My Brudda's Wife: Virtual Birthday Dinner

My Brudda, the Pork Master, is married. His wife, the Pork Mistress, is celebrating her birthday today. They live several states away. The Pork Master appears to be under the weather. He's sutained an injury, perhaps from basting pork.

I've been mulling over all day what I'd make for The Pork Mistress for her birthday, were she in town or were I nearer to her. Here's what I think I'd do:

While I'm throwing together dinner:
Marcona almonds and a gimlet

For dinner:
Vietnamese skirt steak with Vietnamese Chimichurri from the NYTimes food blog
A simple cucumber salad with paper thin slices of cucumber marinated in a little rice wine vinegar and splash of a vegetable oil, just a few lovely grains of cayenne
Simple coconut rice with a bit of finely diced candied ginger and a little retro chunk of pineapple atop

For dessert:
A cook the blog special: The plum crumble from Orangette. I made it this weekend with some prune plums I picked up from the orchard and oh, it is special. Just a hint of ginger from both candied and powdered. Not overly sweet. The crumble is a bit unusual in that the dry ingredients are mixed with an egg, then once spread over the fruit, melted butter is gently spooned atop. Lovely. Stayed crisp even in the fridge. This is definitely a keeper. A splash of cream or warm with ice cream? Heaven.

Happiest Birthday to the Pork Mistress. Many, many, many, many more. Bon appetit.

PS: The cheerful pillow-faced lady is the closest thing to a picture of me you're gonna see!

Really? Does the world need another brownie recipe?

Maybe. Consider these, from Serious Eats, with sea salt. Many brownies, for my money, are overly sweet and not chocolate pillowy buttery enough. But these? Maybe. I mean, they have all my favorite food groups: chocolate, butter, salt, and coffee:

Adult Brownies

Cooking the Blog

We've worked our way through a few recipes from Three Squares this week and I thought I'd include my own two cent's worth, now that I've actually cooked the blog.

1. The Serious Eats Leftover Meat Salad
Let me tell you. This was seriously spectacular, and I had it ready, kind of, in 30 minutes. Now, I cheated a bit. I used steak, leftover from last night. I threw some dried dark red kidney beans in my little crockpot last night and let them stew till morning on low. That's right, no presoaking, no salt, no nothing. Well, I used a bay leaf. They were divine. So the steak and the beans were ready when I walked in the door. I had leftover homemade vinaigrette (with a standard 1:3 vinegar to olive oil ratio plus a little mustard) I quickly chopped a red onion in half, then sliced it thin and threw it in some olive oil with a little salt and oh, maybe a teaspoon of brown sugar. Those cooked on medium high for about 25 minutes, till brown. Once that was on, I flipped on my toaster oven, strolled out to my potager and grabbed five tomatoes, all perfectly ripe. They were sliced in half, thrown on a small baking tray, dowsed in olive oil, salt, and pepper, then roasted till runny and sunken. Oh, divine, and I HATE tomatoes. The whole thing was thrown together along with some chiffonaded basil and pine nuts. I didn't even bother to toast them. SERIOUSLY spectacular, quite possibly company good, especially with a loaf of crusty bread. Especially if the steak were hot off the grill and sliced thin. Note: I didn't have any rosemary and this was still spectacular.

2. Vegetable tostadas
Not bad. I used leftover black beans (which I threw in the crockpot without presoaking on high for about five hours and they were PERFECT) which I blitzed in the food processor with a little mild salsa. We used prepackaged guacamole from a market. Lettuce I had prepped a few days before. We topped with Greek yogurt and a little cheese. The makings literally took me about 10 minutes to put on the table. The kids helped. We served it all on top of Charros yummy precooked stacks of tostada shells, in a make-your-own fashion. Quite easy and yummy.

3. Hominy and me casserole
I turned this into a not-pretty but quite delicious everyday meal. I didn't have quite enough hominy, so I added some fresh corn and some beans (see item #2). I used a bit less cheese inside the casserole, but did toss in an egg to bind everything together. One big pan made more than enough for two meals. For one it was the main dish; another it was a side with sliced apples and grilled sliced flank steak.

Drooling with Itinerant Foodies: Weekend Edition

Hold the phone. This is serious. These pictures and menus make me very drooley and swooney. Take this menu:

Eggplant and Sundried Tomato Spread (Really? I just fainted.)
Grilled Shrimp with Cilantro, Lime, and Peanuts
Corn and Tomato Scramble
Lemony Potato Salad
Spicy Mac & Cheese (although nothing, NOTHING is better than PassUBy's mac & cheese)
Sticky Balsamic Ribs (I just had my heart shocked with a defibrillator and am on a vent. Make the deliciousness stop!)
Plum-Blackberry Streusel Pie with All-Butter Pastry Dough

Read all about it with pictures AND recipes from the Midwest's own Itinerant Foodies.

How I spent my holiday weekend

Rosh Hashanah with Itinerant Foodies

Two menus recently which look quite delectable from Itinerant Foodies, emanating from my own heart of the Midwest. How about:

Beet and Goat Cheese Salad
Brown Sugar Glazed Carrots
Pork Tenderloin with Sauteed Apples and Leeks
Apple Cinnamon Upside Down-Cake

WITH pictures and commentary. Ah, yes please. Thanks, iFoodies!

Itinerant Foodies: Do the Reading

I brake for corn chowder especially with red peppers

This recipe from the Wednesday Chef recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo for me, the movie in which Mia Farrow (it was her, right?) walks right into a movie screen and movie. Or was it Jeff Daniels? Doesn't he live in Michigan? Was it really The Purple Rose of Cairo? When will I be back at Trader Joe's for Israeli couscous? Should I have a second glass of wine? What WILL I wear tomorrow. I can't take the humidity. It's almost October. I need a stew. What should I do with my butternuts squash from Legend Hills Orchard?

Welcome to 30 seconds in my brain.

I recalled a Woody Allen flick, though, because I rarely have wanted to dive into my computer screen so badly and drown in corn chowder as I did when I beheld the pictures from the Wednesday Chef. I can't WAIT to try the recipe.

Pete Wells' Shrimp Chowder with Corn

Okay, well, Concentration Girl (that's irony) just noticed that it's really SHRIMP chowder with corn and not corn chowder with red peppers. I don't care because SHRIMP chowder is even better. This will be made immediately upon entering a beach zone.

Vegan Cupcakes? Have I lost my mind?

From the very precious Gwynneth Paltrow's site, Goop, which I actually secretly kind of like oops the secret is out, an interesting post on vegan cupcakes and darn it, other vegan baked goods.

The one time I had vegan bread I was violently ill for a day. I channeled my grandmother, "My body needs butter." But the baguette is butter, salt, and oil. I eat that without turning my gastrointestinal tract inside out. Of course, I usually eat it with cream of cauliflower soup topped with Gruyere, shmeared with lots of fresh imported butter, but still. It makes no sense.

I am, however, intrigued. I might try it. I might like it. I will not, however, give up the precious goodness of the butter cow.

Goop Make: Babycakes with recipes

Best use of vodka on a Monday

If you're a conspiracy theorist, then you probably already recognize this drink with the word "Moscow" in the name and "vodka" in the glass as the drink that NO DOUBT Barack Obama imbibed while he was being inculcated into Communism in order to take over the world. How he did that during his free time getting good grades and going to Harvard Law School I'll never know. My husband went to law school and I remember him barely having time to read the paper and nap on the couch.

If you're not a conspiracy theorist (why exactly DO people want to believe this stuff?) but you just want to try an interesting drink, check out:

Moscow Mule via Serious Eats

The best use of squash and corn pudding perhaps ever

From the genius 101 Cookbooks. Heidi has done it again:

Roasted Corn Pudding in Acorn Squash

On the subject of eggplant

Another killer article from Gourmet. The directions are a bit coy, although they read like my directions so maybe I should pay more attention and be more specific. It can be such a downer to measure everything, though, and to skip cooking something just because you don't have everything on the menu. But the title is a killer. This must be tried:

An Eggplant Confession

Orangette is going to use it as a sauce for pizza, which sounds fabulous especially on my grill in the backyard. Read her post, although it makes me tired. She and her husband are working so hard on their restaurant.

What I do now

Her post was just in time. I need the crumble recipe for the prune plums I picked up at the orchard today, along with the 4 bushels of apples fresh from the tree.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Tomatillo Chicken Stew

WWYD?

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

Stuffed eggplant and the 12 foot window

Image by Brooklyn Museum via Flickr

Long ago, before I went to medical school, Monsieur Latte and I took a trip to Turkey. This was one of our best trips. There were so many wonderful, colorful, aromatic moments. Istanbul is amazing. (I haven't had a lot of coffee yet, so bear with my turgid writing.) We felt as though we were in wonderland.

One wonderful evening we "spent a little extra" on dinner. That means we probably dropped $20 for the two of us including alcohol. We sat one evening on top of a rooftop restaurant, about 3 or 4 stories high, in the lovely, sparkly Istanbul weather. We looked out over the old City, the Sultanahmet, right across from the Blue Mosque. I had one of my ten best meals ever, stuffed eggplant. Two things, in fact. On that trip, even though (as usual) Monsieur Latte drove me crazy it became absolutely clear to me that I couldn't be separated from him. Ever. We weren't married yet and he was living in Connecticut, but I'd figured out bigger problems.

I also fell head over heels completely gaga crazy for eggplant on that trip. Monsieur et the Aubergine. They are still with me.

Monsieur and I live in a house with a 12 foot window in the living room. Try covering that for $100. We've been limping along for sometime with an Overstock.com meets Lowe's solution and I tire of it. What to do? Well, I was just having a chat with Google about it, and one thing led to another and I found a new cookbook. Not only that, I found a GORGEOUS new cookbook with a recipe for stuffed eggplant.

For a moment, at 7:14 this morning, gazing at the picture I clicked on a lark, Google sent me on a virtual magic carpet back 15 years ago to a rooftop restaurant with my beloved, kooky, neurotic Monsieur, in a far away place surrounded by exotic, ancient, enormous buildings, enveloped in a scented, silky cocoon of eggplant. A land before children, patients, sick parents. I'd never seen a leg amputated. I'd never delivered a baby. I'd never fallen in love with the chortle of my own babies. I didn't want to go back for long, but my, my, what a way to start a day.

Here's the recipe, in case you're interested.

Vefa Alexiadou's Meet Stuffed Eggplants Recipe

Few more cookbook links:

Vefa's kitchen (there are links here at Phaidon to recipes)
Amazon (with a few pics of the inside of the book)

On the menu today...

Well, I wish these were on the menu today. So it's been a banana, coffee, and cookies. Tonight is Mexican meatballs from the crockpot which I'll be having on my patented Mexican vege rice. I have too many recipes and too little time! They all make me swoon. This is such a terrible problem. Consider, for example:






The Snickerdoodle via Smitten Kitchen.



Oh. Swoon. I am cookie, hear me roar. My husband loves the snickerdoodle. I might have to make this quite selflessly for him and just so I know they won't hurt him I'll probably need to try them first.





The baked corndog via Slashfood.

No recipe, but I'll bet Google has one or fifty. I don't even WANT a recipe. This makes my brain itch. I want it now with a little sweet potato mustard from Jack's Cosmic Dogs in Mt. Pleasant, SC. And slaw.

There's always the problem of what the kids will eat. They would certainly eat snickerdoodles and there's a good chance they'd eat a corndog. But how about the tostada? Could I get them to eat something in which healthy food is hidden? I might try, especially because the photo from Simply Recipes is simply divine (see above):

Mexican tostada

Pancakes are always a perennial favorite at Casa Latte. Of course, I'm talking about the traditional flapjack with occasional fruit and perpetual syrup. I made crepes once and my son was mortally offended for the flapjack. "Oh, no, no," he protested, "This is not a pancake. It is yucky and I will NOT EAT IT." And he didn't. Is there a sneaky way to get him to eat a pancake with a vegetable? Would he eat the:

Zucchini pancake? (via Joy the Baker, surely the most clever and prolific pancake recipe creator on the planet)

I'd love to ponder the zucchini pancake with a piece of:

Ethiopian Honey Spice Bread via Wednesday Chef

I'm stuffed. I'd better stop because lunch is a mere 50 minutes from now.

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Serious Eats: Best Meat Salads

Yes, please. Great ideas for those few extra slices of flank steak, or the chicken thigh and bits of breast leftover.

Best Meat Salads
via Serious Eats

Could I make this when I get home from work? Or maybe NOW?

And serve it with just a drizzle of Snowville Creamery Half & Half?

Apple Cake in and Iron Skillet

via the always fabulous Pioneer Woman

Can you tell I'm hungry?

Vegetable tacos: Look divine. These are on the menu next week. Thanks to Simply Recipes.

Whilst you are visiting Simply recipes, you might want to check this out, especially the sauce, which I think I want to put in a mug and drink:

Porkchops with Mustard-Bourbon Cream Sauce

We don't use nuts in our house 'cause my boy has a raaaaah-ther nahsty reaction to cashews and peanuts. So I chanced upon a granola bar recipe at Smitten Kitchen which looks terrific and doesn't have nuts:

Granola Bars

They will be on the menu for breakfast next week, too.

I don't like green beans

I think green beans taste like dirt and I don't generally like a big helping of dirt. However, this past weekend we rented a farm. The owners left us a great big pile of fresh produce. Included was a huge bag of fresh picked green beans. The challenged to IcedLatte was to make them edible to her dirt-suspcious palate.

I did. I inhaled these green beans, and picky Little Capuccino ate them too. Little Machiatto will eat anything vegetable or fruit. That they were a hit with her was not a surprise.

Without further ado, I give you:

No Dirt Green Beans
Lots of fresh green beansm (say a pound or even more), end & string snapped off
Olive oil
Red pepper, diced
1/2 cup onion, shallot, whatever
Salt
Pepper
Nob of butter
Water

In a heavy pan for which you have a lid, heat up some olive oil over medium to medium-high heat. When it's hot, add your onion and red pepper. Stir occasionally until they have a little color. When they do, throw in green beans plus say, 3/4 cup of water, little more, little less. Add salt. That's important.

Throw on your pot lid not quite all the way and let these suckers cook. Toss occasionally. They'll need 15 minutes or so at least. You want them to be cooked but not mushed. When they're almost there, take off the lid and let the water evaporate and let some color come to those beans.

When they're done, remove from the heat and toss in a bit of butter. Add salt if you think they need it. Add some pepper. Serve.

I know it sounds too simple to be true, but it is. Feel free to substitute your favorite grease. Bacon grease would be lovely, and a little crumbled bacon at serving would be delightful. Garlic wouldn't be bad, either.

See Post Below Before You Run

In the next post down I am going to tell you to run to the store, and I mean it. But before you go you might want to get the ingredients for Joy the Baker's Favorite Red Velvet Cupcakes.

Run, Don't Walk.

To the store because she did it, she really did it. The High Priestess of Community Gardening, yes, Lady Stoddart herself posted the very best, bar none, roasted marinated red pepper recipe. Go go her website immediately and get the recipe and run, run, run to the grocery store and make this right now. They need several hours to mature, but they are so lovely and worth it. Buy a lot. You'll eat a lot.

The Best Roasted Red Marinated Peppers in the World. Seriously.

I am swooning.

I am also typing this from my brand new little netbook which was delivered today to my house. I call it "MiniMe". It's cool. Just went I'd almost kicked the face-buried-in-the-crackberry habit!!!!

Buried. In a good way. But still eating.

Big weekend. Little Latte went to kindergarten and turned six. We made a tunnel of fudge cake together that was seriously fabulous, even better cold the next day with milk. Recipe to follow under separate post. I even remembered to take a picture.

For now, a few goodies.

Grilled Mango with Balsamic Vinegar via Slashfood. Looks good and I'll bet it tastes good too. I'll bet on some greens with a little feta it would make a pretty good meal.

While your grill is out, and you've got Slashfood up on the computer screen, check out:

Smoked cheese on the grill.

Then go take your Lipitor.

Were you thinking you'd like an orange and cream NO-BAKE pie for dessert? I thought so. Thank Joy the Baker for what looks to be a superb recipe:

No Bake Orange and Cream Pie

Oh, and while you're visiting Joy and her baking, be sure to review and bookmark her pancake roundup.

Every Which Way Pancake Recipes

Did you buy a bag of lemons or limes and have five left over and just didn't know what to do with them? You should have called me. Here's what i would have suggested. And I probably would try it with tequila:

Sweet or Salty Lemon or Limeade via Bitten

Enough! Go forth and eat. Stay tuned for a ravishing menu from a dinner party a week ago; a tunnel of fudge cake recipe to take an aspirin before and have a cath later so as not to die for, and the testing process for the breakfast cookie Little Latte and I have been tweeking.