I have a friend in Denver who often called her mom’s cooking pile. I am not 100% sure why although I have come to love the term and define it not as something bad, but as a pile of yummy grub that I can’t help but love eating as a flavorful mix instead of as distinctly different dinner items. We made this pile of black beans with apple salsa, rotisserie chicken and brown rice upon our return from vacation. It is out of the January issue of Bon Appetit and part of the traditional January healthy eating the New Year spurs. It was so refreshing and comfortable-also filled with complementary flavors, savory chicken, bright apples and creamy beans. My photo looks so like theirs it is uncanny. I changed out the chili powder for cayenne because that was what we had.
Category: home cooking
belated valentine treat
we didn’t manage to get this one made for Valentine’s Day although that had been the original plan. It is a riff on the dessert we had from Cafe TuTuTango a week or so earlier. I picked up Na’an bread and some bananas. I preheated the oven to about 425 degrees and quickly doused the bread under the running faucet. I tossed the bread on the rack for 3 minutes and then pulled it out. I placed it on a cookie sheet for the remaining cooktime. I sliced a banana on top and sprinkled some large grain sugar crystals on top. Then I broke out my kitchen torch and bruleed the sugar and then sprinkled with cinnamon. I put the whole thing back in the oven for 4 more minutes. After I pulled it out I liberally swirled on Stonewall Kitchens Maple Honey Caramel and dolloped on some whipped cream. It was a perfect treat to share. Happy Valentines Day!creamy potato soup with bacon vinaigrette
it had me at bacon vinaigrette. A creamy potato soup with hardly any fat, tons of flavor and topped with a brisk bacony onion bite. Saw it on one of the blogs I read that aggregates the best recipe creations if their readers and compiles them. Nothing wrong with onions if you both eat them. Happy Valentines Day!
pasta e patate
we have been going strong with our eating less and healthier regimen started on Dec 8. Workdays are easy with the regimen of it all. Weekends tend towards a little more challenge. There are things to do, places to go, people to see, food to eat out, et al. We have had two extra-caloric kind of dinners this weekend-last night fish n chips and tonight a dish we recently saw on tv by David Rocco. He is a Canadian Italian who cooks in Florence in a sort of homecooking rustic hot Italian kind of way. He really reminds me of my Italian friend Danny (Daniele) which totally freaks me out and pleases me. Their mannerisms are so similar it’s eerie-I guess it’s an Italian thing. Anyhow, we crave David Rocco’s pasta on a semi regular basis. It’s really amazing. So, tonight we tried pasta e patate. A boiled not quite soup concoction with a soup base of carrots, onion, celery and prosciutto filled up with broken spaghetti and bites of potato and nubbins of pecorino romano. It was warmly dense and packed with flavor. We decided it didn’t really pass the guests for dinner test (we wouldn’t serve it to guests) due to a little bit of noodley tomatoey chin action but it was a great dinner at home. I did manage to eat only a 6th of those 4-6 servings and reduced the oil to 1 1/2 T at the beginning which was just fine. By the way, the eating healthier is beginning to pay off too!
curry
curry is kind of an interesting thing. It is specifically nothing. If I said, ‘we made curry’ that would be something different to every person. As far as I can say, curry generally speaking is heavily spiced, hopefully heavily flavored and filled with interesting bits and pieces.
Z was in San Francisco for a conference recently and in their daily walk between hotel and conference center passed an Indian restauarant. The scent was enticing enough that they stopped there for dinner one night. Z had a butter chicken that was so spectacular he was driven to try to recreate it at home. So, he tried a random butter chicken off the internet recipe. We had to turn up cardamom pods and garam masala. It is vaguely a stewed chicken with butter and some tomato passata with a pile of spices. For reasons we don’t understand it didn’t turn out to be a particularly flavorful recipe. Too much tomato and no warm heat. It was filling served on jasmine rice but not exciting. We will try again.
My Urban Pantry 