Cooking and Gadgets

ImageSnow days keeping me tucked inside my warm, cozy house with my favorite guy, a sweet puppy, a fire in the fireplace, hot soup, homemade bread and a bottle of red wine — winter life in northern Minnesota really doesn’t get much better than that.

Making your own bread does not have to be difficult. French Bread Times Two proves it.

I learned of this recipe that makes two loaves of French bread from an energetic friend of my mom’s years ago. This friend loved to cook and bake and entertain. She excitedly shared the recipe with my mom, explaining how she loved being able to conveniently pull the chilled loaves from her refrigerator and bake them just before her dinner guests arrived, bringing her all kinds of raving compliments and incredulous ooohs and aaaahs.

Well, my mom was duly impressed. Unfortunately, she was never very interested in making bread from scratch. After all, those frozen loaves of dough from the freezer case at the grocery store were awfully good and demanded no effort at all.

My mom passed the recipe over to me.

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chutneycheesepuff.jpg I'm a cheater, in the kitchen anyway. While I may not be a fan of mac and cheese from a box, I positively love using gourmet specialty products. What kinds of products? Jams, mustards, chutney, tapenade, Chinese sauces, so many things! Two of my favorite secret weapons are in the freezer--phyllo dough and puff pastry.

You could easily write a book on all the things you can make out of phyllo dough and puff pastry. I suggest the title "How to Succeed in Baking Without Really Trying". Once you learn how to handle them, the possibilities are endless. They even turn something mundane into something special. For example you could make a stew into an elegant pot pie. You could turn a fruit compote into pastries. You could make fancy little appetizers to serve hot from the oven. How fancy? I suggest little napoleons or tartlets. It's really easy.

A few weeks ago I had a lot of goat cheese languishing in the fridge. I had promised my friend Alison I would develop some recipes for her fabulous chutney and it dawned on me that using puff pastry I could make a delicious pastry with nothing more than goat cheese, puff pastry and chutney. 

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From The LA Times

parmrindsHere in California we love to brag about our abundance of wonderful seasonal ingredients and how that makes good food easy. That's more or less true, but I have to confess that I've also always had a sneaking admiration for those cooks who can whip up something from nothing.

Sure, it's wonderful to be able to just pick up a sack of Ojai Pixie mandarins and a box of medjool dates and call it dessert. But you've really got to admire someone who can take a couple of wilted zucchinis, a sprouting onion and some canned tomatoes and turn that into something delicious — the real-life equivalent of the proverbial stone soup.

I've got my own version, and, in fact, it does start with something hard as a rock. In a battered plastic bag in the deepest recesses of my refrigerator, I've got a hidden stash of gold: rinds from used chunks of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Whenever my wife finds them, she pulls them out and asks disbelievingly: "You're saving these?" And probably 98% of people would have the same reaction.

But those rock-hard rinds are flavor bombs, packed with umami. Simmer them in a pot of beans, in a soup, even in a tomato sauce, and you probably won't actually taste Parmesan, but you'll certainly taste the difference.

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From the LA Times

ImageI don't think I've ever written about cioppino without getting into an argument. That's probably as it should be.

One of the definitive California dishes, cioppino is a classic soup of fish in a garlicky tomato-wine broth. And that's probably where the agreement ends. Definitive and classic though it may be, there are as many cioppino recipes as there are cioppino cooks.

Maybe even more. Just in my own kitchen, I rarely prepare it the same way twice. Part of this, of course, is because it is based on a mixture of fish and shellfish, and rarely will you go to the market and find exactly the same proportion of the same species you bought last time, all in perfect condition.

Maybe more to the point, this is California, and here we tend to believe that provided a good final dish, how you get there is pretty much your own business. If you need the security of definitive, classic recipes in which every ingredient and garnish is specified with no room for deviation or inspiration, pick up a copy of Escoffier.

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jetsons.jpgThere are so many conveniences the Jetsons had that I could really use today. Jane Jetson had this thing that came down from the ceiling, encased her head and presto! New hairdo! I hate doing my hair. My bathroom has all kinds of gizmos with one purpose; to make my hair look cute. You can’t imagine the work that goes into that.

Flat irons, blow driers, round brushes, the Denman Brush, which is a plastic brush that grips the hair, pulling it taut, while I beam my Elcim blow drier at it. I blast it with the highest heat you can find on the market. God forbid there’s a hint of moisture in the air. My hair goes back to Israel before you can say Jiminy Cricket.

The conundrum of my hair is only surpassed by the puzzle of what to serve at the end of the day. The Jetsons had what really amounted to a microwave oven and TV dinners. I wouldn’t serve that even if I could.  This free-floating dilemma had me open my eyes one morning with what I thought would be the solution: A Slow Cooker! Yes! 

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