Comfort Foods and Indulgences

We love chili. Enough said, really.

The weather has finally turned and Fall is in the air. While the rain and gloomy weather is not good for the wine grapes, it is chili weather.

There are so many versions of chili out there. At our house, we prefer chili without beans, the real way to make chili, he-he. However, I love Cincinnati chili with all of its 3-way and 4-way styles. Yum.

I have to admit, my chili changes a little bit each time, based on the amount of meat I have or what chili powders I have. However, the overall style does not change. This chili is great by itself or poured over things like hot dogs and burgers or even chili fries. Okay, chili fries sound good right about now.

Growing up, summer time meant spending time on Balboa Island.  Some summers, we would rent a house.  Sometimes with another family, yet most summer’s we just rented our own home. We participated in many daily activities; fishing in the bay, riding around the island in a small motor boat, and riding our bikes until the moon was our only light source.

The most important daily activity was eating a “bal bar”.  A bal bar is basically a brick of ice cream with a stick in it.  Then it is dipped in the most amazing chocolate sauce and covered in either nuts or jimmies.  I always went for the nuts (see original ice cream here).

This dessert reminds me of my childhood. For me, it’s all about the nuts. The original bal bar didn’t have cake in it.  However,  topping this dessert off with roasted, salted peanuts brought back some darn good memories!

When I pulled out the pocket folder filled with recipes I’ve gathered from cooking classes I’ve attended over the years, I was surprised to see that some of the recipes dated back to 1984. That was the year I started taking classes from Andrea Halgrimson in her cozy little kitchen in Fargo. I had two young sons at the time. Gathering with a small group of food-loving people in Andrea’s kitchen was always a special night out for me.

I flipped through my stash of recipes to find Chocolate Strawberry Shortcake. On a May evening in 1984, Halgrimson mixed up a biscuit-like chocolate dough that she rolled out and pressed into large round cake pans. The two chocolate shortcake layers were packed with a filling of whipped cream and fresh strawberries.

That was the night I got over my fear of unflavored gelatin. Halgrimson showed how easy it is to dissolve a little gelatin in water in a glass measuring cup. She placed the measuring cup in a small amount of water in a saucepan over low heat. As the water in the saucepan warmed up, the granulated gelatin dissolved in the water in the cup. Easy.

From the L.A. Times

In Italy's Piedmont region, where polenta may be better loved than anywhere else on Earth, the cornmeal mush is a food of the fall. When the air turns crisp with the first frost and people await the arrival of snow, housewives labor over their cooking pots, stirring, stirring as coarse meal slurried in water gradually thickens and becomes sticky and delicious. To serve, it's poured out onto a wooden board in a rich golden puddle like a harvest moon.

Cesare Pavese wrote about it in "The Moon and the Bonfires," a nostalgic novel about a Piedmontese expatriate's return home: "These are the best days of the year. Picking grapes, stripping vines, squeezing the fruit, are no kind of work; the heat has gone and it's not cold yet; under a few light clouds you eat rabbit with your polenta and go after mushrooms."

We do things differently in Southern California. In the first place, fall can be even hotter than summer. Here polenta belongs to these damp chilly days of winter.

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