Sharing the wealth

Every once and a while I get presents in the form of food from friends. It ranges from the insane amount of figs I've received this year from Lauren that I've made in to so many jars of jam to fun seasonings and spices from Sarah who gets all manner of samples from her work to random produce from people who just have too much of one good thing.

I have a friend who I met through my job....she started out as a just cool lady who owns a rental company so I work with her a LOT. We got to know each other through industry mixers and events we worked on and after while I realized that this is someone who I would love to have in my life outside of work....and I was right. We've vacationed together and dined together and I've gotten to know that Heidi shares so many of the same things that I absolutely love in my life.....family, fun and food. She gardens and owns chickens (even though she doesn't eat the eggs) and loves to share her bounty with the people in her life.

In this case, Heidi showed up at my office to pick up leftover event goodies from a recent party and while she was there brought me up a cardboard box full of goodies. A honeydew type melon the size of a large grapefruit, a crookneck squash, a few lovely lemons and a handful of beets...yanked from the ground with dirt still clinging to them.

I love beets. I love the red ones, the yellow ones, the pink ones and the candy stripe ones. I love them roasted, pickled and grilled (yes, grilled!). They are amazing on salads or on their own, sweet and earthy and if made right with none of the rubbery texture that comes from the canned variety. Beets pair really well with cheese, you will often find them with goats cheese, bleu cheese, brie cheese and anything else that is creamy and or pungent.

Tonight we had one of the more perfect salads that I have had with beets, simple as heck, but the end result was fantastic. Thank you Heidi for contributing to an awesome dinner!

Beet Salad with Pistachios & Goats Cheese

Serves 4

4 Medium Beets

1/2 C Pistachios

1/4 C Goats Cheese

Butter Lettuce

1 Small Shallot (about 1/8 C)

1 T Lemon Juice

1/4 C Orange Olive Oil (or 1/4 C Olive Oil with 1 tsp Orange Zest)

Salt & Pepper

Toss Beets with a little olive oil, salt & pepper, place in tin foil and seal. Bake at 400 for about an hour. Depending on how big the beets are the time can vary. Cool and peel.

Slice beets in to 1/8" slices and distribute among 4 plates in a single layer, dot the beets with goat cheese and sprinkle the pistachios over the top.

Mix olive oil, shallots, lemon juice, salt & pepper. Toss the lettuce with the vinaigrette and place on top of the beets.

It's better when you know where it came from!

I swear food really does taste better when you know where it came from, how long it's been off the vine or out of the water.

A few nights ago I finally had enough time off to get my ass back in the kitchen and cook something other than quickie meals, pre-packaged easy meals or heat up leftovers.

Simple simple simple...I had a fellow friend who was also overworked and in need of food love and girl time so I knew I didn't want to go crazy in the kitchen, but wanted to spend time chatting, drinking wine and burning our fingers gluing corks together to make corkboards.

Fresh Silver Salmon from Alaska courtesy of our friends Bruce & Jill, quick seared in a hot skillet and topped with a hollandaise sauce. Hollandaise sauce made from scratch with dad's eggs (well...his chickens eggs anyway) and dad's lemons of course.

Sliced tomatoes from Mom & Pop's garden drizzled with fig balsamic and fresh basil from a plant that is gracing my counter.

Zucchini from my friend Tiffany shredded and made in to cakes with a little cheese and other goodness.

Nothing frou frou, nothing fancy and everything probably took me about 45 minutes to prep and cook. But damn it was good. And the zucchini cakes are just as good, if not better, the second day so feel free to make extra!

Zucchini Cakes

1 Large Zucchini, shredded

1/2 of a Medium White Onion, shredded

1/2 cup Shredded Parmesan Cheese

2 Eggs

2/3 cups Panko Bread Crumbs

1 T Dill

Salt & Pepper to taste

After shredding the zucchini, squeeze with a paper towel to remove some of the moisture. Blend everything together in a bowl and season to taste. If you let it sit too long it will get watery so try to do it at the last minute. Spray a large nonstick skillet with spray and fry the cakes over medium heat for about 5 minutes to a side or until browned. They can be kept warm in the oven before service.

A bit of Summer in the heart of Winter

Sometime in the latter part of summer when the last of the heirloom tomatoes were giving themselves to us one at a time so stubbornly (did anyone else have a bad tomato year?) I came across a few plants on the first tier of my Dad's ranch that were overflowing with golf ball sized cherry tomatoes. They didn't have the sweet tart "pop" of the sweet 100's that we prefer for salads and eating raw, but were more mild and filled to bursting with seeds and juice.

Never one to waste something like this, I set out to fill two 5 gallon buckets and a large bowl with these little gems and tried to figure out how I could somehow easily preserve them so that somehow I could have fresh tomatoes somewhere down the line when the farmers market doesn't yield them and the supermarket tomatoes are tasteless fleshy blobs.

So I stemmed them and soaked them. Triple washed them and went through them to get rid of any blemished, squishy or not quite ripe ones. Sorted out the bugs and picked off the last of the tops and proceeded to cook them down, batch by batch.

And there were a LOT of batches.

Then I strained out the seeds from a couple of batches.

But there were a LOT of seeds!

So I got a little lazy and cooked them down a bit and mom helped me pack them up in 1 quart Ziploc bags that we froze and split between us. In reality, she actually packed them up because by the time they were cool, I was in my bed a few miles down the road.

Since then I have used a bag or two for spaghetti sauce, but tonight decided that I wanted something so comforting that I think every American child has it imprinted on their brain as one of the top 10 comfort foods of all time.

Tomato Soup served with......

Grilled Cheese Sandwiches! (you knew that was coming!)

Currently suffering from a head cold, allergies and an earache I decided about mid day that this was exactly what my inner child was crying for.

So here I am in my kitchen enjoying a few of my Christmas presents and making a nice batch of Tomato Bisque to go with grilled cheese sammiches. :)

New bamboo cutting board made by my sweetie....that gets stored so nicely in it's custom made rack. How awesome is he? If you are in the market, I can put in a good word to Santa or St. Valentine or the birthday fairy.


Shiny red Dutch oven with which to make all kinds of delicious meals. Isn't it nice that we are so color coordinated for our maiden voyage in the Dutch oven???



Fuzzy red Mary Jane slippers with sparkles to slog around on my cold tile floors (they had to match the Dutch oven, ya know?) . You know you think they are sexy....

And a new laptop with which to type my blog from right in my kitchen instead of schlepping my lazy ass upstairs to type on the old desktop. :)

Christmas was unexpectedly great, this year in general was pretty awesome. Hope yours was just as blessed.

Tomato Bisque

1 quart tomatoes in juice-you can use canned if you have to!
1 medium onion, diced
1 carrot, peeled & diced
1 stalk of celery, diced
2 large cloves of garlic, diced
1 bay leaf
1 T sugar

Bring all ingredients above to a simmer in a soup pot for about an hour or until carrots are tender. Strain through a sieve remove bay leaf and smash as much of the vegetable through as you can. Return to soup pot.

2 T butter
2 T flour

In a small saucepan, melt the butter and add the flour, stir and cook for just a few minutes. Add to soup pot and whisk over low heat until incorporated and the soup starts to thicken a bit.

1 C Milk (whole milk or cream, no low fat stuff as it will curdle)

Scald milk and add to the soup. Season with S&P as needed.

If you are looking to step outside the box, you can flavor this with any number of herbs or spices including the traditional Italian basil, oregano and rosemary. You can garnish with croutons or lump crab meat, swirl in a little creme freche for ultra decadent soup.

Or you can serve it as is with a buttery toasted grilled sourdough Swiss and cheddar filled sandwich that is cut in to triangles and call it a day.

Guess what I did?

Beyond the Farmers Market

Slow Food, locavore...we have all heard the terms that refer to eating local, sustainable foods that have not been processed, frozen, shipped and stored for a week before they hit our tables. It is a lovely thought and one that I embrace as much as I possibly can, but there are items that I am either not willing to give up or am just too damn lazy to make from scratch that are just easier to pick them up at the local TJ's or Vons. I love buying from the strawberry farm next to my neighborhood when she is open, clamming on the Rincon when the season is right and visiting the Farmers Market in Ventura or Ojai when the timing is right. Making my own pasta on a regular basis? Nah...been there and done that and it was a righteous pain in my arse.

I am lucky enough to have my parents ranch, which is the next best thing to the farmers market, fish shop & local butcher shop depending on the time of year. "Shopping" at the ranch can consist of the following and many more based upon what he decided to plant, raise or hunt this year: harvesting the late ripening tomatoes from the bottom of his vines to make marinara sauce (accented with herbs from mama's garden), random vines with squash, cucumbers & watermelon that come up intentionally or unintentionally based upon where he dumped the seeds at last year, picking several varieties of oranges, Meyer lemons and Mexican limes (the BEST limes ever!), filching ripe avocados from the counter, raiding the fridge for those gorgeous brown and tan eggs from the 9 laying hens on the hill or digging through the freezer for elk, venison or fish brought back from one of Dads hunting or fishing trips.

Yesterday afternoon, my buddy Tiffany took me to her garden where we harvested zucchini and the most beautiful heads of lettuce...which I traded her for a watermelon from my Dad's garden! Gotta love the trading system, it is almost like being without grocery stores again for a minute....but I digress, back to my original train of thought :)....

I headed home to make what I though would be a fantastic dinner with elk steaks seasoned with rosemary & oregano and served with sauteed mushrooms paired with this out of this world pasta dish my mom created from two different recipes. I could easily go face down in this dish alone and plan on enjoying the leftovers for several days if I can. The Elk steaks turned out to be a dissapointment as they were dry even though still very pink inside, but the pasta was as good as I remember it! Best of all I was able to use Tiff's zucchini & blossoms, moms herbs and an egg from the chickens, so I got to be a partial locavore which is better than not at all!

Enjoy!

Cappellini with Zucchini & Zucchini Blossoms

1 small onion, chopped fine
1 large stalk of celery, chopped fine
3 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
2 T olive oil
2 medium zucchini, halved and sliced thin
Zucchini Blossoms, chiffonade
1/2 cup lovage, sliced
2 cups chicken stock or broth (reserve1/8 cup in a ramekin)
pinch of saffon
1 egg yolk
basil chiffonade
grated parmesan cheese
cappellini pasta, cooked al dente

Sweat the onion, celery & garlic in the olive oil until soft & a bit translucent. Add in the zucchini and mix well. Add in stock/broth about 1/4 cup at a time and let it reduce-the zucchini should be very tender at the end of this process. When there is about a quarter cup of liquid left, add the saffron, the zucchini blossoms & the lovage. Blend the egg yolk with the reserved stock and then stir in to the sauce and cook until slightly thickened. Season to taste with S&P (if you use boullion or broth, you may not need any salt). Stir in the cappellini gently. Garnish with basil & parmesan.