kayb

Really not a Waldorf salad, in that it doesn't have either apples OR nuts OR celery, but I had some leftover ambrosia (pineapple, mandarin orange segments, coconut, in their own juice) and decided I wanted a creamy tang to it...added a couple of tablespoons of Hellman's. It was a most serviceable lunch. I tend to be a Waldorf minimalist -- apples, nuts, mayo. I don't even add celery. Arkansas Black apples are in season now, and they're excellent, especially mixed with Granny Smiths.

My favorite new green bean recipe is green beans Provencale -- steamed, then sauteed in butter and olive oil with shallots, rosemary, halved grape tomatos and basil. Wonderful.

Not a lot of cooking this past week. One night, it was cheese, smoked salmon, and bread and butter pickles while I browsed through my newest cookbook: That's Pyrenees, colby jack, and sharp cheddar cheese, and salmon a friend caught and smoked herself. Wonderful! Another night, in a confounding combination that was based on what I had handy and what I was in the mood for, it was fried rice and butternut squash soup with chile: Note the "fine china." This is my absolute favorite soup mug.

Oh. My. God. That's the most revoltingly hysterical, or hysterically revolting, thing I've ever seen.

I volunteered to cook dinner for our company staff retreat (12 people, a lake cabin). I wanted good food but knew it was going to be important to cook a good deal ahead. The menu wound up as bouef bourguignon, potatos dauphinois, green beans Provencale, and coriander glazed carrots, with a salad of mixed greens, walnuts and goat cheese. I picked up some bake-it-yourself French bread at a local bakery, and made a coconut cake with fruit salad for dessert. Cooked the cake two days ahead, so it could get nice and moist; made the beef the night before, and while it was cooking prepped the potatos up to the point of covering them with cream and baking, made the fruit salad, and packed what kitchen necessities I thought I'd need. That left me to do the salad, the carrots, the beans and the bread on-site, as well as reheat the beef and bake the potatos. It was a hit. Unfortunately, the pic of the beef doesn't seem to want to upload. Not that it was all that photogenic, in its huge roaster pan, but it was certainly good.

YUM! And it looks as good as it sounds. Recipe?

Bran muffins with All-Bran. I had a recipe years ago that used both bran flakes AND All-Bran, but have no idea where it disappeared to. Snack mix with Cheerios, Chex, pecans and pretzels, flavored with Worcestershire and butter and Tabasco. Oatmeal as part of the crumble topping (with brown sugar and butter) for baked apples or an apple pie. Or any other fruit, come to think of it.

One of the changes I made was to use tenderloin, since I'd happened upon a great sale on them and had some in the freezer. I was afraid poaching would mean too much of a breakdown of the meat, so I just browned the raw cubes and used beef stock. Worked like a charm. I subbed a couple of tablespoons of Santa Cruz chile paste for the jalapeno, which I didn't have handy, either. It was wonderful!

Posole, with baked arepas: I made some changes from the recipe posted in the posole cookoff thread, to accommodate what was in my kitchen. It was astoundingly wonderful. Thanks, Chris!

Trying again, to post the photos: Chicken pot pie and roasted tomato caprese: (and apparently they will be one post per photo, for some reason....)

A chicken pot pie with roasted tomato caprese: And Friday night, with greatest thanks to Chris Amirault for posting his mother-in-law's posole recipe: (which I seem to be having trouble uploading, but Chris, it was wonderful! Please thank your mother-in-law for me!) Last night was choucroute garnie and German potato salad, with no photographs because we were starving.

Entirely too much breakfast today, but some mornings you splurge: Potato latkes, country style bacon, apple butter, over easy egg, sourdough toast.

Got to go with the BLT, on good non-toasted wheat bread, with a slice of a big, vine-ripened tomato, so big one thick slice covers the slice of bread, with Petit Jean Meats' peppered bacon, leaf lettuce, Hellman's mayo, the full-fat variety, please, and a few slices of avocado if I happen to have it handy. Or just the bacon and tomato and mayo on the bread.

Oh, absolutely. A few examples: Pot roast with veggies shows up a day or so later as vegetable beef soup. Any kind of chicken or pork is reincarnated in fried rice, which of course also necessitates cooking extra rice ahead for something else. Leftover meat loaf gets crumbled into beef and barley soup. Any grilled or Mexican-seasoned meat becomes the centerpiece in quesadillas. Leftover baked fish becomes a fish croquette (think the salmon or tuna croquettes of your childhood) Odds and ends of veggies get frozen in a special container which gets dumped into the vegetable soup. There are two of us at home, and one of us is a 20-year-old, which means I often cook just for myself. I take lunch of leftovers most every day to work, but that's still not generally enough to deal with what all is left. So "repurposing" the entree and/or sides is a critical part of meal planning for me.

I've been traveling much of this week, but I did have a couple of nights at home and put them to use with an old-fashioned country dinner of white beans and fried cornbread: And one day last week, it was a chicken quesadilla with sweet potato chile grits, sour cream, salsa and guacamole.

Yummm....Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday of the year. My menu has evolved over the years, but still includes many of my childhood favorites. This year, I'm cooking it at a friend's house in Philadelphia, so it'll be interesting to see how well I do outside my own kitchen comfort zone. Roast turkey, perhaps just turkey breast this year as there will be just three of us Cornbread dressing (Dan, mine is vegetarian but for the chicken stock, and I'd wager you could use vegetable stock) Giblet gravy Cranberry salad (fresh cranberries, apples, oranges, pecans, all chopped in the food processor and mixed with a big box of raspberry jello made with half as much water as called for, plus an extra cup of sugar; just gives it a little body, doesn't taste like a congealed salad at all) Sweet potato casserole with a pecan-brown sugar topping (NO marshmallows, NO pineapple, NO orange juice!) Homemade mac and cheese Green bean casserole (the canonical one from my childhood, with golden mushroom soup, pimentos, and french fried onions; only time of the year I buy canned soup) And probably pecan pie. The menu expands and contracts depending on who and how many are eating. It'll be somewhat abbreviated this year, as I'm cooking for a small group.

Best fried rice I ever made was from Mark Bittman's recipe in How To Cook Everything: Saute onions, garlic and minced ginger, remove; saute carrots, remove; saute peas, remove, saute meat, remove. Add rice, toss to coat with oil, make a clear spot, scramble in eggs, add some mirin, some soy sauce, some sesame oil, fold in veggies and meat. I use whatever's on hand; have used leftover yellow squash and zucchini,leftover cooked chicken or pork. That recipe alone is worth the price of the book, which remains my all-time favorite cookbook.

To this Southerner, the gravy/sauce/etc. divide is roughly this: 1. White gravy is made with the rendered fat of bacon or sausage, flour just cooked until it barely begins to turn color, and milk, salt and pepper to taste. It's served for breakfast, with biscuits, and one may use the bacon grease from the crock of it one keeps on one's stove (you don't do that? How do you cook?) to make said gravy for country fried steak, breaded pork chops, or fried chicken (or for the mashed potatoes that accompany those dishes). 2. Brown gravy is made from other meat drippings, flour cooked in until brown, and liquid which may be stock, water, wine or a combination of any of the above stirred in. It's served with all other meats except roast turkey. 3. Giblet gravy is made from the turkey drippings plus chicken stock, flour or cornstarch dissolved in water used to thicken, the cooked and diced giblets, and diced hard-boiled eggs, and eaten with turkey and cornbread dressing. 4. Red-eye gravy is made with the drippings from country ham, flour cooked to a dark roux, coffee and water stirred in. Must admit I have never heard of using any kind of tomato product in red-eye gravy. 5. The divide between brown gravy and a sauce is pretty thin. I guess I consider it a sauce when it has to be reduced to thicken, and a gravy when the flour serves as a thickener. Well, except for bechamel, but that's a white, and not a brown, sauce, and it's definitely not white gravy. 6. Spaghetti gravy is, I learned when I moved to Arkansas, a tomato-based pasta sauce with ground beef.

There's an easy fix for that. Leave the grill dirty. Wait until the next grilling event. Light the fire, put the grate back on, walk away. Come back 10 minutes later with your steel brush and clean in in about 15 seconds.

This morning: bran muffins with diced figs. And what was probably an unhealthy-sized pat of butter.

The peaches were. The pancakes left something to be desired. And I'm not sure how the pic got there twice!

Kim, it's just a basic carbonara, only with udon noodles rather than any other sort of pasta. While the noodles were boiling, I sauteed some diced bacon with a big clove of minced garlic, and set it aside in its rendered fat,and I beat two eggs and added a half-cup grated parmigiano reggiano. When the noodles were done, I drained them, dumped them back in the pot,and added the bacon and fat, tossed that, added the cheese and eggs and tossed until it got creamy. And then stuffed myself. The honey-miso roasted veggies were eggplant, zucchini and yellow squash, tossed in a mix of 3 tbsp each of honey and miso, 1/4 tsp powdered ginger, a dash of sesame oil, a tablespoon of rice wine vinegar, and a dash of soy sauce. (Measurements approximate.) I whisked that together, tossed the veggies in it, and roasted at 400 for about 15 minutes. It's a great treatment for veggies; I'm going to try it with butternut squash.

Chicken Cider Stew, from the Kitchen Parade blog, slavishly adhering to the recipe here: http://kitchenparade.com/2002/10/chicken-cider-stew.php It was good; would have been better with some paprika or some ancho chile powder, which I'll add next time.

Gosh....after that, I'm almost ashamed to post my meager effort from this morning....gluten-free pancakes (for the gluten-allergy child who was visiting) with peach sauce and creme fraiche: It was my inaugural run at gluten-free pancakes, and they were less than stellar. The peace sauce, though, with diced fresh peaches, honey, ginger and amaretto, was pretty wonderful.

In a food blog challenge in which I occasionally compete, the challenge this month was fusion cookery. Theme of the contest is economy -- make a meal for two for under $5. I combined Italian and Japanese with Udon Carbonara and Honey Miso Roasted Vegetables. In a very tightly cropped photo to disguise the fact that my plating skills leave much to be desired. The veggies were to die for, though.