Category Archives: Food & Recipes

Pheasant Pheast a la Rick

Brace yourselph: this inspired recipe that sprang spontaneously phrom deep within Rick’s inner chef is some of the most wonderfully phragrant and phestive phood I’ve ever phaced.

Step #1: Get some phresh pheasant breasts. (Okay, I’ll stop already. Enouph is enough.)

Wash and pat dry. Admire how incredibly fit and outdoorsy they look.

Actually, pheasant is a super-lean and finely-grained game meat. That’s why the apples and bacon are such an inspired combination: the bacon ups the flavor-enhancing fat quotient with a smokey base, while the apple brings a fresh treble balance to the whole experience.

Steps #2/3/4: (We missed a few steps with the camera… sorry.)

Pan fry some bacon, remove from pan and crumble, and then saute a sliced apple in the bacon fat. Remove apple slices, reserve bacon fat, and deglaze the pan with some of the red wine you’re drinking.

Reserve the resulting red deliciousness from the deglazing, and wander over to put a few more pieces in place in the puzzle on the dining room table.

Seriously, what’s better than cooking with a bit of red wine and a puzzle?

Step #5:

Put some long-grain brown rice on to simmer, then salt ‘n pepper the breasts and dredge in flour…

… return the bacon fat to a fresh pan (or clean the one you were just using), and fry the dredged breasts at a decently high heat until they’re just done.

Step #6:

Set the cooked breasts aside to let rest. (After all, they’re tired, poor things. They’ve been through a lot.)

Step #7:

Hit the pan with red wine to melt and release the caramelized “taste” stuck to the bottom. Return the juices from the first deglazing…

… and add the apples and bacon back in to reheat as the sauce reduces, thickens, and comes together.

Step #8:

Plate the pheasant and rice, then pour the apple and bacon sauce over top of the pheasant. Add something green to the plate, and prepare to experience field-to-table bliss. (You’ll have to image the green stuff for yourself. We got busy with the puzzle again.)

Her Baked Eggs

Once upon a time, there was a most magical Queen and King of Hospitality, living in the bodaciously gorgeous wine region of West County.

Let’s call them “Bonnie” and “Zinc.”

One glorious Saturday morning when they were hosting some poor commoners from the South Bay, Bonnie waved her magic spoon around the kitchen for a few minutes, and…

… poof!

Out of the oven came the most wonderful and fragrant brunch dish. And as the aroma wafted throughout the castle and out into the kingdom through the kitchen window, there was great rejoicing in the land.

Bonnie waved her magic spoon again, and…

… poof!

There appeared on the picnic table a delightful array of beautiful linens…

… and ice-cold champagne in exquisite mystery stemware…

… a chunky white-fish spread and hunks of warm, fresh baguette…

… sweet succulent melon, a dainty strawberry-laced salad…

… and one enchanted prince from a far-away land who had been turned into a teeny, tiny frog by a wicked winery owner. *

Seeing Bonnie’s kind and somewhat startled face, the frog hopped out from his hiding place under the butter dish.

“Please,” said the frog. “I smelled your magical baked eggs and if I could have just one bite, I would turn back into a prince!”

Zinc, being the benevolent befriender of all things small and slimy, quickly picked up his own magic wand and cut into the eggs.

They were in-freaking-credible, and indeed, magical.

For as soon as the smell of the eggs, sausage, nutmeg, fresh herbs, and cheeses hit their noses, the four diners began to salivate and pay close attention to the accurate division of the dish into four exactly equal servings.

The moment the portions hit the plate and were joined by the salad, bread, champagne, etc., the people began to eat with much moaning and table banging and exclamations of ecstasy.

And they were all very, very happy.

Everyone, that is, except the frog, for in their enthusiasm and delight, they had completely forgotten about him and his plea for help.

The End.

*It was actually the wicked winery owner’s apprentice, the evil wedding DJ, who did the dirty work. He bet young Prince Bob, who was there for the wedding and was a tad tipsy from all the festivities, that he couldn’t say “Funky pumpin’ Monkey Punkin” three times quickly without biting his tongue. Of course, everyone knows that NO ONE can do that, and when the poor prince failed… poof!

Bob’s yer frog.

Eggplant

When the kids were little and we were in our one homeschooling year, as a language arts project we kept a “family meal” journal. The girls chronicled shopping for ingredients (counting, weighing, paying for, etc.), wrote out the recipe, crafted stories of what happened while we were cooking, and then interviewed and recorded the feedback from family members.

I could sell that thing on eBay for millions.

“Eggplant parmigiana” was the first and only entry in the journal for the humble Solanum melongena. In the feedback/interview section for the recipe, Emily wrote, “Mathias cried.”

It was not a big hit, and I hadn’t bothered to cook it since.

Come to think of it, I still don’t cook it, but fortunately, Rick does.

He slices it thinly, and lays the rounds in layers in a colander, sprinkling them with salt, where they rest for about 20 minutes and leak out the mystery juice that can make them bitter.

He gently pats olive oil on them to make them feel better…

… and then slaps their happy little bottoms on the hot grill, where they grow these beautiful stripes and turn utterly translucent and crispy with joy.

We grab some hummus, a few olives, carrot sticks, pita, and maybe a glass of wine, and…

You guessed it. Sometimes it’s so good, I cry.

If you enjoyed this post, share it with your friends! Click the “Share It” button just below, select your social media community of choice… and… doink! You’re the instant sharer of enjoyable stuff. People like that.

A Perfect Blue Point Oyster Dinner

To make a perfect Blue Point Oyster dinner:

1. Go home and start the laundry while Rick visits the Half Moon Bay Fish Market, leaving his wallet in the car and entering the store with a maximum of one $20 bill in his pocket.*

2. Get out of the corporate zoot suit and hose, jump into favorite old yoga pants and fuzzy blue sweater, start the washing machine, put on some Diana Krall and then take the flowers that Suzie brought over and place them where you can see them during dinner.

3. Give Rick a hug when he gets back from the market and help put away the groceries.

3. Go upstairs and see what’s new in Facebook, Gmail, Statcounter, Google Analystics, and start tomorrow’s blog post while Rick lays out a beautiful bed of ice, perfectly shucks the exquisitely fresh and delicately flavored oysters, plates out olives, baby carrots, leftover roasted eggplant, cuts the fresh bread, sets the table on the balcony, and mixes up two ice-cold Manhattans with Italian amarena cherries.

4. Grab the camera. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS grab the camera when Rick has prepared, well, anything.

5. Pause for a couple of profound moments in gratitude for the life you inhabit, noticing the warmth of the setting sun, the chirping frogs, and how close the warring hummingbirds are to your head tonight. Duck if necessary.

6. See if you can coax your trusty D90 into coming anywhere close to capturing the beauty and essence of your dinner.

7. Lift your perfectly chilled glass in celebration of another great day on the planet, and then try hard not to inhale your meal like a trucker with the motor running and a thousand miles still to go.

*Coming to a blog post near you soon: the story of how Rick went to the HMB Fish Market to buy a couple of tilapia fillets for dinner and came out with two grocery bags full of wine, bread, six different kinds of fish, and $108 less in available cash reserves.

On Making Bread

“I would say to housewives, be not daunted by one failure, nor by twenty. Resolve that you will have good bread, and never cease striving after this result till you have effected it. If persons without brains can accomplish this, why cannot you?”
’Housekeeping In Old Virginia’ Marion Cabell Tyree ed. (1878)

“Bread baking is one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells…there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.”
M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating, (1990)

“In Paris today millions of pounds of bread are sold daily, made during the previous night by those strange, half-naked beings one glimpses through cellar windows, whose wild-seeming cries floating out of those depths always makes a painful impression. In the morning, one sees these pale men, still white with flour, carrying a loaf under one arm, going off to rest and gather new strength to renew their hard and useful labor when night comes again. I have always highly esteemed the brave and humble workers who labor all night to produce those soft but crusty loaves that look more like cake than bread.”
Alexandre Dumas, French writer (1802-1870)

“The first time I ate organic whole-grain bread I swear it tasted like roofing material.”
Robin Williams

“God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

“Bread is the warmest, kindest of all words. Write it always with a capital letter, like your own name.”
from a café sign

“Honest bread is very well – it’s the butter that makes the temptation.”
Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)

“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight…”
M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating, (1990)

“You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.”
Henry Miller, American writer (1891-1980)

“Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, and after the egg is there anything in the world lovelier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea?”
Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (1996)

“Good bread is the great need in poor homes, and oftentimes the best appreciated luxury in the homes of the very rich.”
A Book for A Cook, The Pillsbury Co. (1905)

Crab Cakes A La Label

It’s the dirty little secret that good home cooks don’t discuss in public.

But as our regular readers know (all 14 of you, bless yer hearts), that’s not how we run our operation around here. We share.

Ready? Here it is: some of the very best recipes on the planet are hiding in plain sight.

They are distributed for free by the people who generally know their ingredient better than anyone else. It’s their core competency, their passion, and they tend to be intimately acquainted with the most common ways it’s used in recipes.

It’s the recipe on the back label, and I’m a big fan.

My hunch, backed by extensive research into what my gut tells me, is that people generally tend to overlook these gems. While I can’t say with certainty why this might be, I have a few ideas:

1. It’s so free, you don’t even have to buy the product to get the recipe, so how good can it be? Everyone knows, you get what you pay for, right?

2. The recipe doesn’t come with glossy art-directed photos, so it’s highly likely it won’t be as romantically fabulous as the exact same recipe you’d find in Gourmet magazine.

3. It usually calls for ingredients we’re likely to already have in our pantry. Because we all secretly suspect that we generally lead a boring life and our pantry isn’t all that exciting either, by default, how great could the end product be?

This is the same thinking as when Groucho Marx declared that any club that would accept him as a member isn’t worth joining.

4. Extreme foodies generally prefer to head out from the “I have a recipe I want to try” gate. We, on the other hand, tend to jump from a “Hey! Feel like crab cakes?” starting spot, so any decent recipe will do, as long as we end up with crab cakes. And easy is good.

5. The recipes rarely come with wine pairing or side dish suggestions. For us, this is no problem, since Plan B starts with “What’s still alive in the fridge?” (Swiss chard, in this case, sauteed with oil and garlic, and a splash of white wine.)

In the end, though, these “label on the back” recipes almost always result in a line-drive to home base for any craving in which you find yourself gripped. Coming soon to a screen near you: LOTB chocolate chip cookies, cherry pie (both crust and filling!), white bean soup…

But enough about us: what LOTB recipes do you recommend? Aw, come on… you know the rules about sharing around here..

Bubble and Squeak

Before we get our collective knickers in a twist, let me assure you up front: I know this is not traditional bubble and squeak.

However, as a little kid I spent a few years in England where that pan-fried left-over vegetable breakfast dish featuring cabbage was always served with bacon and eggs. And if you were five years old and someone put a plate in front of you that held said veggies…

… and things that came out of the fridge looking like this…

… alongside meat that comes from animals known to squeal…

… what element on the plate would you assume was the “bubble,” and what was the “squeak”? I rest my case.

In fact, while I’m here anyway, I’m going to re-purpose the name: “Bubble ‘N Squeak, Cast in Teton.”

Here’s how you make it.

You take a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet and load ‘er up with as much squeak as the little piggies around the table will consume. Cook on low heat, and as soon as there is enough fat melted on the surface of the skillet, start pushing the squeak around gently so it doesn’t stick. (There’s nothing worse than sticky squeak.) Stand with a steaming cup of warm coffee in one hand, and while humming your favorite Willy Nelsen tune, flip the strips frequently until they’re almost done.

There will be shrinkage.

Skootch the squeak into the center of the pan and crack as many bubbles around the outside edge as you want. Resist the temptation to panic when you see the bubble white wandering casually over to make friends with the squeak. There will be intermingling. What can I tell you? Life is messy.

Let the bubbles firm up nicely and pepper to taste. Here comes the tricky part.

In the center of the pan, separate the squeak into serving size portions and mentally assign a bubble or two to each. Slide your spatula under a serving, and with the confidence worthy of a Julia or a Jacques, flip the whole mess over, all at once, all together.

That move alone will set the whole tone for your day. Nothing screams “Bring it!” more enthusiastically than flipping bubbles stuck to squeak like you mean it.

There may be breakage. Do not let this concern you. Bubble N’ Squeak, Cast in Teton, laughs at breakage.

Take the plates that have been warming in the oven, pop up the toast made out of your home-made bread (tomorrow’s post, coincidentally), pour the apple cider…

… and sit down with your Pookie for a friendly discussion about who is going to wash the skillet.

rickandkathy.com

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