Globe trotting and persistence pay off: Tilapia with Miso and Scallions
by Terry B on February 8, 2012
Miso, mirin, rice vinegar and garlic create a flavorful Japanese-inspired marinade for mild tilapia fillets. Quickly sautéed scallions and toasted sesame seeds add a beautiful finish. Recipe below.
Food is at a particularly cool intersection these days. On one hand, we’re thinking more about how our food gets to our plates, and locally sourced ingredients are getting much deserved attention. At the same time, global influence has never been stronger in the kitchen. Home cooks everywhere have ever increasing access to flavors, ingredients and ideas from around the world.
This week’s recipe is of the global variety. It will send you on a hunt for a number of Japanese ingredients. But don’t worry—they’re readily available lots of places, some of them in supermarkets, in fact. And in the Kitchen Notes, I’ll give you some ideas for other uses for those ingredients as well as a couple of substitutes if you can’t find them. [click to continue…]
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Small Bites: A taste of NOLA in St. Louis and Black History Month cooks
by Terry B on February 8, 2012
Riverbend Restaurant & Bar brings New Orleans to St. Louis, and African American wine director Brian Duncan makes wine accessible, enjoyable. Both are subjects of recent USA Character Approved Blog posts.
One of my favorite passages in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the one in which Mark Twain describes St. Louis as Huck’s raft glides by at night on the Mississippi River. It’s not a long or detailed passage, but it always takes me home when I read it. I grew up in St. Louis and can tell you firsthand that the river’s influence on the city cannot be overstated.
Happily, much of the Mississippi’s influence has actually flowed upriver from places like Memphis and New Orleans. Marion and I heard our first zydeco music in St. Louis. Fernest Arceneaux and the Thunders had packed the beer garden of the Broadway Oyster Bar, and our friend Sharon, who tended bar there, called us and said, “Get down here now.” We did. And we still thank her for making that call. [click to continue…]
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Chocolate Chunk Cherry Brownies and the evilness of squirrels
by Terry B on February 1, 2012
Bittersweet and white chocolate, a touch of espresso and dried cherries soaked in red wine give these brownies a nice grown-up finish. Make them ahead—they’re twice as good the next day. Recipe below.
My primary relationship with baked goods is to eat them. Marion made these delectable brownies, so I’ll turn the kitchen over to her to tell you about them. And about evil squirrels.
Before I embark on the story of how I came to make these brownies, I would like to say death to all squirrels. All squirrels, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
A few weeks back, I was seized by the baking bug and to my amazement found that we actually had ingredients that would make it possible to both bake something delicious and to avoid a trip to the store. The product of that frenzy was double chocolate chunk cherry cookies, which turned out to be rather unexpectedly fiddly to make. [click to continue…]
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Celebrate National Soup Month, with six delicious, savory soups
by Terry B on January 25, 2012
January is National Soup Month. (It’s also National Blood Donor Month, but I’ll leave that topic to the Twilight bloggers.) Here are a half dozen soup recipes from the Blue Kitchen archives—and from fellow bloggers.
My first memory of soup is when I was seven. My mom, my baby brother and I had just come to stay with my grandmother in St. Louis. It was December, and we were arriving from Southern California; the snow outside the train window as we pulled into Union Station was the first I remembered seeing. My grandmother had a big pot of vegetable soup on the stove—its aroma filled her apartment as we walked in.
This sounds like epiphany time for someone who loves food as much as I do, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. To my limited, suspicious seven-year-old palate, the soup was a vegetable-filled nightmare. I fished out the chewy meat bites, probably short ribs, and had visions of starving to death if we stayed at my grandmother’s very long. [click to continue…]
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Berry, beery satisfying: Beef Pot Roast with Beer and Juniper Berries
by Terry B on January 18, 2012
Flavorful, inexpensive beef chuck roast, roasted for hours in a low oven with beer, juniper berries, onion, garlic, potatoes and carrots, is the very definition of comfort food on a winter evening. Recipe below.
When the first real snowstorm of the season is predicted, most people stock up on sidewalk salt. I bought a chuck roast.
The snow began falling in the morning, not heavy but persistent. I happened to be working from home, and I watched the snow coating first the lawns, trees and bushes, then the sidewalks and the street outside the study window. I also kept an impatient eye on the clock, eager to start cooking our first pot roast of the year. [click to continue…]
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Fast food fast tracks Indian cuisine to mainstream
by Terry B on January 18, 2012
In my latest USA Character Approved Blog post, a bevy of new Indian fast food restaurants reflects the mainstreaming of food from the Subcontinent here.
Fast food gets a bad rap, often for good reason. But something it does well, I think, is spot culinary cultural trends and help make them mainstream. In many cases, it even speeds them along.
One of the latest cuisines getting the fast food fast track treatment is Indian food. Living in Chicago, we’re blessed with lots of good options for Indian food, especially along Devon Avenue. The many restaurants along the crowded street are stuffed with Indian and Pakistani immigrants as well as growing numbers of adventurous Westerners. But dinners there are often protracted affairs, and for the uninitiated, the menus can be daunting. [click to continue…]
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One-pan impromptu in the key of winter: Pork Chops with Chickpeas, Spinach and Cumin
by Terry B on January 11, 2012
Chickpeas and spinach bring big health benefits to this hearty one-pan meal. Cumin, chili powder, garlic and onion bring big flavor. Recipe below.
This meal wasn’t going to be a post. It was just meant to be dinner. But suddenly, the kitchen was smelling heavenly (assuming there’s cumin in heaven, and I certainly hope so). And when I served the chops and spooned the chickpea spinach mixture next to them, the plates looked really inviting. So before cutting into my chop, I had Marion taste hers. She smiled and nodded, and here we are.
This particular dish came together because we’ve been eating too much chicken. We love chicken, but even for us, there’s been a lot of it. So when I saw a nice looking pair of pork chops in the grocery store, I grabbed them. My first thought for sides were mashed potatoes and a salad, quick and easy. But we’ve been doing those a lot lately too. [click to continue…]
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Bake in it, serve in it, then bury it in the yard: Biodegradable, compostable bakeware
by Terry B on January 11, 2012
Biosphere Industries and its biodegradable, compostable bakeware and serveware made from tapioca are the subject of my latest post on the USA Character Approved Blog.
For having such a tiny garden plot, we compost a lot. (And by we, I mean Marion, of course, the same we who does our gardening.) So when we started seeing compostable “plastic” drinking cups made from corn in some of our favorite takeout places, we got excited. Until we read the fine print. Turns out they take up to 180 days to compost in commercial composting facilities; try composting them in a home system, and they can take a year or more.
Not so with the bakeware, plates and other serving pieces from Biosphere Industries. Introduced last summer, their tapioca-based pie pans, muffin trays and other containers compost in just 10 days in commercial facilities. [click to continue…]
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Sweet, savory, quick, delicious: Sweet Potato Sage Pasta with Chicken
by Terry B on January 4, 2012
A handful of fresh ingredients—sweet potato, sage, onion, garlic and chicken—make a sweet/savory pasta dish that’s weeknight quick. Recipe below.
With holiday excesses behind us, it’s good to get back to quick, simple, everyday cooking. This dish is one of my favorite examples of that kind of cooking, in that involves fresh ingredients, using up leftovers and unexpected synapses firing.
One thing I’ve noticed in writing about food for the past five years or so is that it makes me think about food, a lot. Sometimes it seems that everything I see or read or hear or smell or taste has the potential to inspire some cooking idea. [click to continue…]
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Fighting food deserts and taking the week off
by Terry B on December 28, 2011
Holidays, birthdays, houseguests and other pleasant distractions have kept us preoccupied in the kitchen this week. We’ve mainly been whipping up reliable favorites or ordering in pizza to keep everyone fed and happy. So no recipe this week. But don’t worry, we’ll cook up something fresh next week.
Instead, I’d like to tell you about my latest USA Character Approved Blog post. One of the great things about writing pieces for this blog is discovering cool new things in food—everything from chefs to trends, restaurants, cookbooks and people working to help us all eat healthier. Stockbox Grocers is one of the coolest stories I’ve come across in a while. [click to continue…]
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