Food Recipe Archives

Red Chile Marinated Grilled Chicken 0 komentar

This is some of the best chicken I've ever eaten - grilled, roasted, baked, whatever. Juicy, spicy, tender, lipsmackin' good. Here's the deal, there are two ways to make this recipe. One way entails making your own red chile sauce from scratch, using dried ancho and guajillo chiles that you can usually only find at a specialty Mexican market. Even our local Whole Foods doesn't carry these dried chiles. The second method starts with a base of canned red chile sauce, which is a little easier to find in a regular supermarket, and saves quite a few steps. I've made this recipe both ways. As you might expect, if you have access to the dried chiles and can make the time to make your own sauce base, it's totally worth it for the extra intensity and depth of flavor. The good news is that if you can't get a hold of the dried chiles, or you don't have the time, canned red chile sauce works fine as a base for this sauce. Red chile enchilada sauce works too, though you may need to add some chili powder to it to increase the heat. In any case you are going to pump up the sauce a bit with ground cloves, cinnamon, and cumin.

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Mediterranean Tuna 0 komentar

This is a great recipe for a delicious tuna sidedish. A
great way to add variety to your meal with it's delicious
mix of tuna, tomatoes, parsley, garlic, and more.

Ingredients
- 4 tbsp. fresh lemon juice, divided
- 4 tbsp. olive oil, divided
- 4 tbsp. capers, divided
- 1/2 tsp. salt, divided
- 1/4 tsp. pepper
- 4 (4-oz.) tuna fillets, cut into 2-inch pieces (thaw, if
frozen)
- 4 tomatoes, seeded and chopped
- 3/4 cup chopped arugula
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- 2 tbsp. chopped fresh parsley
- Hard crackers or toasted rye slices (optional)

Instructions
1. Preheat oven to 425°F. Lightly coat shallow baking dish with
nonstick cooking spray. Place fillets in baking dish.
2. Combine 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 tablespoons olive oil,
2 tablespoons capers, 1/4 teaspoon salt and pepper; pour over
tuna pieces. Bake 15 to 20 minutes or until fish flakes with a
fork.
3. Meanwhile, combine tomatoes, arugula, garlic, parsley,
remaining 2 tablespoons lemon juice, remaining 2 tablespoons
olive oil, remaining 2 tablespoons capers and remaining 1/4
teaspoon salt in container of food processor; cover and
process.
4. Serve tuna on hard crackers, if desired. Top with tomato
mixture.

Grilled Corn Salad 0 komentar

There are, I think, three essential ingredients to this salad - corn, which you can grill or even prepare by toasting frozen kernels on the stovetop, onions, and cumin. The rest is a medley of whatever fresh vegetables you might have on hand. In this case I had zucchini and a serrano chile pepper from my garden, a big red bell pepper. I tossed in some cotija cheese for good measure. Although this is a grilled corn salad the other vegetables benefit from some searing heat as well. A simple seasoning of cumin, salt, pepper, olive oil and vinegar or lime juice pulls everything together. I made this for my parents today and my father insisted that "this one needs to go on the site" while polishing it off. Enjoy.

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Chicken Salad with Tarragon 0 komentar

From the recipe archive, a cool salad for hot days.

Inspiration for good food can be found anywhere, even Starbucks, where I had a delicious chicken salad sandwich recently. The key ingredients other than chicken? Cranberries and tarragon. French tarragon is a distinctive herb, with a slight anise or licorice aroma. We don't use it that often; I grew some last year and don't think we used it more than once or twice the whole season. But it does pair well with chicken. The dried cranberries add some sweetness to the chicken salad, and the lemon juice just enough acidity to brighten all the flavors.

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Zucchini Muffins 0 komentar

Now that we are living in the land of zucchini plenty (our zucchini plant is well along in its mission of total garden domination) we have ample opportunity to try out zucchini recipes. I've been experimenting with muffins and have settled on this one, a riff on our banana bread recipe. Much like the banana bread, these muffins are insanely good and insanely easy to make. No mixer, wooden spoon only, and two bowls, though you could really even make the batter in one bowl. Very moist. Just sweet enough. I say that the nuts and raisins/dried cranberries are optional because today I watched my favorite 12-year old friend pick out all of them while still declaring how much she loved the muffins. If you like nuts and raisins (or dried cranberries) by all means keep them in.

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Old Fashioned Sour Cream Muffins 0 komentar

Old Fashioned Sour Cream Muffins

My grandma used to make these sour cream muffins whenever
we would go to visit her.

Ingredients
- 6 tablespoons butter or margarine
- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 4 eggs
- 1 3/4 cups sour cream
- 2 3/4 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
- 3 tablespoons granulated sugar or cinnamon/sugar for
topping

Instructions
1. Cream butter, sugar and salt at high speed with electric
mixer. Beat for 3 minutes until very smooth and creamy. Make a
hole in the middle and add eggs; beat them until they are
thoroughly incorporated and are a light lemon color. Add the
sour cream, and beat well.
2. In another bowl mix the flour, baking soda and nutmeg with a
fork.
3. Grease 3 dozen muffin cups or use paper cups. Preheat the
oven to 425 degrees F.
4. Quickly mix the wet and dry ingredients together. As soon as
the dry ingredients are thoroughly moistened, fill 3 dozen
muffin cups half full. Sprinkle each muffin with 1/4 teaspoon
granulated sugar or the cinnamon/sugar mixture. Bake for 15
minutes. Let cool for 2 minutes then loosen from the pan.
5. Serve hot.
6. NOTE: To make blueberry muffins, fold in 2 cups floured
fresh or frozen dry blueberries or currants. This will add 6
more muffins so prepare 42 muffin cups.

Orange Poppy Seed Cookies 0 komentar

Please welcome guest author Garrett McCord who brought these cookies over today. They lasted about a second and a half. ~Elise

Generally, I stick to ice creams and sorbets come summer, it just gets too hot out to start cranking on the oven. Still, certain treats are worth the heat and when these orange poppy seed cookies bake it's culinary aromatherapy.

The bright orangey flavors with the slightly citric and nutty, textural pop of poppy seeds make these cookies taste like bursts of sunshine itself. They're easy to put together and during a season when lighter flavors just seem to pair so well with the warmer weather. The cookies are light and delicate yet pack in a lot of flavor, making them delectable for kids, yet still perfectly suited for bridal parties, baby showers, or other lighthearted events.

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Mexican Green Bean Salad 0 komentar

One of our favorite ways to eat green beans is with salsa. The tomatoes, onions, chiles, spices, and vinegar perk up the beans in the most wonderful way. This bean salad recipe is sort of a riff on the salsa theme, taking it up a notch with pickled jalapeños, cilantro, cotija cheese, and avocados. It would make a perfect picnic salad for a Mexican themed potluck. If you love Mexican food, I'm willing to bet you'll love this salad as much as we do.

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BBQ Beef Sandwich 0 komentar

My mother grew up in a house where there was constant entertaining. My nana was somewhat of a social bee and even I remember how every night was a party night when as a child I came to visit during the summer. Mom and dad were reminiscing the other day about one of their favorite recipes of my grandmother's, her pulled beef. Mom remembers Nana once feeding 80 people this dish at her small adobe house in Tucson. It's terribly easy to make, you can easily double, triple, quadruple the recipe, making it perfect for serving large groups of people in an informal gathering. And it's absolutely delicious.

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Quick and Easy Pan-Fried Flank Steak 0 komentar

Flank steak is a lean, flavorful cut of meat that is probably best prepared marinated and cooked over a grill. But sometimes you just don't have time to marinate the meat or deal with the grill. My mother raised 6 kids (all born within 8 years) on my dad's teacher's salary. (Her favorite TV show is John & Kate plus 8, wonder why?) Which means she is the master of efficiency in the kitchen. This is her favorite method of preparing flank steak. The trick is to put little knife pokes in the meat, breaking up some of the long muscle fibers. When I asked about the juices running out of the meat, it's not really an issue as the meat is cooked rare, and whatever juices do come out get reduced in the pan and served over the meat.

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Cherry Ice Cream with Chocolate Chips 0 komentar

Every year about this time, I'm invited to pick Bing cherries at our next door neighbor Pat's yard. Pat picks all she can freeze and eat for the year, and anything left is for friends or the birds. There is something truly glorious about standing in the shade of a cherry tree ripe with cherries, and picking them and eating them right there on the spot. As kids we would have pit spitting contests to see how far we could make them fly. Do kids even do this any more? They've already bred the seeds out of watermelons, I sure hope they don't breed the pits out of cherries. Call me old fashioned, but I don't mind working for my food, pits, seeds and all.

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Nocino 0 komentar

Recently I hosted several Sacramento area food bloggers over for a potluck. Late in the afternoon, after most of the guests had left and the die hards remained, I pulled out some nocino, a spicy, sweet, slightly bitter walnut liqueur that I made a couple years ago to share with the group. The recipe comes from our favorite Parisian man-about-town David Lebovitz, from his terrific book, Room For Dessert. David recommends using nocino to flavor custards, or to pour over vanilla ice cream. We had ours straight. To any other group of my friends, tasting homemade nocino would be a novelty at best. To this group, it was an inspiration. A few friends looked around the yard and noticed that our walnut trees had plenty of perfectly young green walnuts on them. A few minutes later, one group was off to the store to buy a gallon of vodka. The other group was on ladders picking the young walnuts within reach. In short order, our kitchen was filled with cooks, chopping walnuts, parsing out sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and other ingredients to different glass canning jars. A nocino party! One of the guests even noticed churro remnants on the kitchen ceiling (that's another story) and knocked them down.

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Boysenberry Pie 0 komentar

Come late May and early June, my mother's boysenberry vine comes alive with fruit. Boysenberries look like blackberries, but are actually a cross between blackberries, loganberries, and raspberries. As such they fruit much earlier in the season than blackberries, and they are more delicate in touch and taste. As a vine to cultivate, they aren't nearly as thorny as blackberries and neither are they as invasive of a plant. I used to grow blackberries in San Francisco and it was a constant struggle to keep them from taking over the yard. (Trivia fact: the hybrid boysenberries were popularized by Walter Knott of Knott's Berry Farm.)

This berry pie recipe is easy to put together. The tricks are to let the whole berries macerate in sugar first, and to use instant tapioca as a thickener. You can use corn starch instead of the instant tapioca, but we found that it is harder to gauge the correct amount and tapioca has a nice consistency that works well with berries.

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Sautéed Zucchini with Gruyere 0 komentar

After several years of observing the results of my feeble gardening attempts, my next door neighbor Pat (76 and still going strong) graciously responded to my pleas for help and has been guiding me this spring with soil amendments, starter plants, seeds, and all around gardening advice. As a result, here it is early June and I have a zucchini plant that is growing with wild abandon (amazing what a little water, sunshine, and organic fertilizer can do). The plant produces almost one zucchini a day and has been for about a month. Blessed with this new bounty, we now have a very good reason to try out new zucchini recipes, so be warned, you may be seeing more zukes on this site the summer than usual. (Have a favorite zucchini recipe? Please let us know in the comments.)

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Chipotle Flourless Chocolate Cake 0 komentar

This flourless chocolate cake by Garrett is to-die-for. Almost like fudge. ~Elise

For a recent potluck for all the Sacramento food bloggers I decided to throw together this intensely decadent and very easy chocolate torte. The original recipe is based around David Lebovitz's Chocolate Idiot Cake, however, this one bakes up much more quickly, uses less butter, and has a bit of burn to it. The chipotle pepper and cinnamon give a nice bit of spice and a slow, sweet tingle that lingers after each bite.

If you can't get chipotle chili powder, ancho chili powder will work fine as well. As the ingredients in this are few, and thus their flavors are of the utmost importance I highly suggest you splurge a bit for a high quality chocolate; Guittard and Scharffen Berger are excellent choices.

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Rosemary Lemon Rhubarb Spritzer 0 komentar

I was told by my friends, "whatever you do, don't call it a rhubarb anything, or no one will want to make it." Ever since Garrett gave me some of his rhubarb rosemary jelly a few weeks ago, I've been experimenting with rhubarb and rosemary. The combination really is outrageously good, though sadly, I seriously doubt that I can convince you of it, without actually feeding it to you myself. If you are adventurous, like rhubarb, and like rosemary, I urge you to try this concoction. Garrett thought we should call it a "ruby slipper", but alas that name is already taken. Perhaps a "pink princess" would be fitting? The following recipe would make a great punch for a bridesmaid shower. Or a birthday gathering of 6 year old girls in princess outfits. I served it to a group of Sacramento food bloggers to rave reviews.

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