a lifestyle website featuring food, family, adventure (even going to the corner store with your toddler can be considered an adventure), life (including but not limited to politics, current news and trending topics), crafts and above all cooking.
The Feed's Daily Sifter, with America's Test Kitchen featured my electric knife post.
My post is mentioned about halfway down the page and entitled "Electric Knife Love Affair".
I can't recommend getting yourself an electric knife enough.
Here's my original post, too.
Enjoy!
Mother's Day is just around the corner. It's one of my favorite days. My daughter always makes me feel very special and does a great job celebrating me.
On the holiday, Isabella has made me a nice breakfast on her own for the past four years. She's an inspiring daughter, and at thirteen is more than capable of making breakfast,. I loved it when a few years back she asked me to close my eyes, come into the kitchen, and turn the oven on for her. Or when she was five and made me a grilled cheese sandwich in the microwave, because she was not old enough to use the oven. I cherish her Mother's Day breakfasts and can't wait to see what she has on offer this year.
The extra-special part for me is that this is our day together to just be mother and daughter. I am a single parent, so whenever Isabella is at my house, it is just the two of us. But Mother's Day is a day when we put aside all our day-to-day madness, bickering and chores and enjoy each other.
I always knew I'd have at least one child. I love kids and babies. They make me feel happy and secure and I know how to communicate with them on their own level. Kids and babies are just small people, and I tend to treat them as equals to adults. They are smart, funny, insightful and loving. This is why I became a mother.
And I'm very glad I did. I love being a mother enjoying my child and treating her with patience and understanding, regaling her with silliness and offering unbridled love. As Isabella gets older, I have to adjust the way I use these traits, but they are all still necessary. Patience is way at the top of the list these days, so is silliness (however, not in front of her friends, thank you very much). I find that with every passing year, we come to an understanding of how we relate and move into these new roles, sometimes with ease, sometimes not.
Gran Fran (my very own mother) and I are not always on the same page, but we talk or IM almost every day. We collaborate on food projects and discuss ideas for upcoming work that we're doing. There is bickering and eye rolling a-plenty, but I will say that we are as bonded as ever. Though we live on opposite coasts, we are incredibly close.
We may not always see eye-to-eye on everything, but Gran Fran does have good advice on many of the stagesIsabella is going through. Having raised five kids, four of them girls, Gran Fran and Joe have seen it all. If Isabella and I start bickering when we are with Gran Fran, she helps defuse the situation by gently (which for Gran Fran means yelling instructions at top voice) reminding me that I was no cakewalk at thirteen and to give the kid a break.
From my echo (Isabella) my shadown (Gran Fran and me, here's to Mother's Day and all of the fabulous moms out there. May your kids treat you well more often than not and celebrate you always!
You can find recipes for my first installment of Mother's Day here.
A wonderful Mother's day breakfast created by three generations: me, mymother and my daughter. It's not a complicated meal, but it is delicious and means a lot to me.
My daughter usually makes me corn muffins on the big day. I've always loved them, and she knows it. She generally serves them with a side of strawberries.
When I serve strawberries, I like to soak them in a simple syrup infused with mint. That's my contribution to this meal.
As for my mother, Gran Fran, no matter how long it has been, to me Spring and Summer at her house mean iced blended cappuccino drinks.
Please enjoy this with your family and let Mama put her feet up and relax while you scurry around and meet her every need.
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you will need a blender (ok, seems obvious, but thought I should mention it)
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I made two roasts recently (roast pork and roast beef). In the midst of preparation, I came across an America's Test Kitchen review of electric knives. It had been a long time since mine had seen the light of day. I was glad for the timely reminder to get my out of the cabinet.
I'm so happy I did. Check out these slices of meat. They were thinner and more even than I could've managed with my carving knife alone.
Joe (my dad) used to be in charge of the electric knife. I've mentioned before that Gran Fran is anti-sharp anything, and that she doesn't like gizmos or gadgets in her kitchen. The only electronic appliance I ever see her use is her Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Even her coffee is made with a filter set on top of her mug. Needless to say, there was often a lot of drama around Joe using the electric knife. Gran Fran would clear the room of all children and hold her hand to her mouth, cringing all the while Joe was cutting up whatever nice roast they had made for dinner.
Fast forward to present day SF. I called Gran Fran in NY to get her advice on the cooking temperature for the roast beef and mentioned I'd be using my electric knife to slice the roast. After an audible gasp, Gran Fran told me to call her after I had finished slicing the roast so she knew I'd made it out with all of my fingers and limbs intact.
Guess what...I made it out alive, all limbs and digits still adhered to my body, with a perfectly sliced roast on my table.
It's no secret that I love a good pork roast. The fat. The meat. The flavor.
Recently, I reposted a post from my trip to Paris in 2010. It covered my feeling towards my first (and only) Parisian-style Greek sandwich. It was great. Check out the picture of it (and me) here.
I decided to make a roast that would mimic the flavors of the meat in the Greek sandwich, while still being not too much work. The recipes I found all involved cutting the raw meat into thin slices, marinating them and then quickly panfrying or grilling them. I didn't want to take the time, nor did I have any interest in cutting up raw meat.
My method uses all the same spices, but with way less effort. I simply marinated the whole pork roast in a mix of herbs, spices and vinegar. The end result tasted very close to the real thing, though I know if I'd taken the time to actually slice up the meat and marinate thin slices, they would absorb even more of the great flavor.
I ended up making a Greek Sandwich Salad (read: no bread, but all the other great stuff that was in the original sandwich) with the cooked roast. Using my handy electric knife, I was able to slice the pieces nice and thin, which let the with plenty of delicious pork roast for the week to come.
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I've told the tale more than once about Gran Fran's aversion to sharp knives. She winces whenever I take one out of my knife block. My brother once demonstrated how much more dangerous her butter knives were than his super swanky sharp chef's knives. To no avail, she continues to believe it's safer to have dull knives in her kitchen.
I have had some of my knives for almost twenty years and they've never been sharpened. It occurred to me that on Christmas Eve several years ago my friends and family showed up with their own chef's knives. When asked why, they all said that my knives were too dull and they refused to cook with them. I didn't agree, and stubbornly refused to get them sharpened.
The other day, I was walking to my neighborhood farmer's market and saw the knife sharpening truck. I remembered stories from Gran Fran's childhood that included the traveling knife sharpening man. She had described a horse drawn truck of sorts with some sort of a sander, which I believe was powered by a foot pedal, but not too sure. You'd drop your knives off and a bit later, you'd get them back. I'm a little hazy on the details, but the truck in my neighborhood seemed to fit the bill. You can read her post about the sharpening man here.
If this truck was close to what Gran Fran was describing from a good 60 years ago, I figured I'd give it a go. It was time, I decided, to see if my friends and family were right. So I packed up all six of my knives and handed them over to Saucy Joe for some sharpening.
Let me tell you, when I picked them up from him, he showed me that they could cut through paper, like nothing at all. I got them home and cut some veggies and meat. The slices were thin, even and incredibly easy. The knives were better than new (though maybe they were once this sharp, I clearly can't remember). And, I didn't even use a serrated knife for the tomatoes, just my regular chef's knife!
Saucy Joe has a video on his site that shows one and all how to sharpen your knives in between professional sharpening appointments. If you have a traveling sharpening truck in your town, please, go get your knives sharpened. You will be amazed!
This hot and sour soup is amazing.
And, it's even more amazing because DailyBuzz Healthy Living decided to feature it today in their Top 9.
Please enjoy all the other lovely Asian themed recipes shown alongside mine.
And, do yourself a favor, make yourself some soup, ok?
Herewith a recipe for an orange puff pastry tart. It's so easy, it's almost criminal. If you use pre-made dough, there are only 4 other ingredients involved.
My daughter saw the finished product and asked when I had found the time to make the tart. She was sitting in the kitchen with me the whole time, but because it took such little effort, she had no idea I had made an entire tart.
This is the first time I've tried oranges as part of a tart. I really like the scent of the vanilla with the oranges and love how the segments look all laid out in rows on the pastry dough. Get creative here and add more fruit, or even a thin layer of warmed up apricot jam onto the dough before you place the orange segments.
Served warm with a scoop of coconut milk ice cream you will be brought right to summer's doorstep.
Note on the pastry dough:
Since this tart was for my co-workers, and not good old gluten-free me, I used a standard puff pastry, but did come across this gluten-free version from an Australian site. Or, you can make your own, using this recipe from the blog Tartelette, which I plan to do very soon.
This post is one of my favorites. I love the area where all of the garden supply stores are. Original post was shown here.
OK, so I love gnomes.
I only keep one in the house, since my fear of becoming That Crazy Gnome Woman who the kids fear on Halloween is always quite high.
It is unclear to me what these gnomes did to deserve being caged.
Could be the creepy one with the lantern was peeping into people’s windows at night.
Or, maybe it’s the half-nude who was pulled inside for drunk and disorderly behavior.
Whatever happened, I may need to go spring them.
That day, Isabella and I enjoyed a plate of escargot. Two years later, she ordered escargot and ate the whole dish. It's a winning taste.
Click here to make Escargots à la Bourguignonne yourself, from a recipe originally published in Gourmet in 1949.
Joe Claro makes a mean roast beef. That's my Dad, in case you didn't recall that from some of my other posts.
His method is simple just use some salt, pepper and roast the meat until cooked to your liking.
Everyday after school one of us five kids would get dinner started. Gran Fran would call us from her office (which was an actual office with a door and a ceiling, not a cube) and give us instructions. She talked at the lowest possible whisper, so we could barely hear when she said "Put the roast beef in for 1 hour. Make sure to put lots of salt on it." Trying to decipher her instructions took some time, and it often made me feel like we were involved in some kind of espionage instead of just dinner making.
Joe, on the other hand, always wanted to make sure that we knew the proper grammatical reason whether, when the roast was finished cooking, it was done or finished. I had to ask him to go back in time and outline his preference for the use of done or finished when referring to meat. We got in all kinds of trouble when we were kids. So, here's his definition (though he finally admits that maybe he's the only one who cares).
I am finished (with what I was doing). I have completed the activity I set out to complete.
The activity is done. It has been successfully completed.
I am (or you are, or she is) done should be used only when a person is the victim of cannibals, a tanning machine, or a hairdresser. Hence, the reference to roast beef.
On the other hand, if you check reliable usage sources, you'll find that most otherwise respectable people no longer think this time-honored distinction is valid. This is one definite sign of the decline of Western civilization as we know it.
Let that be a lesson to you, young lady.
Now onto my all time favorite Joe-ism: where does the inflection go when talking about roast beef?
The roast beef mispronunciation is a little harder to defend, but I'm ever willing to take on the extraordinary challenge.
In normal American English speech, a two-word noun-adjective phrase will almost always be pronounced with the stress on the noun. Nouns, after all, are far more meaningful than adjectives, which serve only to describe (or modify, in traditional grammatical jargon) the really important half of the phrase.
Of course, there are phrases in which we will on purpose emphasize the adjective, such as, "I wanted the GREEN beret, not the RED one." But that kind of pronunciation is by definition out of the ordinary, which is why we would usually exaggerate the emphasis.
So, unless you're talking about ROAST beef as opposed to BRAISED beef, emphasizing the adjective is careless, improper, and in some localities morally questionable.
And let that also be a lesson to you.
I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you.
And so, goes my reminiscense of all things ROAST beef with Fran and Joe.
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