StreamingGourmet
Getting the seeds (arils) out of a pomegranate is not as difficult as it may seem. I got more than a cup of arils out of just one large pomegranate, pictured here.
Start by cutting off the top of the pomegranate about 1/2 inch down from the top (the crown).
Roasted beet salad is one of my absolute favorites and recently at Le Garage in Sausalito, I had a beet salad with some scrumptious goat cheese on it. I was inspired to make beet salad at home and add a little goat cheese myself.
The goat cheese does not appear in the photograph but I dropped slices of it as a garnish right before serving the salad.
Ingredients
6 medium beets (3 red, 3 yellow)
Olive oil for roasting
3 Tbsp Olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
1 Tbsp fresh grated orange zest
Juice of one orange
1 Tbsp shallot, minced
1/2 tsp dijon mustard
1 1/2 Tbsp Fresh Italian parsley, chopped
1 3 oz package of herbed goat cheese – room temperature
I’ve been looking for a better way to roast beets and this time I found one from who else? Martha Stewart. Following her advice, I drizzled each beet with olive oil and wrapped it aluminum foil lined with parchment paper. I also seasoned the beets with salt and pepper before folding them up into their individual packets. Then I roasted them for about an hour in an oven heated to 450˚F. They were delicious right from the get-go and needed little adornment for the salad.
I think of November as comfort food month, so I thought I’d kick things off by making some beef stew. It’s easy, healthy and relatively affordable. What more could you want?
Time-saving tips:
Buy beef cubes pre-cut
Buy baby carrots and throw them in whole
Buy little red potatoes and just slice them in half
Ingredients
2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 lbs Beef Chuck cut into 1 inch pieces (you can buy it that way at the store)
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
1 large onion, chopped
1/4 cup flour
2 cups beef stock
1 cup red wine
1 Bay leaf
2 tsp dried thyme
Salt and pepper to taste
1 can (14.5 oz) ready-cut diced tomatoes
3 cups baby red potatoes, cut in half
1 bag (16 oz) frozen peas, thawed
1. Heat olive oil in dutch oven over medium heat. Add garlic and sautée for 1 minute.
This pizza was an almost complete failure. I say “almost,” because it actually tasted really good. The flavors mingled perfectly: tomato, mozzarella, basil, and eggplant. What could be better? The problem was that the dough would not cook all the way through and it remained so soggy, I couldn’t really pick up a piece of pizza with my hands. I ate it in forkfuls. Tasty, soggy, forkfuls.
I thought I had taken all of the necessary soggy-avoiding measures. I salted the eggplant and let it sit for 30 minutes, blotted out the moisture with a paper towel and repeated for another 30 minutes followed by more blotting.
Last night, I decided to make some hard-boiled eggs for a chef’s salad. Well this chef is embarrassed to admit that I had it in my head that 20 minutes are required to hard boil an egg. I also couldn’t remember if I was supposed to bring the eggs and the water to a boil together or boil the water first and drop in the eggs. I second guessed myself a couple of times and then decided to boil the water first.
I think I did everything wrong. The photo above demonstrates that. The eggs were overcooked. It turns out that 20 minutes completely overdo it. Also, some of the eggs exploded in the water, indicating that perhaps they should have heated up along with the water rather than being tossed in and shocked.
I found this video about boiling the perfect egg and posted it to StreamingGourmet. Next time, I’ll follow the instructions in the video, which include bringing the eggs and the water to boil together and boiling the eggs for only 7 minutes!
Usually for this blog, I document my attempts to make recipes I’ve never tried with ingredients that are new to me. I must confess that I have been working on perfecting a Bolognese sauce for years. I think I’ve finally got it.
This Bolognese sauce has a secret ingredient that you won’t find in most Bolognese sauces. But we’ll get to that later.
First a little background.
For a long time, I was dissatisfied with the results of my Bolognese attempts. The sauces always seemed relatively tasteless and never thick enough. My normal approach was to brown onions and ground beef, add dried herbs (like oregano and such), add a jar of prepared sauce (like Classico) and let it simmer for a long time. I thought that the longer it simmered, the tastier it would be, and that was a little bit true, but not all that much. I tried adding garlic and then adding more and more garlic, to give it flavor. It worked a little, but it seemed that the garlic flavor just disappeared. I tried adding red wine. That worked a little too. I tried adding lots of olive oil once. Again, it enhanced the flavor a bit, but it came at a cost and didn’t give the dramatic flavor I was after.
I’m a huge fan of chicken Marsala and veal Marsala, but I’ve got a craving for a pork chop, so I figure “why not try pork Marsala?” At the store, a double thick pork chop catches my eye and once again I think, “Why not?” (read on to find out why not). I’ve never made Marsala sauce before, but I figure it’s a variation on the Fig Sauce I did in September, just with mushrooms and Marsala wine instead of figs and Balsamic vinegar. Let’s see how this one turns out. An ingredients list (of sorts) is at the end of this post.
The other day, I went to the Ferry Terminal Marketplace in San Francisco for lunch. I thought I’d add a mini-photo gallery to this blog featuring the tasty bites I sampled while there. I purchased the Recchiuti Chocolate sauce after sampling it, so watch for a future blog entry where I try out different ways to use the sauce. The Recchiuti representative recommended serving it with pears. Mmmm.
While Americans often refer to a grilled sandwich as a Panini, when we say “panini,” we’re actually using the Italian word for “small bread rolls” (in the plural). Panino is the singular and “panino imbottito” is the phrase used for “stuffed panino” or sandwich. So this posting should be titled, Panino Imbottito with Ham, Cheese, and Fig Jam,” but I’m not that imbottito with myself (i.e. full of myself). Or am I?
After cooking with figs last week, I had a hankering to use the fig jam I purchased awhile back at the Jacuzzi Family Vineyards wine and olive oil tasting center.
Fig jam is pretty sweet, so it’s a great counterpoint to the salty, black forest ham that I’m using in this sandwich. If you don’t live near Sonoma, you can purchase fig jam at Amazon.com. I’ve added a link to the right to make it easy to find.
I’m going to be using my Cuisinart Griddler Gourmet which can function as an indoor grill or a panini press or open up into a griddle. You can use a frying pan right on the stove and just put a heavy lid on top of the sandwich. I do love my “griddler gourmet” though and use it a lot more than I thought I would.
For this sandwich, I purchased Black Forest Ham. In the US, that term doesn’t mean as much as it does in Europe, where Black Forest Ham is a protected designation and therefore is required to come from the Black Forest in Germany. I know that the ham I’m buying has a spicy, sharp flavor that I like. A Virginia ham, or Smithfield ham would also work well for this sandwich because of its salty and strong flavor, but a honey-cured ham might prove too sweet to pair with fig jam.
I’ve also chosen a Jarslberg Cheese. It’s a Norwegian cheese in the Swiss Emmentaler-style family of cheeses. It’s less sharp than Emmentaler, which satisfies my personal taste, while still providing that tangy counterpoint to the other flavors in the sandwich.
This photo shows the amount of jam I chose to use. The La Brea French loaf is nice and crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Most panini you find in Italian cafés are made with Ciabatta and when made properly, chefs use the whole loaf, splitting it horizontally. The loaf I chose was too big to do that, so I cut slices off of it.
I added some iceberg lettuce to the sandwich because that was what I had on hand. You might choose something with a little more bite, like arugula. (I love that arugula is called Rocket in the UK).
I grilled the sandwich under medium-high heat for about 10 minutes. I really wanted the cheese to melt without burning the bread, so I watched the sandwich carefully.
This was a thoroughly satisfying sandwich. To make it even richer, you can add butter or brush olive oil on the outside of the bread so that it browns even more as it grills. You could also use Salami rather than Ham. This version is a nice, relatively lite (I used low fat Jarlsberg cheese and there is no mayonnaise or aioli) sandwich. Buon Apetite!
