Category Archives: Food

Here’s a fun little thing I did on a recent day off from work, while stricken with that nasty stomach flu and on a strict BRAT diet of bananas, rice, applesauce and toast: I watched the Food Network. My favorite was the ‘Barefoot Contessa.’ Watching Ina Garten and her husband Jeffrey share a picnic of California BLTs (with avocado, thank you) on the docks of Montauk while waiting for Andy to get back with Gatorade from the local Price Chopper was my number one highlight. Seeing her tell Jeffrey that she was “ready to rock and roll,” and then calling him “babe” was a close second. They were laughing at me, I know it.

After the Contessa, that buffoon Paula Deen had a kid from the Disney channel on (Kenton Duty). Could the nightmare get any worse? Yes, because the precocious fuck soon began singing a song he wrote for her. Accompanied by himself on the guitar.

[Sigh] – I’m going back to my banana.

I thought our Mexican weekend had ended, but once in a while you extend the fun into Sunday morning. JoAnn usually does a big breakfast at some point during her visits, but we had done so much already, it didn’t look likely. However, I had some purple potatoes that needed to be used, so I popped them in some olive oil and salt and pepper, roasting them to a tender crisp. I asked Andy, half-jokingly, to prepare us a few Mexican omelettes, not expecting him to do so. JoAnn and I sat in the living room while the potatoes cooked.

To our surprise and delicious delight, Andy had scraped together the leftover vegetables from the previous eve’s fajitas, and conjured a perfect Mexican omelette, with a side of purple potatoes and a piece of jalapeno cornbread. It was the perfect ending to a pretty perfect weekend. To ease the pain of her leaving, we made plans for the next rendezvous, and a date for the Summer of Love 60’s Party. It helps to look forward to something, especially if the summer is involved.

Like so many other tidbits of integral knowledge, I first heard of Harvey Wallbanger from an episode of ‘The Golden Girls.’ (There is much I have learned solely through Golden Girl episodes). In this one, Sophia’s friend was waiting for her at a bar and was drinking a Harvey Wallbanger. “Seeing a lot of Mr. Wallbanger lately, aren’t you?” Years later, for our most recent holiday party in fact, my friend Scott made a Harvey Wallbanger cake, and suddenly I was sold. Making use of that bastion of 70’s liqueur – Galliano – some vodka, and fresh orange juice, this is one sweet and moist cake. I liked Scott’s version enough to try it on my own, and with the exception of the Galliano and some pudding mix, we already had all the ingredients on hand. If it’s easy enough for me to handle, you can handle it too. The recipe follows:

Harvey Wallbanger Cake Recipe

Ingredients:

Cake:

1 box (about 18.75 ounces) yellow cake mix

1 cup vegetable oil

4 large eggs

1/4 cup Galliano liqueur

1/4 cup vodka

1 package (3-ounces) vanilla instant pudding mix

3/4 cup fresh orange juice

Glaze:

1 cup sifted powdered sugar

1 Tablespoon fresh orange juice

1 Tablespoon Galliano

1 teaspoon vodka

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease and flour a Bundt pan or spray with floured vegetable spray.

Place cake mix, oil, eggs, liqueur, vodka, pudding mix, and orange juice into a large mixing bowl. Beat on medium speed for 2 minutes.

Pour evenly into prepared Bundt pan and tap gently on the counter to release any air bubbles. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes. A toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean. (Do not overbake or it will become dry.) Let rest for 5 minutes. Gently loosen edges around the rims with a thin rubber spatula. Invert and unmold from Bundt pan onto a cake platter, then glaze while warm.

For the glaze, mix powdered sugar, orange juice, liqueur, and vodka until smooth. (If it is too thick, add more orange juice a few drops at a time to get a drizzling consistency. If it is too thin, add more powdered sugar a teaspoon at a time.) Drizzle over the warm cake and let cool to room temperature for glaze to set.

These Baby Yukon Gold potatoes look better than any other potato I’ve ever baked, thanks to a nifty trick culled from the Barefoot Contessa again. Ina Garten found this method of preparing the tubers while in London, and it adds a delicate flair to an otherwise simple and hearty side dish. It’s quite simple – you skim off the bottom of a potato so it stands solidly without rocking. Then you cut almost to the bottom in 1/8 inch slices, so that the potato stays intact, but sliced. Coat in olive oil and a mixture of rosemary, salt and pepper, working both oil and spices in between each slice. Bake at 425 for about half an hour. Pretty, easy, and perfect for a holiday dinner.

Growing up, the sliced radish was the one part of a salad that I couldn’t stomach. It was too spicy, too harsh, too biting – and like Fritos and pizza and lobster, I didn’t go back to it for many years. But while I returned to those favorites and grew to love them, my return to radishes has only just taken place, spurred on by an episode of the Barefoot Contessa Goes to London, wherein the root vegetable formed a colorful addition to a ploughman’s lunch. Ms. Garten has featured the radish before, honoring it as a popular French snack, served with sea salt and a baguette of French bread smeared with salted butter.

Without radishes from the garden (we are, as FUSSYlittleBLOG pointed out, far from radish season – he directed me to Buenos Aires), I looked in Fresh Market, which had a few in their organic section. I found some cheap sea salt there as well, but forgot that Marshall’s is the real secret place to get decent spices at much more reasonable prices. With that in mind, I stopped by their Homegoods store and found some Himalayan Pink Sea Salt in its own grinder. Pink just makes everything better.

As for taste, the radish is just as I remembered it, though the addition of a little pink sea salt added another layer of welcome interest. Served with a buttered baguette, it made for a simple preamble to dinner, and I can see how it would make a good after-work snack. Nothing that I’ll do with any regularity, at least not until I put some radishes in my own garden, but a nice enough break to winter monotony.

(My favorite part was still the Himalayan pink salt. I mean, it was pink.)

These precious gems are pomegranates, and once removed from their encasement they shine like jewels. The trick to excavating them and not getting your hands stained with their potent color, is to cut the whole fruit in half, then work to remove the seeds in a bowl of water. It just takes a bit of practice, and soon you’ll have a gorgeous pile of antioxidant-rich fruit, ready for snacking, cocktailing, or just sprinkling on melon or salads.

Baking and cooking are things that I usually only get into during the Fall and Winter seasons. Cocktails can be done year-round, but to turn on the oven or stove requires cooler temperatures and the desire to get cozy. To that end, this weekend marked my return to the kitchen. A bag of Macintosh apples was resting on the kitchen counter, so when I woke up I did a quick online search for an apple crisp recipe and used the following, as it seemed the easiest:

Peel, core, and slice apples, then add to baking dish with water and lemon juice (I added the latter to keep the apples from going brown, but it’s probably not necessary as once they’re coated it doesn’t matter). Mix the dry ingredients with the butter, then pour over top of apples. Bake at 375 for 40 minutes.

Waking Andy for a demonstration of the assembly and operation of the apple-peeler-corer-slicer that we bought from some Pampered Chef party many years ago seemed to go against the surprise element of the breakfast I was making for him, so I did it the old-fashioned way, peeling them without mechanical aid, then slicing them up without a corer. Once I got the hang of it things went smoothly, but I was thankful for the lemon juice.

I may have had too many apples, but they filled the baking dish so I let it go – next time I’ll go heavier on the crisp – as that’s the best part of this whole thing anyway.