Holiday Recipe #4: Christmas-Stuffed Sirloin

Friday, December 9, 2005

When we have guests for dinner, I always know in the back of my mind that I should rely on a tried-and-true recipe, something that I am certain will turn out well. Do I ever do that? No, of course not. I usually intend to, but then at the last minute, I decide to try something new.

Those exact circumstances created the inspiration for this Christmas-Stuffed Sirloin, so-named because of the red and green of the filling. I first made this stuffed steak when Jessie and Jerrod were in town, and it turned out to be a great company dish. It's not so much trouble that you spend all afternoon in the kitchen but elegant enough to feel special. And, it tastes really, really good.

The only part that takes some time and concentration is preparing the meat, but I imagine you could get your butcher to do that part for you (I just wasn't exactly sure when I bought mine what I planned to do with it!) I served it with Garlic-Roasted Sweet Potatoes and an arugula salad with Sara Foster's Caesar dressing. Here's how you make the steak:

Christmas-Stuffed Sirloin

3 lbs. sirloin

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

4 ounces goat cheese

4 T. basil pesto

1 T. olive oil

2 T. sun-dried tomatoes, chopped

2 t. chopped Kalamata olives

Flour

Preheat the broiler. If your steaks are more than 1/8-inch thick, you have two options. Either, you can pound them flat with a heavy-bottomed skillet, or you can butterfly them by slicing through the middle. Mine were especially thick, so I opted for the latter. You need a really sharp knife to make this work; one of mine did not turn out so pretty. Either way, once you get the meat thinned out, then tenderize it by beating it with the small end of a beer or Coke bottle (this is my dad's technique; I'm sure there are many others). Rub olive oil into the tenderized meat; salt and pepper both sides. For the filling, mix together the pesto, olive oil, tomatoes, and olives until well-combined. Spread evenly over the ugliest side of each steak, and then roll up, longest side to longest side. Dust the outside of the steaks with flour; shake off any excess. Tie with kitchen string. Heat a large oven-proof skillet on high heat with just a touch of olive oil coating the bottom. When the skillet is very hot (a drop of water sizzles at the bottom), add the steak rolls, turning quickly, just to brown on all sides. Add the skillet to the broiler, and cook briefly, about 2-3 minutes per side. Slice to serve. Serves 4.

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Holiday Recipe #3: Almond Fudge Pie

Thursday, December 8, 2005

One of the challenging things about cooking during the holidays is that you're also trying to do a million other things at the same time: shop, wrap, decorate, plan, attend parties, not to mention whatever other daily activities you have that don't stop just because the holidays are near. For us, besides the daily what-to-fix-for-dinner dilemma, that busyness also can interfere with one of the things we love to do, which is to have people into our home for meals.

This pie serves two major functions for me: it gives me something quick but yummy to take when we're invited to dinner and something to make in a hurry when guests are on their way and I haven't planned dessert. The best things about this recipe are that you almost always have everything to make it in your pantry and you can mix it up in about 10 minutes and pop it into the oven to bake while you're having dinner.

I got this recipe from my Aunt Cindi, who wrote it on one of those brightly colored index cards in the Aunts' Recipe Book; she cites Cotton Country as her source. I'm pretty sure it's the Monroe Junior League version, but I can't be sure (this is how recipes develop in the South: very organically!). At any rate, I've amended the original Fudge Pie recipe to dress it up a bit for the holidays.

Almond Fudge Pie

1 cup sugar

1 stick butter, softened

2 eggs

1/2 cup flour

Dash salt

1/3 cup cocoa

1 1/2 t. almond extract

1/2 cup sliced almonds

1 refrigerated pie crust

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cook the pie shell for 5 minutes. Reduce the oven's temperature to 300 degrees. Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add the eggs and beat until combined thoroughly. Add everything else except the almonds, and beat until the mixture is thick and creamy. Pour into the pie shell; sprinkle almonds on top. Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until the center jiggles only slightly. If you want to be really fancy, you can serve the pie with a dollop of amaretto-spiked whipped cream. It's also rich and delicious enough to stand on its own, especially with a strong cup of coffee. 

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Holiday Party Recipe #2: Christmas and Cream Cheese!

Wednesday, December 7, 2005

I don't know what office holiday parties are like in the rest of the world, but here in the southern U.S., they can be pretty dreadful. On NPR right now, as a matter of fact, is one of the annual pieces on office party etiquette. Whatever other social horrors these parties forebode, they can also have a pretty chintzy selection of food (depending on where you work, of course). A familiar item on food tables around here is a block of cream cheese with some sort of chutney or jelly poured on top. Now, usually I would be opposed to something so effortless, so devoid of cooking. But for some reason, whenever I happen to be at one of these parties, I can't stop spreading the chutney-covered cream cheese on my crackers. It really does taste good, I just couldn't ever bring my self to dump a solid block of cream cheese from its foil wrapper right onto a pewter tray. It just isn't me.

To help with this dilemma, my good friend Casey (with whom I used to work, coincidentally) gave me this recipe. As you will see from the ingredient list, the dip is not lacking in cream cheese. But the presentation is much more elegant, and the cheddar and pecan layer at the bottom provides a nice punch to the whole affair. Now, this dip is in no way gourmet cuisine. But, it's pretty and Christmas-colored, people like it, and you can make it in about 10 minutes without dirtying anything except your food processor and the spring form pan you put it in. I could never complain about a recipe like that. Here's how you make it:

Christmas Torte

12 ounces grated cheddar cheese

3/4 cup salted pecans (better if they're roasted)

1/2 small onion

1/8 t. cayenne pepper

2 8-ounce packages cream cheese, softened

1 10-ounce package frozen spinach, thawed

1/3 cup cranberry chutney (you can use any kind, but I like the cranberry because it makes the middle layer reddish)

1/2 t. Kosher salt

Grease a small spring form pan. Spread the grated cheese in one layer on the bottom. In the food processor, chop the pecans and onions together with the salt and cayenne until  chopped finely. The mixture will be a bit pasty. Mix the pecans and onions with the grated cheese on the bottom of the pan; press down to make a kind of crust. Then, in the food processor, mix the chutney and 1 package of the cream cheese until smooth. Spread this mixture on top of the cheese crust. Squeeze all of the liquid out of the spinach, and add it to the food processor, along with the remaining cream cheese. Spread this on top, and refrigerate. To serve, unmold and surround with crackers (I like wheat thins; Casey recommends Ritz). Garnish with dried cranberries and pecans.

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You Are What You Eat: My Ten Favorite Foods (and the recipe for the holiday-spirited one above!)

Tuesday, December 6, 2005

I've been tagged by Kalyn to tell you all about my ten favorite foods. Although ten is not many, I will do my best. In no particular order, here they are:

#1 Pizza! I love pizza of all kinds, especially homemade.

Here's one with ham, artichokes, capers, and feta cheese that I made a couple of months ago. Perhaps my love of pizza has to do with the fact that it's so versatile, or maybe I'm just a sucker for bread products of any kind. At any rate, I do love it so.

#2 Sweet Potatoes Evidenced by my self-proclaimed sweet potato week during Thanksgiving, my love for this tuber is no secret. For one thing, they are my favorite color. For another, they can take so many different forms: sweet, salty, baked, roasted, fried. My mom brought me a big bag of them for Thanksgiving, so there may be more sweet potato recipes on the way...beware!

#3 Mangoes Aaahhh, the mango. The fruit love of my life. I love these all by themselves when they are just ripe, super sweet and spicy, but not mushy. One of my favorite ways to dress them up is by pouring a little coconut milk in the bowl with the slices and letting the flesh soak it up. Yum...summer, hurry up! Why don't I live in a tropical climate again?

#4 Pad Thai This spicy noodle dish has been one of my favorites ever since I was a waitress at the (sadly now closed) Brick-Oven Cafe in Jackson, Mississippi, a long time ago. As a matter of fact, when my husband proposed to me, Pad Thai from the Brick-Oven is the food he used to get me to say yes. It worked! This one here is my attempt to copy that version I originally learned to love.

#5 Boiled Shrimp One of the traditions in my family is that for your birthday dinner, you get to pick what we eat. I always choose boiled shrimp because my birthday is in June, and boiled shrimp are, to me, the perfect summer food. I love them with cocktail sauce, a simple salad, French bread, and really cold white wine. Have I mentioned already that I'm a summertime girl?

#6 Citrus One of the things I'm learning about my tastes, even as I write this up, is that I love contrast. I love oranges that are sweet and sour at the same time, and I like any dessert with (real) lemon that plays the sour effectively against something sweet (especially using butter, like in really good lemon squares. I need to post a recipe for those soon.) With the exception of garlic, lemons are probably the food item you're most likely to find in my kitchen if you pop in for a random visit. I rarely am without at least a half of one in my produce drawer.

#7 Oysters I have always loved raw oysters, even as a child, and my dad would often buy them for us to swallow down with Saltine crackers, a squeeze of lemon and salt. Enjoying food in its simplicity doesn't get any better than that for me.

#8 Cheese Another food I like to eat in its unadulterated simplicity, I can't think of a cheese I don't like. When we get the chance and the weather is nice, David and I love to have a picnic with good cheese, bread, and wine. We really are easy people to please.

#9 Peaches My second favorite fruit, one that also appears on my annual birthday dinner at Mom and Dad's. My mom makes this fabulous dessert with a cream cheese layer, peaches in gelatin, and a pecan crust. When they come in season, I promise to make it and share the recipe. Other than in that dish, though, I love peaches with the tiniest sprinkle of sugar and a spoonful of cream. Simplicity and summer, these seem to be the things I love.

#10 Anything Sweet and Salty Again, contrasts are really what drive my passion for food, but this one is the one that kills me. I don't snack too often because when I do, I'm not prone to stop until all of the snack food is gone. Here's why: snacking for me means eating something sweet and then something salty, and the cycle never ends. This is the reason I love this Christmas Cracker candy--it is both all in one. Plus it is super easy to make (10 minutes, start to finish), fun to take to parties (people can never figure out exactly what it is), and makes a lovely gift. If you don't believe me, you can just ask Chef Kristy. I sent her some for Blogging By Mail :)

Alright, so now you know what 10 foods I like the most! The 5 people I tag to tell us about their top 10 foods are, in a spirit of community, the last 5 people (not related to me) who left comments on my blog:

1. Chef Kristy, who wrote a lovely post about the package I sent her.

2. Rorie at Milk & Honey, whose blog I recently discovered through the delicious-sounding muffin-ish cookies she made for the Cookie Swap.

3. S'kat at Skat and the Food, who, from the looks of things started her blog around the same time I did, but I'm just now discovering it.

4. Chanit at Mom's Recipes and More, who writes about very interesting food from Israel. Her blog is also new to me through the Cookie Swap.

5. Heather at Eating for One, who recently sent me a package full of delightful goodies.

Happy Meme-ing, everyone!

And here's the recipe for the candy pictured at the top, as promised. Just don't make it when it's humid or raining; the caramel will be chewy instead of hard.   

Christmas Cracker Candy

1 cup brown sugar

2 sticks butter (preferably salted)

Saltine or other soda crackers

1 12-ounce package chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with foil and coat with cooking spray. Lay the crackers side by side in a single layer on the foil. In a small saucepan, melt the butter. Add the brown sugar and stir until it's dissolved. Boil for 3 minutes without stirring. Pour carefully over the crackers, making sure to coat them evenly. Bake at 400 degrees for 5 minutes. Sprinkle chocolate chips on top, and spread to coat as they melt (carefully, so as not to mix with the caramel). Cool to room temperature, and then wrap in wax paper and foil and freeze. I love to eat it really cold, straight out of the freezer, but you can also let it return to room temperature. I make batches of this to freeze, a few at a time, and then give it away for Christmas. Of course, I always make enough to cure my sweet-salty cravings too!

P.S. It's time to vote for your favorite cookies from the Cookie Swap. Jennifer and Alberto have posted the round-up, and you can vote for your top 3 picks by emailing them at cookieswap@gmail.com. Remember those spicy sweet potato ones with the sticky maple orange glaze...?

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Paper Chef: A Clean-Out-the-Fridge International Holiday Cocktail Party

Monday, December 5, 2005

Alright, so the first three Paper Chef ingredients this month were not so exciting for me. Carrots are cute and sweet, but in my opinion, the best thing about them is their color (I love orange) and their nutritional benefits. Rice is flexible at least, and offers the possibility for many adaptations. Anchovies, though?? I am no anchovy fan. Tiny fishes packed in oil: with the exception of a Puttanesca sauce I made once, anchovies have not had a place in my pantry. The last ingredient, however, I found intriguing: "Something from the other side of the world that helps make this dish a celebration for you." Hmmm...the other side of the world...celebration...maybe I can find a way to make this work.

So, here are the things I'm celebrating through my entry: 1. This holiday season. I love this time of year, and I love to throw a good party. This one will be my warm-up. 2. The sheer cultural variety of food traditions in the world, represented visibly by the lovely montage of culinary prowess I find in the international food blogging community. 3. People who contribute to this cultural variety in my personal life. 4. The opportunity to clean out my fridge and pantry. 5. The end of my first semester as a Ph.D. student, without the stress of which I'm sure I would not have enough pent-up creative energy to pull this off!!

How do I plan to celebrate these things, you ask? Why, through a Clean-Out-My-Fridge Holiday Cocktail Party, using the Paper Chef ingredients plus whatever I have on hand, including foods from around the world that remind me of people and cultural traditions I cherish, of course!

Actually, I had both rice and carrots already, so I picked up a tin of anchovies from the market and set about examining the culinary contents of my kitchen. Although it is possible to pinpoint the exact location of "around the world" from here, as my husband cleverly discovered, I chose to think of the term more broadly. The three places from around the world I wanted to make sure I represented are: India, as my lovely office-mate has recently arrived in the U.S. from Calcutta, and brings with her many of the country's delicious culinary traditions (which she has been kind enough to share!); Italy, where my husband and I first learned to love food and wine together (a long time ago!); and Australia, home of this month's distinguished Paper Chef judge, who always manages to produce some of the most unusual and creative food I've ever seen.

India would be easy: I usually keep basmati rice, Indian curry paste, and spices on hand. In fact, I recently bought some whole cardamom pods that were on sale at my grocer...maybe they could be of use.

Italy shouldn't be too hard either. I cook Italian food quite a bit, and I found just the thing: half a container of mascarpone cheese left from a sauce I made last week!

Australia: Hmmm. This would be trickier. After searching my pantry high and low and researching traditional Australian ingredients, I was pretty certain I'd have to go back to the store and forsake my self-made rules. Rats.

But wait! On the wine rack there...isn't that chardonnay made in...yes, Australia! Hooray--Yellow Tail to the rescue!

With the ingredients all in place and my party hat on, here is the menu I created:

(Click here to see it and read on!)

Sunday Brunch for My Sister

Sunday, December 4, 2005

A few weeks ago, my baby sister came to visit for the weekend. We had a great time while she was here, and for her send-off brunch on Sunday after church, I made fried chicken and biscuits. Fried chicken is really not hard to make; it just takes the willingness to get grease all over you and your kitchen. But I love it nonetheless, and I particularly like to make it for people I love.

When David and I visited his brother and wife in LA this summer, we had a southern-themed party for their friends. Among many other things, I made this chicken with Comeback Sauce, and it was a big hit. You can make the chicken without the spices in the flour, but I really like the way they pair with the flavors in the dressing. According to Mississippi chef and cookbook author Robert St. John (famous around these parts for what must be one of the best-named cookbooks ever), Comeback Sauce is an original Mississippi creation. Maybe that's why my native Mississippi family makes it so well.

This recipe belongs to my Aunt Prissy. My family uses it for a number of things--to dip fried chicken, to spread on Saltine crackers, to dress our salad. According to legend, the sauce is so-named because it will keep you coming back for more. I don't know if that's true, but it sounds right to me.

Here's the recipe for the chicken and Comeback Sauce; you can find the biscuit recipe here.

But first, here is my lovely sister, with whom I hope to share many, many good meals in the future. Come back soon Elizabeth! A recipe for the apple pie she made for dessert is soon to follow...!

PAPRIKA-SPICED FRIED CHICKEN

6 boneless chicken breasts

Buttermilk, to cover

Salt and pepper

1 c. flour

1/2 c. yellow cornmeal

1 T. paprika

1 t. seasoning salt

1 t. cumin

1 t. chili powder

Cut chicken into bite-sized pieces, salt and pepper, and soak in buttermilk for at least an hour (or overnight). To fry, heat about 1 cup of safflower or canola oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Dip chicken pieces in flour mixture and fry in batches until golden brown, about 10-15 minutes per batch. Be careful not to let chicken brown too quickly; remove from skillet to paper towels to drain when golden brown and crispy.

MISSISSIPPI COMEBACK SAUCE

2-3 cloves garlic

Half a sweet yellow onion 

1 c. mayonnaise

1/4 c. ketchup

1/4 c. chili sauce

2 T. Worcestershire sauce

1 t. yellow mustard

Kosher salt

Ground black pepper

Tabasco (a couple of dashes)

In a blender or food processor, chop the garlic and onion until finely minced. Add remaining ingredients; blend until well-combined.

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