Chicken saltimbocca and accordion potatoes.

I’ve made stuffed chicken and chicken Marsala on multiple occasions, but when I hosted friends for dinner last weekend I decided to try making one of my favorite Italian recipes: chicken saltimbocca.

To go along with the chicken, I thought I’d try a really bizarre yet tasty-looking potato recipe I spotted on Pinterest. If you are a Pinterest user, you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s one of those novelty ideas that seems to float around on the social networking site and end up on everybody’s food board.

First, the chicken saltimbocca: Traditionally made with veal, saltimbocca is defined in “Food Lover’s Companion” as “a Roman specialty of finely sliced veal sprinkled with sage and topped with a thin slice of prosciutto. It is sauteed in butter, then braised in white wine.”

However, when I searched a bunch of saltimbocca recipes online, I couldn’t find any two alike. Some called for cheese inside, some didn’t. Some called for white wine, some for Marsala. Some called for mushrooms in the sauce, some didn’t. Well, I never met a cheese, mushroom or Marsala wine I didn’t like, so I cobbled together a couple of different recipes to form the one I used.

My helpful hints: Make sure you are using a thin chicken breast. Consider buying the “thin and fancy” cut or, if you’ve bought those massive, mutant chicken breasts, butterflying them all the way in half. Also, pound them with a meat mallet until they are super thin but not mangled. For the cheese, I cut my own slices from a small block instead of using pre-sliced cheese. If you use those pre-cut slices that are the size of American cheese slices, you may wish to either fold them in half or cut them in half.
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Homemade fettucine. Photo by Lindsey Nair | The Roanoke Times.

This weekend, I was lucky enough to have three days off. It gave me some time to sleep in, clean house and tackle a kitchen experiment I’ve always wanted to try: fresh pasta.

My wonderful aunt gave me a set of pasta-maker attachments for my KitchenAid mixer as a Christmas gift. She’s had wonderful pasta in Italy, so I promised her I’d try to perfect my fresh pasta and make some for her next time we get together.

I was a little intimidated by the process. It seems that anytime I try to make a dough, it is challenging. Pie crusts took a while for me to master, I’m still working on biscuits, and dumpling wrappers and pierogi wrappers were both a long and arduous process even though they turned out well.

Amazingly, I only had to make two batches of pasta dough to get it (almost) right. I used a basic egg pasta recipe from the manual that came with the attachment. If my memory serves me well, it called for four large eggs, 3 1/2 cups of sifted all-purpose flour, a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of water.

When I tried to gather the first batch of dough with my hands, it was too crumbly. I forced it together, thinking it was a bit like a pie crust in that it would seem too crumbly when it wasn’t. Not the case. I could tell almost immediately that it wasn’t the right texture, so I went about making a second batch while the first one rested.

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File photo.

On Tuesday, I wrote a blog entry about a friend, Suzanne, who is trying to find the perfect method for making fried pickles. She has been foiled twice by the breading, which either turned out soggy or fell off the pickles. I turned to blog readers to ask for tips on how to make breading stick to fried foods, and you all offered some great advice.

I also thought it might be nice to take this conversation to the next level and bring in some chef advice. I emailed some chefs and asked them to read through that blog entry and comments, and Jeff Bland with US Foods responded with some guidelines. As you’ll see, we were generally on the right track.

1. Dredge the item in flour.
2. Dip the item in your wet ingredient, whether this is egg wash, buttermilk, or batter.
3. Dredge the item in another dry coating, whether this is bread crumbs, corn meal, cracker meal, or what have you.
4. Fry in hot oil. It can be peanut oil, vegetable oil, or Canola. They all have high smoke points.
5. If you are using a wet batter, you should still dip it in flour first because that will help the batter to adhere to the food. Put battered foods immediately into the hot oil and make sure you have enough oil to cover the entire object.

Another chef I talked to was a little shy about letting me use his name, but he said that once you have breaded the item, if you refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes, that will help to make the breading adhere when you fry it. That obviously does not apply when using a wet batter.

So, there you have it. Suzanne, we’ll be interested to hear how your next experiment goes. Good luck!

Photo courtesy Benimoto/Flickr

One of my colleagues is on a mission to make fried pickles at home, but she isn’t having much success. The biggest problem she’s had is finding a way to bread them so the coating will turn out crispy and not slide off the pickles. She sent me the following description of her efforts so far:

“I’ve been putting oil in a pot and heating it on the stove. I frazzled the heck out of my first batch. That used a wet batter, and that did stick pretty well, it was just flabby, not crispy; the second was a dry one and involved dipping the pickles in buttermilk. The batter was crispy, but it slid right off the pickles (so much for those little grooves holding anything in place).”

I am looking for some advice from folks who have some experience deep-fat frying foods. Do you think my friend is having trouble because the pickles are too wet to begin with? Is a wet batter better or should she be dipping them in cornstarch, then egg, then cornmeal or bread crumbs? Knowing how complex the science of food can be, I’m also wondering if there is some trick such as freezing the pickles beforehand or chilling the batter.

She is determined to make this work so I’m determined to help her out. What do you all know about turning out foods with a nice, crispy coating that wants to stick around?

File photo.

One of the reasons I love cooking is because it provides me with an endless opportunity to learn. Even cooks who live to be 100 years old can still be amazed by kitchen hints they’ve never heard before. I’ve been writing about food for six years and I probably only know about 5 percent of what there is to know about the topic. Or less.

That’s the beauty of books that offer lots of kitchen tips and tricks. One such book is “How to Squeeze a Lemon” by Fine Cooking magazine, which promises “1,023 kitchen tips, food fixes, and handy techniques” between its covers. I’ve been holding onto this book for long time with the intention of sharing some of its best hints with you. So here goes:

* Protect your nonstick cookware by placing sheets of bubble wrap between them in the cupboard (that is, if you can keep yourself from obsessively popping all the bubbles first).

* To clean broiler pans, lay heavy-duty paper towels on the dirty surface of the pan and wet them with hot water. Let sit for a while. A lot of the gunk will supposedly stick to the paper towels. I haven’t tried this, but if it works it’ll be magnificent.

* To clean a blender without taking it apart, fill 1/3 full with warm water and add a squirt of dish soap. Put on the lid and turn it on for a few seconds, then pour out water, sponge off any remaining residue and rinse.

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Frankenstein heads. Photo by Rebecca Barnett l The Roanoke Times.

I’m a fan of Pinterest.

For someone who likes cooking, gardening, crafts, fashion, art, traveling and more, it’s easy to find gorgeous pictures and Internet articles I can “pin” to my “boards.” Better yet, because I save too many magazine clippings, recipes and cookbooks, Pinterest offers me the liberating ability to hoard online to my heart’s content.

But the content on Pinterest is sometimes annoyingly perfect. The wedding dresses, gowns and jewelry can be beyond the average person’s means; gardens and craft projects that look so easy are often anything but.

This is particularly true in the realm of recipes, which are typically accompanied on Pinterest by professionally styled images. At home, the finished product might be delicious but the appearance probably won’t be up to Pinterest standards.

For Halloween, I decided to test some of the cutest recipes I discovered through Pinterest to determine if they were more like tricks than treats. With the help of two coworkers, we tested six recipes – a pumpkin-shaped cake made by stacking two Bundt cakes, Frankenstein heads made from crispy rice treats, white chocolate ghosts, witch hat cookies, witch brooms and white chocolate “bones.”

Some of the results made us cackle like a witch over her cauldron, but others made us scream like a vampire in the sun.

To read more, click here.

Click the links to see these recipes:
Pumpkin Spice Cake
Monster Toes
Spider Web Pumpkin Cheesecake

(The rest of the recipes from the column, including the Frankenstein heads, are in the body of the column, so just click the link to read more, above)

Does your family have a favorite recipe you always prepare around Halloween?

With all the restaurant news that’s been hopping on the blog lately, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about cooking at home. And I’m not going to lie — for the past few weeks, I’ve been experiencing the end-of-summer burnout when it comes to cooking. We’ve been on-the-go on the weekends and all I’ve had the energy to do is eat a lot of fresh produce and grilled meats, with the exception of some go-to dishes I’ve made for dinners and potlucks. But those are dishes I’ve mentioned on the blog or in the column before.

As the weather starts to cool down a little, I feel that spark of inspiration in my belly. I am ready to experiment again, using some unfamiliar ingredients and recipes. On my list to try this fall or winter are an osso bucco dish like this one on Simply Recipes,  Caribbean- or African-style oxtails such as this Emeril Lagasse recipe, a maple cake with maple icing (I’m a sucker for anything maple-flavored), and various dishes that call for chicken thighs. I’m always on the lookout for good chicken thigh recipes, so if anybody has one they would like to share, please do.

I also want to do a muffin column within the next couple of months, so I hope to crank up the oven and make several different kinds of homemade muffins. Got any favorite muffin flavors you’d like me to test?

Most of all, I want to hear what YOU have been cooking lately. Has anybody tried a new recipe or ingredient they loved (or hated, for that matter)? I always know that all of you foodies are out there creating great meals in your kitchens. Inspire us with your kitchen genius!

Photo by Lindsey Nair l The Roanoke Times

My sister lives in South Carolina, so every summer (if I’m lucky) I get the absolute best peaches I’ve ever tasted. Yes, we have great peaches around here but the ones my sister gave me this weekend were the size of softballs, so sweet and so juicy.

Unfortunately, I have a stone fruit allergy so I cannot eat peaches raw. I had to cook them, but I didn’t want to adulterate them with a bunch of sugar and fat. My regular fruit cobbler recipe is delicious, but it calls for a stick of butter and more than a cup of sugar – it is by NO means “light.”

I found a recipe for a lighter cobbler on Food.com and decided to try it. It was plenty sweet enough because the fruit was naturally sweet. I rather liked the bit of tang that remained, too. The topping is kind of like light biscuits and only includes one tablespoon of sugar, which you could increase if you wanted a sweeter topping. But with a little light whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, it was just about perfect. If using really tart fruit, you’ll probably need to add more sugar to the fruit. I’ll share the recipe and its nutritional information below.

Another great discovery for me this weekend is one that a lot of people probably have already found. In case you have not, you might want to try this method that removes the need to shuck the corn the standard way:

1. Remove any brown or bedraggled bits of husk or silk from the corn with a pair of kitchen shears.

2. Place the corn, unshucked and uncovered, in the microwave. Microwave on high power for 4 minutes per ear.

3. Wearing oven mitts (it’ll be hot!) and using a sharp knife, slice off the butt end of each ear of corn about one row of kernels up from the stem. Squeeze the corn from the tip end out and the cob will slide right out of the husk without a single strand of silk. It’s quite amazing. Here is a link to the YouTube video my mom first saw (she’s the one who showed me this trick). Try it and see what you think.
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Shredded pork tacos. Lindsey Nair l The Roanoke Times

I had planned in advance to marinate a pork tenderloin in Goya Mojo Criollo marinade this weekend and cook it until it fell apart for soft tacos. Mainly in honor of Cinco de Mayo, but also because I had three tenderloins in the chest freezer. Of course, I forgot to take one out to thaw in time to allow for a lengthy bath in the marninade as well as a lengthy slow-cooking process.

Instead, I decided to break out my pressure cooker. I had just been thinking about pressure cookers a few days before while watching an episode of “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” (which, by the way, is on ALL the time now. Have you noticed it’s on infinity marathon?). In that episode, a guy was pressure cooking his boliche, and I thought, I really need to try making boliche in the pressure cooker next time. If you have never had boliche, or stuffed eye of round roast, you are seriously missing out. Click here to see the recipe my friend Natalee’s Cuban mother’s recipe. It’s “off the hook,” as Guy would say.

But back to the pork tenderloin. I figured I’d marinate it all day yesterday and then pressure cook it until I could shred it with a fork. I went to the Internet to see how long I should let it pressure cook and found that recipes varied from 35 minutes to 80 minutes for a 2-3 lb. roast. OK, that’s helpful.

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Cocoa in a steak rub? No doubt about it.

I’ve been working on a column this week about chefs’ secrets, but that doesn’t thoroughly explain the point of the exercise. Chefs have a lot of secrets; what I’m interested in is how they use normal ingredients in unusual ways.

For example, I have heard from chefs who use cornflakes to bread fish or pixie sticks to color meringues.

Of course, chefs aren’t the only ones who use typical ingredients in surprising ways. Home cooks might use grape jelly in a meatball sauce, for example, or salt on truffles, or cocoa powder in steak rub.

I’m no expert chef, but when I scoured my brain for an example from my own kitchen, I thought about a ramen noodle dish I make sometimes when I’m in a big hurry. I cook the noodles in low-sodium chicken broth, then add some fresh spinach, a handful of shrimp, some soy sauce, fish sauce, hot sauce and lime juice for a Thai-inspired supper in a flash. I’ve tossed chunks of frozen tilapia in there instead of shrimp before. I have also been known to pour some beer in the pan when I’m sauteeing cabbage or greens.

Stay tuned for some far better examples of chefs’ secrets in next week’s paper. And if you have a secret ingredient that you like to use in a creative way, I would LOVE to include it in next week’s column. Any chefs out there who have not heard from me? Please feel free to give me a call at (540) 981-3343, email me at lindsey.nair@roanoke.com or comment on this blog entry.

My yummy Sunday morning breakfast of French toast and bacon. The bacon was cooked in the microwave.

Until recently, I was a major doubter when it came to this subject. Even though I knew people had been cooking bacon in the microwave for decades, I still pictured those ridged pans they sold especially for nuking bacon and considered it a far inferior method to frying it in a pan on the stove.

I like my bacon 100 percent crunchy, without any chewy fat valleys or leathery meat. For that reason, I usually use a cast-iron bacon press when I fry bacon, just to make sure it doesn’t curl up and cook unevenly. But my friend Stacy is who finally taught me the error of my assumptions by fixing me awesome, crunchy bacon in the microwave.

This is one of those blog posts that’s going to be really helpful to some folks, while others will be thinking, “You are just now figuring this out?” For the benefit of both, I’ll tell you that my friend adds one little step at the end that might not be on everyone’s radar.

Here’s her method:

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Quacktaculous/Flickr

I had a dinner party this past weekend, and it wasn’t until I had finished cooking that I realized how many wonderful ingredients came from right here in Southwest Virginia. The Italian sausage in the manicotti was from Sandy River Pork in Axton. The tomatoes came from my garden and a neighbor’s. The salad came from a friend who sourced some things in Floyd. And for dessert, I had a Ziploc bag packed full of blueberries my other friend had picked.

What to do with those blueberries? I decided to make a very simple sauce that could be used in a number of different ways. Since it was only sweetened with a little honey, it wasn’t cloyingly sweet like some fruit sauces, or jams and jellies.

We’ve eaten ours warm on lemon pound cake and cold over vanilla ice cream. It would also be fabulous in ice cream sundaes or smoothies, on cheesecake, on pancakes, waffles or French toast, and stirred into oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. It could be frozen for later use. Here’s how I made it:

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My colleague Rebecca (who writes the Shoptimist blog) yesterday sent me an intriguing link to a recipe for red velvet cake made with beets. Beets! It may seem strange at first, but it made perfect sense to me when I stopped to think about it.

Store bought food dyes are approved by the Food & Drug Administration, but that doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence. They are still basically synthetic, with names like FD&C Blue Nos. 1 and 2, FD&C Green No. 3, FD&C Red Nos. 3 and 40, FD&C Yellow Nos. 5 and 6, Orange B, Citrus Red No. 2. Yummmmmmm!

These days, we are seeing a return to old food ways. More people are gardening, more people are canning and otherwise preserving, and more people are interested in things like raw milk or fermented teas. So why shouldn’t we borrow a page from the Native Americans, who knew how to color fabrics and other items with natural ingredients such as flowers, vegetables and tree bark?

The beet cake is just the beginning. Beets can infuse all sorts of things with their lovely hot pink/red hue. And according to this recipe, the red velvet cake has no lingering beet flavor. Here are a few other clever ideas I found:

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I had a couple of light bulbs go off over my head this weekend. Okay, they were about the size of an oven light bulb instead of a standard size, but I still think these tiny tips might be worth passing along.

Spoon bread for cheaters: I had some leftover cornbread recently. Specifically, I had six corn muffins I’d let sit around too long, and they’d become a little too dry to enjoy the standard way. Cornbread is one of those breads that lends itself well to creative leftovers. For example, you could turn it into a cornbread dressing, make cornbread croutons or just do what my grandfolks used to: Crumble it into a glass of cold buttermilk and go at it with a spoon.

But I thought I remembered my mother turning leftover cornbread into spoon bread, and I had such a craving for spoon bread that I tried to find such a recipe. I had no luck whatsoever! But seeing as how I had very little to lose, I decided to experiment. Here’s what I did:

1. Scald one cup of milk in a medium saucepan.
2. Stir in about two tablespoons of butter until melted.
3. Crumble the dry, leftover cornbread into the mixture and stir until all of the liquid is absorbed. Serve hot with another pat of butter, if desired, or a drizzle of honey or molasses.

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Don't do this at home.

I’ve been licking my wounds and nursing my ailing pride for about a week and a half, and I think it’s finally time to admit what I did: I ruined an entire pot of soup.

Now, those of you who believe in karma will probably be raising your eyebrows before this post is finished, and don’t think I haven’t done that myself.

It started with a chicken carcass. Wait, no, let’s back up. It started with a phone call from a reader who was disappointed in a soup recipe I’d run in the newspaper. She declared it tasteless, despite the fact that it contained some highly flavorful ingredients, including breakfast sausage. She claimed it was so far beyond help that she poured it down the drain, which caused the frugal, waste-hating part of me to want to curl up and cry. Why could she not add more herbs and seasonings, I wondered (a bit smugly, okay). Perhaps it needed more salt, or some acid, or some hot sauce? But no, it was gone down the tubes. I would never do such a thing.

I believe it was the very next day when I left a chicken carcass (originally a smoked paprika roasted chicken) simmering away in the Crock Pot with some celery, onions, rosemary, thyme and bay leaves, intending to turn the resulting delicious stock into delicious chicken soup with wild rice and mushrooms. So when I got home, I busied myself with separating the meat from the bones and fat, and straining the non-edible out of my homemade stock, which I then returned to the Crock Pot. Everything was going OK at that point.

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Two nights before my wedding, I stood in the kitchen and wondered what kind of idiot bride thinks she can do her own food for a 75-person affair.

As usual, my sense of frugality had won over my common sense. But I had a planned menu of heavy hors d’oeuvres and my sister was there to help, so we flew into action.

Boiled, boneless chicken breasts were zipped through the food processor, as were a bunch of other ingredients — onion, celery and apples among them. We had a basic concept in mind, but we didn’t bother to multiply quantities, instead throwing it all together with mayonnaise and seasonings and judging by taste.

At the wedding, a half-dozen people or more said it was the best chicken salad they’d ever eaten.

“May I have the recipe?” a guest asked, munching on her salad-topped croissant.

“I would be happy to share,” I said, “if I actually had one.”

And that, my friends, is the beauty of chicken salad. If it were a person, this dish would be a professional actor, because it can take on any ethnicity, any style, any mood, and still be fairly convincing.

All manners of nuts, fruits, seeds, vegetables and spices can be mixed in for big flair.

Chicken salad may be the most versatile member of its family, but it certainly isn’t the only one that can wear different flavors. Don’t be afraid to make your tuna or egg salad sing, as well.

To read the rest of today’s Front Burner column, click here.

Do you have some favorite recipes to share? Let me know!

Since my regular blog readers saw some photos of my kitchen in mid-remodel and had to listen to me complain about all of the sanding and staining and polyurethaning, I figure it’s only fair that I share the before-and-after slide show now that it is finally finished.

We completed this remodel on a tight budget. We did not want to remove the cabinets entirely because we didn’t want to spend that much money on a house that is not our “forever home” and may never sell for enough to justify all that work. But we wanted to give the cabinets a new look without simply slapping a coat of white paint over the old, scuzzy finish. So we got ourselves roped into sanding down the lot of them, restaining them a colonial maple color and adding new hardware.

We also got a new laminate counter, ripped out some old, fugly fake brick back splash and had a new tile back splash put in. We replaced the sink and outlet covers. Still need to find a new light fixture for above the sink, replace the old ceiling fans and do some touch-up painting, but you can see that it’s quite the makeover! Thanks for the advice along the way.

Two more blog readers, The Other Rebecca and Connie Smith, have sent me photos of their gardens. These are so impressive; I think you will all enjoy looking through them as much as I did. I especially love the beautiful scarlet runner beans with their brilliant red flowers.

Thanks to Rebecca and Connie for sharing. If anyone has questions about their gardens, post them on this entry and I’m sure they will respond. This show-and-tell has been fun. If anyone else wants to send pictures as the summer progresses, please do not hesitate to e-mail them at full size to lindsey.nair@roanoke.com.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Better than mine, I hope.

I am having mixed success in this, my second year of gardening. I still don’t consider myself a full-fledged gardener, because I have few plants and they are scattered around the yard instead of being planted together in a patch of tilled-up earth. That’s the plan for next year: To plow up a rectangle of the yard right where it is sunniest.

So there’s the update on my part-time gardening efforts this year. I love to see other people’s gardens, so if you’ve got photos of yours, please send them to me at lindsey.nair@roanoke.com and I will feature them on this blog!

Asparagus and cheese-stuffed meatloaf.

Meatloaf is one of those wonderful dishes that manages to be delicious and comforting, yet incredibly easy to make. Once a cook gets a handle on the basics – ground meat, chopped vegetables, some filler such as bread crumbs, maybe an egg or two and seasonings – he or she can adapt the recipe in whatever way they choose and pretty regularly find success.

I’ve rarely followed an exact recipe for meatloaf in my time. I have discovered over the years that you ought to saute your onions and celery and peppers a little bit before adding them to the mix. I have also discovered that a mixture of meats results in a more flavorful meatloaf than using straight beef. We like half pork and half beef, but some folks like to throw in some ground veal or lamb, too, and you can use ground turkey or chicken for a lighter version.

Here’s a twist on the usual meatloaf, though: The other night, while mixing my meatloaf, I remembered that half-bunch of fresh asparagus in the refrigerator that was about to be not-so-fresh. On a whim, I cleaned and trimmed the spears, then packed half of my meatloaf mixture into the loaf pan before laying the asparagus across the top of it. I then sprinkled some cheddar cheese on top of the asparagus before packing the rest of my meat mixture over the top. When we sliced the finished meatloaf, the asparagus and cheese inside looked pretty. It tasted good, too.

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A summer slaw with cabbage, carrot, Granny Smith apple, dried cherries and an orange-balsamic vinaigrette.

I had an epiphany last weekend while trying out a new recipe for an Asian-style slaw. It called for 1/2 head of shredded green cabbage, 2 shredded carrots, raisins or dried cranberries, chopped green apple and bottled balsamic vinaigrette.

As I often do, I started messing around with the stated recipe. I kept the cabbage, carrots and Granny Smith apple, but since I already had dried cherries, I subbed them in place of the other dried fruit. Also, I wanted to make a balsamic vinaigrette for the salad instead of buying a bottled dressing. Using the old vinaigrette ratio of three parts oil to one part vinegar, I whisked up a combo using balsamic vinegar and some blood orange olive oil given to me as a Christmas present by my aunt and uncle. To finish it off, I sprinkled in some toasted sesame seeds.

The slaw was delicious, and I started thinking about how many other summer salads follow the same basic formula: freshly chopped or grated veggies and fruits, a pop of sweetness from dried fruit, a dressing of choice and some kind of seed or nut, if desired. One of my favorites, carrot-raisin salad, is made with shredded carrots, raisins, mayonnaise and a touch of sugar. Sometimes people add crushed pineapple. Another of my favorites is broccoli salad, which can be made with broccoli crowns or the packaged broccoli slaw, mixed with raisins, mayonnaise, sunflower seeds and bacon bits, if desired.

So think about these categories of ingredients and how many options you have:

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I’ve had oil on my mind lately because of the screaming front page news. I’m worried about all of the wildlife that is being affected by the spill, not to mention the Gulf shrimp and oysters and fish and other things many of us love to eat.

To take my mind off such depressing things, I’m redirecting it to a different kind of oil: olive oil. I’ve been thinking about olive oil lately, too, because of a cooking technique I keep seeing in magazines and on Web sites. I’m not sure if it’s a new technique or if it is an old method that has lately become the “in thing,” but everybody is talking about poaching fish and shrimp in olive oil now. There was an article about this in the latest regular issue of Fine Cooking magazine.

Poaching fish in olive oil (which can be infused with a variety of seasonings) supposedly results in a silky, delicious texture. You heat the oil to a low temperature (120 to 200) and submerge the fish to cook it. But here’s what bothers me about the technique: most recipes I’ve seen call for at least 4 cups of olive oil, and only Fine Cooking’s article acknowledges the fact that several cups of olive oil is kind of an expensive thing to use just once.

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Kyle Green l The Roanoke Times

Everyone who loves to cook has that moment when common sense evaporates.

A 27-step recipe? That doesn’t look too hard.

Slathering a wheel of brie with sticky jam, then wrapping it in pastry as thin as Kleenex? I can do that.

Deboning, stuffing, poaching and coating a chicken in aspic? Child’s play.

I must have had one of those moments while leafing through a cookbook in search of inexpensive Easter candy recipes. When I saw one for homemade marshmallow chicks, my eyes lit up and my brain went dim simultaneously.

Let’s examine the reasons this was a bad idea:

To continue reading this column, please click HERE.

To see the recipe for marshmallow chicks, please click HERE.

If anyone has the courage to try and make these yourself, I would LOVE to hear about how they turned out. Better yet, e-mail me some pictures at lindsey.nair@roanoke.com.

Let the staining begin

This weekend, I made just two things in my kitchen: a lasagna that will hopefully feed us for the next several days and a giant pile of sawdust. And by that last item, I do literally mean a pile of sawdust, not a cake gone awry.

Back in November 2008 I wrote a blog entry called “One can always dream…” about the changes I would love to make to my kitchen. Attached was a photo of my kitchen as it looked until recently, when we started destroying it. We spent this weekend sanding the old, 50+ -year-old varnish off our knotty pine cabinets so we can restain them and get new hardware before hiring somebody to replace the ratty, old butcher block counter and that hideous faux brick back splash that I sponge-painted green.

I now have a sore throat, a pair of dust-filled lungs (even with a mask, yes) and a blank canvas. I couldn’t be happier to have finished what I think will be the hardest part of our low-budget kitchen remodel. Staining will not be fun, I know. Neither will trying to find 3.5-inch handles for our doors when 3.5-inch handles are no longer the standard size for kitchen cabinets. But neither task could compare to crouching on my kitchen counter all weekend, at times with my neck craned upside down, trying to coax the stain off intricate little areas with a mouse sander. I never want to see a mouse sander again.

These little shelves were a pain to sand.

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The Cookbook Giveaway contest ends at 5 p.m. today. Keep leaving your comments on the entry below to be entered.

I flipped through the new Feb./March issue of “Taste of Home” magazine last night and found a piece that hit home. “Can Do” is about jazzing up canned soup to make a much more complex and flavorful meal. I’ve doctored a can of soup or two in my time.

My favorite is frozen spinach and refrigerated cheese tortellini simmered in canned tomato soup (make with water or use milk and/or half & half for a more bisque-like flavor) garnished with Parmesan cheese. I also like to add bacon bits, scallions and cheese to canned potato soup to make loaded potato soup. And one of my husband’s favorites is not made from canned soup, but packaged Ramen noodle soup. I start with chicken flavor and add some spinach, thawed shrimp, soy sauce, hot sauce and a squirt of lime.

The magazine article, in most cases, goes even crazier with the canned soup, but in a way I like. The recipes also make a ton – most serve 6 to 10 people – and I would think they’re friendly on the budget. The tomato tortellini soup and chicken tortilla chowder look particularly good to me. I’ll share those recipes below. To see the rest (including hearty cabbage, split pea, chicken noodle and french onion) pick up an issue of the Feb./March 2010 “Taste of Home.”

Do you fancy up your canned soup in a way we ought to know? Bring it on!

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As cliche as it may seem, when a big winter storm is rolling into town, I just can’t stop thinking about what kind of soup or stew is going to be simmering away on the stove top or in the Crock Pot. It’s even better when this kind of weather hits on a weekend, because those of us who love to while away hours in the kitchen will have plenty of time to do it.

So far, I’ve heard from an editor who plans to make chili in the Crock Pot and our wonderful librarian, Belinda Harris, who will be making her mother’s cream of potato soup this weekend. Personally, I’m going for gumbo. I have never made gumbo before, but since the New Orleans Saints are playing in the Super Bowl in a little over a week, I want to run a good gumbo recipe in the paper.

I don’t usually put recipes out on the blog before I run them in my column, but in this case I think it would be nice if any of you want to try it out with me and give me your opinion. Gumbo, it seems, is not a soup for beginners because it requires the darkest roux you can make without burning it. The color of a dark brown roux is sometimes compared to chocolate. It requires quite a bit of time and patience to stir the fat (oil or butter) and flour mixture over a medium-low heat to achieve the correct color. This darkest of rouxs is what gives the gumbo its depth of flavor.

The recipe I found is from Emeril Lagasse, and it calls for vegetable oil in the roux instead of butter. That gives me a little pause. It also calls for duck legs, but I’ve called around and have not had much luck finding duck legs in town. Breasts and whole ducks, sure, but not legs. So I’m omitting the duck legs. This recipe already calls for 3 pounds of chicken anyway, and duck is expensive.

I’ll paste it below. UPDATE: Check the next blog entry for a report on how this recipe went for me.

If you’ve made gumbo before, I want to hear from you. If you try this recipe, I want to hear from you. And if you plan to make a big old pot of something hot this weekend, I want to hear from you!

Looking for a soup or stew recipe? Let me know and I can consult my library of cookbooks for ya.

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Okay, you know how my blog description says I share “successes and failures in the kitchen”? Well, this is one of those times when my experiment didn’t turn out so well. I’d like to blame the Crock Pot, or my husband, or maybe even the cats, but I can’t really do that. I can’t even blame the recipe because… well, I didn’t follow one. Could that be the reason my Crock Pot barbecue didn’t turn out as well as I hoped? Indeed.

In the past, I’ve thrown hunks of meat into the Crock Pot with half a bottle of good barbecue sauce, a little water and a couple of fat onion slices, and the results have been good. I just drain off the grease, shred the meat, add some more barbecue sauce and top with some of the onion. This method has been especially useful for tough cuts of venison. It’s nothing like the flavor of barbecue cooked the old-fashioned way, but it’ll do on a busy weekday.

This time, my error was in the cut of meat. I had purchased some boneless pork chops on clearance at the grocery store and wanted to use them right away. It turns out that even on low, the cut was too small for such an application. And I overcooked it (7 hours), which left us with dry, shredded pork.

In this case, my husband can be credited with saving the day. He recalled a method he used to use when he lived out at the lake years ago. He mixed our shredded pork with more barbecue sauce and put it in a tightly crimped tin foil pouch with the onion. Then he tossed that pouch on the grill long enough for it to “Jiffy Pop,” or plump up. Apparently, this steamed the meat enough to moisten it. By the time we ate it, with some frozen, cooked corn and green beans canned by Mom, it was pretty good. Not great, but good.

Here’s what I learned: I will always use much larger cuts of meat when I make Crock Pot barbecue, such as a pork butt or a beef pot roast. I found a recipe that I SHOULD have used, and I’m going to paste it below the jump in case anyone wants to do a better job than me. It shouldn’t be hard!!! D’oh!

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Since I picked the slow cooker beef stroganoff recipe for last week’s meal, I let my partner in crime choose our Crock Pot dish for this week. He picked something from a Prevention magazine slow cooker recipe book called “Sauerkraut Meal.” The name really cracks me up for some reason, but I digress. Here are the ingredients:

2 cups low sodium barbecue sauce
1 cup water
2 lbs. lean pork chops, trimmed of fat
2 lbs. sauerkraut, rinsed

The directions called for mixing together the barbecue sauce and water, then combining the sauerkraut, pork and sauce in the slow cooker and cooking on low for 8-10 hours. I had found a nice package of boneless pork chops, about 1-inch thick, on special at the grocery store, but it was only a 1 lb. package. With only two people to feed, I didn’t think I needed another package of pork. I did, however, use all of the sauerkraut, mainly because I would probably just let the other half of the bag sit in my fridge until it was time to toss it. We used Cattlemen’s barbecue sauce, and I peeled a few Yukon gold potatoes and tossed them in whole to go along with the rest of the dish.

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My grandmother could practically make a batch of fudge with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back. If my first attempt at using her recipe is any indication, I did not inherit those fudge making talents.

This is a photo of my first batch of fudge. Looks good, doesn’t it? Nicely set up, nicely cut into squares. It even tastes good — chocolaty, buttery and sweet. But when you bite down on a piece, the problem becomes pretty evident.

CRUNCH! As one co-worker put it, it’s “sandy.” Yes, it is gritty. According to my mother (whose name is Sandy but her fudge is not), I didn’t let it hold a rolling boil long enough and the sugar crystals did not break down — or something like that. Look, it’s all chemistry and I’m no chemist. It probably does not help that I’m trying to eyeball the stuff instead of using a candy thermometer, which, with any luck, will show up under the Christmas tree for me (Dad? Hello, Dad?).

I have always believed that in order to really succeed in the kitchen, one must fail at first. So I’ll be writing about this unsuccessful fudge attempt in my column next week, when I will also examine some other techniques for candy making. I know a lot of folks make candy during the holidays, so I’m interested to hear whether any of you have much experience making candy?

www.foodnetwork.com

I tend to get stuck in a rut when it comes to cocktail party food. I know what’s easy to make, so those hors d’oevres make an appearance at any gathering I throw. Meatballs, fruit and veggie trays, cheese and crackers and other standards are tasty and well-loved, but change is good.

I know it’s a little risky to try a new recipe on guests, but hey, I’m a risk taker. So when I had a jewelry party at my house on Friday evening, I decided to make a few new things. This chicken satay with peanut sauce emerged as a favorite. It required a little bit of prep work, but boy, was it worth it. The holidays are coming up, and along with them comes a flurry of parties. Perhaps one of you will be able to use this recipe. The marinade would also be delicious for a simple dinner of grilled chicken breasts. Enjoy!

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Chuck roast becomes ground chuck.

Ever since reading the hamburger story in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been wondering just how hard it could be to grind my own burger at home. I mean, we don’t generally buy frozen, pre-formed hamburger patties, but we do occasionally buy packaged ground beef at the grocery store. And one theory is that when the beef scraps used to make ground beef come from all different parts of the cow (and possibly different parts of the country, or the world) there’s just a better chance of some illness-causing bacteria getting in the mix.

I am not losing sleep over this, but what could it hurt to make homemade burger? It could be a good way to control the fat content since I’m trying to diet, and perhaps it would even taste better.

First, the tools: My Kitchen Aid mixer came with a rebate offer for a free attachment, and I, thinking maybe I’d make sausage someday, chose the grinder. Which comes in quite handy now. But not everyone owns a grinder attachment, much less a Kitchen Aid mixer (mine was the result of years of whining). I did some checking, and meat grinders can be had for as little as $30 for a hand-cranked model that clamps to the edge of a counter or table. They range all the way up into the hundreds of dollars.

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Lindsey Nair/The Roanoke Times

I’m back to writing about fried chicken because, really, who can think enough about fried chicken? Last night, I tried out Paula Deen’s fried chicken recipe to great success. You can see that the end product was quite golden and crispy. The inside was cooked through but was still juicy. I expected this chicken to be spicier because of the half bottle of hot sauce that I added to the egg mixture, but it wasn’t. I guess the brief swim through the egg before hitting the flour wasn’t enough to impart much of the hot sauce flavor.

The only complaint I have about my fried chicken was that it was a tad bit greasy. I know anything fried is a tad bit greasy, but I can’t help but wonder whether hotter oil in my cast iron Dutch oven would have made a difference. I don’t fry foods very often, but I’ve always heard that if your oil is hot enough without reaching the smoking point, the food fries without a lot of grease soaking into the food.

How to tell if the oil is hot enough? Well, it called for an oil temperature of 350 degrees. Various sites suggested various methods of testing the oil if you don’t own an oil thermometer, which I do not. One method was to flick a drop of water into the oil and see if it dances around and pops. Another is to toss a cube of bread into the oil and if it browns nicely in one minute, the oil is ready. A third is to toss in a pinch of flour. I used the first two methods.

Cook large pieces, like breasts, first.

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Allrecipes.com

I’ve never made a quiche before this weekend, but I have made pies and frittatas, so how hard could it be? Not hard at all, especially with the help of my friend, the little dough boy who makes my pie crust for me.

My mother loves quiche, and since she came over for lunch yesterday on her way home from my sister’s house, I chose a recipe for spinach quiche with feta cheese and mushrooms. It was a big hit and was just enough for lunch with a side of fruit salad. Hubby and I ate another slice for dinner last night with a cup of soup.

This recipe calls for sauteeing the onions and garlic, then adding mushrooms and spinach, and finally stirring in the cheeses so they begin to melt into the other ingredients before you spread all of the filling in the pie shell. Then just top with beaten eggs and pop in the oven. I made a few small adaptations, which I will note with the recipe below.

Oh, and I tested my aluminum pie crust shield on this quiche and I’m in love. I will never again have to painstakingly cover the edges of my pie crust with little strips of aluminum foil, then burn my hand taking it off halfway through the cooking process! Find one here or at kitchen stores.

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Recently, a chef told me what she believes is the most underutilized “condiment” in the home kitchen. And you have probably guessed based on the citrus face here, so I’ll just tell you: acid.

As in citrus juice or vinegar, not the psychedelic stuff. And now you can see why I sat here for a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what to title this post. Drop a little acid on that asparagus? No. Squeeze my lemon until the juice runs down my eggs? Double no.

But all jokes aside, there is true value in this hint. Often, when we taste our food and sense that something is missing, it might be our immediate inclination to reach for salt or pepper or some other seasoning. But it could be that a little squeeze of lime or a splash of vinegar is all we need to brighten the flavors of the dish.

The best way to figure out uses for acids as a finishing touch at the table is to experiment. Already, many Southerners like vinegar on their greens, and lots of people love lemon on seafood. But check out some lime juice on Thai food, a squeeze of lemon on your chicken tacos or fajitas, a splash of apple cider vinegar on your broccoli or asparagus.

When I made those pulled pork tacos I wrote about not long ago, we squeezed a little lemon over the pork before piling on the rest of our toppings. I believe it made a big difference, and it probably cut back on the amount of sodium we would have consumed had we added more salt or seasoning blends.

Do you ever use acids to liven up the flavor of your foods? If so, what is your favorite application?

My sister’s mother-in-law, Alice, is the Christmas cookie queen. For as long as Kim has been with her husband, I can remember hearing about the many varieties of cookies Alice bakes every year. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I even get a few leftovers when Sis gets home for Christmas.

There are little fruit fold overs, miniature pecan pies, molasses cookies and more. Her secret: she starts baking early and freezes the goodies so all she has to do is pull them out when company comes.

Because I currently have two giant tubs of Christmas cookies in my kitchen, I’m seriously considering freezing a couple dozen so they’ll still be fresh next week. But they are all different kinds — some frosted, some not; some with raisins, some with chips, some with coconut. I wondered if some cookies freeze better than others.

Thanks to a Web site called Cookie Club Recipes, I now know. See below the jump for their cookie freezing tips. And if you have any advice, feel free to contribute it!

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