Sweet Potatoes Stuffed with Eggs

I saved this recipe back in November and didn't think about it again until this past weekend when I was trying to make up for lost time with "nueva recetas". I made this for breakfast on Saturday, and then forgot to write a post about it, even when I was writing posts for Sunday's breakfast and dinner. There are a lot of things I like about being fifty. My faulty memory isn't one of them. Anyway, this was easy to make. We didn't have bacon, so I made a vegetarian version. I baked the sweet potato in the microwave first, it didn't take long (perhaps 5-6 minutes) to become soft enough to slice in half and scoop out the middle. I cracked an egg into each opening, topped with shredded mozzarella, and baked at 350 for 20 minutes. I also put it under the broiler for a few minutes after. We topped these with garlic salt, and fresh basil.

Something like the Ghanaian Spinach Stew posted on the NYT website

I try to read at least some of the New York Times online everyday, and occasionally I try a recipe I find there. The Ghanaian Spinach Stew looked good, and I thought I could probably substitute some of the mixed greens I froze over the summer from my CSA for the spinach. I ended up making a variety of substitutions as it turned out, and in fact, ended up adding an ingredient just because it seemed like a good idea. Ultimately, I wound up with a pretty tasty dish that still had some resemblance to the recipe provided.

Rather than list all the substitutions, I'll describe what I did from the beginning:

I chopped up and sauteed half a medium onion, along with some garlic scapes (frozen from the CSA) and a dried, chopped chili pepper. I followed the recipe's instructions to cook until the onion was caramelized, at which point James and I both started to cough from volatilized pepper. I turned down the heat, and put on the mostly useless stove hood fan. (James adds: Our fan does not have an outdoor vent, so it is essentially a Playskool fan. One of these days...)

Once the air was brought back under control I added a can of tomato paste, some ground ginger, and a can of diced tomatoes. I had planned to used pumpkin seeds (as the recipe called for) but realized the ones I bought were not raw, but rather roasted and salted, so I decided to throw in a can of chick peas instead. Finally I put in some of the frozen greens and cooked until everything was heated. The dish was spicy hot, so it worked well served over some leftover rice and paired with some Long Trail Ale.

A Good Way to Make French Toast

After sauteeing some banana slices last week to go along with the Blueberry-Vanilla Goat Cheese Quesadillas it occurred to me that sauteed bananas and walnuts topped with Dark Chocolate Vinegar might make a good dessert, then I thought it might also make a good topping for French Toast. Turns out I was right.

Creamy Pesto Shrimp

I saved several recipes for shrimp over a year ago, and finally went back and picked one to try. This was simple to make, and prompted me to buy a basil plant so I could make the pesto. We had frozen shrimp, so I didn't have to cook any, I just thawed some and threw it in the sauce for the last few minutes of cooking.

Blueberry-Vanilla Goat Cheese Quesadillas

We have been rather remiss in 2015 with following through with the weekly recipes. I don't feel bad about it. The New Year started with a death in the family, and one snow storm after another, so getting out  cookbooks and finding something to blog about has fallen to a low priority after mourning, traveling, and cleaning up snow.

The dish I made for breakfast this morning didn't come from a recipe book. I was simply inspired to make it when I happened to notice the two main ingredients next to each other in the refrigerator. We bought the blueberry vanilla cheese from Trader Joe's last week. It is something we usually pick up there and I enjoy it on English muffins or crackers, but yesterday I realized it would make a jim-dandy breakfast quesadilla. The cheese is crumbly and hard to spread, so getting it onto a tortilla shell was more a matter or pressing down on the crumbles with the flat part of a knife rather than spreading. I covered one half of a round tortilla shell with the cheese, folded and then grilled it on the stove-top for a few minutes in each side. As a side dish I sauteed some banana slices.

We topped the quesadillas with some flavored vinegars from Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium. I took a selection of likely pairings from the cabinet and tried them all. I found the Dark Chocolate to be especially tasty. The Wild Blueberry, and Ripe Peach were also good. James tried Wild Blueberry and called it "delicious". 

These were super easy, and super yummy.

Feast of St. Valentine

A quick glance at the blog shows that we've hardly kept the "cada semana" pace of late -- we have gone from one holiday to another without pausing. Fortunately, the convergence of a snow day, a Saturday, and a holiday brought us back into the kitchen ... all day. This was especially the case since Valentine's Day is definitely a day we avoid restaurants. Why struggle to get a table for food that is probably not as good as what we can make ourselves?

We started the day, of course, with some good coffee. Coffee with heart, no less: some hand-ground El Corazón from Just Coffee in Madison was the perfect start to the day. We usually eschew blends, but this blend does include Nicaraguan coffee, along with ethically-sourced coffees from Colombia and Ecuador. The blend of medium and dark roasts make this both sweet and smokey -- the perfect romantic coffee.

Coffee was served in our matching cicada-wedding mugs. It might seem peculiar to have big insects involved in our romantic day, but our wedding took place in the midst of an epic swarm, so we have a soft spot for these hard bugs.

Brunch was bacon and French toast -- made even more French by the inclusion of a bit of Courvoisier VSOP in the batter.

Soon after brunch, we began preparing dessert, since it would need time to chill. We used a mousse recipe from Boston Globe Magazine. It is in one of those articles that describes a recipe in detail, with variations following. Despite our best efforts, we missed a step this way -- using water where we should have used rum -- but it worked out OK. We discovered we did not have rum anyway -- HOW DID THIS HAPPEN AT CASA HAYES-BOH? -- but substituted bourbon, adding it where there should have been water. It worked out very well in the end. (See below.)

It being a romantic holiday, for the main course and beverage we turned to two favorites that will be familiar to regular readers oft this blog -- Intercourses and Booty Food, respectively. Both of these books are full of fun and interesting foods, as well as fun and interesting essays on love and romance.

For the main course, we selected enchiladas with asparagus, beans, and chicken. We've not made enchiladas much before. We found these to be absolutely scrumptious!

A lot of good food is not easy to photograph, and this is no exception. It looked best at this intermediate stage, before final assembly and baking.

The finished dish photographs best at a distance.

For the beverage, we worked for the first time with fresh pomegranate to make margaritas. With four feet of snow on the ground, a frozen beverage might have seemed an odd choice, but the fresh summery fruits were very welcome, and we were fortunate to be in a very warm and cozy home for the occasion.

The dessert was AMAZING and we will certainly be making this again. We were glad to be using local eggs we could trust, and we paired it with Farmer's Fizz from our favorite vineyard. We learned recently that sparkling Pinot Noir is a thing, and a thing that pairs perfectly for chocolate. So despite our loyalty to local white sparklers, we will be spending some time in the coming year looking for that wine!

New Year's Cookin' Eve

... with apologies to the late Dick Clark.

Over the past few years we have developed some great, festive traditions around the winter holidays. And one of those traditions is for Pam and James to celebrate New Year's Eve at home with the dog while Paloma represents in the wider world. And since we've not had TV for a decade, we do it without any images of falling crystal balls. Rather, we focus on having a very nice meal together.

As often happens, Pam made the most important contribution, which was to find an excellent recipe. She perused Intercourses, in which she found a good shrimp recipe, but we settled instead on Spiced Roast Chicken from Laura Esquivel. Actually, John Willoughby is the author of An Appetite for Passion, but we only know of this delightful little volume because of our Esquivel fandom, so she gets top billing for several dishes we have enjoyed from this book.

It was actually quite simple to prepare this recipe, which is essentially a special "Latin" rub. The recipe begins with a thorough mixing of dry, ground ingredients:

2T cumin
2T chili powder
1T coriander
1t cinnamon
2T brown sugar
1t salt
1t red pepper flakes

James began by combining these in about 1.5x proportion, omitting the salt, and substituting cilantro for the coriander seed. The extra rub was used for the potatoes roasted in the bottom of our funky chicken roaster --  just a little rub and melted butter. This is similar to a way James often prepared potatoes, but better.

As for the rub itself, the recipe called for something very unusual -- making a slit in the skin near the top of the bird, and rubbing the mixture as far as possible under the skin. It was a little strange, and some of the rub had to go on the outside, but it really infused the sweet hotness throughout the bird.

This particular roaster has a well in the center, to be filled with liquid before setting the chicken inelegantly onto it. The idea is to add flavor and moisture. We sometimes use wine, but in this case used some ale from a recently failed (that is, flat) batch.

The recipe called for baking at 400F for 30 minutes, brushing with melted butter every 10 minutes, and then another 30 minutes at 325. We did the brushing only three times instead of four, and found the cooking time inadequate, reaching a core temperature of only 135. We continued our Buffy marathon by one episode so that it could reach a much safer -- and still very succulent -- 165 and cool a bit for cutting.

It is difficult to explain just how PERFECTLY this paired with our favorite New Year's beverage, a 2006 Brut Cuvée from Westport Rivers.