melting your mouth

I’ve been trying to find a fish tacos recipe I like for a long time. I think maybe I like the idea of fish tacos more than most incarnations of them. I kept trying different versions, and Matt and I would always end up kind of saying “eh, they’re ok”, and the recipe would go in the Don’t Bother Trying This Again Unless They Stop Making Cookbooks pile. But here, I think I’ve finally found a winner!

Somehow I recently got on a mailing list from Culinate, a website about food with recipes, articles, etc., and I’m actually enjoying the suggestions rather than resenting the extra space in my inbox. That’s where this recipe comes from. The fish is marinated in lime juice and soy sauce, served with a lime-chipotle mayonnaise sauce, and topped with mango salsa. Don’t think about skipping the salsa, I think that may be the key.

We used the leftover chipotles in these chicken quesadillas the next day, which, incidentally, I recommend as well.

I remember this recipe from when I was a little kid and it is one of my favorites as I like almost any sort of pasta. My grandmother, whom I called Granny Pat, made this recipe for my mom many years. I latch on to traditions more than the rest of my family did when I was growing up. One tradition we had was having this for Christmas Eve either right before or right after a movie.

The sauce is a mix between chili and a traditional spaghetti sauce. I truly don’t know the origins of the recipe, but it very well could have come from a Campbell’s soup recipe book. I have written the recipe just as my mom has given to me, but it is fairly forgiving to add a few things for a change. I like to add garlic, fresh mushrooms, or a fresh spice like basil or oregano. One of these days I will try it in a crock pot. I hope you enjoy.

Recipe after the break.

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Matt and I had a delicious, though perhaps not all that balanced or healthy, meal of steamed mussels and artichokes the other night. We first started eating mussels while we were studying abroad in France, where they are often served with French fries as “Moules Frites.” There, mussels are eaten not with one of those silly little shellfish forks as I’ve seen them served here, but by using one of the shells as little tongs to pull the meat from the other shells. (Sorry for the blurriness in the picture, but I thought it was worth including for purposes of instruction.)

We’ve cooked them a couple times since then, and they are very easy to prepare. A recipe in this months Cooking Light inspired us to make them again. This time, we simply steamed them with chicken broth, lemon juice, and some spices, and served them with some butter for dipping.

We also steamed an artichoke, which was originally planned as an appetizer but ended up being finished about the same time as the mussels. We also had some dipping sauce for the artichoke — as I said, not very healthy, but certainly delicious! If you’ve never eaten whole artichokes before, as we hadn’t until moving to California, they may require some eating instructions too. Basically, you pull off the petals, dip them in the sauce, and scrape the little bit of pulp off with your teeth. I didn’t take pictures of that part, but Elise has a nice tutorial. Also, you want to stop eating the petals when you get to the purplish ones in the center. This part is called the “choke.” It should be scraped out, leaving the delicious “heart” of the artichoke underneath.

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As Mary pointed out previously, I have had to take off my Sous Chef badge and take the helm for the next couple of weeks. Fortunately for you that means a few articles may yet get written. Unfortunately for you I am not as practiced as Mary in the art of cooking or the art of writing. So bear with me as at least I do in fact know how to cook and I am mostly using her recipes and guidance.

This chili is a wonderful warm and rich comfort food. I am sure we can learn several more recipes from the native Californians here, as I hear it is quite good. This recipe was perfect for me to cook this past week as it is really simple and relatively easy to clean up. Only two items that didn’t go in the dishwasher was the cast iron skillet used for the cornbread and the nonstick pan I used to brown the ground beef in. The reason it was so easy?…it is made the night before and assembled in a crockpot. Yes of you course you are smarter than me!, as I am sure that is not much of a novel idea.

Before we get going a couple of suggestions. First off we typically make this the night before and put in the refrigerator. If you like it spicy feel free to add more chili powder, the original recipe had 3 T. Be creative and find a topping that suits you. Since we weren’t worried about keeping it remotely healthy we added sour cream and cheese. If I weren’t too lazy I may have added some green onions. Walk it off, either after dinner or the next day. Thats about it, here we go.

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In case you were wondering what I made for dinner to go with my French Bread — wonder no longer! Matt and I had Mom and Dad over for dinner so I could cook out of my new Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook that I got for Christmas. I chose one of her so-called “uncomplicated menus”, with a few changes. This is the original menu:

• Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Salad
• Carrot and Shallot Soup with Chervil Cream
• Charcoal-Grilled Chicken with Garlic Puree
• Cherries and Almond Cookies

We decided to change things around from this a bit. We had planned to make this menu back in January, and we bought ingredients and everything before Matt and I both got sick and had to cancel. We made the carrot soup then (I always like soup when I’m sick), and it was good but I wasn’t quite ready to have it again yet, so we decided to make our friend Kelly Branson’s butternut squash soup instead. Also, I’d been wanting to try the CBGB (cherries, biscuits, ginger, and butterscotch, oh my!) dessert Habeas Brulee posted a while back. But, we decided we didn’t need something quite so rich or complicated, and so we made just the almond biscuits and cherry sauce instead.

I’m not going to copy whole recipes out of this book, but I do have permission to share Kelly’s recipe for butternut squash soup which I highly recommend. I’ll give a summary of the other recipes though, and if you want more details, you can buy the book. Which, by the way, I highly recommend. I basically read the whole cookbook cover-to-cover between Christmas and New Year’s this year. It’s so beautifully written, and she includes interesting details about the origins of each recipe. Now, I just need to find an excuse to go eat at Chez Panisse!

Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Salad

I marinated the goat cheese rounds in olive oil and rosemary for a day. (It was supposed to be thyme, but I think Alice Waters would approve of using what I grow instead of having to buy something at the store.) Then I dipped the goat cheese in bread crumbs and baked it for a few minutes. I served this over mixed greens tossed in a light vinaigrette of olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Butternut Squash Soup
Recipe from Kelly Branson

Charcoal-Grilled Chicken with Garlic Puree

I marinated a whole chicken (cut into pieces) in garlic, red wine, and rosemary (again, it was supposed to be thyme, but I had rosemary so I used it). Matt grilled the chicken on a low charcoal fire. We also roasted garlic, and made a puree of that which we rubbed on the chicken after it came off the grill. We served this over roasted potatoes, and garnished with lemons.

Almond Biscuits with Cherry Sauce

Danielle at Habeas Brulee posted this gorgeous dessert a few months ago. She named it CBGB, for Cherries, Biscuits, Ginger and Butterscotch. The original version was almond biscuits, with a sauce made from sour cherries, garnished with candied, pickled ginger, and accompanied by butterscotch sauce. Some dessert, huh?! I’d still like to try the whole thing sometime, but for this meal, I wanted something not quite so rich and sweet. So I made the almond buttermilk biscuits and made a sauce of (frozen) black cherries, since I couldn’t find sour ones. I thought this was a perfect close to this meal. The cherry sauce was pretty sweet, but I added lemon juice for a nice tart flavor, and the biscuits were nice and crumbly but not too sweet. I definitely think I will at least make the biscuits again, and I might add some more almond extract next time, or maybe press some slivered almonds into the tops, as I wanted a little more almond flavor.