When we went to the Halloween store, Michaela picked up a bag of Halloween petit four paper cups and I went ahead and bought them. I didn't want the purchase to be useless, so I decided to make these easy candies that have been a favorite of mine since I was a little kid. They are rolled on shredded coconut so we decided to call them Maggot Balls.

They weren't as big a hit with others at the party as I'd had expected. Well, it just meant there were more for me! :)

All the proportions are approximate, as I didn't measure when I made them.


Maggot Balls

• 3 tbsp butter
  
• 1/2 cup 1-minute oats
  
• 2/3 cup dulce de leche
  
• 1/4 cup cocoa
  
• a dash of cognac, rum or another liqueur
  
• shredded sweetened coconut
  

Mix all the ingredients save for the coconut together in a small saucepan. Heat over medium heat until they all melt and can be easily combined, stir well. Take off the heat and let the mixture cool down. Take a teaspoon of mixture in your hands and roll into a ball. Roll on the shredded coconut, put in a paper cup or directly a serving sheet.

When they are all done refrigerate before serving.

Mike saw the idea for a spider cake in a Family Fun magazine and immediately wanted us to make one for Halloween. I've learned my lesson about actually baking cake, so we figured we'd buy one premade and then assemble it. That turned out to be harder than we previously thought. They had no plain black cakes at Safeway and the cake I thought to buy at Costco was too high to make it look like a spider. Finally Mike found this semi-frosted, plain chocolate bundt cake at Albertson's and that's what we used.

He used licorice for the legs, white dot candies for the eyes and a pink one for the nose. He decided to skip the mouth. We were all pleased with the results and served the cake with ice cream.

My Halloween party is over and the menu and recipes are now available in my website. You can find them at http://www.marga.org/food/party/hallow04/

These include the recipes below plus a recipe for chili con carne and one for meat empanadas.

We buy it at Trader Joe's where it's usually available. Yesterday Mika had a couple of cracker/brie sandwiches which she enjoyed very much.

When I saw the white stilton with apricots at Trader Joe's I knew I had to try it. I hadn't had white stilton before, but I love blue stilton. White stilton apparently is a younger version of blue stilton to which the blue mold has not been added. I have to say that without the mold it's just not as satisfying. In this version it's mixed with dried apricot pieces. It's good but nothing extraordinary.

The cheese has a light flavor , slightly more pungent and salty than creme cheese. Its natural flavor is almost completely overwhelmed by the sweet apricot, however. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it tastes good, though I'd have preferred a stronger cheese taste. It has a crumbly texture which makes it hard to spread or it by itself, perhaps its best used would be crumbled over a salad or another dish.

I did like the idea of combining apricots with cheese, though, and I think a bagel with cream cheese and apricot preserves would probably be delicious.

We went down to LA Friday night to visit my family and drop off our daughter for the week. On the way we stopped at a couple of roadside restaurans. We ate mostly at home (an asado, some milanesas) but we did have one lunch out at Thai West, our favorite Thai restaurant in that area. Reviews for all these places are now online.

Buckhorn Family Restaurant at Santa Nella, located at the TravelCenter center gave us bland food, fries fried in old oil but friendly service.

Pea Soup Andersen's, this roadside institution in Santa Nella also features bland food but at higher prices

Thai West a neighborhood Thai restaurant in Chatsworth has consistently good food at modest prices

the parents play.

Mika spent last week with her grandparents, and we took advantage of it to go out to "nice" restaurants, "nice" being a code word for "child unfriendly" ones. We did hit a few child-friendly restaurants as well. I've been a good girl and written reviews of all of them, which will be on my website as soon as Mike returns them.

We started last Monday by going to Bistro Liaison in Berkeley, which had been in my list for a while. It's a nice, loud and friendly spot in downtown Berkeley serving classic French food at moderate prices (entrees under $20). The food was good, not great, but we enjoyed ourselves.

Tuesday was our night for hitting San Francisco. We considered going back to Piperade, but decided instead on Bocadillos, a tapas bar by Piperade's owner Gerard Yrigoyen. It was a disappointment. The food was good, but not outstanding and not particularly innovative - nowhere nearly as good as Piperade's. We didn't like having to wait and the barstools were not the most comfortable of places. In the future I'll leave places like this to the younger crowd.

Wednesday was "Lost" night, so we decided to stay in and have dinner (Zachary's by the fire. We did have lunch together at East Village, a dim sum place. The food was OK, though not great, but I loved their pork buns.

Thursday we joined Regina and Boris for dinner at Neumanali - a posh restaurant in Hayward. The food was good, the service clearly deficient. I wrote a letter to the management about it and I still haven't heard back.

Finally Friday we had a low key evening, dinner at taqueria Cancún in Berkeley (very good, fresh ingredients) followed by a good movie.

Our dining adventures have continued. On Saturday we picked up Michaela in Kettleman City and again had lunch at Mike's Roadhouse Cafe. Their quesadilla was actually not bad, and a hefty portion. Sunday we spent the day having fun in Tilden and then had a late lunch and Naan n' Curry on Telegraph, I was not impressed. Then today Mike got home too late to buy chicken at Galvan's so we went to Aloha BBQ, and had really good Hawaiian BBQ.

Mike has been in an editing frenzy (he only owes me 3!!!!) so there are several new restaurant reviews up at my website, http://www.marga.org/food/rest/:

I have finally finished cooking the Bhutanese dishes I proposed to make months ago. It took me such a long time because I was actually fearing making them - hearing the heat (which made me seed the peppers in a couple of recipes) and the potential blandness. After all, how good can dishes with such few ingredients and no herbs or spices taste? I foud out - pretty darn good. Once again (it happened to me with Albanian and Belarussian cuisine before) my prejudices have been shown to be baseless.

The dish I cooked last night, a beef with mushroom curry, was particularly good so much so that I can imagine making it again for company. It was my first time cooking oyster mushrooms and I have to say I loved their texture, I'll certainly use them again.

The menu is at http://www.marga.org/food/int/bhutan/

Saturday we took Mika to Chuck E. Cheese in Hayward. We'd been there before but this is the first time we actually ate there (that's the great thing about Chuck E. Cheese, they don't make you eat to play and the tokens for the paid games are pretty cheap - about 20 cents each). I was surprised that the food wasn't bad. We got a pepperoni and sausage pizza and we both liked it, the crust was in the thin side and somewhat sweet. It didn't have much cheese, and what it had had toasted, which wasn't bad. The toppings were good.

We also had their apple dessert pizza ($3), which was supposed to have a streudel dough but it actually felt pretty bready (like pizza). The apple topping was very sweet but good. I liked it.

We hadn't brought any coupons so it was expensive, but you can often get coupons in the Sunday newspaper or at their website

Chuck E. Cheese
24039 Hesperian Blvd.
Hayward, CA
(510)265-0590

I'll be brining a turkey this year, and this useful website tells you (and me) how.

THANKSGIVING SPECIAL / The Chronicle's Classic Turkey

Last night I had meant to serve braised pommegranate pork but, alas, I miscalculated how long it would take it to braise and started too late - so we decided to eat out instead.

We were shopping at Kmart (no longer, now that I know that they feed the Republican machine) and decided to go to Mi Tierra Restaurant & Taqueria 'cause I wanted something quick and cheap and it was right there (well, across the street, right next to Best Burger in the DeeDee's outside shopping mall).

The little restaurant is tiny and has a limited menu of burritos and tacos, with a few fajita plates thrown in for substance. It seems to be a family operation, and when we dined there were two women working both the counter and the open kitchen. There isn't much ambiance to speak of, but the place has been decorated with orange walls and Mexican paintings and other decorations. It's fine for a quick bite.

Mike ordered a regular chicken burrito ($4) and I ordered a carne asada super burrito ($6.50), without rice and beans. They were both the same size (large) but mine came with guacamole and cheese (not sour cream).

I liked my burrito well enough, though I didn't appreciate that it came with lettuce (the ingredients weren't listed). The meat was in low proportion to the other ingredients (salsa, cheese, guacamole sauce and particularly lettuce) but what was of it tasted good. Mike didn't like his. He felt the chicken and the other ingredients were not well integrated so when he bit into it he either got hot ingredients or cold ingredients. He also felt there wasn't enough chicken.

We also ordered a quesadilla for Michaela ($3.50) which comprised of just a tortilla filled with cheese, nothing else. Here again we felt there wasn't enough cheese in proportion to the tortilla. The two fountain drinks we got ($1.45, no refills) were fine.

In all, I can't imagine a reason why I'd go back to Mi Tierra, but the food wasn't bad, just not good enough.

Mi Tierra Restaurant & Taqueria
14393 Washington Ave. #D
San Leandro, CA
510-352-4883

Probably by now everyone with an internet connection has heard of Jones Soda holiday pack, featuring sodas in such festive and inviting tastes such asTurkey & Gravy, Cranberry, Mashed Potato & Butter, Green Bean Casserole and Fruitcake. But beyond the entertainment value, what do they really taste like? A group of intrepid men and women set out to find out, and here are the results. In a nutshell: they taste just as bad as you imagine they would.

Last night I made Pomegranate & Spice Braised Pork, a recipe I'd seen in the Wine section of the Chronicle a couple of weeks before. I had actually meant to make it Monday night, but I miscalculated when I had to start on the recipe so I left it for dinner last night.

I followed the original recipe quite faithfully, though I used regular anise seeds instead of the star anise, I chopped rather than pounded the garlic (misread it) and used a good quality cab instead of the fruity wine (I wasn't serving it with wine any way, and wanted to use what I had open).

The results were quite good, the sauce was sweet but not overwhelmingly so and complimented the pork quite well. Mike liked it, but he found the pork a little dry. I don't know if somehow I failed in cooking it, or this is related to how lean pork nowdays is (and I may have messed up by cutting off the lawyer of fat on the outside of the pork shoulder). I thought the pork was fine - though the fattier parts were definitely tastier - but I found the sauce to be too one-dimensional. It was just there, tasting good but with no complexity to it. It bore me. I served the dish with couscous (always a good choice for any sweet sauce) and I do have to admit that it went wonderfully with it - the couscous much better than the pork set off the different flavors within the sauce.

It was an easy dish to make, though as with any braise dish it takes quite a while to cook. Pork shoulder is relatively cheap, but beware that a bottle of pomegranate juice cost me $6, the hoisin sauce was another $3 - so this dish can get expensive. Another caveat is that it smells just like cinamon rolls while it's cooking, it may give you a craving :)

Recipe

• 3 1/2 to 4 lbs bone-in pork shoulder roast
  
• Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
  
• 2 tsps.. vegetable oil
  
• 1 large onion, chopped
  
• 5 large garlic cloves, chopped
  
• 6 slices fresh ginger
  
• 1/4 tsp. anise seed
  
• 1 stick cinnamon
  
• 2 tsp. whole black peppercorns
  
• 2 cups dry red wine
  
• 2 cups unsweetened pomegranate juice
  
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
  
• 2 tsps. fish sauce
  
• 2 tsps. hoisin sauce
  
• 2 tbsp. dark brown sugar, or to taste
  

Heat the oil in a large pot or dutch oven. Season all sides of the pork with salt and pepper. Brown all sides of the pork in the oil. Remove and set aside.

Fry the onions until transluscent. Add the garlic and cook until aromatic. Add the ginger, anise seed, cinnamon andn peppercorns and stir. Add the pork, wine, pomegranate juice, soy sauce, fish sauce and hoisin sauce.

Stir, bring to a boil, turn down the heat to low and simmer covered for 30 minutes. Check the level of tartness and if needed add the brown sugar.

Continue to simmer for 1 hour, turn the roast, and simmer for another 1 1/2 hours, until the meat is tender.

Remove the meat and set aside. Bring the sauce to a hard boil, uncovered, and boil until it's reduced by 1/2 to 1/4th. Meanwhile, slice the meat. When the sauce has reduced, strain it, discard the solids and return the liquid to the pot. Add the pork to the liquid and simmer it for a few more minutes until it gets warm. Serve.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I prepared a (reduced) Thanksgiving feast for our small, nuclear family. Still - cooking for 3 or 7 is not that different and I did spend a fare amount of time in the kitchen. Enough to realize that there is no way I'll be able to cook Xmas dinner next month - when I'll be almost 8 months pregnant.

Dinner came out well, but nowhere near perfect. The problem was clearly that I didn't pay enough attention - pregnancy brain, tiredness, I have tons of excuses. I did leave tons of dirty dishes for Mike to cook, however.

We started with a sweet pumpkin soup, made from a Trader Joe's base I'd previously bought. All you have to do is add some sour cream and milk, and it's very good but very sweet. A jar should be enough for four as an appetizer, as you can't quite handle too much more of the sweetness. Mika liked it and ate quite a bit as well.

Then it was time for the main meal.

I made Roast Turkey with Prosciuto-Hazelnut Crust from this recipe at epicurious.com.

I started by brining the chicken (a free range, organic 12-pounder) in a solution of kosher salt, sugar, dried thyme and bay leaf the night before. Then I rinsed it (note, some of the thyme leaves stuck to the turkey skin), dried it and let it sit in the fridge for several hours before cooking. I cooked it according to instructions, but I wasn't able to baste it as part of my baster was inexplicably missing. I also overcooked it somewhat. I'd checked the turkey and it had been at 172 - when I checked 10 minutes later it had shot up to 180. Clearly I should have taken it out at 172. Live and learn.

The turkey was very good, I found the drumstick a tad too salty but Mike found the breast was fine. It was, however, too dry - though Mike said he expects that from turkey. Still, I wanted something jucier. Mike loved the skin where the butter had been.

The accompanying gravy was rich and thick and tasted quite good, but the bits of meat made its consistency too disconcerting. The recipe didn't call for it, but it should definitely had been filtered. In any case, I wasn't able to palate it - knowing that it was made from the internal organs gave me a case of the willies. This even though I have no problem eating foie gras or pates made out of innards. Oh well, let's blame it on pregnancy.

I made mashed potatoes from the Zuni's cookbook recipe. I'd previously made it and loved it. Once again, they were a big hit - I'll make them again for Xmas and quadruple the recipe. This time they were too lumpy, I didn't spend enough time mashing the potatoes and I should have probably whipped them for longer (I was afraid they'd get gummy - they didn't), but the taste was all there. Oh, and this time I didn't use buttermilk, just whipping cream.

Finally, I made Stove Top stuffing, which I like so much that I never see a need to make any other kind. We made the sourdough kind with salted butter, and I found it a tad too salty - Mike didn't. I had meant to mix it up with grilled chopped apple-chicken sausage, but I totally forgot. Pregnancy brain again.

I had also meant to make green beans, but we left them in the plastic bag overnight and they had mold by then.

For dessert I made an apple pie. I used frozen Marie Callender pie crusts and they were very good, they tasted great in combination with the apple stuffing. They were too thin, however, so it wasn't possible to cut off a piece of pie without having the whole thing disintegrate, and my proportion of apple-stuffing to crust was too high (I used four granny smiths, next time I'll use 3), but the pie was delicious, in particular with some Ben & Jerry's vanilla ice cream. I had meant to make a sugar-free pie, using Splenda instead of sugar, but once I started adding the spleanda to the apples I realized the taste just wasn't there so I used probably twice as much sugar as splenda. My other ingredients were cinamon and a dash of nutmeg and ground cloves.

Today our leftovers are mostly turkey and pie. The pie held up great and Mike said his turkey sandwich (bread, turkey and mayo) was awesome.