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/
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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/:
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 Canc
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
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.
Belletoile Triple Cream Brie is our favorite brie. It’s 70% cream which means it’s extremely creamy and smooth. It has a rather mild flavor which I love.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I wrote this post in 2004. Since then, I’ve made this recipe many, many, many times. It’s one of my kids’ favorite, as well as my own. It’s very simple, it only requires buying 3 ingredients (chicken, onions & celery), and it’s absolutely delicious. I’m re-editing this post by doubling the recipe for the dumplings, they’re the best part 🙂
Last night I made chicken and dumplings. This was a favorite recipe of mine when I was a kid, probably because it was a specialty of my grandmother and my father, whom I loved very much. It also tasted completely different from everything else we ate in Argentina. I based the recipe below on my father’s recipe, which didn’t have precise measures. I also looked at this recipe at Allrecipes.com to give me some guidance. The dish came out great, I loved it and I will certainly make it again.
Note that with these measures, the dumplings are not very sturdy, they broke up very easily. I liked this, as they helped make the sauce much denser, though if you prefer firmer dumplings you may want to use another dumpling recipe (like this one). You can vary the spices in the broth and add whatever you like, you can also use fresh parsley, I used dried ’cause that’s what I had at hand.
Chicken and Dumplings
For the chicken
- 1 Tbsp. oil
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 4 lbs chicken parts
- 3 ribs celery, chopped
- 4 cups water (about)
- 1 1/2 tsp. coarse salt
- 1 Tbsp. dried oregano
- 1 Tbsp. dried parsley
- 1 tsp. garlic powder
- 1/2 tsp. paprika
- 1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper
For the dumplings
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp. salt
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 6 Tbsp. butter
- 1 1/2 cups milk
In a large pot, heat the oil. Add the chopped onion and fry over medium-low heat until golden, about 8 minutes. Add the chicken parts and brown on all sides. Add the celery. Add enough water to cover the chicken. Add the herbs and spices, mix, turn down the heat and simmer over low heat uncovered until the chicken starts falling apart from the bones, about an hour. Add more water if necessary.
Meanwhile prepare the dumplings. Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together. Add the butter and blend together using a fork or your hands. Put the mixture into the fridge until the chicken is almost ready. Remove and slowly add the milk, blending with a fork.
Add the dumplings to the simmering liquid by the spoonfull. Let them cook for about 5-8 minutes and then flip. Cook for 5 more minutes or until cooked through. When you put them in the water and/or flip them parts of the dumplings will fall off and mix in with the broth making a gravy. Stir to make sure this happens. If it doesn’t, add some extra flour and stir until the gravy is the consistency you like.
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