With all the mushroom recipes on here, you must be thinking that I’m mad about mushrooms. You’re right. Especially these Escargot Style Roasted Mushrooms that I happened upon at the Gourmet website (how I miss that magazine!).  This now my favorite way to make mushrooms. I’ve always been a sucker for those butter and garlic drenched escargots you can get in your neighborhood Greek taverna, but if you find the mere thought of eating snails repulsive, this recipe is for you. They were a big hit at my family’s Christmas dinner. I make a casserole of these every week and leave them in the fridge to add to pasta or meat dishes. Of course, they’re perfect on their own as an appetizer, with chunks of French baguette to mop up the garlicky and buttery juices.

Respectfully, I must point out that this recipe as originally printed by Gourmet calls for three large cloves of garlic, which in my humble opinion, is way too little.  I use a whole head. Remember, the mushrooms are supposed to be escargot style, right? And to me that means lots of butter and lots of garlic.

Roasted Mushrooms Escargot Style

adapted from Gourmet

Ingredients:

1 pound whole crimini or white mushrooms, or mix of both

2 tablespoons capers

1 head of garlic, cloves peeled and minced

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 tablespoons butter, cut into pieces

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450F with rack in middle. Toss mushrooms with capers, garlic, oil, and 1/8 teaspoon each of salt and pepper in a 1 1/2 to 2 quart baking dish. Top with butter and roast, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms are tender and golden, about 20 minutes. Stir in lemon juice and parsley.

Like a lot of people, my New Year’s resolution is to lose some weight. 2011 saw too many treats at the new office, too many trips to the Gourmet Warehouse for duck confit and all-butter puff pastry, and a new relationship, which always means a lot of dinners out.  Truth be told, running this blog has made it difficult to stay svelte. There has just been too much damn good food around here.  I don’t want that to change, but I still need to start doing things differently because I have gained 15 pounds since my lowest weight in the summer of 2010

Loving food the way I do, I have always struggled with twenty to thirty extra pounds. In my life I have tried countless diets: Atkins, Weight Watchers, South Beach, Slim Fast, Nutri System, Jenny Craig, just to name a few. Some of them several times.  Nothing ever worked for long until I got divorced in 2004.  At 5’8″ I weighed 180 pounds. It was the heaviest I had ever been.  I felt miserable and knew that I looked terrible. It was then that I did the only thing that has ever helped me lose weight and keep it off for any length of time.  I call it the eat half diet.

One thing I had learned from fifteen years of dieting was that diets don’t work.  I also learned that any time I deprive myself, I tend to binge on the foods that I deny myself sooner rather than later. Eating whatever I feel like–but eating a lot less of it–is far more effective for me. I don’t have to measure anything, write things down, or worry about macro nutrient ratios.  I don’t eat much processed food or junk, anyway, but I get to have those few bites of chocolate mousse or lemon tart.  I can still have a handful of frites with my steak at my favorite bistro.  When I first tried this method back in 2004, I lost ten pounds in the first month, all the while eating exactly what I felt like eating.  And for a long time, I kept the weight off.  But over the last year my portions have slowly crept up in size and I have begun to snack throughout the day, something I had also put a cap on.

So now I’m back to the small portions of the foods that I really want to eat and slowly savoring every bite.  It has worked before and know that it will work now. Basically, when I did this in the past, I was following the recommendations outlined in Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat. If you haven’t read this mega bestseller, I highly recommend it. You can read my review here.

I think we’d all be a whole lot slimmer and happier if we ate small portions of food we absolutely love. I’m starting with this Roasted Shrimp Salad by Ina Garten, taken from her latest cookbook How Easy Is That–which I absolutely adore.  Roasting the shrimp gives them so much flavor. The salad contains mayonnaise, but I don’t worry about the fat.  Because eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Eating too much does, right?

Ina Garten’s Roasted Shrimp Salad

Ingredients:

2 1/2 pounds peeled jumbo shrimp

1 tablespoon good olive oil

kosher salt

freshly ground black pepper

1 cup good quality mayonnaise

1 tablespoon grated orange zest (2 oranges)

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

1 tablespoon good white vinegar

1/4 cup minced fresh dill

2 tablespoons drained capers

2 tablespoons small-diced red onion

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 4ooF. Pat the shrimp dry with paper towels and place them on a cookie sheet. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper, and toss together.

2) Spread the shrimp in one layer and roast for 6 to 8 minutes, turning once while cooking, just until pink and firm and cooked through. Allow to cool on the pan for 3 minutes.

3) Meanwhile, make the sauce; in a large bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, orange zest, orange juice, vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. When the shrimp have cooled, add them to the sauce and toss. Add the dill, capers, and red onion and toss well.  The flavors will improve if you cover the salad with plastic wrap and allow it to sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. Otherwise chill up to 6 hours and serve at room temperature.

If you’ve been following this blog for any time, you know that I am a lover of mushrooms. Which is why I contributed this recipe for Brown and Wild Rice Mushroom Risotto to the Mushrooms Canada blog back in October for Breast Cancer Awareness month. I eat mushrooms on an almost daily basis, starting with my scrambled eggs in the morning. One of my favorite things to eat is mushroom toasts. I feel a bit silly offering up a recipe, since there isn’t much to it. You simply fry some mushrooms in a pan with a bit of butter, add a sprinkling of a herb or two, and serve it in a jumble on slices of crusty French baguette. Except I’ll be the first one to admit that I was almost forty when I discovered you should never crowd a pan with mushrooms, lest they steam instead of getting nicely browned–crucial to a fine mushroom toast. Everyone needs a little direction.

First, start with a mixture of mushrooms.  Button mushrooms are okay but a little ho hum. I like to get an organic mix of baby mushrooms at my local market, but the last time I made mushroom toasts I splurged for a heaping handful of chanterelles. I could have gone for a sushi lunch for the price of those mushrooms, but their buttery, meaty goodness was worth the splurge and I enjoyed every bite. I also love crimini mushrooms, those sexy little baby portabellas once as rare as a good hair day for Donald Trump but now easily found at every corner Safeway.

My version of mushroom toasts have a bit of a French twist, with shallots, thyme, and a dollop of crème fraiche for extra richness, but feel free to experiment with the basic ratio of eight ounces (227 grams) of mushrooms for four people, to two tablespoons (30ml) fat–I prefer a mixture of butter and olive oil. You can add a splash of cognac, top them with cheese and put them under the broiler, or simply sprinkle them with Parmesan.  Adding a few crumbles of Roquefort is also a very good idea.

I’m don’t know what you’ll be eating this New Year’s Eve, but these will definitely be on my table.

Mushroom Toasts

Serves 4

Ingredients:

12 slices French baguette, toasted and cut on the diagonal

1 garlic clove, minced

8 ounces (227 grams) mushrooms, sliced

2 large shallots, minced

1 tablespoon (15ml)butter

1 tablespoon (15ml) olive oil

splash white wine

1 tablespoon crème fraiche

fresh thyme leaves

fresh chopped parsley

sea salt

freshly ground pepper

dash lemon juice

4 tablespoons (60ml) grated Parmesan cheese

Directions:

1) Melt butter and olive oil in a heavy pan (preferably cast iron) over medium heat. Add shallots and soften for about two minutes. Add the garlic and cook for a minute longer, stirring; do not allow garlic to burn. Add mushrooms and increase heat to medium high. Making sure not to crowd the pan, fry mushrooms until they are golden brown and no liquid remains in the pan. Add a splash of white wine and cook off until evaporated.

2) Take mushrooms off heat and mix in the lemon and crème fraiche. Season with salt and pepper to taste and then stir in thyme and parsley. Serve immediately on 4 small individual plates, topping baguettes slices with mounds of the mushroom mixture, followed by 1 tablespoon of Parmesan.

Bon Appetit and Happy New Year!

I always drop the ball on Christmas recipes. With a table that seats a maximum of four, I’m never the one that cooks. New Year’s is another story. I’m one of those people that hates going out, finding most venues for the big night expensive and overrated. Ideally, I like to put together some tapas and kick back with a few friends for a fun but mellow evening. This year it’s going to be just me and my man, and I’ve been mulling over food ideas ever since he presented me with Ina Garten’s How Easy is That?. I have a couple of Ina’s other cookbooks, but this one is my new favorite. I love so many of the recipes; find them so simple but never boring. Every other page has a green stickie on it, a reminder to make the mussels and basil bread crumbs or roasted figs with caramel sauce. I’ve already made the chipotle and rosemary roasted nuts and the baked Fontina–which reminds me of a fondue but is a lot easier to make, because you just cube some cheese and put it in a cast iron pan with some herbs and olive oil. How easy is that? Incredibly easy. And good.

Ina Garten’s Chipotle and Rosemary Roasted Nuts

Serves 8-10

Ingredients:

vegetable oil for greasing pan

3 cups/14 ounces whole roasted unsalted cashews

2 cups/7 ounces whole walnut halves

2 cups/7 ounces whole pecan halves

1/2 cup/3 ounces whole almonds

1/3 cup pure maple syrup

1/4 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed

3 tablespoons orange juice

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 teaspoons ground chipotle powder

4 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary leaves, divided

4 teaspoons kosher salt, divided

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 350F degrees. Brush a sheet pan generously with vegetable oil. Combine the cashews, walnuts, pecans, almonds, 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, the maple syrup, brown sugar, orange juice, and chipotle powder on the sheet pan and toss to coat the nuts evenly.

2) Add 2 tablespoons of the rosemary and 2 teaspoons of salt and toss again. Spread the nuts in one layer. Roast for 20-25 minutes, stirring twice, until nuts are glazed and golden brown. Take care not to burn them.

3) Remove nuts from the oven and sprinkle with 2 more teaspoons salt and the remaining rosemary. Toss well and set aside at room temperature, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking as they cool. Taste for seasoning. Serve warm or cool completely and store in airtight container at room temperature.

Ina Garten’s Baked Fontina

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients:

1 1/2 pounds Italian Fontina cheese (preferable Val d’Aosta), rind removed and 1-inch diced

1/4 cup good quality olive oil

6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme leaves

1 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary leaves

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 crusty French baguette, for serving

Directions:

1) Preheat the broiler and position the oven rack 5-inches from the heat.

2) Distribute the cubes of Fontina evenly in a 12-inch cast iron pan. Drizzle on the olive oil. Combine the garlic, thyme, and rosemary and sprinkle it over the cheese and olive oil. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper and place the pan under the broiler for 6 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and bubbling and starts to brown.

3) Serve the baked Fontina right out of the oven in the cast-iron pan with crusty chunks of bread for dipping.

Come autumn, salad rarely graces my table. I tend to focus on roasting vegetables once cold begins to nip the air. I will admit this is partly because I lack imagination in terms of the endless possibilities in putting together a melange of vegetables. In my studies of French food, however, I have discovered that one can tell the season simply by looking at the vegetables on one’s plate. And so it should be. Sautéed wild mushrooms, nuts, crumbles of Roquefort cheese are all elements that can be added to a salad for heft and take it beyond your average bowl of mixed greens.

My favorite in the pantheon of  Great French Salads is the Frisée au Lard et À L’oeuf. Of course, it makes perfect sense that I would be so attracted to a cuisine that has come up with a way to put bacon and eggs in salad.  Escarole or frisée are used for the greens but I prefer the latter.  Where I live in Vancouver, it can be hard to come by, but I have found it available at Granville Island Market. Typically, it’s two to three dollars for one measly little bunch the size of your palm, but the last time I was there I found a package by Earthbound Farm Organic at a reasonable price.  Rich egg yolk and bits of salty, smoked bacon are the perfect foil for the slightly bitter frisée . The egg should be lightly poached and burst at the touch of a fork to help dress the greens.

Frisée au Lard et À L’oeuf – Frisée with Lardons and Poached Egg

From Epicurious/Gourmet, February 1999

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1/2 pound frisée (French curly endive)

6 ounces thick-cut bacon slices, preferably smoked

2 tablespoons white vinegar

4 large eggs

2 tablespoons chopped shallot

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Directions:

1) Cut bacon into lardons (slice crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick slices). Tear frisée into bite-size pieces and put into a large bowl.

2) Cook bacon over moderate heat in a heavy skillet, stirring occasionally, until golden. Remove from heat. Have ready another skillet with 1-inch warm water. Half-fill a 4-quart saucepan with water and stir in white vinegar. Bring liquid to a bare simmer.

3) Break each egg into a ramekin. Slide 1 egg into the simmering water and immediately push the white around the yolk with a slotted spoon, moving egg gently. The egg will become oval, with yolk completely covered by white. Add remaining 3 eggs in same manner. Simmer eggs about 1 1/2 minutes and immediately transfer to the skillet of warm water.

4) Reheat bacon in its skillet over moderate heat. Add shallot and cook, stirring, 1 minute. Add red-wine vinegar and boil 5 seconds. Immediately pour hot dressing over frisée and toss with salt and pepper to taste.

5) Divide salad among 4 plates and top with drained poached eggs. Season egg with salt and pepper and serve salad immediately.

I received my December issue of Bon Appetit last week and found several recipes I wanted to make immediately. For starters–a potato galette, baked gnocchi, and a version of this almond bark. This rarely happens. I am embarrassed to admit that although I have subscriptions to several foodie magazines, I rarely cook anything from their contents. I pore over them with enthusiasm, reading every column inch and admiring the luscious photography. They give me ideas and inspire me to get into the kitchen, but often the ingredients I need are not routinely found in the single person’s refrigerator. Sometimes a recipe just requires too much shopping and even money to execute, that it seems hardly worth the bother to do it for oneself. And that’s a shame, because I know how thoroughly the recipes are tested in most food magazines–more so than a lot of cookbooks.

But the recipes I was most intrigued by in Bon Appetit did not fall into the save-for-a-dinner-party category. For instance, I quickly whipped up this almond bark. I always have almonds on hand, as well as a slab of Callebaut chocolate. In a matter of minutes I had a tasty treat that would not have come cheap at my local gourmet food shop.

Chocolate Almond Bark with Sea Salt

from Bon Appetit, December 2011

Ingredients:

1/2 cup sugar

1 tablespoon butter

1 1/2 cups roasted almonds

1 pound good dark chocolate (62-70% cacao), finely chopped

coarse sea salt, for sprinkling

Method:

1) Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil. Combine sugar with 2 tablespoons water in a small saucepan. Stir over medium heat until sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil. Do not stir but occasionally brush down sides with a wet pastry brush, until caramel is a dark amber–about 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

2) Immediately add butter and whisk until melted. Add almonds and stir well to coat. Transfer to baking sheet, spreading out to separate nuts. Let cool. Break up any large clumps of nuts. Set aside 1/4 of the nuts.

3) Stir chocolate in a medium bowl set over a pan of simmering water until melted. Remove from heat and add nuts from baking sheet, stirring quickly to combine. Spread chocolate-nut mixture on same baking sheet, keeping nuts in a single layer.

4) Top with reserved nuts; sprinkle with salt. Chill until chocolate is set–about 3 hours. Break bark into pieces and store between layers of parchment or waxed paper.

Can be made 1 week ahead. Keep chilled.

As the offspring of Eastern European immigrants, I grew up in a household where the mainstay of every meal was meat.  When I was twelve, my father built a smokehouse in our backyard, inspiring our fellow Yugoslavian neighbors to do the same, followed by the Czechs who lived next door.  In it he would cure his own prosciutto and homemade sausages, which ended up hanging in the shed like stalactites.  I learned the value of fresh homemade food early on, and that there was honor and history in the task of spending hours in acts such as patiently stuffing raw meat into endless tubes of pig intestine.  On the odd night no one felt like cooking, dinner was slivers of cured bacon accompanied by tomatoes, raw onion and chunks of fresh bread.  I thought we were unique in this type of meal, until I learned about the plowman’s lunch and that a snack in Spain might consist of a piece of bread spread with unsalted butter and rubbed with tomato.

Despite all of this, there have been times I have flirted with being a vegetarian–most notably while in university.  I was a a very bad one.  I ate chocolate bars and pastries instead of vegetables. I became so malnourished that after a year of this, bits of my front teeth started to flake off and I had to get my dentist to file them down to make them even again. In the many years since, I have come to fully embrace the wonders of saturated fat, as outlined in Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient and Nina Planck’s Real Food: What to Eat and Why.

Socrates once said “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I would add that a life without sausage and bacon is not worth living.

So tell me. What foods can you not live without?

The Autumn issue of Edible Vancouver is out, featuring my article Clay Pot Cooking. If you can’t find a copy, there is an online digital edition available. Edible Vancouver is a beautiful periodical focused on a matter close to my heart–local food.

If you haven’t cooked with a clay pot before, the article will hopefully convince you to give it a try. Foods cooked in clay offer superior results in terms of taste, nutrition–even browning. Clay pots are the world’s oldest and most widely used cooking vessels but somehow have not caught on in North America. Whether it’s a Morroccan tagine or a simple terracotta garlic baker, a clay pot will elevate what comes out of your kitchen.