Sponsored Post: What Lies Beneath? Plus A Food Gal Giveaway
What deliciousness is inside of this?
Can you guess what lies beneath this lid?
A juicy berry crumble? Cornbread? An apple crisp? Maybe even a river of deepest, darkest chocolate pudding?
Category Archives: Cool Cooking Techniques
Meyer Lemons Part I: The Quick and the Savory
This is what I call an ideal lemon chicken.
Lemon chicken may be a mainstay of Chinese restaurant menus, but I never order it.
Battered to oblivion, and tossed with a gloppy sauce that tastes more of sugar than citrus, it just doesn’t appeal.
Melissa Clark’s “Sauteed Chicken with Meyer Lemon,” however, is much more my style.
The veteran cookbook author and New York Times food writer does swaps out the deep-frying for stir-frying instead. That means this dish comes together in no time and with no mess.
What’s more, you can really taste the fresh, bright Meyer lemon in this dish.
What To Do With Leftover Holiday Buttermilk?
The method to make these biscuits is easy yet provide very distinctive results.
Hmm, pancakes? Salad dressing? Mashed potatoes?
How about “Cathead Biscuits”? Ones that are fluffy inside and have distinctive craggly crisp, buttery tops?
Yeah, now we’re talking.
After a run of holiday baking, I found myself with leftover buttermilk. I pulled a couple cookbooks from my shelf until I hit upon “Muffins & Biscuits” (Chronicle Books) by Heidi Gibson, co-owner of San Francisco’s The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen.
Festive Red (Wine Risotto) For the Holidays
Barbera wine colors and flavors this hearty risotto.
At this time of year, the color red rules.
In “Red Wine Risotto,” it really dazzles, too.
The recipe is from “Eataly: Contemporary Italian Cooking” (Phaidon, 2016) by Eataly, the Italian food brand with mega food emporiums around the world.
The 300 recipes are surprisingly pared down, more like what Italians make at home rather than what four-star chefs labor over at restaurants. The recipes are one-page each with most having just a few paragraphs of directions.
Find everything from “Fresh Pea Soup with Smoked Ham” and “Spaghetti Pasta with Mussels, Clams, Jumbo Shrimp, and Bell Pepper Puree” to “Egg and Pancetta Tartlets” to “Chocolate Puddings with Caramelized Oranges and Amaretti Cookies.”
At the end of the book, there’s also a great primer with photos that gives the lowdown on types of Italian salumi, pastas, rice, fish, beans, grains, breads, and cheeses.
Foodie Gifts — For Friends, Family or Yourself
Avocado oil, apple cider vinegar and apricots combine for this zesty Farmhouse Lab dressing. (Photo by Carolyn Jung)
Farmhouse Lab Salad Dressings
True, it’s easy enough to whisk together your own salad dressing at home if you have a good variety of oils, vinegars and seasonings.
But Farmhouse Lab of Marin does it one better by packaging its consciously-sourced dressings in cute little mason jars that make the perfect host or hostess gift.
The dressings use raw honey or raw coconut nectar for sweetness, as well as vinegars and oils, and mustards from artisan producers for flavor.
They come in four varieties, which I recently received samples to try: Sunny Avocado, Berry Olive, Green Pumpkin, and Red Sunflower.
The Sunny Avocado is buttery with a slight vegetative note to it, as well as the zing of apple cider vinegar. The Berry Olive is fruity sweet-tart with pomegranate vinegar and raw blackberry honey. The Green Pumpkin is nutty and rich with a dash of mustard. The Red Sunflower is also quite nutty with a subtle spiciness from red pepper chili.
They come in a handy four-pack. (photo by Carolyn Jung)
A four-pack (one of each variety) is $67.99. You can give the entire pack to someone or break it up and gift one or two to someone while keeping the rest for yourself. Best yet, through the end of this year, 10 percent of proceeds from each four-pack to SF Fights Fire, a grass-roots chefs effort to provide food and services to North Bay Fire Rescue Centers in the aftermath of the Wine Country fires. Just enter the code at check-out: Enter Code: SFFF.
“Moto: The Cookbook”
I will go on record as saying that it’s a good bet that I will likely never cook anything from the new “Moto: the Cookbook” (Little, Brown and Company, $50) by Homaro Cantu. Yet when a review copy arrived in my mail, I couldn’t stop reading it or stop staring at the photos of its phantasmagorical dishes or being in awe at the mind that came up with it all.
Cantu, a former sous chef at Charlie Trotter’s, was the visionary behind the ground-breaking Moto in Chicago, which opened in 2004. Sadly, he took his own life in 2015. The restaurant continued on without him for almost a year before his widow sold it to the Alinea Group.
But not before it made an indelible mark on the food industry.