Winter

Happy New Year! It's hard after the holidays not to want to take a break from all the indulgence and make sweeping resolutions. My diet resolutions this year are simply to eat more soups and salads. Sure, I'd love to eat healthy, exercise more and lose weight but I'm trying to be realistic.

When it comes to soup, there is no problem. I probably eat soup for dinner once a week. While I grew up eating salad every night, it's just not all that popular around my dinner table. I have a couple of ideas to shake things up. I am going to try to develop more interesting salad combinations and recipes. I am going to get creative with salad dressings and I am also going to try eating more salad for lunch.

This is a salad I served on New Year's Eve. It is very festive looking, don't you think? The salad is light and healthy, but has a good variety of flavors and textures. The Napa cabbage adds color and crunch, the pomegranate adds color but also sweetness, which is balanced by the saltiness of the miso dressing.

I’m calling it…the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers that is. This was truly the end of my turkey…those last two cups of shredded meat. It is December, time to wrap up this turkey thing and move on to the next holiday. However, I do know lots of you also make a gobbler for Christmas, so this recipe might come in handy at the end of the month. You’re welcome:).

I have to say I thought long and hard on how I was going to use up these last bits of the Thanksgiving bird. For me it’s a challenge, there’s no way I’m going to serve it with gravy like the regular holiday meal. I want to make something completely different.

Since it was lunchtime and after I fiddled through the spice cabinet, I decided on this A-M-A-Z-I-N-G sandwich. I added everything I possibly could because texture in a sandwich like this is key. Is has to have crunch.

My husband had it for lunch and requested more for dinner…it was that good. This is definitely a nice way to send off the bird for another year. (Okay I’m lying, I’ve stockpiled two turkeys in my deep freeze. I know I’ll be breaking them out over the winter.)

I’m perhaps one of the most happy-go-lucky kind of guys when it comes to food. I eat everything, enjoy a wide variety of foods, and can find something to eat just about anywhere I am. This ease disappears when I talk about pizza and my world view becomes nothing short of black and white. But only with pizza. Stay with me here.

I will eat the fanciest of hamburgers. I will eat the trashiest of hamburgers. In this case, I like the high brow and I can get down with the low brow, too. But pizzas? Forget it. I’ve spent half of my life consuming gummy, bready, greasy, gross pizza and I just won’t do it anymore. In fact, I haven’t in twenty years or so. Because once you taste a Neapolitan-style pizza (my personal benchmark) it’s hard to go backwards. There’s a balance of ingredients, a simplicity in its construction, and to me it gets no better. My apologies to my Chicago deep-dish pizza loving’ friends. I really mean that.

Anyway, when I tend to find my idea of pizza perfection I will visit regularly. It could be a bakery in Rome, a take-away window in NYC, or in this case my local pizza place in Long Beach called Michael’s Pizzeria. I’ve written about it before, and it’s one of my standard go-to places here in town. And for the longest time I refused to veer from their margherita pizza.

But one day a salad on the menu caught my eye, and now it seems to be the only thing I want to eat (in addition to my pizza). Picture this: winter root vegetables, pancetta, roasted pumpkin seeds and herb buttermilk dressing. It’s clean, flavorful, crunchy,  with a fantastic balance between the sweet & earthy and the tangy and salty.

You've seen it at the market. You've picked it up and wondered, What is this? An odd shaped acorn squash? Then you saw the sign: Kabocha squash, and thought, How the heck do you pronounce that?

What is Kabocha squash? A relative newcomer to the US squash scene, Kabocha squash (pronounced kuh-boh-cha) is a hard winter squash available from late fall to late spring. Its hard, dull, bumpy dark green shell is marked with pale celery green striations. It's rather heavy for its size (usually 2-3 pounds) and has a stumpy grayish colored stalk. Kabocha squash has a brilliant yellow-orange flesh, like a pumpkin's. Both the texture and flavor of Kabocha squash is similar to a sweet potato: the soft, moist, fluffy flesh is surprisingly sweet and slightly nutty.

Kabocha squash is a centuries-old variety of Japanese squash that in Japan is often referred to as a Japanese pumpkin. Apparently it was brought to Japan from Cambodia by the Spanish in the 1500s and is used in dishes ranging from soup to sushi.