Sherry – Page 29 – Rosemary and the Goat

Elote Dip

If you like Mexican corn on the cob, you’ll love this dip.

Coming up blank for an idea for your next cookout? Sometimes I have problems putting together a menu; don’t know why because I have an endless supply of recipes I want to try or to recreate from places I have been or ideas that friends have told me about. Corn of some type is almost always on our menu as a side dish when we bbq.

Corn isn’t actually a vegetable, it’s a grain but I always called it a vegetable because it was one of the few so-called vegetables my kids would eat when they were young; green beans – sometimes, fried okra – of course, no on salads, no on broccoli, spinach etc. So I had to call corn a vegetable so I would feel like I was half-way getting my kids to eat healthy. Of course, now, they eat everything.

Elote Cafe in Sedona is famous for their Elote (corn) appetizer. A friend of mine went there a few years ago and loved the cafe so much they ate there three times.

Elote corn is sold by street food vendors in Mexico. Usually it will be cook in the husk, the husk will be pulled back and used for a handle to hold on to the corn and the corn will be smeared with butter, mayonnaise, lime juice, chili powder (I add some cayenne too when I make it this way), and sprinkled with some cojita cheese. It is delicious for any summer cookout and if you like that then make some Elote dip. All the same ingredients but cut off the cob and put in a bowl and baked for you to enjoy with some really good tortilla chips.

My favorite corn is yellow corn or even the peaches and cream variety which is yellow and while. The weekend I made this Elote Dip I could only find white corn. If you have a choice go with the yellow variety because it makes a prettier dip and I personally like the taste better.

May 4, 2016 By Sherry

Entree/ Pork/ Salads

Grilled Pork Chop and Roasted Apple Salad

Eat those greens!

Do you love your greens and vegetables? Did your parent always say “eat your vegetables”. I feel like I’m saying that to my husband these days as he just informed me, after almost 47 years of marriage, that he doesn’t really like most vegetables. He just eats them because I make them and if he doesn’t I guess there isn’t much left to eat other than meat. He does like salads though so I get to experiment a lot with recipes.

I love greens whether it is cooked cabbage, kale, chards, baby bok choy, spinach, lettuces, you name it I like greens. Have to admit, though, that I have never cooked collard greens. We have even grilled romaine lettuce and that’s delicious when you turn it into a chopped Caesar salad. I’ve mixed kale with mashed cauliflower, I’ve put it in turkey kale soup and I’m sure there are a lot of other recipes out there using greens in recipe that I haven’t even come across yet.

I love looking at menus and trying to recreate dishes. A friend of mine was in New Orleans last year and dined at K-Paul’s so I went to their website to see what she might be eating (weird huh). This salad sounded so interesting and there really isn’t a need for a recipe. After thinking about making this salad I decided to turn it into a main dish salad by adding the grilled pork chops that I glazed with some more of the red apple balsamic vinegar, then cut the chops into strips to put on top of the salad. I love pork and apples together and this way I did not have to come up with a meat to go with the salad. My daughter asked me if I had ever put pork on a salad and I thought “why not”, we put shrimp, chicken, steak, tuna, and even bbq on top of some shredded cabbage so why not a pork chop.

April 29, 2016 By Sherry

Appetizers/ HotApp

Avocado Lime Shrimp Cups

Beautiful, spicy, crunchy little appetizer for your next get together OR just because you want to make something new.

If you look at my appetizer index you will see that appetizers are probably my favorite things to cook/bake/make. I love little tidbits of food. You can graze on a table of appetizer and not feel overly stuffed. Plus, they are usually cute and interesting little pieces of food. And, I love anything made with shrimp.

Cocktail parties were always my favorite type of party to cater and I always prepared some of my all-time favorites. My Parmesan Bacon Wraps (we always referred to as a “heart attack” on a cracker) were sooo good and everyone loved them. Once someone referred to my Parmesan Shrimp Toast as sex on a cracker (have no idea how he came up with that description). Over 11,000 people have looked at that recipe. This little Avocado Bacon Sandwich is one of my favorite tea sandwiches and is perfect with a pot of Walnut Green tea.

I feel like my taste have changed over the years. I haven’t done those bacon wraps in a couple of years and I love appetizers that are a little more on the fussy side rather than making a big batch of dip or something I just dump in a pan. Back in the 70’s I had a friend (still a friend – hi Sally) who said she didn’t like sharing a particular appetizer recipe because she didn’t want to see it at someone else’s dinner party. After we moved away from each other, she did share the recipe. I never shared recipes when I catered for the same reason; but when I quit catering that was the point of this blog and that was (is) to share some of my favorite old and new recipes.

April 24, 2016 By Sherry

Entree/ Poultry

Chicken Chow Mein

Thanks Mema for teaching me how to make this.

I can’t tell you how many years I have been making this; oh, I guess I can, and that would be since I’ve been married which is going on 47 years.

I started dating my husband in high school when I was 15 and the rest is history. He use to hang around our house and ate many a meal there and I would go to his house for dinner. One night his mom was making chicken chow mein which I had never heard of let alone tried. So this one night that I had dinner at his house, I remember like it was yesterday, he put the chow mien on my plate and told me I would really like it. My initial thought was it looked like a lot of little worms. Maybe so, but it was delicious.

April 19, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Cucumber Noodle Salad

Ever see green noodles? These are cucumber.

Do you have a lot of tools/pans in your kitchen pantry? I have way to many but I NEED them. Never know when I might need one of them to make something special. The spiralizer is my newest gadget. See picture of my pan pantry below and this doesn’t even include my gadgets hiding away in my drawer or mini tart tins and cookie cutters in pull out bins. I even have a strawberry huller/pinfeather plucker and I never intend on plucking a chicken.

I first tried making cucumber noodles when I made my Spiralized Veggies with Salmon; now, I’m on the search for anything to twist out of my Paderno Pro 4 Blade Spiralizer. English cucumbers definitely work the best if you can find them.

Yikes, it is almost swimming season and if we start heating our pool this month then I’m in trouble (the dreaded swimsuit season is here). Aren’t we all looking for new recipes for the summer to take to get togethers? Honestly, I don’t think I will ever get tired of cooking and trying out new recipe as long as there is someone around to try them out and with my husband I can always count on getting a thumbs up or thumbs down. I hope for a thumbs up, of course, and the thumbs down never make it on this blog.

April 14, 2016 By Sherry

Entree/ Fish/Seafood

Red Snapper with Citrus Gremolata

One fish that didn’t get away.

I’ve always loved fishing but not too much into baiting that hook. I remember as a kid my dad taking us fishing and we would always have him to bait the hook. Now, I don’t mind putting a minnow on the hook; after all, that is just a baby fish. But, I never wanted to put a squirmy worm or a hopping cricket on the hook. I remember my dad sometimes trying bread balls or even a piece of bologna to try to catch some kind of fish, and he usually caught something.

A couple of Februarys in the last several years I have gone fishing with my husband and one of his friends at River Ridge Fish Camp in Texas. The fish we are looking for were white bass (not my favorite) BUT we would catch our 25 limit each in less than two hours. Now, that was fun fishing. I wasn’t along on the Alaska fishing trip my husband went on but did get to eat the 75 lbs. of silver salmon, king salmon and halibut he brought home.

Several weekends ago we decided to take a road trip down to Port Aransas and on every menu there was some kind of red snapper listed and when we returned home I hopped on over to the store and bought some; $22/lb., ouch, (this week it was $16/lb.). While at Port A I had a Mahi Mahi with a butter sauce and it got me to thinking about making a gremolata and using it on red snapper.

April 9, 2016 By Sherry

Appetizers/ Salads/ Sandwiches

Smoked Chicken Salad with Cranberries and Roasted Pecans

Not for a sandwich kind of chicken salad.

Back when we were first married my husband always wanted me to put apples in our tuna fish salad sandwiches. Yuck, I would say, fruit doesn’t belong on a sandwich and if he wanted apples in his then he would chop some up and put on his sandwich. When it comes to any creamy type salad that goes on a sandwich my opinion is NO fruit.

But, I have changed my mind over the years (not about fruit on sandwich) about adding fruit to things like chicken salad. There are so many chicken salads that have fruit like grapes, oranges, pineapple and this one has dried cranberries. To me this type salad has to be eaten with a fork or in this case I’m using some endive leaves and radicchio as little containers and also some crackers on the side. And funny thing, the day after my bunco group ate this my husband wanted some for lunch and he said do you have any bread, and I said Noooo, you can’t have bread with that kind of chicken salad. I know that’s crazy but I gave him a fist full of crackers instead.

There are two things I always feel like make a salad recipe better, that is, if it calls for chicken or nuts you use smoked meat and roasted nuts. I do my nuts in the microwave on a Pampered Chef small baking stone and we always have something on the Kamado Joe Smoker I can use in a salad.

April 4, 2016 By Sherry

Dessert/ Desserts/ Ice Cream

Lemon Sorbet with Mint Marigold Syrup and Meringue Bark

Put those marigolds in your yard to good use.

Don’t you just love beautiful desserts. Sometimes they look better than they taste. There is nothing worse than seeing, wanting, buying and eating a beautiful dessert only to find that it was all looks and nothing in the taste department.

You should know by now that I love copying or trying to recreate something I’ve eaten at a restaurant. It’s not like going to someone’s house and you love something and ask the hostess for the recipe and she’ll give it to you. You have to do a little detective work sometimes.

A few weeks ago, I met my daughter, Alexis for lunch in Austin at Olemaie. I always want what the person next to me ordered. This girl had a bowl that looked like salad, had some interesting greens, sprouts, fennel etc on top but it was a bowl of dumplings and not salad at all. The most delicious drop dumplings I’ve ever had and I didn’t think I even liked “dropped” dumplings and the bowl had pieces of fermented carrot floating in the broth along with the dumplings. Of course we ordered their BISCUITS which are not on the menu at all; they are a secret and only people knowing about then, know to order them. I’d read about them before going there. $10 for three biscuits with honey butter and it was the best $10 I’ve spent in a long time. Big square biscuits, brown and crunchy on all sides and soft in the middle. (Of course, I’m trying to find out how they made them and I did read some of their secrets which I will be trying.)

March 30, 2016 By Sherry

Egg Dishes/ Morning Foods

Asparagus with Poached Egg, Toast and Bacon Vinaigrette

What better reason to have a brunch than a rooster table-cloth!

I didn’t need a reason to have a brunch but my rooster table-cloth has had me wanting to do brunch and have a bunch of friends over. The friends never got asked over for this recipe; someday they will.

While working at Williams Sonoma for 6 years I collected so many of their tablecloths and paid next-to-nothing for them once they went on sale. The rooster table-cloth is navy blue and have these cool roosters (and I’m not even a rooster fan.) along the border of the cloths which is just screaming or “crowing” make brunch and serve it on me.

So what should I do? Of course, make brunch but as it turned out the bunch with friends was just my husband and myself. I couldn’t wait to try to make this so rather than fuss with a bunch of other dishes and arrange time for friends to actually make it over for brunch I made it just for the two of us.

I was tracking down this chef (John Fleer) who now works at Rhubarb restaurant in Asheville and read where he had worked at the Blackberry Farm Restaurant located at the foothills of The Smoky Mountains in Walland, Tennessee, so I had to mosey on over to the Blackberry Farm website to see what was going on. Of course, the first place I look is the restaurant and the menu where I happened upon a menu item Asparagus with Poached Egg, Toast and Bacon Vinaigrette and thought I could do this without a recipe. We have eaten at Rhubarb in Asheville but this wasn’t on his menu at that time.

March 25, 2016 By Sherry

Appetizers/ Side dish

Caramelized Mushrooms

I love these little fungi.

How many ways can you love a mushroom. Well, I love them in mushroom soup, love them fried, raw in a salad, on pizza, from a can, fresh from the market and of course, who doesn’t love stuffed mushrooms. I actually won a contest with my Italian Stuffed Mushrooms back in the 70’s when we lived in Jeffersontown, Kentucky.

I would love to go foraging for mushrooms but it would be my luck I would pick the wrong kind and end up in a deep sleep or worst. What fun it would be hunting these little things; kind of like an Easter egg hunt but much tastier.

So, when I saw this recipe for Caramelized mushrooms and the instructions said “walk away” I knew I was going to have to try these. So many times, when I walk away from something I’m cooking, I end up burning the thing I was so looking forwarding to eating; but this night I did not. We were enjoying the outdoor kitchen before another one of our “cold spells” came through Texas and I decided to whip us up a little appetizer while we cooked outside. These were gone in a few minutes so make plenty if you plan on sharing them or just make a batch for yourself.

These mushrooms would be delicious as a side dish to a good grilled steak, chicken or how about a big platter of them for no particular reason.

March 20, 2016 By Sherry

Dessert/ Desserts

Peppermint Delight

Born again! and just in time for St. Pat’s Day.

This is a born again dessert recipe. Over the last few years I’ve been watching Paula Deen and Pioneer Woman make desserts and recipes that my mother use to make back in the 50’s and 60’s and now on Facebook all these old recipes that we grew up with are popping up all over the place. I think anyone under 50 would have never been treated to some of these family favorites.

This particular recipe is one that my sister, Terry, and I put in our Double Delight Cookbook that we did many years ago and came from one of her friends in Caruthersville.

What a fitting dessert for a St. Patrick’s Day party or anytime in the month of March when you are looking for something green to make. One year I was desperate for something green to make to celebrate St. Pat. and made these Green Velvet Cakes in a jar. I should make an Irish dinner every year since my husband’s grandmother’s family came from Ireland (grandfather’s from Scotland). My favorite Irish side dish has to be Potatoes Colcannon which is mashed potatoes mixed with some sautéed cabbage and onions and topped with cheese. I’ve only prepared corn beef like once so maybe this year with our new outdoor kitchen we can try doing it outside on the smoker. Throw in some green beer and some other green foods and some decorations and we can have a party.

March 15, 2016 By Sherry

Dessert/ Morning Foods/ Pies/Tarts

Rustic Citrus Almond Tart

Rustic and beautiful citrus tart.

All I can say is “wow”, this was one beautiful tart. Not too tart and not too sweet, as Goldilocks said “it was just right” and I think all the ladies that tried it at my craft circle enjoyed it.

I’m sure you have all heard that snapping turtles bite and don’t let go. In Alabama they use to (may still do) call a snapping turtle “thunder turtles” because they believed that once bitten by the ST that it would not let go until it thundered. So, what does a snapping turtle have to do with this recipe.

Well, I have a problem letting go of an idea for a recipe I’ve seen or a product I have not used before. See the chunky sugar on the above tart. Well there’s even a story there. While in France back in 2012 (see, I told you I hold on to an idea for a long time) we spent a week in Provence after doing Paris (liked Provence much better) and we stayed in Eygalières in Provence area. This little commune, town, or whatever they call a town less than 1,700 actually had two bakeries a couple of grocery stores (very small, one English-speaking the other not) and one very good restaurant, sous les micocouliers which we ate at our first night there. I still get emails from them with their menus and I can’t read a word of it. (I just looked at their website and I never noticed they have “English” version.)

So, back to the story about the sugar. Every morning we would walk down to one of the local bakeries and buy some beautiful and delicious pastries (see below) for breakfast before heading out for the day. Usually at least a couple of the things we purchased had this sugar that stayed chunky. I couldn’t find it in the small local market but when I came home I looked until I finally located it I think on Amazon (of course). The sugar has been sitting in my pantry since then just waiting to be used for something special. This sugar will not melt and disappear as normal granulated sugar does at baking temperatures. I want to try it on some cinnamon elephant ear pastries sometime soon.

March 10, 2016 By Sherry

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