A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Happy Birthday, Sis

Today is my baby sister's 37th birthday. I'm not sure if the 37 depresses her more or me more by way of the fact she's my little sister.

But aside from realizing we're sliding into middle age, her birthday is a wonderful thing. The girls had asked me a few months back if I'd help them make a cake for their mom. We decided to make it a full out lunch party.  So Jordan has been quietly arranging behind the scenes for Suzanne's boyfriend, Andrew, to make sure Suzanne was at my house at 11:30am yesterday for lunch/party.

I picked up the girls Wednesday night after I got off work at 11pm so we'd be together first thing in the morning. Well, we meant to get up early but that didn't exactly happen. Sydney passed out fairly early considering it was almost midnight before we got home, Jordan got caught up in a movie, and my nose was deep in the new Harry Potter book (fabulous!). So it was more like 10am before we were up and cooking.  Did I mention they were coming for lunch at 11:30am?

Thankfully, the cake layers were already baked. So while the Paula Deen's French Toast casserole was in the oven, the girls and I made buttercream and the they did it all.

I think they did a fantastic job. The cake is a layer of coconut sandwiched in between two layers of lemon with lemon buttercream and deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep purple fondant flowers and green leaves.

So we weren't awake yet and didn't get pics of the casserole but I do have the recipe after the jump. It was pretty popular. I'd never made anything quite like that before but it's a nice brunch dish.  We put the casserole together the night before so it was easy to slip it into the oven the next morning while we were still in our jammies.  The girls also served fresh cantalope and sausage links that they baked in the oven.

 

From bottom left:  Ann, Aunt Miranda, me, Sydney, Jordan, Andrew, and the birthday girl: Suzanne.

We all went in together and got Suzanne a family-sized crockpot that she's been needing for a while. She has a crockpot but it's too small. We knew the bigger one was a hit when Jordan said "Yay! Now when we have beans we can have ham TOO! And when we have roast we can put vegetables in with it!"

So what did I do after they left?  I was a big wuss and collapsed into the chair with an ice pack on my knee for most of the afternoon and read Harry Potter.

Yesterday was a hard-knock life but today it's back to the grind.

My Job Interview

Pay Scales web site, "True tales of working people who do what they love and love what they do", contacted me through this blog for an interview about Respiratory Therapy.  Wow, you never know where blogging will lead, do you?

To read the interview, click HERE.

Take a Peek at my Cookbooks

Everyone eventually shows their cookbook collection so today I'm showing mine, along with my messy "someday" and "haven't had time to make up recipe cards" papers shoved in the side in the left hand corner of the top shelf.  The bookcase stands on a wall dividing our open plan kitchen/hearth dining room.  On the top is the flag from Gene's father's funeral for serving in World War II.

The top row has the messy shoved in sheets of paper, a small photo album where I keep all my cake recipe cards from the business, my wooden recipe box I won for placing in one of the Newman's Own contests, Gene's mother's recipe box, and the cookbooks I use the most (right to left):  The New Professional Chef textbook, Baking Illustrated, The New Best Recipe, The Cake Bible, Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread (for any of you who have that one look on the acknowledgements page, my name is there, I worked at DHH when Crescent published that one), The Passionate Vegetarian, Grill it, Paula Deen, Food & Wine Yearbook, The Whole Grain Cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa, and the Carriage Park Preventive Health Care cookbook from The Doctor's Kitchen (no longer open) where I wrote the original menu and consulted on setting up the kitchen.

The second shelf has a little bit of everyone:  on the far left a notebook of my mother's recipes, Nigella Lawson, the local Junior League cookbook: Sassafrass, Farmhouse cookbook, The White House cookbook, a couple of professional pastry volumes, and a Williams Sonoma set.

The bottom shelf is all of my mother's Wilton Yearbooks dating back to the mid-70's, and the middle shelves are several years' worth of Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and assorted cake decorating and newstand cooking magazines.

Gene says I have waaaaaaaaaaaay too many cookbooks.  I laugh and know he has no clue how many cookbooks a lot of my foodie friends own.  I will say that since I tend to make up my own recipes as I go along and since the advent of the internet and all the wonderful recipe databases, I don't linger over cookbooks as much as I used to. In a way it makes me treasure the ones I do buy even more for being able to hold them in my hands and leaf through their pages.

Lunchbox Looky-loos

I think a lot of us have found that taking a lunch saves us from the perils of the cafeteria, both bad food and bad choices. Yesterday was a good proof of that for me.  For this last stretch of work, on the days I took my lunch to work I was able to get in my fruits and vegetables and eat good sources of protein while the one day, yesterday, I didn't pack a lunch and ended up with a ham sandwich. Not that that part was bad but a croissant? Why didn't my mouth say "wheat bread, please"?  Instead I said "mayo, yes please.". Grrrrr...  And then I had macaroni and cheese on top of it. Grrrr...

But on the other days I'm glad to say this is what I ate:

Chicken Finger wrap, bing cherries, sharp cheddar cheese, cucumber sticks, baby carrots.

The wrap looked like this:

Looks like fish sticks, doesn't it? It's chicken fingers. I didn't like using the ones with breading but I was in a hurry and I'd run out of breadless tenders. Next time I'll put the tomato and lettuce in separte baggie and put it together at work.  The tomatoes made it a little soggy but other than that it was good.  From bottom up, the layers are:  light cream cheese, Harry & David onion pepper chutney, lettuce, cherry tomatoes halved, and chicken fingers.

Small tuna, sharp cheddar, melba toast, raisins, zuchini sticks.

The All Rose Wedding Cake

This is another wedding cake from when I had the business.  One of the things I loved about this was that the couple had asmaller reception held in an art gallery downtown. One of my favorite galleries, actually, where there were pieces I wanted badly, like a three foot high sculpted calla lily glazed in a earthy mix of browns and greens designed to look like burnished copper with verdigris.  I loved both the use of color that wasn't traditional for the lily and that the artist used the medium in a way that made my eyes go wide when I realized that what I thought I was looking at from across the room wasn't what it was at all. 

This cake was one of my favorites because it was a winter wedding with the color scheme of red and white, my personal favorite color is red, with red roses and holly with berries.  The photo looks okay but in real life it was extremely attractive against the brick wall.  I would have thought the reds would clash but it was the opposite. The brick background set off the vividness of the white buttercream and the true red of the roses.

I took a beating price-wise on this cake because there were so many gumpaste roses.  The couple did pay me for a few dozen but at the time I just kept adding them in until I got the look we all REALLY wanted.

Not everyone thinks of cake decorating as artistry but I do.  Other than the challenge of completion, I never really enjoyed just repeating a design from a Wilton book or a magazine where people want every single flower and border to be exactly the same in color and placement. That's yet another reason why I no longer have the business and only bake for family.  With family, they're happy to get (within their theme) what I decide to create for them and they know I'm in my element when I have a free hand.  I remember that this couple said only that they wanted a no pillar construction, no plastic bride and groom, and lots of red roses in a simple design. That's the way I like it too.  The design seems common now but for twelve years ago in this Midwestern town, it was very progressive. 

Every time I walk by that gallery at the corner of Walnut and South, I smile and hope those folks are still married and happy.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: 16 Pictures Speak Louder than a Thousand Words

Time Magazine in partnership with CNN has posted a photo essay called:

What the World Eats 

Everybody needs to look at this.  I found it very compelling.  One of the things I noticed right off was something we already knew but this really underlines the fact:  The more modern the country the more boxed/bottled/canned/processed foods there were and the more fast food containers on the table. The less modern the country, the more vegetables and whole grains there are on the table.  I was also struck by the differences in the amount of food and it doesn't always correspond with the number of people in the family.

Click HERE for the link to "What the World Eats".

This is an example of a one of the families in the essay from California. Sure looks pretty typically American, as in mine and my friends' tables,  to me.  But there were also a lot of boxes, bottles, and cans on the tables of the families from Great Britain, Germany, and Italy.  Very interesting. Less bottles/boxes/cans on the tables of the folks from Egypt, Chad, Bhutan, for example.

At the end of that photo essay you can connect to another photo essay called "What Makes You Eat More Food" which is also a good reminder of how much our senses of sight, smell, and time influence our eating patterns.

Click HERE for that direct link to "What Makes You Eat More Food".

And what am I eating right now this morning for breakfast as I type this entry?

Shredded wheat cereal out of a box with 1% milk and a spoon of white granulated sugar.  And a 12 oz can of Coke.

Could be worse.  Could also be better.  The photo essays made me more aware of my choice. Too bad I didn't read the essay before I put the sugar on my cereal and popped the top on that can. I might have chosen differently.

The Biggest Loser--the Work Version Update:

I've currently lost .7 % of my body weight.  Remember my goal is at least 10% by Halloween. I hate that it's not a round 1% but .7% still translates into a loss.  Hey, maybe I should drop those Cokes for breakfast, duh. :-)  Click HERE for the original post about my work buddies and our diet contest.

Sweet and Sour Meatballs over Fried Rice

I served these last week when Ann and Aunt Miranda came over to lunch before we went to see Evan Almighty. Good movie, by the way. Family oriented, feel good, just one of those you walk out in a good mood on.  Of course, when we went in the theater the skies were clear. We came out to thunder and rain. Hmmm...and the ark is parked where?

Sweet and Sour Meatballs is one of my standard "go to" recipes, you know what I mean? It's one of Gene's favorites, it's the one people always ask me for the recipe at potlucks, etc.  I don't remember where the original recipe came from, I think I clipped it out of a magazine, but I've been making it for 20 years and it's gone through so many permutations scribbled on the recipe card that I pretty much claim it as my own these days.

Loaded with ginger in both the meatballs and rice, Sweet & Sour Meatballs is my addition to Weekend Herb Blogging this week, created by Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen and hosted this week by Chris of Mele Cotte.  Stop by later tonight for the weekly herbalicious round up!

Happy 4th of July! Panna Cotta

Red, White, and Blue. That's the dessert color theme of the day.  Happy Independence Day, y'all!

But I tell you what. I wasn't in the mood to make a flag cake. No offense to flag cake makers of flag cakes. I just have made a lot of them over the years, especially when I had the cake business and I wanted to try something new, something I thought might be...gasp...hard.  Well I was right about "new", wrong about "hard".

Why is it that there are certain dishes we buy in restaurants all the time but hesitate to make at home because we think, for no good reason, they might be difficult or time-consuming to make?  I dunno either. 

Panna cotta was one of those dishes for me.  Yep. Panna cotta. I'd almost feel guilty about that but Aunt Miranda said the same thing, that she'd been wanting to do it for years but just hadn't gotten around to "girding up her loins", so to speak.

I finally did try it, and guess what? it's EASY!  So easy that it's going to be a long time before I made homemade pudding or flan again, let me tell you. Okay, at least for the summer. This dessert is perfect for summer because you don't have to turn the oven on. The only "cooking" is heating up the milk with the gelatin to make the gelatin set. The rest of the work is straining for a smooth product and refrigerating. If I can handle it, anybody can. 

For this first go 'round with the recipe, I followed instructions completely including the cream.  Next time I'm going to play with it and see what happens if I sub fat free half and half just to cut the sat fat. I'll let you know how that turns out.  In the meantime, this is the perfect hot summer day dessert: cold, creamy, mucho vanilla, and topped with triple berry coulis and fresh berries.  It even feels righteous somehow.

Everyone have a wonderful celebration today!

My first Run in with Truffles

Who knew that these four simple ingredients could serve up a homey, comforting, light meal?  I do now. 

Last night Gene was out helping a friend move a bunch of furniture so  I was left on my own for dinner.  Just yesterday morning I was saying I'm determined to get back into fresh meals packed with nutrition most of the time and away from grabbing something drive-through or take-out.  Last night was the first challenge of my new resolve/rededication.  I chose a simple pasta over a burger and I'm so glad I did.

The four ingredients above complimented each other perfectly.  I tossed the warm pasta that I had boiled in salted water with a splash of chicken stock with a couple of Tbsp of omega-3 loaded walnut oil and a few drops of truffle juice.  Then I re-seasoned the pasta with the very finely ground and light Maine lemon salt.  At that point I could have stopped. I couldn't wait to dig in because the smell, woodsy and citrussy, made it an act of willpower to finish grating a little truffle and asiago on top, let alone taking the time to photograph the dish. But even with "all that", once the pasta was cooked, the whole dish took less than five minutes to put together.

You know what really surprised me?  As light and subtle as that pasta was I ate less than half (but all of the truffle bits) and was well-satiated for the evening.  I've never had truffles before so I have nothing to compare this too, but what I ate I really liked and the walnut oil set it off well.  The only word I can use to describe the taste is woodsy.  Sort of along the mushroom line but not exactly, something primordially satisfying to the senses.

My dish is this week's entry in Ruth's, of Once Upon a Feast's, weekly event Presto Pasta Nights.  Run by her site later in the week for more great pasta ideas for the week.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: The Mediterranean or Omega Diet

Fresh Cherry/Strawberry bread with low fat Cardomom/Honey Cream Cheese

At work, Ashley has gotten about a dozen of us together to play The Biggest Loser-The Work Version where everyone is measured by percent body weight lost, minimum 10%, and the reward is not only looser jeans but everyone's throwing in $1/week. The contest runs from yesterday through Halloween, 18 weeks.  Nice time frame to really accomplish some health changes and a nice little pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for someone.  We're focusing on the 10% since, being in the medical field, we're all aware of the studies that have shown that for folks who have weight to lose, even a 10% change can reap medical benefits in lowered blood pressure, lowered cholesterol, etc. 

I'm not going on any weird diet, just going to refine what I'm doing now, cut out the junk, and get back into a solid exercise plan.  For years, since Gene's heart attack, I've focused on excising transfats from our diet and focused on more veggies and complex carbs, but we've gotten lax.  The truth is the biggest bulk of eating right is about what you allow yourself to buy at the grocery and how many times you take the time to cook even when it's easier to run through a drive through.  I've gotten bad about being lazy with cooking.  I tend to forget that simple can be better for you, and as much or less trouble than getting in the car to pick-up take-out.

The basic rules of the Mediterranean, or Omega Diet**, are mostly what we already know:

• Eat foods rich in Omega-3 Fatty acids such as fatty fish (salmon, tuna, trout, mackerel), walnuts, canola oil, flaxseeds, and green leafy vegetables.
• Use monounsaturated oils such as olive and canola oil, expeller pressed (not heat processed).
• Eat seven or more fruit and vegetable servings every day.
• Eat more vegetable proteins: beans, peas, and nuts.
• Choose lean meats and low-fat dairy items over high fat meat and full fat dairy products.
• Avoid transfats:  basically anything in a box at the grocery, from the bakery, or is ordered at a drive-thru window.

**From The Omega Diet by Dr. Artemis Simopoulos and Jo Robinson.

Getting back into the Mediterranean routine, I purchased expeller-pressed canola and walnut oils at The Cheddar BLOCK on Saturday to make salad dressings (no way to get that many veggie servings in without making more salad meals), and I've stocked our crisper with veggies and berries, and have refilled the "fruit bowl" with apples, peaches, plums for the moment.

Last night we had steamed cod (not fatty fish but still, fish) and salads for dinner.  As a side at lunch the other day I made fresh cherry/strawberry bread with low-fat cardamom/honey cream cheese, a nice way to combine a whole grain with a fruit serving.  I think the couple of years I was in school, I just got out of the habit of thinking fresh and common sense wholesome to the point where it became more of a treat than a way of eating generally most of the time.  After school, I just didn't get myself back into the habit of making better choices but this is an excellent chance to recommit to both cooking more with our health foremost in mind and getting back into a better exercise frame of mind too. 

At work, we all get exercise, I have learned that by being off with my knee the last couple of months and how easy it was to put on ten pounds from the lack of exercise. When I first left school, I wore a pedometer for about a month at the hospital and we average about five miles a day on our feet.  But it's not the same as that 30 minute walk around the track and getting some resistance work in.  For me, because of my knee I'll have to go a little more slowly with the cardio but I'm even more motivated to getting back to strengthening the muscles around my knees, and my back, all for the sake of staying healthy on the job and not being out with another injury.

Losing a chunk of weight and winning that almost $200 bucks would be the cherry (pun intended) on top.