recent cooking

Happy Saturday!  I have banana bread in the oven and an easy afternoon ahead.  Hey, why not cast our minds back to past weekends and see what was cooking.

Two of my ASU classmates, Melissa and Patty, came over a couple of weeks ago.  First time seeing them in a few years.  Good to see them and catch up in person.  I went with an old restaurant favourite of mine for that dinner:  South Miami Cuban stew. 

A Paul Prudhomme recipe.  Authentic to Miami?  No idea.  I have always liked it, though.  A meaty stew with which I served a salad and some bread and a scoop of rice.  The leftovers came in handy in days after that, too.  Dessert was a nice one, too:  a rhubarb upside down cake. 

Oh, I love upside down cakes!  This one is lightly flavoured with anise seed, and although rhubarb is a rare (and expensive!) find in SoCal, it's worth it.

The next weekend was dinner for Geoff

and Kent. 

They have now been in the south of France for several days where they hope to fully relocate to.  It's quite the move, having sold their desert home.  We wish them best - and we hope to visit!  In the meantime, though, I cooked up the most enormous lamb shanks I have ever encountered and served them with a parsnip puree. 

I also made a lemon and blueberry trifle

that was a little better the next day and the day after, to be honest.  The cake gets to be more custardy that way.

Some recent cooking, then.  Not bad cooking either.  Tonight will be a simple pasta with some meatballs, a simple dinner.  Now to check on those banana bread loaves....

pork ribs with Bob

Back to cooking at home for friends, and tonight we welcomed another librarian over. Bob is someone who lives here in Chicago and works in the area, but I only seem to see him at conferences in other cities, which I think is a little ridiculous. With that in mind, I asked him over for a casual Saturday night around the kitchen peninsula. The result, I think, was altogether pleasant.

Dietary restrictions for more than one person kept the carbs in the dinner to a minimum, which is a shame, because the pork ribs would have gone well with potatoes stewed in among them, or carrots, or a heaping mound of rice cooked with black bean liquor served up in a bowl with masa bisuits on the side. Oooooh, and some fregolata or a quick bread of some sort to go with the cheeses for dessert. Ah well. Bob, as you can see, was in awe of the trifle dish. He swears I hiked miles across the Canadian wilderness with this in my backpack, all in the intent of Canadianizing my little corner of the US, but I swear I bought the bowl at Sears down on State and Madison!

No matter, we had a lovely little dinner, but not before Conrad and I had scrambled to finally tidy up some of our mess around the house and make it presentable. My poor guy: he exhausts himself at work (and in Virginia) all week, then has to spend a somewhat sunny Saturday inside with a vacuum and dustrag. I'm glad he stole a few minutes of relaxation.

Dinner was family style. I made up a favourite standby: tomatillo-braised country-style pork ribs. It's such a winner of a recipe, I swear, and thank you Rick Bayless for that! And piping hot, as you can see! I put together a simple romaine salad and made a cilantro dressing to go with it. The other side was some pattypan squash cut up and seared with red pepper and white onion, seasoned a bit first with oregano, cumin, pepper, and salt. We enjoyed a Gruner Veltliner alongside, and stayed at the table through a cheese course, chatting amiably.

Clean up, I am happy to say, was minimal - the meal was a one pot thing essentially - and Conrad tackled much of it. 10:00 already? Time to grab a book or magazine and wind down before bed!

Trifle, cake, and chicken wings

Hmmm, now THAT sounds like a nutritious breakfast! Yea and verily, a breakfast of champeens!

Three food items that took up some of my time this past long weekend (okay, I actually had to work today, but I was still in the kitchen after that!). The lemon blueberry trifle (another Emily Luchetti recipe), in fact, took longest as it involved making a sponge a day or two in advance, making lemon curd and blueberry sauce, folding the curd into whipped cream, layering it, then topping with a last minute layer of whipped cream for a nice clean appearance. By comparison, the rose water angel food cake was a simple matter of using up some egg white yesterday afternoon, then whipping up some cream and flavouring it with rose petal syrup to garnish the cake this morning. Chicken wings? Marinate overnight in a buttermilk, cumin, and garlic mixture, drain this afternoon, and bake in a hot oven with a couple of bastings of a lemon juice, cumin, and salt mix.

In the end, though, all three were hits, or so I think. I didn't taste the angel food cake; instead I gave it to the Reference Department in thanks for them covering some chat shifts for me. I hope it was good - I feared it was a little too moist and dense.

I'm not nearly so good a food photographer as Jeph. He stages his food nicely and plates it well, something I don't quite have enough patience for. So I instead offer you humbler photos of things that were yummy. Enjoy.