Morning Foods – Page 7 – Rosemary and the Goat

Duck Confit Hash

I’m using the last of my duck confit; time to make some more I guess.

For Father’s day this year I decided to do a special dish for my husband who has been doing more than his share of the work around here for the last year.

I have talked about duck confit in the past and have told you how to make it so I’m hoping someone out there has tried it and maybe has one leg quarter stashed away in the refrigerator. I just happened to have a leg and thigh left over in a jar, covered in duck fat and just waiting to be used. There are still two packages in my freezer I need to make some more confit because there is a pear salad with crispy duck that I want to make this summer.

All hash has potatoes in it but I decided to use the small purple fingerling, regular fingerling and tiny red new potatoes. This recipe was so easy to throw together and if you want to practice your egg poaching skills, this is the perfect recipe to try it on. My poached eggs could have been cooked less by about 15-20 seconds.

July 1, 2013 By Sherry

Fruit Dishes/ Morning Foods/ Salads

Dragon Fruit Salad

Beautiful and unusual fruit.

How often do you go out of your comfort zone? I’m doing it more lately and on a recent trip to Central Market in Houston I was eyeing some of the fruits that were being sampled. I have to admit I had never tasted the Rambutan, Dragon fruit or Feijoa and I don’t think I have ever laid eyes on them either.

Typically my fruit salads start with bananas, strawberries, melon, kiwi and maybe apples. But today I’m going way out of my comfort zone and adding three new fruits to my repertoire of fruits.

When the man handing out samples of the rambutan, cut it open, my first thought was “hey, this looks like an eye ball” but it has a seed in the center. My first thought of the Feijoa when I opened it was that the center kind of looked like bone marrow. Now, those aren’t very appetizing descriptions of some new fruits I want you to try so I guess I should just be quite about what I thought the fruits looked like. When I opened the dragon fruit, I did think it was beautiful; white flesh full of hundreds of black tiny seeds. And, what can I say about a star fruit, it looks like a star. I once used the star fruit when I made a dragon sushi roll and I cut the star fruit in thin slices and put it in between the sushi pieces to look like scales, very pretty.

So, I’m taking rambutan, feijoa, dragon fruit, kiwi, strawberries, star fruit, a little lime and honey and coconut white balsamic vinegar and making a fruit salad with some new acquaintances.

Dragon fruit — Dragon fruit is a member of the cactus family and is football shaped and has a beautiful pink/red thick skin. There are three varieties, red, white and yellow flesh with greenish petals sticking out here and there and they have hundreds if not millions of black seeds and this fruit tends to be enhanced in flavor when mixed with other fruits. This fruit is very common in Asia. And here’s an interesting bit of information. Dragon Fruits help to protect the environment because they absorb carbon dioxide at nighttime, and then release oxygen to purify the air. Dragon Fruit contain no cholesterol, saturated fat or trans fat. Cross between a kiwi and watermelon.

June 11, 2013 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods/ Muffins

The Best Blueberry Muffins

The vote is in and these are the best blueberry muffins!

Don’t these make you want to grab one and get a cup of tea/coffee or milk.

I always thought I had the BEST blueberry muffin recipe and in fact, in a cookbook that my sister and I put together, that is exactly what I named my recipe — The Best Blueberry Muffins.

If you love blueberry muffins and you think you have a recipe that is wonderful, I would like to hear from you and try your recipe. Like I said I always thought I had the best muffin recipe for those freshly picked blueberries I gather each year. But this recipe is from a friend, Kay, in Missouri (my sister’s husband’s cousin) and my sister had been telling me recently that this was the best recipe and that her husband, Gary, said they were the best he ever had.

Well, I have a freezer full of blueberries from last summer’s harvest and I’ve decided if I’m never picking blueberries again, I need to use up the ones I have in the freezer. For some reason they have a tough skin, I think, when they are thawed and they are not washed before freezing so I know that’s not the problem; but they are wonderful in muffins. Anyway, my berry picking this year will just be blackberries and maybe strawberries.

These muffins freezer beautifully and after thawing and few seconds in the microwave will give you a muffin that taste straight out of the oven.

I made a double recipe of these muffins and put them in a cute wire farm basket and took to craft circle of 50 or so ladies. They were gone before lunch.

May 17, 2013 By Sherry

Bread/ Breads/Biscuits/ Morning Foods

Chive, Dill and Cheddar Biscuits

Dreaming of biscuits!

At 6:00 this morning I woke up with the idea of making a new flavored biscuit. Shouldn’t there be something else I’m thinking about the first thing in the morning; like are my knees going to bend this morning? or that pile of laundry that’s staring at me in the laundry room, or what’s for dinner tonight or at least something more profound than a BISCUIT. But what can I say….

Maybe I woke up thinking of this biscuit because I spent so much time yesterday entering all my herbs in a garden app on my iPhone. I spent a couple of hours walking through my yard photographing newly planted flowers — morning glories, delphiniums, snap dragons, hummingbird bush, and herbs; the list goes on and on.

Recently we relocated my herb garden from one side of the yard to up next to our house where I had bat face growing for the last 4-5 years. It was time for it to give up this prime, sunny location to some struggling herbs that were not thriving in their old home.

My husband has recently gone pot crazy and now we have 92 pots in our back yard (I counted them twice). On his way to a fishing trip a few weeks ago he and a friend stopped at Marshall Pottery in Marshall, Texas and came back with 7 pots for $100. (Now that was worth the trip just for the pots and he actually caught his limit of white bass also.) I like having my herbs in pots and now I have a huge assortment of potted herbs even closer to my kitchen than they were and they are loving their new spot in the yard.

This biscuit is getting gussied up with some dill and chives from my herb garden and a little grated white cheddar really compliments this biscuit. They are delicious for breakfast and would probably go great with a country style dinner; and there’s hardly a bread recipe that’s quicker to make than homemade biscuits.

April 18, 2013 By Sherry

Appetizers/ HotApp/ Morning Foods/ Pork

Rosemary Brown Sugar Bacon Twist

Need something special for your brunch? Only three ingredients!

This is by far the easiest recipe I have ever made (Rosemary and The Goat comes in second.) with the fewest ingredients.Go figure, I use to say I like recipes with lots of ingredients which yield lots of taste and flavors; but this recipe just goes to show you that great things come from small beginnings.

Do you know there are entire blogs that are devoted to bacon. Is there anything better than the smell of bacon and the sizzling sound of it cooking to make you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Did you know there are bacon flavored beers, vodkas, candy bars with bacon bits, chocolate covered bacon (now that sounds good), bacon toothpaste (that sounds like a little too much bacon even for me), bacon mayonnaise, and the list goes on and on and on.

When it comes to bacon I will try just about anything that has the cured meat as one of the ingredients. Turkey bacon is not a favorite of mine. If you can find uncured bacon, then you have pork belly and I think this is even better than bacon. Fry it up, salt it because it hasn’t been cured and it is the Cinderella of bacon. Canada has Canadian Bacon, Pancetta is Italy’s version of bacon, all the dieters have turkey bacon (they can keep it), and the Irish have back bacon.

Bacon has such an addictive taste; it is hard to just eat one piece, kind of like potato chips. Have you tried caramel popcorn with bacon added at the last stirring; it’s great.

I’ve seen lots of bacon twist recipes and they all have the brown sugar; but most of the recipes have cinnamon and other sweet type spices. I decided to use the rosemary because I think it pairs nicely with the brown sugar and the bacon. Now these would really be good with a glass of wine or beer or just for your weekend brunch.

One more thing before I get on to the recipe; my son, Paul, made a compound bacon butter at Christmas to put on top of our steaks. I’ve been thinking of doing a blog on different compound butters that can be made and kept in the freezer; so stay tuned because that may be coming in the near future.

February 2, 2013 By Sherry

Breads/Biscuits/ Morning Foods/ Pastries

Bacon Belgian Waffles

What’s better than the smell of bacon wafting in air?

Someone told me once that sometimes in the bakery section of supermarkets they will fry bacon just so it will get people’s taste buds going. Makes sense to me. It works every time my husband gets up before me which is ALWAYS and if he fries bacon you better believe I will get out of bed and make my way to the kitchen to find that big pile of crispy bacon; sometimes it is pork belly which is even better than bacon.

So, on to the waffle story. If I have told this story before, please forgive me; maybe all that anesthesia went to my head. Just blame it on the knees and my inability to get them back in working order. Anyway, my mother would often do waffles for Sunday night supper since we usually had a big Sunday lunch. Sometimes she would make just plain waffles and we would cut a big slab of ice cream and put between two hot off the waffle iron waffles and eat it with a fork as the ice cream ran all over the plate faster than you could sop it up with a waffle piece.

The other thing my mother would do was to put raw bacon across the waffle batter before shutting the lid of the waffle iron. There would only be one piece of bacon across every two waffles so that isn’t really all that much bacon; and certainly not as much as you would gobble up as it cooled and got crispy out of the frying pan. Back when I was doing technique classes at Williams Sonoma and we were demoing the All-Clad waffle iron. I told the group about the waffle story. A year later one of the the attendees (a UPS lady) came in and said ” you know since you told me about putting the bacon on the waffles” my family won’t eat them any other way. So if you can’t trust a UPS lady, who can you trust. Try them you will like them.

I finally broke an old waffle iron I had had since we were married. I loved that waffle iron because you could reverse the plates and have a griddle on one side and waffles on the other. I broke down and bought an All-Clad Belgian maker (4 squares) and have made waffles several times with the bacon. If you like bacon, fry some extra to go on the side.

December 31, 2012 By Sherry

Appetizers/ ColdApp/ Garnish/ Jams & Marmalades/ Morning Foods

Tangerine Kumquat Marmalade

Beautiful color marmalade.

Delicious scones and great marmalade.

I decided to do the duck appetizer over the holidays and wanted to try Thomas Keller’s marmalade recipe. You’re have to wait until Christmas for the duck appetizer but for now, here’s the Tangerine Kumquat Marmalade recipe.

Recently I found some fantastic little (or big) Weck brand jars at one of our local gourmet grocery shops. I love them, they have rubber rings and instead of the normal screw tops, they have clips that hold down the lids; so retro looking. You can find these online at Amazon, Crate and Barrel, or to to www.weck.com to order them.

I have never been a toast and jelly kind of person. Strawberry jam, even though it isn’t a favorite of mine, is a must for freshly baked Cream Scones. All kids and adults probably love peanut butter and jelly. Not me. I’m strictly a peanut butter and bread type of person.

A couple of years ago I did make some wonderful peach preserves. Aren’t preserves so much better than jelly anyway; you get those bits of fruit and rind that give it so much more intense flavor. Some habanero peppers even got slipped into a few jars of the peach preserves for some extra kick and was fantastic on top of different types of cheeses.

I just had to try some scones with this jam but you can try it on any type of bread, put it on a cheese or even incorporate it into some recipe. A beautiful marmalade that can have so many uses.

If you are interested in the difference between a marmalade, preserves, jelly, jam, look here.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: If you haven’t already tried this Sugar Plum Cake you need to make it for the Christmas holidays. It’s the best and I’m sure your family will love it. If you make it and like it, please leave a comment at the bottom of that page.

December 21, 2012 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods/ Scones

Bacon, Cheddar and Chive Scones

I could live on bread alone. Could you?

So today, he gets a treat for breakfast and that’s going to be these bacon and cheddar scones.

Most people think of scones as being sweet, but a savory scone is just as delicious. I saw this recipe awhile back on King Arthur flour’s website and just knew that I would be making these for a very special breakfast; maybe some scrambled eggs, some good stone ground grits and a big bowl of milk gravy to go with them.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: EGGS AND PESTO STUFFED TOMATOES has been one of my favorite new breakfast dishes. Hope you will give it a try.

Such simple ingredients. You probably have these in your refrigerator.

I like to cut my bacon in 1″ pieces to fry then all you have to do is stir and no turning required.

Everything chopped up and ready to go into the dough.

My preferred method of cutting in the butter is to use my fingers.

You can either pat this out to a 7-8″ circle and cut in wedges or use a 2″ ring cutter and cut into circles.

These were delicious and the milk gravy was the best. I bought that cute little skillet in France.

Bacon Cheddar and Chive Scones

Ingredients

2 c. King Arthur all purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. baking powder
2 tsp. sugar
4 Tbsp. cold butter
1 c. finely grated cheddar cheese
1/3 c. snipped fresh slice or diced scallion tops green part only
1/2 lb. bacon cooked, cooled, and crumbled, about 1 cup
3/4 c. + 2 Tbsp. heavy cream

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 425°. Lightly grease a baking sheet, or line it with parchment.
Whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar
Work the butter into the flour until the mixture is unevenly crumbled with some of the butter remaining in large pieces.
Mix in the cheese, chives (onion) and bacon until evenly distributed.
Add 3/4 cup of the cream, stirring to combine. Try squeezing the dough together if it's crumbly and won't hang together or if there are crumbs remaining in the bottom of the bowl, add cream until the dough comes together. Transfer the shaggy dough to a well floured work surface.
Pat the dough into a smooth 7" disk about 3/4" thick. Transfer the disk to the prepared baking sheet.
Use a knife or bench knife to cut the disk into 8 wedges, spreading the wedges apart a bit on the pan.
Brush the scones with a bit of cream; this well help their crust brown.
Bake the scones for 22 to 24 minutes until they are golden brown. Remove them from the oven, and cool right on the pan. Serve warm, or at room temperature.
Yield 8 large scones.
Tip: If you want to make these and freeze, after you cut them, put them on a cookie sheet and freeze. When firm enough to wrap, wrap individually and put in a ziploc bag. When you're ready to bake, remove the scones, place on a baking sheet, brush with cream and let thaw about 10-15 minutes then bake in preheated 425° oven for 35-40 minutes until golden brown.
**Note: I added maybe an extra tablespoon or two of the cream as it was still a bit crumbly and needed the additional cream to come together. I also used the green onion stems instead of the chives. Either one would work great.

July 31, 2012 By Sherry

Dessert/ Fruit Dishes

Fruit Salsa with Cinnamon Tortilla Chips

Fruit explosion!

Who doesn’t love chips and salsa at a party? I think it is kind of un-American to turn up your nose at probably one of our first appetizers we ever learned to make whether it is guacamole, onion dip (even the packaged type) or anything you throw together with a sour cream or mayonnaise base. And this little fruit salsa just explodes in your mouth with taste; kind of like the best bite of fruit cobbler you put in your mouth and you don’t even need a recipe.

IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR AGAIN; The time when I drag myself to the blueberry and blackberry patch with the possibility of snake bite, mosquito bites, sunburn, pricked fingers from the throned berries, heat stroke, and dehydration and force myself to pick berries so I can make some preserves and then put the remainder of the berries in the freezer (it better not go out again and spoil my fruit).

I was ready this year and decided to drag myself off the couch and quit complaining about my knees (by this time I should be two days into one new knee) and get out and do something. The first trip was to the blackberry patch. So, I took a tumbler of water (that dumped before I picked a half a pail of berries), hung my iPhone around my neck, put on earphones, set it to play my favorite soundtrack from the movie French Kiss, and donned my big floppy hat and set out down the patch with two buckets in hand. So the first hour I picked 10 lbs and went back for two more buckets which I filled in 45 minutes. $65 later, I have enough berries to last awhile.

My second trip was to the blueberry fields of Moorhead Blueberry Farm. They were the first blueberry farm in Texas according to their website. I did not beat everyone there the day I went even though I was there at 7:00 a.m. By the time I left, there were at least 100 berry picker’s cars along the road and more coming in. This was a fun morning. I was by myself and as I picked berries (there were gazillions) I could hear cries from all over the fields from parents who had taken their children — “watch out for the poison ivy”, “only pick the dark blue ones”, “don’t throw them in the bucket”, “WHERE ARE YOU”, and AWWWWWWW from the ones that were probably too little to take on this outing. I was glad to be in my own little world with my headphones and music.

June 29, 2012 By Sherry

Bread/ Muffins

Honey Jalapeño Cornbread

Cornbread meets a plate of veal sweetbreads.

And you thought you knew cornbread.

Cornbread is a quick bread made with cornmeal, flour and some leavening and there are so many types of cornbread that come from soul food country in the south to a sweet cornbread from Texas. Two things I was disappointed in when we moved to Texas were the BBQ sauce (not hot but sweet) and the cornbread (not course in texture but more sweet and cake like).

I’m sure there are just as many ways to use/eat cornbread as there are recipes out there. My grandfather use to crumbled up cornbread into a big stemmed glass full of full fat cultured buttermilk that would go klug, klug when it was poured because it was that clabbered. And what would our thanksgiving dressing be without cornbread for your stuffing mixture; cornbread salad is a wonderful salad for the summer that is layered with beans, lettuce and other ingredients; and I have even used thin slices of cornbread cut in triangles as a base for an appetizer using smoked pork tenderloin and then topped with mango salsa.

Just as there are a million recipes and uses for cornbread there are just as many shapes it can be bake; in an iron skillet, muffins, corn sticks, fried in a skillet, spoon bread, cactus shaped, and I even have an iron skillet that is divided into individual wedges. I also have these tiny loaf pans that are 1″x3″ which make adorable (if you can say that about cornbread) little loaves.

To me there’s nothing better with cornbread than a big bowl of white beans with a spoon of chow chow on the side. But, on a recent trip to Chicago we had dinner at Leopold’s, which is a Belgian food inspired restaurant. We had a wonderful honey cornbread to go with some fried veal sweetbreads (thymus or pancreas glands) served with a mustard gravy and that was the cornbread that inspired me to come up withethics recipe.

Whether you are having a bowl of beans, soup, a vegetarian meal or just about anything you set before you to eat, a good piece of this cornbread in my opinion would be the finishing touch to your meal.

June 21, 2012 By Sherry

Morning Foods/ Side dish/ Vegetables

Parmesan Baked Tomatoes

Campari — The tomato lover’s tomato.

Campari tomatoes are one of my favorite types of tomatoes. They are known for their juiciness and extraordinarily sweet taste and low acidity. They are deep red, bigger than a cherry tomato and so cute to boot. As baby bear said, Not too big, not to little, but just right.

Brunch for my daughter’s birthday on Memorial day consisted of ham, bacon and mushroom quiche, tiny cinnamon rolls, these Baked Parmesan Tomatoes, and some pork belly that was fried up by my husband and of course a bunch of mimosas.

These tomatoes are great to add into any menu. I’ve never been accused of not having enough food but I like to cook and I’m not force feeding anyone. Guest can always pick and choose what they want to eat with no retribution from me not even a hurt feeling or two.

It does take me awhile to get over failures. I tend to dwell on something for days (don’t know why) if it doesn’t turn out like I expected. I think I am far, far from a perfectionist but when someone doesn’t like a recipe I know I should have tried it before serving the dish. I feel like if I read a recipe and know the ingredients the end results will be good. Anyone that knows me is aware that I’m not a taster. Never tasted raw cookie dough, can you believe that? All the years of catering did not change that. Now if I was making something chocolate I would probably taste it (after it is cooked, of course) but I guess I feel like if I like the ingredients then I don’t need to be picking on it the whole time taste testing it. Sometimes I do not hit the nail on the head with a recipe and it may need to be tweaked at another time but most of the time I think I do pretty well without sticking my fingers in the pot.

June 13, 2012 By Sherry

Cake/ Coffee Cakes/ Dessert

Fresh Peach and Raspberry Cake

Why can’t I leave a recipe alone?

Thanks Ina (Garten) for this recipe; and I decided to add in some raspberries, hope you don’t mind.

We got home from a weekend trip to Austin of seeing the kids and grandkids and as always the first thing I do is to flip on the computer. I don’t know what I was looking for but, there staring me in the face is Ina Garten’s Fresh Peach Cake.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this before and I will probably mention it at least a gazillion times before I can let it go, but while we were in France our freezer shut off for no apparent reason and one of the things I lost was all the summer fruit I had picked (or bought) last summer and put up for future use.

If riding three hours back from Austin wasn’t enough work for the day, I decided to clean out the bottom freezer of my inside refrigerator. Lo and behold I found a package of my peaches and raspberries that were saved from that ghastly day everything decided to die in my outside freezer.

So, recipe – fruit — MAKE CAKE. I did Ina’s recipe exactly (I guess not exactly) but decided to use the raspberries along with the peaches; I do love the combination of those two fruits and it was delicious and beautiful.

I’m serving this tonight for dessert with a soup that I threw together with a bunch of other stuff I cleaned out of the freezer. The soup may not be worth keeping around for leftovers, but I know the cake will be delicious and hey, I still have some of that Blue Bell Homade vanilla ice cream that is waiting around for someone to eat it.

June 1, 2012 By Sherry

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