rice.

Read more »