Pumpkin Fritters

Here is one of the dishes I made for our dinner with Joanna and Margot! A nice, quick appetizer.

These were soo tasty! Pumpkin, flour, curry powder, cardamom, salt, pepper, egg. Fried in peanut oil and salted at the end. Yum!

Palm Hearts

My first recipe (well, I only made part of the recipe) from the French Laundry cookbook Jeremy let me borrow. I want to go to dinner there soon but it's a couple hundred dollars for all the courses. I think Mike and I might go there for Christmas but we'll have to see what's available.

I left out the marrow beans from this recipe because I didn't want to do anything fussy, but I loved the idea of coating the palm hearts in panko. I had both, so it was a simple thing to make. Coated in flour, egg, then panko and fried in peanut oil. This is my new favorite oil: light, flavorless, and high smoke point.

These were soooo good. Crispy, briny, and kinda like artichoke hearts. Some times almost creamy and nice and salty. Mike was reminded of scallops.

Suppli

OK the main reason I wanted to make risotto was to have leftovers, to make suppli!! Or arancini, but that's the sicilian version. Basically, these are balls of risotto stuffed with cheese, breaded and then fried. YUM OH MY GOD.

Traditionally they have sauce, meat, even peas inside, but I wanted just cheese. Couldn't get a good pic of the inside but I tried. I think these were stellar. I made the sauce w/ tomato, tomato puree, basil, oregano, garlic and olive oil.

Shrimp Stuffed Squid

I marinated baby squid and shrimp in Hot Lime sauce, mango chili vinegar, chilis, lemon and mint for two hours. Then I chopped up the shrimp and tentacles, and stirfried them quickly in the marinade and added some breadcrumbs.



Then I stuffed the squid and broiled them. They were soooooo good! This recipe was from the Silver Spoon (although it was modified).

Stuffed Peppers

My grandparents made the very best stuffed peppers in the world. I tried to recreate them tonight -- we'll see tomorrow, since I've already eaten enough calories today!

In this bowl is ground beef, parsley (Italian flat leaf), mint, onion, garlic, pepper, salt, 2 eggs.
The mixture is almost slimy. I really wanted to see if I could duplicate their mixture, which was almost slippery after cooking.

Here is a close-up of it all blended. You can see it looks pretty wet. The last thing I wanted would be for the stuffing to turn out like crumbled ground beef. I wanted almost a sausage consistency inside.
Here they are stuffed. Unfortunately, all I could get were a type of bell pepper. I really wanted bigger Italian frying peppers, but the ones I got were too narrow to stuff. Bell peppers in general taste like crap, but these were smaller farmer's market ones so hopefully they don't suck. For god's sake, please do not attempt with GREEN bell peppers. Honey please!


Oooh fresh outta the oven! They took 45 @ 300. I can already tell the bell peppers are too thickly walled for what I really want in texture, but hopefully they will taste right. They smell right!!


You can see the fat/juice from the hamburg in this shot. All of that should be discarded. I used 90% lean instead of 80%, but even that is too much fat it turns out. I will probably attempt with 93-96% lean next time, I just don't want them to be dry (It's not even worth it if they are too dry).

The goal is moist, juicy, slightly slippery, and very rich tasting. After all, it's basically all beef!

Corn Salad

I made this as a quick side dish for Labor Day's grilled sausages. Corn, peanuts, cilantro and tomato, topped with tahini.

Toasting peanuts,


Adding sweet white corn,

Adding cilantro (whole leaf) and roma tomato (diced, seeds discarded),


Plated with tahini to taste,