I Whip My Hair Back and Forth!

Admittedly, this post has nothing to do with food.  Although, given a little creative interpretation, that may or may not be true.  Technically, these pictures were taken the night before Thanksgiving (food related).  And I had just finished baking a 6 layer chocolate cake right before this happened (definitely food related).  A 6 layer cake with salted caramel holding the layers together.  And here's the evidence...

Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words was either an anorexic, or they weren't talking about food.  There are no words for this cake!  There are only sounds.  Mostly oooh, ahhhs, with a few moans on the side.  We'll get back to that at another time...

Anyway...that's not what this post is about.  This post is about what happens when you try to convince a 7 year old to help you do a photoshoot for this year's christmas card.  I had one song, and one song only playing in my head when I saw how the pictures turned out.  So...CUE THE MUSIC!

Hop up out my bed turn my swag on.  Pay no attention to them haters because we whip em off. 

And we ain't doin nothing wrong.  So don't tell me nothin.  I'm just tryna have fun.  So keep the party jumpin!  So what's up?  Yeaaaaaaaaaaah!  And I'll be doin what we do.  We turn our back, and whip our hair, and we shake em off.  Shake em off!

I'ma get more shine than a little bit.  Soon as I hit the stage applause I'm feelin it. 



Whether it's black cars, black stars, I'm feelin it.  Cause can't none of them whip it like I do.  Owwww....

You can't be mad at Willow Smith.  And you've gotta love one of the cutest girls in world agreeing to help me make my one of kind Christmas card.  What a trooper.  Thanks Mini Me!

Thanksgiving: A Love Letter

Oh Thanksgiving.  Sweet, lovely, Thanksgiving.  No offense to Christmas, or my own Birthday, but of all the National holidays, you my sweet, are my very favorite.  You are the only holiday that celebrates the beauty of the food comma.  It is an art, indeed the fine line, that separates being full, from complete nausea.  And every year, as families the mainland United States over, fall into that slight comma, you make sure that there is plenty of football playing softly in background to lull us into a gentle sleep. 

Like me, you always root for the underdog.  You celebrate ingredients that no one could care less about the other 364 days of the year.  Things like turkey...the red-headed stepchild of poultry.  And canned cranberry sauce.  If someone offered me canned cranberry sauce in April, I would seriously consider smacking them in the mouth.  But on Thanksgiving, I have actually witnessed the look of desperate panic as one of my family members heard that I forgot to pick up a $1.99 can of Ocean Spray at the grocery store.  And I'm pretty sure that the can I finally found in the back of my brother's pantry had been there since last Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving, you little lovebug you, you remind me that I should practice being more grateful more often.  It shouldn't take a national holiday, and butter-ladden homemade cinnamon roll (or three) for me to feel so fortunate.  So sappiness be damned, this year, the thing that I'm most grateful for is the gift of my entire family showing up to participate in the most basic pleasures: an amazing meal, a glass of wine, and long conversations with nothing but time.  Ummm...and also, an extended game of grown-ups vs kids Wii Just Dance, which just for the record, I won. 

Winter Scallops

Um...LOOK AT THOSE SCALLOPS!!!  And I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking: Clearly the bits of double-smoked extra-thick cut bacon topping those scallops were originally attached to a larger piece of bacon.  What happened to the rest of that piece of bacon?

Well, see...what had happened was... I was just about to sautee that kale that the scallops are sitting on, and I looked over and realized that the double-smoked extra-thick cut bacon had made it's way out of the refridgerator and was sitting there on the counter.  Staring at me!  I mean, I couldn't just leave it there.  It would have been relegated to the back of the freezer until who knows when!  That's just wrong.  So instead, the bacon came along for the ride.  It was slowly sauteed until some (read: all) of the fat melted off the meat and landed safely at the bottom of my sautee pan.  I married that bacon fat with a lot of thinly chopped kale.  Talk about soulmates....

It was EXACTLY what I wanted that day.  It was warm, little smokey from the bacon, a little crispy from the seared crust on the scallops.  And it went perfectly with the Pinot Noir we were drinking that afternoon.  I love having EXACTLY what I want.

Vegetable Soup & An Amazing "Crouton"

My eyes are almost always bigger than my stomach.  Typical.  A great thing for my stomach (and my waistline), but a horrible thing for my refrigerator space.  At least twice a month, I find myself starring into the refrigerator at an abundance of vegetables that are threatening to start wilting any day now if I don't do something about it.

And my mind immediately flashes to my grandmother.  This is a woman who carried ziploc baggies filled with snacks in her purse because she'd be damned if she was gonna waist good left overs!  And by "snacks", I mean that one time we got in a cab headed to the airport and she pulled out a ziploc filled with pancakes and ham.  Pancakes.  And HAM.  It didn't matter if you were at Jean George or Ponderosa (yes I'm from the Midwest where we have Ponderosa...leave me alone!) she was NOT going to leave good food on the table....and into her tupperware it went.

Fortunately, it turns out that if you throw a ton of vegetables into a pot with a piece of double-thick cut bacon, and some fish broth, let it cook for an hour, and then hit with the hand-blender, you come out with a perfect fall soup. 

And of course, you'll need to top it with the best crouton ever...a piece of Pancetta Foccacia.  I don't understand why anyone would serve anything other than piece of toasted foccacia as a crouton.  Probably because they're stupid.  Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that.  The perfect snack on a perfect fall day spent playing in the park doing this...

Yep!...that's my friend...yeah, the grown up one...on the swing...with all the kids...giggling hysterically.  I won't lie, I was on the swing right next to her.  No judgement.

Bottega



After a morning spent wine tasting, it was definitely time for some carbs.  And when you find yourself in Napa, you obviously want to eat said carbs at Bouchon.  Obviously.  Until you find out they're fully booked, with at least an hour wait for a table.  And your tour guide said you have to be back in 2 hours.  ...Damn it!  Not a problem, I always have a backup plan.  Ad Hoc is just a short 5 minute walk away.  Just long enough to help you start to crave that next glass of wine.  Perfect. Until...DAMN IT!...you find out they have an hour and a half wait.  Who's gonna serve me my parmesan polenta now?!

Oh, that's right, Michael Chiarello will.  God I love that man.  He can really do it all.  He can write cookbooks, he can compete for the Next Iron Chef.  And he can make me Parmesan Polenta with Caramelized Wild Mushrooms.  And when I've cleaned my plate like a big girl...

...I get a prize for being so good.  And I love prizes!  Especially when my prize is Red Wheat Tagliarini with a Veal/Pork Bolognese and Mushroom Sugo.

Do it Michael.  Do it!

San Francisco

Oh San Francisco.  You little minx you.  Look at your gorgeous smile...er, I mean sunrise.

Onion Ragu

First of all, can we talk about the word "Ragu".  Somehow, no matter how many amazing words I've heard associated with ragu (i.e. short rib ragu, lamb shank ragu, wild boar ragu, you see where I'm going here) I can't help but associate it with one very specific image...a can of Chef Boyardee.  Why is that?! 


Sorry, I digress.  (Wait, is it digressing if it's the first thing I started talk about?  Is that an oxymoron?  Oh crap...I'm digressing again...oh pre-digressing.  Is that a word?  Hmpf... You know what I'm trying to say!)

All that is not the point this story.  The point of this story is what happens when you let an onion...yes, the lowly onion...cook for inordinate amounts of time.  So long in fact that it goes beyond carmelizing (the point at which I typically like to mix it with some fontina, shove it into some puff pastry, and call it a tart), and actually just falls apart.



A friend of mine once told me she watched a show where some 95 year old Italian grandma did this, and she called it "killing the onions".  Ha!  I love that.  Italian grandmas really know what they're talking about.

So after about and hour, and most of a bottle of white wine (some of the wine accidentally/on purpose escaped into a glass for me) the dead onions look kinda like this...

 I left the lid on the pot for about half the time since I didn't want the onions to get too much color.  I was more concerned with texture, and I wanted to speed this process along since I wanted to eat dinner in the somewhat near future.

Shortly after I took this picture, the onions got a bit more white wine, and then they got pulsed with the hand-blender.  Yes, technically that's cheating, but I was STARVING, and I didn't have another to wait for them to fall apart on their own.  It was all worth it when the sauce was tossed with a bit of duck liver ravioli, and then topped with a balsalmic reduction.



I love how you can barely see that there's a sauce.  It's a nice little suprise when you eat it and the taste of killed onions is aaaaaaall there.

Winter Salad

I ran out of my apartment early Saturday morning to go meet a friend who was leaving for LA for a while.  She had my stuff, I had hers, and I wanted my stuff!  The weather has been so erratic in New York, and I didn't think twice when I grabbed a litght jacket and ran out the door.  

When I actually stepped outside, it felt more like December than October.  But as usual, I was in a rush, so I thought a light jog might warm me up, and as an added side-effect, do a little something about that pappardelle I'd eaten the night before.  I finally got to her apartment all toasty and warm.  But when I left her apartment 45 minutes later, I was just as suprised as every other New Yorker to find that it was snowing! 



And not some nicey-nice first snow of the season type snow.  We're talking get your umbrellas cause it's wet, nasty, and coming down hard type snow.  We're talking head to Fairway, get some supplies, a bottle of wine, and hunker down type snow.  And that's exactly what I did.  Unfortunately, somewhere between Fairway and door of my taxi home, I stumbled into Citarella and found fresh ricotta.  Whoopsie.