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In our small city of Easton, PA, we’re experiencing a downtown revitalization, a remarkable charge led by the opening of several new eateries.  It’s wonderful to see, and most of the places I’ve tried are quite good.  And I even work in one of them, now!  My only qualm with this is the grim but real statistic that most new restaurants close within a year of opening.  It’s great that all these new places in town will create competition to keep the older, more established places on their toes.  But on the other hand, I’d hate to see our town just not have the interest and money to support all these new places at once.  Uncontrolled, rapid growth can be harmful in any business situation.

Perhaps those of you who live in other small cities that have experienced an economic reboot and the gentrification of dicey neighborhoods can relate to this.  This is not a big place, and yet we now have TWO Thai restaurants, five delis, inumerable pizza places, one upscale Japanese place, one very upscale tapas joint, soul food, several grub pubs and nicer grills, and a patisserie. I could go on. Within the next year, the chatter indicates the arrival of Tex-Mex, an Argentinian bakery, South American churrascaria, and Indian, all within one square mile.  Yikes.  I hope we’re all feeling hungry!

My husband and I love to dine out, and consider it a form of relaxation, entertainment, and sometimes education.  But even we, who eat in really nice places once a week, have our limits on what we’ll spend and how often we’ll spend it.  Maybe there’s more people around here like us than I realize, and everything will proceed swimmingly.  I hope so.  I’ve got my mind set on having ready access to big steaks with chimichurri and homemade mole.  If it’s all tasty, my heart will be broken if these places can’t afford to stay open.

I was washing up my one and only piece of Le Creuset cookware this morning, briefly thinking I should get more of it, when I realized that aside from cooking a holiday meal, one piece is all I really need. The piece I have is a two-handled deep casserole with a lid, and I use is it as a frying pan, baking dish, braising pan…and probably other ways that I’ve forgotten. It was given to us as a wedding gift over three years ago, and I absolutely love this thing.  If I had a true need for more of it, I probably would have gone out and splurged on some a while ago.

If you spend any significant amount of time cooking at home and you’re on a budget, and you don’t own any cast-iron cookware, you really need to get some.  I submit to you that if you’re thinking buying one of those cheap-o sets of pots and pans, please reconsider your needs and think about buying one or two pieces of really high-quality stuff, like Le Creuset.  It combines the excellent heat distribution and heat retention of cast-iron with an easy-to-care-for enamel coating. Plus, they’re beautiful to behold, coming in many colors. There’s no need to “season” it like plain cast-iron, you can scrub it with soap, and you can let it air dry.

Also, keep your eyes peeled for open stock sales of high-quality pans like All-Clad, Farberware, or Calphalon.  With a piece of Le Creuset, and a piece or two of heavy stainless steel or copper, you’ll be set.  Now if you like to puff yourself up, and display a whole matched set of cookware of which eighty-percent will simply gather dust, my way of thinking won’t help you.   But if you want the helping hand that really good cookware brings without breaking the bank, two or three well chosen pieces should do the job.

Yesterday I wrote that braising season is upon us.  Yeah, well, it’s supposed to be over eighty-five degrees for the next three days.  Not only that, but after tomorrow, my husband will be away on a business trip, so my aversion to leftovers has returned.  I need to make something for dinner this evening, and as I so often find myself, I’m stuck for ideas.  I want to make sure I’ve got something fixed in my head before I head out to run errands, so I’m not meandering aimlessly around the grocery store.  I can’t stand that.  In short, I want to cook something tasty and fast, just enough for two, and something DIFFERENT.  I’ve been in a cooking rut.

So what am I in the mood for?  Sure, I could be in the mood for lots of things, but I try really hard to keep ingredients purchased for a single meal under ten dollars.  Pasta’s out (we had that last night), we’ve had a lot of chicken lately…Ugh, I feel exasperated and uncreative. 

Okay, another tack.  What protein haven’t I made in a while?  I love fish, but my husband kind of only tolerates it.  Ooh, wait, I’m just remembering that using crushed chips, cereal, or crackers makes a tasty, crunchy coating on just about anything.  I’ve got it!  I’m going to make some fancy homemade fish sticks (I titled this post “Fish Fingers” because that’s what the English call them, and I think it’s funny).  I guess I’ll buy some firm, white fish for them, and I already have sundried tomato veggie chips in the house.  

Here’s what to do.  Crush two or three cups of chips in a plastic bag, and dump them in a shallow dish.  In another shallow dish, mix some mayonnaise with salt, pepper, paprika, and dried herbs.  You could also use melted butter instead of the mayo.  Heat a skillet with a quarter-inch of olive oil in it to medium heat.  Smear each piece of fish around on both sides in the mayo mixture, then press it on each side into the chips.  Fry the fish on both sides until done.  Times will vary according to the type and thickness of the fish, and whether or not you fry whole fillets or cut your fish into “sticks.”

Can’t have fish sticks without something to dip them in!  Here’s my version of remoulade sauce.  Get out that mayonnaise again, and put a cup of it in a bowl.  Squirt a touch of mustard, a teeny-tiny bit of ketchup, and plop about a tablespoon of chili garlic sauce into it.  Add a little fresh minced onion, parsley, and capers.  Mix well and let the remoulade hang out in the fridge until dinner’s ready.

Tonight I think I’ll make sweet potato home fries and a salad to go with the fish sticks.  I’m just glad an idea finally came to me.  Cooking at home is so much harder at home than at work. 

I blogged about leftovers a couple of days ago, mentioning a pork loin.  It’s a yummy, hands-off recipe, wicked easy and very warming.

Smear your pork loin with good dijon mustard and pepper.  Cover it with plastic wrap and let it hang out in the fridge for a couple of hours.  Two to two-and-a half hours before you’d like to eat it, pull it from the fridge.  Heat a mixture of butter and olive oil in a large, heavy skillet (with a lid) and brown the pork loin well on all sides.  Remove it from the pan.  In the mustard-y fat that remains, saute half a large, chopped onion, a chopped, fresh apple, and a half-cup of dried cranberries.  Salt and pepper the mixture lightly, add the loin back to the skillet, and add water, white wine, beer, and/or stock (whatever you’ve got, you get the picture) to halfway up the pork loin.  Put on the lid, bring it to a boil, then turn the heat very low.   Let everything simmer for at least an hour and a half.  Pull the pork from the skillet and let it rest.  Meanwhile, turn the heat back up to reduce the sauce to however sticky you like it.  Check the seasoning.  Finish the sauce with a little chopped dill and parsley.  Slice your pork loin into rounds (it will probably be very tender, make sure your knife is SHARP), and pour the sauce over it.  C’est tout.  Delicious with brown butter noodles, mashed potatoes, or spaetzle if your feeling ambitious.

Well, it’s a little demoralizing to say it, but this cake was not fabulous.  It wasn’t by any means hideous, either.  The icing tasted assertively of avocado, which was a bit strange, and the mango flavor of the cake was not pronounced enough.  I can see why Alton Brown put lemon extract in his icing.  One of the many party guests who tasted the cake thought another flavor in the icing would have been an improvement, too, suggesting pistachio or mint.  After I made the cake, I got the feeling there would need to be more acid on the plate when the cake was served, so I made a mango coulis to go under each cake slice.  That helped.

First, the good news.  The cake itself was moist, but not flavorful enough.  If I make it again, I’ll be adding some chopped, dried mango and maybe some toasted almonds or pistachios.  The texture of the avocado icing was lovely, probably because I added a stick of softened butter to it, and ended up using an entire pound of confectioner’s sugar.  And if I make the icing again, I’ll definitely add another flavor, like Alton’s suggestion of lemon, or my friend’s suggestion of pistachio.

The bad news, which really isn’t that bad, was that every time someone took their first bite of the cake, they wore an expression that waivered somewhere between contemplation and confusion.  When I serve a dessert, I like to see an expression that hints at rhapsody, accompanied by “mmm.”  Is that so much to ask of a dessert?  I think not.  The Tropical Thrill Cake is not there yet.

I really don’t like leftovers.  I don’t mind eating them so much, but I can’t stand seeing them build up in the fridge.  The sight of them produces a peculiar, specific anxiety in me…the idea of food going bad and having to be thrown away makes me feel all wrong inside.  Too many people are going hungry in this world, not to mention that I pride myself on buying really good ingredients and cooking them lovingly. 

Last evening, after working on The Tropical Thrill Cake (more on that in my next post), I presented my husband with a veritable smorgasbord of leftover choices for dinner.  I hadn’t had the time to cook after messing around with that cake.  There was lasagna, shepherd’s pie, and pork loin with a sauce of cranberries and apples.  I realized that all of it was really good food, hardly to be classified as ”leftover,” an inherently pejorative term.

My husband picked the pork loin (with brown butter noodles and green beans almondine), and I went for the shepherd’s pie.  Don’t misunderstand me, it wasn’t the first time I heated leftovers for dinner.  But last night, for some reason, I got over myself and decided I could feel good about leftovers.  Not only did it help clear out the fridge, but we genuinely enjoyed our respective dinners, like we would on any other night.

So to any other foodies out there who might be feeling like they’ve failed themselves or their loved ones when pressed to serve leftovers, just stop it!  I did, and it felt good.

Yesterday, after working all day and then hitting the gym, I stopped on my way home to buy a bottle of wine.  Tired and sweaty, I stood in front of a selection of varietal reds, ready to grab an old stand-by to go with the lasagna I was planning to make for dinner.

Chianti?  Maybe, but none of it looked at all intriguing.  Beaujolais?  We had that last week, plus the nouveau will be coming out in a couple of months.  Barolo?  Too expensive for light-weights like my husband and me…we never finish a bottle in one sitting anymore, and really good wine is never the same after being open for too long, I don’t care how good your vacuum-seal on it might be.   So Malbec, then?  Ah,  Malbec, how I love you, so self-assured and sexy, yet so unpretentious and forthright.  Argentinian Malbec is our absolute favorite, more so me than my husband, I think.  It’s like meeting a rough-and-ready gaucho in the countryside, then taking him to Buenos Aires and finding out he’s a tango champion as well.

I was getting more impatient with myself by the second.  I couldn’t justify spending more than $10 on a bottle…it was for a Thursday night lasgana, right?  But I felt annoyed that we seemed to keep on drinking the same wine over and over, so what if we liked it?  But I was in a hurry, too…Aargh!  I grabbed a bottle of Valpolicella impulsively, paid for it, made my way home, and promptly forgot about it until it was time for dinner.

 My husband opened it just a minute before we sat down, we took a couple of bites, toasted each other and…the Valpolicella was GOOD!  Not great, but really good, light in the mouth and very easy on the tannins,  which was nice with the red sauce on the lasagna (it had plenty of it’s own acid).  The bottle claimed notes of cherries, berries, and almonds, but I honestly wasn’t catching anything more than a sheer fruitiness that rode on top of a decent amount of alcohol.  In short, just right for a Thursday night lasagna.

The moral of the story?  Try a completely different wine once in a while, letting impulse and impatience be your guide.  You’re guaranteed to learn something or find something new.  You might love it, you might hate it.  Just be sure you don’t pay too much for it.   Unless you’re wealthy, which we and most others are not, it can be totally demoralizing to spend a fortune on crappy wine.  I’ve got this story about a Vouvray…but that’s for another day.

I’m still not quite sure how to approach this blogging thing.  I’m new to it.  At my husband’s behest, I will give it a shot, see what happens.  “Run it up the flag pole, see if anybody salutes,”  my grandfather used to say.

So if a somebody like me (NOT web-obssessed, don’t even check my email on a daily basis) is going to blog, it had better be about something with which she is preoccupied.  In this case, she is me, and that thing would be food, and all those things food-related.

 Will I focus on recipes…equipment…technique…ingredients?  Yes, I will, and I’ll probably be including a good bit of opinion, too.  Hopefully, this blog will eventually create a useful and vibrant discourse for foodies, from which we can learn from each other’s cooking triumphs and errors.  It wouldn’t hurt if we could inject a bit of humor into things, either.

Without further ado, a CAKE is in the works for me right now.  A very experimental cake it is, and I’ll include the preliminary recipe below.  If the recipe works, that’s terrific.  If it doesn’t, then I’ll post my amendments to the recipe later.  If it totally sucks and tastes revolting, I’ll post that as well.  Anyway, this cake will be called something like Tropical Thrill Cake.  In my mind/ tongue’s eye (don’t forget, I made this recipe up yesterday and haven’t tried it yet), I’m picturing this gorgeous layer cake, glowing pale orange inside with a brilliant green frosting, decorated with mango slices and toasted coconut.   If it turns out as pretty as I think it will, I’ll post a photo of it.

The idea for this cake was inspired by Alton Brown.  I was half paying attention to his show during work one day last week (I work at an upscale deli and food market so we often keep the Food Network on the television) and he made cake frosting out of avocado.  It was so BEAUTIFUL!  Anyway, he put both lemon juice and lemon extract in his frosting.  I think I’ll leave out the extract because I’m not feeling it will fit seamlessly into the flavor profile I’m going for.  All week after seeing the show, I was trying to think of how I’d like to use that frosting, and it came to me…MANGO CAKE!  I’m planning on incorporating the barest hint of toasted coconut into the cake as well, with more of it being part of the decoration.

FOR PETE’S SAKE, DON’T FORGET THAT I HAVEN’T ACTUALLY MADE THIS CAKE YET!  I wouldn’t want my inaugural blog to be tainted by comments like “I made this woman’s cake and it tasted like poop.”  or “The Tropical Thrill Cake was more like a catastrophic Guatemalan mud slide.”

The cake:

2 3/4 c. cake flour

2 1/2 t. baking powder

3/4 t.  salt

1/2 t. baking soda

1 1/2 stick unsalted butter, softened

1 1/2 c. sugar

1 t. vanilla extract  (don’t you just love Penzey’s double-strength?)

2 eggs

2 c. fresh mango puree

 1/2 c. toasted coconut

Sift together the dry stuff.  Cream the butter, sugar, and vanilla, then add the eggs one at a time.  Alternate adding the dry ingredients, the mango puree, and the coconut to the butter mixture until just combined.  Pour into 3   8-9 inch  greased round cake pans.  Bake at 350 degrees for 18-25 min., or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Cool on wire racks for ten minutes, then remove the cakes from the pans.  Cool completely.

The frosting:

 8 oz. avocado flesh

2 t. lemon juice

1 c. sifted confectioner’s sugar

 Whip the avocado and the lemon juice until smooth.  SLOWLY add the sugar.  Yum.  Store in fridge if not using immediately.

Assemble and decorate your cake as you please.  I’m planning on doubling  the frosting to use it as a filling, and then decorate the whole shebang with fresh mango slices and toasted coconut.

Talk to you later.  Sorry for the brevity of the baking instructions, but I think at this point anybody reading a food blog has made a scratch cake or two in their lifetime. 

Happy Kitchen Time to You and Yours!

-Samantha

This is my first post, let’s talk about food!