Cinnamon Apple Bacon Brie Bites October 7, 2008
Posted by kitchenconfidence in Exploration, Recipes.Tags: Cinnamon Apple Bacon Brie Bites, Ile de France Brie
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I was thinking about what one could do with brie that would be a little different than the usual baked brie and had a load of puff pastry in the freezer. I decided to change the scale and add bacon- how can you go wrong with those good ingredients?
4-5 slices cinnamon apple bacon (look for it in the deli)
4.5 oz. ripened brie (rind left intact – this is part of the flavor of the cheese!)
2 sheets frozen puff pastry, thawed
Place the bacon on a plate lined with a double layer of paper towels. Cover with an additional paper towel. Cook for 5-6 minutes in the microwave until bacon is crisp. Use a small biscuit cutter and cut rounds of puff pastry and place them in ungreased mini-muffin tins. Cut up brie in half inch cubes and put inside the mini crusts. Break up bits of the cinnamon apple bacon and place them around and on the brie. I baked these beauties at 400 degrees for 15 minutes and they puffed up like little towers. They’re very architectural and delicious. Serve them right out of the oven- they’re best melty and warm.
We had them as an appetizer and had a hard time eating the main course as we were all full of brie bites! The adults and kids alike wolfed them down with abandon!!
My experiemental brie was provided by Ile de France cheese company. Their cheese is of excellent quality. They have several other good recipes on their website. At the moment they’re offering a dollar off coupon as well. I’m anxious to try their brie flavored with herbs.
Super Chef: The Cooking of France July 24, 2008
Posted by kitchenconfidence in Culinary Interest Building, Exploration, reviews.Tags: Culinary Interest Building, Matthew Locricchio, Super Chef Cooking Series, Super Chef: Cooking of France review
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The Super Chef series offers a look at world cuisines giving a bit of history and culinary background and a few attainable recipes from various regions of the target country. Locricchio divides France into three regions for the purpose of his book: the north, the central and the south. He gives six pages of background which would be way too much for any preschooler, but of course he’s writing to an older audience. This summary is nice for a parent trying to get a simple idea of the background of a dish which could be communicated to a young cook simply by pointing to France on a map.
From the very simple Carottes Glacées (Glazed Carrots) to the more involved Pain Baguette (French Bread), there are many candidates for sharing another cuisine with your young cook in this book. There are only a few instructive illustrations herein, so some culinary knowledge is necessary for execution. That being said, the instructions are well written and easy to understand for the adults who would be leading the cultural and culinary expedition. Five to seven recipes are offered for each region.
A cultural experience is more the aim of this book than developing specific culinary skills. Still, it provides real recipes and not some kitschy assembly instruction. Some work on the parent’s part will be necessary to employ this text for very young cooks. It is, nonetheless, worth looking at.
Locricchio, Matthew. Super Chef: The Cooking of France. Tarrytown: Benchmark Books, 2003.
ISBN 0-7614-1216-6.
Overall rating schema here is on a scale of 1-10. (1 too “cutesy:” seems to insult intelligence of adult and child – 10 imaginative and forward-thinking towards building actual cooking skills).
Overall ratings: Culinary Interest-Building: 5 Recipe Quality: 6
Goat Cheese-A-Palooza July 11, 2008
Posted by kitchenconfidence in Exploration, reviews.Tags: Cooking with Shelburne Farms, Fire Roasted Tomato Triscuits, Four Vines Naked Chardonnay, Goat cheese, Ile de France, Periano Estate Vineyards
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Ile de France’s American importer contacted me to see if I would try their goat cheese and write about it. I did not hesitate to take them up on their offer and promptly invited our best friends over for dinner.
Thankfully, the La Buchêtte chèvre they sent was a large one so that I could try more than one recipe and evaluate the cheese in different gastronomic settings. I set about finding recipes that interested me without concern for the protégées in our lives. (Though the supply was copious, it wasn’t endless. I going to use this occasion to introduce the girls to something they might spit out!) I searched my files and the internet for recipes and ultimately, for the appetizer and main dish, I settled on these:
Goat Cheese on Fire Roasted Tomato and Olive Oil Triscuits
Oyster Mushrooms with Corn, Goat Cheese and Farfalle
We all thought the goat cheese tasted great on the Triscuits. 
We’re all big fans of goat cheese to begin with. These new Triscuits have a flavorful kick which was a nice compliment to the plain goat cheese. To add variety I also served Tillamook Vintage White Extra Sharp Cheddar. The tanginess of both cheeses was nicely offset by the 2007 Four Vines Naked Chardonnay from Santa Barbara County, California. Chardonnay was the recommended pairing on the Ile de France website.
The main course recipe was found in Cooking with Shelburne Farms. I had never prepared anything with oyster mushrooms before. They’re very unique and as you might guess from the name, have a slight seafood taste to them. The goat cheese here added a subtle richness. With dinner we tried a chardonnay blend called The Other which was 65% chardonnay, 25% sauvignon blanc and 10% voignier (this from Periano Estate Vineyards of Lodi, California). Sauvignon blanc was another recommended pairing, so this wine looked a good choice. It was very different than the Naked Chardonnay, but quite nice with the pasta.
For enjoyment on it’s own, or in a recipe, goat cheese can’t be beat. Tune back in tomorrow for a recipe where you might not expect to find goat cheese.
Myrecipes.com Online Resource – Recipe Search June 19, 2008
Posted by kitchenconfidence in Exploration, reviews.Tags: myrecipes.com recipe search review
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My Recipes (features recipes from Cooking Light, Southern Living, Sunset, Coastal Living, Cottage Living and Health magazines: http://www.myrecipes.com/
Myrecipes.com is filled with features. To review all of them in one post would be too long and cumbersome. My focus here will be the recipe search, the feature I use most on any recipe site. The myrecipes recipe search can be attacked from several different angles. The four options offered under the Recipe Finder tab are: Recipe Finder, Enhanced Recipe Search, Search Recipe Categories, and Search Menu Categories.
The general Recipe Finder option offers categories to search by as follows: ingredients, courses, regional cooking, occasions, diet, conveniences, publications, and partners. There are pictures with popular subcategories under each one with tempting pictures to fuel your imagination.
If you’d like to browse, Search Recipe Categories gives more detail than the general search. You can view all the recipes in a given category. I chose fruit and a myriad of recipes came up. Pictures were shown for the first 15 of 4210 recipes in which fruit was featured. The fruit was in main dishes, desserts, drinks and dressings on that page. An option to search within those results is also offered. The pictures make this option an inviting one, if you’re wanting something that looks good you can gander at the picture and see how your appetite responds.
The enhanced recipe search gives you even more options, allowing you to check boxes for multiple subcategories at once. Main ingredients, exclude, courses, occasions, cuisines, conveniences, cooking methods, dietary considerations, publications and partners are the subcategories. Here the options are more detailed even if only one option interests you. I did a search for chocolate, dairy, fruit, dessert, exclude nuts and came up with 1,650 recipes. There are multitudes of recipes available in the database, so you need to be specific or you’ll be looking at options all day. I did a new search adding ice cream maker to the options and the result was 131 recipes. I redid my search narrowing with French cuisine. That search netted five sorbet recipes, none including chocolate!
The last option is Search Menu Categories. Here you can select a given cuisine, occasion or convenience. I chose the make-ahead category and 107 menus showed up. I picked Casual Make Ahead Buffet for summer entertaining which featured the following recipes:
- Thai Eggplant Dip
- Chili-Spiced Smoked Turkey Breast
- Herbed Potato Salad with Green Beans and Tomatoes
- Chunky Plum-and-Ginger Ice Cream
- Passionate White Sangría
Myrecipes.com also has options for saving your recipes in your own online recipe box. This feature will be examined in a future review. Myrecipes.com is one of my favorite search sites. I especially like using their Cooking Light recipes as I’m trying to shed a few pounds. I’ve had good success with the recipes I find there. I hope it will be a useful tool for you too!
Sushi, yeah, sure. . . June 1, 2008
Posted by kitchenconfidence in Exploration.Tags: exploring new foods - sushi, Fujiyama
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My first encounter with sushi was many moons ago when I was spending a summer in San Francisco as a coed. I was a guest in someone’s home, and was eager to try and enjoy this cool food. I bit the roll and immediately gagged. I choked it down with a smile, and that California Roll was not followed by another in that sitting. After analysis of what had happened, I determined that my visceral reaction was to the seaweed.
My husband is a sushi aficionado and wishes I shared his fishy passion. We were graced with a night to ourselves and I decided to bite the bullet and give sushi another try. I was lucky to have an in, a lady in my pottery class spends her working time as owner and restaurateur of a Japanese restaurant and sushi bar. I had asked her what I might try to get over my sushi fears and she suggested I come in and she’d help me over my mental blocks.
I was eager to like sushi, but a bit wary from my prior experiences. We sat down at the sushi bar and Minji asked me a few questions and then placed my order. My husband selected his own delicacies and we watched the chefs prepare our sushi while enjoying a bowl of miso soup. Minji selected two special rolls for me- Heart Attack and an Avalanche roll.
I trusted her completely and didn’t even look to see what I would be in for. The Heart Attack roll was ready first. When it was placed before me, I found it contained jalapeño, shrimp, cream cheese, and spicy tuna. It was deep fried with eel sauce and spicy mayo. It was certainly a gentle entry into sushi waters with the palatable shrimp which would be cooked. Given my past reactions, I thought this a wise place to start and mentally thanked Minji for her deeming me a hard sell. It was delicious! It was very spicy given the jalapeño “wrap” for each piece. I really enjoyed it and felt empowered to tackle something more adventurous.
The second roll was already in front of me, ready to be tasted. This one was called an Avalanche Roll. It was crab, shrimp, eel, onion and cucumber; baked, with creamy Masago sauce. This was fishier tasting and I felt my gag reflex coming to the fore. I mentally powered past that and did enjoy that as well.
My husband had gone for the real McCoy- sashimi composed of a nice big fresh, cool piece of white tuna over rice. I was guarded, but tried a piece anyhow. It was harder to down, but I felt a sense of accomplishment that I did eat it.
I can’t call myself a sushi lover, but I have overcome my propensity to write off the possibility of a night out including the sushi bar. Marriage is about give and take. Thanks to Minji, eating sushi is now an area where I can give.
Just TRY it! May 6, 2008
Posted by kitchenconfidence in Culinary Interest Building, Exploration.Tags: Culinary Adventure, Indian Food, preschooler, Trying new foods
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“Try one bite! If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it.” Have you said this before? This week I was saying it to myself as we sampled fare from a local Indian buffet. I’m not against trying new things, but I had a pre-natal block against Indian food. Five years ago, I attempted to ingest Indian edibles and let’s just say my body reacted violently. I was less than enthusiastic about venturing to try it again. My husband has a goal of trying ethnic restaurants throughout town. I support him in this, and I wanted to be brave and to communicate open-mindedness over reluctance to my protégée. Off we went for a culinary adventure.
The smell of curry and Tandoori chicken permeated the small restaurant. I was a bit on edge, but determined to go through with eating there. The entire offering of the restaurant was contained in their buffet. This was perfect for our purposes as there was no possibility of getting stymied by choosing the wrong thing from the menu.
My protégée’s plate held a small portion of Tandoori Chicken along with raw veggies and a yogurt dressing. She nixed the dressing, but loved the chicken and asked for more. She also liked a carrot salad which she said reminded her of baby food. Even more important than her trying new foods was her observing her father and me doing the same. Her father is an adventurous sort, and piled his plate with good-sized portions of lots of different things. To his benefit, he didn’t have any pre-natal blocks in his food memory!
Though it was a struggle for me to fight off the reminiscence of my last Indian buffet, I hope I presented a willingness to try things I might not like. I found two dishes I’d readily eat again, Butter Chicken and Chicken Tikki Masala. More importantly, I think I’m over my block and can venture to eat Indian food again without feeling like I’m on Fear Factor.
Being an adult means you get to pick your own meals, avoiding things as you care to. It also means you can choose to set a good example by stepping outside your comfort zone and into your kid’s shoes.
Confidence in the Kitchen: Sharing Cooking Experiences with Your Preschool Child 