skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Yesterday was Wild food day. We were busy so postponed it until today. We are having Wild Duck. The best way I found to make wild duck is Orange Duck . Soak the duck in milk for 24 hours to remove the gamey flavor. I make it a little less sweet by adding orange juice instead of Orange Marmalade. I serve with fried rice, egg rolls and baked cream cheese wontons.
Life gets busy, no excuses, but it’s a fact, and as a result, I am hot and cold about blogging. But I try to be responsive when a friend or a client makes a request for a recipe or help with a specific problem. A friend is hosting Thanksgiving and she wants to serve Cranberry-brie puffs as an appetizer.
This recipe comes from my sister-in-law Sarah, and it never fails to impress. Sarah’s recipe calls for whole cranberry sauce, which I often use, but I also make cranberry chutney and fresh cranberry-orange relish around the holidays, so I sometimes substitute those. Another quick fix for these is to use prepared, thawed filo cups. You can bake them just a touch or eliminate the baking altogether. Please note, the baked puff pastry version is superior, but sometimes you’re in a pinch and it’s nice to know you can work with what you have.
An additional plus for the hostess: They don’t take much time to assemble, you can do the assembly the day ahead, then just pop them in the oven at the last minute. Happy hostess, happy guests, what more could you want?
Cranberry-brie puffs
1 package puff pastry, thawed
1 small wheel of brie, chilled
1 can whole cranberry sauce
slivered almonds, optional
Preheat oven to 350°. Roll out puff pastry and cut into 2-inch squares. Place one square of puff pastry in each cup of a mini muffin tin. Cut brie into ½-inch cubes. (Chilled brie cuts easier than room-temperature brie.) Place one cube of brie and one scant teaspoon of cranberry in each cup. Top with slivered almonds, if using. (Can be covered with plastic wrap and refrigerated at this point if you’ll be baking them later.) Bake for 20-30 minutes, until puff pastry is golden brown and brie is melted. Let cool about 5 minutes before removing from tin and serving as the brie will be extremely hot.
My neighbor’s hot artichoke and spinach dip — the best I’ve ever had! — and key lime martinis that tasted just like key lime pie! Part sweet, part tangy, part garlic, part creamy, it was the perfect combination. If you like, for an extra special touch, rim martini glasses with graham cracker crumbs.
Key lime martinis 2 oz vanilla vodka
2 oz liquer 43
2 oz Rose’s lime juice
Combine in cocktail shaker with ice. Shake, let set to chill well. Strain into martini glasses.
Today is National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day. I’m so glad all the fattening desserts have national holidays. What else would I do with my time? How else would I keep my waistline growing?
Besides the flavor and the creaminess, the good news is, it’s a vegetable!
Don’t cheat like I did and eat the cake an hour or two after it comes out of the oven, it’s not worth it. Wait the full six hours, or better, overnight, you’ll be glad you did. Also, my cheesecakes almost always crack when they cool, even when I leave them to cool slowly in the oven. It’s not the end of the world, and that’s how your friends will know that it really is homemade.
Pumpkin cheesecake
1 c ginger snaps, crushed into crumbs
2 T butter, melted
2 T sugar
¼ t nutmeg, freshly grated
8 ozs cream cheese, softened
1 c light brown sugar
16 ozs ricotta cheese
1 15-oz can canned pumpkin
¼ t nutmeg, freshly grated
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 eggs
Preheat oven to 350°. In 9" round springform pan, with fork, stir ginger snap crumbs, melted butter, sugar, and nutmeg until moistened. With hand, press mixture onto bottom of pan. Tightly wrap outside of pan with heavy-duty foil to prevent leakage when baking in water bath later.
Prepare pumpkin filling: In large bowl, with mixer at medium speed, beat cream cheese until smooth; slowly beat in sugar until blended, about 1 minute, scraping bowl often with rubber spatula. With mixer at low speed, beat in ricotta, pumpkin, nutmeg, and vanilla. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until blended after each addition. Pour pumpkin mixture into crust and place in large roasting pan. Place pan on oven rack. Carefully pour enough boiling water into pan to come 1 inch up side of springform pan. Bake cheesecake 1½ hours, or until center barely jiggles.
Remove cheesecake from water bath to wire rack; discard foil. With small knife, loosen cheesecake from side of pan to help prevent cracking during cooling. Cool cheesecake completely. Cover and refrigerate cheesecake at least 6 hours or overnight, until well chilled. Remove side of pan to serve. Garnish with crystallized ginger.
The Dunican sisters were anti-grocery shopping today. I’m not sure what Regina ended up finding in her pantry and freezer to turn into dinner, but I had quite a coup, inspired by National Seafood Bisque Day, I combined the recipe the punchbowl.com page recommended with some inspiration from Ina Garten’s Shrimp Bisque (because I had all the ingredients on hand).
This recipe is truly a last-minute preparation. I made the whole thing from frozen shrimp to eating the piping hot bowl with a piece of crusty bread in 30 minutes. If you use frozen shrimp, skip the sautéing step, but the olive oil does add some depth of flavor to your bisque. If you don’t have white wine, you can substitute seafood stock or even water, but add a splash (less than ¼ cup of brandy, vermouth, or dry sherry at the end). Remember to take the center out of the blender when blending hot liquids; hot liquids tend to cause the blender to “explode” and are quite dangerous, so place a folded dish towel over the hole in the blender top to let the steam escape, and keep your hand on it so the top and towel stay in place.
Truly last-minute “National Seafood Bisque Day” shrimp bisque
1 T olive oil
1 lb shrimp, in shells, frozen is fine
1 bottle white wine
1 qt light cream
¼ t thyme leaves
1 pinch black pepper
1 pinch kosher salt
1 pinch cayenne pepper
If shrimp is thawed, sauté shrimp, shells and all, in olive oil; add thyme, pepper, and salt. Simmer shrimp in wine just until cooked (pink), overcooking shrimp will cause it to be tough. Pull shrimp from wine and chill in refrigerator until cool enough to handle. In the meantime, add cream to wine and continue simmering over low heat.
Once shrimp is cool enough, peel shrimp and place in blender; reserve 12 shrimp, peeled, with tails intact. Add liquid so blender is half full. With center of blender top out of hole, place folded dish cloth over hole. Keeping your hand on dish cloth, pulse blender until shrimp is chopped fine. Return to pot to warm over low heat. Stir in cayenne pepper. Serve immediately with two whole shrimp as garnish.
It was a quiet rainy night. One football practice had ended early, the other one had been canceled altogether, so there were more kids around, and fewer adults. It called for just a bottle of red wine and an easy dinner. Corn chowder was in the crockpot, and I put together some Open-faced Italian tuna melts based on Rachael Ray’s Tuna Mini Melts with Rosemary, but I was looking for less sandwich, more appetizer. And, as usual, I wanted to use what I had in the house, so I used a hearty whole-grain bread, and made them open-faced (who needs that extra slice of bread when you could have an extra glass of wine instead?). I added some sundried tomatoes for color and flavor too.
Open-faced Italian tuna melts
2 cans Italian tuna in olive oil, lightly drained
1 small shallot, finely chopped
1 large sprig rosemary, leaves stripped and finely chopped
1 sundried tomato, finely chopped
Black pepper
1 T olive oil
4 slices provolone cheese, deli sliced and chopped
8 full-size slices of grainy bread, or 32 slices of cocktail bread
Mash tuna with finely chopped shallot, rosemary, sundried tomato, black pepper, and olive oil. Stir in the chopped cheese. Toast one side of the bread under the broiler until light brown, turn bread over, top each with a generous tablespoon of tuna. Place under the broiler again, just until warm.
When I was adapting my sister Bridget’s recipe for Microwave Corn Chowder to make Crockpot Corn Chowder this week, I may have come across the greatest time-saving and cleanup-saving tip of all time. To add crispy chopped bacon to a crockpot recipe usually meant a big mess and some time and diligence cooking up and chopping bacon, or chopping, then extra diligence because small pieces burn faster.
Bridget’s recipe, however, uses a pair of kitchen shears to cut the bacon into small pieces. Place the bacon in a 4-cup glass measure, cover with a paper towel, and microwave for 5-6 minutes (I paused after about a minute or two to stir them up, so they weren’t stuck together). Voilà! Crispy bacon pieces for my corn chowder in no time, with minimal mess!
For the final cleanup, this tip is from my cousin Jenn’s husband Frank: Place a piece of aluminum foil so that it sets in your sink drain, and turn the edges up a little to catch the bacon fat as you pour it into the foil. Let the fat congeal, wrap the foil around the fat, and toss it in the trash!
Thanks Bridget & Frank for making my life easier this week!
I love this blog author’s honesty; that is exactly what would happen to me if I planned a hike to discuss how the key to the success in the new school year is to be “organized, organized, and organized.” But it did get me thinking about The Ultimate Sandwich. What would yours be?
Part deux. I have some homemade amaretto on the hutch staring me down. My friend Tammy has seasonal cocktails, and my husband usually loves them. I can’t remember what her summer cocktail is right now, but her winter cocktail is amaretto and ginger, and Fred loves it. I’m not a ginger ale person, but you can only drink so many amaretto on the rocks before you’re lying flat on your back, so I came up with amaretto and orange juice. Whether you prefer ginger ale or OJ, serve it in a highball glass, on the rocks.
This evening, we’ll be having our amaretto cocktails with black bean “hummus”. This is a recipe that originally came from my friend Eileen. It isn’t a Mediterranean inspired hummus, it’s more of a Mexican black bean dip, but because of it’s consistency and color, we had trouble coming up with a name for it [that didn’t sound like the punchline of a 5th grader’s off-color joke]. Thus, I’ve taken to calling it “hummus”. Again, one of my favorite things about it is that I usually have all the ingredients on hand, and if I don’t, they’re simple enough that I can remember what they are without writing them down.
Black bean hummus
1 can black beans, drain and reserve liquid
½ jar Mrs. Renfro’s Roasted Garlic Salsa, more if you like
1 clove garlic
juice of 1 lemon
½ bunch cilantro, more if you like
Put garlic in a blender and blend until garlic is chopped fine. Add beans, salsa, lemon, and cilantro to blender. Blend until smooth (a hummus-like consistency). Add as much reserved liquid as you like to reach your desired consistency.
Sunday is Football Day in our house this Fall. Youth football games at one o’clock, and the Patriots after that (so far it’s been on tape delay because the games have all conflicted with the 1 o’clock youth games). It has worked for us, though, because I have been able to throw a meal in the crockpot and have dinner waiting when we come in to sit down in front of the game. Last Sunday I tried a new recipe, and (as usual) I didn’t have all the ingredients handy, so I improvised. It made so much that we had some other folks from my son’s team come back and join us, and it was such a hit that my sons asked for it again for dinner on Monday night — and there was enough that they could.
Crockpot pork carnitas (Based on Slow Braised Carnitas from foodtv.com)
3 lbs lean boneless pork loin, roughly chopped
15 ozs red enchilada sauce
15 ozs beef broth
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 chipotle pepper, roughly chopped
4 green bell peppers, roughly chopped
4 plum tomatoes, roughly chopped
3 T vinegar
½ bunch fresh cilantro leaves, roughly chopped (even better if you have a friend to do this for you like I did)
hard and soft taco shells, salsa, guacamole, cheddar cheese, sour cream
Season pork with salt and pepper and sear in skillet until it has a nice golden crust. Place pork in crockpot with enchilada sauce, beef broth, onion, peppers, and tomatoes. Cover, and simmer on low for 6 hours or until pork is tender.
Stir in cilantro and serve with taco fixings.
I served a quick black beans and rice side dish with this. Nothing beats a quick side dish, and I like this one because of the easy proportions, so put this in your mental file (and the ingredients in your pantry) for a rushed night. It would work equally well as a main dish if you add in a sausage like kielbasa or chorizo.
Quick black beans and rice
1 can Rotel tomatoes with green chile peppers
1 can water
1 can rice
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
¼ c cilantro, roughly chopped
Add tomatoes, water, and rice in saucepan, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. At the end of 20 minutes, remove from heat, stir in black beans , and let sit covered for 5 minutes. Stir in cilantro and serve.
Can also be served as a cold rice salad.
P.S. The Patriots won!
Most Friday nights you can find some neighbors in my kitchen (and some neighborhood kids of all ages in various rooms in the house), kids generally feast on chips and salsa and pizza, but whomever is in the kitchen is looking for a signature cocktail and a tasty app.
Today felt like Fall. Today’s signature cocktail was apple cider with some dark Puerto Rican rum. Yum. Today’s signature app was red bean dip. For those of you who don’t live in New England, red bean dip is often served at Really New England restaurants (those with lobster specials, early bird specials, and lots of blue hairs). The red bean dip is great with Wheat Thins® — and all those red beans pack quite the protein punch!
Red bean dip
1 can red kidney beans, drained, rinsed
¼ c ketchup
¼ c relish, drained, squeezed dry
½ t dry mustard
2 T horseradish
2 t worcestershire sauce
Mix all ingredients together. Refrigerate at least 3o minutes. Serve with Wheat Thins®. Even better the next day.
Today is National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day. I’m so glad all the fattening desserts have national holidays. What else would I do with my time? How else would I keep my waistline growing?
The Dunican sisters were anti-grocery shopping today. I’m not sure what Regina ended up finding in her pantry and freezer to turn into dinner, but I had quite a coup, inspired by National Seafood Bisque Day, I combined the recipe the punchbowl.com page recommended with some inspiration from Ina Garten’s Shrimp Bisque (because I had all the ingredients on hand).
