Food Photos

Barbecued Brisket

Cooked in the oven and finished on the grill.  The cooking sauce was processed with an immersion blender and served on the side.

Sweet Corn and Basmati Rice Salad with Pecans and Watercress

I used to take this salad to Easthampton for 4th of July house party.  Serves a crowd, keeps, well, and the pecans and watercress make it special.  Finally found watercress at Whole Foods in Legacy Place, averting disaster.

Mascarpone Tart with HOney, Oranges and Pistachios from Bon Appetit

So easy and so rich and delicious.  Uses a dairy case pie crust, but of course, you could make your own.  Try it with blood oranges.  Yowza! 


The salad and the tart recipe links  are in the previous blog entry.  If you try them, let me know how you fared.


Grapeshot

Cyber-warfare novel

The takedown of Twitter and news of various other hacks always makes me think of my cyber-war novel, The Shadow Warriors.

If "information warfare" broke out, I'd be sitting in the catbird seat with a cool book about it, but how would I sell the book, which is mainly sold via the Internet?

In the meantime, Spenser's Mystery Books is featuring The Shadow Warriors this week, and here is the link. Way cheaper than Amazon by the way. http://www.spensersmysterybooks.com/

On the food front, I tried an original Mexican recipe from Bon Appetit, and the sauce has a big afterkick that maybe the guests won't like. The chilis were not supposed to be hot, but no one told the chilis. We're having the spicy sauce on a pork tenderloin, and I'm serving grilled corn, zucchini, summer squashe and egg plant. All saturated with fresh herbs from the garden and healthy olive oil. Salad will have an avocado to carry out the mostly Mexican theme.

I made lemon-lime ice milk in my ice cream maker, and I'm dipping mint sprigs in dark chocolate for a garnish. How cool is that? Stay tuned for the photos. The table looks great, too. Sometimes it's nice to make the effort.

Onward,

Grapeshot

A Recipe Obsession

First it was Gourmet. Then finally, a cheap subscription opportunity to Bon Appetit. A relative recommended Cooks Illustrated. I got a free companion air ticket if I subscribed to Food and Wine. Of course the Globe and the NY Times and even the Wall Street Journal have recipes.

At the dentist the week I read Saveur, and tempted, told myself, no way. For a person who is always dieting, why do I put temptation front and center. It's not like I'm subscribing to Cooking Light.

And of course there's the web recipes: Epicurious that has a reprise from Bon Appetit and Gourmet. There's the Weber Kettle recipes, the smoker recipes, the this, the that.

I have 5 of my own "cookbooks" and 10 or so folders labeled "chicken" "salad" and well, you know, these folders are growing and I need to separate the stuff I've made from the stuff I want to try.

If we live into the next century I'll never make all the cakes I've clipped. Yesterday, in anticipation of company, I made a coffee cake like affair, with a thick yummy crumb topping. It was from Food and Wine and a photo follows. The day before we had enchiladas verdes, and were they ever good, both the chicken and the cheese.

It's hard to find tomatillos in New England. Tried to grown them once and it was a miserable failure: huge plants, no fruit.

See the next post for a photo of the cake.

Grapeshot

Endive with smoked trout and herbed cream cheese

This is from Bon Appetit (I think), otherwise from Gourmet. 2004. It looks pretty, tastes wonderful and is a little different. Easy to make. Smoked trout can be a bitch to find in Boston. In the summer, smoke your own.

Endive with Smoked Trout and Herbed Cream Cheese

1 8-oz. pkg. cream cheese, room temperature
½ cup minced fresh dill
2 green onions, finely chopped
1 t. (Packed) grated lemon peel

4 heads Belgian endive (green and red if available)
8 ounces smoked trout fillets, broken into 1-inch
Pieces
Fresh dill sprigs

Mix first 4 ingredients in small bowl. Season with freshly
Ground black pepper. (Can be made up to 2 days ahead)
Cover and chill. Bring to room temp. before using.

Separate endive into leaves. Spread a small amount of cream
Cheese mixture on base of each leaf. Top with trout piece, and
Garnish with small dill spring. Arrange filled leaves on a platter.
Can be made 6 hours ahead. Cover; chill.

Cheers!

Grapeshot

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream

About a year ago, S.O. and I were shopping with a friend at the Williams Sonoma outlet at the Wrentham mall and discovered an ice cream maker that was really really reduced in price. I had always seen these really cool (!) recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appetit that require an ice cream maker and glossed over them. The time to purchase such a device seemed ripe.

Our friend told us that we were too fat already and why make ice cream and get even fatter, her somewhat flawed reasoning being that one would only eat ice cream one had made. Ha ha! Like the supermarket doesn't have it, or Boston doesn't have a bunch of super-yummy premium ice cream parlors.

We bought it anyway, but due to both guilt and all of a sudden no ice cream recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appetit (had they, too, bought her philsophy?) we never opened the box.

This week I volunteered to bring a dessert to a dinner party and thumbed thru some old recipes for something incredibly delicious, using fresh fruit in season. I found a plum pie with a streusel topping and lemon-lime ice milk. Hey! Ice milk--practically low-cal, right?

So we unpacked the ice cream maker and took it apart and washed it, as directed, read the instructions 16 times because this suddenly didn't look so simple. Anyway, I put the bowl in the freezer for 24 hours as indicated, and yesterday morning I made up the lemon-lime ice milk mixture, which was really simple, because I didn't have to make a custard. With that properly chilled, and the pie crust cooling in the fridge, it was time to make the ice cream, and we had to assemble the freezer again. I confess to being an idiot about following verbal and pictorial instructions, all of which are written by folks who can assemble the whatever in their sleep. After a number of false tries, we finally got the thing together before it thawed and the ice milk was made and popped into the freezer--no problems there. Then we had to disassemble the rest of the pieces to clean. We couldn't get the paddle out. More reading of the instructions and much cogitating and tentative pulling and twisting. The paddle was stuck tight. Finally, I told S.O. to give it a very strong yank, and voila! out it came.

We decided to try the ice cream making again, real soon now, hoping to become more adept at the process.

I am pleased to report that the pie was scrumptious and the lemon-lime ice milk was sweet and tart and frosty and not too rich, almost low-cal. Almost. What's better, there are two pieces of pie left for dinner tonight, and a bit of the frosty stuff. All's well that end's well. I'm thinking of rum raisin or coffee next. And definitely some frozen yogurt, to balm the conscience.

Isn't that what one does with a conscience? Bad and guilty are bannable words. Shun them. To the back of the dictionary with you, I say.

Onward,

Grapeshot