Category Archives: Recipe Ideas

I don’t have to serve wine with dinner. But when it comes to summer meat marinades I tend to use the following for pork: garlic/thyme/wine; grainy mustard and beer; or with hard apple cider.

What happens when the preacher comes to town? I’ve lived in a dry town for years, except I was off at college. My husband grew up in a dry county and has never imbibed, but he appreciates his wife’s cooking and likes the flavor of each of the dishes above.

His church forbade alcohol, dancing and solo singing. Ask him. He taught me the Texas Two-Step in his closet as I was helping him move away from me less than a month after we met. Don’t worry, he came back for me a few weeks later and the rest is history.

Now his and his brothers’ great high school friend is visiting us and staying over a night with wife and toddler daughter. He teaches school and preaches at his local church.

Jim’s been out of the church for some time so I asked my brother-in-law if it was OK to marinate meat in beer or wine or cider, dry the meat then grill it. He said if I gave the baby a jigger of whisky (here’s to the Scots for their spelling) that would be against the rules but there’s nothing against marinating.

I’ll hold him to that but came up with a new idea. This family will have been on the road for a few days eating restaurant food. We will provide them a place to stay en route and a family meal. I’m thinking of roast chicken, mashed potatoes and they liked my corn on the cob at Memorial Day so I’ll stick with that, plus a dessert. I want them to enjoy their vacation but make it feel like home. I’ll give them a chance to relax, take a walk, do a load of laundry and have a good night’s sleep before my breakfast… Cheers, Dee

Favorite Home-Cooked Dinners

This was really hard for me! Less so as both my grandmothers died before I was a year old, and my mother died nearly two years ago. So now I only have my siblings, aunts and in-laws’ feelings to consider. Fire away!

Years after making turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mother decided to go back to her British roots. Normally I’d shudder at the thought of grey lamb and dreaded mint jelly, but this was, as “Martha” would say, a good thing.

Medium rare prime rib studded with garlic; golden roasted potatoes from the pan, Yorkshire pudding from some of the pan juices and beef gravy. Sure we had brussels sprouts or carrots or spinach (cooked the German way) or another vegetable but wow! What a meal! It was crowned with dessert, mincemeat tarts, lebkuchen (German, of course), Scandinavian cookies, apple shortbread cookies and whatever cookies my sisters decided to make. I was the sous-chef, prepping and cooking all the sides. To this day I’ve never made a prime rib in my life!

A perfectly roasted chicken, with stuffing or without. I truss it a certain way (majored in chicken bondage and even taught the chefs I apprenticed for) and while it’s not traditional to my family, I like my “seat of the pants” sausage and apple stuffing. My mother always used beef consomme to moisten her bread stuffing and to make gravy so that’s normal for me and I believe it gives the chicken more flavor. Add some garlic mashed potatoes and veg of choice and that’s a stalwart meal for me.

Jacques Pepin gave me, via a recipe, a way to delight my family with his Lamb Robert. I believe it’s my brother’s favorite dish (he calls it “Sheep Bob” but I’ve never made it for my husband or for guests because one never knows whether folks like lamb. I certainly do, and not grey and covered in mint jelly. This recipe calls for a boned, butterflied leg of lamb. I’m a terrible butcher but have worked my way through this probably ten times. Marinate it in a mixture of soy, garlic, ginger, jalapeno, I don’t have the recipe here but you can find it online. Cook it rare to medium-rare. It is delicious. With it I like green beans, even a cold green bean/vinaigrette, and rosemary roasted potatoes.

My latest favorite is a rosemary-maple marinated beef flap done on the grill. That comes courtesy of Don, my butcher. I believe I’ve given you his marinade recipe.

Once I made cassoulet from a recipe from Simone “Simca” Beck, of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I told you the story of living in a one-room cabin with no lock on the door, freezing after the store-bought bundle of wood burned out of the wood stove. In that month I spent $10 frivolously in a used bookstore, buying Simca’s book. Many of the recipes I cooked in school were hers, including lettuce timbales and a wonderful chocolate-raspberry pudding/cake that I made every day of my apprenticeship. My father loved it. I probably would have learned to love it but it took two days to make! Now I hear there’s a kit you can buy with the perfect original beans and saucisses de Toulouse to make a classic cassoulet. The one thing I really love about cassoulet is that it’s like fish stew, everyone has the “perfect” version and there remain heated arguments about what’s best. Don’t you love serving controversy along with a meal? That way people don’t have to talk about politics or the economy.

Salmon is probably my favorite fish, en papilotte with braised leeks and grainy mustard, microwaved with lemon and soy, smoked on a sesame bagel. But I made an entire side of salmon covered in a scallop mousse with zucchini slices as “scales” for my family the day after cooking school graduation. My cousin deep-fried parsley for me as a garnish. Don’t worry, I don’t cook nearly that fancy anymore! It was the late 80’s, give me a break! I was probably wearing a shirt with shoulder pads.

That’s it. If I’ve offended anyone, sorry. I’m sure I’ll come up with five items I forgot later on, which I’ll share with you. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend! Cheers, Dee

I canceled our delivery order for this week. If we need milk or juice, I’ll buy it locally. I’m working through a frig that’s filled to the gills and a cooler out on the deck full of iced tea and sodas.

Last night I took the last two boiled ears of corn, cut the corn off, chopped up 1/4 of a red bell pepper, and added enough chimichurri sauce to coat (I use Tyler Florence’s recipe from Food Network). It was good. On a long platter I placed sliced orange and yellow tomatoes (olive oil, s&p, basil), my cuke salad (on the site) and the corn salad. It was served with grilled beef flap meat with Don’s maple-rosemary-garlic marinade.

There were a few kernels of corn leftover so I made boxed cornbread and included the stragglers. The oven ran too hot then too cold and the resulting bread broke apart rather than allowing itself to be cut. So it’s mine, for breakfast this morning and probably tomorrow.

There are three sweet Italian sausages that I parboiled and I thought of joining them with some ground beef and tomatoes and making a version of Frank Sinatra’s dish (his called for about 1 1/2 cups of olive oil) with pasta.

The other night we had guests to see the fireworks and I was supposed to make a blueberry-lemon trifle. It wasn’t until I got everything together to realize I was already using a huge cooler and the frig was full, and the last time I made trifle was for Jim’s office and it was winter! I stored it, covered, in the garage! I still made my version of Mom’s blueberry sauce and sent the guys out for vanilla ice cream before the fireworks started. It all worked and that’s how the frig will be emptied.

Hope you’re having a great start to the summer and will pass along any recipes we need to know about. Cheers! Dee

NY strip on the grill rubbed with garlic, olive oil, and sprinkled with Borsari seasoned salt. Add some chipotle sweet potato fries (frozen), and corn on the cob and dinner’s on the table. I made three extra ears of corn, which I’ll use for soup or a corn salad.

Yep, it was a good day today. The neighborhood is fine, and it looks like my dad will be around for a while longer as his test results were good. Yea! It did start raining on my newly waxed car but that’s minor.

The nightstand arrived, so sometime this week I’ll have a real printer stand with an open cubby for paper and drawers for my stuff. The printer sits next to the dining table and for a year it’s been sitting on the box in which we packed Jim’s PlayStation! That was his one non-negotiable item to take on the move. Mine was our food processor. That meant I had to leave my beloved Kitchenaid 5-qt. mixer in storage.

I’m working on dinner, Jim’s en route home and the delivery order for tomorrow is complete. Let’s hope that local nectarines are not rock-hard and that there are true surprises in the surprise box. I love the idea of the surprise box, just wish it was organic. It’s fun to try to figure out how to use certain things I don’t normally buy. More later, hope you’re having a good day. Dee

About a 1-2 month old email from The Dish with Food & Wine gave me ideas. The recipe was Soy-Glazed Chicken Yakitori and I do not have permission to publish it.

I had to order sweet Indonesian soy sauce (ketjap manis) from Amazon (rather than make caramel in the tinny pots that are here in our rented townhome). The first time I made it, for guests, using cheap wooden skewers, it was good and very sweet. Then I found out our printer had cut off the last two ingredients when printing the page, Sriracha and garlic! It was much better when I made it last night, quite a kick! We bought flat skewers with a metal “cage” in which they can be grilled and turned. It made quite a difference.

Last night I had chicken breast, red onion, scallion, red pepper and pineapple. Just mixing things up a bit! It was great though I should have made rice. Next time.

The farmers’ market was good today but I didn’t get much, only some farmer-made feta cheese that I included in our burgers tonight, along with some scallions. Also a peanut butter cookie for the dog. Not much but we had a nice lunch outdoors and we couldn’t do that at last week’s market when we were scrambling to get our nephew gloves and headgear from our winter coat pockets! Lots of people donned tank tops, shorts and sandals today but at lunch I was happy to have long pants, shoes and a denim jacket because there was quite a breeze.

Hope all you dads out there had a happy Fathers’ Day! We both called our dads today to express our gratitude. When I was young my sister and I would have Dad take us to the Zoo, a three-hour round-trip drive. If he didn’t feel like a dad Sunday morning, he certainly did by that evening! Sorry, Dad. Cheers and have a great week, Dee

We actually ate in a civilized manner last night, as my computer is up on the kitchen counter and all my papers are stored temporarily while we entertain guests.

As an incentive for putting up my piles of paper, I got four new placemats and napkins, and five small votive candle holders. It’s the middle of the night so I won’t take a photo for you now, as the camera is up in our room in the closet and I don’t want to wake the husband or the dog or the guests in the guest room.

They’re really not my style but we have a dark red accent wall downstairs and I found Indonesian-inspired placemats in reds, oranges and yellows and yesterday picked out neutral yellow napkins and rattan napkin-holders. Then I bought five sunflowers and placed them in a pretty vase that came with the place. For new readers, we took two cars with luggage and necessities and one dog halfway across the country over a year ago, and all our worldly belongings are in storage back there! Yes, we thrive on adventure. I really do have dishes, vases, napkin holders, votive candle holders (and candles), just not here.

I had planned on burgers last night but first started out with picking my mother-in-law and our nephew up at the airport then went to the copper mine to see the big trucks. When we got to the house, my nephew was all a-twitter with the new environment, his first plane ride et al, and our dog Zoe. I decided to try a totally new menu.

From The Dish With Food & Wine, a few weeks ago, I made Soy-Glazed Chicken Yakitori. It was delicious. It calls for skewers of chicken, scallion and shiitake mushroom. My husband doesn’t like shiitake mushrooms so I substituted chunks of red bell pepper. For the sauce I had to obtain ketjap manis (sweet Indonesian soy sauce) from a mail-order company and that sauce was delicious. My husband overcooked the chicken a bit, as it was pouring and thundering and lighning out at the grill and with a young boy running around…. but it was tasty.

I paired it with cold sesame noodles, a recipe from Epicurious, as my favorite recipe for this dish is from Deborah Madison’s Greens cookbook, and still is. I shouldn’t have dressed the noodles so early because they drank up all the marinade, but those noodles were tasty. Deborah Madison’s book can be found on my cookbook list.

Veggies included two bunch of radishes, tossed with oil, salt and pepper; three ears of corn on the cob; and sliced tomatoes with olive oil and basil, s & p. We didn’t have room for dessert!

A visit to the grocery store is a must tomorrow, though there is little room in the frig or freezer. I ordered my farm-fresh goods in bulk that arrived early yesterday morning and even got the non-organic (they don’t carry organic anymore) “surprise” package. In it were a very green pineapple, a mango, two avocados, four tomatoes, four kiwis and a bunch of red radishes that I mixed with my red, pink and white ones in a bowl for munching.

I think it was good day, and we were all tired as our guests are missing an hour. So I’m up writing and planning for tomorrow. It’s a good plan and leaves all the activities to our guests, plus timing, so I just have to get them started and do all the stuff I didn’t get done yesterday like mail, drycleaning, grocery shopping. What’s a hostess to do? Cheers, Dee