Cooking: Cobb Salad in Winter

What to do with leftover turkey?  Fry some bacon, hard boil an egg, chop some vegetables and an avocado and herbs (aim for color), whip up some homemade buttermilk dressing, and assemble a Cobb salad.

Cooking: Mediterranean

I am really fortunate to live in a town with not only Asian and Mexican grocery stores, but also Middle Eastern...as well as Indian, Peruvian, Portuguese, French and other purveyors of ethnic foods.  My favorite in my hometown is Dean's Produce, and I especially love shopping its dollar bins where I get a lot of produce that I cook right away.  Besides my staple of garbanzo beans to make hummus, I also saw pomegranate molasses.  Stay tuned.

Cooking: Vegan Chili

Cooking has been my salvation and so essential to my well-being this past year, and I especially am at peace when I'm undertaking this activity to feed other people.  I also needed to shrink my pantry and freezer a bit.  And so I pulled out all the dried chilies (New Mexican and Guajillo), cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, pinto and kidney beans, soy chorizo and nopales.  First task was to soak the dried beans.

Next I removed the stems, seeds and inner membranes from the dried chiles and boiled them with the cinnamon sticks and bay leaves.  I then pureed it and set to boil on the stove.

I'm all about flavor galore in chili.  I chopped onions, garlic, green bell pepper and raided my spice cover for it all to go into the chili.

I  also chopped tomatoes and then continued simmering.  I don't brown the soyrizo beforehand with the aromatics because it sticks to the pan and just add it to the sauce directly.

 

All in all, I was pretty pleased and thought the vegan chili pretty tasty.

Ceramics: Whale Study

Cooking: Friendsgiving

I spent Thanksgiving with my brother and his extended family and didn't think I would end up with any yummy turkey leftovers.  And so I decided to host a Friendsgiving the day before to which I invited my best travel buddies, Kat and Meral.  My favorite dish at any Thanksgiving feast is the DRESSING.  I don't think it necessary to make stuffing or to cook my dressing in the cavities of a turkey.  Sometimes my family just resorts to cooking Stove Top, which I like and appreciate, but I especially love a homemade dressing.  That week, I had in my pantry:  a package of English muffins, a bollilo, a stump of French baguette, and the ends of a sourdough loaf, which I shredded by hand into a bowl to get further stale.  I also save bones from roasting and stubs from carrots, celery, and aliums when cooking to make soup stock, which I also use to add to dressing.  But key to a delicious stuffing or dressing are lots of aromatics and herbs:  onion, celery, sage, rosemary, and thyme.  

The extra special ingredients for this dressing were the leftover breakfast sausage in my freezer and a pint of fresh oysters.

I could tell that the dressing was the favorite with my friends too because I know they love the flavor of fresh oyster liquor and because they kept spooning more dressing onto their plates.  The little glass round of stuffing contained NO OYSTERS for the boring palate of the hubs.

I had wanted to cook a green bean casserole for my feast.  I bought French green beans and a mushroom condensed soup base.  I also printed out these instructions from Cooks Illustrated because I like vegetables to be as emerald green as possible.

Alas I had no time or energy left to make that green bean casserole which will just have to happen at Christmas feasting or another meal needing zhushing.  

What took so much time to cook were my winter squash soups.  I kind of went all out while shopping and bought kabocha, butternut and a couple of acorn squashes.  I thought of slicing them up and roasting with brown sugar and butter, but never did get to them.  That part of the meal like my planned green bean casserole went by the wayside.

I turned to online recipes as well as my big black binder in which I store favorite recipes and recipes I want to eventually try.

 

Kabocha squash is my favorite for Asian curries, and so I thought it would make a delicious soup.  I followed one recipe which called for slicing it open, removing the seeds and then roasting.

I pureed the roasted squash with some of my homemade soup stock and then put into pot along with caramelized aromatics.  I rarely make pies from scratch and stuck a commercial frozen pie into my still-hot oven.  My favorite unusual ingredient in a squash soup is citrus--I squeezed the juice of an orange into the kabocha soup.

I ended up bringing the soups to my brother's home the next day for his Thanksgiving lunch-dinner.

The next labor intensive dish was my Brussels sprouts salad.  I shredded each and every sprout on my mandoline as well as toast pecans I had left in my freezer.

 My short cut was the Delfina lemon vinaigrette that a friend gave me as a gift, but if I hadn't that, I would have made my own with olive oil, lemon juice, shallots, salt and white pepper.  The final touch on my cabbage salad were pomegranate seeds.

My Friendsgiving dinner in the end was comprised only of roast turkey (my bird which I bought premarinated was not picture worthy though delicious); the to-the-nines dressing with pork and oysters; mashed potatoes (which were basic and awesome by the way because you can't go wrong with Russet potatoes, maybe a few Yukon golds, and lots of butter and heavy cream which you have to mash by hand to get tiny lumps of handmade deliciousness); a giblet gravy (also homemade from flour browned in the turkey drippings as well as boiling the heart and giblets and liver and neck and then chopping all that very fine afterward)and lots of glasses of Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon.  We had no room for dessert, but a fine meal nevertheless was had.  

Hosting a Cocktail Party: Planning

The last party I hosted was a DIY evening of Chinese dumpling making, which I totally want to do in 2020 again to celebrate a new year and to wish people a long life with noodles.  At that February celebration, I bought eggroll or wonton skins, prepared up a filling of ground pork and vegetables, served noodles, served wine, and then cooked up what my guests rolled for our meal.  I sent home the extra dumplings home with my guests.  I had lots of fun of crafting a different kind of party and connecting with my neighbors & friends, and I think they enjoyed the evening as well.  

This Saturday, I'm throwing an impromptu cocktail party, last minute because I just sent out this invitation yesterday, which I downloaded from a free invitation site, customized it with my details and colored it with magic markers because I've only a black and white printer at work.

I know for sure I want to spend my time in the kitchen mostly before the party, and so a couple of cheese boards for sure.  I've already got a couple nice wooden boards, acacia and olive wood, which I'll oil up plus I'm borrowing a slate board from a friend.  I've an aged gouda, for which I'll need a knife like below, and I'm definitely down with being grown-up and owning a cheese knife.  

Below are the kind of knives you need for soft cheeses like Brie, but I can wait on getting this specialty tool.

And I always seem to have semi-soft cheeses on hand for which I'd need a slicer like the one below.  And maybe I'll be fully grown up when I finally have a whole set of cheese knives.