Weekly Dish

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…?

This weekend our friends Jerrod and Jessie came to visit with their two-month-old baby, Ren. Since we moved away from Jackson, we have really missed not only all the meals we used to share with Jessie and Jerrod but also getting to see Ren on a regular basis. He’s grown so much since we saw him six weeks ago!

Usually on Sundays, David and I get up and go to the early service at church, and I fix a brunchy-type meal when we get home. That was our plan this morning too, but somehow, having a baby around tends to complicate even the best of intentions. We did have a big breakfast–scrambled eggs with pesto and parmesan, toast with Aunt Prissy’s homemade plum jelly, and sausage–just later than we’d planned and still in our pajamas. Here’s what we spent most of the weekend doing:

holding, touching, rocking, watching, listening to the baby! Breakfast was no exception: Ren sat beside the table in his swing, and cooed at us the whole time. The food was good–pesto is a great way to liven up scrambled eggs–but the best part of this Sunday breakfast was definitely the company. Can’t you guys just move down here?

Everybody has her favorite grocer and liquor store. Lucky for me, both of mine are in the same place!

When I first moved to Baton Rouge, a friend who’s lived here for several years asked me where I was doing my grocery shopping. She knows how much I love to cook, so she recommended Calandro’s, a locally owned grocery just down the street from my house. “You’ll love it,” she said. “And, that store has the wine lady.”

Eileen Bonemery, apparently known around town as “the wine lady,” has worked at Calandro’s on and off for about four years, but she’s been learning about wine and food for, as she says, “as long as I can remember.”

She grew up in Istanbul, the daughter of a Turkish mom and American dad, and came to the States for college in Massachusetts, where her dad’s family lived. She wanted to go to the Culinary Institute in New York, and was accepted, but her mother wanted more for her daughter than to work long, hard hours in a kitchen. Instead, Eileen got a degree in industrial engineering.

She lived and worked as a caterer in California until 1999—never as an engineer—and then made her way to Baton Rouge, so her son could be close to his father. She was looking for a low-stress, low-pressure job that would allow her to focus most of her energy on parenting. She worked for a while as a caterer for an antiques business, but when they had to cut back on expenses, she asked her friend Charlie Calandro if he had anything she could do. She first worked at the store on Perkins Road, and one of her first responsibilities was to cook for the Taste of Baton Rouge, an annual food and wine showcase featuring cuisine from area restaurants and vendors. Over the course of three days, with the help of only a dishwasher, she made appetizer-portioned food for 2,000 people. Calandro was apparently impressed; he and Eileen have been collaborating on food and wine ever since.

Eileen says that her responsibilities at the store include “anything and everything.” The business is a team effort: she and Calandro taste every new wine that comes into the store, usually on Friday afternoons, and then decide whether to stock it or not. Their decision has a lot to do with whether they like it, whether customers will buy it, and whether they have a need for another wine in its category.

Sometimes distributors will drop off samples; sometimes Eileen will set aside a new bottle for them to try. The staff tastings take place in the climate-controlled wine room at the back of the grocery store. Shelves of dusty bottles line the walls of this cool, concrete-floored room. A richly covered cloth covers the table in the middle of the room, surrounded by heavy, wooden chairs. In the center, a silver ice bucket marks the table as the tasting spot, and big oak barrels tower in the background. The wines are divided by region—California wines occupy most of the space with a small selection of French wines at the front of the room. Eileen doesn’t have a collection herself, except for two bottles of Italian wine bottled the year her son was born. She plans to give them to him one day.

The front of the store, where the wine is sold, is also divided by the winery’s locale. Boxes of bottles staggered at different heights display colorful tags that draw customers’ eyes to certain wines. A fluorescent orange one reads, “New! Featured in Advocate! Non-oaked Chardonnay.” Another one comments on the 2003 Fleur petite sirah: “Yummy! My fav grape. Eileen.”

One customer, new to the area, asks where to find the French wines. “Well, you’re standing right in front of some of them, and then the others are over here,” Eileen tells the silver-haired gentleman and his high-heeled companion, gesturing towards the bottles at the end of an aisle. He says he’s from New Orleans and has had a hard time finding the selection he’s accustomed to; a friend recommended Calandro’s. She asks how long he intends to be here and assures him, “Anything you want, we’ll write it down and order it for you.”

With wide bottle-green eyes behind oval glasses, and short, brown curls framing her face, Eileen leans forward slightly when talking to customers, demonstrating her intent willingness to help. She moves quickly between the rows of bottles, deftly maneuvering her way to the bottle she’s looking for. She asks a few standard questions to help her make a good selection, but there are no hard-and-fast rules. Anyway, “all rules are meant to be broken,” she says. Customers usually know if they want red or white, and they usually have a price range in mind. A few details about the herbs and flavors they’ll be eating helps guide Eileen to the right selection.

The best way for a novice to learn about wine, according to Eileen, is to “read, read, read.” She recommends Saveur magazine for both its food and wine content and says she also sometimes reads The Wine Enthusiast. She warns against trusting one source completely, though, as every wine connoisseur has her own particular taste. Ultimately, every wine drinker has to decide what he likes, according to Eileen.

She started forming her own taste as a child in Turkey, and then sharpened it during her tenure in California. There, she had a group of friends who shared her interest, and they would get together to test different food and wine combinations. She also traveled a lot to wineries, especially in the Santa Barbara region, tasting for fun.

She values different characteristics in different grapes: in a pinot noir, for example, she likes big fruit. She has learned the combination of traits—sight, smell, and taste—that make a particular wine good or bad through years of reading and tasting. Sotheby’s Encyclopedia of Wine, The Wine-Lover’s Cookbook, and other resources stay tucked behind the store’s glass counter, and she consults them as she works to meet a customer’s need. If a customer has his heart set on a sweet rosé with barbecue chicken, though, Eileen won’t talk him out of it. “Ultimately, it’s your own taste that matters,” she says.

Apparently, the thirty-five or so years or so that Eileen has been honing her taste for wine has rubbed off on at least one person. When her son was about nine, Eileen overheard him telling a customer at Calandro’s about the “earthiness” of a particular Cabernet. The woman leaned down and said, “Son, how do you know so much about wine?” Since then, Eileen is the only one in the family who’s allowed to talk to customers about the wine, at least until he’s legally allowed to drink, she says, laughing.

Another customer asks for a rosé to go with seafood his wife is cooking: “some sort of pasta with shrimp.” She recommends one from California. “Isn’t it a nice color?” she asks. He nods. “We just got this one in. It’s dry, not sweet,” she says, picking up another bottle. “And I love this one.” He chooses from her selections, and they chat some more about the pale pink wines.

The customer requesting the French wine returns to ask about pinot grigio for his companion. Eileen quickly picks out several bottles. Upon inspection, he adds them all to his collection. The couple moves on, their buggy loaded down with a dozen bottles or so, and he thanks Eileen profusely. “We look forward to seeing you again very soon.”

He turns to his companion, and says softly, “This is definitely the best so far. We’ll come back.”

For my dinner of catfish with lemon-butter sauce, Eileen recommends either a buttery Chardonnay to complement the sauce or a Viognier, a French wine perfect for fish. The Viognier is out of my price range, so she picks up three bottles of chardonnay, and displays them for me to look at. “At this point, it’s up to the customer to decide,” she explains. Some people will go with the label they like; others will compare prices. I choose the Mark West, which I’ve not tried before.

When I get home, Eileen proves her mettle: the smooth, buttery flavor of the wine is a perfect match for the subtle flavors in the fish and citrus butter. What she lacks in formal training, Eileen clearly makes up for in studied practice.

Calandro’s also holds monthly themed tasting events at Avoyelles on the River on Third St. Last month’s theme was Santa Barbara; in November, they’ll be tasting wines fit for a Thanksgiving feast. Maybe one of these months David and I will go to a tasting, and I’ll tell you about what I learn. Until then, look for recommendations about what wine to serve with the meals I’m cooking; they will all come from Eileen!

I have lived in Louisiana for almost three months now. In the course of the last one, my new state has been hit by two hurricanes. The response from the American community on the whole has been overwhelming; so much money has been given to the Red Cross, and so many people have turned their outrage into positive energy through the act of giving. In the food blogger world, as a matter of fact, Adam of The Amateur Gourmet is hosting a cook-off of sorts to raise money for the hurricane victims. The contestants have been cooking New Orleans-style food, and it all looks fabulous (you should check out the beignets and vote for your favorite).

Although I am not an official part of the festivities, this sandwich is the one that comes to my mind when I think of New Orleans. My mother, a Louisiana native, has a particular affinity for muffalattas (I have no idea whether I’m spelling that correctly–don’t tell my students!), so I think of her when I make them. You can buy olive salad in the grocery store, but I really like to mix up my own. The best muffalattas I’ve had are crunchy on the outside and warm and gooey on the inside, so I attempted to recreate that texture with this one.

If you haven’t ever eaten in New Orleans, please put it on your list of things to do when the city is rebuilt–it is a culinary city like no other. In the meantime, perhaps you can bring a little of the Crescent City into your kitchen with these sandwiches (or with the po’boys and beignets cooked up by the contestants and their coaches on Adam’s site–go William, Melissa, and Jason!).

Muffalattas and Oven Fries

1 potato per person (fries don’t keep well)

Rosemary, minced

3 cloves garlic, minced

Olive oil

Kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Wash and dry the potatoes; slice them into fry-like wedges. Place them on a baking sheet and toss with oil, so that the wedges are coated on both sides. Sprinkle with rosemary and garlic. Bake for 20 minutes; then flip the potatoes and bake for 10-15 minutes more. Meanwhile, prepare the sandwiches.

1 loaf crusty French bread

Genoa salami

Ham

Provolone cheese

1 cup green olives

1/2 cup black olives

3 cloves garlic

Fresh oregano, a few sprigs

Olive oil

Combine the olives, garlic, and oregano in the food processor until very finely minced. Drizzle with a little olive oil (about a teaspoon) to bind, and pulse a few times. Carve out the top of the bread loaf, leaving the sides in tact (so that the filling doesn’t spill out). Remove the top and fill with the olive mixture. Line with Provolone slices, salami, and ham, and then drizzle the inside with a little more olive oil. Replace the top of the sandwich and wrap in foil. Bake in the oven with the potatoes for about 10-12 minutes, until the cheese is melted and the outside is crunchy. Cut into sandwich portions and serve with the fries, which should be crispy on the outside by now. Sprinkle them with Kosher salt. And, if you’re so inclined, this meal works nicely with Abita beer, bottled right here in Louisiana. Eat, drink, and think of New Orleans.

Tomorrow, I will resume the menu to the left, but for now, I thought I’d share what we cooked on the grill the day our power went out. After a week of watching the harrowing coverage of the tragedy in my two home states, it seems trivial¾to say the least¾to contemplate my own inconvenience of a few day without electricity. Nevertheless, many people found themselves resorting to the grill until their refrigerators and stoves were back in action, so I thought I’d offer this recipe for what we cooked the night we lost our power.

My heart goes out to those who have lost so much, and I can only pray that the recovery efforts will help them begin to put their lives back together. In the meantime, I hope you and your family and loved ones are out of harm’s way. May all of us who have survived count our blessings and remember to reach out to those in need.

The original recipe for this antipasto, which my Aunt Prissy shared with me, comes from Angela Rhemann, a long-time friend of our family who occasionally teaches cooking classes at The Everyday Gourmet in Jackson, Mississippi. If I followed her recipe, I would bake the antipasto in the oven and serve it with crostini, which I am certain makes a divine appetizer. However, I wanted it to serve as a main dish, so I cooked it in a skillet on the grill, and then stuffed it in some grilled portabella mushroom caps and topped it with slices of fresh mozzarella.

Antipasto-stuffed Portabella Mushrooms

1 red bell pepper

1 14-oz. can artichoke hearts, chopped finely

4 cloves garlic, sliced thinly

4 oz. mixed Mediterranean olives, chopped

¼ cup olive oil

¼ cup capers

4 oz. fresh mozzarella cheese

4 large portabella mushroom caps

French bread

Over a medium flame, grill the bell pepper until it is charred on all sides. Remove from the grill and place in a shallow bowl; cover with plastic wrap to steam. While it is grilling, remove the stems from the mushroom caps, chop them finely, and mix them with the artichoke hearts, garlic, olives, capers, and olive oil in a flame-resistant skillet. Cover with aluminum foil and cook on the grill for about 20 minutes, or until the garlic is very, very soft (you should almost be able to mash the mixture to a paste). Spray the mushroom caps with cooking spray (I use the canola oil spray) and place gills-up on the grill. Cook until the mushrooms are soft. Remove the mushrooms and fill with antipasto mixture. Place each cap in a foil packet, top with mozzarella slices, and drizzle with olive oil. Cut the French bread in half length-wise, brush it with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and place it face-down on the grill. Cook until the cheese is melted and the bread is toasty.

Welcome to Weekly Dish! My good friend Jessie, who is expecting her first child in about a month, recently asked me for some recipes and tips for planning menus that would be both cost-effective and worth eating. I love good food, and especially since I’ve been married, I’ve worked hard to find a way to cook delicious dinners at night without spending exorbitant amounts of time or money. On this blog, I will record my menu plans for the week, some recipes and time-saving tips, and brief descriptions of how the dinners turn out. I do a lot of experimenting, but if a recipe turns out badly, I will tell you!

Planning: My first step to stress-free meals is to plan well. My food week always begins on Saturday, when I survey my fridge and pantry to see what I already have, make a trip to my local farmer’s market to see what looks good, and then return to plan my week and make my grocery list. Now, I know this takes time, but when I first married, I tried to think about dinner on my way home from work, or to wait until I got home to see what we had. We ended up eating a lot of take-out. The time I spend planning my menu on Saturday frees me up during the week to follow the menu on the dry erase board without thinking about it. Now, it’s my Saturday morning ritual, and I enjoy it.

Grocery Shopping: I always buy too much and the wrong things if I don’t take a list. I have gotten in the habit of organizing my list by sections of the grocery store, so in the top left-hand corner I write down any produce I need; in the middle, pantry items; the right-hand side, meat and dairy; and bread products at the very bottom. This helps me to navigate the grocery quickly and efficiently–if I don’t need any baking items or canned vegetables or snack food or whatever, I avoid those aisles altogether. I also shop at a locally-owned grocery store, rather than at a large chain. And, I avoid Wal-Mart altogether.

Use It Up: The second thing I learned to help me save time and money is to try to find uses for all the food I buy. I hate a cluttered refrigerator, and my mother taught me not to waste food. So I try to incorporate any leftovers into the next week’s menu. For instance, this week, I am making Stuffed Cherry Tomatoes, and I know I will have more stuffing than I need. So, at the beginning of next week, I will probably use the leftover stuffing for an omelet or a pizza. I also will buy ricotta cheese for the stuffing, of which I will only use about half, so in the next couple of weeks, I will try to find a recipe that uses ricotta.

Planning Menus: I try to mix it up a lot because I love to experiment, and when I first started, I spent way too much money on groceries. Sure, we were having chicken one night, beef the next, shrimp the night after that, etc., but my weekly grocery bills were too high. So, now, I try to pick one or two main ingredients and center most meals around them. Chicken is an easy one because it’s versatile and relatively inexpensive. That doesn’t mean we have chicken every night, of course, but we will maybe 3 out of the 5 nights. Fill in with a non-meat pizza, pasta, or egg dish here and there, and you have a whole week’s worth of meals. I also have some basic recipes that use up leftovers well: frittatas, risotto, pizza or calzone, quesadillas or enchiladas, soup, and main-dish salads all work well with whatever you have in your fridge. I use these basic recipes often, experimenting with different flavors and textures.

I try to cook five nights a week, and we eat leftovers or takeout on the weekend. Of course, life is busy, so I try to be flexible; if I planned a labor-intensive soup for a night when I don’t get home until 8, I substitute something else on the list or throw together some sandwiches and fix the soup another night. Or, if we end up going out during the week with friends, I might cook on both Friday and Saturday nights. It just depends on what’s going on that week.

On the site: Each week, I’ll post a menu and write daily about what I’m cooking. On Saturdays, I’ll explain the method behind my menu madness, how I came up with my list and what I plan to do with any leftovers. I will be cooking a week ahead of the site, so the menu for this week will actually be what I cooked last week. That way, I can make sure I have my photos and recipes ready to go at the very beginning of the week. Monday’s recipes will be posted late Sunday night, and so forth. I am new to the blogosphere, so if something on the site isn’t working right, please let me know by email. Also, if you have a recipe you’d like me to try or an ingredient you don’t know what to do with, feel free to contact me by email: weeklydish AT gmail DOT com. I love to try new things.

Let’s get cooking: This week, the corn, enormous cherry tomatoes, and earthy new potatoes at the Red Stick Market caught my eye, and the chicken at Calandro’s (my neighborhood grocery store) was on sale. I have been wanting to try the Chicken Taboulleh Salad in The Barefoot Contessa Family Style cookbook because my sister-in-law, Hannah, highly recommends it. Instead of waiting until I’m having the salad, though, I’ll go ahead and cook all of the chicken at once. One of my favorite ways to cook a whole package of chicken breasts in the summer is on the grill. So, I’ll start with a grilled chicken recipe, pair it with a complimentary salad and some yummy grilled corn, and use the leftover grilled chicken for the Chicken Taboulleh later in the week. I’ll fill in with some vegetable recipes and add salad and bread and be done. After a quick trip to the grocery to pick up what I need, I’m all set for the week. Tune in to see how it all comes together.