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Monthly Archives: November 2008
Horses Neck Cocktail
Recipe
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Roasted Turkey
Sugar Pie Pumpkin Pie
Recipe
Our Thanksgiving meal was a labor of love which involved everyone in our family, whether you were cooking dinner or washing dishes, it brought us all together. Lenny was the best & sexiest sous chef a girl could ask for! Kathie, my step mom was in charges of the stuffing, turkey and pies. I handled all the sides and cocktails: horses neck cocktail (recipe from Married with Dinner), roasted chestnuts, baked sweet potato rounds with sage, roasted asparagus drizzled with olive oil, sea salt and Parmesan, steamed green beans with bacon, shallots and roasted cherry tomatoes, fennel and rosemary mashed potatoes, and rich turkey stock (homemade, love making stock) gravy.
I am thankful for having the most fantastic man and the love of my dreams in my life as well as my wonderful and very supportive family and friends. As well I am thankful for the area we are blessed to live in!
My sister Daniele is a lucky woman, she has a man who likes to cook for her, which is probably a good thing as she just does not have any interest in the cooking department. Tonight he made us one of his signature dishes, Pasta with Sea Scallops. He sauteed the scallops with butter, olive oil and garlic – the smell was incredible! Then he made a very creamy Alfredo sauce. I have never made an Alfredo sauce and am glad to have one to add to our recipe collection as it was simple and by far the best one I have eaten.
Fantastic and easy meal … bowl of pasta with a creamy sauce and sauteed scallops with a hunk of french bread and a glass of vino! All Daniele had to do was the dishes!
(recipe to come)
Whenever I travel, one of the first things I do is figure out what food that region is known for and I make sure we eat lots of it – France it is wine and cheese, Wyoming it is buffalo, Hawaii lots of great local sushi, Boston it is lobsters and Portuguese food, etc.. you get it by now! Well, when I think of Montana the first thing that comes to mind is “Montana Beef” and after today, now I am questioning all of the beef inspired meals I have had there, the past 14 years.
When one is out in the wild wild west as we are this week, one would think that you would be eating the freshest and hopefully most humanely cuts of beef; right? After all, my family’s house is sandwiched amongst a few different cattle ranches. One would also think that the local grocery store (only Safeway & Iga) would sell the beef that is right in the backyard. One would also think that there would be a local butcher so that you could take advantage of all that great Montana beef.
Then I find out that most of the ranches sell their cattle to slaughterhouses far from Dillon for the actual slaughtering. This shocks me. Then after picking up the beef for dinner I see the words I hoped to never see, when there are cattle running around your house, printed on the label, “product of the USA or Mexico”, which clearly translates to, “not from Dillon”; this shocks me even more, after all the resources are in their backyards.
WAIT! There’s more »
I love Anita’s site Married with Dinner. Every time I read it I am completely inspired to start the tradition of cocktails in our home. If we had more space we would probably be doing just that. When we come to Montana, we seem to have cocktails more often, maybe because we have more space and a bar dedicated to just making those vibrations or maybe to deal with the craziness?
In honor of Thanksgiving week, I wanted to make the Oh Henry cocktails. Unfortunately, when I ran to the liquor store I forgot the benedictine so I am calling this the Oh Montana cocktail. We used ginger beer and bourbon. It was spicy and smooth ……..
Tomorrow we will have to give the Oh Henry another try!
Vibi from La Casserole Carrée is the hostess for this weeks Tuesdays with Dorie challenge. Even though Vibi is not American nor will she be celebrating Thanksgiving this week, she picked Dorie’s Twofer Thanksgiving Pie. Thank you!
We are in Montana celebrating with family this week and lucky for you all, the family loves to eat, so we (or I) decided to make the Twofer Pie for a little pre-Thanksgiving indulging.
The pie is two pies rolled into one: pumpkin and pecan. The recipe is pretty straightforward, make Dorie’s wonderful crust recipe, add a basic pumpkin pie filling and top it with a pecan filling. The pie smells wonderful cooking with the two different flavors blending. I did have to cook it more than the recipe called for, probably due to altitude and it did come out rather soft still; but, the flavors and texture were really nice. The end verdict – it was not my favorite Dorie recipe. I would probably make two separate pies, but it was fun to try.
My dad loves salmon and my stepmom does not, so when we come up to Montana, we make salmon. This week my dad had a recipe picked from Bon Appetit. It was a roasted salmon that was coated with a mayo, mustard and herb coating. I was interested to see how mayo would be roasted on a salmon and it was delicious. The coating really held the juices and flavor of the salmon in and make a very flavorful piece of fish. I served it with roasted potoates that were thinly sliced but kept together and then stuffed garlic between the slices, drizzled with olive oil and baked. The recipe is from Donna Hay‘s latest magazine.
Susan at the Well Seasoned Cook is the hostess for this month’s Sugar High Friday. We participated in our first one last month and enjoyed it so much that we are doing it again. Now I should tell you about the new rule in our house – no sweets unless there is a good reason. This is definitely hard being part of the Daring Bakers and Tuesdays With Dorie, but I usually am able to come up with a good reason to make each of these challenges.
Diane & Todd of White On Rice Couple got tired of seeing me complain on Twitter, about how I could never find any passion fruit in the city so they surprised us with a box of the little gems. They were so sweet that we pretty much slurped all of them up except for the couple that we saved their pulp and froze – sounds like we saved something else & froze it! During this couple of weeks Diane slipped a birthday by us, she is so modest, so I knew that I had to send a “thank you” and happy belated birthday gift to her (them, she was suppose to share).
Diane and Todd are one of the go to sites for when we need a couple good cocktail ideas and since we know they love their cocktails, it only seemed appropriate to create a gift that was cocktail inspired. We wish we could have shared one of our favorites with them, but since we can not mail a cocktail and a fly down to make it, we recreated it as a cupcake.
Here you have it the Blood Orange Margarita Cupcake. I made a cupcake that was flavored with the zest and juice of one blood orange and topped it off with a ginger tequila buttercream frosting. Where does SHF come in, well, I dusted the tops of the cupcakes with silver sparkle sanding sugar. For this photo I used a gold edible dusting powder. The cupcakes were, well, pretty fantastic and definitely meant for adults only.
Recipe: Blood Orange Margarita Cupcake
On November 4th, I was walking in my neighborhood, when I stumbled upon a gem, Omnivore Books. Celia Sack, the owner of this little gem, was not even open yet but she was kind enough to let us in to check out her new project – a bookstore devoted entirely to cookbooks. I was completely ecstatic! It is one thing to have a new store in our little neighborhood but it is another to have one devoted entirely to one of your biggest passions.
I drug Lenny and two of our friends to their open house that following Saturday afternoon, which proved to be the best thing to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Celia had fantastic food such as cured meats from Boccalone, an assortment of cheeses, olives and fantastic wine – just the thing to warm you up and get you in the mood to wander through her fantastic assortment of old books and new. We left with two books, a cookbook for Portuguese food and an easy read about a foodies adventure in Paris over Christmas.
This little nook in the neighborhood is the perfect place to find a rare book for the foodie on your list or for the hippest new cookbook out there. You will not want to miss the charm and warmth of the store but also from the very knowledgeable owner, Celia. It is a delightful place to spend a few hours.
Omnivore Books on Food
3885a Cesar Chavez Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
415.282.4712
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