I see why codes and regulations are so much more stringent in California. Those people are paranoid about everything. My husband, a native, is no exception. Last night, I was told that steaming broccoli in the microwave would kill the nutrients. I was also told not to use the new bowls in the microwave because "you can only microwave dishes that say 'microwave safe' on the bottom" and that the bowl was "clay and may have lead in it".
I dropped what I was doing and turned to Google to rescue me from "paranoia kitchen". Within minutes I found that he was wrong on both counts.
Claim #2 - Dishes that don't say "microwave safe" on the bottom aren't microwave safe
I found this WikiHow on testing dishes for use in the microwave. Following the instructions, I found that the unlabeled bowls that were accused of containing lead passed the test.
photo by DavidErickson After the research and testing, I was able to resume my meal and thoroughly enjoy my micorwave steamed broccoli. Yum.
I'm a fan of kingcake season and have been to enough kingcake parties to be ready to host my own. So three weeks before Mardi Gras we threw a kingcake bake-off/tasting in our courtyard. I've been so busy lately that this was the only window of opportunity that I could find to host such an event and knew that it would be a hit to host before the Krewe de Vieux parade began to role. Because of this tight schedule, I had no choice but to keep the scheduled date despite the weather forecast warning of a 50% chance of thunderstorm.
Needless to say we had a downpour, but everyone had a good laugh while we moved 20 kingcakes under cover. The rain only lasted about 30 minutes so we continued on to eat, drink and parade.
These are the categories that were judged:
Best Gourmet Kingcake
– flavors other than cream cheese, strawberry, and apple
BestTraditional Kingcake
– plain/cinnamon, cream cheese, strawberry or apple
BestHomemade Creation
– king of cakes….anything goes
Most Creative Costume
– get out your glue gun
Our neighbor, Angela, won two categories
(Best Gourmet and Best Homemade)
with her Bacon Maple Kingcake.
It was a clear favorite!
Eve and I tied for best costume because
she dressed as a kingcake baby, and I have one in my belly.
We haven't had a party at our apartment complex since July 4th for the crawfish boil. My husband and the neighbors decided the next event should be a chili and cornbread cookoff. It turned out to be a great idea. The French Quarter was very busy and the streets were filled with Alabama and LSU fans for the National Championship game. We were lucky enough to have friends willing to brave the crowds with their entries. We had eight total including a white chili, veggie chili, pork chili, steak chili and beef bouillon chili. The only thing that was missing was a seafood chili. My chili and cornbread came in second place. It had beans, plenty of peppers, ground meat and sausage. The cornbread came out really moist and flavorful, like a casserole. I got the recipe from my boss. It had corn, onions and jalapenos too.
The winner was my husband for his steak chili. He used chilies imported from New Mexico because he's so fancy. He also won best cornbread by using his Grandmother's West Virginian recipe. Some of her secrets are whipped cream and honey. Amanda brought a veggie chili and won first place in the spicy category.
Lindsay’s Second Place Pepper Chili
(aka My Bean Beef Sausage Chile Chili)
1.5 pounds ground beef chuck
.75 pound Italian sausage
5 strips bacon
1 (15 ounce) can light kidney beans, drained
2 (15 ounce) cans chili beans in spicy sauce
1 (15 ounce) can diced tomatoes with juice
1 (15 ounce) can tomatoes sauce
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
1 large yellow onion, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
2 green chile peppers, seeded and chopped
3 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped (from can)
½ packet taco seasoning
1/2 cup beer
½ cup salsa
½ tablespoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white sugar
Directions
In a large skillet over medium heat, cook bacon until crisp. Remove to paper towels. Cook crumbled beef and sausage in bacon drippings just until brown; drain. Stir taco seasoning into meat.
Pour meat into large crock pot. Add all chili beans, all tomatoes and tomato paste. Add the onion, celery, green and red bell peppers, chipotle peppers, chile peppers, crumbled bacon, and beer. Season with chili powder, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, Italian seasoning, crushed red pepper flakes, salsa, salt, and sugar. Stir to blend, then cover and cook on high for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
After 2 hours, taste, and adjust salt, pepper, and chili powder if necessary. Simmer on low as desired. If the chili is too watery. Cook without lid for an hour or two. The longer the chili simmers, the better it will taste. Remove from heat and refrigerate to serve the next day. Top with fresh parsley or cilantro and cheese as desired.
I hope you enjoyed the earlier post about the crawfish boil and how to make the best of the leftoevers. If you missed it, find it here. I also wanted to share two recipes that a new friend of mine made and brought as dessert to the boil.
I met Laila through Yelp and thought she was super nice so I invited her to the party. She offered to bring a dessert, and having my hands full, I accepted the offer. This turned out to be a smart move because her dish was AH-mazing and such a refreshing break from the spicy crawdads. Seriously. Whenever someone would take their first bite, they'd say, "Oh My God." Every. time.
Soooo what did she make you wonder? Why....blueberry cobbler and homemade ice cream of course. So American and sooooo good. The blue berries were hand picked and the home-churned lemon-ginger ice cream was wildly flavorful.
The cobbler recipe can be found here at her blog, Rice and Beans and Collard Greensand the ice cream recipe is here. She such a sweet lady. I look forward to getting to know her better and maybe, hopefully getting to taste more of her creations.
My boyfriend is from California, and being the ambitious soul that he is, he wanted to tackle a task that most life-long Louisiana residents don't even attempt. He threw a crawfish boil AND boiled everything HIMSELF. Daring - I know. If you follow only this blog and don't know me in real life, which is probably not the case, you may be thinking "BOYFRIEND? You never told us about a boyfriend." Well, I didn't because I didn't want to jinx, and I still don't. It's actually quite a magical story, but like I said, not going to jinx it. Let's just call him "some guy I know". Anyway, some guy I know threw a wildly successful crawfish boil. He had lots of friends there as did I.
Everyone enjoyed the Star-spangled Jello Shots, most claiming that they were the best ever. Hooray for a whipped cream center. Recipe Here
Everyone also enjoyed the music. The neighbors opened their windows, turned up their speakers and their computer to play a Pandora station. The station they played was based on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and surprisingly made for a very good party mix. If you haven’t heard of the website Pandora. Check it out at www.Pandora.com. Users type in a band that they like and the site creates a playlist of artists that have the same sound.
Back to the food...We boiled lots of veggies including onions, bell peppers, corn-on-the-cob, artichoke, potatoes (red, white and blue), and garlic.
Not wanting anyone to leave hungry, "some guy I know" ordered 100 lbs. of crawfish so we had lots to spare. Two of my friends sat there and peeled over two pounds with the agreement that I'd make something good with the leftovers. So I made crawfish enchiladas. This recipe is similar to the one that my family uses.
We had two big bowls of vegetables left over as well, and I wasn't about to let them go to waste because they had so much spicy flavor. I bought some shrimp and canned tomatoes and threw together a lovely spicy soup. Louisianans never throw anything edible away. We just add butter.
Lindsay's Leftover Crawfish Boil Shrimp Soup
Leftover Crawfish Boil Veggies:
5-10 ears of Corn-on-the-Cob (decobbed)
1 or 2 Bell Peppers (chopped)
2 or 3 Onions (chopped)
5-10 Cloves of Garlic (chopped)
Fresh Veggies:
1 Onion (diced)
3 Ribs of Celery (diced)
4 Stalks of Green Onions (diced)
1 cans Diced Tomatoes
1 small can Tomato Sauce
1 Can Tomato Paste
2 cans Seafood Stock
Equal Part Flour
Equal Part Oil or Butter
1. Make roux with Flour and Oil or Butter.
2. Saute fresh onions, celery, green onions in roux until soft.
3. Add tomato paste, stir.
4. Add crawfish boil veggies and seafood stock to bring to desired consistency. Simmer 30 minutes
5. Stir in shrimp and cook until shrimp cooked.
If you aren't hungry enough to eat grits, you aren't hungry.
When I was in college and lived alone, I lost weight by not keeping food in my apartment. I did keep grits around. I felt like if I wasn't hungry enough to eat grits, I wasn't hungry.
I was reminded of this when I came across this insightful blog that a guy created to list 1001 rules for his unborn son. I bet he's a chick magnet these days.
Twitter helps you gravitate towards other people with similar interests. That's how I met a bunch of foodies. Keith and Lindsay have a blog called "A Couple Bites", and they were nice enough to invite a group of us over for brunch.
What I thought was going to be a simple brunch turned out to be a massive feast. The pictures below show you what happens when a bunch of New Orleans foodies are asked to bring a dish.
I was in charge of the cheese tray. Luckily I found these nifty label tags because I wasn't even quite sure what kind of cheese I had purchased.
The amount of prepared food was excessive, and the bar was just as stocked. Mimosas were flowing as well as Bloody Mary's, Irish Coffees and Screwdrivers.
My favorite must-go-back-for-seconds item was the baked french toast made by A Couple Bites. Keith and Lindsay pointed me to the recipe here.
photo from Food Network.com
The hosts made the best party favors - thin mint cookies, better than the Girl Scout version. They were nice enough to share their little party favor secret recipe with me.
Had the girls over for a sleepover and instead of eating junk food, we opted for a healthy menu. A few veggies and a few proteins turned into quite the spread. We are anticipating our 10 year high school reunion in a few weeks and for some reason that means we need to be thinner than ever. Don't you love our society?
I think we did pretty well. Maybe too much food, but hey; what's a celebration without too much food?
Dessert was graham crackers and fat-free whip cream frozen for about an hour. So good and so low in calories. It's the lighter version of this awesome ice cream sandwich sundae that I usually make.
I finished off the Birthday Feast with cookies instead of birthday cake. Why?
Last time, my dad and I were in NYC we fell in love with Levain Bakery cookies. They will change your life. Just check out the Yelp reviews. 600 people have taken time out of their lives to write reviews about how good these cookies are. So when I got home I did some research to find a copycat recipe and decided to try it out as a special treat for the birthday feast. It went well. It's hard to go wrong with Ghiradelli chocolate morsels, sugar, and cocoa. The verdict is that they were good, but they weren't Levain Bakery good. Oh well, I'm heading to NYC in November to bite into the gooey center of the holy grail of cookies. Until then these bad boys will have to do.
Fold Butter and Sugar
Fold Flour, Eggs, Cocoa, and Baking Powder
Blend Ghirardelli chocolate morsels by hand
Bake for 16 minutes
Enjoy!
Floating in ice cream, these cookies were superb, but to put ice cream on a real Levain Bakery cookie would be a sin.
As you know in my post Food = Love, my dad cooked a birthday feast for me back in April. So to share the love, I did the same for him. For Father's Day, I whipped up my new specialty, chocolate waffles.
Today, we celebrated his and my step-mom's birthdays. I tried to make it as nice as they did for mine. Key word, tried. My shortcomings were a lack of homemade bread and a last minute run to the grocery for ice cream, but all in all everything tasted great.
Prepping takes the most time
Got these the first week of the oil spill. Breaks my heart that I may never get these beautiful Gulf Shrimp again.
Paprika, Cayenne and Salt... Sauteed in Butter and Olive Oil
Smoked Sausage, Yellow Onions, Green Onions, and Garlic
Finish off with tomatoes and shrimp stock
Grits with butter and white cheddar cheese
Plate and garnish with Parsley
Happy Family
I am a terribly slow cook so it took me all day, but the finished product was so good and so worth it. Everyone, including my dad, loved it. The recipe comes straight out of Emeril's new cookbook, Farm to Fork, which I won from NOLA-Eats! I'll follow up this post with dessert!
photo by DavidErickson
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