I just returned from another business trip, so I didn’t have time to bake.  Heather of Sherry Trifle chose Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread on page 212 of Baking: From My Home to Yours.  I love gingerbread, so I’m putting it on my “to-do” list for the future.  I’ll have a post up later on some wonderful parmesan-garlic rolls, and I’ll be back in TWD baking mode next week, when we make the famous World Peace Cookies.  To see how others tackled this week’s recipe, be sure to check out the TWD blogroll.

GOTCHA! A healthy recipe! Now that I have lured you into my pastry-laden lair, I’m springing something healthy on you. And easy, very easy!

One of the most nourishing greens (not to mention tasty) that you can eat is Swiss chard.  What you see to the left is a variety called rainbow chard, and the stems come in vibrant shades of red, yellow, and orange.  I often whip this up for dinner, or throw it into soup (that’s the Italian in me).

Start with about a pound or  two of chard.  Chard can be rather sandy, so be sure to clean it well.  Don’t shake off the water, as that will help the greens to cook later on. Chop the stems into 1/2-inch pieces, and then the leaves, but keep the leaves and stems separate.

Drizzle some olive oil in a pan, and add a couple crushed and minced garlic cloves, and a pinch of red pepper flakes.  After about 30 seconds, add the chard stems, and saute them gently for about five minutes, then add the leaves.  Just pile them on – chard is like spinach, it will really cook down.  Once the leaves start to wilt, sprinkle on some kosher salt and pepper to taste, and a pinch of nutmeg.  Add about 2 Tablespoons of red wine vinegar, and toss the mixture.  Give it a taste, and adjust seasonings accordingly, but don’t go crazy on the salt since you’re going to finish this with about 1/4 cup of parmigiano reggiano.  In the summer, I’ll toss in a couple of chopped tomatoes, but I don’t cook those.

This is a quick, tasty, and healthy dish.  The colors alone are a feast for the eyes!

And here we have our last participant in my New Year’s Day dinner, which included prime rib, and iceberg lettuce wedges with blue cheese dressing.  According, to Master Chow, the Best Meal that I have Ever Made.

We will now have a moment of silence as I look at my feet and kick the dirt.  Modestly.

OK, let’s move along.  I realized that it had been years and years since I had made popovers for my now-honorable husband, my then-honorable boyfriend.  When I was thinking of what to serve with New Year’s dinner, popovers came to mind.  Of course, since I have but one oven, making them for dinner would require a bit of juggling, but juggle I did.

I didn’t have the time to dig out my old popover recipe (where IS it?), but I found one over at Epicurious that I tweaked a bit.  Long ago I discovered that the key to popovers is not so much the recipe, but the technique.  Let the batter sit at room temperature for a while, and preheat the empty pan in the oven before you fill it.  That’s about it.  Oh, and you need a hot oven.  So, basically, I ignored about half the instructions in the recipe, and had excellent results, I must say.

The recipe made 5 large popovers.  I stuck the leftovers in a plastic zip top bag, and we ate them the next morning for breakfast.  Were they as great as they had been fresh out of the oven?  No, but they were still tasty and had a slightly chewy texture that I liked.

So, without further ado, you will find the popover recipe after the jump.  If you want to jazz them up a bit, you can always add a bit of your favorite herb or spice to the mixture.  Recipe after the jump. . . .

continue reading "Popovers, Revisited After Many Years (No TWD – I’m Out of Town)"

Bread and cheese have to be two of the greatest inventions ever.  And the Earl of Sandwich must get karmic brownie points for turning a vice into a blessing:  legend has it that he invented the sandwich so that he could eat and continue to play cards uninterrupted.

Things have been crazily busy at the Imperial Palace, also known as Chez Chow, as we get ready to leave town on a business trip, yet again.  I had to take the pups to cage-free boarding, and that’s hard on all of us, even though they have a good time there.  Gus is partial to blondes, and virtually every young lady who works at the place is a blonde babe.  Both he and Daisy just love to be cuddled, and they get a lot of that there.

So, what does this all have to do with food?  In a nutshell, I’ve been so busy that I had to take a deep breath and force myself to eat something decent, something besides ramen noodles.  Lately I’ve been making paninis, but this time I was too darned worn out to go dig out my grill, so I just made it the old fashioned way, as you can see from the picture below.

So, what do you get when you take crusty focaccia, and stuff it with dill havarti, lettuce, tomatoes, Dijon mustard, and some chicken?  And then you brush the whole thing with extra virgin olive oil and grill it in your trusty and faithful cast iron skillet?  Heaven.  Thank you, Earl of Sandwich, thank you.

And if you’d like to see some fantastic bread creations by food bloggers, be sure to check out Susan’s Yeastspotting roundup every Friday!

I used to blog about recipes that I had tried out from other food blogs, and I’m going to do that again this year and call it “Cooking from Blogs.”  All you food bloggers out there are fonts of culinary inspiration.

In addition to the Iceberg Lettuce Wedges with blue cheese dressing (via Smitten Kitchen), I recently tried King Ranch Casserole from Ezra Poundcake.  Sorry about the poor picture, but if you head over to Rebecca’s, her fabulous photos may inspire you to give this casserole a try. I had heard of this strange beast a couple of years ago, and last year bought a can of Ro-Tel to have on hand should I ever feel inspired to venture into the land of retro American gourmet cooking.  I had never heard of Ro-Tel until a couple years ago, but apparently it is quite the pantry staple in some parts of the country.  In the end, when I threw this together I didn’t have to buy a thing, just used up things  in the pantry and refrigerator.  I love it when I can do that!  You can find Ro-Tel’s original recipe, here.

I’m batting .1000 at this point.  The wedges were a hit, the King Ranch chicken casserole (to which I added some peas for color and extra veggies) is on the repeat list.  I used up different cheeses that I had laying about, and I substituted high fiber, whole wheat tortillas in the casserole, instead of the traditional corn.  Master Chow enjoyed the change from the usual chicken dishes.  Thanks, Rebecca, for passing along an easy recipe that my family enjoyed!  Recipe after the jump . . . .

continue reading "Cooking from Blogs – Ezra Poundcake’s King Ranch Chicken Casserole"

This week, Rebecca of Ezra Poundcake chose Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins on page 6 of Baking: From My Home to Yours.  Madam Chow had a brain fart and made Dorie’s Corniest Corn Muffins by accident.  Of course, I didn’t realize this until I was actually posting this.

Hanging my head in embarrassment, I will proceed with my review of the wrong muffins.  These were quick and easy to put together.  If you like your cornbread sweet (I like it just about any way you want to serve it), this is the recipe for you:  sweet, but not too sweet.  Cut back on the sugar if you want a more savory muffin.

I left out the corn kernels, and went a bit too heavy on the nutmeg.  The nutmeg flavor really comes through, so next time I’m going to go a little lighter on my pinch of nutmeg.

This was a great change of place from all the sweets of the past couple of months.  Check out the TWD blogroll to see what others have done WITH THE CORRECT RECIPE.  If you want the recipe for Corniest Corn Muffins, see Dorie Greenspan’s post over at Serious Eats.

Master Chow loves prime rib, and I had never made it, so this past New Year’s Day I decided to cook up a three-rib roast for him, and learn a few things in the process.

First, I found the meat on sale (at Whole Foods, no less!), and aged it for a week in the refrigerator.  Basically, that involved simply wrapping the roast in cheesecloth, and changing the wrapping a couple times.  To prevent the cheese cloth from sticking to the rib, unwrap and rewrap the cheese cloth after the first day. Before applying any seasoning, cut off the discolored exterior fat and meat of the roast.

Master Chow likes to be able to taste the meat he eats, so I decided on a Prime Rib Au Poivre recipe in the December 1998 issue of Bon Appétit.  He tells me that this is the best meal I’ve ever made for him, and he sat there chewing with his eyes closed, and occasionally murmuring that it was “soooo good.”  If you read the comments that accompany the recipe on the Bon Appetit web site, you will see that a lot of people feel the same way.

The one thing I did after I pulled the roast out of the oven was to pick off all of pepper coating – it seemed really, really strong, and looked a bit burned.  The bottom line, though, is that the flavor had permeated the meat, and Master Chow thought it was wonderful.  I served it with really sticky rice, and iceberg lettuce wedges, which is the only way to go according to my husband, because it’s really good at sopping up the gravy.  And the gravy was good, too!

This is my submission for Yvonne’s Magazine Mondays, so be sure to go over to her blog and see what she and others cooked up from their stack of food magazines!  Recipe after the jump.

continue reading "Prime Rib Au Poivre for New Year’s Dinner"

I didn’t think I’d be able to get something in this month, but due to our hostess’s, Susan of She’s Becoming Dougmesstic, unfortunate stomach bug, we got an extension to post our pies.  This month, we had to bake a “Resolution Breaking Pie.”

Now, under normal circumstances, for me that might be a fudge and nut filled ice cream pie.  But these are not normal circumstances.  I’m so burned out on chocolate, cream, and chocolate cream yule logs, that nothing tempted me.  I had to think long and hard, but I came up with one thing:  a sour cherry pie.

In heaven, I will have sour cherry pie on a regular basis, I assure you.  I love fruit pies, and this has to be one of my favorites.  I bought the cherries at our farmers’ market last summer, pitted them (hours, people, hours of work), then froze them.  To make the pie (or crostata), I thawed eight cups of frozen cherries overnight, then I mixed the drained fruit with 1/4 cup of tapioca FLOUR (not the pearls),  1 Tbsp. of all purpose flour, about 1 cup of sugar, and 1/2 tsp. of almond extract.  I tucked the mixture into my adaptation of  Dorie Greenspan’s Good for Anything Pie Crust, substituting cream cheese for the shortening.  I brushed the crust with an egg wash, sprinkled on some sugar, and baked the whole thing for about one hour at 400 F, until the top was golden brown and the juices were bubbling.  The whole thing fit into a deep dish, 10-inch pie plate.  If the crust starts to get a bit too dark, before the juices bubble, just cover the whole pie with a sheet of foil.

What can I say?  Yum.  Resolutions broken, you dastardly pie bakers.  Be sure to check the You Want Pies With That? website in a couple days to see what great pies other pie aficionados came up with.

I feel like such a groupie!  In honor of TWD’s one year anniversary,  Dorie Greenspan picked this week’s recipe – her French Pear Tart, which you can find on Dorie’s website, or on pages 368-69 of Baking: From My Home to Yours.  I think this has now moved to the top of the list of my favorite Dorie recipes.  I used canned pears (according to Dorie, a very French thing to do, and I’m not going to argue), and regular old almonds (unblanched).  I used an adaptation of Dorie Greenspan’s Good for Anything Pie Crust, and substituted cream cheese for the shortening.

What can I say?  The dessert is absolutely fantastic.  Master Chow, my honorable husband, announced that this ranks with one of the best desserts he’s ever had – in a restaurant!  He could have eaten the whole thing, and thought that the canned pears (canned without sugar and in their own juice) worked out really well.  The filling combined with the crust to form almost a chewy cookie-like texture at the bottom of the tart.  The frangipane filling was light and flavorful.  I should point out here that I chose to use 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, along with 2 teaspoons of golden rum for the filling, and I’m going to use that again.  I also added a pinch of kosher salt to the almond cream.  And after making the Daring Bakers Buche de Noel (another fabulous dessert, but considerably more work), putting this together was a piece of cake.  Or tart, I should say.

Thank you, Dorie, for a great pick and a great book.  Please check out the blogroll to see how others have fared with the tart, and for an interview with Dorie.

Master Chow and I don’t buy iceberg lettuce, opting for greens with more nutritional bang for the buck.  But about five or six years ago, I ordered and iceberg lettuce wedge with blue cheese dressing in a restaurant, and became a fan.  I love the dish, but rarely order it, and had never made.  I decided to remedy that on New Year’s Day, and Master Chow thoroughly enjoyed it, too.  Apparently, it went well with the prime rib and popovers that I made for dinner (more on those in future posts).

I turned to Deb’s recipe over at Smitten Kitchen.  I used some gorgonzola cheese that I had on hand, and substituted . . . are you ready? . . . soy bacon for the regular stuff.  Master Chow, aka He Who Loves Pork, was delightfully surprised at the result, and announced that the soy bacon worked well in the dish.  Hooray!  I also didn’t have any chives on hand, so I thinly sliced some scallion greens.

Some thoughts:  I will definitely be making this dressing again, and will try it on our usual fare of romaine lettuce.  If you like a thick dressing, this is not the one to try without adjustments – this is a thin, flavorful dressing with a lot of depth to it.