When I was a little girl, my favorite restaurant was a steakhouse in my hometown called the Sawmill. The interior was one of those 1980’s restaurants with no windows, an open kitchen, dim lighting, a terrarium, rough-hewn wood beams and leather club chairs, but to very small me it was heaven. I always ordered a steak sandwich and a Shirley Temple (in a short glass, with extra cherries), but what really made the restaurant my favorite was the old fashioned salad bar. Young children don’t usually have that much control over what they eat, but at a salad bar I was master of my destiny. After much trial and error (what is the POINT of baby corn?) I settled on the winning combination of romaine lettuce, spinach (this was before the era of ubiquitous mixed greens), chick peas, scallions, croutons, bacon bits, blue cheese dressing and beets. This was a particular treat because we NEVER had beets at home — to this day my father claims to be allergic based on a rash he got in 1948 (and to this day, I remain skeptical about the existence of such an allergy), and I loved their earthy sweetness.
Fast forward to 2006, and when enjoying a lovely (outdoor) dinner at a local Greek restaurant in Los Angeles, I discovered Patzaria — a Greek spread made from yogurt and beets. Spread on toasted pita bread, the sweetness of the beets tempered by the tang of the yogurt, this spread was my favorite beet dish I had had since those childhood salads. So I decided to reconcile the two experiences, and come up with my own patzaria that replicates the flavors of my childhood nostalgia with a modern Greek spin.
(As a housekeeping note, I’m giving away a set of Oxo Tools and you have until 11:59 Pacific Time Wednesday to enter! What are you waiting for?)
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Tags: Bacon·Beets·Dip
The summer after I graduated from college, I took off for Europe. I wasn’t living the bohemian life with a backpack and a Eurail pass (Quel horreur!), I was traveling with my parents and about 30 college juniors on a summer program for my mom’s university. The downside of this plan was that I spent three weeks in a hotel room with my parents in what may be the most boring down on the French Riviera. The upside was that we got to take a leisurely coach ride (OK, it was a bus, but coach sounds much more romantic with its regency overtones) from Paris, through Southwestern France, and into Provence. We visited Chateaux in the Loire Valley, peered over the defensive walls in Carcassonne and tasted wine in the caves of Bordeaux. But the experience that really stuck in my mind was the day we visited the goat farm. We drove up through bucolic pastures into a fenced yard which held any number of baby goats, and then we were ushered to a small restaurant where we ate a five course lunch featuring goat cheese. There was goat cheese quiche and goat cheese flan, and aged cheeses with fruit. But the dish that I loved the best and that I still remember, many years later, was a goat cheese salad with honey. The sweetness of the honey perfectly balanced the pungency of the cheese, and the vinaigrette on the salad added a lovely acid note.
It was that dish that I had in mind when I created this maple mustard chicken with goat cheese. I’m always looking for new things to do with chicken, which seems to be the ubiquitous protein, and to add some flavor to chicken breasts. In this dish, Chicken breasts are pounded thin, and then marinated in a sweet vinaigrette of maple syrup, mustard and lemon juice. They’re then spread with good fresh goat cheese and some arugula (which adds a lovely nutty taste) and then baked.
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Tags: chicken·weeknight
I hate to say that I don’t care about the Super Bowl because it’s such a lame girl thing to say. On the other hand, I don’t really care about the Super Bowl. And I am kind of a lame girl. In my defense, L.A. hasn’t had a pro football team in years, so I can’t exactly root for the hometown. But the truth is, I’m just not really a pro football kind of girl.
Football food, however, is something I can get behind, because I am an appetizer kind of girl. Salty, spicy bite sized morsels? Yes please. Creamy dips with crunchy chips? Absolutely. I remember a highlight of my college dining hall experience being Super Bowl Sunday — in addition to the regular Sunday night fare like lentil tortilla rollups or Salisbury steak (this was before Alice Waters reformed my college dining hall) the chefs would provide an array of traditional Super Bowl nibbles for students to take to the buttery or back to their rooms to watch the big game. Things like nachos and hot dogs were popular, but what I looked forward to every year were the delicious crunchy spicy cheesy bites of goodness — the jalapeno poppers. My roommate and I would load our plate and head back to our room to read poetry (our freshman year, when we were intellectuals), listen to Tori Amos (sophomore year, when we were angsty) or watch girly movies (junior and senior year, when we were cool). OK, so we were kind of lame girls. But we were lame girls with jalapeno poppers (and our Caribbean themed spa party that took place during the Super Bowl senior year was super fun. We made blue cocktails and cranked up the heat in our room and gave each other pedicures).
Now I’m married to a boy who did not grow up in Los Angeles and does not have that as an excuse, and he likes watching the Super Bowl to boot, sadly without pedicures, which means my only consolation is the snacks. (And the commercials). Oddly enough, jalapeno poppers can be tough to find here in L.A. (which is usually a city where jalapenos are ubiquitous). Fortunately, I’ve managed to recreate the creamy spicy crunchy goodness in an easy to make dip form, which has the added bonus of tortilla chips.
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Tags: cheese·Chiles·Dip·Super Bowl
