Weekly Dish

(Oscar Night Dish #2: more cheesy humor)

When I planned our Oscar-night menu, little did I know that each of my dishes would end up representing a category winner! The Crash martini, of course, is a nod to the best picture. David and I both thought the film was really excellent, but we were surprised that it beat out the other nominees. How I love an underdog.
These sweet potatoes are named for the other big suprise of the evening: Three-6-Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” which won best original song. (Maybe it wasn’t such a surprise to other people? We just had a hard time visualizing the Academy members voting for gansta rappers. I guess we were wrong!)

Actually, the other thing I was thinking about when I named these was that MTV show, Pimp My Ride. I’ve never seen a whole episode, but some of my students are big fans, so I hear about it. The metaphor is apt, anyway: for this dish, you take plain-jane roasted potatoes, dress them in a glistening, garlic-tinged orange-scented glaze, and they go from tuber-next-door to ghetto fabulous side dish in no time flat. (And now is the time that I refrain from using the phrase bling-bling because I fear that I am getting way too into this whole thing. If only you could see me in my tiara.)

Here’s the recipe:

Pimp’d Out Sweet Potatoes
(or Orange Glazed Sweet Potatoes, if you prefer. Can you imagine ordering these at a restaurant? Ha!)

4 small or 2 large sweet potatoes, diced
Olive oil to coat
Kosher salt
1 clove garlic
1 T. butter
Zest of half an orange
1 T. orange marmalade
1 T. cider vinegar
1 1/2 T. cane syrup or molasses
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Toss the potatoes with enough olive oil to coat, and lay them in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle liberally with Kosher salt. Roast for about 30-35 minutes, stirring once about halfway through. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a small skillet. Fry the garlic and orange zest until very fragrant and golden brown. Add the marmalade, vinegar, and syrup; cook over medium-low until very thick and syrupy. Take the potatoes out of the oven and pour the glaze over them, turning to coat as many as you can. Put them back into the oven and cook for another 5 minutes. This last step can be done at the last minute, when everything else you’re making is ready.

These potatoes are my contribution to this weeks ARF/5-a-Day Tuesdays over at Sweetnicks.

WARNING: VERY CHEESY HUMOR TO FOLLOW.

Blame it on the Mardi Gras vacation we’ve enjoyed this week, or the silly star-struck-ness that I feel towards the Academy Awards (or perhaps on the drink you see above…), but David and I decided on a whim yesterday to throw ourselves an Oscar party. This is sort of a tradition for us–last year, I even dressed up in an old bridesmaid’s dress (because my close friends sometimes read this blog, I won’t disclose which one!) and a plastic tiara to cook our party food and enjoy our evening with the stars.

I’m a total sucker for the Hollywood glam, and David and I are both movie fanatics, so I guess it’s no surprise that we watch the Oscars every year. This year, though, we’re taking our celebrating to a whole new corny level. And for some reason, I felt inclined to share our corniness with you. So, without further ado, I present the evening’s menu, and the recipe for the dessert cocktail pictured above.

To kick off the evening, we shall be having Constant Garden Salad, for which no illegally obtained pharmaceuticals will be used. We promise. For the main course, Brokeback Ribs glazed with a Chipotle-Marmalade sauce will be accompanied by Pimp’d Out Sweet Potatoes (the kind that someone like Terrence Howard might sing about). For our dessert cocktail, a Chocolate Mint Crash Martini demonstrates that liquor of all shades can reside in harmony.

And, the recipe for the martini represents my first-ever contribution to Weekend Herb Blogging over at Kalyn’s Kitchen. Please give a big round of applause for…

Chocolate Mint!

To make the Crash Martini, you will need:

1 ounce of heavy cream
1 ounce of caramel or chocolate flavored cream liqueur, like Cask and Cream or Godiva
1 ounce of vanilla vodka
2 or 3 sprigs of chocolate mint

Smash the mint leaves and vodka together with the handle of a wooden spoon or other blunt instrument (I’m sure there’s a proper bar tool for this). This process, of infusing the mint into the vodka, is called muddling, I’m told. Let the minty vodka sit while you prepare the rest. In a martini glass, pour in the cream first and then the cream liqueur, carefully so that the colors mingle but don’t mix entirely (this requires a bit of a steady hand). Remove the mint leaves from the vodka and top off the martini with the vodka. Enjoy and try to concentrate on how well those flavors get along. Hopeful, isn’t it?

This is really more like dessert than a cocktail, but I bet it would make a fabulous addition to ice cream or coffee too.

The rest of tonight’s recipes are to follow next week…stay tuned!

The theme for this month’s Paper Chef, as decreed by the grand master of cermonies, Owen, is the spirit of renewal that a new year brings: health, peace, simplicity. The ingredients, presented Friday by that ever-hilarious duo over at Belly-Timber, are healthful indeed: cashews, quinoa, yog(h)urt, and something baby, in honor of the infant year. (We’ll get to that mysterious q-word in just a moment).

But, well, see, here’s the thing. I live in southern Louisiana. Here, the New Year (January 6 to be exact) kicks off the beginning of Mardi Gras (or the anticipation of Mardi Gras, often called Carnival). A spirit of. . . celebration, revelry, getting all the fun out of your system before Lent begins marks the atmosphere ’round these parts. Parades and masks and balls and feasts. . .and health and simplicity? Hmmmm.

Alright, so maybe we interpret renewal a bit differently down here. BUT, in light of the ways in which the state suffered in 2005, I certainly think renewal is in order. And what better way to inaugurate such renewal than with a celebration of one of New Orleans’ oldest and most famous traditions? (more…)

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.

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…?

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 you, 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:

Drunken Australian Rice Cakes with Carrot Coulis

Cardamom-Spiced Basmati Rice Pudding with Anchovy Butter

Wontons with Poblano-Mascarpone Filling

Orange Coconut Sticky Rice Brulèe

(more…)

Looking over the last week’s posts, it occurred to me that everything I have written about has had something to do with color: a color-coordinated salad on Monday, purple pasta on Tuesday, the green stuff on Wednesday, and yesterday’s white pizza. Anyone who knows me would tell you that bright colors are sort of an obsession. I hate to move, but when we bought our house here, one of the most exciting things was planning what colors to paint all the rooms. Yes, we (really I should say David here; all I did was pick out the colors) painted every room a different color. While I was defending my thesis in Jackson, David camped out in our empty house here in Baton Rouge and painted for four days straight, bless his heart. But it makes me so very happy to come into a brightly colored space. No offense to anyone who loves beige, but I think I might be severely depressed if all of my walls were a pallid shade of dust. So what is with the photo above then, you ask? Well, I don’t know. I should have sprinkled some paprika on the hummus, at least, to spice things up a little bit.

But don’t let the blah appearance fool you; this Greek fare is very flavorful. The spinach pie was originally meant to use up leftover spinach, but it turns out I didn’t have enough and had to cook more anyway. The onions for this recipe really need to be cooked before they go into the filling, so cooking the spinach too is no big deal. The filling comes together pretty quickly, but I will warn you, working with phyllo dough is a little bit tricky. I tend to tear it easily, but it still tastes good, so I’m not extra careful. The trick is to use it immediately, or else it starts to dry out and break. So don’t take it out of it’s wrapper until you’re ready to put it in the dish. As for the hummus, it’s one of our favorite snacks, and I like it simple. Beans, garlic, olive oil, and a little bit of lemon is all I put in mine, but it takes many flavors well, so feel free to experiment. I make it ahead of time so I can have a snack while I’m cooking. Be careful, though, it’s very filling!

Very Simple Hummus

2-4 cloves garlic, depending on how garlicky you like your hummus

1 can garbanzo beans (chickpeas), drained

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 a lemon

Kosher salt

Process the garlic cloves until they’re finely chopped in a food processor. Add the beans, olive oil, juice from the lemon, and about a half a teaspoon salt. Blend until the consistency is just a little bit chunky (check out the photo for how I like mine). Add more olive oil if you want it to be smoother. Taste and adjust the seasonings if necessary. Serve with soft pita bread.

Spinach Pie with Pine Nuts and Feta Cheese

1 yellow onion, diced

Olive oil

Any leftover Lemony Spinach

2-3 cups fresh spinach leaves (or 1 pkg. frozen spinach)

1 cup artichoke hearts, chopped

1/4 cup pine nuts

1 egg, beaten

2 ounces feta cheese

1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Phyllo dough, about 10-12 sheets total

1/2 stick butter, melted

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Cook the onion in olive oil (about a tablespoon) until very soft. Add the uncooked spinach, chopping it with kitchen scissors as you add it to the skillet. Turn and wilt, adding more spinach as you go. Add any leftover spinach you have (you should end up with 2-3 cups of cooked spinach when all is said and done, but there’s no magic amount). Remove the spinach-onion mixture to a large bowl and add the artichoke hearts and pine nuts. Mix thoroughly and whisk in the egg.

Get out the phyllo dough and butter, along with a square or round casserole dish. Brush individual sheets with butter on both sides, and lay them in the dish. Let some hang over the edge on all sides (so you have to do some overlapping). Do this with about 6 sheets of dough. Quickly pour the filling on top of the dough. Butter 4-6 more layers for the top, and roll the sides together to seal. Brush the top with more butter so it will brown nicely. Bake for about 30 minutes.