Steak and Eggs

Occasionally, I like to be a little decadent.  Probably more than occasionally.  In fact, in my life, many a common bond has been forged over this shared interest.  So for those of you out there that "occasionally" like to go all out, this breakfast is for you.  No other lazy weekend breakfast says decadence like steak and eggs.  Especially with garlic butter and sauteed mushrooms.

 
It's an easy breakfast (hence made for the "lazy" weekend), if you take advantage of some key Whole Foods'/your market of choice's sliced mushroom blend and garlic herb butter.  I imagine it's not too hard to make the butter yourself, with garlic and herbs, but I prefer imagining that step to actually chopping anything first thing in the morning.  You'll need a package of mushrooms (or more, to appetite), as many filet mignon steaks as you have guests, eggs, garlic herb butter and fresh chives, ideally.


1.  Begin with putting a pot of boiling water on for the poached eggs - add some salt and vinegar to promote egg cohesion, but don't expect much in that department if you're not using a poaching pan (which I detest for its faux tidiness of eggs). 
2.  Next put a dollop of that garlic butter in a pan, let it melt and add your package of mushrooms.  Sautee these while the water's boiling.
3.  Once you're close to boiling, put your steak in a pan with a pat of butter.  Do you notice that any recipe labeled as "decadent" must involve butter?  It's no mistake. 
4.  Slide your eggs into the now-simmering pot of water, where they gently cook for about 4-5 minutes.
5.  Turn the steak once during the egg cooking time.
6.  Plate the steak, then the mushrooms, add a pat of remaining garlic butter to the steak, then throw the eggs on top, after carefully lifting with a slotted spoon and patting dry with a paper towel.



Add some fresh squeezed orange juice and a New York Times crossword puzzle and you've got yourself a morning.

Roast Chicken with Herbs, Lemons and Shallots

There's something about cold weather that inspires serious cooking.  Armed with a desire to spend the evening cooking and a Le Creuset I had yet to break in, I found myself attempting the quintessential non-holiday centerpiece:  Roast Chicken.  I started with Martha Stewart's guidance in her Cooking School book for timing, but branched off with my own ingredients.  The results?  Best. Chicken. Ever.  I don't eat white meat (I know, I know, I'm the perfect dining companion), and I couldn't help myself from eating it here.  It was that moist. 

First, the ingredients:

8-10 shallots

2 lemons

3-4 sprigs fresh sage

3-4 sprigs fresh rosemary

Salt

1/2 stick butter

Small roasting chicken

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Remove all shallot skins, dice half of them, reserve the rest intact.  Chop all of the herbs, careful to remove herbs from stems.  Quarter the lemons.

I don't know how necessary this next step is, but it gave me some assurance I was giving the chicken the maximum flavor.  Sautee 1/4 stick of butter with the diced shallots and about half the herbs.  Salt liberally.

While those ingredients are cooking over low heat (Le Creuset tells me never to put this guy over a high open flame), prep the chicken by rinsing in cold water and drying.  Then soften your butter for about 10 seconds in the microwave and much like you would butter a cake pan, butter your chicken all over and then sprinkle the rest of the herbs over the butter.  If you want to get crazy (I know I did), combine the herbs and butter and insert into the pockets between the breasts and skin.  Stuff the cavity with the quarted lemons (as much as possible) and remaining shallots.  Drizzle lemon juice over the chicken.

So, unbeknownst to me because I am not a veteran chicken roaster, I think this is "upside down."  Whatever it is, everything about this chicken was juicy and moist.  I cooked it for 30 minutes uncovered, then 25 minutes covered, then 5-10 uncovered again.  You want to get the internal temp (measured at the deepest part of the thigh) to 165 degrees.

But the bonus of roasting?  Pan gravy topping.  While the chicken is resting, put the dutch oven back on the stove and deglaze (a.k.a. add) white wine, about a cup.  Cook on low/medium until reduced by half.  Carve up the chicken (good luck, I struggled on this one) and pour on the pan jus.  Enjoy.

Christmas Dinner

On the 8th day of Christmas blogging... I choose to write about my awesome Christmas dinner.

Clockwise from the giant bowl of: mashed potatoes, corned beef and cabbage, sauerkraut, fresh ham, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, deviled eggs, sweet potato puree.  Ridiculous amounts of delicious food!  Props to my mother for pulling off the fresh ham, which is challenging to make and tempting to overcook (she resisted!).  She used Paula Deen's recipe, available at the Food Network site, http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/fresh-ham-recipe/index.html, and featuring soy sauce and spices.  Fairly simple, fairly delicious.

Pumpkin Pizza

Another October brought another Scary Movie Night, my annual ode to finger food and classic horror movies.  This year, Scary Movie Night fell in the midst of my being overextended, with little time to prepare the French classical food of last year or really anything taking over an hour to prepare.  I reverted back to the pumpkin theme and went with pre-made pizza dough, making a variety of flatbread-style pizzas with anything that sounded appealing.

The pumpkin pizza began with the small decorative pumpkins you find in front of the grocery store.  After several failed attempts to cut into those turtle-like shells, I reverted to just sticking the entire pumpkin in the oven.  Sure enough, after 40 minutes, it was soft enough to open and brush with olive oil and salt.  It finished about 20 minutes later, after which I threw it in a pan with sage and butter.

While that was happily sauteing, I tackled the dough.  This is the dough you can find next to the buttery biscuits in the cylindrical cardboard cans in the dairy aisle.  I boldly chose "thin style," and after dividing it into two and contrary to its instructions, rolled it out a bit thinner, with flour and a rolling pin, to the shape of two rectangles.  Roughly speaking of course.  The dough is very buttery and fluffy, not what I would choose for pizzas, so rolling it out is key, as is committing to imperfection when schedules have you constrained.  The instructions call for pre-baking for 5 minutes, which results in the version of the dough you see to the right. 

After the pre-baking, I topped with gruyere mixed with a light dusting of romano and as much of the pumpkin sage as made sense, and baked for another 5-6 minutes or until the cheese seemed adequately melted and browned.

Et voila!  Pumpkin pizza with sage and gruyere.  Enjoyed while watching "White Zombie," the Boris Karloff classic.

Veal Chop, Roasted Garlic and Fresh Mozzarella Ravioli with Roasted Butternut Squash and Sage

There is something uniquely wonderful about creating a meal around ingredients that you find appealing at the market that day. And so I found myself at the Ardmore Farmers' Market on a beautiful fall afternoon, making impulsive decisions with no agenda other than enjoying the process of cooking. The resulting meal was a mouthful, both in name and flavor: Veal Chop, Roasted Garlic, and Fresh Mozzarella Ravioli topped with Roasted Butternut Squash and Sage with Leek, Parsnip and Ginger Soup. (I'm not entire clear on why I'm capitalizing these words, but perhaps the cooking effort merits such treatment).

After fortifying ourselves with interesting cheeses and champagne ginger cocktails, DCWB and I embarked on, for lack of a better term, making stuff. Bulbs of garlic were thrown into the toaster oven, butternut squash was cut up (much to the detriment of DCWB's hands, with the squash's apparently common skin irritant reaction) and roasted, and the Kitchenaid was removed from its shelf to make the pasta. The following recipe emerged on the spot:

Veal, Garlic, and Mozzarella Ravioli with Butternut Squash and Sage
1 veal chop
2 heads garlic
1 med. ball fresh mozzarella
fresh pasta sheets for ravioli (semolina preferred)
1 large butternut squash
1 container fresh sage leaves
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp rosemary
1 tsp paprika
2 tsp your favorite salt blend

Begin by cutting the heads off of the two garlic bulbs. Drizzle with olive oil and salt, wrap in foil and roast (375 degrees or so) for 1 hour+, until the garlic starts to become soft and slightly caramelized. Do essentially the same with the butternut squash: Peel and chop butternut squash. Wear latex gloves to avoid skin reaction. Drizzle with olive oil and salt and roast until golden and slightly browned.

Make the pasta (Use your favorite recipe here).

As the garlic and butternut squash are finishing, combine the last three ingredients in a mortar and pestle. Find the strongest person around to mortar and pestle them all together and dust the veal chop with the spices. Broil the chop, flipping mid-way, until nicely browned on both sides. Let rest for 5 minutes and finely chop. Shred the fresh mozzarella. Combine the mozzarella, chop, any remaining spices and the roasted garlic. This is your ravioli stuffing. At this point, stuff away! (Boil your water to cook the ravioli).

While the water is boiling, heat the butter with a splash of oil in a pan until hot and then add the sage. Cook for several minutes and add the chunks of the roasted butternut squash. Add more butter, sage, or squash to taste. Top the cooked ravioli with the squash.Light some candles, open the windows, put on a sweater, and voila, a perfect meal. I've skipped describing the soup, which is always a good fall fall-back, ahem, but any squash soup will be a great accompaniment, albeit unnecessary.

The experience affirmed my longstanding intuition that the best meals come out of seasonal ingredients and a willingness to depart from recipe and routine long enough to create something great.

The Ardmore Market is located at Anderson and Coulter Avenues, Ardmore, Pa.

Signature Potato Salad

Nothing signals summer like potato salad. A staple for barbecues, summer holidays and family outings, it's the perfect comfort food tempered by its coolness. After tasting my mother's potato salad over July 4 weekend, I became determined to make my own potato salad - my signature version, so to speak.

As it turns out, potato salad is much harder than it looks. Trying to make it your own? Well, there may be more peeling potatoes in my future. I started with the ingredients featured to the left, as well as Martha Stewart and Julia Child ideas floating around my head. I also opted against the vinegar or "German" styles. While I love them, there is something to be said for the cold and creamy taste of classic potato salad.

I used about two pounds of red potatoes, hoping they would stand up to the challenge of being firm (they did). I peeled and covered them with water and set them on the stove to boil, despite Julia Child's instruction to go for simmering. I can't pay attention to the boil/simmer dichotomy, Julia, I'm way too busy with prep.

The majority of my prep was spent on mayo. While I adore my mother's version because it reminds me of her and my family, I am strangely averse to mayonnaise (or miracle whip or anything else like that). However, I've had great homemade mayo at fancy restaurants and loved it, so I thought that might be part of this salad. After looking at several recipes, it appeared Martha's was the easiest, so I went with that. It calls for two eggs, a dash of dry mustard, 1 cup each of light olive and a vegetable oil, 2 tbsp of lemon juice and 1/4 tsp kosher salt. Mixing all of the ingredients together except for the oil, you then add the oil slowly while blending (or whisking, as I did, with an electric whisker). I recommend going light on the salt, or adding it at the end to taste. I also used slightly less oil as I wanted a thicker consistency. I ended up putting in about a teaspoon of sugar to take off the salt edge, but this may have been a misstep. All in all, not bad, not wonderful for my mayo-hating palate. Another key is light olive oil -- I used the good stuff and it overpowers the flavor.

All this whisking made me lose track of the potatoes, which were over-boiling (told 'ya I had no time to monitor). I turned them down and let them go until the fork test said "done, but not crumbly." I drained them, but let them sit about 5 minutes before I remembered my mother's trick of running cold water over them to get them to stop cooking. It works!

And now we come to both the easiest and hardest part: seasoning. I ended up going with chopped mild yellow onion (about 1/4 -1/2 cup), bacon bits (the kind on the jar is better for you, but TRB wisely noted that the freshly made ones may have had more flavor) and chopped chives to taste, with a little light sour cream to even out the mayo tang.

The result? I need to work on the spicing, to bring this up from good potato salad to great, and make the mayo in advance so I'm concentrating on the potatoes and bringing everything together. I'm also thinking of using real bacon freshly cooked and browned onion bits versus raw. Any other advice is always welcome, as I'm hoping to perfect the recipe.
Perfection aside, I'd like to think it still fits well into this tailgating meal. Beer, a Phillies win, and fireworks are all good accompaniments, I might add.

Healthy Meal: Fish with Leeks, Shallots and Lemon

It was 6:30 and I was tired. I worked a long day, sandwiched between a long commute and, as per usual, cooking was not high on my list of appealing activities. Enter my resolution to cook more and eat better. (And the ticking spoilage clock that is fish once you buy it).

In any case, I am pleased to report that at 7:30, after 25 minutes of easy prep, I sat down to an awesome, home-cooked meal. One that was healthy, fulfilling, and sustainable.

How, you ask? Well, let me expound. First, if you're going to buy fish these days, you have to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium website (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/) and get to its Seafood Watch pocket guide. It offers the definitive list of what you should and shouldn't buy. A warning: it's complicated. I intended to buy cod, but of the list of where and how the cod is fished, Whole Foods failed to offer sustainable cod in its fresh fish section. I also tend to think having a conversation with the Whole Foods folks about the website is a good thing. I ended up with silver hake, like cod but a more course grain. I think this recipe would work with any fish, your conscience permitting.

Ingredients:
2 lemons
2 shallots
2 leeks
2 cloves garlic
2 zucchini (or any roast-able veggie)

organic olive oil cooking spray
Sea salt
Pepper
2 6 oz. fillets of your favorite fish

(6:35 pm) Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees. Spray a casserole dish (9x12) with olive oil spray - about 3 sprays should do it. Wash and slice leeks on a diagonal for large circles, white and light green parts only. Juice and zest one lemon. Toss sliced leeks, 2/3 of the lemon juice and the zest and a healthy dose of salt into the casserole dish (see picture above) and roast covered for 10 minutes, until the leeks just start to turn soft.

(6:45) During those 10 minutes, mince the two shallots, cut the two cloves of garlic into slivers, zest the second lemon and slice the zucchini into bite size pieces. Put the zucchini, garlic, sea salt, most of the lemon zest and two sprays of the olive oil into two pieces of foil, wrapped well but not closed entirely to prevent the zucchini from steaming. Roast.

(6:55) Take out the leeks and add the two pieces of fish right on top of the leeks. Generously season the fish on both sides with sea salt. Top with any remaining lemon juice, the minced shallots and pepper. Cover and roast side by side with your zucchini 15-20 minutes.

(7:20/7:25) Plating and eating. Easy, delicious and healthy. Get this part: Per serving, this entire dish is only 250 calories a serving. (Hake - 160 cal/6oz; Leeks - 54 cal/1 cup; lemon juice/zest - 20 cal; Zucchini - 20 cal/cup, or 3 Weight Watcher points total for the whole meal). If you anticipate needing more food to be full, I would recommend adding brown rice to the dish.

Thanks go to Great Food Fast, the book that offered the basis for the fish recipe, which I then tweaked a bit.

Scary Movie Night

Every October, I strive to throw a small dinner party, involving a culinary theme and "scary" movies (old school horror, no gore). My French theme this year was a challenge; part of my personal culinary objective is to make everything in finger-food version so it can be consumed while watching the movie. With tremendous gratitude to Clothilde at Chocolate and Zucchini (http://www.chocolateandzucchini.com/), I was able to come up with attempted variations on French classics. Pictured above are mini-tartlets with goat cheese, quince, and pine nuts (Clothilde favors "brousse," or fresh cheese, with quince, no pine nuts). This easy recipe is available on her site and I ordered a square mini-tartlet pan from Fante's, which has an amazing selection of any baking pan you could imagine. I also used Clothilde's "Terrine de Viande a la Ricotta" recipe and made this veal, pork and cheese terrine that was mild but satisfying. Think I should have upped the herb content. I added chervil, sage, thyme and Italian parsley, but think I somehow missed the mark.Thanks also go out to Martha Stewart who, in her hors d'oeuvres book, suggested the following cheeses for a French cheese plate:
I loved the strong earthy taste of the Morbier, was sucked into the alternating consistency of goat cheese and brie of the Bucheron, and thought the Pave d'Affinois was what the combination of butter and cheese should taste like. Pretty amazing.

The surprise hit of the evening were the gougeres (French cheese puffs), consumed so quickly I failed to get a picture. I followed Ruth Reichl's recipe (love her and the chapter of Garlic and Sapphires that precedes the recipe) and amazingly, that combination of butter, flour and gruyere melted together held some appeal. It did go wonderfully with champagne cocktails.

I attempted boeuf bourguignon in small roasted red potatoes and coq au vin in mushrooms. The reason you may have never heard of such ambitious appetizers is that they really don't work. Stews should be consumed in shallow bowls, not bite-size portions. Oh and coq au vin? Not the appetizing red color pictured in the Julia Child book, but more a purple-grey-ish. Let's just call it camera shy and leave it at that. (Both tasty, however, once I transferred them to larger bowls for unfettered enjoyment).

I stayed away from dessert and let my far more talented friends like MCRF bring peanut bars and brownies -- the perfect munchies for the second movie.

Maido and Miso Soup

When I returned from Japan, I was desperate to find a place where I could buy and recreate some of the wonderful food I had there. While Chinatown and Washington Ave. markets do offer some Japanese food, Maido in Narberth features only Japanese food - and is great fun.

Most of the foods offer Japanese labels (although thanks to regulations, an English "nutrition information" sticker is usually somewhere on the package) and finding the place can be tricky (follow the website directions closely), but I found that once I arrived, Maido offers the foodie equivalent of an excellent used book store - someplace in which you could get a little lost browsing.

Here are some highlights of what I purchased. My mother was coming for Easter and hesitantly agreed to try an all-Japanese meal (I sold her on the idea that it would be more healthy than ham and potato salad, which it is, although that's not saying much).

Onto miso soup! I pulled these recipes from http://www.epicurious.com/, although Martha Stewart's new cookbook also features them in almost identical form. Apparently, there are few ways to make it. Here's what you will need:

1 oz. kombu (kelp)
1 cup katsuo bushi (dried bonito flakes)
1/4-1/2 cup dried wakame (seaweed)
1/4 cup shiro miso paste (white fermented soybean paste)
1/2 pound soft tofu
1/4 cup thinly sliced scallion greens

Miso soup starts with dashi, "Japanese Sea Stock." To make dashi, you put about 1 ounce of kombu, or dried kelp, into 6 cups of water and bring to a boil (pictured right). Once boiled, you add 1 cup bonito flakes (pictured left) to the mix, remove from heat and let stand for 3 minutes. Bonito flakes are a type of dried fish (skipjack mackeral, according to one website) and have the consistency of flaked prosciutto - a bit oily. They're also very pungent. (My cats go a little crazy when I open the bag). After three minutes, strain all of that stuff out with as fine a sieve as you can find. I strain mine twice, because I find the bonito to be just that strong.

And congratulations - the hardest part of making miso soup is now over for you. Once you have the stock, simply heat it up (if it's not hot already), take a cup out and mix with a 1/4 cup of miso shiro paste to blend it (pictured right). Add the blended mix to the stock, along with 1/2 pound soft tofu cut into cubes and thinly sliced scallion greens.
If you'd like seaweed in your miso, soak 1/4 cup of wakame in a warm water about an inch over the wakame until it is reconstituted and add that to the soup, too.

And voila! Miso soup, ready to serve. I think it tastes better than most restaurants to make it fresh, but it's not too different from what you might get. It's also nice to add the ingredients according to your taste preference.

Thanks to my mom for helping me with the pictures and being such a supportive taster.

Maido is located at 36 N. Narberth Avenue, Narberth, Pa., http://www.maidookini.com/.

The Perfect Omelette

It only seems fitting that now, mere weeks before my 35th birthday, I have finally mastered the art of making an omelette. It came to me suddenly -- I no longer had to push in the cooked egg on the periphery, creating a swirling maze of overdone and done egg. Rather, I could use patience, let everything cook evenly, and, with a little bit of confidence, flip the whole omelette straight to perfection.

I share these tips with you, with some trepidation that maybe you, and everyone else, already knows these things. Nevertheless, here goes. Start with three eggs. De-shell (you knew that one, I know). Beat them in a bowl, with a fork, until they achieve a uniform consistency. In the meantime, melt a slab of butter in a non-stick pan, being careful to make sure the butter covers all of the pan and as much of the sides as possible.

Like so. When the butter is melted and is covering the entire pan, dump the three egg mixture into the pan. Turn the heat from high to medium. Let the eggs start to set a bit and then -- this was my revelation, so brace yourself -- start swirling. Initially, this will look a lot like the first picture, above. The idea is to get everything evenly cooked. Swirling the uncooked portion on the sides, around the cooked, will help this along. Don't be panicked by air pockets; they work themselves out. When you get to something that looks a little like this (in the course of less than a minute),

start swirling enough to loosen the entire omelette from the pan. Here, you're judging whether or not it's solid enough to flip, to finish off that last little uncooked portion. Try to have as much cooked as possible before your flip. The trick to flipping is to, while holding the pan handle, push forward very quickly, so that the omelette starts to lift, then immediately jerk your hand back, so the omelette flips back on to the plate. Practice with sauteing vegetables if it's easier. Confidence is key. As are two cups of coffee.

You may want to ignore what appears to be, but no one has yet to definitively confirm is, the spattering of raw egg around the pan post-flip. I have no idea where that could have originated, and am sure has nothing to do with prematurely flipping the omelette before it was cooked enough. Nothing to do with that. The important thing is, what remains of my flipped three eggs look very pretty in the pan (and, for the record, did land in the pan).

The next part is all up to you and is all, mercifully, downhill from here. I wimped out and used my pre-grated bag o' cheese from the store, and ended up with a straightforward cheese omelette. I enjoy putting some freshly cut chives on top, with a little salt. Variations on the theme can include yesterday's roasted vegetables, or mixing in fried onions into the initial egg omelette and adding lox as the filling, or whatever sounds good to you.

Okay, it looks a little overdone to me, too. I've got a couple of weeks until my birthday, I'll work on it.

Guacamole

Have you heard of the card game Pinochle? Well, apparently, it's back "in." Or knowing myself, it's been in for a while and this is the first I'd heard of it. As it turns out, however, thanks to my grandparents, I was raised playing it. I was taught when my hands were too small to hold all of the cards (there's a whopping 12 dealt) and my family allowed me to spread everything out under the table. I was told what was played and I would throw up the right card to play on the trick. In any case, now that the game has managed to surface again, I am one of the few people out there among my friends that knows how to play. Cards on the table, this time. Of course, I had to turn this into an evening where I can cook for everyone, too.

I decided to make guacamole. I began with a Martha Stewart recipe that my chiles rellenos friend whipped up while we were at the beach. Then, after doing that and realizing that I had about a bazillion leftover avocados (her recipe calls for ... one), I started to riff on her theme. The one idea I borrowed, and will borrow again, goshdarnit, is her use of mortar and pestle. To be honest, I lack these things in my kitchen (why must they be so heavy?) so I improvised with a mint muddler (hello mojitos!) and a pyrex bowl. I think it worked out well:

Ingredients

avocados... let's say 3, peeled and chopped
5 tbsp chopped cilantro, more to taste
1 small - medium white onion, finely chopped
3 large juicy tomatoes, seeded (or substitute salsa fresca and use a little less onion), chopped
2 cloves garlic
3 tbsp. finely chopped, seeded jalapeno pepper
2 tsp. lemon juice
2 tsp kosher salt

Trick to cutting avocado: take your knife and cut the avocado in half length-wise, avoiding cutting the pit. Twist the two halves apart and chuck out the pit (you can attempt to do this with your knife, but your thumb is a little safer). Holding one of the halves in one hand, take your knife and cut into the avocado flesh through to the skin (but not through the skin) in a checkerboard pattern. Scoop out the chunks with your thumb or a spoon.

Combine 2/3 of the cilantro, the onion, the garlic, the jalapeno and the salt into a bowl. Combine with the mint muddler until (these are Martha's words) "smooth and juicy." Blend in the avocado chunks with the muddler, but keep it fairly chunky. Blend in the remaining cilantro, tomato or salsa and top with lemon juice.

I'm a blue corn chip fan myself, but pretty much anything will work with this. I'm multi-tasking with the guac tonight for make-your-own-burritos. And enjoying the spring!

Lemons and Shallots

Faced with the happy task of hosting a shore house for a rotating list of good friends, I knew I wanted to cook. A lot. And so I have. Perhaps it's the spring, but the recipes I have selected seem to involve lemons in some form, and shallots. Sometimes together. It's crazy fun.

Meal 1 - Lemon and Parsley Chicken with asparagus couscous. Born from my intrigue with pan sauces, wherein the pan remains of the sauteed chicken are used for their flavor, I stumbled upon a page of recipes for pan sauces in Cooks Illustrated. This one, which also calls for capers (Ocean City grocery stores seems devoid of capers for some reason), was also great without. To make it, after sauteing chicken cutlets pounded thin, add oil, minced shallots, chopped fresh parsley, butter, 1 teaspoon flour, 3/4 cup chicken broth, and 2 tsp. lemon juice. The shorehouse is also devoid of measuring spoons, so I suggest winging the ingredients. It still turns out well. Simmer until reduced and serve over the chicken.

Meal 2 - Shrimp and scallops with fresh herbs and lemon risotto. Thanks to Martha Stewart's Quick and Healthy Cookbook (now rather old, but still one of my all-time favorites), I discovered a risotto recipe that isn't quite as heavy as most risottos. This one calls for the usual leek sauteed in butter, then arborio rice with a 1:2 ratio to broth, but then 1 tbsp. lemon zest with 1 tbsp. lemon juice and fresh chives added at the end with a little more butter (it is, after all, Martha Stewart). No cheese. It's pretty amazing. I sauteed shrimp and scallops and then, when all were cooked (about 2 min. on each side), tossed them with fresh tarragon, basil, and, of course, lemon juice. Fresh and delicious.

Other recipes I've tackled have included eggs benedict (fresh lemon juice) and smoked salmon butter (look it up on epicurious.com, it's wonderful with pumpernickel and features shallots and lemon juice). There have also been a few non-lemon/shallot recipes and a few amazing co-chefs (thanks, guys!). In fact, my chile rellenos friend, who expertly made fresh guacamole for burritos, was surprised that the Martha Stewart recipe lacked lemon juice.

As it turns out, cooking in a kitchen roughly the size of my apartment that overlooks the ocean is pretty pleasant, regardless of the outcome. I'm attempting lamb tonight and perhaps some combination of shallots and red potatoes. Wish me luck.

Let them eat steak

With the advent of very cold weather comes my need to hibernate. And eat a lot. Thanksgiving usually signals my taste buds to re-orient to rich starches, from mashed potatoes to pie. In an effort to pick my decadent meals wisely, I've gone back to my favorite diet: low carb. The only diet allowing unlimited portions. Sure, if you cheat, you've then eaten the type of meal typically reserved for midwestern farmers, whose manual labor allows them to burn off about 3000 calories per day, but if you don't cheat, the results can be good.

Which brings me to steak. Whole Foods and DiBruno's offer excellent cuts of my favorite, New York strip. Whole Foods offers "dry aged," which I actually find has a better flavor. While you're at DiBruno's (or your favorite upscale grocery store), don't forget to pick up soppressata and fresh mozzarella -- after all, you're on a diet, you shouldn't feel deprived. In any case, if you're not up to cooking or eating a three inch thick steak, any other New York strip will do; just watch that you pick one without a line of cartilage running through the middle. I am not a huge fan of Omaha Steaks, whose taste and size pales in comparison to Whole Foods, for roughly the same price.

I'd like to think I've perfected the preparation: sauteed. Melt a healthy slice of of butter (carb free! eat all you want!) in a standard frying pan (non-stick for easy clean-up, regular if you're going to do something fancy with the browned bits) and wait for it to bubble a bit. You should be on medium high heat. Add the steak. If more patient than I am, you should hear the crackling of meat when it hits the pan, a signal that the butter was sufficiently hot. If not, it's still okay. Partially cover for three to four minutes. I usually leave the lid "ajar" by about a centimeter so the meat doesn't steam, but you may not even need the lid if your steak is relatively thin. Turn the steak over and partially cover for three to four minutes more. Again, if patience is your virtue, after you remove the steak from the pan, let it sit 1-2 minutes to finish up. This gets you to medium rare, the temperature at which, if you bought an expensive steak, you should be eating it.

Then top. You can be really lazy and enjoy the saffron or garlic herb butter sold by Whole Foods. Melted on top of the steak, it's hard to match. Or get crazy and prepare a quick sauce of diced, sauteed shallots and reduced red wine in the same pan. If you're feeling decadent, sprinkle some Roquefort over the top. Dieting never tasted so good.