My youngest daughter (19) is an amazing cook. One of her favorite recipes (that she just happens to be making for her dad and me tonight) is one of Giada de Laurentis's recipes. Here it is:
Balsamic (and sesame) Chicken Drumettes
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar 1/2 cup honey 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/4 cup soy sauce 5 sprigs of rosemary 5 garlic cloves, halved 10 to 12 chicken drumsticks 2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds 1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Combine the balsamic, honey, brown sugar, soy sauce, rosemary sprigs, and garlic cloves, in a large, re-sealable plastic bag. Shake and squeeze the contents of the bag to dissolve the honey and the brown sugar. Add the chicken drumsticks to the bag and seal with as little air as possible in the bag. Place in the refrigerator and marinate for 2 hours. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
Place the chicken drumsticks on a foil-lined baking sheet. Bake until the skin is caramelized and very dark in spots, about 30 to 35 minutes.
Meanwhile, place the marinade in a small saucepan. Bring the marinade to a boil (in order to kill bacteria). Reduce the heat to simmer and cook over low heat until thick, about 15 minutes. Reserve.
Use a pastry brush to brush some of the cooked marinade on the cooked chicken. Place the chicken on a serving platter. Sprinkle with the sesame seeds and the chopped parsley.
Cook's note: I like the rosemary and garlic flavors in the background. Brushing the cooked drumettes with the reduced marinade helps the flavors along. Also, re-moistening helps the parsley and the seeds to adhere.
Chop up in large chunks zucchini, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, red onios (if you like them) and put them all on heavy duty aluminium foil, shiny side inside. Drizzle with XV olive oil and coarse sea salt, add an herb like basil or tarragon and wrap well. Place on medium flame, lid down for 40 to 45 minutes. Check after 30 minutes or so. Serve with fresh cracked black pepper. (Hint - don't pierce the foil. If you do, it'll cause a smokey mess and you'll curse having ever tried it.)
Chicken on the BBQ:
Squeeze one lemon, splashes of sesame oil and a bunch of Kikoman teriyaki sauce. Marinate a couple of hours, then grill over medium low heat.
i get most of my recipes from Rachael Ray simply because they never take more then an hour if you have your ingredients together.
Tex Mex Mac n Cheese 1 pound elbow macaroni (or whatever) 1-2 tbsp of EVOO 2 tbsp unsalted butter 1 small onion, finely chopped 3 tbsp all purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 teaspoon paprika 3 cups whole milk 1 cup chicken stock or broth 3 cups sharp white cheddar 1 tablespoon dijon mustard 1 pound ground sirloin 1 red or yellow bell pepper
Cook the pasta el dente and return to the pot. Preheat a medium nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add a drizzle of EVOO and the beef. Brown the meat, breaking it up with a wooden spoon. add the peppers. Cook together for 5 minutes. Seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. In a separate skillet cook the onions in a little EVOO, Raise the heat a little bit and whisk in the flour, cayenne pepper and paprika. Whisk together until the roux bubble up, then cook 1 minute more. Whisk in the milk and stock and raise the heat a bit higher to bring the sauce to a quick boil. Once it bubbles, drop the heat back to a simmer and cook until the sauce thickens, about 305 minutes. Add the cheese to the thickened sauce and stir to melt. Stir in the mustard and season the sauce how you want. Pour over the pasta and toss to combine. Fold in the beef and bell peppers after combining the cheese with the cooked pasta. It says it serves 4..
There is also one that involves Chipotles but I wasnt sure if you wanted something hot
Ive made this a few times and the hubby and Jolene love it
The fact that my daughter is now cooking, and the aromas are wafting out here into the family room isn't helping matters.
KaeEll, those vegetables sound delicious! And, I love red onions. I use them all the time.
Shelly, the Mac n Cheese sounds delicious. I love chipotles too; we're a family that can handle A LOT of heat! Most people wouldn't be able to get past the first bite of our household's signature chili.
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
well for the chipotle version all you do is swap the sharp cheddar for smoked cheddar.
Add 2 chipotle peppers in adobo chopped, or you can add 1 tablespoon of ground chipotle powder and you will need a little more EVOO. Swap the hamburger for chorizo with the casings removed and a 15 oz can of fire roasted tomatoes drained. Its pretty easy and oh so yummy
And Moore I would love to try your chili. I love all things hot.
--Combine Cheddar and Gruyere in a small bowl. --Mix beef, Worcestershire, paprika and pepper in a large bowl with your hands, without overworking. Shape into 8 thin, 4-inch-wide patties. Mound 2 tablespoons of the cheese mixture on each of 4 patties, leaving a 1/2-inch border. Cover each with one of the remaining patties. Crimp and seal the edges closed. --Lightly oil the grill rack. Grill the stuffed patties over medium-high heat, about 4 minutes per side for medium-well. (Be sure not to press the burgers as they cook or they'll split open and the cheese will ooze out.) --OR, if you wanna broil them, : Cover a broiler pan with foil and coat with cooking spray. Broil the stuffed patties in the upper third of the oven, about 4 minutes per side for medium-well. In either case, let the burgers stand for 5 minutes before serving.
I always use those two cheeses cause they taste good together...another good pairing is asiago and parmiagano. YUM.
Wow, these sound wonderful. I do not really cook very often these days, being an empty nester, with dietary restrictions I lean more towards the meat and potatoes type of meals.
I made an American chop suey the other day, and substituted rice for the pasta.
A couple of tricks I use are, anytime that I fry up hamburger, I throw in a couple of chicken boullion cubes with it, they give it a great flavor. Any time I am using canned tomatoes, I use the diced tomatoes with the spices, or garlic and onions, I have found that they really have a great flavor, and are super easy to work with if you have a limited time availability.
In the summer I love a fresh tomato sandwich. Take a fresh ripe tomato, slice it up, put it between a couple of slices of bread, with mayonaise and it is delicious, and quick!
There is NOTHING better than a vine ripened tomato, Tess!
I'm always so disappointed with the so-called "farm fresh" tomatoes every year. Summer or not, they still taste like cardboard. Half the time, I forget to go to the Farmer's Market on Thursday mornings. Someone REMIND ME tomorrow morning!
My father was the most amazing gardener on the planet. He had been raised on a Georgia farm, and the man could grow anything. We always had an extensive garden every year, both veggies and flowers, but the tomatoes were always my favorite. I still get a heady feeling, just from the aroma of the tomato vines. Even if you barely touch them, it leaves a scent on your fingers that, to me, is akin to euphoria. I'm sure that the scent is also very much mixed in with my own memories...
My father used to keep a salt shaker in his tool shed, which had a "front porch" on it. When I was a little girl, he used to pick the ripest tomato off the vine, and then he and I would sit on the porch of that tool shed together. He would take his strong hands, and break the tomato in half (I don't know how he managed it because even today I would probably smush it), and then would sprinkle each half with a little salt. We'd sit there, and eat that tomato, still warm from the sun, and it was just heaven to me!
Our yard (an acre) was gorgeous! We had literally hundreds of azalias, roses (both tea roses, and climbing roses), every kind of annual cutting flower you can think of, all the vegetables, a grape arbor, fruit trees, flowering trees, daylilies ... I just can't name everything. We also had a lot of trees.
AND, my father raised honey bees!!! We had hives at the back of our property, and those creatures were just fascinating to me. I used to go back there, and just sit in front of the hives to watch the bees come and go. Robbing them was a huge adventure because my father had to get all dressed up in his silly costume (necessary in his case because the man was allergic to bee stings) to go after the honey.
Of course, having our own honey was nice, but I'm certain that it was just the byproduct of my father's main purpose which was to pollinate his plants. I say this because he also raised earthworms in the crawlspace area of our basement. Those suckers were the biggest worms I have ever seen -- even to this day!
But back to food! Tess, a good tomato and mayo sandwich is the best. I'm coming to your house for lunch...
-- Edited by Moore ideas at 09:33, 2007-07-18
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
Oh, Moore, what an enchanted childhood that must have been. It took me back to standing under the tamarack trees on our front yard, hopping from one mound to the next, trying to figure out how to ask my mother for my first bra. Your mother must have been in love big time to have allowed a worm farm under her roof, lol.
We've started going to the Saturday morning Farmers' Market here a few weeks ago. Their tomatoes are a far cry better than the grocery store's, but nothing like the ones grown at home. Only once did I ever have a market garden, and it was so much darn work that I let it go to seed. The kids had to pick all the raspberries and blackberries (a bloody task because of all the thorns and bees) and the plums and apples, digging up potatoes, the weeding..... . It was in a little town named Clarksburg not far from our ski club, an old farmhouse we quasi did-up and used for a few years before we bought the land directly across from the club. But that's a loooooong story. And not a pretty one.
But yes, there is nothing like a fab tomato and mayo sandwich! Best summertime lunch ever!
"Your mother must have been in love big time to have allowed a worm farm under her roof, lol."
She WAS!
She and my father met when they were in college, and my mother was already engaged to someone else. Her first impression of my father (they were in several classes together) was that he was a smart-ass. (My mother was a very SMART woman! I'm joking now, but actually she WAS smart. She skipped two grades...)
Ultimately, she fell madly in love, and returned her engagement ring to fiance number one. According to all the tales, he was a deadly serious guy (no humor, which is probably why my mother dumped him) who told her that he was going to take the returned ring, smash it into a thousand pieces, and throw it into the river.
Wow. Did she ever dodge THAT bullet!
My father was flat broke when they ELOPED, the day he graduated from college. (Mother had graduated the year before, even though she was younger, because of those skipped grades.) He then came up here to Washington, DC to look for work, find a place for them to live, and go to law school. As I said, he was flat broke, and this was all taking place during The Depression!
So yes -- she loved him!
I lost both of them way too early, KaeEll, (and they were each too young to die when they did) and I wouldn't trade any of my memories for the world. It was an enchanting yard, and all due to my father's hard work!
Oh yes -- and he was very much an organic gardener. We had a HUGE mulch pile in the very back corner of our yard, behind the vegetable garden. Black gold! He used it on everything he grew. He also saved seeds from his best plants, and used them in the garden the following year. Each year, those plants were better and better. He tested for PH levels, and he knew how to graft plants.
When the bees swarmed one summer -- luckily enough to a tree in our own yard -- he captured them, and began a new hive! (The man WAS a smart-ass! Remember, he was allergic to stings...)
I learned so much about bees! You can actually buy queens to introduce into a hive, and you can also combine hives, if necessary. My father actually did this once. You put one hive on top of another, and separate them only with layers of newspaper. The bees will buzz around inside the two separate hives, naturally, but they'll begin to get used to each others sounds, and make friends. Once the two hives feel comfortable with each other, they'll chew away the newspaper, and form one large hive! Just fascinating creatures...
Somehow, even though I wasn't paying too much attention at the time (too busy running and playing), a little bit of what he knew about gardening seeped into my brain. It didn't know that it had until we bought our house, and I began to realize that my husband and I were going to have to do the planting if anything was going to grow around here besides just grass! Slowly, some of those childhood memories began to emerge, as I remembered names of plants and what my father had done with them.
I'll never be the gardener that he was, but I'm grateful to have grown up where I did!
KaeEll -- you're absolutely right. Vegetable/fruit gardens are an enormous amount of work. We haven't had one ourselves for a number of years, although I decided a couple of summers to try to grow tomatoes in large pots.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Disaster... All the gardening shows say that you can to it, but they lie!
-- Edited by Moore ideas at 11:42, 2007-07-18
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
I havent planted any vegetables yet at our house. I mainly wanted to see what kinds of plants the former owner had planted because there are ready made beds. And there are lots of pretty flowers in the back but not much in the front. I have a mint plant in its pot still that I about killed, I still dont know if it will survive. But I need to get it into the ground so it will grow better. Problem is is that I only have one plant and everyone says you cant plant anything with it because it will take over the other plant. So I think I may get another mint plant and just put both plants in the bed.
Anyways, Jojo those burgers sound oh so good. I will need to try them
Thanks for sharing the love story your parents lived out! Much better than what's been on our soaps lately, huh?
A colleague of my husband's runs a small organic farm out in Erin (50 minutes northwest of here), and he too keeps apiaries AND is allergic to the stings he gets. Crazy bee nuts, lol. But the honey we buy from him is amazing, and nothing like the crap you buy at the grocery stores. And he makes his own maple syrup, taps his sugar maples, built himself a condenser, too. And a forge!
After the farm house experience, we moved into the property across from the ski club, and it had an orchard in front of it. Big apple growing country up there on the Niagara Escarpment. Anyway, other apple growers in the area would spray our trees in order to protect their own orchards. We picked dozens of bushels of apples for many years, gave them away to as many people as we could. Then one year when developers started buying up adjacent lands and the orchards were leveled, our little collection of apple trees just up and died. Not one apple appeared! Just like that!! It was as if they had lost heart. Weird.
Anyhow, we finally sold that land last summer to a developer, let our membership in the ski club lapse and just walked away from a lifestyle we'd enjoyed for many years. I'm glad we raised our kids with that connection, but I can tell you that their experiences with growing vegies and fruits turned them right off gardening in any form! I guess I worked them a little too hard.
KaeEll, that's very strange about the apples! I imagine that they MUST have suffered from some sort of environmental trauma. How brave of you to simply walk away from the place you had enjoyed...
Shelly, I don't think that you can kill mint, although my husband tried to kill ours a little earlier this season.
My husband's parents had planted some of the BEST mint I had tasted in the perfect place on their property. It was enclosed on all four sides by cement! On one side was the house itself, opposite that was the pool decking, and on each side were concrete door stoops. It was the perfect area because the mint couldn't spread to any unwanted garden location, but it had a large enough place to thrive.
So, when we had to sell the property, I pulled up some mint to plant here. I wanted to have some of it, not only because it was so, well... "minty", but also for the sentimental value of having a plant from my in-law's land.
I have nurtured that darned potted mint for several years now, and this past May, I had intended to repot it. My husband had been doing a little backyard cleanup (uh-oh), but I had set the mint aside, so I thought it was safe. Several days after his little project, I went outside to do the repotting, but I couldn't find my pot of mint ANYWHERE! A terrible feeling of dread began to creep over me, especially when I realized that it was the day after trash collection!!!
Well, I found that he had DUMPED the mint, root side UP, in another location in the yard, apparently thinking that it was a dead plant. And, it had been HOT outside, so the roots had been exposed to the sun for about two or three days, with the leaves buried underneath all the dirt!
I was so upset. I was threatening to send him back out to the country property, an hour from here, to BEG the new owners of the house to let him pull up some more mint. Assuming, of course, that they hadn't replanted the area with something else in the meantime...
In an act of desperation, I pulled out my intended pot, filled it up with that Miracle Grow potting soil, pulled the mint's roots apart a bit (because they had been rootbound which is why the plant had looked so puny, and needed repotting in the first place), and watered the hell out of it. And PRAYED!
This is the BEST looking crop of mint that I've had since I first pulled it up. AWESOME! So don't worry about your mint... (And, my husband doesn't have to go begging, for which he is enormously grateful.)
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
yeah, I just need to get it into the ground. I think it will thrive better in the ground then in the rinky dinky red pot that it is in now. Its not a great pot..Just a little plastic thing. Thanks Moore, I was a little worried...though I have heard people say that they had tried to get rid of a mint plant that they no longer wanted but couldnt kill it.
LOL, Moore! I think every amateur gardner has a mint story! I don't plant the stuff anymore because the darn plant has a mind of its own. It even choked out lily of the valley two houses ago, and that stuff is impossible to kill or contain!
And Moore, when we walked away from the Collingwood area, it was indeed the end of an era for us. We started going there, renting chalets for the ski seasson when Tony and Mike were still in diapers. We built 2 cottages, bought several acres of waterfront property, did a couple of smallish developments, then the worm turned for us.
I don't think I could even drive up there again. When I hear that so-and-so has left Toronto for life in the Collingwood area, my stomach turns. We didn't leave the area all that voluntarily in a way. The property turned into a kind of nightmare for us as we went head to head with corrupt politicians throwing up self-serving roadblocks for almost 19 years. Eventually, a guy with very deep pockets took the politicians to the courts and won. The town of Thornbury was at the verge of complete bankrupcy as a result.
There's a busboy/billionaire syndrome there now as a huge corporation moved in and started developing at the other end of the mountain. Disney-esque horrors replaced the charming chalets, sewers were installed, town water, and property values skyrocketed.
If interested, google Intrawest - I'm sure they have proudly splashed their deveoplmet in Collingwood all over the place. They managed to ruin Mt. Tremblant, too. The last time I was at Whistler outside Vancouver, they were busy wrecking that place too. But it's profitable, and THAT seems to be the only motivation now.
That is a SAD story, KaeEll. So disappointing! It must have been heartbreaking for you to see all of that happen to a place you loved so much.
I honestly think that this is beginning to happen just about everywhere. MacMansions are going up all around here, and out where my inlaws lived too. My husband was just telling me a story last night about how the airport in the Leesburg, VA area has managed to block a new development of houses nearby.
The Leesburg area (and my inlaws were farther out than Leesburg) used to be a roadtrip destination! Now, there is a huge bypass, outlet malls, the aforementioned MacMansions, etc.
As my husband pointed out last night when he was telling the story, these people who want to build near the airport are the SAME ones who will then be complaining about all the noise from the air traffic! You just know it...
Shelly, I STRONGLY advise you to buy yourself a LARGE plastic pot (lighter to handle), plant the mint in that, and put the entire thing into the ground! It sounds bizarre, but otherwise you'll be mowing mint in a couple of years instead of grass. And THAT, unfortunately for you, will only make the mint even stronger!
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
thanks for the advice moore. And your right about the people building by the airport. I remember in Phoenix people built houses not far from the air force base and now complain (I think someone may have even sued) about the sounds from the jets.
Yes, it was a heartbreak for us, but our hearts were broken long before we actually left. But the one good thing that came out of that fiasco is that I honestly think it made my husband and me better people. We'd been a little too full of ourselves there for a while, having had several successes in a row, and a touch, ahem, of hubris snuck in there. We were probably deserving of a bit of a smackdown, just not such a HUGE one, lol.
Anyway, the best part of all is that it put an abrupt end to my political career. After dealing with those rat bastards up north, politics was the last thing on my to-do list. I resigned, and never looked back.
