Never Before Eaten – Spaghetti Squash! A new culinary adventure beckoned with a recipe from Everyday Food, a Martha Stewart publication. After baking, you use a fork to remove the squash creating spaghetti-like strands. Combined with roasted prawns, lemon, extra virgin olive oil and parsley, and voila! a delicious, healthy dish. The wonderful Pezzini Farms market in Monterey yielded the squash as well as the artichokes we ate with this. Pumpkin pie from Swanton Farms, lush with spice and a delicious crust, was devoured afterwards.
A Simple Sirloin Supper
K-I-S-S Keep It Simple Stupid — the watchwords of my wonderful mother-in-law. Grace would have heartily approved of this Marin Sun Farms sirloin steak, grilled along with fingerling potatoes — crowning a bed of wild arugula. Worcestershire sauce, Stonehouse Farms extra virgin olive oil and fresh thyme dressed this delicious dish. Cosentino Winery‘s Zinfandel created an atmosphere of further relaxation for our simple supper, concluding with left-over Halloween candy. A salute to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Kit Kat Wafer Bars!
Sizzling Shrimp Scampi
Food & Wine’s October issue featuring Sizzling Shrimp Scampi set the theme for this delicious dinner. Gulf of Mexico prawns, surrounded by a bubbling butter flavored with lemon, garlic, parsley, basil and thyme, took center stage while also providing the dip for our artichokes and bread. The Acme Bread sweet batard and prawns were purchased at Bryan’s; the artichokes from Richmond Produce Market, a wonderful local shop. Although Julia Child has been renown to say “nobody has to know” about your food travails, mea culpa that the artichokes set off the smoke alarm making it a completely sizzling meal. A William Hill Chardonnay from Bevmo cooled everything down!
Italian night
A private tasting and tour of A.G. Ferrari Foods for members of the San Francisco Professional Food Society inspired the dinner for this evening. In fact, the featured pasta – artisan produced organic Fusilli Napoletani – topped with incredible San Marzano tomatoes were gifts from that wonderfully educational, epicurean experience. Eggplant from the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market (grilled stovetop and dressed with extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and Trader Joe’s goat cheese) along with Gallo Italian salami from Safeway and olives from our huge Costco jar continued the theme. An Italian Primativo wine, “A Mano”, from BevMo helped transport us from Land’s End to Italy!
Summer Salads
Simple, one dish salads are the entree of choice at ChezHelvetica this summer. For this weeknight meal, we dined on whole grain Barilla penne pasta and Trader Joe’s organic garbanzo beans nested on a bed of Little Gem greens. These heavenly greens were purchased at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market. Crostini topped with a tapenade made of kalamata olives and sun dried tomatoes (a recipe adapted from Giada de Laurentiis “Everyday Italian” cookbook) accompanied our salad. We delighted in our Powder Keg wine selection that evening but felt like we were shot from a cannon the next morning. That will teach us!
A Berry Good Breakfast
“A Mixed-Berry Dutch Baby” recipe, presented in the July issue of Food & Wine’s dinner-party fruit desserts, intrigued me since mentioning it would also be great for breakfast. This “German pancake” was exactly what I was seeking for my Sunday breakfast with visiting family! With blackberries picked the day before by my husband from the Florins beautiful garden in Mill Valley and organic Driscoll rasberries purchased at Cal-Mart, this delicious “Baby” was just the right dish to accompany lox (garnished with Early Girl tomatoes, red onion and fresh dill) and Everything bagels from The House of Bagels. (NB: The wonderful lox was purchased from Bryan’s Meats now in a new location within the general market at Laurel Center, a testament to these economic times.) A note of nostalgia – the linens on the table traveled with me from the Reid’s Palace gift shop in Funchal, Madeira to San Francisco in the last century!
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Bastille Day
Bastille Day seemed like a fun occasion to celebrate with French-related cuisine, wine and national colors. Our Bakers of Paris baguette was topped with a walnut-parsley pesto, a great side for the farfalle pasta with summer squash and mushrooms. No specific recipe was used in the creation of this dish, but knowing my ingredients were the finest from the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, as well as Barilla Multi-Grain pasta, I forged ahead. While the wine wasn’t French, the name is: Folie a’ Deux. This wonderful Zinfandel is from a Napa Valley vintner with grapes from Amador County. Dreyer’s French Vanilla ice cream, accompanied by sweet red cherries, concluded our tribute to France and the storming of the Bastille!
Summer Fun
Stone fruit, berries, grilling and company all add up to summer fun. My sister and niece were leaving and my mom arrived later that day. With bounty from the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco and the Fruit Basket in Sonoma, we feasted on grilled chicken sandwiches with red onions and a whole grain mustard and creme fraiche dressing, tomatoes in garlic oil and grilled fingerling potatoes in vinegar and salt, all recipes from Martha Stewart Living’s June issue. A word of caution about those potatoes, the vinegar was somewhat overwhelming. Now for the dessert – a delectable Almond cake with berries from Jacque Pepin’s “fast food my way.” Along with almond paste, the ingredients called for a syrup made of either whiskey, rum or cognac. Given that my 15 year old niece was going to be eating this, I had to make a substitution. Happily, my concoction of pomegranate syrup and vanilla was a success! During the dinner with my mother we enjoyed a luscious chardonnay from Pine Ridge Winery as we watched “In Wine Country” and “60 Minutes” featuring a segment on Alice Waters. We felt like we were in the wine country and that Alice Waters would have enjoyed our meal!
Dinner before Phoenix
With my husband’s impending departure for a business trip to Phoenix, this was the perfect opportunity to have a special farewell dinner. Artichoke risotto and grilled halibut were the featured dishes this evening. The purchase of a huge jar of artichoke hearts from Costco propelled my search for a recipe which I found online through a surprising source – the Junior League of Tulsa, Oklahoma! Wild halibut (which I actually ended up broiling) was dressed in lemon juice, lemon zest, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, capers and basil, a great recipe presented on Epicurious.com. A delightful Edna Valley Chardonnay accompanied this meal. Thanks to the current issue of Martha Stewart Living, we enjoyed a blueberry crisp for dessert. Delicious! P.S. I heeded the advice in the recipe about making extra topping and freezing it so that it would be ready for quick assembly when we next have fresh fruit on hand.
Grilled Steak Salad with Roses and Calla Lilies!
Surrounded by beautiful roses from my husband’s co-worker Carole and calla lilies from my BFF Joan, we enjoyed a Gourmet Every Day Quick Kitchen recipe of grilled london broil salad with worcestershire vinaigrette, roasted yams and bites of black bean and cheese tamales. Grass-fed london broil from Marin Sun Farms was purchased at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, as well as the organic yams and Primavera Tamales. This dinner morphed the london broil we first ate a couple of days before (perhaps the best I have ever had) into a delicious salad with arugula from Trader Joe’s and grilled red and white onions. The vinaigrette used thyme just picked from our garden. We couldn’t quite finish the tamales at another dinner so this was a great opportunity to eat these delicious bites. Medjool dates (filled with potassium) capped off our colorful, healthy meal.