Food Friday: Tomato & Arugula Salad

This salad is a warm weather staple at my home - arugula with pesto, tomatoes, burrata, and a smidge of olive oil and vinegar.

We have it often.  I usually serve it with pasta or grilled veggies and crusty bread, but in a big bowl on a hot day, it is a full meal on its own, the delicious taste of Summer.

Strawberry Season

 The season for fresh strawberries has arrived and I have made use of the delicious bounty to be found in our local markets.  I made strawberry pie.

We ate bowls of strawberries and cream.

I made strawberry compote for our waffles on a leisurely Sunday morning.

Soon enough we’ll stir up some strawberry jam that we’ll preserve for the cold Winter days when strawberry season seems far away.  That’s happy!

Food Friday: Grandma’s Carrot Cake

My Grandma Mac was an amazing cook and her carrot cake was to die for - filled with raisins, pineapple, and nuts and frosted with the richest cream cheese frosting.  The cake is a winner.  My mother has the recipe and mentioned last week that she was going to bake it.  On Wednesday, I set to baking the cake.  The cinnamon-rich batter came together easily.

The cake baked up well and the frosting was amazing.

JT and I declared it health food and may very well have enjoyed a slice for breakfast the next morning.  

Food Friday: Chicken Supper - Home Cookin’

Early on in the pandemic lock down, there were chicken shortages at our local market,  Chicken is the universal favorite food among the inmates of this house and both JT and T got a little panicky about a poultry shortage.  However, as supplies evened out it became clear that we would be able to fill our freezer with chicken for some chicken suppers.  I am the primary cook and meal planner around here and in this season of anxiousness, I’ve made old favorites as a means of comfort.  We’ve had fried chicken.

And chicken tacos.

Not pictured is chicken noodle soup, cowboy chicken, peanut chicken, and chicken cordon bleu....among other family favorites.  Suffice it to say no one has gone hungry around here.  Family suppers are among the blessings of this crazy period of time.  I've been one to take them for granted and it's been nice to have this daily blessing.

Food Friday: Turkey, Brie, Cranberry Panini

I like Thanksgiving leftovers best when they can be turned into something new.  One of my favorite post-holiday treats are the turkey, brie, and cranberry panini sandwiches we enjoy after the holiday feast.

I mix the the cranberry sauce leftovers with dijon mustard and spread a thin layer on a slice of bread, add thin slices of brie cheese, and minced turkey.  I top it with another slice of bread, butter both sides, and grill it on a low flame so that the brie has time to melt while the bread sears.  The result is delicious enough to become a holiday tradition of its own!

Food Friday: Arugula & Tomato Salad with Burrata

This salad is the perfect warm weather dish and served with some fresh fruit and crusty bread, it’s delicious and easy.  The recipe is a riff on a burrata and peach salad I saw on Cup of Jo and it’s become a Summer staple at Sassafras House.

You’ll need a bag of arugula, a cup of cherry tomatoes sliced in half, burrata, Italian salad dressing (I use Newman’s Own when I don’t have homemade on hand), and a fourth a cup each of toasted pine nuts and pesto, either fresh pesto or pre-made from the grocery store.  Easy is the theme here, so don’t sweat the details.

Fill an 8x8 dish with the arugula and then spread the sliced cherry tomatoes along the edge of the dish.  Place the burrata in the middle and sprinkle the pine nuts over the dish.  Dollop the pesto on the burrata and the tomatoes and then add salt and pepper over the lot.  Pour a tiny bit of the Italian dressing on the arugula.  Go easy here because you can always add more.

Served alongside fresh  fruit and crusty bread, this will serve four people.  Add some grilled chicken or shrimp and it will stretch to feed six.   Yum!

Food Friday: Lemon Curd

Spring Break gives me the luxury of some unscheduled time.  I used some of mine to make things, including homemade lemon curd.

I followed this Simply Recipes version, altering mine to use just a tablespoon of lemon zest, which I left in the finished curd.  I’ve made lemon curb before and know that I should never stop whisking, but a strainer is a good idea if this is your first time.  I poured the finished lemon curd into small preserve jars.  

The recipe makes a cup and a half, enough to give one jar away and still have some of your own to enjoy.  We ate it with homemade scones and a cup of tea.  It looked and tasted like Spring.  That's happy!

Food Friday: Cranberry Brie Turkey Panini

For me, one of the nicest things about Thanksgiving is the leftovers that can be turned into delicious meals.  My absolute favorite “leftover” is made using the turkey and cranberry sauce.  Behold the turkey, cranberry, brie panini sandwich.

For each sandwich, I spread two slices of bread with a thin amount of dijon mustard.

Then I add thin slices of brie cheese.

I add minced turkey.

Then I put a thin layer of cranberry sauce on the bread.  

The sandwich gets grilled on medium low so there is time for the heat to spread and melt the brie without burning the bread.

It’s delicious!

Food Friday: Crepes!

One of the reasons that I enjoy cooking is that it involves the completion of a project.  Much of my professional life is about works-in-progress and while it’s incredibly rewarding to watch adolescents mature and learn more about the world and themselves, when 8th graders walk out of my daily world and into the 9th grade, they are incomplete.  Even completion of high school is not quite the finished project whereby we can measure our success.  That measure comes later, when students succeed in college and move on to professions that they find satisfying and meaningful.  So a big part of my job requires that I make peace with the notion of works in progress.

Cooking is about completion.  From start to finish, a biscuit is mixed, baked, and then it’s complete and ready to eat.   Much of my cooking is the daily business of putting breakfast on the counter and supper on the table.  I work to vary our choices but in the end I am cooking a lot of the same things.  Days off and holidays give me a chance to make foods that require more time or are otherwise special.  I enjoy those completed projects a great deal and I’m often on the look-out for something new to cook.  

Enter a Good Friday holiday and this crepes recipe.  I saw it earlier this week and thought "I should make that someday." Someday was this morning and it came together just as the instructions said it would, a feature of the Simply Recipes website that makes it my favorite cooking website.  I mixed the batter, poured some in a buttered pan and watched it settle as the edges browned.

I flipped the crepe over (it was easy!).

And behold my new superpower.

That’s happy!

Food Friday: Cinnamon Apples

In New Jersey, diners are located on nearly every corner.  They have huge menus and serve breakfast all day.  In this state, they are an institution.  In the South, that same role is filled by restaurants collectively known as “ a meat and three.”  That means places where you choose what’s on your plate one item at a time.  Your start with a "meat".  The meat choices are usually a long list of options: fried chicken, pork chop, country ham, sugar-cured ham, chicken fried steak, meatloaf, chicken and dumplings, pot roast……..you get the idea.

The “vegetables” on the "three" list are usually an enormous collection, only some of which are actually vegetables: corn, grits casserole, cole slaw, turnip greens, green beans, squash, black-eyed peas, pinto beans, carrots, crowder peas, cottage cheese, mac & cheese, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes……..and there are always sweet cinnamon apples (also called fried apples).  

Cinnamon apples taste like the inside of an apple pie.  It’s a simple dish of sliced apples, cooked in a smudge of melted butter with brown sugar and cinnamon.  The apples cook down and release their pectin, so the sauce is thick with flecks of cinnamon.  Served warm, they are always delicious.  Leftovers, if you have any, can be served for breakfast with a corn muffin or biscuit, on pancakes, or in oatmeal.

But for supper, they taste like home and fall.  And in our house they taste like your mama loves you.  That’s happy!

Banana Cream Pudding

On Sunday evenings, the weekend’s relaxation gives way to chores to get ready for the work week and that often feels a little depressing to me.  Somehow, Sunday evenings are even more of a challenge in May, when the work weeks are packed with busy activities and days away from home often last more than 12 hours.  This May, we’ve endured the Sunday evenings with delicious desserts.  I like my desserts old-fashioned and a few weeks back, I made an adaptation of banana cream pudding.

It was a delicious way to ease back into the week.

That’s happy!

Food Friday: Boursin Super Power

Homemade boursin, known to us as white cheese, is a long-standing favorite at Sassafras House and I make it fairly often.

Most often, I serve it with little homemade garlic toasts that are also a staple at my house.  I thinly slice a fresh baguette, use a pastry brush to apply melted butter to each slice, sprinkle them with garlic powder, dried oregano and basil, and some salt and pepper.  Then I toast the slices for 10 minutes in a 400 degree oven.

This week, in addition to enjoying boursin with our garlic toasts, I sliced some small, sweet peppers in half and filled them with my homemade boursin.  I got the idea from Pioneer Woman and it was delicious.

Food Friday: Blueberry Scones

I have a couple of different scone recipes.  This one results in a moist, rich dough and is less dry than a traditional scone.  The recipe is adapted from the Pioneer Woman, which perhaps explains the richness and certainly accounts for the butter!  The dough looks lovely studded with blueberries.

Once baked, I add a glaze but they could just as easily be served with a bit of jam.

The recipe:

- 3 cups Flour

- 1/3 cup Sugar

- 3 teaspoons Baking Powder

- 1/4 teaspoon Salt

-  2 sticks Cold Butter, Cut Into Pieces

- half cup Heavy Cream

- half cup half & half

- 1/4 cup Milk

- 1 whole Egg

- 1 teaspoon Vanilla

- 1 cup fresh blueberries

Glaze

- 2 Tablespoons Butter, Melted

- 2 cups Powdered Sugar, Sifted

- 1/4 cup Milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Add the butter and use a pastry cutter to cut them together until they resemble coarse crumbs.

Stir together the heavy cream, half & half, milk, egg, and vanilla.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix them together until they're halfway combined. Add the berries and stir until mixed. Add the remaining berries and stir until everything is combined.

Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and press it into a rectangle that's about 16 inches tall by about 6 inches wide. Using a floured pizza cutter or knife, cut it in half lengthwise and then make 4 cuts across to create 4 squares. Cut each square into two triangles. Transfer the scones to a baking sheet lined with a baking mat. Bake for 20 - 25 minutes or until done. Remove to a cooling rack and allow them to cool completely.

To make the glaze, whisk together the melted butter and powdered sugar.  Add the milk a bit at a time, until the glaze is smooth and somewhat thick. Place the racks of scones over baking sheets to catch the excess, then use a spoon to drizzle the glaze all over the scones. Allow the glaze to set before serving.

Food Friday: Comfort Food

Perhaps its because of my California origins that I find homemade Mexican food to be the best sort of comfort food.  And at the very top of the comfort hierarchy is the corn tortilla.  These were fried into homemade tortilla chips and served with a heaping bowl of guacamole.

Delicious.

Food Friday: Homemade Popcorn

When I was a kid, my dad made homemade popcorn in a popcorn popper and it was the most delicious of treats.  As an adult, I love popcorn nearly as much and I’ve learned to make it on my own.  While the rest of us have become a nation of microwave popcorn poppers, at Sassafras House we are old-school poppers. In my book, homemade popcorn is the ideal comfort food.

It takes practice to learn how to make popcorn just right but it’s a skill worth practicing because homemade popcorn is snake-charmingly good.

You need:

a big pot or kettle with a firmly-fitted lid

1/4 cup oil

1/2 cup popcorn

salt and melted butter to taste

Heat the oil with the lid on the pot and 2 or 3 kernels of popcorn.  Usually, I heat it just short of the highest setting on my gas stove.  This is a practice-makes- perfect exercise and you’ll have to find your own sweet spot for heat.

When the first kernel pops, pour in the rest of the kernels and set the lid on top.  Let the pot sit on the heat until more kernels pop and then every few seconds, give it shake over the heat.  You need to keep the lid on, so the best way to accomplish this is with some hot pads to hold the lid secure.  When the popping begins to slow, listen carefully.  When there are a few seconds between kernels popping, you’re done.  Turn off the heat and let the hot pot sit for a minute in case any kernels pop late.  Empty into a large bowl and sprinkle with salt and melted butter to taste.  Turn on something great on the telly and sit back and enjoy the taste of childhood.

Food Friday: Caramel Pie

Back in my misspent youth, I lived in Nashville where there was a chain of restaurants known as O’Charley’s.  Among other things, they made something called caramel pie.  It was delicious and this week I tried my hand at making it myself.  It’s easy enough to do but it takes time, so this is a plan-ahead sort of treat to be made the day before you intend to serve it.

Ingredients

2 cans of sweetened condensed milk, wrappers removed

1 graham crack pie crust (you could make your own or just get the Keebler elves to hook you up)

whip cream

chocolate chips

chopped pecans

Fill a large pot of water and drop in both cans of sweetened condensed milk —— unopened —— bring the water to a boil and boil the cans for 3 hours.  You will need to check regularly and add water.  After three hours, let the cans cool off completely before you open them.  This will take 2-3 additional hours (and now you know what I mean by plan-ahead).

Once the caramel is done, the pie comes together easily.  Open the cans and pour the thick caramel into the graham cracker crust.  Though it looks like a small can, it is quite densely packed with caramel goodness.

Spread the caramel around the graham crust so that the crust is filled.  Then refrigerate, preferably overnight.  The day you plan to serve the pie, whip the cream.  My whip cream formula is to add 2 tablespoons of sugar to each cup of whipped cream I intend to make.  I whip the cream for about 2 minutes on high…..but keep a close watch, as this process can go awry.

Cut the pie into slices and plate them.  Sprinkle some pecans and chocolate chips on top of each slice.  Place a generous dollop of whip cream on the slice of pie.  

Delicious!

Food Friday: Grandma's Potato Salad

Many of my most favorite recipes an inheritance of my Grandma Mac, who was one hell of a cook.  That lady could put out a spread with her eyes closed and with nary a cookbook in sight.  I learned quite a few of her go-to recipes and every time I make one, I feel her presence.  Most of her recipes were simple, the only complications involved are ones of time.  Her potato salad recipe is a case in point.  The ingredients must be set up to chill for a night before the salad is made.  It is a basic cast of characters and can be expanded or reduced as needed.  To serve 4-6 people, you need this:

- 4 peeled, boiled potatoes

- 2 hard-boiled eggs

- 1/2 an onion, finely chopped

- salt & pepper

- 1 - 2 cups of mayo and a squirt or two of yellow mustard

The potatoes and eggs should be boiled and chilled the night before.  Come the morning you intend to serve the potato salad, mash the chilled potatoes and finely chop the eggs.  Stir together in a large bowl and add in the onion.  In a separate bowl, stir together the mayo, mustard, salt, and pepper to taste.  Don’t skimp on the salt; potatoes usually require more than you expect.

Pour the mayo mixture onto the potato, egg, onion mixture and stir well.  Add more mayo if necessary; the goal is to have a creamy consistency.  Once it’s well-mixed, place the potato salad in the fridge and chill 3-4 hours before serving.

It’s an old-fashioned delicious taste of Grandma’s kitchen.

Tomato Competition

One of the best things about summer is homegrown tomatoes.  I wait all year for the pleasures of these tomatoes and when enough have accumulated, I make a batch of salsa fresco.  JT is a notoriously picky eater who enjoys tomatoes pureed into sauce or salsa but, to my knowledge, has never eaten a sliced tomato, let alone enjoyed one in a salad or sandwich.  This year, he was game to try his mama’s homemade salsa fresco and, after several bites, announced, “This is really good.”

I was excited that he even tried something new, let alone liked it.  But I am cautious about his sensitivity about being a picky eater, so I calmly allowed that yes, homegrown tomatoes in freshly chopped salsa was rather delicious.  And then he offered, “maybe a tomato would taste good on a sandwich.”

I nearly fell off my chair as I agreed that yes, homegrown tomatoes might be tasty on a sandwich.  It will serve me right if he becomes competition for the homegrown tomatoes in my garden.

Food Friday: Side Dish Salads for the Grill Season

Last weekend’s good weather put me in a grilling mood.  Grilled burgers, chicken, and hot dog invariably means side dishes and I have a nice list of summery salads to serve with grilled food.

A favorite is Spring Salad.   I've been making this salad for over 20 years.  It’s a mix of broccoli, cauliflower, bacon, and grated cheese in a dressing that is tangy.  

This past week, I also made a dish that came my way via T.  She calls it Corn Bean Mash.  I call it delicious.  It’s best on day two and can be served as a salad, a dip for tortilla chips, or a filling for lettuce wraps.  

I also made Confetti Cole Slaw.  

This recipe is an adaptation from one my mom makes and I don’t even know the original origin.  It’s pretty on the table, comes together quickly,  and goes with most any grilled food.

- small head of red cabbage, chopped

- 1 medium tomato, chopped

- 4 green onions, sliced

- ½ cup crumbled feta cheese

- ¼ cup finely chopped cilantro

Dressing:

¼ cup canola oil

2 tablespoons white vinegar

¾ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon cumin

1 clove of garlic, crushed

dash of ground pepper

Mix salad ingredients.  Combine dressing; shake and toss with slaw when ready to serve.

Finally, I mixed up some good Old Fashioned Macaroni Salad.  

Mine is an adaptation of the original Pioneer Woman recipe and it’s flexible, in that you can change up the list of ingredients.  Sometimes I add in green pepper; other times I swap it out for the red pepper and use a Vidalia onion instead of green onion.  The key is that it’s flexible and all you need to do is make sure the macaroni is cooled before you mix in the dressing.

- 4 cups of elbow macaroni, cooked according to package directions, rinsed and cooled

- 1/2 cup chopped red pepper

- 1/2 cup chopped black olives

- 3-4 chopped green onions

Dressing:

- 1/2 cup mayonnaise

- 1 tablespoons white vinegar

- 3 teaspoons sugar

- 1/4 teaspoon salt (more to taste)

- 1 tablespoon black pepper

- milk to thin dressing for pouring.....usually about 1/4 cup

Cook the macaroni in lightly salted water according to package directions. Drain and rinse under cold water to cool. Set aside.

Mix together mayo, vinegar, sugar, salt, and pepper. Splash in enough milk to make it pourable.  Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Set aside. 

Place cooled macaroni and chopped ingredients in a large bowl and pour 3/4 of the dressing. Toss and add more dressing if you'd like. (Dressing will seem a little thin, but it will thicken up as salad chills.)  Keep the extra dressing to mix in just before serving, as needed.

Chill for at least 2 hours before serving. 

These salads will turn up on the supper table at my house all summer long.  That's tasty!

Food Friday: Texas Caviar

It is a Southern tradition that a heaping serving of black eyed peas on New Year’s day will help to secure good luck in the new year.  Though I live in yankee territory these days, I love this tradition and always serve some black eyed peas to start the year.  This year’s black eyed peas are a recipe I first learned about when I lived in Tennessee: Texas Caviar.  Over the years, I’ve adapted my version to include black beans, corn, and tomatoes.  You’ll need a big bowl to mix it up some good luck for yourself.

Ingredients

1 can of black-eyed peas

1 can of black beans

1 can of corn

1 can of petite diced tomatoes (I use spicy, if they are available)

1 can of diced Ortega green chiles

1 green pepper, finely diced

1 medium red onion, finely diced 

1 jalapeno, seeded and finely diced

4 large cloves of garlic, minced

juice from half a lime

1 teaspoon Chili Powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons Ground Cumin

dash (or 2!) of cayenne

¼ cup chopped cilantro

Drain and rinse the black-eyed peas, black beans, and corn.  Drain the tomatoes.  Then get a big ole’ bowl and mix all ingredients together. Cover and chill for at least 2 hours before serving. Serve with tortilla chips or Fritos Scoops.  It could also be served with quesadillas or in a lettuce wrap.  No matter how you choose to serve it, Texas Caviar is a delicious way to secure your good luck for 2014.  Y’all get to work and make yourself some today!