If you don't have to entertain an entire family for Thanksgiving dinner this year but still want to have a feast, here's the recipe for you. This is all you need to make a mini-Thanksgiving dinner for up to four folks.
Okay, our recipe is not exactly turkey but it is poultry, it's stuffed and it's tasty. Not to mention, it won't take all day to make, and you can avoid that tryptophan trip to la la land afterwards.
Instead of the typical 10 - 15 pound turkey, here's our quick and easy 2 - 3 pound version -- stuffing and all.
Chef Johann Schuster, of Charivari Restaurant in Midtown, tossed together three bowls of a fine ceviche at last weekend's Houston Peruvian Festival. The keys to a good ceviche, Schuster says, are fresh fish and sharp knives. But chewing raw fish is a bit more pleasant if there's, you know, other stuff with it.
So we rang Schuster up before the dinner rush this week and asked him to share his classic ceviche recipe with us. Patrons can find Charivari's version at the bar.
This isn't cranberry yogurt ice cream. But this is how we imagine it should be served.
Whenever I buy fresh cranberries to make cranberry sauce, I end up with too many of them. They aren't cheap, and they usually go to waste in my refrigerator. If you have ever popped a fresh cranberry in your mouth, you know why nobody eats them raw.
If you have an ice cream freezer, you can use this dessert recipe to make ice cream with some of the extra cranberries. You can also vary the recipe to use leftover cranberry sauce if you end up with a bunch of it after the holiday.
Calvin Trillin has lobbied to replace the Thanksgiving turkey with spaghetti carbonara --something to do with Columbus being Italian, I think. In the Tex-Mex Cookbook, I pointed out that Juan de Onate and his Mexican pioneers held a Tex-Mex thanksgiving in El Paso decades before the Pilgrims ran into Plymouth rock. So there's plenty of precedent to skip cooking turkey.
Here's a lovely pork chop recipe for Thanksgiving. The sauce was inspired by my father, who was an apple butter fanatic. We always had some in the refrigerator. Apple butter goes great with dried chiles and it looks like mole -- which is why I call this sauce apple butter mole.
This is my favorite side dish with roast turkey. The idea here is to spoon some sweet potato puree into some dried ancho chiles that have been soaked in warm water to make them pliant. Then you put a medallion of goat cheese on top and stick the stuffed chiles in the oven and warm them up. It's an awesome presentation, and the ancho chiles give a really nice flavor to the sweet potato if you eat them together. But I have noticed that when I serve these, most people just eat the sweet potato and goat cheese and leave the pepper behind.
The editorial staff of the Houston Press has a holiday pot luck lunch every year in December. I brought sweet potato-stuffed peppers because there were so many vegetarians working here. People liked them so much, I bring them nearly every year now, even though we don't have any vegetarians in the newsroom anymore.
I'm on vacation in Southern California now -- I'll be back in Houston resuming the donut patrol soon. But since everybody is getting ready for Thanksgiving, I thought I'd dig up a few recipes from one of my first cookbooks, Nuevo Tex-Mex, which I wrote with David Garrido, and share them for the holidays.
The book offered some ambitious variations on old classics, like this twist on roasted potatoes. The sweet and hot potatoes in this recipe taste incredible with roast turkey. It's a challenging recipe because you have to be really careful not to burn the potatoes as the syrup thickens. Keep the heat low and don't stop stirring toward the end of the cooking time. I hope you agree it's worth the effort.
Though a cuddly two-month-old alpaca drew some interest, the hit of Houston's first Peruvian festival, held last weekend at Heights Theatre, was a ceviche demonstration by chef Johann Schuster.
The owner of Charivari Restaurant in Midtown, Schuster whipped up three batches of the raw-fish dish, common in several South American countries, and dropped handfuls into cups for onlookers to sample.
Working with corvina, a Pacific bass, then monchong, a Hawaiian fish that's among his favorites, Schuster dropped the chopped fish into a bowl, then added Peruvian sweet onions, key lime juice, diced Fresno pepper and salt.
This is not a Rachel Ray recipe, so just wipe that thought out of your mind. We can't stand Rachel Ray and have banned her show from our house. We do all like a fast meal, though. So here's our version of a 30-minute dish: chicken soup:
When I talk about making homemade chicken stock, people look at me like I have a third eye. Why would you do that when you can just buy it at the store? Because making stock tastes way better than the store-bought stuff.
Very few recipes are easier than this one for chicken stock. All you really need is a big stock pot, chicken, veggies, spices and water.
The jalapeños I bought a couple of weeks ago turned red and started to shrivel, so I figured I might as well make a big batch of red and green jalapeño jelly and put it in little jars for Christmas gifts. Jalapeño jelly got its lowbrow reputation from the holiday tradition of pouring the stuff over cream cheese and serving it with crackers. I'm not very fond of that appetizer, but I love jalapeño jelly.
Pepper jelly is wonderful to have around when you're grilling. Thin it with a little white wine and keep it in a pan on your grill. Just before you take your meat or seafood off the grill, paint it with the jalapeño jelly glaze and flip it over the fire a couple of times until it bubbles and sets. The sweet and hot glaze is perfect for grilled pork chops, lamb chops, venison backstrap and shrimp.
If you're looking for an authentic marinara sauce recipe, or one that only requires a few minutes of your time, you should probably stop reading right now. The following recipe is neither authentic nor is it a time-saver. It is, however, very simple to cook, uses ingredients that are (most likely) already in your pantry, nutritious and -- most importantly -- delicious. Over the course of an afternoon, it will fill your house with the rich scent of simmering tomatoes and garlic and will fill the bellies of a hungry horde later on.
The most important thing to note about this marinara sauce is that it is vegetable intensive. We once had a boss who would request this sauce on a routine basis, as it was the only way her children would eat their veggies. We're willing to bet this subterfuge will work on other vegetable-averse children and adults alike. Served over a tangle of whole wheat pasta and with a glass of wine (the same wine you used in the sauce, ideally), it's a healthy meal that doesn't taste like rabbit food. And since there are already plenty of veggies in the sauce, it's easy to slip more in at your discretion (we like zucchini, yellow squash and thick strips of sauteed red bell peppers).
And although the recipe does require simmering for a few hours, that's just a few hours that you can spend on a cold, rainy afternoon -- like the ones that are predicted for this coming winter -- basking in the scent of the bright, earthy sauce and enjoying some quality time at home.
If you love artichokes, but want to cut down on the nutritional benefits, you can dip them in mayonnaise or melted butter. That's what I used to do -- until I encountered the artichokes at Mint Café, a hip little Lebanese restaurant that went out of business last summer. The artichokes there were covered with an olive oil, garlic, parsley and lemon juice dressing that made the vegetable taste spectacular. I reluctantly abandoned my beloved mayo and started using the olive oil garlic dressing at home.
The concept went a little further when I discovered Lebanese stuffed artichokes, or ardishawki bi zayt. The more elaborate recipes for this dish call for several varieties of beans to be added to the ingredients used here, but I wanted to keep it simple. You use the leaves of the artichoke to scoop up the stuffing. This recipe turns a couple of artichokes into a very cool appetizer, and it's extremely easy.
This week I baked vegan cinnamon rolls. Before I started the project, I envisioned myself exhausted at 2 a.m. with my arms and forehead coated in flour, waiting for dough to rise for the second time before baking. I had never baked with yeast before and was anxious about an I Love Lucy-style dough-monster disaster. Lucky for me, the cinnamon rolls were in the oven by ten, and my apartment smelled like the Keebler elves' tree house. Baking with yeast turned out to be an awesome experience. I watched my first dough ball fluff up to twice its size before punching it to deflation like a prizefighter.
The rolls came out golden brown on the outside and tender and fluffy on the inside, with the mottling of cinnamon and brown sugar along the curves. The only thing I would change about my next batch is to make more filling for a stronger, gooier cinnamon roll.
I'm trying to get invited to John Seaborn Gray's house for shepherd's pie. I'm betting it tastes great. His Shameless Chef column reminded me of Andrew Schloss's cookbooksAlmost From Scratch, Homemade in a Hurry and Cooking With Three Ingredients. Schloss's premise is that great chefs don't cook from scratch -- they have assistant chefs who make the master sauces, roast the peppers, and chop the veggies for them. Schloss encourages home cooks to use canned soups and prepared ingredients found on grocery store salad bars to speed up home cooking.
The Velveeta and Rotel tomatoes in my Tex-Mex cookbooks have already made me a pariah among food snobs, so I don't worry much about using prepared foods in my cooking. Remind me to show you how to make tamale pie with Pioneer Cornbread mix and Wolf Brand Chili one of these days.
But I like easy recipes that use fresh stuff even better. Yesterday, after sampling three Vietnamese dishes from two different restaurants in the afternoon, I wasn't in the mood to eat a big dinner. I also had a head of cauliflower in the crisper drawer I needed to use. So I put together an easy cauliflower casserole with five ingredients -- cauliflower, pasta, olive oil, garlic and cheese. (Okay, six ingredients if you count two kinds of cheese.) It took about a half an hour to cook. It was so good, even small children liked it.
We're starting a weekly series on how to make the perfect [insert food here]. While none of us are experts on everything, some of us are pretty darn close on at least a couple of things. Stay tuned each week as the Eating Our Words bloggers detail how to make the perfect meatloaf, marinara sauce, fried chicken or beer bread (yes, beer bread).
Grits are such a maligned food. Served primarily in Waffle Houses and Denny's, the noble hominy porridge is usually reduced to a sad side item in a larger -- and more delicious -- breakfast spread. And for good reason. The grits that one usually receives in restaurants are -- with very few exceptions -- watery, bland, undercooked and entirely unappetizing.
The reality is that grits can be not only delicious, but visually appealing as well. They're simple to make, inexpensive and highly nutritious, containing thiamin, riboflavin, niacin and iron in addition to fiber. And grits should never be relegated to just a side item. With only the tiniest bit of ingenuity, a $1.59 box of grits can be transformed into a savory centerpiece that will feed an entire table at brunch or a family at dinner. Not bad for a bunch of ground hominy.
The trick to making the perfect grits is simple: Ignore the instructions on the box. They will lead you astray every time. Instead, follow these simple directions and you'll have a delicious bowl of grits in under ten minutes.
Plinio Sandalio is the pastry chef at Textile Restaurant on 22nd in the Heights. He invited me into his kitchen for a short interview about all things Plinio.
Eating Our Words: What would you say your signature dessert is that screams "Plinio Sandalio made this"?
Plinio Sandalio: I don't know if this is the right answer, but any dessert with a meat product.
EOW: You are trained in sweet as well as savory (obviously). How did you get so dynamic in your recipes?
PS: No one else is doing it here in Houston, and when you look around across the globe everyone is combining sweet, sour, salty and bitter. I used to be a sous chef at another restaurant, and I wanted to apply that skill set into desserts. All in all, I wanted a fun and diverse dessert menu for my guests.
Eating Our Words: After work, what happens next?
PS: Hang out with other chefs, wind down with a few cocktails, karaoke, and of course Guitar Hero.
Lucky Strike Lanes' first Texas location has come to the Houston Pavilions. This bowling alley-cum-bar-lounge hails from Hollywood, where the original location houses vintage fixtures from Hollywood Star Lanes of The Big Lebowski fame. The concept is hip and edgy, which explains why, instead of pizza, Lucky Strike cooks up items like corn hash with shrimp. Whether the Dude would have abided by that menu choice is an unanswered question.
Okay, so William "Trey" Smith went to Rice University, where he graduated in 2006 with a degree in economics. Following a not-unexpected career path, he enrolled in law school at the University of Oklahoma.
Along the way, however, he found he liked his avocation better than his planned life's work. The son and grandson of accomplished cooks (his grandmother Vita Espinosa introduced him to Santa Fe flavors) and a cook himself since childhood (his mother taught him to cook because she didn't always have time to make him his favorite dishes), he started working for a chef during his first summer of law school.
"It just felt right," he says. So he contacted the Culinary Institute of America, which offered him a scholarship if he came right away. He jumped ship and landed in New York City -- which is where he spoke to Eating...Our Words in a telephone interview.
Turns out the Houston native has just been declared the winner of the Ethnic category and overall Grand Prize winner in (and we are not making this up) "The Potato Innovation Recipe Contest" sponsored by the (not making this up either) the U.S. Potato Board, for his "Cheesy Southwestern Potato Crisps."
Giant mangos are $11 for a box of six at the Airline Farmer's Marketing Association. But you can pick up a box of overripe mangos for a mere five bucks. I took two boxes of the nasty-looking fruit home last weekend and showed my assistants how to cut them up. The 12 mangos yielded almost five quarts of very soft flesh, which my assistants and I combined with habanero chiles, raisins, ginger, garlic and cider vinegar in a huge batch of old-fashioned English-style mango chutney. (Indian mango chutney is more often made with green fruit and a few other ingredients.)
Using a propane tank and my crawfish boiling pot, we set up a home canning operation in the backyard and turned out a dozen 12-ounce jars of chutney, which will be given away as Christmas gifts if they last that long. I like mango chutney with Indian curry or chicken tikka masala pizza, but it tastes damn good on a grilled pork chop too.
Here's a recipe for chutney using 10 cups of mango:
Here's another way to use up that sourdough you have to get rid of every day if you have a culture going. Thanks to reader LW, who suggested Betty Sue as the name of my new sourdough. Betty Sue is looking real good lately. Especially in this bread machine pizza recipe.
Making the dough is really easy -- shaping it is the trick. My dough came out very loose and sticky, and I needed to work a lot of flour into it. Getting the dough into a pan or onto a pizza stone makes you admire those guys who throw pizza dough in the air. I have some work to do before I get to that level. So far, I can't even keep the thing round.
Granted, the dough was misshapen, and I left the pizza in the oven a little too long so the cheese got brown. I also forgot to brush the shell with olive oil before I put tomato sauce and mozzarella on it, so it looked dry. But nobody cared -- the pizza tasted sensational. The crust was crispy with a nice bread flavor. And the effort was minimal, thanks to the bread machine. Next time--pepperoni.
The decorate-a-cookie-for-free option available to little kids at Ruggles Bakery has always made us jealous. Luckily, now we can make our own. These chewy, toffee, chocolate, coconut cookies are one of the special Dessert of the Day selections that come around from time to time. They're big enough to share - and as adults, we know how to.
Ah, Pasadena, land of refineries, illicit slot machines, and creative domestic disturbances.
We'll let the Associated Press, in its trademark deadpan style, tell the story:
PASADENA, Texas -- Authorities say a Houston-area woman who was burned up at her former common-law husband fried their pet goldfish and ate some of them. Pasadena police say it's a civil matter and no charges will be filed.
The seven goldfish were purchased together by the couple during happier times.
If there's a more heartbreaking sentence than "The seven goldfish were purchased together by the couple during happier times," we've yet to hear it. ("Jesus wept," maybe. But that didn't have any goldfish in it.)
How best to go about frying goldfish? Or at least how best to do it Pasadena-style?
My neighborhood H-E-B was selling family-size packages of assorted pork chops for an unbelievably cheap price the other day. I couldn't resist picking up a couple. I seasoned some up and froze them in dinner-sized portions. But that still left me with four or five pounds of pork chops on my hands. So I used the rest of them to test homemade breakfast-sausage recipes for an upcoming cookbook.
I made the first batch in the meat grinder, but that was too much work. I decided it would be more practical for home cooks if I came up with a small batch recipe you could make in your food processor. I tried a lot of variations, but the best one had a lot of herbs, a little sugar and nice jalapeño kick. I used fresh red jalapeños -- they looked good ground up.
I want to try this recipe again with pickled green jalapeños. I think the vinegary flavor of a pickled jalapeño might make the sausage taste a little like chorizo. See what you think:
The sourdough I started on Monday is bubbling like crazy now. I fed it three times so far. You usually have to wait a while before your starter develops a good sour aroma, but not when you inoculate it outside with wild yeast. My starter smells like a brewery already. So now what?
Cooking with Sourdough:
If you store your sourdough starter on the kitchen counter, you need to remove a cup and a half or so every day and feed the sourdough by adding a cup of flour and a cup of water, stirring to mix well. (Change bowls for clean-up every couple of days.)
If you store your sourdough covered with plastic in the refrigerator you can slow it down and feed it every three or four days. You can put it in a glass jar with a lid for easier storage.
Sourdough starter keeps indefinitely if you keep feeding it, and it improves with age. Its sort of like having a pet, though--you have to have somebody feed it if you go out of town. Maybe that's why its customary to name your sourdough. (Suggestions?)
Buttermilk Pie at Pie in the Sky; Bourbon Sweet Potato Pecan Pie unfortunately not pictured
This pie was a Grand Champion Winner at the 2001 Montgomery County Fair, entered by Morgan Cartwright -- niece of Pie in the Sky owner Marlene Mathis Stubler. Although the original Pie in the Sky is located in Conroe, the diner is expected to open a second location in the Heights by mid-November. For now, Houstonians can get pies from Pie in the Sky at Barnabys and Rice Epicurean Markets.
World Food Warehouse on Highway 6 at Beechnut is a good place to go if you're looking to acquire some balls. They run five dollars a pound if you're interested and it looks like you get about seven or eight in a pound. Some are a lot larger than others.
I've eaten a lot of calf testicles (a.k.a. mountain oysters) in my day, usually deep fried. Goat testicles are called kapura or kapoor in India and Pakistan where they are commonly grilled on skewers. Kapoor kababs are reportedly sold at roadside eateries in Punjab. A more elaborate testicle curry known as kapura bakra masala can be made from either lamb or goat balls.
Goat's milk cajeta is popular and widely available in Mexican specialty stores (Coronado brand is the most common). But many people prefer the milder flavor of cow's milk caramel sauce, which is known as dulce de leche in Latin America. You can make your own dulce de leche at home.
This could possibly be the easiest dessert recipe of all time.
Potage a French name for thick, mushy, pureed-vegetable soup. You can make it out of just about anything, which makes it an ideal dish for cleaning your crisper drawer. I started my last pot with limp celery and a couple of wilted onion halves, to which I added a wrinkled red pepper and a whole package of mushrooms that were starting to get slimy. I put a package of the frozen broccoli that is cluttering up my freezer on top of that. Then I added four cups of chicken stock.
My friend Paul Howell makes risotto all the time. Pumpkin risotto and mushroom risotto are two of his favorites. I have always found the labor-intensive stirring and adding of liquid required for perfect risotto a little tedious. But Paul introduced me to the pressure cooker method.
For my first attempt I tried a dark purple beet risotto. I doubted that the pressure cooker could produce the creamy consistency of a really great risotto, but I was pleasantly surprised. The texture was fabulous. The flavor was a tad bland -- maybe it needed a little more seasoning. But I think it's fair to say that this is a pretty easy way to make risotto.
Fresh broccoli used to lie around in my crisper drawer for a long time. That's because plain, steamed broccoli is so tedious to eat.
A couple of months ago, I bought some cavatelli at Nundini's, even though I had no idea what to do with the weird-shaped pasta. I Googled cavatelli recipes when I got home, and I came across the awesome combination of cavatelli and broccoli seasoned with garlic and red pepper. It's was ridiculously simple to cook.
Cavatelli looks like gnocchi, but it's made from wheat flour rather than potato, and it is sometimes mixed with ricotta. Though I haven't tried it, I am told the soft version found in the freezer cases at some specialty stores is the best. For now, I'm quite content with the dried versions of cavatelli that I find on the shelves of Houston supermarkets.
After experimenting with several recipes, I came up with this adaptation:
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