Well I’m pretty much convinced at this point that we won’t be having a March blizzard like we did last year. We’ve had enough warm, or at least mild, weather lately that it’s been pretty obvious. I’m disappointed there wasn’t more snow this winter (seems like everyone else got it but us) but I’m also eager for the spring and everything it will bring with it.

Still, there are a few cold days left here and there. And so even though winter is breathing its last breath, there’s still time for the restorative power of a good bowl of borscht.

I’ve posted my recipe for borscht here before, so I’m not going to re-invent the wheel. What I will stress though, is that it is one of those dishes that’s always just a little bit different every time around. As long as you’ve got the beets, you can use nearly any soup-friendly vegetable you’ve got around. For traditional borscht, many would claim that cabbage is absolutely necessary, but I have made the soup many times without it and it still turns out great.

Stay warm these last few winter days. Spring is just around the corner now.

This is a pretty simple, but wonderful, recipe that I got from Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” It’s a fantastic non-fiction book cataloging her move from Tucson, AZ, to her childhood home of Virginia – and the subsequent year that she and her family took it upon themselves to become real honest-to-god locavores. They produced the majority of their food themselves on their farm, eating seasonally and learning the skills that allowed families of the past to make it through the whole year with such a method. What they didn’t raise or grow themselves, they traded with their neighbors in the community. The book is full of lots of great ideas for reigning in your own food miles, and each chapter ends with a handful of recipes that were her family favorites.

The spinach lasagna recipe has become one of my family favorites. It’s quite easy, generally lasts a couple days with leftovers, and is perfect for Meatless Monday. Only trouble is, lasagna can take a bit more time than I have available on occasion (particularly with pre-cooking the lasagna noodles). So I’ve broken down the recipe into it’s simplest form – a basic pasta dish – and will replicate it below for you.

You can really use any kind of long noodles that you like – spaghetti, capellini, vermicellini – it’s up to you. I do recommend whole wheat pasta though, any chance you get. That white flour stuff just really doesn’t have much in it for you.

So this can actually be made in about 30 minutes, and my pictures prove it. Generally I tend to turn my nose up at the whole “30 minute meal” thing, because I feel pretty strongly that trying to minimize the amount of time you have to spend with food per day down to the smallest possible unit is the wrong approach entirely… but then again, I don’t have kids (yet), so what do I know?

We begin at 8:30pm. I eat my dinners too late, I know, but it is what it is.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes

Ingredients…

- pasta
- about 25-30oz fresh spinach
- 1/2 cup fresh ricotta cheese
- 1 cup pasta sauce
- 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella

Optional…

- 1/2 cup mushrooms
- 1/2 cup diced onion, sauteed
- basil, oregano

1. Trim the stems off your spinach and wash well, cut the leaves a bit if you prefer smaller bites. This took me 7 minutes cause I got distracted washing dishes.

2. Wilt the spinach over low/medium heat with some salt and olive oil.

3. Bring a pot of water to a boil, and cook your pasta as you regularly would. If you’ve got stock (chicken, duck, vegetable, etc), you can cook the pasta in that instead of water to impart a bit of a stronger flavor to it.

4. While pasta is cooking, warm up the sauce in a small sauce pot over low heat.

5. That’s really about it. Start plating with the pasta and sauce first.

6. Then add the ricotta.

7. Home stretch here. Add the spinach, then more sauce, maybe a little more ricotta, and top with the shredded mozzarella.

8. Don’t forget about the garlic bread you had time to whip up while the pasta was cooking.

9. Done. 30 minutes.

It’s not the most photogenic meal, I’ll readily admit that. But it’s damn tasty.

Every once in awhile I get emails out of the blue, on account of being Somebody with a Blog, asking if they can send me free things and I can review their product and – of course – write an amazing, glowing review here in this space so all 19 of my readers (that’s you!) will immediately drop what they’re doing and go buy a life’s supply.

I’ll admit, even just that is kind of cool – although 98% of the time the product they want to send me is some highly processed new super food stuff that I’ve never heard of, which I can tell you off the bat is just not for me. In these cases, it really never gets much farther than that initial contact. But I recently got my first contact that was actually something worth following through on.

The contact was from a representative from POM Wonderful (it’s pomegranate juice, but yes that’s the full name of the company). He wanted to send me a case of their main product – bottles of 100% pomegranate juice. I’ve had this stuff before, and it’s good. I’m a pretty big fan of pomegranates in general. So I was already inclined to accept the offer. Reading through the email, the second thing I noticed was that there wasn’t even any caveat for some sort of reciprocation. I mean, obviously the tacit implication is that I’m then going to go ahead and write about it here, but there was no quid-pro-quo deal explicitly necessary for them to send me some product. This might seem like a small detail but it made an impression on me.

So – naturally – here I am writing about it. I like POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. I liked it before I got the free stuff (a case worth, not too shabby) – and I still like it after. I tend to use it for mixed drinks, a LOT. It’s great with some vodka and a bit of seltzer. But it’s also pretty great for cooking with, too. I thought for awhile about what my dish would be to showcase it, and I felt like a nice crispy roast duck would make a perfect delivery vehicle for it.

Since I’ve never talked about duck here and some people find it intimidating, I thought I’d do a little step by step for my roasting process. Two of the best things about roast duck are – 1) the crispy skin, and 2) the fat you can save. This method works great for both.

Prep time: 20 minutes (or a couple hours if you include the thawing/bringing-to-room-temp of a frozen duck)
Cook time: 3.5 hours

Ingredients…

- 1 whole duck, fresh or frozen
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- salt
- pepper
- pomegranate molasses (can usually be found in the Middle Eastern/ethnic foods section of a grocery store – if need be, sub in regular molasses but tread lightly with it)

1. If frozen, move the duck to the fridge for a good 24 hours before the day you want to cook it. On the day of, take it out of the fridge about 90 minutes before you are ready to start roasting it. The roasting will take about 3 hours, so be sure to plan accordingly.

2. As the duck is coming to room temperature, dress it up with some olive oil, salt, and pepper. Remove any giblets from inside the cavity and save with the heart for stock, save the liver for paté (quick paté recipe coming soon for bonus points!).

3. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees fahrenheit.

4. Cut the neck skin and fat from the body and reserve. You can render this while the bird is roasting to get the most amount of fat out of this as possible. More details follow.

5. Make diagonal cuts in the skin of the duck all across the breast side and the back. Do not cut all the way into the flesh, just cut through the skin and the fat. This will make it easier for the fat to drip out into the roasting pan when you’re cooking it. Use the image below as a guideline. Make sure you have a sharp knife.

6. Next you want to truss the duck with some twine. You can truss a duck the same way you would a chicken – it’s pretty easy. Snip yourself a nice long piece of twine (you can always cut off extra if it’s too long, but you can’t add more), and start with the duck breast side up. Place the duck down on the halfway point of the twine, and wrap once around the wings (the top half of the following image). Then wrap one more time around the legs and knot in front of the cavity (the bottom half of the following image).

7. When it’s ready to go in the oven, place it in a roasting pan with something to raise it off the base of the pan. This is critical for keeping the skin crispy and for reserving as much fat as possible. It should look something like this:

8. Just before it goes in the oven, brush it with pomegranate molasses and poke it all over to make small holes in the skin for fat to drip out. Then roast for 1 hour at 300, breast side up, and it will look a bit like this…

While it’s roasting for the first hour, you can prep and start reducing the pomegranate glaze.

Ingredients…

- 1 cup pomegranate juice
- 1/4 cup pomegranate molasses
- 2 serrano chiles, diced with seeds removed
- 1 minced garlic clove

1. Add all the ingredients together and then pulse in a blender until smooth.

2. Put in a small sauce pan over low-medium heat and reduce until desired thickness is reached.

NOTE – you still have about 2:30 hours left to go before the duck will be ready, so be aware of this as you are reducing the glaze. Either keep it on very low heat and make it a nice long process, or wait a little while before starting the heat. I’d leave yourself at least an hour to reduce it, though. If it gets too thick, just add a little more pomegranate juice.

9. Pull the roast out of the oven, and flip the bird – CAREFULLY – so that it is now breast side down. Prod the sides of it gently for the fat to drip out into the pan. Roast for another 1 hour at 300 degrees fahrenheit.

While the duck is roasting for the second hour, you can make some easy duck liver paté on the stove top using the liver which you set aside at the outside – if you roll that way, that is. And I definitely do.

Ingredients…

- duck liver
- 1 tbsp duck fat
- 2 small shallots, diced
- 2 small garlic cloves, grated
- herbs – I recommend thyme, fennel, basil
- 1 tsp cognac

1. Put the duck fat into a skillet over medium heat for 2-3 minutes until it’s good and warmed up, then throw in the diced shallots.

2. Sweat the shallots in the fat for just another few minutes, and add in the garlic, herbs, and duck liver.

3. Cook over medium heat for about 3 minutes, flip, and cook for another 3 until the liver is well browned.

4. Remove liver, herbs, and shallots from the pan and throw them into a blender with the cognac. Pulse until smooth.

5. Put into a jar with a lid or covered bowl and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, or overnight. Spread it on some nice toast to serve.

The paté will keep in your fridge for about 3 to 4 days, but it probably won’t last that long anyway.

10. After the duck has roasted for the second hour, take it back out of the oven and crank the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit. Prod again to get those fat drippings out of the duck and into your pan.

11. Flip it back to breast side up, and put it back in the oven for about 50 minutes.

While it’s roasting for this final hour, take the skin and fat from the neck that you reserved earlier and render it to get a little more duck fat out of it.

1. Pour just a little bit of water into a skillet – about enough so the bottom is covered but not much more.

2. Bring the water up to a low simmer while cutting the skin into small pieces.

3. Drop the skin into the simmering water for about 5-7 minutes or so. The water will evaporate out will the fat gets rendered.

4. Remove the skin from the skillet and discard. Carefully pour the fat out of the skillet into a measuring cup or mason jar.

12. For the final ten minutes of roasting, raise the oven temperature up to 425 degrees fahrenheit, and then take your roast out of the oven. Prod it one final time all over to release the fat into the pan.

13. Move the rack out of the pan, again – CAREFULLY – and set aside on a plate or carving block. Using a baster or spoon, carefully lift up one corner of the pan so that all the fat and drippings run down into the corner. Use the baster or spoon to move the fat into your measuring cup or mason jar that you’ve set aside from when you rendered the neck fat earlier.

Yummy duck fat…

You can see here that the burnt gristle pretty much falls to the bottom once the fat has had a minute to settle in a container. You can use a strainer to pour the fat through to remove that stuff, but if you just put it into the fridge as is the fat on top will congeal and it will be pretty well separated anyway. Note that when it goes into the fridge for a couple hours, it will turn into a white, semi-hardened substance, not unlike butterfat. This is normal and it doesn’t mean it’s gone bad or anything. When you take it back out to cook with it and it comes to room temperature, it will return to it’s more oily state.

More on what to do with the duck fat at the bottom of this post.

14. Now that the duck is out of the oven, let it rest for a good 20 minutes or so before carving into it. It should be thoroughly cooked, but if you’re a paranoid thermometer type then you can check to make sure that spot between the thigh and the body (this is the last spot to cook) has reached 165 degrees fahrenheit.

15. Give a nice final brush all over with the glaze, then carve and serve. You may also want to plate the meal with a little of the glaze spread out on the plate, but be warned that the glaze is fairly sweet.

16. As always, when roasting a bird be sure to save all the bones and the carcass to make some stock the following day. Duck stock is fantastic, can be made exactly the same way as any chicken or turkey stock, and not doing so should be a crime.

So what can you do with all that duck fat you saved? A better question is: what CAN’T you do? Duck fat is seriously a wonder drug of cooking. You can make nearly anything 10x better just by cooking with duck fat instead of oil, or instead of butter. Even better, duck fat is actually healthier for you than butter in quite a few ways. Duck fat contains more linoleic acid and less polyunsaturated fats than most other fats, making it more like olive oil than anything else.

Here are a few of my favorite uses:

- any kind of potato dish – fried, roasted, mashed, baked – will be excellent with duck fat
- caramelized onions
- deep fried won-tons or dumplings
- popcorn – with artisanal salt
- mix it with half butter for biscuits
- any kind of savory pie crust, like shepherd’s pie or chicken pot pie
- scrambled eggs with scallions
- rub for any other kind of bird roast – chicken, turkey, quail, etc.
- hamburgers: a bit mixed into the meat, or smeared onto a toasted bun, or both!

There’s no end to what you can do with it. Be creative. Anything you could cook with oil or with butter, you can cook with duck fat. As a general rule, if you’re worried then stick to savory – anything savory cooked with duck fat will be exceptional. But don’t forget – rules are made to be broken.

Being the live-in cook for a pregnant women gives you cause to learn all sorts of fancy tricks with your food. My wife’s tastes right now change weekly, sometimes daily, and even she cannot predict them herself. But I know that I need to make sure she is still getting lots of “the good stuff” – the good stuff right now being protein, calcium, and fats (specifically omega-3s for brain development). Given that she’s had a pretty significant meat aversion since almost the start of the pregnancy, the protein bit has been a little tricky sometimes.

And me, being a runner – I am always trying to pack as much protein as I can into my meals without having to resort to powders or bars. So when I skimmed over this recipe in the January issue of Runner’s World I knew it would be perfect for us.

Amanda *will not* eat yogurt. And that’s not a pregnancy thing, she just won’t. No matter how hard I try. Can’t deal with the texture of it. But it’s high in protein, calcium, and fats so it’s one of the better foods out there for her right now. So what better way to get her to eat some than including it in one of her favorite foods – mashed potatoes? She still doesn’t even know, I’m hoping that by posting this recipe I won’t ruin the dish when she reads about it.

I, on the other hand, love Greek yogurt. It’s simple, it’s quick, you can easily add fruit, nuts, or honey – or even chocolate, and it’s got a great protein-to-calorie ratio.

Check out our secret weapon…

Also – with this recipe, the potatoes are steamed before they’re mashed. This retains more of the natural vitamins and minerals in the potato, which are otherwise leached out into the water if they’re boiled. It takes a little longer but it’s a better deal in the end. I don’t have a steamer, so I use a make-shift one by putting my colander in a stock pot.

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 25 minutes

Ingredients…

- 6 russet potatoes (or any potato good for mashing)
- 1 cup Greek yogurt (I used Fage 2%)
- 1 pat of butter
- salt and pepper

The recipe is super simple.

1. Wash and dice the potatoes. Make it a small dice so it will steam quicker.

2. Bring water in your boiler (or stock pot) to a boil, and add potatoes to steamer. Cover.

3. Steam potatoes for 20-25 minutes, until the largest pieces are fork tender.

4. Remove potatoes and put them in a large bowl. Mix in 1 cup Greek yogurt.

5. Mash potatoes along with yogurt in the large bowl. Add salt and pepper (and some herbs if you like) to taste.

6. Serve with a pat of butter on top to melt over it.

You don’t even ever have to tell your unsuspecting diners about how you just beefed up their potatoes into something way better for them. It may be better if they never find out, in fact. It can be our little secret.

Over the holidays, my brother and his family from Hawai’i came to visit with us for a little over a week or so. You may remember a little from this post that I have one older brother, Matthew, who lives in Maryland with a wife, Margaux, and two kids (Anna and Peter) and another older, older brother Sean, who lives in Hawai’i with his wife Lurana, and two twin girls – Ruby and Teia.

Recently I’d been hearing snippets here and there about some kitchen adventures and activities that Lurana had been able to get her kids to participate in – at least with a small degree of success – so I thought I would embrace that as their Christmas gift and see if I couldn’t do something to encourage it.

So we got them some personalized chef’s gear.

They’re still working on the whole idea that the rolling pin is NOT a weapon.

It took a little while to bring some focus to the whole endeavor (I had to compete with the marble rollaway toy pictured in the background of the first two pictures, and if you’ve ever played with one of those you know that is some stiff competition), but once we got going the girls were great.

To try out the new gear, we decided to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies and a batch of coconut macaroons.

The most common question… can we taste the cookie dough yet?

Anna helped out too, she was just as involved as the others.

The coconut macaroons were really awesome but the yield was pretty low (like 10 cookies). I’d suggest at least doubling the recipe to make it even worth making because they will definitely go fast.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 18-20 minutes

Ingredients…

- 1 cup shredded coconut
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1/8 tsp cream of tartar
- 1 egg white

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees fahrenheit.

2. Separate the egg yolk from the egg white, reserve the yolk and try to find another use for it.

I was pretty impressed here… Teia had no fear of working with the egg and was happy to volunteer to separate out the white.

Okay, next step…

3. Add the egg white and cream of tartar in a medium sized bowl.

4. Beat with an electric mixer (you can do it by hand if you want, too) until the whites are fluffy and peaked. Gradually add the sugar. Almost done…

5. Bake in the oven for 18-20 minutes or until the flakes are just turning golden brown. The kitchen will smell fantastic as the coconut toasts.

Me: “So, Ruby, you know now that you have your chef’s hat and apron and cookbook, you can make these cookies at home any time you want.”

Ruby: “What! No, we can’t.”

Me: “Of course you can – you know how to do it now.”

Ruby: “But they won’t ever be good. They won’t be as good as these cookies now.”

Me: “Sure they will, why wouldn’t they be?”

Ruby: “Well … cause… we won’t have an expert there to make them with us.”

<3

Okay so maybe they’re not his favorite, I never asked the guy to know for sure, but they’re certainly MY favorite. And I’ve had a lot of chocolate chip cookies in my day. Though I guess I’d have to admit he’s probably got me beat on that tip. The man is undoubtedly a fully fledged cookie connoisseur.

Nevertheless, these are damn good chocolate chip cookies. I’ve been making them for many years now, the original recipe came from a Cooking Light cookbook. Generally I’m not a huge fan of the Cooking Light stuff cause I tend to prefer the real products (i.e. butter, etc.) to the “lite” or “low-fat” or “diet” alternative substitutions that you’ll often find in their recipes. But there have been a few notable exceptions – these cookies being one of them.

What really makes these unique – at least of any other cookies I’ve used before – is the use of applesauce.

Yes – applesauce.

Applesauce replaces the white sugar that would normally be used in a regular chocolate chip cookie recipe. The applesauce itself is pretty sweet, so you get just as much sweetness, and it makes for a really great texture in the cookie, too. You really don’t get any of the apple taste coming through in the final product, so while it might sound weird it actually works out quite perfectly. You can also experiment with cinnamon applesauce for a slightly more holiday-esque type cookie. You get soft, chewy, fluffy, chocolatey perfect cookies.

And, of course, by leaving the white sugar out, you’re also cutting back on total calories. Bonus.

So I suggest whipping up a batch (or three) of these for Christmas – or whatever holiday or non-holiday you’ve elected to observe this year – and indulge. I’m confident you’ll be glad you did.

Prep time: 20 minutes
Refrigerate time: 1-2 hours
Cook time: 10-12 minutes per baking sheet

Ingredients…

- 3/4 cups white flour
- 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 3/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup applesauce
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- 1 large egg
- 1 cup chocolate chips

You don’t need to use two different types of flour if you don’t have them available, it will turn out fine just with all-purpose flour. But I like to mix it up, I feel it gives it a more rounded out consistency.

The original Cooking Light recipe calls for reduced fat margarine and chocolate chips and you save about 20 calories per cookie. Feel free to go this way if you like, for me it’s not worth it.

I encourage some possible experimentations: white chocolate chips, dark chocolate, pecans, walnuts, macadamia nuts, etc. Mix and match.

1. Spoon applesauce out into a sieve over a bowl and let drain for 15 minutes. If you don’t have a sieve, you can use a paper towel and it will do the trick. Discard the liquid and put the drained applesauce into a large bowl.

2. Combine dry ingredients except for brown sugar (flour, baking soda, salt) in a bowl and whisk together.

3. Add brown sugar and butter to large bowl with applesauce and beat with a mixer on medium about 2-3 minutes, until fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla extract.

4. Gradually add the flour mixture into the large bowl while running the mixer until everything is well mixed.

5. Mix in the chocolate chips, nuts, etc. with a fork or spoon.

6. With a sheet of wax or parchment paper spread out, make the dough into a roll / snake that is about 1 – 1 1/2 inch circumference. Refrigerate for 1-2 hours. You can skip this step if there is a necessity for COOKIES RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY!!! but, if at all possible, refrigerating them will keep them from flattening out too much when they are baked and you’ll get a better final product in the end.

7. Preheat oven to 375 degrees fahrenheit.

8. Take your dough roll out of the fridge and slice into cookie size discs/balls and drop onto the baking sheet (my dough roll turned out a little big so I halved each disc before putting them onto the sheet). Bake for 10-12 minutes until golden and fluffy.

9. Remove cookies from pan, let cool slightly on wire racks. Best when eaten warm!

I hope you love these cookies as much as I do. There’s no need that they only be made for Santa, as they are fantastic all year round.

Happy Holidays everybody! I hope you’ve been having a great holiday season and will get the opportunity to enjoy these next couple weeks with your loved ones. I may or may not be posting much next week, I’m just going to play it by ear. I have some major stuff going on (rest assured – it’s ALL good stuff) so I just can’t really say what will happen. Cheers!

Okay how about a recipe post for once? It’s been awhile. They are tending to be a little more few and far between with so much “life shit” going on these days. I’m still managing to find time to cook for the most part, although last week – training week – was pretty awful food wise. I won’t get into it. It’s depressing.

ANYWAY. We had a big celebratory dinner the other night, just for no good reason really, so I suppose celebratory isn’t necessarily the right word other than that we were simply celebrating all that’s good and right. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

That dinner included some filet mignon from Polyface Farms – a delicacy for sure. We also had wild caught lobster tail and some potatoes Bearnaise. Since I so rarely talk about steak here – or even red meat in general – we’re gonna focus on the filets.

One of my favorite ways to prepare a choice cut of beef is to use a simple bloody mary marinade. This marinade consists of a tomato liquid mixture (juice, paste, sauce, V8, etc.), some quality vodka (I like Belvedere, myself) and a little salt and pepper.

Now, a wet marinade is never going to do *too* much to affect the flavor of a cut of meat, because even if you rotate the meat in a tumbler it’s never going to get too far absorbed – it just doesn’t work that way. At best you’ll get maybe 10%-15% absorption if you’re thorough about turning it (or if you actually own a meat tumbler). Dry rubs are the way to go for flavor absorption.

But that doesn’t speak for tenderizing. Acidic marinades (wine, vinegar, tomatoes, citrus) break down the protein bonds within the meat making for a more buttery and delicious cut. Filet is already a tender piece of meat to begin with, so the bloody mary treatment on one of these gives you a seriously succulent piece of beef.

I’m not going to bother structuring this like a typical recipe post, cause… well I don’t know, it doesn’t really seem like a recipe. Except for the marinade part, I guess.

Ingredients…

- tomato juice/sauce/paste/V8
- 2-3 oz vodka (don’t cook with it if you wouldn’t drink it)
- salt
- pepper

Make sure you start with a good piece of meat. This can’t be overstated. If you don’t have a good piece of meat when you start cooking, nothing you can do will give you a good piece of meat when you are finished. The cheapest filet mignon you can score at the big box grocery is NOT a good piece of meat. You get back what you put in here. The Polyface filets set us back about $20/lb., which is by no means cheap, but you can taste where your money goes. And it just means we don’t eat filet all that often – which is for the best for quite a number of reasons.

So – make enough of that marinade to completely cover the meat.

Marinate for at least 4-6 hours, turning the container once every hour or so for best absorption.

When you’re ready to cook, use a cast iron skillet and bring it up to a pretty high heat like 7 or so out of 10. With just a small drizzle of oil, sweat some onions or some scallions in the skillet for a minute.

Then add the filets.

As you start your filet on the stovetop, turn your oven on to 400 fahrenheit. We’ll need it in a few minutes.

All you want to do with the filet in the skillet here is sear the outsides, so don’t leave it on any one side for more than 2-3 minutes. And yes, you can use the sides too. I always do, but I think maybe it’s kind of a personal preference thing. I think they cook more evenly this way though.

After you’ve got each side seared, throw the whole thing (with skillet) in the oven. Depending on the size of the filet, you’ll need anywhere from 5-10 more minutes or so in the oven.

What we’ve done here is seared the outsides so we will lose minimal juices while we use the radiant heat of the oven to bring the rest of the meat up to temperature. If you like it really bloody, you can skip this step – or just do it for a few short minutes – but make sure you let the meat rest awhile so that carryover cooking will give you something edible.

Once your meat is cooked, you need to test for doneness. Whatever you do, don’t just slice it open and look. I’ve seen far too many people take a piece of meat directly off the heat and slice it open to see how it’s cooked without even waiting for it to rest, in case they need to put it back on. You lose just about all your juice and flavor this way. Instead, teach yourself how to test for doneness by feeling the meat and feeling how hard it is.

It’s easier than it sounds. Use your hand as a guide.

With your fingertips touching your thumb tip, press a finger from your other hand on the large part of your palm right under your thumb. That should be about similar to the resistance that you get from your piece of meat.

So, for instance, if you have your thumb and your index finger touching, your palm should be pretty supple and springy – that’s what a rare piece of steak will feel like. If your thumb and middle finger are touching, it’ll be a bit harder. And so on. Go ahead and try it now, you’ll see what I mean.

Once you’ve got your meat to the desired doneness, make sure to let it rest for at least ten minutes. It won’t get too cold, because it’s still cooking at this time. And the juices are re-absorbing into the piece of meat instead of being lost all over your cutting board.

I would normally prefer a slightly rarer piece than the one pictured below, but I AM cooking for a pregnant woman these days…

… and that pretty much trumps everything.

Harry Potter.

There, I said it.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with Harry Potter, but I somehow feel obligated to make mention of the-boy-who-MUST-be-named today regardless. We, of course, will be seeing the Deathly Hallows Part 1 this weekend and yeah, I’m excited. I’m into it. I’ve read it all. Some of it multiple times. The movies are played with a significant regularity in my house – it’s never too long in between.

Alright so there it is. Moving right along…

Continuing on the obvious Thanksgiving theme, today we have a bit of a twisted classic. Everyone knows you can’t go wrong with sweet potatoes and marshmallows, but maybe it’s time to give the age old dish a little bit of a new flair.

This is one of those things that I made for the first time probably 5+ years ago, and I really don’t know where I can attribute it to. I suspect that I must have gotten the inspiration for it somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I could tell you where. I kind of think that’s part of what I love so much about “recipes” in general though, they can be so fluid and there is always so much room for adaption, alterations, creativity.

All you need is a little inspiration to get you going.

So I have been day-dreaming about the Thanksgiving table all week at my desk. I will be leaving work early on Wednesday to head down to the in-laws house and start the food prep that afternoon.

I only wish I had more time to cook for it. This is the big day.

Make a lot of these. They’ll be grabbed up quick.

Prep time: 45 minutes
Cook time: 45 minutes

Serves 4-6 people, depending on the size of your patty.. ifyouknowhatImean.

Ingredients…

- 3 cups large dice sweet potatoes
- 1/2 bag large marshmallows
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup walnuts, chopped
- 2 cups coconut flakes
- 2 tbsp butter, room temperature

The first couple steps of this recipe is to make mashed sweet potatoes. Then from there, we go on to make the patties, stuff with marshmallow, coat in flakes, and bake.

It’s pretty straightforward, just a little time consuming since it’s twice cooked.

1. Rinse and skin sweet potatoes.

2. Chop into a rough 2″x2″ dice.

3. Boil sweet potatoes in salted water until soft, about 5-10 minutes depending on your boil.

4. Remove from water, drain, and mash in a bowl.

5. Add brown sugar, butter, walnuts, and mash together with potatoes.

6. Allow to cool for 10-20 minutes.

7. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

8. Start forming the patties. Grab a small handful of sweet potatoes, and insert a marshmallow in the middle. Make sure the marshmallow is completely covered by sweet potato, then roll the patty in a bowl of coconut flakes to cover the outside of it. The result should look a little like this…

9. Bake at 350 degrees F until just crispy and lightly browned, likely about 10 minutes or so.

10. Serve warm.

Do you have a favorite sweet potato dish?

It’s been ages since I last actually put a recipe up here. I haven’t even posted anything up since the fig margarita a good while ago.

No particular reason for this I guess – not having a camera didn’t help, for sure.

But it being officially Thanksgiving season (it’s next week!), I’ve been working on some classics lately. Cranberry sauce is a great example.

In my opinion, it’s very easy to top the store bought canned gelatinous “sauce”, as long as you’ve got decent ingredients. On the other hand, I know there are some people who swear by that stuff – Amanda being one of them – so to each their own I guess. You could probably come up with a consistency that’s a bit close if you mixed in some water with dissolved gelatin after a good purée.

But that’s not what I’m after here. I actually like a cranberry sauce with some fruit and nuts still retaining shape to give a bit of texture interest. You can make this one two ways – just bake and serve as is, or bake-serve-cool-purée.

I also like to add a touch of an orange alcohol – such as Grand Marnier or Triple Sec. A little bit of Cabernet would be a nice move too, but “instead of” rather than “as well as.”

Since I’m cooking for two and a half now, I put the alcohol in before baking the dish so the booze would cook off, but if I weren’t serving pregnant wife and developing baby I’d leave it to mix in just before serving – you’ll get more of the flavor that way.

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 1 hour
(Optional – purée) additional prep: 20 minutes

Ingredients…

- 2 cups fresh cranberries, rinsed
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1/4 cup pecans
- 1/4 cup liquor (Grand Marnier or Triple Sec) – or sub in orange juice
- 2 oz butter
- nutmeg
- cinnamon

This recipe can easily be doubled, tripled, whatever – if you’re expecting guests. But a little goes a long way.

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

2. Rinse and measure out cranberries.

3. Measure out sugars and pecans.

4. Pour all ingredients out into a baking dish. I used a pie dish because, well, because it was clean. Top with the little pat of butter.

5. Bake in the oven at 300 degrees F for about an hour. Stir with a wooden spoon every 20 minutes or so.

6. After it comes out, it’s ready to serve. You can put it in a bowl and serve as is (see first photo in this post), or you can take the optional next few steps of letting it cool down a bit and throwing it into a food processor.

(7). Let cool for 20 minutes or so.

(8). Pulse in a food processor until smooth.

Do you have any twists on the classic cranberry sauce?

Okay, so one of the best takeaways from my trip to NYC this past weekend, and definitely the best thing I enjoyed at the (admittedly pretentiously named) Rouge Tomate, was their fig margarita.

I would have never thought. A fig margarita? Really? I wasn’t even sure I should order it. I had to ask the bartender if it was “safe.” He said it was one of his favorite drinks on the menu, so that was enough for me. I ordered it.

Love. Amazing. Fig, tequila, lime perfection.

So when I got home, of course I had to try to replicate it. I think I still fell a little short of what I tasted that night in New York, but what I made was still a damn good cocktail. The rich sweetness of the fig imparts a very seasonally appropriate flavor that is a little dark but still fruity enough to carry the tequila. Despite what you might initially think, it all comes together very well.

And so I share with you, the fig margarita.

Ingredients…

- 8 figs
- 2 jiggers of your favorite tequila (silver or gold both work fine)
- splash of fresh lime
- splash of fresh lemon (optional)
- 1 egg white
- splash of water and/or tonic to taste

Makes two cocktails.

You really don’t need any simple syrup in this margarita because figs are naturally very sweet. And of course, feel free to tweak the quantity of tequila to your own personal taste.

1. First you need to puree the figs. Chop off any stems, and throw them in a food processor to pulse for a bit. You can skin them first, if you want, but after it’s pulsed you should strain the puree anyway so it’s not entirely necessary. I skinned mine, but I probably won’t bother in the future.

2. Break an egg and split the white out into a bowl, save the yolk for another use. [Optional] – Splash a bit of lemon juice into the egg white – this is for the paranoid among us who are worried about raw eggs. The acidity of the lemon juice will kill any bacteria (particularly salmonella) that might have tainted your egg. Of course, you should still do your best to only use farm fresh eggs – the kind you don’t buy at a grocery store. But sometimes in life, situations are not entirely what they could be.

Not familiar with eggs in your cocktails? Drinkdogma.com has a great explanation about using eggs in a cocktail. Essentially, the egg white in this cocktail works as a tool – you will not taste any flavor difference from it. When shaken, the protein molecules of the egg will separate, joining back together when they are near air. This will change the texture of the drink, adding a bit of creaminess and smoothness, while also creating a foamy layer on top. Don’t be afraid of the egg!

3. Grab your favorite cocktail shaker and mix it all up – add the tequila, the lime juice, the egg mixture, and some ice cubes. Save the tonic for after you shake it, if you plan to use any.

4. Pour and garnish with a slice of fig on a toothpick.

5. [Optional] – Dust with a little cinnamon and/or nutmeg.

And that’s a fig margarita. One of my new favorite drinks – I know I’ll be pouring these for at least awhile to come.