I was walking through my local farmer’s market today and saw a new vendor called the Maine Connection Seafood Company.
The prize on their table was fresh Maine lobster – flown to LA the same day that it is caught from the family run fishing business.
Of course, you can buy a whole lobster and cook it yourself, but this is so convenient and incredibly fresh.
Lobster rolls in Maine are almost always made with a top split hot dog bun, but they’re nearly impossible to find in California.
Have you ever attended a grill shindig where chicken is the star of the show and what you are served resembles eau d'ashtray or worse the bird is literally still raw. Bleck.
For some reason, people feel the need to char the heck out of grilled chicken, leaving it dry and literally unpalatable. But you eat it anyway to be nice.
And then there are those who remove the chicken from the grill too soon because they put the grilling sauce on way too early and now it's burning. Their solution...take the uncooked chicken off the grill... a very dangerous choice. There seems to be no middle ground.
This is a dish that is perfect for all of the endless “end-of-school-year” pot luck dinners or for BBQs all summer long: Oven Roasted Potato and Green Bean Salad with Skinny Basil “Pesto.”
Real pesto–which is made with basil and garlic but also loads of oil, nuts and cheese–is delicious…but also very calorie dense. (The Barefoot Contessa’s recipe costs you 430 calories for a 1/2 cup serving.)
But by using more herbs, calorie free lemon juice and Dijon mustard, less cheese and oil and skipping the nuts altogether…this skinny “pesto-ish” dressing has just 120 calories but still packs a flavorful punch and a toothsome texture. And by using an equal amount of green beans (40 calories a cup) as potatoes (140 calories a cup), you can have the sensation of a pesto potato salad with less than half of the calories!
People in Portland, Oregon have salmon on the brain. It is a centuries old, intense love-affair – one that I can easily identify with having grown up in the Bronx where lox was one of the five basic food groups along with pickled herring, pastrami, rye bread and shmalts {or schmaltz} - chicken fat. Everyone from the state’s original people – the Umatilla, Warm Springs, Siletz and Grand Ronde tribes, to the chic tattooed urban dwellers, is salmon obsessed.
At the downtown Portland farmers market there are at least 3 purveyors of fresh and smoked salmon, not including a Native American guy who also sells fresh salmon eggs that you can take home as I have and make ikura. I’ve not done any scientific surveys but it appears to me that in the last 10 years the Oregonian has had more front page articles on protecting salmon habitats than on any other major political issue – except logging maybe. (Actually logging and salmon are joined at the hip because logging allegedly destroys salmon habitats.)
A friend of mine from NYC called the other day to ask which pie bakery I preferred. He had guests from Norway stopping by that afternoon for coffee and wanted to offer them a slice of “American pie”.
When he told me a whole pie from a bakeshop would cost anywhere from $35-$65, I suggested he take a quick lesson in pie making and bake one himself. He had 3 hours before they arrived and I was convinced I could help him get a pie, prepped, baked, and on a cooling rack before they rang his buzzer.
I quickly emailed this recipe for Best Ever Blueberry pie and he raced to his local grocery store to pick up everything we needed, (including a pie plate). With the help of Skype, I coached him through the basic steps (he saved time with a ready-made pie crust) and the pie was in the oven in no time.
There's nothing better than the smell of a freshly baked pie and this one is certain to please any guest.