StreamingGourmet – The Blog

Meyer Lemon Black & Green Iced Tea

Today is the first in a series of Maryland (my homestate) oriented posts. Maryland summers are full of just-picked corn on the cob, Blue crab feasts, Thrasher’s French Fries, and pitchers of iced tea. My mother used to make 2 quarts of iced tea with a few Lipton’s tea bags, a cup of sugar, and a couple of lemons. She would let the tea and lemons steep for a really long time. Like most of the afternoon. It was awesome and there was never enough. I didn’t think I would taste tea that good again, but two things happened. I moved to California and my tastes changed a bit (a whole cup of white sugar? Ouch.) and my friend Paige brought over a batch of her iced tea. It’s iced tea heaven all over again.

There are three secrets that comprise the genius of this tea.
1) The black & Green combo
2)The honey and
3)The Meyer lemons.

In Marin County, where Paige and I live, it’s as if Meyer Lemons grow on trees. Well, not as if; they do. Lots of them. People are often trying to unload them because there are so many. We are so lucky. Eureka lemons are the bright yellow lemons you usually find in the grocery store. Meyer lemons are darker on the outside and are nearly orange on the inside. In fact, Meyer lemons aren’t truly lemons. They are believed to be a cross between lemons and either oranges or mandarins. They are less acidic than Eureka lemons and have earthy, herbal undertones. They are a great match for the Green Tea in this mixture. If you can’t find Meyer lemons (since they are usually only available in specialty stores from later winter to early Spring), you can substitute a mixture of two regular lemons and one small orange.

Meyer Lemon Iced Tea with Mint Sprigs

Meyer Lemon Black & Green Iced Tea
Makes 2 quarts

Ingredients
4 Black Tea Bags (I like Earl Grey)
4 Green Tea Bags
1/4 cup honey or more to taste
2-3 Meyer Lemons, sliced thinly and seeded
Mint springs to garnish

Method

For the Green Tea
Heat one quart of water to boiling in a medium saucepan. Remove from heat and allow to cool for a couple of minutes. Green Tea is best steeped at about 180˚F and remember, water boils at 212˚F. Add 4 Green Tea bags to the pot and allow it to steep for 1-3 minutes. Remove tea bags and allow Green Tea to continue to cool.

For the Black Tea
Heat one quart of water to boiling in a medium saucepan. Remove from heat. Add 4 black teabags to the saucepan and allow it to steep for about 5 minutes. Remove tea bags and allow black to continue to cool.

The mix
While both teas are still a bit warm, pour them into a glass pitcher. Add honey and stir to dissolve and mix. Add half of the lemon slices, reserving the other lemon slices for garnish.

To serve
Fill glasses with ice, add the tea and garnish with lemon slices and mint sprigs (optional).

Avocado Crab Gratinée

In late May, the California Avocado Commission hosted a dinner at One Market in San Francisco for a small group of members of the food media. The five-course tasting menu was prepared by Mark Dommen, chef-partner at One Market. We were invited to taste the wide variety of flavors and textures avocados can provide and to learn a little something about how they are grown. Did you know that avocados are in season in California for a full seven months? March through September. And did you know that California grows 90% of our nation’s avocados? For tips on how to best select and store an avocado, check out the avocado commission website.

I must admit. I am a fairly recent avocado convert. Growing up in Maryland in the eighties, I didn’t see an avocado until I was at least 20, so I was a little bit scared of them until recently. Ten years in California have warmed me up to them and now I can barely eat a veggie burger without smooshing avocado slices on top. The avocado commission dinner was well-timed for me. You could say I was ripe for it.

Here’s what was on the menu:

	Chilled California Avocado & Pea Soup with Smoked Sable Fish and Shiso
	Dungeness Crab & California Avocado Salad with Lemongrass Sorbet
	Alaskan Halibut “Sous Vide” with California Avocado “Hollandaise,” Asparagus, and a Quail Egg
	Wood Grilled New York Steak with California Avocado “Chimichurri,” and Fresh Corn Polenta
	Meyer Lemon-Olive Oil Cake with California Avocado Ice Cream, Strawberries and Almonds

The Dungeness Crab and California Avocado Salad with Lemongrass Sorbet stood out that night as one of my favorite dishes. The recipe is available at the Avocado Commission’s website. As you can see in the photo above, you can prepare it with the avocado slices wrapped around the crab in an almost “sushi” style, or you can prepare it as it is in the photo below, piling the crab on top to make it “tall.”

A few weeks after this amazing dinner, I flew to the south of Spain for a family wedding. We stayed at a small inn about 45 minutes west of Malaga called Hotel Rural La Paloma. Owned and operated by an Italian couple, Philippo and Elena took amazing care of us.

The menu at the inn’s restaurant was a great mix of Spanish and Italian-influenced dishes. They were incredibly accommodating as well. My husband is a vegan, and they were happy to prepare separate, off-the-menu dishes for him. While I am moving towards a vegan diet, I took the opportunity to taste a few dishes on the menu that contained dairy and seafood. One of my favorites was “Aguacate relleno de pulpa de cangrejo gratinado,” or “Puréed avocado stuffed with crab au gratin.” We’ll call it Avocado-Crab Gratinée.

I couldn’t wait to come home and try to prepare the dish myself. Elena was nice enough to share the recipe with me and both avocados and dungeness crabs happen to be in season right now. This dish is so easy to prepare, you could easily whip it up for weeknight treat for two.

Avocado-Crab Gratinée

Ingredients

1 ripe California Grown Avocado
Salt and pepper to taste
3 Tbsp heavy whipping cream
2 oz lump crabmeat
2 Tbsp grated Parmesan cheese

Method

1. Preheat the broiler. Cut the avocado in half. Discard the pit, but reserve the skins. Empty the flesh into a microwave-safe bowl. Mash it with a fork it and add salt and pepper, combining well. Add the heavy cream and the crabmeat and mix well with a fork. If the mixture is too thick, add additional heavy cream.

2. Warm the mixture in the microwave for 1 minute. Add the grated Parmesan cheese to the mixture and stir it in completely. Spoon the mixture either back into the two empty avocado halves or into one or two small oven-safe dishes. Sprinkle additional Parmesan cheese on top.

3. Bake under the broiler for a couple of minutes until the cheese has browned slightly. Serve immediately.

Avocado Crab Gratinée

Marinated Olives with Fennel

This weekend, I hosted a birthday dinner for my husband, but this year was different from all the rest. The entire menu was vegan and gluten-free. Several of the guests are vegetarian and a few are gluten intolerant. In addition, many of them are trying to avoid dairy, so I decided to just take the menu all the way. I knew that I would need help to make it an elegant, flavorful dinner with these restrictions in place. I am a newly-minted vegetarian chef, so I turned to my friend and amazing gourmet blogger/writer/instructor/video-maker, Viviane Bauquet-Farre, author of the blog food and style. Viviane and I met when I featured on her cooking videos on StreamingGourmet.com. Her videos are as beautifully made as her fine cuisine.

Viviane creates innovative, seasonal dishes that are flavorful, deceptively simple, and… as it turns out, vegetarian (not vegan or gluten-free necessarily). I read her blog and watched her videos for about six months before I even realized that they were all meatless. I knew she was the person to call for help with my menu.

Sure enough, we were able to come up with an elegant five-course dinner free of bones, cheese, cream or wheat. Eager to know what the menu was? You’re in luck, but you’ll have to check back. All five courses will be revealed over the next five days.

Vegan, gluten-free dinner about to begin

Today’s post is a bit of a teaser. These marinated olives were among the hors d’oeuvres on the table during the cocktail hour, but there are five courses yet remaining. The olives were devoured, but I have a confession to make. I don’t eat olives. I don’t think an entire olive has ever passed my lips. So I can’t vouch for them myself. And because I don’t eat olives, it didn’t occur to me to put a little bowl out to collect all the pits. It also didn’t occur to me to put out little toothpicks with which to pick up the olives. You can learn from my mistake and use a dish like this one (available at Amazon.com).

But this recipe is that good, because despite my lack of proper accoutrements, guests wolfed down these olives with their bare fingers and left the pits wherever they could hide them.

Marinated Olives with Fennel

Marinated Olives with Fennel
By Viviane Bauquet Farre of food and style
Reprinted with permission

makes 2 cups

1/2 small fennel bulb
1 tablespoon coarsely chopped fennel greens
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds
2 strips lemon zest – (use vegetable hand-peeler) and cut in 1/16” julienne strips
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 1/4 lb mixed olives

Step 1: Trim and cut fennel bulb in half. Using a vegetable hand-peeler, shave 12 strips from the bulb and put in a large bowl. Place the balance of ingredients in the same bowl. Mix well and transfer to a Tupperware container.

Step 2: Let marinate at room temperature for 1 hour before serving.
Cook’s note: Refrigerate up to 1 month. Bring to room temperature before serving.

Scrambled Egg Grilled Cheese with Leeks

To help celebrate Grilled Cheese Month and to join in Panini Happy’s Grilled Cheese Pageant and because I just had a craving for a dish like this, I decided to make an indulgent, grilled cheese sandwich filled with scrambled eggs.

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Roasted parsnips, potatoes and carrots

I’ve been working on perfecting roasted root vegetables for awhile. Getting them to come out of the oven crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside is no small feat. Should you parboil first? How hot should the oven be? I’ve gone back and forth about the parboiling question. For years, I’ve been too lazy to bother and I thought that I was getting by just fine. That all changed the other day, when I followed the recipe in Jamie Oliver’s latest book, Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals. He got me to parboil again and I don’t think I will ever go back.

Click on the book to see more:

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Vegetarian Chili with Cornbread Topping

I usually avoid vegetarian chili because I fear that it won’t be flavorful enough, but my husband has really laid off meat lately, and he likes his food to have a lot of kick, so I set about making a chili that would stand up to both of our flavor requirements and not include any ground meat. Sure enough, this chili delivers. In addition to chili powder, I’ve added a couple of dried red chilis (seeds and all) which manages to kick it up a notch. The other trick is to add all of the dried spices to the pot while there is hot oil in there to bring out all of the trapped flavors. While you are cooking, you should experience all of the fragrances. Adding dried spices to heated oil makes them truly fragrant.

The other trick to this dish is to make it in a pot that can transfer from stove to oven, like this Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron 5 Quart Oval French Ovens. After you’ve prepared the chili on the stove, you will bake it with the cornbread batter on top for about 30 minutes.

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Chicken and Leek Stroganoff

For my birthday in January, my husband gave me a copy of Jamie Oliver’s new book Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals. At the time, I didn’t realize that it was going to be part of a whole movement he is trying to ignite here in America. A few months ago, when I first looked at it, I thought, ‘These are easy recipes with real food you’d want to eat,’ and I put it on the part of my kitchen counter reserved for cookbooks that I actually use. Now that I’ve seen the television show he has created, I’ve been inspired to use it even more. I’ll be blogging the results over the next couple of weeks.

You can pick up a copy of the book at Amazon, by clicking here:

If you haven’t seen the show yet, you MUST watch this preview. This 2 minute clip brings tears to my eyes every time I watch it.

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Pan Seared Halibut

Okay, I’m officially back on a health kick, which is why I’ve been blogging a little less frequently lately. I actually go to the gym now! But, I’m determined to eat delicious, healthy dishes and am eager to share them all with you, so here we go. Today’s installment is a seared halibut with mashed potatoes and kale chips. Now, I didn’t totally skimp on the ingredients here. I use real butter and olive oil and even whole milk in the mashed potatoes – one could substitute skim milk, cooking spray and so on, but my strategy is to eat flavorful foods but be careful with the portions and to choose foods that have tons of vitamins and minerals and aren’t high in bad fat. We’ll see if it works.

The sauce below breaks some rules because I needed to use ingredients that were on hand. The good news is that it turned out great anyway. Normally, I would have used heavy cream and wine and so on, but I didn’t have any of either, so I used chicken stock and whole milk instead and to my delight, the sauce thickened up nicely and was flavorful too. Again this sauce could easily be tweaked. You could take out the mustard and put in sour cream and paprikah instead or you could keep the mustard and also add capers or olives. I just love mustard and leeks, so that’s how I did it.

Pan Seared Halibut with Leek-Dijon Sauce
Serves 4

Ingredients

4 Halibut fillets about 1/2 lb each
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup chicken stock or white wine
1/2 cup whole milk
1 Tbsp butter
1 leek, trimmed and finely chopped
1 tsp grated lemon zest
1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

Method

1. Season halibut fillets with salt and pepper and set aside. In a medium bowl, whisk together mustard, olive oil, chicken stock, and milk. Set aside.

2. Heat about 2 tbsp of olive oil in a large sautée pan over medium-high heat. Add fillets to the pan and sautée on one side for about 3 minutes. Flip carefully and sautée for another 3-5 minutes. If the fillets are very thick, they may take a little longer, but be careful not to overcook them. They should flake with a fork and be just opaque (maybe even a little teeny bit translucent in the very middle depending on your taste). Remove to a warmed plate.

3. Add butter to the same pan. Add leeks and sautée gently until softened, about 2 minutes. Add the milk and mustard mixture. Simmer over medium heat until thickened, about 5 minutes. Grate lemon zest over the sauce and squeeze about a Tbsp of lemon juice into the sauce. Stir to mix. Spoon sauce over fish (and mashed potatoes) and serve immediately.

Creamy Leek Mashed Potatoes
Serves 4

Ingredients

4 Yukon Gold Potatoes
Salt and pepper
1 leek trimmed and chopped finely
1 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup whole milk or more

Method

1. Peel potatoes and cut into one-inch pieces. Boil for about 15 minutes or until fork tender. In the meantime, melt butter over medium heat in a medium sautée pan. Add leeks and sautée until softened and slightly browned, about 4-5 minutes. Spoon into large bowl. Drain potatoes into same bowl. Add milk and mash either with hand masher or electric hand mixer. Season with salt and pepper.

Kale Chips
Serves 4

Ingredients

4 large leaves of Dino Kale (curly leaf kale can work too)
1 Tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt to taste

Method

1. Preheat oven to 400˚F or use your convection setting and preheat it to 375˚F.

2. Wash and dry kale leaves. I left the stems on mine, but it really is better to remove them, because they remain tough and stringy while the rest of the pieces of kale becomes paper thin and crispy. Remove a stem by folding the kale in half and cutting away the stem.

3. Brush kale leaves with olive oil and season with fresh ground sea salt. Lay them side by side on a cookie sheet and bake for about 5 minutes. Flip them over and bake for another 5-7 minutes or until leaves are slightly browned, paper thin and crispy. Serve immediately as garnish over the fish.

Pan Seared Halibut

Apple Carrot Cupcakes

Day 3 of 14 Days of Apple and I decided I wanted to make an apple muffin/cupcake. I was looking around at different recipes for inspiration and guidance when I found one I like at MarthaStewart.com. That recipe calls for shredded apples and something about imagining myself taking an apple to a grater made me think of shredded carrots. I still have a scar on my thumb from shredding a carrot a little too aggressively when I was 12, but that’s another story. Anyway, I decided to split the four cups of shredded apples into two cups apples, two cups carrots et voila.

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Pumpkin Pudding

It’s day 30 of 31 days of pumpkin, my friends, and I’ve gone back to basics and back to the book that inspired me as a young home cook so many years ago. My mother gave me this book when I was a junior in college and I cooked from it religiously back then. Now it’s funny. Some of the recipes feel a bit dated. There’s even a recipe in there for a pumpkin mold: a kind of custardy, pudding-like thing that you chill in a bundt cake pan and turn out. I didn’t have the energy to actually make it, although I considered doing so just for the retro appeal and possible shock factor of the resulting photograph. (Tastestopping, here we come)! It will have to wait until next year.

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