hand made, mcg made

photo: me knitting a baby hat whilst still pregnant, august 2007

So apparently handmade gifts are super trendy this year. I'm feeling kinda good about this because it's always been really important for us to put a personal touch on the gifts that we give to our loved ones.

My friends are very creative people and I feel lucky to have received handmade gifts from them. But the good news is that you don't have to be creative to make nice handmade gifts. They can be really easy and in most cases none of it requires a lot of work or money to execute.

Last year we gave away homemade vanilla extract, pregnant belly salve, lip balm, infused whiskey, rosemary limoncello, change purses made from upcycled leather, mulling spices (for wine or cider), and things knit by me

This year we plan to give away more whiskey and mulling spices to folks that didn't get any last year as well as more hand knit and home sewn items.

What are you making this year?

not disgusting vegan cookies

In spite of my obsession with eating high quality, non-processed foods, I really do not have any desire to ever be vegan. I have done it in the past and I was miserable. I thoroughly enjoy things made with eggs and dairy and can't see myself giving them up unless prompted to do so by circumstances beyond my control. The thought that I'd never have real cheese or yogurt again is too much for me to properly contemplate.

So anyway I know someone that works hard to be a good vegan and so I decided to bake some cookies for her. In the past I've had vegan cookies and they run the gamut from totally inedible to pretty damn delicious. The best vegan cookies that I've had were peanut butter cookies so I thought I'd go with a recipe for those since they have a reasonably high chance of turning out great.

And so I set out to find a good recipe - as it turns out 101 Cookbooks has a decent selection of vegan options so I went with the peanut butter cookie recipe that I found there.

The dough is pretty loose so I did refrigerate it as recommended in the recipe notes. I also experimented with using a variety of cookie cutters both large and small. I found that peanut butter cookies are pretty rich so it's best to keep the cookies on the small side.

I sprinkled some with sanding sugar before they went in the oven and that gave the finished cookies a nice crunch. The texture of the cookies is soft and dense but not at all crumbly or chewy. I froze half of the dough right away and am looking forward to spontaneously baking up a pan full to cure some future late night cookie jonesing.

first apple pie of the season

It's that time of year again. Warm spiced cider, pumpkins, brightly colored leaves and apple pie.
If summer is my favorite season then fall is a very close second. It's a wistful time of year where you lament the things you didn't get done during the warmer days of summer.

But a warm slice of apple pie with melty vanilla ice cream makes it all better, no?

I use Martha Stewart's Old Fashioned Apple Pie recipe. Of course I modified it a bit, using a combo of Granny Smith and Gravenstein apples. I also added about 1/2 cup of caramel sauce to the filling (left over from a fresh apple cake that I had made a week earlier).

I encourage you to make the crust from scratch using the Pate Brisee recipe (linked on the same page as the pie recipe). It's really easy and tastes far superior to store bought crust.

a16 meatball mod

My friend recently sent me an article about A16 meatballs. I had heard of them before but the buzz around them is that they are pretty labor intensive to prepare. Since I have little or no time for labor intensive meals, I just filed it away as something I'd make when I was old and bored.

Well the time came for us to start planning how we'd spend our anniversary. We elected to celebrate on the weekend since the actual anniversary fell on a weekday (today!). We also decided that it would be nice to just celebrate at home as a family. So we set out to make a really nice meal paired with a great bottle of wine and spend quality time with each other.

So it dawned on me that A16 meatballs would be the perfect thing to make for a special meal where we had lots of time to prepare.

Having said all that, I decided not to grind all of the meat myself, opting instead to purchase grass fed organic ground meat. The original recipe calls for prosciutto and chopped pork fat as well but I left that out too and subbed in bacon fat (something we already have plenty of). The original recipe also does not include the addition of garlic but I added it anyway because what is a meatball without garlic, kwim?

So I prepped the meatballs, taking time to fry up a test meatball to ensure adequate seasoning.

After I fried the test meatball (it was seasoned perfectly) I threw these bad boys into the oven to cook. When they were browned I removed them from the oven and drained off all of the fat that was in the bottom of the pan and removed the meatballs.

The recipe calls for a very simple sauce for braising - 1 can of crushed san marzano tomatoes. Well, I didn't want to go quite that simple so I put the roasting pan on the stove top, added back some of the fat rendered from the meatballs and heated it up. To this I added 1 clove of sliced garlic, cooked it til fragrant and then a splash of red wine to deglaze the pan and pick up all the lovely brown bits left by the meatballs. Then instead of one can of crushed tomatoes I added 2 because I wanted alot of sauce. Stirred the whole thing up, added the meatballs back in and set it all in the oven to braise for about and hour and a half.

When the whole thing was done I sprinkled it with torn fresh basil and served over linguine with a bit of grated cheese. The recipe calls for grana padano but I could not find that so parmagianno, it was.

Here are the finished gems:
Links to the original recipe and an easier version:
A16 Meatballs
A16 Meatballs, the easy way

A16 Meatball Mod - McG style:
Ingredients
meatballs
1 lb ground pork
1 lb ground beef
1 half loaf of day old italian bread torn into cubes and chopped into coarse crumbs in the food processor*
1 tablespoon of bacon fat
1 clove of minced garlic
1 cup loosely packed fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, coarsely chopped
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1 teaspoon dried chile flakes
2/3 cup fresh ricotta, drained if necessary
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup whole milk
sauce
2 28-ounce cans San Marzano tomatoes with juices
1 clove of garlic sliced
3 tblspoons of red wine
Handful of fresh basil leaves
Block of grana padano or parmagianno reggiano for grating
Extra virgin olive oil

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Coat two rimmed baking sheets with olive oil.
2. In a large bowl, combine the pork, beef, bread, bacon fat, parsley, 1 tablespoon of the salt, oregano, fennel seeds, and chile flakes and mix with your hands just until all of the ingredients are evenly distributed. Set aside.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the ricotta, eggs, and milk just enough to break up any large curds of ricotta. Add the ricotta mixture to the ground meat mixture
a little at at time until the mixture should feels wet and tacky - you may not need to use all of the ricotta mixture. Pinch off a small nugget of the meatball mixture,
flatten into a disk, and cook it in a small sauté pan with a bit of olive oil. Taste it and adjust the seasoning of the mixture with salt if needed.
Form the mixture into 1 1/2-inch balls each weighing about 2 ounces, and place on the prepared baking sheets. You should have about 30 meatballs.
4. Bake, rotating the sheets once from front to back, for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the meatballs are browned. Remove from the oven, place the meatballs in a bowl and drain the fat into a separate container. Lower the oven temperature to 300° F.
5. Sprinkle the tomatoes with the remaining 2 teaspoons salt, and then pass the tomatoes and their juices through a food mill or chop in a food processor.
6. Place one of the roasting pans onto the stovetop and turn the heat up to medium. Add a couple of teaspoons of the meatball fat back to the roasting pan, cook the sliced garlic in the hot oil until it is fragrant and translucent.
7. Add the red wine to the pan and then the tomatoes. Stir to incorporate.
8. Pack the meatballs into the roasting pan with the sauce cover tightly with aluminum foil, and braise for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, or until the meatballs are tender and have absorbed some of the tomato sauce.
7. Pull the pan out of the oven and uncover. Distribute the basil leaves throughout the sauce.
8. For each serving, ladle meatballs with some of the sauce into a warmed bowl. Grate cheese over the top, drizzle with olive oil to finish, and serve immediately.

*I didn't have day old bread so I toasted the torn cubes in the oven for a few minutes before I threw them into the food processor

New Orleans BBQ shrimp

This shrimp recipe is oddly named since it includes nothing resembling bbq sauce. As a matter of fact I have only actually cooked it on a bbq grill once. So I don't know where the name comes from but it sure doesn't matter because it's freakin delicious.

We first had it at place called Oddfellows in Hoboken, NJ. Perfect for a quick happy hour meal on a weeknight after a crappy day at work. We always chased it with a bottle of Abita Purple Haze (try it - you must). Strangely we did not eat this shrimp dish when we were actually in New Orleans so I cannot confirm it's authenticity. Rachel??

So this recipe also calls for Abita beer but that can be hard to find (Whole Foods carries it but I think it's a regional thing) so just use whatever good beer you have on hand and a PBR would certainly do in a pinch. Though I definitely would not use any of those fruity beers for this because I doubt it would work well here.

Here's what you'll need:
1 lb. raw shrimp with tails on (we buy the bag of frozen shrimp from Trader Joe's)
3 tbls unsalted butter
1 tbls olive oil
½ onion or 1 shallot chopped finely
2 Cloves Garlic minced
2 tbls Worcestershire Sauce1 half Bottle Abita Beer - Amber or TurboDog (or whatever else you have)Juice of one lemon
dash of cayenne
1 tbls old bay seasoning (or other ground dry crab boil seasoning)salt
pepper

Thaw the shrimp if they are frozen. Leave the tails on.

Preheat your broiler or grill on the high setting (~500°)

Place a large and deep (also broiler or grill safe) skillet over medium/high heat. Add the olive oil.
Add the chopped onion or shallot to the hot oil and sautee until transulucent
Add the minced garlic. Cook until fragrant.

Add the butter to the mixture and cook until it is melted. Stir in the worcestershire, crab seasoning, cayenne. Stir to incorporate.

Add the entire bottle or can of beer. Cook until the foam disappears. Add the lemon juice, stir to incooperate and remove the mixture from the heat.

Pat the shrimp dry to remove any excess moisture. Add the raw shrimp to the sauce (you may need to transfer the mixture into a broiler or grill safe pan at this point). Stir to coat the shrimp with the sauce and arrange them in a single layer in the pan.

Place the pan of shrimp into the oven or into a covered bbq grill. Cook for 5 minutes (watch these closely so that they do not get over cooked). Flip the shrimp to cook on the other side. Remove from heat when the shrimp are just cooked (they will be opaque and pink).

Serve with crusty pieces of baguette and grilled veggies (we like asparagus or zucchini).

we're going camping kids!

We are not the backpacking/wilderness/hike to the campsite sort of people so traveling ultra-lite is not a goal of ours. We basically just car camp but we have so much other crap (dog gear, baby gear, etc...) that we do try to minimize the amount of extras.

We're headed out to the Olympic peninsula for a bit of car camping with a couple of other families. This will be our first time camping with Fenix but my confidence in our ability to pull this off is growing as I talk to people who have done it before and realize that if all goes to hell, we'll just pack up and leave. I have a feeling though that Fee will love it - it's in his blood after all since his dad lived outside for a bunch of time. He'll have to tell you all about that some day. It's a pretty great series of stories that I don't mind hearing over and over again. Aaanyway....

As far as tools/utensils go, we bring:
camp stove and fuel
a bit of firewood for the campfire
compact cutting board and knife

1 small pot
1 cast iron skillet
cheap flatware that we bought from the bins at goodwill (who cares if it gets lost!)
wooden spoon, wooden spatula
scissors
french press (after a fitful night of sleep in a stuffy tent, I must have the kind of viscous coffee that only a french press can provide)
*cast iron popcorn popper for making popcorn over the campfire
enamel coated dishes and cups
Several big jugs of filtered water - just sterilize some jugs that we have and dump in Brita water (I do not want h. pylori, no, I really do not)

For meals we like to make things that can go in one pot:
Southwest skillet ragu
or
Braised chicken thighs with pinto beans (I'll post the recipe later)

It's also good to have some sort of charcuterie plate for snacking before the meal is done because salted cured meats are awesome and of course we throw some cheese, fig jam and crudites on there too. You could always just do chips and salsa but I think a meat and cheese plate with delicious olives and fresh raw vegetables and fruit brings an air of elegance (if that is even possible on a campground).

There is always wine - white because red makes you groggy and headache-y and you want to stay bright and fresh for as long as possible or at least until the neighboring campers tell you to pipe down.

What about breakfast? A granola bar is the easy way out but that isn't very exciting, now is it?
Have you ever had the pleasure of being lured from your tent by the smell of bacon frying?

Up round these parts we get beautiful morels that grow in wooded areas and if your trip included a little mushroom hunting you could make a wonderful scramble with a sautee of minced shallot and chopped mushrooms in butter - fold that into some scrambled eggs - and serve with a side of bacon of course. For bread we just do english muffins because they hold up better than sliced loaf bread.

Lunch is usually pretty spare, just a piece of fresh fruit and snacky things like the aforementioned granola bars and maybe some jerky or a piece of cheese if you want some protein.

For Mr. Fenix who eats his fair share of solid foods now, we are going to go the easy route to avoid an accidental case of baby botulism and buy some of the organic jarred stuff and supplement it with bits of mild cheese and freeze dried fruit (which he LOVES).

We'll take lots of pictures so that you can see how it goes. I'm off to find my headlamp.....


*now honestly we would not even have this thing had it not been for the fact that we discovered it for some insanely low price at the goodwill. i'm not a big fan of single use kitchen tools but it's for popcorn (!) over the campfire (!), how could we have left it in the store?

breakfast crisp and smitten kitchen love

I really dig the blog Smitten Kitchen. It is my go to place for dinner ideas and cooking techniques. The author has great taste in food and her photos make your stomach grumble with hunger.

I was looking for a recipe that used apricots as I had found some nice organic specimens at the market. I went with a recipe called Breakfast Crisp and it was delicious. I have since made this recipe with nectarines/blackberry combo and a peach/raspberry comb.

It is delicious with a dollop of plain yogurt on top and can serve as a breakfast or a dessert.

The process is simple and after making it twice I needn't look at the recipe because I have all of the steps memorized. Furthermore, a well stocked pantry would have all of the necessary ingredients on hand so this is a great thing to whip up on a whim.

What you do:
Cut up the fruit into small-ish pieces - if the fruit is very soft, like apricots, you can just tear it up with your hands.

Next you make the topping. The recipe calls for turbinado sugar but you can sub in regular sugar. I always have turbinado sugar in our pantry so I've never subbed. So why don't you just buy some?


After you've made the topping assemble the whole thing and shove it in the oven. A few notes though.... I noticed that with the peach/raspberry combo, there was a bit of liquid pooled at the bottom. I think next time I will use more flour than the recipe calls for.

I never wait for this to cool down because I am usually making it when I am hungry and I end up hovering near the oven til it's done but the Smitten Kitchen post says that it's even better the next day and I tend to agree.

adventures in cooking lamb

So for those of you that know me as a tree hugging vegetarian... forget all that for now. I'm back on the carnivore bandwagon and it's treating me pretty well. Basically I love food so it was only a matter of time before this happened. The last time I 'broke' my vegetarianism it was for bacon. This time it was for a cheeseburger. Oh well.

Anyway this post is about lamb and all of it's wonderful goodness. Don't like lamb? Pshaw... yes you do. Well ok, maybe you do. We didn't think that we really cared much for lamb but then we discovered the awesomeness of lamb loin (another virtue of Trader Joe's) and we were converts.

Have you ever heard of Ming Tsai? If you care at all about cooking and food and celebrity chefs then you know who he is. Well he has a pretty great show on PBS called "Simply Ming" and that's what started us on the road to lamb lovin.

The recipe is for lamb satays that are served with a citrus mint dipping sauce. It's very simple to prepare and has wonderful flavor. We eat it as a protein for dinner with rice and a veggie but you could serve it as an appetizer and make out just as well.

First off a link to the recipe:

Peppered Lamb Satays with Citrus Mint Syrup

And now for a quick sidebar regarding the molcajete...

We got a nice molcajete as a wedding present and had been 100% intimidated by the seasoning directions that came with it:

That's a lot of committment for one cooking tool. I have sh*t to do.... I can't be seasoning molcajetes over the course of several days. So we didn't really follow all the steps but....
Grinding the rice:

and of course Fenix helped...

Grinding the salt:

And all I really wanted to do with the damn thing is grind up some whole peppercorns.... I shoulda just used the spice grinder :-/

Anyway back to the lamb. Here are some pics that we took to encourage and tantalize you:

O is for orange (chocolate chip yogurt loaf)

I made this delicious snack bread or whatever you wanna call it last night. It's based on the smitten kitchen recipe for lemon yogurt anything loaf. and. holy. crap. it's. good.

The smitten kitchen lady made hers with lemon/blueberries but one of her suggested mods was orange/chocolate chip. So that's what I did. Plus I threw in some chopped walnuts to take it even further. I was going to do lemon/blackberry but the only blackberries we have are frozen from last year's harvest (thanks to the crazy bush in my inlaws' backyard) and I wanted to bake it last night so that J would have it as a surprise breakfast treat today.
Anyway my combo resulted in a very rad cake/bread/loaf thingie that I will most certainly make again. And I suppose that I can eat like 3 slices in one sitting because it is made with yogurt so that obviously means that it's healthy or whatever. Yeah.

So go make yourself one but change it up and use a different citrus/fruit/flavoring combo.

V is for Vanilla!

howdy kids!

its time for an official McG Endorsed Recipe - homemade vanilla. awesome as always, Wife forwarded this to me last year. I loved the idea so much that I made a big batch and now we don't ever need to buy vanilla extract again. Click the link to check it out!

If you're interested but don't want to overpay for vanilla, check out the Official McG Family Vanilla Bean Supplier - they have a store on eBay.

enjoy!

dammit anthony i love you

Sorry to say but if J ever takes the big dirt nap I'll make it my business to track down Mr. Bourdain and make him my second husband.


Yes, I know he looks like he wreaks of cigarettes and cheap whiskey but there is just something about him. Christ, I'm in love. Plus he's from Bergen County, NJ... birthplace of all rad persons such as myself.

I watch his show on the travel channel almost everyday like the good little groupie that I am.


Anthony Bourdain's blog