= Excellent
= Good/Very Good
= Okay read
= Not recommended
= Ugh! Don't waste your time.
Archive for April 13th, 2008
Sunday, April 13th, 2008A Weekend of Cooking - Gardeners’ Community Cookbook
As part of the Soup’s On Challenge, I immersed myself in Smith & Hawken: Gardeners’ Community Cookbook this weekend and made several recipes over a two day period. This cookbook came about through a community effort of more than 350 gardeners from around the United States, including some well known professional chefs like Barbara Kafka and Sheila Lukins. Victoria Wise has written 10 cookbooks - and if they are all as wonderful as this one I will have to go looking for them.
Wise divides this cookbook up into ten sections: Starters, Salads, Soups, Pasta Aplenty, Main Dishes, Vegetable Sides, Sauces/Salsa/and Pestos, Pantry Perks, The Bakery, and Sweets. She not only includes a recipe index, but also a contributor’s index for those cooks who want to try a specific chef’s recipe. Interspersed throughout the book are interesting facts about food, technique, and tools of the trade. The recipes are easy to read and follow and include a short blurb by each contributing cook.
I chose to create two dishes for Saturday evening: Artichoke Supreme (page 277 - from Vegetable Sides), and Grilled Chicken Salad with Roasted Red Bell Pepper Dressing (page 79 - from Salads).
Artichoke Supreme requires some time to prepare - including about 40 minutes for boiling the artichokes. During that time, I prepared the stuffing using sweet onion, 2 medium tomatoes, chopped fresh basil, and bread crumbs from a loaf of good, day old bread. This is a dish which can be served hot or cold - my husband and I ate it hot on Saturday, and ate the leftovers cold for lunch on Sunday. I liked it better cold. I also thought it would have been tastier with melted butter dripped over it before adding the stuffing. But, regardless, it was a satisfying dish with plenty of flavor.
The grilled chicken salad was a disappointment since I used salad greens which were too tender to hold up to the hot chicken. The recipe called for hearty greens (arugula, watercress or frisee), but my supermarket didn’t carry those, so I substituted baby lettuce to the recipe’s detriment. On the plus side, the roasted red pepper dressing (made with roasted red bell pepper, roasted garlic, basil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar) was outstanding - flavorful and not overpowering, but rich enough to stand up to the chicken. I think this would also taste wonderful over steak.
This evening’s menu utilized some leftovers from Saturday to which I added Rosemary-Roasted Walnuts (page 3 - from Starters), Deviled New Potatoes (page 5-6 - from Starters), and Spinach and Strawberry Salad (page 50 - from Salads).
None of these dishes was difficult, but the Deviled New Potatoes is a bit fussy and takes some time to prepare. It is well worth the effort, however. Delicate, creamy and with a bit of crunch from the diced celery, carrots, sweet pickles, and scallion…it makes a luscious side dish with left over chicken drizzled with roasted bell pepper dressing. The spinach and strawberry salad with Kentucky salad dressing (made with olive oil, cider vinegar, sugar, minced onion, poppy seeds, sesame seeds and a dash of Worcestershire sauce) provides the bit of sweet to this meal. The roasted walnuts would have made a nice addition to the salad, but my husband and I ate them by the handful instead. This meal, served with a cold glass of Hayes Ranch Chardonnay (Central Coast-California), was satisfying and filling. My husband’s favorite dish was the spinach salad, with the deviled new potatoes coming in a close second.
As an aside - I would recommend purchasing an immersion blender if you don’t have one. It made preparing the dressings for these dishes a snap. I love mine and don’t know what I did before I got it.
I’m really happy I joined this cooking challenge as I’ve had this fantastic cookbook on my shelf now for more than a year without having made a single recipe until this weekend! This is a cookbook I can recommend, especially if you are looking for a special recipe to serve to friends fresh out of the garden.
*NOTE: Please click on the photos above to view them in a larger size.
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
Sunday Salon - April 13, 2008
April 13, 2008
10:45AM
It feels as though nature has skipped Spring and headed directly into Summer this weekend. Temperatures have soared into the 80s and the sky is devoid of clouds for as far as the eye can see. Yesterday I lounged on my front porch reading and wishing I had a daybed out there to take a nap. I’ll be reading periodically today while waiting for the paint to dry on my bistro table and chairs.
My reading week in review:
The Sister, by Poppy Adams - a spooky, psychological thriller that kept me up late at night; another book worth reading (read my review)
The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway - not even half way through 2008, I can say with some level of confidence that you’ll see this book in my top five reads of the year; amazing; heartbreaking; beautifully wrought (read my review).
Dipping into Essays:
Some of you may remember me talking about dusting off EB White’s book of essays last week. I’m true to my word and yesterday read from the Essays of E.B. White. Most people recognize White as an all-time favorite children’s author (one of my most loved books from childhood is Charlotte’s Web); but White also has an impressive body of work writing for The New Yorker magazine. His essay entitled: Good-Bye to Forty-eighth Street had me laughing and nodding my head in agreement. He writes about moving out of his apartment, struggling to rid himself of the many acquisitions cluttering up the place:
A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day - smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire thing in order to acquire them. Goods and chattels seek a man out; they find him even though his guard is up. Books and oddities arrive in the mail. Gifts arrive on anniversaries and fete days. Veterans send ballpoint pens. Banks send memo books. If you happen to be a writer, readers send whatever may be cluttering up their own lives; I had a man once send me a chip of wood that showed the marks of a beaver’s teeth. Someone dies, and a littler trickle of indestructible keepsakes appears, to swell the flood. This steady influx is not counterbalanced by any comparable outgo. Under ordinary circumstances, the only stuff that leaves a home is paper trash and garbage; everything else stays on and digs in. -From The Essays of E.B. White-
This passage demonstrates White’s skill in engaging his reader, his dry humor, and his ability to enchant. I am looking forward to strolling through this book over the next weeks and will continue to share my reading with you.
Currently Reading:
Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
I’m barely a fifth of the way through this 550 page book and loving it. Stegner has an absorbing style which transports the reader into the scene. He reminds me quite a bit of John Steinbeck, who is one of my favorite writers- and not just because he sets his novels in the west. His characters feel real to me and I want to know more about their lives.
Speaking of Steinbeck, did any of you catch this article posted by Robert Gottlieb in the New York Review of Books? As a Steinbeck fan, I felt like a mother bear while reading Gottlieb’s thoughts - fur raised, claws out, ready to do combat to defend my favorite author. Gottlieb’s essay questions Steinbeck’s right to the Nobel prize and criticizes his greatest effort (The Grapes of Wrath) as ‘a vertiginous conjunction of sweeping, irresistible narrative and highfalutin theorizing.’ Gottlieb writes about Steinbeck’s ‘compulsion to hector us with heavy-handed opinions and ideas‘ and delves into his personal life in this no-holds barred essay. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Do you agree? Is there truth there? Or, are you like me, ready to defend Steinbeck?
Well, I’m off to paint my little bistro table and chairs and enjoy the weather. Happy reading to all of you!