Tag Archives: dinner

Corn “Quiche”

Posted on August 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

Annual holiday conundrum. New apartment, great building, maintenance service that actually saved our lives when a holiday sauce I was making boiled over, flame went out but gas was on all night. I hate the impersonal nature of giving cash, or gift cards. So what can I do?

I looked up recipes online and found this corn casserole that looked good for “my guys.” It’s on Epicurious, look up Corn Custard with Chorizo for the recipe. It’s still there all these years later! They won’t let me print it and I don’t want to get sued so I’ll just point you in the right direction.

I made them a casserole and they loved it. Jeff loved it so much that the next year I made him a mini-custard just for himself. He got another job and told his replacement, Tom, that he could stay in his apartment for the weekend and when he returned, Tom had eaten the entire casserole. Uh oh. Big stink.

Post-Jeff, I kept making the recipe for Tom (and the guys) every year until he got another job as well. I had the recipe, just hadn’t dusted it off in a while. The boys always called it “corn quiche.” Manly men that they are, I thought the term quaint.

In the boonies, you can’t get cured, smoked Spanish chorizo, so I decided to make my own Mexican choriizo. It’s from a recipe on daringgourmet.com. Note that if you want to make this recipe, you have to mix the pork sausage meat with the spices and leave it in the frig for three days before using. Don’t let it become a timing issue! I cooked it up and we tasted it, not too spicy and very flavorful.

Tonight I’m using my brand new 3-day old homemade chorizo (doubled the meat for the hard-working ranchers) for dinner at my in-laws. I’m serving it with a plain green Romaine salad with sherry vinaigrette.

This post is for Jeff and Tom, wherever you may be. Sorry I haven’t been around much. Lots to do and like everyone, I’m overwhelmed by the politics of everyday living. Cheers! Dee

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The Best Sound

Posted on March 6, 2016 | Leave a comment

in the world for me is my husband snoring. If he’s not snoring away, he may be dead. I wouldn’t want that.

The best sound for a dog is that of a stainless steel bowl being placed on the counter and kibble being measured in, plus Zoe’s frozen medallions and the “special sauce” which is a tablespoon of boxed chicken broth.

Zoe stays by me 24/7 but rarely touches me or wants a pat on the head. She loves my baths, rather than hubby’s, because I do more of a spa massage and he does the “manly man” gotta get everything you’ve picked up in the past two weeks.

Now I’ve two. Our guest dog spends a few hours of the day alone, on my pillow or on Zoe’s bed, on the rug at the foot of our bed. At night she sleeps on my husband’s pillow and keeps her face an inch from me. Sometimes she holds my arm or hand. Zoe’s at the far corner of a king bed so she can see squirrels. A lotta luck there, babe, hermetically sealed in here and you’ll never leave my side.

No matter where they are, they hear their bowls at dinner time. Water first, then their individual food in their other stainless bowls. Do they come running? You bet. I’ve made our guest into a chow hound, must be the special sauce. Also Zoe eats in a minute and it takes guest L at least eight minutes so Zoe goes behind closed doors, then I open up and they play, sleep and then go out for a walk.

As an adult human I wish my day were that easy! Cheers, and here’s to coming back to life as a lucky cat or dog with a loving, caring family and not a cabbage or a steer. Dee

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Thanks and Giving

Posted on November 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

Today I ran into a neighbor at the grocery store. He called out my name and gave me a big bear hug. It’s P and he is delivering an entire Thanksgiving dinner to a family in need. I believe he’s going to be the delivery guy, not telling the family he is the donor.

What a wonderful thing to do. We sat down at a table at the grocery for ten minutes and talked. We’ve both been through tough times of late but he was very spiritual about it. I know that my husband and I, together, can weather any storm.

He walked to the store. I drove and offered him a ride home. By the time I got out of my car, he was in the elevator! You, again? He has my email address. I would love to put a meal together for a family. It is in the spirit of the season.

We will miss family this year. Hopefully Christmas beckons. Cheers to you and yours, Dee

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To Better Times

Posted on April 17, 2015 | 2 comments

My husband’s flight is scheduled to come in 1/2 hour early tonight. That’s for now. He should be home by 10:00, 10:30.

Everything is a scramble here as they’ve been resurfacing/eliminating damaging calcium deposit leaks that ruin the paint of our cars. It ruined mine and they wish to fix it. First there was valet service. Now we’re out in the open and have a shuttle bus. Most of the valets treated me well, as did the shuttle driver after I finally found out where to park my car. Our vehicles are viewable with binoculars. If there is actually security there our greatest danger may be bird poop from the seagulls, ducks and geese.

So, my husband has found a way to actually be home for an entire two-day weekend, beginning next week. I may be able to cook dinner three nights and his favorite breakfasts for two days (cereal Monday morning) and I’ll try to get everything done here so he can relax and perhaps walk the dog once or twice.

For someone who dislikes enforced change I espouse it at work and throughout life. Dog Zoe has taught me much (I trained her) over the past 11 years. I am a creature of habit. If I desire to change my job or city I’ll do it. Tell me to do it, as my family did many times, and I’ll dig in my heels, especially if there is no rational reason to do so.

I do what my dog tells me. She’s old so when she wants to go out I take her right away, even at 2:00 a.m. When she wants something, that’s different. I can usually discern between the two. Sometimes she only wants to get up on the couch or have her precious toy.

A dinner for four and cooking lesson is on deck for tomorrow. Perhaps six, no way to know. I’ll be prepared. I’m teaching Texas Chili a la Lady Bird Johnson 1962 at hers and LBJ’s Pedernales Ranch for 5,000 guests including President Kennedy.

I’m changing up the recipe once again roasting a poblano and a couple of finger chilis (don’t know what the Scoville scale will say on the latter). Now I have to finish cleaning up the house, the dog and finally, me. Have a great weekend! Dee

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What Would You Cook?

Posted on March 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

En route to a new endeavor my husband will be home for one dinner. His favorites are: steak and loaded baked potatoes with salad; and spaghetti and my homemade meatballs.

He has been eating lunch at Subways and dinner for burgers, breakfast at the company cafeteria, for seven months.

Organ meats are out of the question, don’t have me make any Rocky Mountain Oysters. I need to make him something he can’t get in a restaurant.

I’m thinking roast chicken or capon if I can get it in time. Apple-Sausage Stuffing, Brussels Sprouts with bacon. Perhaps a cauliflower puree.

Honey pound cake as a Trifle with cranberry sauce and lemon curd and whipped cream and berries.

Thank you, as always, for helping me think. I have to go order that capon as I’ve only five days to go. Here’s to husbands coming home from work, even if it takes months at a time. Cheers and have a great weekend! Dee

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Heat and Light

Posted on January 13, 2015 | 5 comments

Both are things we treasure in cold weather, especially as I witnessed a first ice fisher out there today, only a few feet from the jetty as the ice is thin.

We also treasure it in inspiration. I don’t remember cooking before age seven when I miraculously found a cookbook in a dusty village library while my mother was off to the grocery store.

The first recipe I ever cooked was from that book, Betty Crocker’s Boys and Girls Cookbook. It was curled carrots. I sliced carrots thinly, and placed them in ice water in the frig. Two hours later I took them out to serve. My grandfather was visiting at the time and he called them “suicide carrots.” Such was the beginning of my culinary life. Everything I cooked he thought he’d die from ingesting.

I wanted my grandfather, parents, siblings, friends and everyone to like me. I learned to cook. Perhaps the best thing my father liked was a cassoulet I made for him from Simca Beck’s recipe many years ago. I would love to make it for him again, with my brother, with two days in the kitchen and items from France I didn’t have. Or we could make it Italian. He may like it even better.

Aunts L and J were also wonderful mentors in cooking and proper English. They still love food and create food for those in need of a good meal, as volunteers.

I was devastated when my husband loved my ten minute (check blog) vegetarian lasagne more than my four-hour version with long-cooked Bolognese and boiled noodles. Then I realized if I made lasagne in ten minutes and cooked it for an hour we’d have more time together.

Lasagne = love? Food, sharing, togetherness, conversation, a toast, that is love. With my berry trifle, it’s also decadence.

As to food I’ve a final exam to pass. Our Swedish neighbor G taught me to make Kottbullar, Swedish meatballs, for us and my husband a few months ago and now I have to take the test and make it for him.

My challenge to Swedish G is true Texas chili, my riff on a classic 1962 recipe from Lady Bird Johnson that was served on the Pedernales ranch for 5,000 guests including JFK.

He’ll have to grind the meat, saute the onions and garlic, add spices and try it three hours later. Then he’ll have his test a couple of weeks later and make it for me. Food is love, darlin’. My husband loves G’s Kottbullar.

My view on life is that if anyone of any nationality or faith met another of a differing one and cooked and sat at a meal together there would not be wars.

Food is friendship, food is love, taste and sharing an experience. I am a complex person and use words to opine, not swards, guns or bombs. I think we spend a lot of our tax dollars for “diplomats” to dine with representatives of other nations. The food may be good but perhaps it is not enjoyed with the camaraderie that best represents our countries.

Savor. Let’s have presidents, princes, diplomats dig in a garden for their meal, together. Cook it, together, and serve, family style to their people. That may actually lead to a representative democracy here in the US of A. and may help other nations as well.

Early on my heat was an Easy Bake Oven. I used it three times. Cooking with a light bulb? Come on. From there I saw light. Thank you, everyone, for getting me here. Cheers! Dee

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Missing Pieces

Posted on August 8, 2014 | Leave a comment

Weeks ago we got dog Zoe an educational game consisting of a round MDF base with nine wood pieces, six pegs and three sliders. Basically the humans place a treat in each hole and add the pegs and sliders. Zoe’s now got the game down to 45 seconds and loses pieces under living room furniture. Then it’s our turn to get down there and find them and put them all away for the next time.

We’ve a huge missing piece of the Dee/Zoe game now. My husband. He has been gone across the country for nearly two weeks now trying out what may become a new job. He’s very busy and it would take 12 hours for him to get to our airport lobby on a Saturday and perhaps go out to the car (on a cool day) to say hello to Zoe, then turn around another 12 hours and go back to work. That doesn’t make any sense time wise or monetarily.

This is the longest we’ve been away from each other in our 13 years and with the time difference we rarely get more than a few minutes to speak on the phone. Zoe always knows it’s him when he calls, must know by my voice and key words, and lays by the door expecting him to come home from work in 20 minutes. We’ve only had 30 second calls from work in the past when he was in or near the neighborhood: I’m coming home dear, do you need anything? No, we’re fine. Just come home. My lasagne is in the oven.

[Change that to there’s pot roast in the oven, or I’m marinating skirt steak and working on Chimichurri and everything else and need you to to man the grill.]

Just come home, dear, and we can figure out where our new home might be. I miss you. Dee

p.s. He won’t come home for anything with eggplant in it, thus my stellar Moussaka is a bust here but I could always make it as a gift. Always live on on the bright side of the street. d

 

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Pizza

Posted on September 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

Here’s what I’d do for a veggie pizza and not.

You know my pizza dough recipe, right? I’ll assume you’re cooking for two. Please try to find a local Italian market for OO flour. It’s a dream to work with.

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup OO flour or unbleached white flour, plus more for rolling out

1/2 tsp. salt (I use kosher salt)

1/2 cup warm water

1/2 Tbsp yeast

1 tsp of your “bench flour”

pinch of sugar

In a measuring cup place your tepid water, teaspoon flour, pinch of sugar and yeast and let bloom. I like to add about a teaspoon of good olive oil.

In a food processor (I’m giving you the quick method, not the hands-on one or stand mixer version) with the steel blade place the flour and salt and mix.

Stir the yeast mixture and pour it in, not all at once. It all depends on temperature and mostly humidity. I usually have to add more water until it forms a non-sticky ball. 20 times around. Off. Go take the dog for a quick pee and come back. 25 times around, take out to a floured board or clean countertop and knead and make into a ball. Place into a bowl with a wet towel on top.

I place it in the microwave so it is not disturbed my me, the dog, air and mostly because it is off the counter. Do NOT turn on the microwave. Set your timer for 90 minutes. Take it out to a floured board or counter and knead again, make into a ball and place the bowl it was in over it, turned upside down of course, for 20 minutes. Roll out and you’re good to go.

 

For this pizza, my husband is not vegetarian but there were only a few tiny crust crumbs left. The OO flour gives this dough nearly the texture of a deep dish pizza crust without all the fat!

1/2 butternut squash, roasted 45 minutes to 1 hour, until soft, seasoned with S/P, and olive oil, face down on a baking sheet. May as well cook the whole thing and save half for later. Take it out of the skin and mash it. I added a bit of ancho chili powder to it for a nice kick.

That was your first layer. Next is 2-4 oz. of a good drier Mozzarella cheese, grated.

Then I sauteed some cavolo nero, also called Black Kale or Dinosaur Kale because of the leaf texture. The kids will love it. Add garlic if you like. That’s the next layer.

Crumbled feta cheese was the final layer, with a grind of fresh black pepper. I would love to cook my pizza in a wood-fired oven or at least 450 degree home oven but if I put my oven over 400 smoke alarms go off, not because the oven is dirty but the heat and design of our home makes it impossible to cook at a higher temperature.

Cook five minutes, turn around for another five. Take it out (potholders, kids) and place on a sturdy trivet for 3-5 minutes. Slide onto a cutting board, get out your pizza roller and cut it any way you want. Mangia bene! Thank you Epicurious for this idea!

Oh, for meat lovers, for the last two minutes in the oven add about four slices of (imported) proscuitto on top. If you don’t want to have a salad with it, add a few handfuls of baby arugula after you take it out of the oven. First, toss the greens with a bit of lemon juice and olive oil, salt and pepper, sprinkle over pizza then serve. Enjoy, dear reader. Dee

 

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Culinary Innovations

Posted on September 20, 2013 | 2 comments

This is on the QT, readers. It’s a synonym for “cleaning out the frig.” Don’t tell my husband, as he’s allergic to anything that grows or moves and leftovers do not hold a kind place in his great heart.

Except for culinary innovations, new dishes his dearest wife prepares with thought and care.

Yesterday I had a beautiful small butternut squash that I wanted to roast for a curried soup this weekend. A little olive oil, salt and pepper and it was ready to go, but that’s another story.

I had two perfect young carrots roasted the other day, and two potatoes baked when we decided to go out to dinner. I added a small onion and roasted all together, keeping the squash in for longer of course.

Then I cooked some stellette (little stars) while I chopped and sauteed all the veg, including some Campari tomatoes plus a piece of kielbasa I had in the frig. The pasta was drained and the rest placed on top and we had a new dish! He liked it and didn’t even want Parmigiano Reggiano on top!

It gives cooks everywhere hope that the word leftover is no longer a bad thing. I once told my mother-in-law that anytime we had leftovers he’d just say “let’s go out” and I asked what she did when he was a kid living in the country. “Eat your dinner.” ‘Nuff said. Except that my steak, cooked rare on the grill, makes his steak and eggs in the morning something special and he loves it.

As I only have seven blogs to go ’til 2,000 perhaps that’s an idea. It is unfortunately one, after he reads this, that my husband will not embrace. Grandma’s Wisdom? Putting together things that are home cooked and renewing them for another day. It’s not Sandra Lee with a box of this and can of that. It’s good home-cooked food that is re-invented.

Oh, he’ll read this tomorrow and  really hate it and won’t help me change over if I decide to do it! We’ll see. I’d still keep the stories and family and politics in it, whatever the concept. But I may be away for a few weeks so y’all take care. Dee

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Attack!

Posted on August 30, 2013 | Leave a comment

Just online. I was horrified by what I saw in Syria this morning. It brought me back to the Civil War (ha, no I wasn’t alive then but thanks for asking) and brother vs. brother. A very sad state of affairs that I’m afraid the US will have to intervene to keep these atrocities at bay.

My attack was not physical, but verbal, from a group of bloggers who were bored and I became the mouse to their cats. I will not even describe this next to Syria and the school that was overtaken by chemical weapons as it has no place there.

As I prepare to retire this blog when I get to 3,000 posts, I’ve had many postings on a news site where there’s a man who’s been with a woman nearly as long as my husband and I have been married, with a child of school age and figures out all he wants to do is go out and party with his friends.

I would never go out and date and live with a man and have a child without being married. So an entire  online “club” who was bored today decided I was the mouse. While I can deal with it, it still hurts. They called me judgmental and despicable for judging the couple for not getting married though I never said anything of the sort.

I did say that if after nine years and a kid he wouldn’t marry her and only wants to hang out and party with his buddies that he’s left her already. Tons of comments, all attacking me for being judgmental and despicable. Most of them from women! Many said women didn’t have to get married. Duh, I know that.

The dog needed walking so as the wind is coming up and rain is in the forecast, I took her out to clear my head. Now I have to figure out something for dinner. It’s Labor Day weekend and my dear husband has three days off. We’ll be firing up the grill. He actually got it cleaned last weekend at a car wash! Happy holiday weekend! Dee

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