Bars, especially good ones, have a large number of liquors to choose from.  But if you are trying to set-up a home bar you really can't have 30 or more bottles of open booze just sitting around.  Instead, you must choose the liquors that are most appropriate for your tastes.  This isn’t an easy thing to do but it’s also not the only issue with setting up a home bar.   You also have to figure out what mixers you want to stock in your home bar. 

Husband and I have been building our bar over the past couple of years and we’re still experimenting with different liquors and mixers to keep in stock.  At first, unless we made a standard drink like Gin &Tonic or Rum & Coke, we had problems finding interesting drinks to make with the various mixtures of liquors and mixers we’d have in stock.  Initially, we did web searches for drinks, but ultimately we found that having a computer next to the bar was less than idea (yes even for us computer-centric Silicon Valley people!).  Next, we bought a bar guide to help us pick interesting drinks.

Problem is that most bar guides only have an index of the drinks and each chapter focuses on a primary alcohol base.  What this means is that drinks using Rum are primarily in the Rum chapter but you can also find Rum, in lesser quantities, in drinks from many other chapters.  This makes finding drinks using specific liquors difficult.  Luckily, last year I found a better drink book ("The Bartender's Bible by Gary Regan") that has an index of what drinks use which liquors.  Now we can target a specific alcohol and find all the drinks that use it. 

Perfect right?  Well, we thought so.  That is, until this past weekend when we realized we had a nice odd mixture of mixers and fillers (cranberry juice, grapefruit juice, sour mix etc.) that we needed to use up soon. Great we thought - just look in the index and ... nope - the index is by drink names and alcohol but not mixers.  Sigh - why is it that improvements never seems to be quite enough?  Maybe the next edition of the guide will index the mixers... In the mean time if you have a favorite drink that uses cranberry juice, sour mix and mandarin oranges (or some combination thereof) let me know!

PermaLink

Purple Basil

As I've written about before, I grow my entire garden from seed rather than purchase the plants.  I do this for a few reasons but the most compelling is the ability to pick specific varietals that match my culinary tastes.  This year's choices include sauce and slicing tomatoes as well as eggplant, basil, parsley, cucumbers, beans, and both summer and winter squash.  Each year I find it really difficult to limit myself to only a few vegetables.  Overall, this year I think I did fairly well but I did splurge on a few items.

Of course I had to get sweet basil, what would summer be without bunches of fresh basil and homemade pesto? But after reading about the many different types of basil I splurged and got purple basil seeds.  They should make a very pretty pesto, although I'm not sure how they differ in taste - that's part of the fun of gardening - trying new things....

I was a bit forced into two types of Eggplant because last year our Eggplants did not do well and I really want Eggplants this year. I choose Dusky, a more or less standard eggplant, that I've had success with in the past.  The other one I choose is Fairytale; an elongated eggplant that is supposed to taste best at its baby stage.  Hopefully one of them will do well.

A little eggplant.

My last set of choices are squash and I admit I probably got too many squash with two varietals of both summer (a Zucchini and a scaloppini) and winter (butternut and buttercup) squash.  My thought was that the winter squash will store and I'll only plant one of each!  We'll see how that goes but I'm really excited about the squash.  I've never grown (nor cooked) scaloppini - little flying saucer shaped summer squash (if you have recipes let me know!).  Same with the buttercup.  Hopefully we'll like both and if I have too much I can always leave them on my neighbor’s doorsteps!

PermaLink

One day last spring I was looking over the latest Cooking Light and eyed a Fava bean risotto.  I'm a huge risotto fan so the recipe which also had Arugula, fresh mozzarella, and Prosciutto immediately caught my eye.  The thing was though that I'd never had Fava beans before.  Nevertheless, I thought I'd give it a try and I'm glad I did.  The recipe was really good.  The only downside was that the Fava beans were really expensive.  That's why this fall when I saw Fava Bean seeds in the fall garden catalog I decided to grow my own.

Beans, and peas which are actually the family Fava Beans are part of, are pretty easy to grow.  The seeds get planted directly in the ground and with a bit of water they just grow.  Fall gardens in California also have the advantage of not requiring much water since they grow during our wet season.  I started the Fava beans about the same time as my snow peas, in late September, but the snow peas have been producing for well over a month.  I pretty much had given up on the Fava beans which is why I was really surprised last week to find that they had finally produced! 

With my first harvest, I made the "Fava Bean Risotto" from last year.  It’s a pretty easy meal except for the time spent podding the Fava beans.  It tasted great - even better knowing I made it from my own beans. 

I still have tons of buds on my Fava bean plants which means I should have several more harvests.  If anyone has some favorite Fava bean recipes I'd love to hear about them!

PermaLink

We were dinning at Paragon, San Jose and examining the dessert menu when both of us eyed the "chip-wich" described as:

"Vanilla ice cream sandwiched between chocolate chip cookies served with chocolate sauce."

Immediately, we both knew that was what we would be getting. How could we get anything else?  Years ago, when we lived in Buffalo, NY we would go to a pizza place that had a dessert called the "Ice Screamer".  Great name - even better dessert. The 'Screamer consisted of two chocolate and peanut chip cookies with ice cream in the middle and hot fudge over them.  It was simply amazing.  The cookies were about 5" in diameter, 1/2" in thick and warm.  The ice cream was either chocolate or vanilla depending on our mood and the fudge thick, rich, and loaded with calories.  We've gone back in recent years but they just aren't the same anymore...

Here in front of our eyes was a San Jose take on our old-time favorite.  We had a plan and we plunged in.  But something unexpected happened when the dessert arrived.  It was absolutely nothing like what we expected!

The "chip-wich" is actually a play on the old-fashioned ice cream sandwich.  The dessert consists of two individual sandwiches cut-out from a sheet of chocolate chip cookie crust with a middle layer of ice cream.  They were really cute and looked just like ice cream sandwiches but made with chocolate chip cookies instead of the traditional dark chocolate crust.  The chocolate sauce was in a little dipping bowl.  They were not what we expected, they were not what we planned but we really enjoyed them. 

We may not have a new tradition but we have learned to crave the unexpected...

PermaLink

I don't even remember what the parsley was leftover from but I found it sitting in a glass of water in the fridge.  One the counter I had about a quarter of a bunch of basil left from a fresh mozzarella and tomato pizza I made for a friend earlier in the week.  I knew immediately that I would make a pesto but since I didn't have enough of either the basil or the parsley it would have to be a "combo" pesto. 

The next question was what to do with the pesto.  Examining my kitchen I found I also had a leftover tomato, some Cremini mushrooms, some mozzarella, some parmesan and even some pinenuts!  Another easy choice - make a pizza. 

The only thing I was missing was the dough and while I wanted to make that myself the events of the day worked against me.  It was 8pm on Friday and I was hungry.  So, as I made the pesto and prepared the other toppings Husband went to our neighborhood market and got a pre-made crust.  (Actually, smarty that he is, he returned with 2 cursts. Now the next time I need a pizza crust and don't have time to make one he won't have to go to the store!).

The result was an amazing pizza that now has me craving pesto from the basil and parsley seedlings that I'm growing too bad they won’t be ready for a while…

Basil-Parsley-Pesto-Combo Pizza

• about 2 cups fresh basil and parsley (all basil, all parsley, or any combination will work).
• 1/4 cup parmesan cheese, finely grated
• 2 T pinenuts
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2-4 T olive oil, add more as needed to get proper consistency.
• 1 tomato thinly sliced.
• 8oz mozzarella, shredded
• about 1/2 lb cremini mushrooms
• 1 pizza crust

Heat oven, with pizza stone if you have one, to 500 degrees.

Mix herbs through olive oil in food processor.  Add more olive oil as needed to get a spreadable consistency. 

Sauté mushrooms on medium heat.

Spread pesto on pizza crust.  Top with shredded mozzarella.  Sprinkle mushroom on top of mozzarella.  Arrange tomato slices on top.

Bake at 500 degrees for 8-10 minutes.

We enjoyed ours with a nice bottle of Merlot.

PermaLink

A recent blog event, Leftover Tuesdays (see here for the most recent challenge), has presentations of dishes created from leftovers.  Great idea! Especially if you have meat such as a large roast and don't want the same thing for several nights, but it doesn't really apply to me.  I generally make dishes that have all of the ingredients mixed together like casseroles, stir fries, noodle or pasta dishes, and so forth.  These dishes tend to be four  servings and we have them for two nights.  Sure, we sometimes have a meat dish and eat the same thing several nights but I'm not much of a meat eater so this doesn't happen often.  

This doesn't mean I don't have a leftover problem - I just define leftovers differently.  To me leftovers are the remaining odd ingredients that I needed for a dish but did not finish.  Examples are a bit of cream, some chicken broth, a bit of cheese - or worse yet a funky spice or sauce that I like but only have a couple of dishes to use it in.  These types of leftovers are a challenge because either you only have a little bit left that you can't do much with or you have a lot left, such as a spice, but you wouldn't want to use much in a single recipe.  Some of the items can be frozen like the broth, some have long shelf lives like some sauces, and some are so easy to use I don't consider them something I'm using up but something I simply enjoy to eat like cheese. Yet, what to do with a 1/4 of a container of sour cream or a bit of cream?  Are these leftovers?  Well according to one on-line definition:

Leftover

• a small part or portion that remains after the main part no longer exists
• not used up; "leftover meatloaf".

PermaLink