Two Zeds are Better Than One Blog

A Sea of Bread

2011-08-16T12:49:00.001-07:00

Well, it's been awhile, hasn't it? I've been busy, busy, busy, promoting my business, now that I don't have a cushy ass-widening desk job EVERY day, just three days a week. As it turns out, that's the perfect support vehicle for The Traveling Chef, allowing me to make tons of bread to sell at the Racine Downtown Farmer's Market every Saturday morning. It's the most fun day of the week! What could be better than hangin' out with nice people by the lake, who praise your product to the skies, and give you money? Love it. Here I am at the commercial kitchen, surrounded by bread -- the photo was my husband's idea, who's great for concept shots and baking help!

The Traveling Chef Website is UP

2011-02-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

At last! I've gotten my well-fed butt in gear and generated the official website of my business, The Traveling Chef. it's at www.thetravelingchef.org

There are heaps of fun photos of all my dishes, not to mention me in a rare snapshot or two that doesn't make me look like I'm having a seizure. Read all about it, and don't forget to see the Facebook page, at "The Traveling Chef", too.

Sunday Bread

2010-01-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

5 Ladies, 5 Bottles of Wine

2009-07-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

These ladies had so much fun at a recent class, I had to post their pictures. Thanks, girlz! Note bottles and glasses in photo.

Our dessert was a blowtorched housemade marshmallow with balsamic vinegar sauce. The sharpness of the vinegar balanced perfectly with the intense sweetness of the marshmallow. And who doesn't like toasted marshmallows? Sorry, no pix of the main course. Next time! Maybe you'd like the recipe? Just send me an email: lizzfabel@netscape.net

Cookin' Class Video

2009-02-18T08:04:00.000-08:00

Greetings, all! My friend and award-winning Milwaukee filmmaker, Brooke Maroldi, is creating a film about people who have changed their careers midlife, to do something they're passionate about. While I'm still at my 9 to 5 job, I guess she figured I was kinda qualified, since I'm doing these fun classes at my house. Check out the trailer, and her website at http://www.ournextthing.com/
or how about a direct link to YouTube? Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqGUiKZC8lg
She called the video "Lizz Fabel's Food Philosophy". What a riot! At least I can say I knew her before she got famous!

Enjoy!

Cooking Classes at my House!

2006-03-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

Hello, all. I thought you'd be interested to see how I've expanded my food adventures to include cooking classes in my fabulously remodeled kitchen. I designed it to include the curved counter you see surrounding the stove, the perfect setting for a cooking class with cool people, just a select few.
Here's what we're making: Cheese souffle, Swiss Chard with Goat cheese, Walnuts and Brandy, and lots of other fabulous dishes.
If you're in the Milwaukee area, I hope you'll email me at lizzfabel@netscape.net to schedule one! Thanks for reading.

Cookin' Pix are Up!

2005-03-09T12:10:00.000-08:00

Hello, all. Below please find multiple images of my cooking weekend marathon, which constituted the completion of an order for my favorite long-standing personal chef customer. She's been ordering from me since 1998, bless her. Here's what she ordered:

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!

2005-03-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

Ingredients for Chicken with Lemon and Olives: olives, olive oil, lemon, onion and flat leaf parsley

2005-03-08T18:17:00.000-08:00

Chicken with Olive and Lemon simmering

2005-03-08T18:16:00.000-08:00

Grilling chicken breasts for Chicken with Mango Salsa

2005-03-08T18:15:00.000-08:00

Lovely fresh mangoes

2005-03-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

Ingredients for Beef Tamale Pie: Sauteed ground beef with seasonings, roasted corn kernels, onion, cheese and cilantro. Tortillas are stacked in between filling.

2005-03-08T18:12:00.000-08:00

Ingredients for Coyote Fettucine: tomato, red pepper, red onion and cilantro. Not shown is the chipotle pepper that gives the dish its Southwestern flavor

2005-03-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

Coyote Fettucine, ready to freeze and deliver

2005-03-08T18:09:00.000-08:00

Ingredients for chicken pasta casserole: sauteed onion and mushroom, broccoli and cream sauce with sherry

2005-03-08T18:08:00.000-08:00

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!

2005-03-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

Mixing the bread: white dough with oats, bulghur wheat, and sunflower seeds

2005-03-08T18:06:00.000-08:00

Bread rising . . .

2005-03-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

. . . bread baked!

2005-03-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

Ingredients for Irish Root Soup: Leek, Carrot and Sweet Potato

2005-03-08T17:03:00.000-08:00

Soup's On!

2005-03-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

Mixing the powdered sugar glaze with espresso for Speculaas with Coffee Glaze

2005-03-08T17:01:00.000-08:00

Speculaas with Coffee Glaze, and Bon Appetit! More ideas for the next big cookin' marathon . . . stay posted!

Cookin' Weekend Photos Comin'!

2005-03-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

Hello, all. I'm currently prodding my husband to get a move on and import all the cool photos I took of my cooking marathon weekend, so I can get them uploaded for you, dear reader, to enjoy. I had such a fabulous time, making soup, chicken dishes, bread and my favorite cookies, and pretending to be a food stylist just for fun, that I can't wait to share the photos.

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.

2005-03-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

A more recent photo (those are not our dogs, however -- we rented them and the umbrella drinks for the photo).

2005-03-06T12:09:00.000-08:00

Checkin' the Chiles

Welcome to my blog

2005-03-05T13:24:00.000-08:00

Hello, all. I thought I'd start out by posting my favorite picture of myself, taken (but of course) a few years ago, when I started my ill-fated food business, long before anyone had ever heard of Personal Chefs, and much less so in the small midwestern town I live in. It was a fun year, spending every day doing what I love best, i.e., cooking, but proved to be not quite as much fun as having a steady paycheck. So today I am employed at an advertising agency in the capacity of office manager/accountant/production/traffic, etc. all rolled into one, as we are a small agency. It allows me to be diverse in my capacities, enjoying all of my tasks, but most of all taking advantage of the high speed internet to post to my blog (on my lunch hour, of course).

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.