Hello friends, remember me?  It’s that old blog you’ve forgotten about. Today I thought I’d post some old-school deliciousness: spinach salad with warm bacon dressing. Here’s my spin on the 100-year-old classic.  Traditionally its a wilted salad, but that’s because the recipe was concocted when there was only one type of spinach readily available: the giant, gritty full grown leaves.  I prefer to keep some of the fresh crispness in the baby spinach to counter the rich, tangy dressing.  BTW, this makes a great, speedy weeknight dinner for two.

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Once again!  HORRIBLE picture!  I apologize internet food blogging posh world.

Nonetheless!   This is a quick and easy dinner option.   I personally love the taste of pork.  It has it’s own complex flavors that I enjoy more than chicken but is definitely not as intense as beef.  I’ve made versions of this recipe a few times and no matter what, it has always tasted amazing.  You can add more sugar to the sauce to make it a little more sweet, add red wine, slice up some crunchy Asian/Korean pears or a crisp apple in with the onions.  I love this recipe and so does Sean.  Whenever we are feeling like an Americanski-riceless-not-so-Asian dinner, grilled pork with a balsamic sauce is the awesome.

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Ok, ok, so this recipe is almost straight out of this month’s bon appetit.  Like, cover image, straight out.  And the only reason it’s “almost” rather than “exactly”, is that I lacked some of the ingredients in my pantry and there were no sugar snap peas at the farmer’s market on saturday  (maybe next week, i was told).  The big difference is that bon appetit’s version is made with snap peas and pea tendrils.  I swapped in pea sprouts since I had some in my fridge, along with some nice bloomsdale spinach from this week’s CSA veggie box.  The salmon is marinated and then broiled on the same pan, which makes prep and cleanup a snap, and I’m pleased to say the finished dish truly looks glamorous enough to be on a newsstand.

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If you’ve never heard of Columbia Restaurant, it means you haven’t spent much time in Florida.  It’s a chain of about a dozen restaurants that to my knowledge is restricted to the Sunshine State.  To be perfectly honest, it’s not a very spectacular restaurant overall.  It definitely caters to the tourists and the snow birds, and as a college student, I found it severely overpriced.

So why is it worth mentioning?  Because they have a spectacular salad on their menu, called the 1905 salad, named for the year their flagship restaurant opened in Ybor City, a district in Tampa.  The 1905 salad is Columbia’s big ta-dah, because all the servers know the recipe by heart and whip it up table-side.  This should clue you in to how simple and fast you can prepare this for a weeknight dinner.  The classic is with ham, which you can swap out for turkey or shrimp.  I like the combo of ham and turkey, but rock it out to your tastes.  Oh and did I mention it was really delicious?

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Just a quick post tonight. I thought I’d share my recipe from dinner even though I didn’t take many pics.

You see, I’ve had a batch of homemade chicken stock sitting in the freezer, just waiting to be used.  And since I spent so much time on it, I wanted to showcase it in a recipe that would be all about the broth.  Hence the obvious choice, soup.  All it took was Kim talking about soup today and I knew it was time.

This is my take on Italian wedding soup, partly inspired by a Tuscan soup called ribollita, sortof a minestrone thickened with bread with tons of local, cheap vegetables.  And since we’re still getting our CSA veggie delivery we had a plethora of local, cheap veggies on hand.  It basically came down to luscious chicken stock base with delicious, basily chicken meatballs, cannellini beans and lots of healthy, vibrant kale.

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For those of you that don’t live in SoCal, it’s been raining like the dickens out here.  Like nonstop.  For 5 days.  Basically California was broken.  It was as close to winter as it can get in LA, so I immediately began craving all those warm-you-to-the-core dishes that my mama used to cook for us when I was a young’un.  Black bean soups, beef stews, sweet and sour pork, creamed chipped beef, pot roast… you know, all those amazing wintertime delights that could never taste as good in a restaurant as in your mama’s kitchen.

One such dish is Beef Burgundy, which is basically a simpler, homestyle version of Julia’s Boeuf Bourguignon.  The biggest difference is that the bacon and carrot is removed, and the red wine is often a combo of wine and tomato sauce, or for those on slim budgets, just tomato sauce.  So sans recipe, I decided to whip up a batch of beef burgundy from the recollections of watching my mama make it back in PA combined with a few tricks of my own.  I think she’d agree I did it justice.

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Yeah yeah yeah, we’ve been gone for a while.  Judging by google analytics, you didn’t miss us that much anyway.

So to kick us off for the new year, let’s start with the most important meal of the day… or if you enjoy a good breakfast-for-dinner like I do, then just about anytime.   This, my friends, is a kickass hash.

I feel bad for hashes.  They’ve got a pretty bum rap.  Probably because most of them are… pretty bad.  Gray, lumpy concoctions of some sort of over-salted canned meat mashed with yesterday’s homefries in a greasy spoon diner.  Hash has been around since the 1600s as a way of making unpalatable leftovers more palatable.  But when you start with delicious, fresh ingredients, a hash can be so much more.
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One of the best looking pieces of produce in our first CSA box was a gorgeous head of bok choy. Usually bok choy ends up playing second fiddle in my cooking, but I knew I really wanted to showcase this great ingredient. I came up with an easy stir fry using items I had on hand, including frozen shrimp and some tasty mushrooms. I was really impressed with the simplicity of the dish. In fact, I would barely change a thing next time around, and I can’t wait to make it again.
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You know, I always have great intentions for a fabulous, involved Sunday supper.   But let’s face it:  I typically don’t wander into the kitchen on the weekend until  I’m actually starting to get hungry.  So when we bought this rack of ribs for the weekend, I’m sure we pictured firing up the charcoal grill and recreating some 3-hour Bobby Flay masterpiece.  This did not come to pass.  Instead, I went for the easy option in half the time.  And gosh darnit, they was gooood.

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