ColdApp – Page 7 – Rosemary and the Goat

Turnip Rose

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

(Juliet)

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Romeo:
[Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

Juliet:
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy:
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot,
Nor arm nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose (turnip)
By any other word would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
and for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Thank you William. I always think of this when I do a turnip rose. Why? I don’t know. I just always think “a rose by any other name” and then realized where that line comes.

April 15, 2010 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp/ Dessert/ Garnish

Dried Pineapple Flowers

I love Martha! and this recipe is from her Cupcake cookbook.

I think Martha is one of those names that you just have to say the first name and everyone just knows who you are talking about.

I taught a technique class on cakes and cupcakes the other day at Williams Sonoma. It was a fun class to teach and I love sharing recipes and ideas with everyone that comes to our classes. Even though I didn’t do any cake decorating, we made a Whipped Cream Frosting that my mother use to make way back in the 50’s. I like playing with food and making garnishes and platter decorations and everything but have never had the patience to learn to decorate cakes. So, these little pineapple flowers really did the trick to finish off a cake I had made for the class.

I plan on making these little flowers to put on top of Hummingbird cupcakes for a party I’m catering before a Jimmy Buffet concert. I think these will look so tropical and will fit well with the theme of the party.

March 22, 2010 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp/ Garnish/ Side dish

Herbed Potato Window Panes

You will want to do more than window shop these windows! You get to eat these.

I have done a “One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato” blog entry where I posted three of my favorite baked potato recipes. This has to be “four”.

It was really nice here in our part of Texas today and I should have been out surveying all of our dead plants that we lost during the winter this year. But, my husband has already cut back and pulled up every dead thing in our yard and right now it is looking like a pretty naked yard. You get him going with a chain saw or pruners and watch out. No such thing as “take a little” off with him. I can put off taking a look until tomorrow. Today, I decided to just practice bridge and play around with making these little potato delicacies

I saw this recipe years ago in a cookbook and recently I was searching for how to make them and and came across this site. A couple of weeks ago I did a little cooking demonstration for our garden club on herbs. We had one member talking about the herbs and then I showed them how to make somethings using that particular herb. I did a cucumber soup, my Rosemary and the Goat appetizer, Lavender scones, a lemon basil/mint sorbet and these Potato Window Panes.

I love potatoes. Even though we don’t eat them often, I’m always looking for new recipes. Last summer I found this recipe using potatoes and arugula and after tweaking it I came up with my Potato and Arugula Salad using purple and white new potatoes. I think potatoes are one of the most versatile vegetables. They can be part of a meal or the meal itself. You can grate them and use for a potato bread sour dough starter. I remember as a kid we cut them and made designs and used ink pads to stamp out designs with the potatoes. I also remember playing a shower game where you put the potato in a panty hose leg, tied it around your waist and tried to knock a ball across the room (some game huh).

March 10, 2010 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp/ HotApp

Mezze Table

Mezze, tapas, muqabbilat, dim sum, hor’devoures, or simply “apps”.

(The 2010 February Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums. Michele chose to challenge everyone to make mezze based on various recipes from Claudia Roden, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Dugid.)

What ever language you may say this word in, “mezze”, tapas, muqabbilat, dim sum, hor d oeuvres, apps, we are talking about small portions of food eaten before a meal or in place of a meal. Mezze is a selection of Greek and middle-eastern small dishes served in “mezze” portions (like tapas.) Typically a mezze might include things like hummus, baba ganoush, pita, olives, dolmas, maybe some grilled vegetables or a kabob. A mezze table would have several small dishes served all at once. If you love grazing at parties, you will love this style of eating. All kinds of things to nibble on. Try this for your next party, or any get together with friends. Everything can be made in advance, making the party an easy one to put together. All you need to do is open your wine, beer or whatever beverage and enjoy.

My menu for my messe table:

Pita Bread
Hummus
Bacon Wrapped Dates with Blue Cheese
Eggplant Caponata
Spanakopita
Tagine Spiced Grilled Quail
Israeli Cous Cous (I bought this ready made)
Herbed New Potatoes
Chocolava

February 14, 2010 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp

Honey Pecan Stuffed Snow Peas

I know you may be thinking “she’s crazy for stuffing those tiny little pods”, but they are always a hit a party.

When I started catering 20 years ago it seemed like everything idea I came up with involved a lot of time and handling of food. But, I have to say, those are usually the appetizers people go crazy for. Anyone can throw out a cheese tray or deli tray so I tend to like appetizers that people know you went to a little extra trouble making. I usually cringe when someone calls me and ask me if I do “trays”. What comes to mind when I think “trays” are piles of cheese or little hoagie sandwiches with those frilly little picks sticking out of the top.

I’ve stuffed black olives with pepperoni and then piped in a flavored cream cheese, I have stuffed rigatoni bites, and the Parmesan Bacon Wraps I make are to die for and they take a couple of hours almost in the oven.

This is a great little recipe I first tried about 10 years ago from “Come On In” cookbook. A few years ago I was catering a wedding and I had the menu all prepared for 75 guest. I had planned on doing these snow peas. Normally I would have done 150, which would have been 2 per person. Well, the guest list kept growing and growing and finally ended up at 225. So the night before the wedding I’m sitting (by myself) stuffing 450 snow peas. I think it took me about 4 hours just to do the peas. After that, I never put them on the menu for 50 or more people — they just takes way too long to do these for large parties.

February 8, 2010 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp

Thai Tuna Wonton Chip

Beautiful little wonton with a spicy bite.

I never ate tuna any way other than out of a can until just a few years ago. When we were first married back in 1969 I think I was really into cooking or at least trying to learn to cook. I remember ordering a computerized menu plan for a month’s worth of recipes. I remember trying every one of them. My least favorite and I think that is why I had a mental block against tuna for years was a recipe for Tuna Noodle Rosie Casserole. I have to admit I hate hot tuna casseroles to this day because of this recipe. It was made with noodles, canned tuna, green peas and some kind of tomato soup or sauce. I gag even thinking of that recipe.

In the last few years I have tried more new things from pork belly to veal cheeks and even deer heart (at our day after Thanksgiving feast). So I have started revisiting tuna and if you try this recipe, I don’t think you will be disappointed.

I came across this recipe for Thai Wonton Chips and ALL it had on it was a few slivered vegetables. With a bunch of tweaking, I came up with this recipe. It was a favorite at one of the Christmas parties I catered recently.

December 27, 2009 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp/ Food Stories

New American Feast — Tasting Menu

New American Feast — Tasting Menu and a Michie tradition.

Every Thanksgiving for the past eight years or so we have had our “Michie” feast on the day after Thanksgiving. It’s a good thing that our Thanksgiving menu is pretty traditional because so much work goes into our meal on the Friday following Tday. Here’s our menu for the night with a few picture teasers. We will be posting some of the recipes over the next few days.

mushroom mosaic terrine

paired with gloria ferrer sonoma brut

———-

lemon basil sorbet palate cleanser

———-

parsnip bisque with crispy pork belly

pared with robledo sauvignon blanc 2006, california

———-

crab, avocado, mango tower

paired with pierre boniface apremont 2008, france

———-

seared yellowfin tuna tostone stack with mexican coke reduction

pineapple, mango, sesame vinaigrette

paired with st. clement, bale lane, 2007 sauvignon blanc, napa valley

———-

fig and port sorbet palate cleanser

———-

chicken fried deer heart, latke, black pepper cream

paired with mo zin, spann vineyard, 2006

———-

duck confit ravioli with port wine and sun-dried cherry sauce

paired with calvet-thunevin cuvee constance, 2005, cotes catalanese

———-

smoked espresso powdered venison tenderloin with chili, chocolate

fresh gulf crab cake and beer blanc sauce

paired with nero d’avola/merlot evoe aziende agricole aollara

———-

madeira-braised veal cheeks with chive cheese grits

paired with bear boat pino noir 2006, russian river valley

———-

gorgonzola dolce latte with asian pear, Tete De Moine, triple cream brie

———-

pumpkin bread and chocolate bread pudding, frozen honey cinnamon custard with cajeta

paired with assorted liquer

(Sherry) We decide on a theme in advance. It all started with frying the turkey for the first time eight years ago. We had all this oil left over and thought we should do something with it so the next day we had a fish and frog leg fry. The next year we decided to do all oysters. I think we did them seven different ways. In the following years we have done, sushi, Mexican, Italian, French Country, Spanish Tapas and this year we decided on a tasting menu, New American style.

(Alexis) This year we had 10 courses, 10 people, 10 bottles of wine. Everyone comes up with their own recipes for the event in advance. Paul oversees the entire menu and if you’re lucky he will cook your course for you too. Just kidding. But it is a life saver when he looks at your recipe and clues you in to the fact that you really need to start parts of your recipe 24-48 hours in advance. Thanks to him I had some awesome duck confit already prepared for me when I went to make my ravioli on Friday.

(Sherry) We have so much fun cooking and laughing and consuming a lot of wine together. Everyone really gets into their dish, preparing and plating for presentation. We decided this year that everyone should present their dish when serving their course and explain how they prepared it and what wine they were serving with it. That was a lot of fun.

(Alexis) I think I had an advantage of being towards the end of the meal, when I was a little loosened up by the wine and more than ready for some “public speaking.”

(Sherry) We had 2 oz. pours on all our wines and by the end of the night I think we calculated that everyone drank a bottle of wine a piece. This is not including what my daughter-in-law coined “intermission” wines in case someone wanted more wine while waiting for the next course.

My dish was the only one that flopped. It was tasty but the terrine, even with 24 sheets of gelatin, did not set up like it was suppose to. The veal cheeks came from Chicago and other ingredients came from Austin and Houston. I made two trips to an Asian market to get the pork belly. We have already been talking about the next feast when we are all together and we’ve decided it will be a “locavore” theme. We will have to cook only seasonal ingredients within 50-100 miles of where we live. So that will be Chicago, Austin, and Houston. This will be a challenge.

(Alexis) I’d like to add to the local part that the ingredients should also be organic, natural, grass-fed, free range, etc..

Stay tuned for more recipes and photos of some of the highlights from the tasting menu!

December 3, 2009 By Alexis

Appetizers/ ColdApp/ Dessert/ Desserts

Cannoli

When the moon hits the sky like a big pizza pie, it’s cannoliiiiii (guess that should be amore’) 🙂

My first real cannoli was in Italy three years ago. We had gone on this 18 day trip to Italy with two other couples. After going to Venice for three days, then Cinque Terra for 3 days, and Rome three days, we settled in Tuscany at iL Borro villa (owned by the Faragamo family) for 8 days. It was a wonderful trip.

I think it was while we were in Cinque Terra and we were taking the train either to Santa Margarita or Monterosso that we learned a lot about riding trains in Italy. Once we were fined for not having our tickets validated. Ouch, that hurt, but could have been worst I guess if the guys argued with the ticket guys on the train.

Then one time we messed up on the timing of the train and had to wait an hour for the next train. While we were waiting, one of the guys hiked up to a little restaurant that he and his wife had been to before and came back with two huge cannolis that we divided up and devoured in seconds while waiting for our train. This was really late at night, maybe 11:30 or so and was getting kind of scary. We got better at reading the train schedules after that incident.

I have made savory cannolis before using a smoked salmon spread for the filling. Recently I made cannolis for a shower using a recipe that an Italian lady gave me 25 years ago. For this challenge I made some sweet ones using cocoa in the dough. I don’t think I care for that recipe as much as my original recipe.

Here are a few pictures of some of the ones I have made recently.

These are great. I dipped one end in chopped pistachio nuts and the other in shaved semi sweet chocolate.

November 27, 2009 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp/ Food Stories

Sushi Challenge

Doesn’t that look like a real dragon?

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge.

Sushi (寿司 or 鮨 or 鮓) is much appreciated for its delicate taste and exquisite appearance. Sushi actually means vinegar-ed rice, which is the essential ingredient in every sushi recipe. Sushi is simple and cheap to make at home, needs no special equipment and is an excellent way to use left overs.

Although sushi in various forms has been around for fourteen centuries, the modern version was invented in Japan in the 1800’s where a ‘hand-formed’ sliced fresh fish and vinegar-ed rice ball was eaten as a snack food. Nowadays, sushi is made with various seafood, meats and vegetables, raw and cooked.

I belong to www.thedaringkitchen.com site and each month there is a cooking challenge and baking challenge. November’s cook’s challenge was to make sushi.

I have a confession to make. Last week our Friday night friends were out of town so I told my husband about a new sushi place we have in town. He asked me if I had been there before and I said “yes, for lunch this week”. What I didn’t tell him was that this would be my third time to eat there that week. I wanted to sit at the bar and watch them make the sushi this time so I could get ready for this challenge. That really helped. Now, if I can just get the rice right.

I won’t be posting a recipe here because if you really want to make sushi I would just google how to make the sushi rice and watch several sushi making YouTube videos. That’s what I did. By the time I had watched about 6 videos I thought I would be able to do it — and I (we) did.

For this challenges we were suppose to make a dragon roll, spiral roll and nigri sushi. I was looking in the produce section for all our ingredients and saw a star fruit and had the idea to use this for his fins, scales or whatever it is a dragon is suppose to have on his back.

Here are a few pictures of what we made last night.

This was a spicy tuna crunch roll. We put chopped up tuna, sriracha hot chilli sauce, some of the crunchies I fished out of the pan from doing tempura shrimp.

This was my least favorite. I didn’t care for the fake crab legs. I think next time I would do shrimp and tuna.

I prepped all of our fillings earlier that day. I cut up cucumber, scallions, red bell pepper, avocado, tempura shrimp, spicy tuna mixture, spicy mayo, made some sweet soy and did some green beans in tempura for an appetizer.

A plate of our night’s work. This ginger was some I bought. I did try making pickled ginger this week and didn’t like the results. I think you really need “young” ginger to make the recipe because mine was tough and string.

This is my dragon roll. I used a star fruit sliced very thin and inserted it between pieces of sushi to look like fins. Of course, I’ve never seen a “real” dragon so I don’t know if they have fins or scales but I think he turned out pretty cute. I used my aspic cutters and cut shapes from a fresh beet to use as a plate garnish.

I will be watching some sushi rice making videos the next time I do sushi.

どうぞめしあがれ (enjoy your meal)

Hope you are up to this challenge one day soon.

November 14, 2009 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp

Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni Bites

I love anything made with pasta and these little tidbits make a fun appetizer.

I didn’t make this rigatoni pasta (I used one I bought in the store). I did make the filling and fill the pasta. BUT tomorrow I am teaching a technique class at Williams Sonoma, demonstrating our KA pasta press. I took our demo model home so I could try it out before the class so I could get the hang of making fresh pasta. It was so much easier than I thought it was going to be. In fact, I took it home on Wednesday and kept putting it off until late Saturday afternoon because I thought it might be complicated. I don’t know why I did that because I’m always up for a challenge.

I have the pasta roller attachment for my KA and have made rolled pasta but never thought of making pressed pasta shapes like rigatoni, spaghetti, macaroni, fusilli, or bucatini. Within just minutes, I had the dough made and was whipping out all of the above mentioned pasta shapes. It was really a lot of fun. Then I though, what the heck, let’s throw in some spinach and make spinach pasta. I was beautiful.

Three years ago we were in Italy and took a cooking class. There were six of us traveling together and our villa offered cooking classes in their restaurant. Our chef/owner was Fredrico and we made about six kinds of pasta that day. When we were using the roller for the flat pastas, it was like the I Love Lucy episode when she was on an assembly line for a candy company. Instead of cramming the candies in our mouths like Lucy and Ethel did, our strips of pasta kept getting longer and longer each time we took them through the machine (this was a BIG machine) and we had the pasta over our arms in folds. It was hilarious. That was one fun day of cooking.

October 3, 2009 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp

Feta and Sundried Tomato Torte

Sun-dried Tomato Torte with baguette slices mixes lots of flavorful ingredients to make a great party spread.

I’ve been catering for 20 years and still my favorite things to make are appetizers.

We just returned from a trip to New York and we had some wonderful meals at DBGB, Gramery Tavern, and Babbo. I learned a new word this trip — amuse bouche. This is a tiny appetizer that the chef sends out to tickle your taste buds. I’m going to be trying one that we had at Gramercy Tavern real soon — as soon as they send me the recipe :). The night at Gramercy Tavern we had a potato amuse bouche that was served as soon as we sat down and then by the time we finished our meal, we had three dessert amuse bouche and then our main desserts we ordered, then they bought us a little crumb cake each to take home for breakfast. A fantastic meal we shared with friends also celebrating their anniversary. Our 40th, their 25th.

This isn’t a tiny appetizer but I think your taste buds will enjoy it.

September 29, 2009 By Sherry

Appetizers/ Bread/ ColdApp/ HotApp

Garlic and Oregano Naan

Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey, my first naan!

The first time I ever heard the word naan I thought of the song “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye”. I had never tasted naan until Christmas last year. We were in Austin celebrating Christmas and awaiting the birth of our grandson. We did a lot of cooking while there for the week, but one night everyone wanted to go for Indian food.

Our kids have been trying to get us to try Indian food for years and we have always said, “we don’t like curry”. So, being Christmas and all, we gave in and went to the Clay Pit that night. We knew right away upon entering that we were going to like it. The aroma was unbelievable.

We had three kinds of naan that night. I don’t remember what they were or what we dipped in them but they were wonderful. I do remember having a coconut dish for my entree that was really good.

So this week I have decided to make Naan to go along with that, my fabulous White Bean Hummus which I like better than traditional hummus. I’ll be posting that recipe soon.

September 18, 2009 By Sherry

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