Here's what's cooking in the Los Angeles Times Food Section today: What's hot, what's not: Russ Parsons and Amy Scattergood weigh in on what a kitchen essential really is.
Celebrity chefs will cut some costs to keep their restaurants afloat in this economy. But cutting quality remains verboten.
Spice your own: Combine spices to create something special...and uniquely you.
An extremely versatile Italian egg dish, a frittata can contain many savory ingredients. Don't be scared by the length of ingredients for this recipe - if you can use short cuts, feel free. I made it for dinner Sunday night and it made a repeat appearance last night for dinner (love leftovers!) Perfect for brunch, this dish can bake while you finish setting your table and get ready for guests. You won't miss a beat with this sure-hit, extremely satisfying meal.
Tip: Whole Foods didn't have any sun-dried tomatoes in stock, but they did have chicken sausages with sun-dried tomatoes in them. While the sun-dried tomatoes weren't as prominent, it did the trick! If you have leftover pasta, whether it be penne or another short cut, use that instead of making a whole new batch.
When I think back on my childhood and I recall fall desserts, sweet potato pie comes to mind. Every Thanksgiving, I remember looking forward to my aunt's luscious delicious cinnamon-flavored sweet potato pie that had marshmallows melted on top. As an adult, I've come to appreciate the many different varieties of this succulent autumnal dessert.
Fall is the season for eating sweet potatoes and for transforming them into sweet pies. Last fall, I tried the most incredible decadent version: sweet potato rum pie with walnut-gingersnap crust. Recently, I tried a sweet potato pie with a marshmallow meringue. What are some interesting ones that you've tried?
I love potatoes almost as much as I love pasta. While they are available all year round, there are some amazing spuds to be found in the farmers markets and CSA boxes right now. When I think of twice-baked potatoes, i think of potatoes stuffed with bacon, cheddar and chives. As I was flipping through Bobby Flay's latest cookbook for a killer steak recipe, I stumbled upon this side dish. The horseradish delivers a clean flavor, while complimenting these hearty vegetables. It was nice to feel the warmth of the stove and the aroma of the baked potatoes cooking within.
From the cookbook: Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill Cookbook: Explosive Flavors from the Southwestern Kitchen by Bobby Flay with Stephanie Banyas and Sally Jackson.
I love cooking on Sunday morning. Sunday is usually the one day of the week I can do whatever I want, so they're pretty laid back and slow. It's only been a recent discovery that I enjoy cooking on my one easy day of the week, as opposed to a bowl of cereal, but I'm glad I finally did come to that realization.
Some of you may remember a post from earlier this week about Nazuki, a spice bread from Georgia. Well, everyone's been pretty busy this week, so the second loaf was starting to go stale. Of course one of the best ways to use up stale bread is a nice bread pudding, and that's what I made for my Sunday morning. My first thought was to make a savory bread pudding with some tomatoes that I need to use up, but I just couldn't see using a sweet bread in a savory dish. The flavors wouldn' mesh.
After breifly flirting with making French toast instead, I mixed up some milk and eggs with some cinnamon and brown sugar, then pourd it over the crumbled Nazuki in a baking dish. The bread pudding didn't take very long to bake, and it was delicious when it was done. It was a sweet dish, but not any more so than French toast and less so than sweet syrup on pancakes. If you don't have any Nazuki on hand, I bet this would be great with cinnamon raisin bread. The recipe is after the jump.
"Fear of both fried food and the act of frying means that doughnuts are strictly outsourced," writes Kelly Alexander in the New York Times Magazine. But it wasn't always so. For centuries doughnuts (and crullers, and fritters, and beignets) were staples of home cooks, who weren't afraid of a little hot lard. And there's no reason you should be either, says Alexander - doughnuts, a combination of flour, eggs and milk with baking powder or baking soda, are easy to make.
The article includes recipes for churros (Mexican stick doughnuts) with bourbon-spiked chocolate sauce, basic powdered cake donuts, and Earl Gray tea flavored donuts.
Attention all people-who-would-really-love-to-make-bread-but-just-can't-find-the-time: The New York Time's Mark Bittman, AKA "The Minimalist" has figured out how to make no-knead bread even easier. Just add more yeast.
Bittman, who made no-knead bread inventor Jim Lahey a foodie household name when he first published his recipes two years ago, knows that Lahey himself wouldn't approve. Lahey thinks bread is best fermented slowly with just a small amount of yeast. But while Bittman's may not taste quite as good (which he freely admits), it only takes four and a half hours to rise. So basically you could mix the dough in the afternoon before a dinner party and have fresh hot bread to pass around the table with your beef tenderloin and roasted new potatoes.
All you need is a standard loaf pan. Check out the recipe here.
If you're prone to chef crushes, you could do a lot worse than Matthew Kenney -- and that's solely on the basis of his food. Though Kenney is now a primary practioner of the raw food movement, foodies who found themselves in SoHo during the late 1990s/early 2000s will remember him for Canteen, a restaurant that emphasized the fusion influences that pre-date his raw food conversion and are the highlight of Big City Cooking. But don't be intimidated: Kenney's magic is in revealing the essence of a flavor, an ingredient, or a technique, and thus, though it is essentially a restaurant cookbook, Big City Cooking is very easy to understand and use -- always with delicious results.
The thesis of the book is that the abundance of ingredients and mash of cultures in a city can be the inspiration for a cook's creativity. That's a great idea, and a true one, but I don't believe that fusion influences are specifically urban -- in this day of super supermarkets, including those online, one doesn't have to live in a big city to have za'aatar in one's spice cabinet or, accordingly, on one's flatbread. (In fact, most of those "urban" ingredients or techniques originated with indigenous cuisines.)
The strength of this cookbook is the dishes themselves, which are organized by technique and which highlight a diversity of ingredients. Thus there are sections on raw and steam cooking, sauteeing, grilling, roasting, and stewing. Within each are recipes from appetizers and salads straight through to desert, all of them accessible to the home cook.
For years I considered soup making a rewarding, but time-intensive process. This is mainly because I grew up watching my mother make her insanely good turkey noodle soup after Thanksgiving -- one that involved a lot of carcass simmering, cooling, and straining before adding the bite-sized new ingredients. But then I learned the simplicity and value in an easy afternoon soup.
Once, on a particularly bad day, I spent a few hours in the kitchen with my grandfather. He was making barley soup with just a handful of leftover ingredients. The relaxed ease of the recipe, and the act of sitting there and smelling the soup simmer, was just about the most calming and enjoyable experience that I have ever had in a kitchen. It is easy to make a fresh pot of soup, and it really doesn't take a lot of time. You can set something up to simmer and run other errands, you can sit nearby and read a book, or you can take a moment to reconnect with someone, as I did.
Obviously, then, I was immediately attracted to Smitten Kitchen's latest recipe -- a ridiculously easy Beef, Leek, and Barley Soup. This is the sort of soup that makes the new, biting cold wind of the changing season a bit more bearable, and one that offers so much more than merely opening a can and filling yourself with calories. It's an experience that warms the senses and makes the impending months just a little warmer.
Part of the New York Time's Recipes for Health series, this risotto recipe can be made almost entirely with food found in the average American pantry: Canned tuna, chicken or vegetable stock, garlic, parsley, onion, anchovy fillets, canned tomatoes, white wine and frozen peas.
Risotto is one of my favorite weekday dinners. It's simple to make - just saute some onions and garlic, add rice, slowly stir in stock, then toss in whatever vegetables, meats or seafood float your boat. Though it is time-consuming - you have to stand over the stove stirring for about 20 minutes - I find it rather relaxing. My favorite variation involves sauteed button mushrooms and dried porcinis, but I'm going to have to try this tuna variation. I'd skip the peas (not a fan) and toss in some diced green peppers instead.
When I was a kid, a Hungarian restaurant opened in my neighborhood. As this was the seventies, and my family lived in the culinary wasteland of Northern Virginia, every new eatery was an occasion for celebration. Consequently, the mood was high as my parents took my sisters and I to consume levesek, paprikas, and other delicacies. Unfortunately, my father felt obliged to give me a bite of his appetizer, which involved smooth meaty sausage-ish things. They tasted yummy, but when my father told me where they came from, my appetite evaporated.
In the years since, I've often regretted that I didn't take more time to savor the testicle dish that my father saw fit to share with me. The Hungarian joint only stayed open for a few months, and "prairie oysters" are not particularly common in American restaurants. To my knowledge, I haven't eaten any testicles since that evening, although I've long since developed both the taste and the bal...um...the intestinal fortitude necessary to try the dish.
With this in mind, I was particularly interested in the World Testicle Cooking Championship, a yearly event that is held in Belgrade, Serbia. Boasting chefs from around the world, the Championship highlights the latest discoveries and advances in testicle cooking. Recently, in fact, Australia caused quite a bit of a stir when it bragged about the culinary charms of kangaroo testicles yet failed to field a cooking team. Apparently, testicle cookery is not for the faint of heart!
Barring a sudden influx of money, I probably won't be going to the Championship any time soon, but Ljubomir Erovic, a renowned testicle chef, has recently released Cooking with Balls, an e-cookbook devoted to testicle cooking. Featuring recipes for testicle pizza, testicles [sic] pie, and barbecued testicles, the book also has some pretty hair-raising illustrations. Seriously, one video that demonstrated how to "peel" testicles made me a little light headed. That having been said, maybe I should leave the preparation to a professional. Now, if I can only find a good testicle joint...
Not everyone looks forward to the cooler weather of fall, and I'm one of them. I really prefer warmer temperatures, but I do look forward to fall food. All of the different squash dishes, puddings, and citrus flavors are so welcome that I can almost forgive the chill in the air. I've been searching for different fall influenced bread recipes and I think I've found some good ones. Check them out and you be the judge.
1. This fig and anise bread sounds so amazing, I'm planning on making this one soon! 2. What could be more fall than a pumpkin bread pudding? 3. It seems more difficult to find a pumpkin yeast bread, but I found one amid all the quick breads. 4. Chestnut rye is a little more unusual of a flavor, but that's what makes it special. 5. Sweet potato rolls deserve a place on everyone's fall table. 6. This cornbread from the Homesick Texan may not be strictly fall, but the cornbread dressing you can make with it sure is. 7. Orange yeast bread is also more rare than its quick bread cousin. 8. Sure cranberry is usually paired with orange, but why not let it shine on its own?
Yesterday I wrote about muscadine grapes, which include a coppery green variety known as the scuppernong. Well they've been on my mind all week. On Tuesday, I stood in a friend's mother's backyard around sundown, fending off mosquitoes as I plucked heavy handfuls of scuppernongs from the musky, sweet vinegar-smelling vines.
Tomorrow I will make scuppernong cake, my new favorite early fall treat. I came up with this Southern take on rustic Tuscan vintners cake last September - slightly cooked scuppernongs tucked, skins and all, into a light, olive-oil scented batter. I like to serve this cake with fresh whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.
Are you a recipe-creating whiz? Well here's your chance to make $5000 off of it.
Tuttiefoodie and Scharffen Berger have just announced a chocolate recipe contest that sounds positively delicious. The Chocolate Adventure Contest seems like a great way to express your creativity, in this case with Scharffen Berger chocolate and an "adventure ingredient" from their list.
There are three categories (sweet, savory, beverage) and the winner gets $5000 plus a collection of cookbooks and mentions in Saveur magazine, Tuttiefoodie, and Scharffen Berger's e-newsletter. All you need to do is create a recipe using Scharffen Berger chocolate and submit it between October 1, 2008 and January 4, 2009. Check here for rules and details. Get really adventurous and submit up to ten recipes!
If you're prone to chef crushes, you could do a lot worse than 
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When I was a kid, a Hungarian restaurant opened in my neighborhood. As this was the seventies, and my family lived in the culinary wasteland of Northern Virginia, every new eatery was an occasion for celebration. Consequently, the mood was high as my parents took my sisters and I to consume levesek, paprikas, and other delicacies. Unfortunately, my father felt obliged to give me a bite of his appetizer, which involved smooth meaty sausage-ish things. They tasted yummy, but when my father told me where they came from, my appetite evaporated.
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