Category: Recipes (Page 23 of 26)

I love chicken marsala (or veal scalloppini a la marsala). It’s one of my favorite dishes and one that I seek out at restaurants everywhere. In Argentina, I’ve had some very good chicken marsalas – but I haven’t found one here that I really like. Indeed, only last week I had a very disappointing one at Spettro. I’ve tried to make it before, very unsuccessfully. But I had a craving for it today, and I figured I’d give it another try.
I’m glad I did. This recipe from epicurious.com is phenomenal. It produced a dark, sensuous sauce that was bursting with flavor. Mike was very impressed, though the girls refused to try it. I did skip the sage, as I didn’t have any at home, and it didn’t seem to be any the worse for it. How could it be, when it was so good without it. My only complains were that there wasn’t enough sauce – next time I’ll double the amounts – and that it dirties quite a lot of dishes, a problem in a home like mine without a dishwasher.
Still, it’s worth it. It took me about an hour to make it – and I used chicken thighs rather than breasts, as Mika only likes “slimy” chicken.

Tonight we had pork chops with a white wine-dijon sauce from the Les Halles Cookbook, which once again I borrowed from the library. It looked like a relatively simple recipe and it turned out to be delicious – though I had to make a couple of substitutions. I served it just with peas – the only veggie I had at home – and unfortunately one of the kids ate just peas, while the other one had only a couple of bites of plain pork. They don’t know what they are missing. The following is my version of the recipe (which doesn’t differ that much from the original). I used gherkins instead of cornichons as I couldn’t find the latter at the supermarket, and instead of a high quality concentrated chicken or veal stock, I used “better than bouillon” chicken base. I also omitted the single chopped sprig of parsley that the recipe asked for (to add with the cornichons) because I wasn’t going to buy a whole bunch of parsley to just use one sprig.
Cote de porc a la charcutiere
-1 tbsp oil
-1 tbsp unsalted butter
-4 rib chops of pork
-salt & pepper to taste
-1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
-1 tsp all purpose flour
-1/2 cup white wine
-1 cup chicken stock
-2 tsp Dijon mustard
-10 cornichons or 5 gherkins thinly sliced
Preheat oven to 375. Add a tablespoon of oil to a large, oven proof sauté pan and heat. Add the butter and melt. Add the pork and cook on high until golden brown, about 4 minutes. Turn and brown the other side. Remove the pan from the heat, and place it in the oven. Cook for about 8 minutes, until done.
Remove the chops from the pan, put in a platter and cover loosely with aluminum foil to keep warm. Make the sauce.
Return the pan to the heat and add the chopped onion. Sauté until golden. Add the flour and stir for one minute. Add the wine and deglace, scrapping all the brown bits at the bottom of the pan. Add the chicken stock, mix well and reduce the liquid by half.
Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in the mustard. Add the gherkins and any juice remaining from the pork chops. Mix well and serve the sauce over the pork chops.

I don’t know if I have any /regular/ readers of my Food Blog, as opposed to people who just drop by from time to time, but if you are a regular and you’ve missed me, I’m back. I haven’t been blogging much ’cause, frankly, I don’t have time to do everything in my to-do list, so from time to time I drop some activities for a while. But I like to blog about food, and I feel guilty about all the restaurant reviews I haven’t posted, so in the next few days I hope to get back on track.
I’ll start by blogging about the recipe I made last night: Orange Soy Braised Pork Ribs. Country style ribs were on sale at Safeway, and I wanted to braise them in some way. That recipe for Epicurious got good reviews so I tried it.
It was a very easy dish to make, juicing the oranges was what took the longest, and the ribs were very tender – just as you’d expect them to be after two hours braising in any liquid. BUT I wasn’t thrilled with the flavor or the glace. By themselves, the ribs just had a mild soy-sauce flavor, nice but not very strong. On the plus side, the kids ate it without complaining. People had complained that it was hard to get the liquid to become syrupy. It did, when I boiled it long enough, but it then became very intense in flavor, I would say too intense.
Still, after rubbing some of the glace off, the ribs were pretty good and Mike enjoyed them.
I’d probably look for a different recipe for next time, though.
Sorry, no pictures. Hopefully I’ll remember next time.

I was looking for something different to make for my Thanksgiving 2006 dinner, and of course I had to consult my “All About Braising” cookbook. I love to braise and that cookbook is wonderful. So I came up with this recipe, which seemed perfect for Thanksgiving. It turned out quite good, with the big exception that my brain cells were obviously not functioning as I cooked the chicken upside down!!!! Not only that, but I didn’t realize it until I was trying to carve the chicken and couldn’t figure out why I was having such difficulty. Yes, I’m an idiot. The big problem with cooking it that way is that the bacon drippings only affected the skin on the back (which was delicious). Oh well, next time.
As the bread stuffing and the chicken cook separately you can also make without the other. The stuffing is very good in itself. Note that if you want to stuff the chicken, you must prepare the stuffing first.

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I made this recipe for red-wine pot roast with porcini a few nights ago and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. Granted, I used portobello mushrooms instead of porcini, as they didn’t have any of the latter at the supermarket, but I think the problem was actually with the celery. Perhaps I used too much celery, perhaps the problem was that the celery had wilted (in a very strange way) after an afternoon left out of the fridge, or perhaps it was the type of celery (I’d bought organic celery at the farmer’s market). In any case, the sauce tasted too much like broth. Mike liked it, I didn’t.

When I make burgers I like going beyond the traditional and trying different variations. Oftentimes this means stuffing them. Stuffing them with blue cheese and goat cheese have worked, but my latest attempt at stuffing them with mozzarella cheese and green garlic was less successful. I based my recipe on an epicurious recipe for Veal burgers stuffed with mozzarella cheese. Alas, I used ground beef instead of veal, green garlic instead of green onions and thyme instead of sage. The result were burgers that were good, but not special. The devil may indeed be in the details, but somehow I don’t think so – so I don’t think I’ll try them again. Plus Safeway’s sale on 7% ground beef is over so I won’t be buying ground beef for a while.

This is an incredibly easy recipe for ribs with BBQ sauce, it makes delicious, succulent ribs with little work. I got it from All Recipes.com. I’ve used both country style ribs and spare ribs for it, and I’m sure it’d work just as well with every kind of ribs. I’ve always made it with two bottles of BBQ sauce (my favorite is Jack Daniels) though I think next time I’ll try using just 1, adding more water and boiling it down afterwards. As it is, there is too much BBQ sauce left over which seems like a waste. The original recipe is for 2 1/2 lbs of ribs, but I use it for whichever size package of ribs I buy.

• a slab of ribs
• 1 tsp. salt
• black pepper to taste.
• 1 onion, qurtered
• 2 bottles BBQ sauce
• water

Salt & pepper the ribs. Place them in a large pot along with the onion. Cover them with the BBQ sauce and enough water so that they are submerged. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat and simmer uncovered for 40 minutes. Remove the ribs and boil off excess water from the sauce.

Oil the grill and preheat it for high heat. Grill the ribs, basting and turning frequently, for about 20 minutes.

It’s summer so it’s grilling time, and that means burgers. Or at least it does when ground beef is on sale at the local supermarket. Yesterday I made burgers staffed with goat cheese – they were delicious. All you have to do is season the ground beef with salt and pepper, make a thin patty (about 1/8 lb), put a slice of goat cheese in the middle and cover it with another thin patty. You then bring the edges together and flattent he whole thing as much a you can. Remember, burgers shrink when you cook them.
I used ground beef with 7% fat (the goat cheese will add moisture, so you don’t need a higher fat meat) and herbed goat cheese. I served them with the usual accrutements and condiments, I particularly liked ripe avocado on mine, it softened the flavor of the goat cheese.
Give them a try!

I like celebrating holidays. All sorts of holidays, whatever their cultural or religious significance. I’m all for partying, whatever the cause. So when St. Patrick’s day snack on me, I wanted to do something to mark it. Corned beef and cabbage is just not my style, but I had a great Irish stew at the Wilkenny Irish pub & restaurant in my home city of La Plata and I figured it’d be enjoyable to make it myself. And, as we were going to spend St. Patrick’s evening with a bunch of friends at a cabin in Truckee, I’d get to share it as well.
I found this highly rated
IRISH BEEF STEW Recipe at Epicurious.com and made some of the recommended modifications, such as using more beef, reducing the amount of beef broth, adding salt and a guiness. The stew was certainly better the next day, but I was all in all disappointed with it. It’s not that different from the stew I usually make (except that rather than broth and beer I use tomato sauce and wine, and add a bunch of different herbs and spices) but more work (in that you have to cook the veggies separately) and the results are definitely less tasty.
Oh well, at least we had a little of the Irish on St. Patrick’s day.