Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Cookin' Pix are Up!
Chicken with Lemon and Olives
Grilled Chicken with Mango Salsa
Beef Tamale Pie
Coyote Fettucine with Chicken, Red Pepper and Red Onion
Chicken Pasta Casserole with Broccoli and Cheese
. . . and I threw in a few goodies, just because I'm so grateful for her business:
Bread with Oats, Bulghur Wheat and Sunflower Seeds
Irish Root Soup
Speculaas Cookies with Coffee Glaze
Sounds yummy, huh? Enjoy, and feel free to email me for the recipes!
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Ingredients for Chicken with Lemon and Olives: olives, olive oil, lemon, onion and flat leaf parsley
Ingredients for Beef Tamale Pie: Sauteed ground beef with seasonings, roasted corn kernels, onion, cheese and cilantro. Tortillas are stacked in between filling.
Ingredients for Coyote Fettucine: tomato, red pepper, red onion and cilantro. Not shown is the chipotle pepper that gives the dish its Southwestern flavor
Ingredients for chicken pasta casserole: sauteed onion and mushroom, broccoli and cream sauce with sherry
Lovely roast chickens for my chicken pasta casserole with broccoli and cheese. Note the browning -- that's the result of brushing them with butter and Karo syrup. Your tip of the day!
Mixing the bread: white dough with oats, bulghur wheat, and sunflower seeds
Ingredients for Irish Root Soup: Leek, Carrot and Sweet Potato
Mixing the powdered sugar glaze with espresso for Speculaas with Coffee Glaze
Speculaas with Coffee Glaze, and Bon Appetit! More ideas for the next big cookin' marathon . . . stay posted!
Cookin' Weekend Photos Comin'!
So while we're waiting, a bit of background on me, my favorite subject. Some time after I had completed work at Casa Mexico (see below), finished college and a starter marriage, and had gotten going on a graphic design career, I met my future husband at Syracuse University, which hosted a "long distance" graduate degree in Advertising Design. This was a good thing, as he lived in Racine, Wisconsin, and I was in Syracuse, taking advantage of the free tuition benefits afforded me by my employment status, which probably included "hardly working", as you may guess from the previous post. When I laid eyes on him in TV class (his TV commercial was a public service announcement for drunk driving, called "Don't Get Smashed", and included a hammy fist smacking a beer can into something resembling a metal pancake), I knew he was exactly my type. But alas, why couldn't I meet a nice guy in Syracuse like that, not one that lived in WisCONsin, already? It was like a foreign country to me. I had never been west of Buffalo.
A year and a half later, I wasn't worried about the long distance factor, as I had managed to opportunistically weasel my way into his freelance graphic design business, and become, as he liked to say, his "business partner" (I preferred to think of my official title as "fiancee"). In 1987 we rented a little house in a suburb of the city, opened a little office, set up our little Macintosh computers, and WHAM! Everybody came runnin' in the door for computer "electronic layout", so new, so cool -- and contracted us to work on BIG projects, like parts catalogs for Massey-Ferguson, totalling hundreds of pages. Being a little fish in a little pond worked well for the business, and before we knew it, we had four employees, two high resolution printers cranking out films all day long, more billings than we could keep track of, and multiple headaches, due to the fact that we never slept, ate properly or had any social life. Ah yes, those were the days. Thank god they're over.
These days I enjoy a much more serene and moderately paced lifestyle, which affords me many hours for enjoying my favorite hobby, cooking. A hobby which was a business at one time, but which flopped miserably, due to the midwestern location, and mostly the fact that the residents of this area like to squeeze their nickels until they scream. It's a pastime kinda like tipping cows, except that they do that in the Plains states, not here. So check the photos in a day or so, I promise they'll be up and running.
A more recent photo (those are not our dogs, however -- we rented them and the umbrella drinks for the photo).
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Welcome to my blog
So one day while I was surfing (after 5:00, of course) I decided to enter a contest hosted by Jennifer, on her Domestic Goddess site. She's an incredible baker; take a look. She was offering a book for the best food short story, which would include a fondly remembered or otherwise significant recipe. Here's my entry, which did win me a book, by the way. Of course, since there were only 5 entries total, EVERYBODY won a book! Wadda gal -- wonder where she got all those books?
When I was young and impressionable, and just foraying into the world of flavors and textures, I spent a summer in between college semesters working at a gourmet Mexican restaurant in Massachusetts, called "Casa Mexico". It was a colorful, lively place, full of clay tile interiors, real Mexican wait staff and cooks (unusual in the '70s), and inventive dishes created and copyrighted by the owner, who traveled to Mexico to purchase ingredients, artwork and serving dishes for his restaurant.
These dishes, decorated with birds, flowers and insects, proved to be so popular that customers and staff stole them on a regular basis. My own particular haul of two small square dishes by the now-famous artist Ken Edwards only recently gave up their lives to my tile kitchen floor, proving that in the end, crime does not pay. But I digress.
The cook at the restaurant proclaimed me the only waitress willing to help cook, and regularly let me behind the serving line to observe, as I was fascinated by the techniques and ingredients of authentic mexican cookery. I learned that omelets puff beautifully under the broiler, mole has an infinite number of ingredients, which even the Mexican waiter proclaimed authentic, and that there was nothing better than a bowl of the cook's special spicy zucchini soup, garnished with a fresh spiral of crema, for lunch before my shift started.
The aforementioned Mexican waiter, Manuel, who could crank up his tips to an amount almost equivalent to the dinner bill, by singing and playing guitar at his tables, used to tell me it was just as good as his abuela's (grandmother's). As the recipes were strictly secret, I had to observe in a sly fashion, to obtain them. And so my very close estimation of the recipe:
Spicy Zucchini Soup
2 small red onions, cut into slices, rings in each slice kept together
4 cloves garlic, unpeeled
2-3 serrano peppers, or more to taste
4 small zucchinis, unpeeled, chopped into large chunks
2 quarts chicken stock (homemade is best!)
or 1 can chicken stock and 3 cans water
2 medium russet potatoes, peeled and chopped
A few leaves of fresh young spinach
Mexican crema or sour cream, thinned with a little cream or milk
Brown the onion slices in a very hot dry black iron pan, until the juices from the vegetable ooze and burn. Keep the rings in the slices together, to facilitate turning them in the pan. Let the onion get very very brown, almost black.
At the same time, if there's room, place the unpeeled garlic in the hot pan, and let the skins burn, to roast the garlic until it's starting to be soft. Roast the peppers, too, until the skins blister. Remove.
Roughly chop the onion, peel and chop the garlic and peppers, and combine with the zucchini chunks, chicken stock and chopped potatoes. Bring to a boil, and simmer for 20 minutes, until all are tender.
Puree, add the spinach leaves for a bright color, and pass soup through a strainer to make very smooth.
Serve in heated bowls with a spiral of crema. The crema should be thinned to the same thickness as the soup, ideally, to float on top in a decorative manner.
A few years after I worked there, I received a couple of small checks as a result of litigation regarding some sort of underpayment of staff at the restaurant. Casa Mexico later closed both its locations, and passed onto what must be a long list of restaurants that didn't survive. Don't I wish I could have been at the auction that offered those dishes! I still think about that.
