CELEBRATE WEDNESDAY WITH PROSCIUTTO-WRAPPED SHRIMP SKEWERS

Posted in Celebrate Wednesday, Seafood by sallybr

This is one of those super simple recipes that deliver a ton of flavor, turning a mid-week dinner into a special event. Since seafood in general doesn’t need to be marinated for a long time, you can do the whole prep after arriving home from work. But, if you want to make things even easier, make the marinade, clean the shrimp early in the morning, and keep both items in the fridge until showtime. Since we have the luxury of coming home for lunch every day, that’s when I normally get this type of prep work done. A small investment of time at noon, and voilà: painless dinner later in the evening.

(Cooked: June 4th – Blogged Oct 1st)

PROSCIUTTO-WRAPPED SHRIMP SKEWERS
(slightly adapted from a recipe by Rachael Ray)

3 tablespoons olive oil
4 scallions, white parts finely chopped and green parts thinly sliced on an angle, divided
1 teaspoon Hungarian red pepper (or 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes)
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
12 jumbo shrimp, tails on and deveined
12 slices prosciutto

Combine the olive oil, scallion whites, red pepper and lemon juice in a medium size bowl. Season the shrimp lightly with salt and pepper, add to the marinade. Toss to coat, and leave for 30 minutes in the fridge. Wrap each shrimp with a slice of prosciutto and thread onto a metal skewer. If using wood skewers, soak them in water for a few hours.

Grill the shrimp until firm and opaque, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer to a serving plate and decorate with sliced scallions, if you like. I had some fennel fronds in the fridge, that’s what I added.

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

Comments: The Hungarian pepper I used for this marinade was a gift I mentioned in this post. I love its complex flavor and mild level of heat. I searched and it is available on amazon.com, but the price made me hyperventilate a little. Lucky me, I do have very nice friends… Red pepper flakes (or fresh Fresno peppers) can be used instead, of course.

My package of prosciutto came with only 10 slices, so some of the shrimp (I actually cooked 14) went to the grill naked. They did not seem to mind, and we definitely did not mind either. I grilled those for about 30 seconds less on each side. I also like to use a double skewer, a trick that prevents the shrimp from spinning around and makes flipping a lot easier.

Most recipes would call for bacon instead of prosciutto, but I don’t quite get that. By the time the bacon is properly cooked, seafood will be severely over-done. I find that prosciutto works much better, as all you need is to get some grill marks on it, so the timing can agree with the seafood wrapped inside it. Alternatively, if you prefer the flavor of bacon, you can pre-cook before wrapping delicate seafood with it. Check Melissa’s method with a click here.

Our dinner that evening was a nice take on surf-and-turf… Juicy shrimp, and deliciously grilled hanger steak. Light, flavorful, and a breeze to prepare! Cannot beat that.

ONE YEAR AGO: Linguine with Cauliflower Pesto

TWO YEARS AGO: Secret Recipe Club: A Tribute to Daniel

THREE YEARS AGO: Nutella Drop Cookies

FOUR YEARS AGO: Dreaming of butternut squash

FIVE YEARS AGO: Simply Elegant: Salmon Curry (one of my very favorite dishes!)

26Sep2014

SPIRALIZER FUN

Posted in Pasta & Noodles, Vegetarian-friendly by sallybr

In five years of blogging, I probably mentioned this before once or twice: I am not too wild about cooking fads, and usually avoid them. For instance, that one from years ago, foams. You could not go to a restaurant that considered itself slightly upscale without foams bubbling around your plate. Then we have the more recent bacon-mania. Because 90% of humans adore bacon, all of a sudden bacon started popping up in every single culinary item. Chocolate-covered bacon? Yes, it is out there! Bacon ice cream? Why not? Well, if I have to explain it, I guess we are from different planets. And let’s not get me started on the fried egg topping everything lately. I guess this fad is still in its exponentially growing phase. Having said all that, I am heavily into the spiral cutter thing. And I insist, this is not a fad. It is a nice way to treat vegetables, easy to use, fast to prepare, and a ton of fun to eat. Zucchini is by far my favorite target, and I’ve shared one of the ways we enjoy it almost weekly, uncooked, bright and fresh. Strands of zucchini can get mushy very quickly when cooked, but now I think I hit the perfect method to deal with them.

LEMONY ZUCCHINI NOODLES & WHOLE-WHEAT SPAGHETTI
(from the Bewitching Kitchen)

Whole-wheat spaghetti (1/3 of your regular portion)
3 medium zucchini, ends removed, cut in a spiral cutter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 shallot, minced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced (substitute tomatoes, spinach, anything you feel like)
lemon juice and zest
salt and pepper to taste

Cook the pasta in plenty of salted boiling water. As the pasta cooks, heat the olive oil, saute the shallot and red bell pepper until the shallots are translucent and with a little bit of color, and the red bell pepper starts to soften. Season lightly with salt, add the zest of the lemon on top of the warm mixture, cover the pan and let it rest while you finish dealing with the pasta.

Ten seconds before the end of cooking time, add the zucchini strands to the pot. Time ten seconds and immediately drain it, reserving a little of the cooking water. Return it to the hot, empty pot, add the sautéed shallots and red bell pepper, squeeze a little lemon juice, toss it all gently, and adjust with pasta cooking water if necessary. Taste for seasoning, adding ground black pepper if you like.

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

One of the things I love about this type of recipe is that you can vary the amount of pasta in it according to your mood or goals. In the recipe I shared today, zucchini was prominent, pasta played a secondary role. The resulting meal felt light and bright. A few weeks ago, I went the opposite way, and made the zucchini stay in the background. At that time I added wilted kale and sun-dried tomatoes to the dish. It was slightly heavier, and quite appropriate for the sorry evenings ahead, when the temperature will fall below 90 F, and I will go through a few boxes of Kleenex to deal with it.

If you are over the fence about getting a spiralizer, jump to the right side, the side where I am ready to play with you. You will not regret it, especially if you have kids who are over the fence about eating their veggies. They might profess zoodles – like this tasty version from Mike’s blog – their favorite dish ever!

ONE YEAR AGO: Beer-Marinated Grilled Skirt Steak

TWO YEARS AGO: Secret Recipe Club: Corn Chowda

THREE YEARS AGO: Page-A-Day Calendar (Pits and Chief 5 minutes of fame…)

FOUR YEARS AGO: Home Sweet Home (our beloved Pits in one of his last photos)

FIVE YEARS AGO: Marbled Rye

24Sep2014

AND THE WINNER OF THE MILLION PAGE GIVEAWAY…..

Posted in General by sallybr

is revealed:

Elizabeth, drop me an email at sallybr2008 at gmail dot com with your mailing info.

Actually, the book is not released yet, but I will pre-order it for you and once it’s out, you’ll get it.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

And let’s move to the 2 million milestone, one page at a time…

(comments are shutdown for this post)

21Sep2014

SECRET RECIPE CLUB: BUTTERMILK-BLUEBERRY BREAKFAST CAKE

Posted in Breakfast & Brunch, Desserts, Sweets, Secret Recipe Club by sallybr

This semester is shaping up as one of the busiest for us. I even flirted with the idea of sitting out of the Secret Recipe Club for a month, but I would be miserable watching everyone else posting their tasty recipes and not joining the party. No, not skipping it. My approach then is to jump on the assignment pretty much the day I get the email, on a rapid-fire stalking mode. The blog I got this month was “Making Miracles“, hosted by Rebekah. I urge you to read her About page, she has lived in many places in the US, including Alaska, but also spent a little over two years in Senegal back in 1995. A fascinating experience, even if at times not easy. If the subject of surrogacy interests you, she has a lot of experience with it as a surrogate mom herself, and also from helping families reach their dream of having a baby. That’s what the title of her blog, “Making Miracles” is all about.

I decided to go back to sweets for this month’s assignment, and had blueberries on my mind. Two recipes were begging to be featured, her Blueberry Coffee Cake Muffins, and her Buttermilk-Blueberry Breakfast Cake. The husband spoke. Breakfast cake won. So here it is!

BUTTERMILK-BLUEBERRY BREAKFAST CAKE
(from Rebekah’s Making Miracles)

½ cup butter, room temperature
2 tsp lemon zest
3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar, separated
1 egg, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour, separated
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 cups blueberries
½ cup buttermilk

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter, lemon zest, and 3/4 cup + 1 tablespoon of the sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla and beat until combined.

Meanwhile, toss the blueberries with ¼ cup of flour. In a separate bowl whisk together the remaining 1 + 3/4 cup of flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the flour mixture to the batter a little at a time, alternating with the buttermilk. Remove excess flour from the blueberries, then fold the blueberries gently into the batter. Batter will be thick.

Grease a 9-inch square baking pan with non-stick spray. Spread batter into pan. Sprinkle batter with remaining tablespoon of sugar. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes. Check with a toothpick to make sure is cooked through. If necessary, return pan to oven for as long as 10 more minutes. Let cool at for 10-15 minutes before serving.

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

Did I mention we’ve been overly busy these days? At the risk of boring you to death with trivia about growing bacteria, I will share some of the sordid details. For some experiments, we need to start cultures growing around 11pm, and then take care of them again before 5:30am. Usually Phil goes late at night, and I play the early bird. It’s not that bad, these late night and early morning visits to the lab are short, we prepare everything beforehand to make it easier. I can quickly drive back home, swallow a much-needed cappuccino, take a shower and we go back to work on our regular schedule. Soooo, back to food. I decided to bake this breakfast cake in of those hectic mornings and take to the department still warm from the oven.

Knowing I would be sleepy and prone to making mistakes, I lined up all ingredients the night before (the blueberries slept in the fridge, together with the buttermilk). Mis-en-place, mes amis. Mis-en-place.

Before I left for the lab, I turned the oven on. Arriving back, Phil had my cappuccino ready, all I had to do was drink the batter, mix the cappuccino… ooops, I guess it was the other way around… What matters is that our department got a freshly baked blueberry cake. Mission accomplished!

Lots of blueberries make this cake moist and quite crumbly. Make sure to bake it long enough so that pieces will be easy to cut.

Rebekah, I hope you are having a wonderful Reveal Day, I loved cooking from your site!

For all my readers, have fun checking out what the other members of my group prepared for today’s Reveal Day by clicking on the blue frog at the end of my post.

ONE YEAR AGO: Silky Cauliflower Puree with Almond Milk

TWO YEARS AGO: Beef and Broccoli Stir-fr

THREE YEARS AGO: Wheat Germ and Sage Sourdough Bread

FOUR YEARS AGO: Popeye-Pleasing Salad

FIVE YEARS AGO: Summer’s Finale

17Sep2014

OUR GREEN TRIP TO COLORADO

Posted in Travels by sallybr

As I mentioned last month, we took a short vacation break to relax in Silverthorne, Colorado. What I did not tell you then, is that we did the trip on a zero-emissions way. We drove our Tesla, stopping at superchargers along the way. We got the Tesla last May and were anxious to see how it would behave on a long trip. One word: awesome! But, before I share the details of this trip, let me say that we put a lot of thought in the acquisition of this car, and getting it was part of another “green move”, the installation of solar panels to power our home. For a couple of months now, the energy of the sun is what fuels most of our appliances and our car. At the moment, with the air-conditioning on most of the time, the solar panels cannot keep up with all our use, but that shall change later in the year, even considering days of less intense sunlight ahead.

A few interesting bits about the Tesla…

There is no engine. The car is basically a huge battery located underneath (shielded by a strong titanium plate), and computers to control everything. When you open the trunk, either the front or the back, what you see is a huge empty space. Storage galore… 😉

At home, you charge the car in a drier type outlet, and a full charge will take you 8 to 10 hours. Once the car is fully charged, it displays the potential number of miles you can drive. Ours usually says 262 miles. That is a number you will never reach, calculated while driving on a flat terrain at a low-speed. In general, one can count with 170 to 180 miles on a full charge.

Can you drive anywhere in the US? Not quite yet. Supercharger stations are popping up everywhere, but some routes do not have enough of them to cover the distance. For our trip to Silverthorne, we planned on four stops to recharge: Hays & Goodland in Kansas, and Limon & Lone Tree in Colorado. Silverthorne has a supercharger station in town, so we did not have to worry about finding an outlet in the hotel and charging the car overnight. For a map of available superchargers and predicted new stations within the next year, click here. By the way, charging the car is free, doesn’t cost a penny. You park, plug, and drive away. Tesla is also building a battery swap station in California, where you will be able to drive in, get a new battery, and drive out, but it won’t be ready until 2015. Once it’s functional, we intend to drive all the way there, should be a cool trip.

Charging stations were always empty. During our trip, only once we had another Tesla charging on the same station. Of course, any long trip with a full-electric car cannot be rushed. It takes at least 30 minutes to charge the battery, up to 45 minutes to fully charge it. But, you don’t need to stick around waiting. A Tesla app on the cell phone shows exactly where the charging stands. You can have a coffee, lunch, go for a walk, read a book, or even think about those great experiments waiting for you once vacation time is over… Another thing to keep in mind is that you won’t always need to fully charge the battery, and that reduces the time to charge quite a bit: the resistance of the battery increases so the final 50 miles take proportionally longer to charge than the first 170 or so. By charging for 20 minutes you will likely have enough juice to reach the next supercharging station, if you are traveling through well-covered regions of the country. Not the case for us in Kansas, at least not yet.

We were worried about how the car would perform on the mountains. It did amazingly well. We knew that the Tesla has a feature called “regenerative braking“. When you drive with that mode on, every time you take the foot off the accelerator, the battery gets some charge back, as the car converts kinetic energy into chemical energy and sends it back to the battery. If you like to know more about it, click here. So, to give you an example, when we drove from Silverthorne to Vail, we covered 30 miles each way, and the battery use was of exactly 60 miles (in other words, 100% efficiency), even though we went way up the hills for part of the drive. The recovery of charge driving downhill fully compensated the energy used for going up. The control panel shows the energy efficiency in real-time. Here is a shot of the screen at the end of our day trip to Vail and back. In other words, the car is a geek’s dream!

But, enough technicality. Colorado is such a wonderful place! Packed with people who love the outdoors, most with that gorgeous reddish tan of the mountains. If the temperature did not drop to obscene 40 F at night, I’d say I was a happy camper. We stayed at a hotel by Lake Dillon, it was perfect for us. Well, almost perfect. On the first morning we planned to go for a run around the lake, but that idea was bagged after a few steps. The altitude got us real bad. Plan B was set in place, and we walked instead, every day at least one hour, often a lot more. Still panting quite a bit on uphill paths, but who cares?

(click to enlarge)

The first thing we do on our trips is find a local coffee shop. Just a mile from our hotel, we stumbled on the perfect spot. Blue Moon Bakery: great cappuccinos, a huge collection of cakes, tarts, and muffins baked in place. They have four bakers working full-time. Take a look at some of the stuff available. It’s a good thing I don’t have a sweet tooth, otherwise I wouldn’t fit in my jeans on the trip back…

Our favorite dinner was at a small sushi spot called Kemosabi Sushi in Frisco, on the other side of Lake Dillon. Great name, fusion sushi by definition, I suppose. I went crazy for one of their rolls, the Curtis C: Tempura Anaheim Peppers, Avocado, Cream Cheese, topped with Yellowtail and Cilantro Oil (shown on the right of the photo below). The place was full, so we sat outside on a slightly chilly evening, but as an unexpected bonus a band was playing at the restaurant next door, and we got to profit from it. Don’t you love simple pleasures?

(click to enlarge)

In one of the days we drove to Vail, a place I’d heard a lot about, but had never visited. It’s beautiful, but I must say I much prefer the atmosphere and energy of Silverthorne. Vail is a little too upscale, with endless arrays of expensive shops instead of a more laid-back environment, which I prefer. Good to visit, and probably great to ski during winter, if you are into that sort of thing. Brazilians do not particularly look forward to sliding their butts on snow, until they come to a full stop, cold and with no pride left (that summarizes the skiing attempts of my past).

Lunch at Vail on a beautiful sunny day…

After having lunch, we sat on a bench and did some people-watching, one of my favorite activities. I can sit, watch and dream for hours. Nearby, a big dog was tied to a pole, evidently waiting for his family having lunch somewhere. The dog was super friendly, and we got along great. Can you stand the sweetness of that paw?

But, of course, no trip is perfect without some golf. We played two beautiful golf courses (Raven Club at Three Peaks, and Keystone Ranch), and I had two totally different experiences. The first day, we were paired with another couple. They were members of that golf course and helped us a lot with tips and advice on how to handle the course. But, I played poorly, and was quite upset about it, feeling like the ugly duckling in the middle of three beautiful swans. Next day I played so much better, but we were paired with two gentlemen, and I must say they were horrible to play with. Putting it mildly, they very unfriendly. I guess I learned a big lesson – it’s not how well you play, but the overall experience. If I had to repeat one of those outings, I would definitely go for the first, but would not let my pathetic performance bother me. Hopefully, the lesson will stick.

I leave you with two short videos of golf swings. Even if you are not a golfer, I bet you will be able to appreciate them, each in its own unique way. Phil is a great golfer, having learned the game at a very young age. If you look at his swing, it’s smooth, his head doesn’t move forward, he keeps it down, and once the swing is over, he looks at the path ahead with that calm confidence of knowing the ball went exactly where he aimed. Check it out here.

Now, take a look at yours truly, with a click here. Let’s say there’s room for improvement. Not much smoothness, not much transfer of weight from the back to the front foot. But the “best” part is my reaction after I hit, clearly trying to “help the ball” go where I wanted it to go. By the way, both Phil and I did not know we were being taped. We do that sometimes to each other so that we can check our swing and make adjustments. I’ve been making adjustments for 17 years. If you are a golfer, please keep your thoughts to yourself. Thank you so much.

Selfies, anyone?

All in all, it was a great trip, and we enjoyed each minute of it. However, Phil is trying to convince me to go back this winter. I thought he loved me. Evidently, I was wrong.

ONE YEAR AGO: Ditalini Pasta Salad

TWO YEARS AGO: Celebrate Wednesday with a Thai Seafood Curry

THREE YEARS AGO: Post-workout Breakfast

FOUR YEARS AGO: Semolina Barbecue Buns

FIVE YEARS AGO: Lavash Crackers