Posts Tagged ‘savory’
open-faced snapper sandwich
A quick post for a quick Friday dinner.
This can be thrown together in 20 minutes, tastes amazing, and could easily be multiplied to cater to dinner for two or a small crowd. All you do is make a quick warm potato salad, sauté some snapper fillets, and pile it high on some thick toasted bread. Inspired by my favorite dish Gordon Ramsay makes on his UK Kitchen Nightmares, he calls it an open-faced sandwich, I just call it delicious.
Warm potato salad.
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parmesan and black pepper popcorn
Happy Oscar Sunday!
Just a quick post before the festivities start. Here’s a special treat to make for the ceremony tonight, using items I always have in my fridge and pantry. Spicy-salty popcorn you’ll eat handful after handful of, and not even feel that guilty about since I go easy on the oil.
Enjoy the awards tonight – and go “Inglourious Basterds” and Kathryn Bigelow!
buttermilk biscuits
This all started innocently enough. I had just seen “Crazy Heart” and after watching Jeff Bridges make “Bad Blake’s Legendary Biscuits,” I had a hankering I couldn’t ignore. So I turned to my usual goddess of southern cooking, Edna Lewis, and followed her recipe. Unfortunately… this happened:
Wah wah wahhhhhh. They don’t look too good do they? They tasted alright, but obviously they’re small, flat, and well, not very biscuit-y. Every recipe can’t be a winner, even from a trusted cook or source, but you can’t let it get you down. So, like with any challenge, I began to research and play with recipes. Butter vs. shortening, salt amounts, homemade baking powder vs. store-bought. And as always, altitude challenges. Finally, four rounds later, I made these gorgeous things today:
Victory! They taste even better than they look, too. I ended up using salted butter (just gave better flavor), homemade baking powder (from Edna), and just the right ratios to make sure they rose nice and proper here in the mountains. Nice crisp top and bottom, airy and moist on the inside, just begging to be slathered in more butter and strawberry jam.
Nice shaggy dough mess.
baked fennel with sausage
Fennel is one of those odd, underused vegetables in an everyday kitchen. It looks like celery, tastes like black licorice, and changes like a chameleon depending on how it’s cooked. But it’s a wonderfully versatile and healthy thing to work with – you just have to give it some time and love.
Incredibly high in vitamin C and fiber, fennel can be served crunchy raw, boiled, braised, baked, and everything in between. The cool thing is, once you bake it, the flavor can change dramatically from pungent and bitter, to sweet and aromatic. If you’re one of the many out there who dislikes its natural black licorice flavor, blanching and baking it is your road to fennel happiness, which you can follow below.
I saw this side dish of baked fennel with parmesan in the latest issue of Everyday Food, and immediately decided to make it. As I wandered around my grocery store trying to come up with something to serve it with, the idea of fennel = fennel seeds = sausage popped into my head. Since Italian sausage traditionally has fennel seeds in it, why not take a plain or non-Italian chicken sausage and bake it with this yummy fennel side dish to get that flavor profile, but in a much more elegant, muted way? Tender and velvety fennel with the rich and robust sausage, the dish is all-season friendly. Plus, the whole thing comes together in under 45 minutes, using only 2 pans, and could easily be served for a hearty lunch or light dinner.
Words cannot describe how much I love this stuff.
spaghetti and meatballs
I love discovering new ingredients to play with. Part of the reason I find cooking so exciting and challenging is that there is an endless ocean of cuisine, recipes, ingredients, and food out there to sail though, and although sometimes the waters are choppy, it’s always a fun adventure.
I tried bison meat for the first time recently via it being on sale at my local grocer, and I was amazed by the taste. It really wasn’t gamey as I had expected it to be, but had a very rich, meaty flavor with a great natural earthiness to it. And then I found out it has half the calories and 1/8 the fat as normal beef, plus it’s always free-range. I was in love.
So pondering what to do with a pound of ground bison… meatballs naturally popped into my head. Spaghetti and meatballs is one of those comfort foods universally loved, like pizza or mac n cheese. So why not take on a classic. The meatballs are unbelievably tender and moist despite using such a naturally lean protein (something I was worried about), and the flavor is classically garlicky with parmesan. My recipe for simple tomato sauce is one of those great things that you can make with pantry staples and it barely takes any time or attention. Plus it always tastes better than the jarred stuff – I guarandamntee it.
Panko.
Meatballs!
