use real butter

Recipe: roasted goat cheese-stuffed squash

I haven’t been cooking lately, unless you count reheating food in the nuker, on the stove top, or in the toaster oven (hey – that toaster oven is my redneck heritage). Why? Because I made too much food in the past week and now we are in the frenzied mode of trying to finish off those leftovers before they expire. Just hate to waste food… I can tell I have fallen into a rut of sorts. We were walking through our local mountain grocery store in search of hoisin sauce because we ran out. [Tangent: Let me tell you, I won’t make that mistake again… I shall henceforth maintain a proper store of genuine hoisin sauce from a reputable Asian grocer because the stuff they carry in my little town is really really narsty. Not nasty, but narsty. All of my ancestors were crying out in horror the moment that stuff touched my lips.] I wandered down the baking aisle in search of ?? Jeremy, in his effort to move us along, asked what I was looking for or rather what I wanted to make. I stopped and realized that I had filed into the recesses of my brain a todo list of sweets: raspberry almond tea cake, baklava, zebra torte, chocolate mousse…

I’m so lame. I have all of the ingredients ready to go, I think I’m just tired after skiing or maybe I’m still tired after my surgery? We went skiing today and I managed one of the most fabulous face plants. Because my left arm is not completely healed, when I fell, I kept my arms back to avoid injury. Except I biffed with my face. Funny how I was so impatient to recover from surgery so I could launch my body down the mountain. Gravity sports are great!

Anyway, I do have a lovely recipe to share with you today. I made this shortly after Christmas. It is another one of those foods I had years ago and loved and am finally getting my lazy bum around to replicating it. The evening before we left Ithaca – five years ago, our dear friends Mike and Carrie took us out for a special farewell dinner. One of the appetizers we ordered was a goat cheese stuffed squash. At this point, I can’t honestly recall anything about the dish other than it had squash, goat cheese, and tasted amazing. So that’s what I started with.

Recipe: crawfish phyllo triangles

I’ve had this recipe in the back of my head for well over ten years. Jeremy and I were driving from Ithaca, New York down to Virginia to visit with my parents way back in the late 90s when we stopped by my friend’s house in Washington DC along the way. I lived in northern Virginia for one year during high school and became close friends with Emily. It was nice to see her parents again (I love them, they are the sweetest people) and introduce them to Jeremy for the first time. While we chatted, Emily’s mom – the consummate hostess – presented us with a platter of hot, crispy phyllo triangles filled with… crawdads. Crawdads (crayfish) are these delicious freshwater critters that look like small lobsters and are practically religion on the Gulf. Mmmmm, mmmm, good.

Recipe: royal raspberry and almond cake

I trust everyone had a merry Christmas and/or federal holiday! I want to thank those of you who bid on my raffle prize as well as all of the other fabulous raffle prizes at Menu for Hope IV this year. What an awesome turnout. MfH raised 50% more than last year’s effort – over $90,000! That’s a whole lotta raffle tickets, kids!

Ever since I found out that my Aussie friends have lovely cold seafood picnics on the beach for Christmas, I have steadily rejected the traditional roasted animal – be it of feathered or four-legged persuasion – in favor of those animals who gurgle and bubble in the sea. Now *that* is a treat to me. I grew up on the water and spent far too much time in it or at its edge during my youth. This year we had lobster bisque, crawdad phyllo triangles (crawdads = crayfish = yabbies), shrimp cocktail, and king crab legs for our Christmas “meal”. The meal was neither lunch nor dinner, but a long drawn out noshing session. We didn’t have it in us to eat dessert. Who needs dessert after all of those lovely critters?