counting blessings, not calories

Gathering together to eat. This is the only thing we need to do to celebrate this holiday. If you can’t get behind that, well then, move along, there’s nothing for you here. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Thanksgiving pumps me up. It’s definitely in my Top Three Holidays, with the two other being, in no particular order: Halloween and 4th of July. Halloween because it’s a great excuse for me to get to wear some fake facial hair and/or spandex and 4th of July because der: fireworks and day drinking! But Thanksgiving is slightly more poignant. Gathering the people I love together for a meal is pretty much my favorite thing to do in the world (unless you count an On Demand marathon of Teen Mom) and taking the time out for recognition of the good things in our life just wakes up the touchy feely yoga teacher inside me.



As the crunch of the holidays with all of its insane consumer craziness, traffic and aggression bears down upon us, we take this one day to move slow. To cook a bird for hours and hours, to simmer gravy and drink wine, to sit and eat and talk and maybe even take a nap. It’s like the calm before the storm, a gathering place where we meet together and remember, if only for a brief, moment, that simply being together is what it’s all about.



So, having gotten totally Namaste on your asses, what’s cooking for tomorrow? If I were the kind of woman that had her eggs in a row and had made and photographed and blogged, I would have a Thanksgiving recipe for you. But we both know I am not that woman (and if I were, I probably wouldn’t be as much fun to hang out with). I am heading home after work to make the oh-so-classic Cheeseball appetizer (always a hit and super easy) and a Browned Butter Butterscotch Pie (makes a serious face). I will let you know how everything turns out.



Meanwhile I have peppered this post with a couple photos I took last weekend. I whipped up a batch of Homemade Cranberry Liqueur (which I wrote about here. Did I mention I am blogging sometimes for edible South Shore? Well I am. Isn’t that fun! Thanks to my good friend, Aja, who is their blog administrator now) which will be ready in time for Christmas and took a long walk. These photographs were taken on said walk. We live a mile and a half from the coolest spot, Nickerson Beach, where granite cliffs peppered with birch trees drop off into the Atlantic Ocean and there are sweeping views of the Boston skyline. It is a really neat spot to walk and I only get moderately scared that we are going to stumble upon some Goth teens performing devil worship out there. On the way back we saw hundreds of birds all gathered together on some power lines. I think they were just chilling out before continuing on their southbound flight path. I just love the look of them.



Lastly, because someone has always said it before, and have definitely said it better than I could, I will leave you with two cute quotes about Thanksgiving. The first is totally squishy and ladylike and the other is quirky and by a lady I like. Have a wonderful holiday and take the opportunity to employ my lifestyle motto: everything in moderation, including moderation.

xoxo, jess

Grace isn’t just a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It’s a way to live

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What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?

Erma Bombeck

full o' beans

I love that expression. It reminds me of when I was little. It’s like a cute G rated way of saying “you’re totally lying a/k/a you’re full of s#!t.” But so cute. “I think he’s full of beans!” It almost makes me like the liar in question. I don’t know why having a belly full of beans would make you prone to bending the truth. When most people are full of beans they’re just more prone to cut one, but hey, liars and farters, the world is full of them. Good thing I’m neither. So this soup is, quite literally, full of beans. I’ve had this recipe on the brain for a while now and hm, wow, two weeks ago (good lord, we are officially in the holiday time warp zone) I finally worked it up and put it together.



However, we are about to tread into untasted territory. I did not make this soup with the ingredients that are set forth below. I did use the prosciutto, onion, garlic, sage and beans, topping it all off with chicken stock, but I did not use the potato or the wine/vinegar. Or did I? I might have used the vinegar. Crap, I should start writing things down. Anyways…in its first incarnation this soup was very good; however, it was a little too soupy. I had visions of a creamy, decadent, yet healthful soup and what I got was, well, not exactly that. It tasted like beans and chicken stock that had seen the business end of an immersion blender. Don't get me wrong, I did eat it and the flavors were great and like so many soups it got better as each day went by. So I endorse this soup, I just am not sure if the tweaks I’ve made to the recipe will work or not. You will have to let me know.



The recipe I’m providing here allows for some thickening by way of potato. I’m basing this adjustment on my experience making potato-based soups in the past and finding them to be hearty, thick and satisfying without having to drop a cup of heavy cream into the mix. There’s a time and a place for heavy cream and it’s not in my lunch on a Monday, know what I’m saying?



As for the addition of vinegar or wine (whichever you have on hand, really) I believe cooking the solid ingredients down with a bit of acid or alcohol will add another layer of flavor here and due to the large scale presence of white beans- which, admittedly are great, but need work to be really tasty- an extra layer of flavor in this soup is a good idea.

CARAMELIZED ONION, GARLIC and WHITE BEAN BISQUE

2-3 slices of prosciutto, diced
1 large onion, diced; or, 3-4 shallots
5 cloves garlic, minced
Sage, dried or fresh*
½ cup dry white wine; or, a splash of white wine vinegar
1 potato (I prefer russet), peeled and diced
2 cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
Chicken or vegetable stock (a 32 oz. container or two cans will do ya)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Splash cream or half and half (optional)

*y’all know that when you use dry herbs you half the amount you’re using, right? Dried herbs are a bit more intense (not in a good way) than fresh when it comes to their flavor. In this recipe, if you are using fresh sage, simply mince a few leaves (removed from the stems). If you’re using dried, as I did, use about a teaspoon and crush it up into a fine powder in your palm before adding it to the soup.



Heat a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Brown prosciutto. Add onions, lowering the heat just a touch. Cook onions for about 20 minutes to a half hour, or until deeply caramelized, stirring often. Add garlic, sage, salt and pepper; sauté a minute longer, stirring constantly, until fragrant. Turn heat up a bit, splash in wine or vinegar and let cook off (about 1 minute for vinegar, a touch longer if you’re using wine) using your wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits on the bottom of the pot. Add beans and potato and then top the whole pot off with chicken stock. Set heat at medium high and let cook about 15 to 20 minutes, or until the potato is completely tender. Taste and adjust salt and pepper accordingly. I used a good amount of salt, but if you are using prosciutto to start the soup, that will give you a nice salty base from which to build on. Lower the heat and let simmer on low until you are ready to serve. Before serving, you’ll need to puree the soup completely. If you have an immersion blender, use it to puree the soup to a smooth consistency. If you are pureeing the soup in a blender or food processor be very careful and do so in batches, because hot liquids expand. Once pureed taste again and adjust seasoning if necessary. Just before serving, feel free to swirl in just a bit a cream or half and half, if you’d like. Serve with a big salad or some grilled cheeses. I made a grilled ham and cheese using smoked Gouda and prosciutto. Highly recommended. Also, if you were to omit the prosciutto and make this with vegetable stock it would be a great vegan soup as well.

I'll take "s"words for $500

At the outset, you should know that when I pronounce the words “sword”, “swords” or “swordfish” I very clearly include the “w” sound. So while you read this, in your head, for the sake of accuracy, I would ask that you do the same.



What can I say about swordfish? Let’s see they have swords for noses, first off, so that’s pretty bad ass. I think we can all agree on that. If you could have a weapon for a body part what would it be and which body part would you replace it with? I can’t decide myself, I might replace my lazy eye with a laser beam, provided there wouldn’t be any free radical damage to my face and it would be the kind of laser beam used for good, not evil. Anyways back to the sWordfish.



When I was 16, I finally decided to expand my eating parameters beyond chicken fingers and steak tips and I decided that I liked swordfish. Probably because it was the most steak-like out of all the sea creatures. So when my parents took me and a friend to Anthony’s Pier 4 for a fancy dinner to celebrate my Sweet 16, swordfish it was. Nowadays, I don’t eat swordfish all that much, mostly because it’s pretty expensive and also not a very sustainable fish to eat; however, something inside me said “sWordfish” on Tuesday and I answered the call.





I had this idea in my head that I wanted to make a nice pan seared piece of fish with some sort of jazzy sauce. Tomatoes and capers came to mind. Mostly, because I knew I had both at home. I did some light googling and determined that this was, in fact, a combination that would work well with some swordfish so I decided to work it out and see what happened.



What happened was I found a sauce/chutney/warm relish type thing that is straight delicious. Make a batch and spoon it over chicken, fish or shrimp. Heck, just spoon it into a small bowl as a tasty addition to a spread of cheese and crackers. The swordfish was great but for me the major success of this meal was really the chutney. This stuff is tangy, salty and sweet all at once. It’s dynamic without being heavy and if you make it you will enjoy yourself I promise.



PAN SEARED SWORDFISH with WARM TOMATO CAPER CHUTNEY

Swordfish (about 1/2 lb. per person)

About a half package cherry tomatoes
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper

Olive oil
1 shallot, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
2-3 tablespoons capers
½ tsp. Dijon mustard
Pinch sugar
Red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper



Preheat your oven to 350. Toss tomatoes with a light drizzle of olive oil and balsamic, salt and pepper. Roast for about 45 to an hour, until they are blistered and have given off some of their juice. While this goes on you can do whatever you want, because this is the only part of this meal that takes a while, but is completely hands off. I drew a picture of my salt and pepper shakers with a ball point pen and did a load of laundry, if you must know. The picture came out awful but the laundry was fine. Win some, lose some.

While the tomatoes are roasting, trim the skin from your fish, salt and pepper each side and then marinate in a shallow pan in some olive oil in the refrigerator. When your tomatoes are ready, remove the pan from the oven. Preheat a skillet with about two tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Sauté shallots for about five minutes, add garlic, sauté another two minutes or so. Add pinch of sugar, salt and pepper and your Dijon mustard, stirring everything together. Splash a few drops of red wine vinegar (about 2-3 tbs. I would guess) in the pan, crank the heat a little and stirring constantly let the vinegar burn off. At this point in time, you can reduce the heat to low and let the sauce hang out while you cook your fish. If you’re adept at multi tasking you can sear the fish while making the sauce.



To cook the fish, preheat two tablespoons of olive oil and one tablespoon butter in a skillet over medium high heat. When the pan is good and hot, add the swordfish steaks. Let cook about 5-6 minutes on one side, flip and cook on the other side until cooked through. The directions I read on how to cook swordfish said 4 minutes per side, but when we got it to the table it was uncooked in the middle. Grody. I cranked the oven to 400 and put the whole pan in there for about 5 minutes and then the fish was completely cooked through. If you are timid about cooking fish and easily skeeved if things aren’t cooked through, this is my advice to you: sear the fish on one side for 5 minutes, flip, sear the other side for 3 minutes and then transfer the skillet to a 400 degree oven to finish cooking for 5 minutes. Once the fish is done, pour the sauce over. Serve with a green vegetable and brown rice or cous cous.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

what the chicken said

Sometimes the food speaks to you and tells you what to do with it. I had barely any groceries in my house on Sunday. It was cold and grey and windy outside and all of my roommates (the one human and two kittens) were nestled on the couch reading. Bruce and Bea were reading Dostoevsky and US Weekly, respectively. Me though, I was ansty. I desperately wanted to cook something but I would rather die than get back in the car. My grocery inventory was nil. I didn’t even have eggs. EGGS. So I started to putz. I pulled out the remainder of a roasted chicken and began to shred the remaining meat off, so that I could use the carcass to brew up some stock.



I looked over my pile of shredded chicken and said “speak to me” it whispered back in a throaty tone, voice dripping with sex appeal, “Buffalo sauce.” Could I? Would I? Checking in with the fridge contents I quickly determined no…Buffalo chicken dip would probably not be happening today; but the ship had not quite sailed. In my freezer I possessed a package of corn tortillas; in my pantry, a can of black beans; the cheese drawer held a sack of shredded cheese, just ready to rock. I also had some sour cream and a gallon sized jug of hot sauce. Somewhere in the background a Mariachi band began to softly play.



I simmered the black beans with a half can of tomato paste (which you will need to break up to incorporate), a generous douse of cumin, salt and pepper. Then I gushed a whole lot of Frank’s Red Hot in. Probably about ¼ cup at least. Then I stirred in the chicken. I layered this spicy black bean and chicken concoction in a baking dish, alternating layers of tortillas, the chicken and beans mixture and cheese until the pan was filled. Then I baked it at 350 for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese was bubbling. It was delicious. Not a groundbreaking work of food craftery, but all the same, a satisfying easy way to utilize my leftovers. Leftovers deserve love too. Even though they seem lame because you have already eaten them, if you repurpose them just slightly, they take on a whole new meaning and get exciting again. It’s just like Can’t Buy Me Love*, how all she does is rip his sleeves off and add mouse to his hair and suddenly Ronald Miller is a stud. Make your used up nerdy chicken a stud again. Add some mousse. Have some fun.

A real recipe tomorrow.

*I think I have made Can’t Buy Me Love references on here before. Clearly that movie had a strong impact on my adolescent sensibilities. I blame the suede fringe outfit. I have always been powerless to fringe.

chips! chips! chips!

I have issues with potato chips. They are one of my kryptonite foods. This means that in their presence I have little to no self control. Especially if they are Kettle Chips, you know the ones with the flavors that make me want to high kick and punch the wind and do a roaring guitar solo because they are so, so good. Holy crow man, keep me away from those things.

Apparently, *they* say if you are going to eat junk food, you should make it at home. I believe that this theory is supposed to apply solely to sugared treats. For example, your made-from-scratch cookies, although high in calories, sugar and fat, are at least not made with a battery of strange sounding, multi-syllabic sucrose based words and Monsanto modified petrochemicals*. You get the point, and I like this theory. I can wholeheartedly get behind it. However, a broad sweeping generalization about how making things at home is “healthier” can be a dangerous revelation to someone like myself. Someone whose metabolism may or may not be totally mad at her and giving her the silent treatment lately and someone who’s jeans may or may not have been seen waving a white flag of surrender from the bottom drawer of my bureau this morning.



So last week I sort of accidentally invented homemade, baked kettle chips. Because that is how most incredible inventions and discoveries happen, by accident. Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, the dude who invented penicillin (possibly also Louis Pasteur?) and Porky Dickens. I’m pretty much on the fast track to having a laboratory named after me at MIT. And yes I realize claiming that making oven fries into a different shape and claiming that they are a new wonder of modern kitchen science is a bit exaggeratory and ridiculous, but hey you know what, it’s Friday and I’ma do what I want.



In fact, if I may, and I will, I’m going to take the liberty to call these little babies “crisps” instead of chips. Because crisps is what they call them in England and everyone knows that food from Europe and/or the UK is not as bad for you as American food and thusly, you can eat more of it [this is a theory I have used to justify consumption of copious amounts of Nutella for decades].



So this sort of enjoyable madness is what I’m talking about vis a vis the dangers of homemade junk food. Are these far better for me than an order of fries or a bag of chips? Yes. Does that give me license to eat like, three whole potatoes with reckless abandon? Sadly no. So be forewarned that these are delicious and addictive and potentially my new favorite sort-of-bad-for-you-sort-of-who-gives-a-crap side dish. Enjoy with caution. Happy weekend.

*holy crap, spellcheck automatically capitalized Monsanto. Gross! You know something is courting world domination if it get automatically switched into a proper noun in Word. Bogus.

SALTY, ADDICTIVE OVEN CRISPS

(serves 2, generously)

2 russet potatoes, scrubbed, dried, thinly sliced**
2 nonstick baking sheets
Olive oil
Salt and pepper



Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Wash and slice your potatoes. Arrange in a single layer on baking sheets. Drizzle olive oil over and rub and flip to evenly coat each side with oil. Salt, pepper and stick in the oven. Set timer for 40 minutes. At the 20 minute mark open the door quickly and remove one pan. Flip all the crisps to the other side. Replace the pan and take the other, making the switch on this pan as well. It is imperative that you only open and close the door at this point in the process and that you close it very quickly. This is crucial to crisping the outside edges. Take a peek (through the door) at the 35 minute mark to see if they’re done. They very well may be, mine cooked a bit quicker than the 40 minutes I allotted. Remove from oven and immediately toss with lots of sea salt and black pepper. Serve as a side dish to any number of things, I plated mine along with burgers topped with Gorgonzola and caramelized shallots.

**if you have a mandolin, you could slice them super thin. But BE CAREFUL and also, watch the cooking time, as I believe it would drastically reduce and your finished product will end up much closer to actual potato chips.