Category: Menus

Christmas Day Lunch Menu:

Romaine Heart Salad with Roasted Red Pepper Vinaigrette
and Emerilized French Bread Croutons (recipe follows)

Suzanne Goin’s Slow-Roasted Prime Rib Roast
(from December 2006 Fine Cooking magazine)

Smashed Fingerling Potatoes with Horseradish Creme Fraiche
(from the same issue, but here’s a synopsis)

My mother’s Orange-Glazed Carrots
(recipe follows)

My mother’s Jailhouse Rolls
(explanation and recipe will follow in next post)

This roast was SOOOO good.
The actual recipe is not available on Fine Cooking’s website, but here is some info. from the article: http://www.taunton.com/finecooking/pages/c00251.asp

The Prime Rib recipe is available here.

It’s worth a visit to Fine Cooking mag to get the back issue, though, for the potato recipe and lots of other great stuff (http://www.taunton.com/store/pages/backissue_fc.asp). That was a particularly good issue.

The “Roast Beast”, as we called it, in the oven.

I would definitely recommend it and would make it again in a heartbeat. My only reservation was the cost of the meat. The roast that I used was a little over 6 pounds and cost $80!!! Prime Rib is so tender and juicy that it was definitely worth it, but I think that the flavor profiles of the herbs, garlic, etc. were so good that this recipe would definitely be worth trying with a “lesser” cut of meat for a more everyday meal. The horseradish cream from the potatoes was GREAT on the roast, too.

Roasted Red Pepper Vinaigrette

1/4 cup white balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
1 clove garlic, pressed through a garlic press
3 Tbsp. roasted red pepper puree
(just pop the peppers in the blender – if you use jarred ones in oil, be sure to drain the oil first)
salt and pepper to taste

Whisk together vinegar, garlic and pepper puree in a high-sided bowl. Whisk continuously while slowly pouring in olive oil. Salt and pepper generously – remember that each salad will only have a bit of the dressing, so will only have a bit of salt and pepper on it.

This basic vinaigrette recipe can be adapted to almost any flavor combination. One of Girl’s favorite recipes is raspberry vinegar and a bit of raspberry coulis instead of the peppers (omit the garlic) to make a Raspberry Vinaigrette.

“Emerilized” French Bread Croutons

1/2 loaf French bread (not baguette, but the larger, softer type)
about 4 Tbsp. melted butter
about 1 Tbsp. Emeril’s Baby Bam seasoning
(recipe here)

Note: You may need a little more or less butter and seasoning, depending upon the size of your loaf of bread.

Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Cut bread into bite-sized cubes (your choice, but I like them on the chunky side). Toss bread cubes with the butter in a large bowl. Sprinkle with the Baby Bam until each cube has a light coating of seasoning on it. Toss again until butter and seasoning are evenly distributed. Bake on an ungreased sheet pan until lightly crunchy and VERY lightly browned (20 – 30 minutes), gently stirring/tossing/turning about every 10 minutes. You will need to watch them carefully. Allow the croutons to cool before adding them to your salad. Store any leftovers in an airtight container or zipper bag.

(Emeril’s Baby Bam seasoning is really yummy and is good as an all-purpose seasoning on lots of different things. It’s worth the extra step to mix up a batch.)

Orange-Glazed Carrots
(Thanks, Mom!)

1 1/2 cups orange juice
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp. butter
1 Tbsp. cornstarch
1/4 cup cold water
pink of ground ginger (or garlic, if preferred)
1 pound fresh carrots, peeled and sliced on the diagonal into 1/2 inch pieces
(or 1 pound whole baby carrots)

Steam carrots until tender but still slightly crisp; set aside. Mix juice, sugar and butter in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat, whisking frequently, until it gently bubbles. Mix water with cornstarch until there are no lumps, then add to the juice mixture. Cook until thickened. Add ginger (or garlic). Pour over carrots.

We had such a busy night, with Taekwondo and Occupational Therapy, lots of homework and some of us coming home late, that I wasn’t sure that we were going to all be able to eat at the same time, so I took this photo of the meal while it was holding in the warming drawer – how sad is that?

Strip Steaks with Rosemary Balsamic Butter Sauce (click on title to see recipe)

An Epicurious recipe. This was pretty yummy and very easy. I didn’t do all of the grilled onions to go with it, because my family isn’t really big on onions by themselves (except onion rings), but I just made the steaks and the sauce. The sauce has a slightly Marsala-ish flavor. I would make this again. The sauce does separate really quickly as it sits, so if I make this again, I will hold the sauce separately and not pour it over the steaks until just before serving (you can see in the photo that it’s starting to separate slightly) – or I will just serve immediately, and not try to “hold” these.

Asparagus with Lemon and Butter (click on title to see recipe)

Another Epicurious recipe. Very plain and simple – unobjectionable. As some of the reviewers on Epicurious mentioned, it’s a pain to peel the bottoms of the asparagus spears, but since it’s boiled in this recipe, it does help the entire spear cook evenly and ensures that the top doesn’t cook more quickly than the bottom. I added a bit of tarragon, because I like it with aspargus.

For the rice, I just made a couple of cups of long-grain brown rice (my favorite) in the rice cooker. I almost always use chicken stock for the cooking liquid (I did tonight). When the rice was done, I just added a couple of tablespoons of pre-made pesto and stirred it in. Easy and yummy. Super kid-friendly.

I didn’t think about it until I was putting this on the table, but I went a little overboard on the herbs tonight (rosemary on the steaks, basil on the rice, tarragon on the asparagus), but we like them….oh, well.

Overall, a pretty good meal. It’s been a really long week for all of us, and we’re pooped, so we probably didn’t have the energy/enthusiasm that we normally would have had. Girl is tired and grumpy (she had a lot of tests last week and was out late on Halloween). Boy had occupational therapy and Taekwondo (he’s testing for his Purple belt next week) tonight, so he’s wiped out. Hubby is working on a HUGE programming job that will take him a few weeks to finish, so he’s slightly stressed. I have become a gym rat and did my first “spinning” class yesterday and am STILL limping and sore – I could barely make it through my “Body Pump” class today. I was excited about this menu, but I probably should have just ordered something in tonight, so we could take it easy. My best friend mentioned to me that tonight is actually “Men Make Dinner Night” (a Canadian holiday, apparently) and suggested that Hubby should make our meal tonight and, of course, she said, it should be something “bloggable” (how we now refer to meals that are blog-worthy), but, truly, we are ALL happier if I do the cooking. Hubby has many talents other than cooking (although he can make omelets MUCH better than I can), and I don’t like other people in my kitchen, anyway.

Time for bed…….

Unfortunately, my camera has suffered a fatal accident and so I will not have photos for a couple of days. Hubby tried to take a photo of our dinner tonight with his phone, but it turned out AWFUL and completely devoid of color:

I was downloading photos from Girl’s volleyball tournament this weekend (her team won first place!!!) and it (the camera) fell off the counter where I was working. Now the lens won’t go in and out anymore. I’ve attached a GREAT volleyball photo of Girl for you as a consolation prize – luckily I got those photos all downloaded before it was too late!

Girl, in the middle of the front row, with glasses.

I was DESPERATELY in need of a new camera, anyway (the power button had been repaired with a thumbtack – I am VERY tough on electonic equipment), so Hubby has promised that he will buy me a new one ASAP. Being a “techie”, though, he feels the need to research and comparison-shop before buying any new electronics, so it may be a week or so before I have one. I did want to mention this meal, however, since I tried a couple of Epicurious recipes.

The first was the Basil and Bacon-Wrapped Chicken Breasts from Gourmet magazine (July 1996). This recipe was really good. I added a little parmesan cheese to the basil stuffing, as a couple of the reviewers on Epicurious suggested (I didn’t have feta on hand today). I always work better when I have a photo, and this recipe didn’t have one, so I’m not sure that I assembled the chicken breasts precisely as they were “supposed” to be (and, alas, I’m not providing a photo for you, either), but they were still tasty and fairly attractive. I did have to use some toothpicks to hold the bacon on the chicken in the oven, and almost burned myself trying to put them in, but it did hold together, eventually. The bacon imparted a different flavor to the chicken that I wasn’t super-crazy about, but Hubby and kids LOVED it, so I think it was just my own bias. I’m used to having bacon-wrapped filets, but had never had it with chicken before, so I think it was just “different” for me. The chicken was, however, VERY moist and juicy.

This Green Bean recipe (from September 1999 Gourmet magazine) was really good and VERY easy, although I did adapt it a little. I didn’t have almonds on hand, so I substituted pine nuts, which were quite good. The butter did foam alarmingly while I was saute-ing the garlic and nuts, but it turned out fine in the end. I cooked the green beans in chicken stock for a little extra flavor. Sometime, I’ll post my recipe for making homemade chicken stock. It’s time-consuming, but WELL worth the effort, if you haven’t ever done it, and is a rewarding thing to do on a rainy day.

I know that Fried Okra doesn’t “go” with this, but the kids love it and had been asking for it. I made some a month or so ago and had it frozen, so I pulled it out to make them happy tonight. It freezes much better than I would have expected (this was the first time that I had tried it), although nothing compares to having it right out of the hot oil. When I froze it, I placed it in a single layer on a cookie sheet lined with waxed paper and then put it in the freezer until the individual pieces froze, then put it in a Ziploc bag. To reheat, I put it (straight out of the freezer, not thawed) on a cookie sheet (lined with foil and sprayed with Pam) and baked it at 400 degrees for 15 minutes – that was the time and temperature that tonight’s chicken had to bake, so I just put it in there with the chicken.

We had some Pizza Bread, from Great Harvest, also to go with this. Yummy.

I first encountered Kataifi (I’ve also seen it spelled “katafi”. I’m not sure which is right, but on my box of dough, it said “kataifi”.) at one of my favorite restaurants, Artie’s, in Fairfax City, Virginia. They have blue crab fritters that are breaded with kataifi (finely shredded phyllo dough) and served with roasted corn salsa and ginger lobster butter. They are SO delicious and you should definitely stop and have some, if you are in the Northern Virginia/Washington D.C. area.

I thought that it would be fun to try something else with shredded phyllo, and Emeril’s website was obliging enough to have this recipe: Katafi Wrapped Chicken Strips with 2 Dipping Sauces

I used Emeril’s “Baby Bam” spice, which is a “bammed-down” version of his “Essence” spice. The recipe for this great seasoning is in his “There’s a Chef in My Soup” book, but it contains paprika, salt, parsley, onion and garlic powder, black pepper, oregano, basil, thyme and celery salt. I use “Baby Bam” on almost everything and even keep a glass jar of it out on my counter, near the stove, with the salt, pepper and olive oil. The chicken strips were good, and the chicken itself had good flavor, but the phyllo was fairly bland. I don’t know if I over-breaded and there was just too much, but I think, if I made these again, I might sprinkle a little Baby Bam over the top of the strips before they’re baked. The good news is that the sauces were pretty flavorful. Hubby decided to use them (well, mostly the raspberry) for “dousing” sauces, instead of dipping sauces, and I think that’s probably the best way to go. The strips, with all of the crumbly, dangling kataifi, are a little unwieldy to be “finger food”, so they pretty much require a fork, anyway, so having them covered in sauce is not an inconvenience. Both Boy and Girl liked these.

The two dipping sauces were:
Apricot Dipping Sauce and
Spicy Raspberry Dipping Sauce
They were both good, but the Raspberry sauce really wasn’t that spicy. I didn’t have seedless raspberry preserves, so I just used what I had, which did have seeds, but it was fine. Girl preferred the apricot sauce. Boy liked the chicken plain, with no sauce. This dish actually might have been really good with a roasted corn salsa (with chopped tomato, black beans, a little onion and cilantro).

I still had some leftover mixed salad greens from Hubby’s party, so I went to Epicurious and did a quick search for a “4-fork” rated salad and came across the Mixed Greens with Roasted Asparagus and Apple. A bonus was that I still had some Gruyere on hand from our recent fondue experiment, so all I had to buy at the store was apples and asparagus. My store happened to be out of regular old green asparagus, and only had the white (it IS out of season right now – I should have known better), but it looked good, so I thought I’d give it a shot. The salad was good and Girl liked it, but Boy has decided that he’s not a great big vinaigrette fan, so I may have to lay off it for a while, or add just a tad bit more sugar to his portion of the dressing. The salad tasted fine, but since I used the white asparagus, almost everything had the same color (white-ish apple, white-ish cheese, white-ish asparagus), except for the salad greens. I did add a bit of roasted red pepper, because I still had some on hand, but it was a little difficult to see if you were eating a chunk of apple or a chunk of cheese, since it all looked similar. Having the green asparagus would’ve helped, I think, but it was pretty good, anyway.

Here’s how it all looked on the (my) plate:

Wasabi-Miso Marinated Flank Steak from Cooking Light, my absolute most favorite food-related magazine of all time. Their new cookbook (The All-New Complete Cooking Light Cookbook) is an update of the one that they put out a few years back and it is absolutely awesome! I even gave it to two friends for their birthdays recently.

Potato Gratin with Gruyere and Creme Fraiche is from Bon Appetit a few years ago. This is one of my all-time favorite recipes, great with lots of things – fancy enough for an adult dinner party, but very kid-friendly. I didn’t put the parsley on top of it tonight, because I didn’t have any – but it was still great! Rice probably would have been a more appropriate choice with this meal, but I just felt like steak ‘n’ taters!

To go with this, I steamed some edamame, in the shell. I like the organic (frozen) edamame from Costco – it comes with multiple single-dinner-size packets in one big bag. It tastes lots better if you add plenty of salt to the cooking water. My kids think it’s really fun to use their teeth to scrape the beans out of the pod – kinda like eating artichoke leaves.

Overall, this was a good dinner, but I’m not sure that I would make this flank steak recipe again. The mirin in the marinade made the finished product VERY sweet and the specified amount of wasabi didn’t add enough spice to counterbalance it – even the kids said that it was too sweet! Using real sake, instead of sweetened mirin, might have helped, but it just wasn’t a standout. A friend of mine made the Flank Steak with Cilantro-Almond Pesto, however, which is the recipe on the same page as the Wasabi-Miso Marinated Flank Steak in the cookbook, and she said that it was outstanding, so I’ll be trying that one next.

Gonna go have some leftover Key Lime pie for dessert…….mmmmmm……..

Hubby and I went to our first dinner meeting of our neighborhood’s “Gourmet Club” last night. The menu was:

Peppers Provencal served on Baguette Crisps.
I think that this recipe is from the Silver Palate cookbook, but I’m not absolutely positive. It was really good! Our hostess served it with a yummy 2004 Jewel Viognier from California.

Toasted Pinon-Coriander Crusted Goat Cheese atop Garden Greens in a Poblano-Almond Lime Vinaigrette

This salad dressing was really good, but the cook/gourmet club member that prepared it said that it was pretty labor intensive. She also said that most of the prep. work could be done ahead of time, however, so that’s a plus. The coriander flavor on the goat cheese was very strong and lemony. I happened to really like it, because I REALLY like coriander, but if you’re not a HUGE coriander fan, I would cut back the coriander quantity just a TINY bit. The wine served with this one was 2005 Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc from Australia.

Whole Roasted Game Hens with Grits and Wild Mushroom Sauce
This was delicious. It was from the current “restaurant” issue of Bon Appetit. The combination of seasonings was perfect and the creamy grits were the perfect foil for the brined hens. This was served this with El Miracle 2003 Tempranillo-Shiraz from Spain.

Key Lime Pie with Passion Fruit Coulis and Huckleberry Compote

This was the part of the meal that I was responsible for, so it would be immodest for me to be TOO effusive about it, especially since I’ve never met a Key Lime pie that I didn’t like, but it really was yummy. The actual pie part of the recipe is just your basic lime pie recipe (Eagle Brand, egg yolks and lemon juice in a graham cracker crust), so it was really easy to make. If I were doing it again, I might add a little lime zest. The two sauces were not difficult to make, but the ingredients were VERY difficult to find. I ended up substituting blueberries when I couldn’t find huckleberries and had to special-order the passion fruit puree to be shipped overnight on dry ice from Perfect Purees. Frankly, I’m not sure it was worth it. The passion fruit coulis was VERY tart and tangy and any more of it than just a garnish would be WAY too potent. I’m not sure that $22 for the puree with $30 worth of shipping is worth it for pie garnish. It was a beautiful, colorful presentation, though, and looked lovely on the plate with the creamy pie, dark rich berries, fluffy Chantilly cream and the bright golden coulis. This was served with Martin Weyrich Moscato Allegro dessert wine. I’m not a huge dessert wine fan, but it was good for its type. I’d rather have a nice vintage Port, myself.

Overall, the food was all fabulous and the company and conversation were even better. We weren’t sure what the Gourmet Club was going to be all about and didn’t know, for sure, if we would enjoy it, but if last night’s guests and menu were any indication, it’s going to be GREAT!

Sorry I don’t have original photos for you, but I didn’t want to take my camera to dinner at someone else’s house! I may make some of these recipes again and will take photos if I do!