fish, healthy, quick and easy, technique Hide

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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low carb, quick and easy, salad Hide

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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beef, french, mushroom Hide

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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Breakfast and Brunch, hash, sausage Hide

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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asian, healthy, quick and easy, seafood, stirfry Hide

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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bbq, pork, ribs, roasted, technique Hide

Tonight, Firat and I were craving something simple and delicious. I’ve also been spending more time learning about Turkish dishes because I know he misses the flavors of home. I’ve been especially attached to the cookbook “Turquoise: A Chef’s travels in Turkey” by Greg and Lucy Malouf. It’s part travel memories, part photo-journal, mostly killer cookbook. What’s impressed me most about this book, is that the chefs have created recipes that replicate true Turkish flavors, while still using easy-to-find ingredients. So tonight I decided to make tomato pilaf, which has a special place in my heart, because it was the first Turkish dish Firat cooked for me when we started dating.

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pilaf, rice, tomato, turkish, vegetarian Hide

Since we’re in southern California, which is completely devoid of seasons other than hot and warm, I figure the best way to celebrate the fall harvest time is with some deliciously earthy, comforting cuisine. Enter Mr. Acorn Squash.

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acorn squash, baked, brown rice stuffing, thanksgiving, vegetarian Hide

Beef stir fry is probably one of my favorite foods to make. It’s simple and has lots of good veggies and meats for all your nutritional needs!

Today’s was a simple one. Beef with broccoli and onions in a sweet soy garlic sauce.

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