Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

Election night, bread, chocolate and red wine

November 6, 2012 by Mary Frances 3 Comments

We’re a nervous wreck here. The race for the presidency of our country is close. I made a lovely light dinner. (I’ll tell you more about that later.) And now I made a famous Spanish dessert, a favorite for children as a simple after school snack. We served it at a small dinner party this past Saturday night, and liked it so much that we wanted to keep on repeating it and repeating it. It’s simple to make and just the right amount of sweetness, of chocolate and a little bit of saltiness. And, it’s lovely with some red wine leftover from dinner.

The basis of this recipe is from Food and Wine magazine. Use the best chocolate you can find. I used Scharffen Berger 3 oz bars. Buy two bars and put 2 squares on each bread slice.

BREAD AND CHOCOLATE
– serves 4

8 thin baguette slices
Two 3-ounce bars of bittersweet chocolate, cut in 8 pieces to fit, you will not use all of this chocolate
Extra-virgin olive oil
Fine sea salt for sprinkling

Preheat the broiler and position a rack 8 inches from the heat. Spread the baguette slices on a baking sheet and broil until toasted, about 30 seconds – 1 minute. Turn the slices over and set a square or two of chocolate on each one. Broil just until the bread is golden and the chocolate is beginning to melt (about 30 seconds – 1 minute). Transfer the chocolate toasts to plates and drizzle lightly with the olive oil and also sprinkle lightly with the sea salt on the chocolate. Serve right away.

Fig Clafoutis

September 16, 2012 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

We were invited to our friends, Nikki and Todd’s house, back in our old hometown, Summit, NJ, for Sunday dinner tonight. It’s so great to get together with old friends. We met when our oldest boys were in first grade. They had just been at our apartment for dinner a couple of weeks before and I had served a blueberry crisp with crème fraiche for dessert. When I asked if I could bring anything, Nikki said a resounding, “Yes, please bring a blueberry crisp, just like the one you made.”

Well, the blueberry season here is over and the ones in the stores look terrible, come from far away and are really expensive to boot. So after hemming and hawing, I decided to do something completely different. The black mission figs are in full season now and after going to three stores looking for nice blueberries and consistently seeing lovely black mission figs, I decided to go for it, hoping she’d like it. I had just read a recipe for a clafoutis in the latest issue of Food and Wine magazine that sounded great. I would have died if she hated figs, particularly when someone asks you so specifically to make something for them. I called her on the car ride there and broke the news. She seemed excited about it. Whew!

So now, I have never made a clafoutis. Doesn’t scare me, I’m always willing to try something new. I got up at 8 am and starting prepping for it. (Only because I wanted to fit in a long bike ride today too!) This recipe is in the October issue of Food and Wine and just look at how pretty it turned out!! I served it with crème fraiche and the port sauce separately, rather than the heavy cream sweetened with the sauce. It was elegant and delicious! I love the way it looks in the cast iron skillet.

Black Mission Fig Clafoutis

Nikki and Todd’s dinner was delicious! A whole grilled salmon fillet with spicy shrimp, a beautiful salad and a yummy pasta dish with vegetables and Pecorino Romano cheese. They told the story of Todd’s mother who apparently was a fantastic improvisational cook. One of Todd’s brothers was in Washington state and his mother asked him to bring back a salmon. He brought back a huge whole fish, much too big to put in any pan she had in their apartment in the West 40s. And she was insistent to not cut up this beautiful being. So, she poached it in the dishwasher!! Nikki said she ran the dishwasher three times to get all the soap out, wrapped the fish in cheesecloth and put it in the top rack and cooked that baby on a wash cycle. (We asked if it was crystal, economy or pot and pans – she didn’t know and the dishwasher probably only had one cycle.) They said the fish was delicious. But isn’t that the greatest story?!

Blueberries!

August 17, 2012 by Mary Frances 2 Comments

They’re here now locally in abundance! And boy, are they delicious this year!! Sprinkle them on oatmeal, toss in your fruit salad, make sauces for duck, pork and salmon or just eat them! I have already made two pies and one blueberry crisp. They supposedly are a true brain food, full of antioxidants to combat all the other toxic things we do to our bodies. My good friend, Margaret, makes sure to eat lots of them year round but right now they are local, sweet and yummy.

Melissa Clark, in the New York Times, recently published a recipe of a blueberry sauce on salmon. This is on fresh, expensive wild King salmon. You can find the recipe here: Salmon With Agrodolce Blueberries. I made the full recipe for only a pound of salmon for the two of us and saved the rest of the sauce for pork chops on another night. To our tastes, this sauce was just okay on the salmon (which would have been just fine by itself), but amazing on the pork chops. You decide. And the crisp is easy as can be with an oatmeal topping. That recipe is here.

Blueberry Crisp – with an oatmeal topping

Brownies!

July 4, 2012 by Mary Frances 4 Comments

I thought you might need this recipe for your picnic today, perhaps?

I’ve been told I make the best brownies. You can decide for yourself. These are easy and delicious, but it is always about the quality of the ingredients you use. And that goes for cooking anything! I try to use the BEST chocolate I can get my hands on, Mexican vanilla, which I adore, (I bought several bottles of it when we were on a family vacation there. People go there all the time, so ask your friends to bring you back a bottle if they’re going. It’s easy to find, they even sell it at the airport!), high quality unsalted butter and the freshest walnuts. (Keep your nuts well wrapped in ziplock bags in the freezer and they will never go rancid.)

It is important to melt your chocolate and butter together, but not completely. Remove from the microwave with still some chunks of chocolate and stir rapidly. They will finish melting on their own and you will not have hurt the chemical composition of the butter and chocolate by overheating. In my relatively new microwave, I do two rounds of 30 seconds on high heat and stir in between. But not all microwaves are the same. You may want to do two rounds at a lower power setting.

Two are two other important things to remember. Beat well after adding each egg. After adding the second egg, beat to achieve a shiny look and consistency and then beat in your salt thoroughly. The last thing you add is the flour, nuts and vanilla, and you don’t want to beat too much when mixing that in. The other important thing to remember is to not over bake them. 22 – 25 minutes is perfect in my oven. Baking them too long will not give you the soft, luscious, fudgey interior.

Enjoy!!

BEST BROWNIES
– makes 16

4 oz. unsweetened chocolate (I use Scharffen Berger), cut into chunks
8 tbs. (1 stick) unsalted butter, plus a little more for greasing pan, cut into tablespoons
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt (French grey salt is the best)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup of coarsely chopped walnuts

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Combine chocolate and butter in a medium bowl and microwave on high for 30 seconds. Remove and stir and decide whether to microwave for another 30 seconds or keep stirring until all of the chocolate is melted and the mixture is silky smooth. Meanwhile, butter an 8 1/2-inch-square baking pan.

Stir the sugar into the chocolate mixture. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Add your pinch of salt and beat until shiny and smooth. Add flour, vanilla and walnuts and stir to incorporate – no traces of flour should remain, but do not over stir.

Pour batter mixture into pan, and smooth out evenly. Bake 20 to 30 minutes, or until set and barely firm in the middle. Cool on a rack before cutting into 16 squares.

Beautiful shiny batter.

Right before going into the oven.

We must know what we’re eating!

February 27, 2012 by Mary Frances 1 Comment

This is from an email I just received from the Center for Food Safety.

Congress to FDA: LABEL GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOOD
Have YOUR Senators and Representative Joined the Letter?

In the U.S., we pride ourselves on having choices and making informed decisions. Under current FDA regulations, we don’t have that choice when it comes to GE ingredients in the foods we purchase and feed our families. This led the Center for Food Safety to submit a legal petition to the FDA demanding that the agency require the labeling of GE foods. In response, Senator Barbara Boxer (CA) and Representative Peter DeFazio (OR) have authored a bicameral Congressional letter in support of our legal petition and will be urging their fellow Members on Capitol Hill to sign onto their letter.

Unsuspecting consumers by the tens of millions are being allowed to purchase and consume unlabeled genetically engineered foods, despite the fact that FDA undertakes no testing of its own, instead relying only on a voluntary consultation with industry and confidential industry data to assure safety. Internal FDA documents discovered in prior CFS litigation actually indicated the foods could pose serious risks, but those views were overruled.

Genetically engineered foods are required to be labeled in nearly 50 countries around the world including the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, New Zealand and many others. A recent poll released by ABC News found that 93 percent of the American public wants the federal government to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. As ABC News stated, “Such near-unanimity in public opinion is rare.” Yet the United States is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t require labeling of GE food!

Please write and call your U.S. Senators and Representative and urge them to join the Boxer-DeFazio letter in support of labeling!

The cut-outs!

December 28, 2011 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

Finished cookies – notice the dreidels and Jewish stars to keep everyone happy

I know that Christmas is over but you still have New Year’s coming and many parties probably await you this weekend. My mom would often make a batch or two during this week. Why not? She ran out of time before Christmas Day, so what’s the big deal, make them in the week in between! Just don’t tell anyone.

I did make these on Christmas Eve, along with another requested batch of Hello Dolly squares (they always go quick) and the 4 loaves of traditional Polish Bread that is my Grandmother’s recipe. Sorry I’m a little late in getting this to you.

Before this recipe, I was never a fan of cut-out sugar cookies. Any recipe I encountered came out too thick or too sweet or both.

Many of you know I went to Parsons School of Design, majoring in Communication Design. For many years, including my 4 years, the Chairman of the department was this wonderful, little (he was short) man named John Russo. He made sure he knew every student in his department. He loved to draw and produced these crazy drawings (I’ll have to show you later) and often converted each student into some type of bird. He made me a peacock. I could never quite figure out if that was good or bad. I have still kept in touch with him until just a few years ago. I should check in with him again. Now he lives in PA and is in his late eighties or early nineties.

So at Christmastime, he would have his wife make these cookies and instead of using cutters, he would spend time hand cutting each one of us as birds and then he made a huge display of them right by the elevators on the department floor. He would put a hole in the top of each one and hang them with a ribbon on push pins. Besides the amazing fact that he would take the time to do this, they were also delicious!!

Light and crisp – I guarantee you – this is the BEST sugar cookie you will ever eat!

ROLLED CHRISTMAS COOKIES
makes 3 1/2 dozen

1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 egg, beaten
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

Cream butter thoroughly. Add sugar gradually and then add vanilla and egg. Beat until light. Sift together all dry ingredients and blend into batter. Remove batter from the bowl, wrap in plastic wrap and chill for several hours. On a lightly floured pastry cloth, roll out 1/8” thin, cut, place on a greased or Siltpat lined cookie sheet. Decorate with colored sugars and bake at 325 degrees for 12 – 15 minutes. Or bake them plain and decorate them afterwards with colored icings. That is what Russo would do.

Store in a wax paper lined tin at room temperature.

The original recipe – signed with love – from Russo