stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
I'll tell you a dirty little secret:
Alaskans eat Rudolph.
And he is delicious.
There are lots of things that one can do with reindeer sausage, like serving it as an appetizer, putting it in a soup, or... eating it with breakfast! My favorite way to have this particular bit of Alaskan fare is in an omlet or breakfast scramble. This is a great way to use the stuff you have in your pantry and vegetable drawer and makes a satisfying savory breakfast that will leave you smacking your lips, savoring the deliciousness. In fact, it's a variation of what I call my pantry scramble because it's something delicious you can make without having to make a special shopping trip for it. Because it's so convenient and delicious, I always make this when I have overnight visitors.
If you don't have reindeer sausage where you live, I suppose you could substitute another ingredient in (after all, this is a pantry scramble, it's made of whatever you happen to have on hand) like chicken or a different type of breakfast meat. Which brings to mind that one of the joys of this dish is that it will be different every time you make it.
With, oh, about four days to spare, I'm finally sitting down to plan my Thanksgiving dinner. This may seem odd because I put way more effort into planning dinner parties, but Thanksgiving? Eh! To me, Thanksgiving is more about delicious but traditional food that is simple by necessity (I don't know about you, but preparing a huge feast with only one oven is a daunting task), whereas when I'm having people over, well, to be honest, I'm generally cooking and plating to impress.
So this year, the first without Adult Supervision, I'll present a menu comprised partially of (eek!) untested recipes, without (gasp!) photos, before the event has actually occurred! Because, really, posting a Thanksgiving menu after the fact has questionable value.
I've decided to include breakfast on this menu because in my family we always overlook it. Me, I think it's important to start the day right and some savory breakfast scones would definitely qualify in that regard. Sometime in between-ish we'll enjoy a simple cheese course. When it comes time for dinner we'll have a turkey version of The Herbed Bird (be on the lookout for an awesome soup made with the leftovers), a bread (undecided between beer rolls, Parmesan whole wheat bread, or a roll version of the delectably light whole wheat buttermilk loaves I made last Sunday), roasted shallots with thyme and butternut squash, roasted pear salad with candied walnuts and blue cheese, mashed potatoes (garlic? Will I use russets, reds, or yukon golds?) and some sort of stuffing or cranberry sauce or relish that Cory will decide upon since I'm not much of a fan of those things. We will finish, of course, with pumpkin pie. The wine will be flowing all day, and it will be a glorious celebration of, well, gluttony.
Enticed? OF COURSE YOU ARE. Let's get cookin'!
Click here for the recipe for "The UNTESTED (gasp!) Thanksgiving menu!" »
If you couldn't already tell, I'm not a big fan of adding fats to everything for flavor. It's a serious cheater route. Anyone can make something laced with butter taste good, but real culinary skill comes from, well, being more sophisticated in your approach to food.
With that, I'm not a big fan of Paula Deen. Shocker, I know, but she represents the worst of the Food Network: someone with no culinary skills beyond cream cheese but with mass marketability (which is why I'm not a big fan of most of the people on that network *cough* Rachel Ray *cough*).
I always joke about how Paula Deen adds a pound of cream cheese to everything. I never thought it was 100% literal, but....
She's managed to add cream cheese to....
... wait for it...
I couldn't believe it. That woman has got some serious cream cheese talent. It's talent she needs to keep to herself, but it's talent nonetheless.
Seeing is believing: link
Happy Thanksgiving menu planning to you all, and for god's sake, leave the cream cheese out of it!
Update: Ye gods!!! She's gone one step beyond cream cheese and - get this - DEEP-FRIED some cranberry sauce!!! That's just offensive. It's like a train wreck, I can't look away. And we wonder why Americans are the fattest people on earth....
Last fall, out on my own, looking for yummy things to eat, and cursing the lack-of-vegetable-repertoire that extended beyond steamed broccoli, I starting looking for new vegetables to titillate my palate and nourish my body. I tried just about every fall vegetable I could find like brussels spouts, parsnips, or spaghetti squash. I wasn't too impressed with the stuff I was trying but was more than willing to try again since a) winter produce in Alaska is, well, yeah.... and b) who could tell if my recipes were any good to begin with! I needed to give the veggies a fair shot to find a permanent place on my plate before I can in good conscience dismiss them.
But two veggies that I found were definite winners: butternut squash is a wonderful surprise, more like pumpkin than anything else, and who doesn't like pumpkin? Plus the stuff is super-versatile. You can roast it, put it in a risotto, make soup out of it, the list goes on and on. The other winner I found was shallots. Have you tried these things? They're freakin' fantastic! If you mated butter, garlic, and an onion, you would get a shallot. They are wonderfully mild yet still very flavorful and will literally melt into a dish the way its more pungent cousins never will. Plus, they melt in your mouth. What an amazing little vegetable...
So you can imagine my joy when, while looking for butternut squash recipes because I had bought too much (again), I ran across this gem. You mean it has butternut squash AND tons of shallots??? AND one of the best roasting herbs, thyme??? AND it is super easy, cooks quickly, and is amazingly delicious? Where do I sign up???
So seriously, do yourself a favor and try this recipe. It would fit wonderfully into a Thanksgiving menu too. You'll find it on my own table come Thursday, the 22nd of November.
Click here for the recipe for "Roasted butternut squash with shallots and thyme" »
Many years ago I was very, very anti-fish. I eschewed that which went forward on no legs -- just fins -- preferring my critters to cluck or moo.
As I got older I started to get skeptical about my anti-fish rule. There were some species that were tasty, and swordfish is really the first actual fish that was prepared like a fish (i.e. not in stick form) that I would readily ate. A couple of years later we moved to Washington state and my parents fell in love with all the salmon there. I refused to eat the stuff, hating everything about it. At some point when we lived there I started to come around -- really, it's tough to resist fresh wild salmon, especially when it's prepared well like my parents do.
Before too long I was eating the stuff enthusiastically and my salmon-hating days were all but forgotten (in fact, I hadn't remembered that I used to hate salmon for a good eight years or so until I sat down to write this entry). But there was trouble in paradise -- I started going to college in Texas, the land of beef, where if a fish and a cow met they would probably annihilate each other just like matter and antimatter. So for many moons I was salmonless, refusing to eat that Atlantic and farmed pale facsimile of salmon.
After college I moved to Alaska though -- and soon re-discovered my favorite fishy friend. It's so abundant and readily available out here -- even in the winter -- that I soon started to look for different ways to prepare it. Don't get me wrong, sprinkled with rosemary and garlic and grilled is awesome, but there's more than one way to cook a fish. I needed something that would fit into my diet more easily (i.e. not just dinner) because I certainly wasn't eating enough of the stuff.
A couple of weeks ago I ran across an article on NPR's Kitchen Window that featured canned wild Alaska salmon. I was immediately intrigued and mentally filed it away. A couple of days ago I ran across a couple of cans of the stuff in the grocery store and the recipes could sense that their time had come.
So today when I was feeling pretty peckish for lunch, I mixed up the salad, pulled out some greens, and sliced into a fresh loaf of my favorite sandwich bread. First impressions? This salmon salad is superb -- it almost reminds me of a super-gourmet tuna salad, but with much better flavor and no mayo (and hence a heck of a lot less fat). To me, this is the perfect way to re-create a bad recipe: add a couple of very flavorful, very healthy ingredients (dijon mustard, balsamic vinegar, dill, and cranberries) and omit the unhealthy and untasty bad stuff (mayo, yellow mustard, egg yolks, and pickles) and replace one fish (tuna) with another that has less mercury and more omega-3s. You're left with something much better tasting and much better for you. If that's not a winner I don't know what is.
When Cory and I arrived in Florence, one of the first things I noticed on menus at local restaurants was tomato and bread soup. I had never heard of it and honestly was thinking, well, something close to "ew."
But then there was Il Latini, the renowned restaurant that hasn't lost its local charm despite its fame (which I have already described in my Panna Cotta entry). Since it was our last night in Tuscany and we had finally found the Florence restaurant of our dreams -- the restaurant that we had literally stumbled across, having gotten lost in the streets in our quest for food -- I decided to branch out and try some of the truly local cuisine. Even though we were offered many, many delicious options for our primi, I ordered the pappa al pomodoro.
As soon as the waiter set the bowl down in front of me all of my previous expectations evaporated. I had been imagining something much like American tomato soup, thin and watery with an assertive salt flavor. Instead I was served a hearty, thick, delicious soup with deep tomato and bright basil flavor. Its texture on the tongue is like no other soup I've ever had. Cory, with his singularly amazing gnocchi, was something akin to jealous.
So, unsurprisingly, Cory and I started looking for a way to duplicate this soup experience when we got back to the States. The William-Sonoma Florence cookbook had disappointing results (which is a cautionary tale to American cooks that what we consider to be aromatics like celery and carrots will never ever stand a chance against plenty of fresh basil), and I was almost beginning to despair until I remembered that in the front window of Il Latini a TV was playing a tape of the international media coverage the restaurant had gotten -- and they had played a clip of Rachel Ray's $40 a Day. Feeling slightly dirty (to put it delicately, I'm not the world's biggest fan of Ms. Ray), I hunted down the episode online, and lo and behold, she had their recipe!!! Cory and I cooked it together, and it was everything we remembered and brought back wonderful memories of that night in Florence.
So if you can't make it to Florence yourself, at least do yourself this favor and make this soup. It's so representative of how Italians can take something most Americans would throw away (stale bread), add it to a couple of fresh, simple ingredients, and create something warm, delicious, and satisfying.
Click here for the recipe for "Pappa al Pomodoro - Tuscan tomato and bread soup" »
Imagine 100% whole grain bread bought from the grocery store: bland, bitter, gross.
Now, I'd like you to completely forget that.
Instead, I'd like you to imagine a bread that's fluffy, tender, mellow, rich, and complex.
That bread is also 100% whole grain. The difference? It's been made by hand with a secret ingredient -- cooked oatmeal. This bread is outstanding for all purposes but makes a singularly spectacular sandwich -- especially when paired with homemade roasted chicken, red leaf lettuce, and tomatoes.
As I write this, there are a couple of loaves rising in the kitchen. I practically start to salivate when I think about the utter sensory bliss that this bread will bring about. I often wonder why I bother making any other recipes at all -- this one is that good.
I first got trapped in this recipe's tractor beam one day while flipping through my favorite baking book, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. Here's what the author has to say about this particular bread:
"When ... made with rolled oats, the bread is light and bright; it has a rich creamy flavor -- very subtle, but with great warmth... You get bread good for toast, good for any kind of sandwich. We consider this one of the best basic breads for everyday eating."
Hear, hear! They speak the truth -- this bread performs as advertised! Let me know if you need convincing... you may just end up with a loaf or two on your hands.
Click here for the recipe for "100% whole grain oatmeal bread" »