Switching sites

I've moved my site to:
www.anhourinthekitchen.com.
I've placed an rrs feed at the top of this site to my new one so you are just a click away!

Spicy-Sweet Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

If you ask my friend Eric, I’m not the one to give anyone advice on how to roast seeds. One fall, years ago, in Eric’s West Virginia cabin dubbed “The Shack,” we roasted pumpkin seeds. For the record, I wasn’t the one who turned the oven to broil, which ignited the seeds, sending flames up through the burners. Yes, cooking can be dangerous.

Luckily, while six adults stood around debating what you throw on a kitchen fire (water=bad, wet towel=good), Eric quickly donned heavy-duty potholders, reached in the oven, grabbed the flaming pan and shouted, “Get the camera!” and “Get the door!” (in that order) as he headed outside to the grill, a perfectly safe place for flames.

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Butternut Apple Soup with Gorgonzola and Bacon

This combines two of my favorite fall things — butternut squash and apples — with two of my all-year-round favorites — blue cheese and bacon.

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Be Like The Squirrel

Experts from my Friday, September 18, 2009 column in the Register Star.

As I've said before, I think that I was a squirrel in a previous life. All summer, I somewhat lackadaisically picked fresh vegetables from my garden or bought them at the farm stand. I got what I needed for the week and maybe a little extra to freeze. Now, with a chill in the air, I know the days of catch-as-catch-can are drawing near. The squirrels and I know this. We get a little panicky and start to hoard.

Read more.

Pita Bread

I made another big batch of baba ganoush. Nothing suits it better than homemade, hot-out of-the-oven pita bread. Seriously.

Click here for recipe.

Amy's Cake

I made a cake for our friend Amy’s birthday last year and her husband Yves asked for an encore this year…Silly, boy. I can never make the same cake twice, mainly because it's near neigh impossible for me to follow a recipe. This year's cake had two layers of chocolate cake (straight from the recipe on the box of Hershey’s cocoa mix, only with butter in place of the oil) and two layers of yellow cake. The yellow cake layers were topped with a soft chocolate ganache and the chocolate cake layers had a caramel sauce. The whole shabang was topped with a mixture of whipped cream, sugar, cream cheese and almond extract. A bit over the top you say?

Baba Ganoush & Ratatouille

I like eggplant. I like the taste and look of them. They come in all kinds of cartoon-like balloon shapes and sizes. They can be purple, elegantly striped or creamy white. Historically, eggplants and other nightshade vegetables, have suffered from bad press. Sometimes called "mala insana" or “mad apple,” it was thought that eggplants caused many ailments including fever, epilepsy and insanity. It’s no wonder that Northern Europeans mainly used them ornamentally until the 1600s.

The PR for eggplants in Spain was certainly more favorable. Prizing eggplants for aphrodisiac qualities, the Spaniards dubbed them, “Berengenas” or “The Apple of Love.” It’s all in the branding.

For the recipes, click here to go to my column in the Register Star.

Dark Chocolate Zucchini Cake

I’m going to come right out and say that this cake is good for you. And why not, it has zucchini, which has a good amount of vitamin C, the dark chocolate is full of antioxidants, and it has less sugar per serving than I put in my morning coffee. That being said, this cake isn’t super sweet. Too satisfy a particularly sweet tooth, top it with a cream cheese frosting.
Click here for the recipe.

Grilled Cubano & The Sandwich for Bleu Cheese Fans

While eating various types of food on bread has been around practically since the Stone Age, the term sandwich is more of a relatively recent appellation. Rumor has it that, in the 18th century, the fourth Earl of Sandwich liked to eat while playing cards. He didn’t like getting grease on the cards, so he started requesting that his meat, which he would normally eat with his fingers, be served between two pieces of bread. People, maybe other grease conscious card players, started to request the same, possibly saying, “I’ll have what Sandwich is having.” And a new term was born.

It wasn’t until the invention of sliced bread in 1928 that sandwiches comfortably took a seat at America’s dinner table and made their way into the country’s lunch pails. Since then, virtually everything has been tried on a sandwich, including Elvis’ infamous peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich.

In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” Michael Pollan laments that people are spending more time watching people cook on TV rather than actually cooking. He states, “The most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich; the No. 1 accompanying beverage is a soda.”

While I am, of course, a big advocate of spending more time in the kitchen, I don’t see anything wrong with eating a sandwich for dinner, especially if it’s a good one and not just a piece of cheese thrown between two pieces of white bread (which I fear is what Pollan is referring to).

I bet you can whip out one of these sandwiches during the commercial breaks of Iron Chef. Be sure to trade in the soda for a seltzer with a splash of juice.

Go to the articles for recipes.>

Peaches

New column up at the Register Star.

While Georgia is known as the “Peach State,” I’ve tasted some darn good peaches here in New York. The local peach crop is now in full swing, so be sure to grab some.

The best place to get a peach is to pick one right from a tree. My friend Douglas said that he never buys supermarket peaches (unless they are local) because they go from being rock hard to mushy.

Peaches bound for the supermarket are cultivated for a long shelf life and a pretty red color. Flavor gets a back seat. They are also refrigerated, which can turn an unripe peach mealy.

Apparently we’ve been having that problem since the late 19th century. This from a New York Times editorial dated Aug. 23, 1895, written in response to an article claiming California peaches were of poor quality: A defense of California peaches – those sent to New York are poor because picked too soon, by Charles Vogelgesang:

The fruit is picked only half ripened, thus, in the first place, depriving it of the nourishment and sunshine necessary to give it its full flavor and sweetness. Consequently, it ripens without those essentials and, as I will admit, with very poor results as we usually find it in New York markets and thereby the fruit is placed at a sorry disadvantage when compared with that allowed to ripen on the trees and shipped comparatively few miles before reaching the consumer.

I always search out organic peaches. The Environmental Working Group, a not-for-profit research organization, has a list of the most pesticide contaminated fruits and vegetables, called the “Dirty Dozen.” Peaches top that list. They have the highest pesticide residue out of the 42 fruits and vegetables they tested. Pesticides easily migrate into the fruit through the soft skin of the peach. Since local peaches don’t have to travel far, farmers can get by with using less pesticide. Ask your peach farmer about his/her pesticide practices and/or shop for the organic variety.

Go to the Register Star for Peach Cobbler and Grilled Shrimp with Peaches and Bok Choy in a Spicy Peanut Sauce recipes.