Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

Here's a great dish that does double duty: it can be dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow. It's delicious served slightly warm or chilled. And it's especially great for a Friday night Lenten dinner. Using readily available ingredients including my favorite cans of tuna, this dish is light on the wallet too. For the best taste and texture use white albacore tuna packed in oil. It's much better than the chunk light in water.

My version of the French salad Niçoise is crossed with the American macaroni salad. Instead of boiled potatoes, I use pasta as a delicious alternative. Cavatappi, a corkscrew-shaped pasta, makes a playful addition, but elbow macaroni works well too. Green beans are quickly blanched and pasta is then cooked in the same pot before being combined with all the ingredients. A finish of briny olives and capers and a fresh vinaigrette make it feel like springtime on the Mediterranean coast.

Ok, so England isn't the home of one of the world's greatest cuisines, but it has exported a number of delicious dishes. I'm particularly fond of crumpets, Summer pudding, bangers and mash, fish and chips, the Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding, and chicken tikka masala (while not completely English the combining of chicken tikka with a masala sauce is believed to be a British invention). On the rise in popularity are sticky toffee pudding and perhaps one day, my favorite English sausage the chipolata.

Something else I think of as decidedly English that has not gained in popularity yet here in the States, are Jellies. Not jelly like grape jelly, but jellies for eating that we call gelatin or Jell-o. But the British versions are much more sophisticated often including booze and ending up like gelatinized versions of elegant cocktails. Every Summer, British cookery magazines feature a variety of these lovelies which can be served instead of a cocktail, as a starter, a palate cleanser or a dessert.

The possibilities are endless. One package of gelatin and you are on your way! Other requirements include little glasses and tiny spoons. I have collected some shot glasses for this purpose and also use my otherwise rarely used vodka set.

It's that time of year again when everyone is ready to jump onto the get-fit wagon. I could easily say that I should include myself in that group, but I believe it's best to start by taking small steps before diving into a plan that you might not keep up. My first step for the New Year is a healthy one, it's simply to eat more healthy foods, like whole grains and to limit my intake of sugar. I actually love whole grains, but I just don't eat them often enough. Luckily my only downfall sugar-wise is chocolate, so it's easy for me to exclude sweets and candies entirely. But I've recently found myself using agave syrup as my choice of sweetener. That was my first step, what's yours?

Eating whole grains doesn't just mean switching your morning toast from white to wheat. It means eating actual whole grains preferably in their minimally processed forms. In place of white rice try brown. Eat steel-cut oats rather than instant. Try some different whole grains, like amaranth, millet, buckwheat, barley, or bulgur. Bulgur is one of my favorites. If you've ever had Middle Eastern or Turkish food, you've probably already eaten bulgur without knowing. The salad tabbouleh and the meatballs called kofta or kefteh are made with bulgur. It's not an unrecognizable grain, bulgur is actually wheat.

A Monte Cristo consists of ham, turkey or chicken, and Swiss cheese sandwiched between two slices of white or challah bread that is dipped in an egg batter, then grilled or fried in butter until golden brown. It is often dusted with confectioners’ sugar and served with a side of red currant jelly.

The Monte Cristo is an American version of the Croque-Monsieur, the famed French grilled cheese and ham sandwich that is fried in clarified butter. The sandwich first appeared on the menu at Gordon’s, a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, but it didn't get its big break until Disneyworld got involved. When the Blue Bayou Restaurant in the Pirates of the Caribbean put the Monte Cristo on its menu, its popularity soared.

I hadn't eaten a Monte Cristo since I was a kid, and I didn't remember particularly loving it. My, how things have changed. This sandwich has it all: it's sweet, salty, and chewy. It's addictive.