Some desserts are decadent, elaborate, and call for a lot of careful planning and effort. This isn’t one of them. Some times, you just want something quick, simple, and delicious. This rustic-looking treat fits just the bill and is very easily tweaked to whatever fruit you have handy. With a crunchy, nutty, crisp top layer, and a gooey, temptingly sweet mix of red currants, blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries, this Quadruple Berry Crumble will hit the spot.
The berries are delicious in their own right and I love the balance of sweet and tart achieved by this mix, but I also wanted to add a few other subtle flavors to the mix. I love the mix of strawberries and balsamic vinegar, so the dark, sophisticated sweet flavors of balsamic were in. I also chose to enhance the sweetness with a bit of ground black pepper (it sounds strange, but try it! You won’t taste any pepper–I promise! The berries jump out more)
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Posted by mike on September 4th, 2008 in Dessert, Fruit
Like most braises, this isn’t quite hot-summer-day food, but if you can’t wait til winter (and given the seasons for one of the key ingredients, winter isn’t possible), this is a good dish for a gloomy, rainy day when you want something hearty to warm you up from the inside out. First, a fennel bulb (a fun vegetable to work with) is caramelized and braised with mushrooms to make a delicious side dish and leave a strongly flavored broth behind which, combined with a bit of Port, is used for braising a veal shoulder steak.
This is something of an ugly duckling. If you tell me that photo looks beautiful, I’d say you’re being polite (but I would also serve you dinner…see how much you get if you tell me what you really think of that photo! 
). But that’s just fine as we all know how the ugly duckling routine goes–flavor-wise, this meal is a beauty!
This dish had a really
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Posted by mike on September 1st, 2008 in Main course, Mediterranean, Sauce, Side dish, Veal
If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed my quiet love for blueberries (unlike my less quiet love for strawberries), and so I thought it would be nice to enjoy them in a savory dish rather than the sweets I usually flock to. In my mind, two proteins go beautifully with fruit: pork and lamb. Based on the randomness of my cravings, lamb it was, and so for this dish, we have Lamb Chops with a Blueberry Sauce.
If you’ve never had a savory application of blueberries like this, you might make a face at the thought of this, but I promise, this is a surprisingly great match. Aside from lamb chops being delicious, the dish as a whole was gamey and rich, the sauce tannic, full-bodied, dark, and lightly spiced with star anise. I was also a big fan of the color: the sauce was vividly dark (oxymoron anyone?)–ok, strikingly dark–on the plate. It had an appearance that looks like it took
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Posted by mike on August 29th, 2008 in Fruit, Lamb, Main course, Sauce
A milestone has been reached–this blog has officially hit the one year mark! Blogiversary? Birthday? Whatever you want to call it, I’m thankful for all of you, my readers, as I never would have thought this site would be what it is today and I couldn’t have done it without you (seriously, if you go back and look at some of the early stuff…lol, yikes). And this includes the quiet readers out there (chime in! You practically have to wish me a happy whatever this occasion is called in the comments ). So I just wanted to say thanks–this would be no fun (well, a lot less fun, I guess) if I were just talking to myself. So how to celebrate? With cake, of course. Very very very very very chocolatey, rich, mouth-watering cake.
Truth be told, I also made this because my wife had been asking for a chocolate dessert (and cake). I chanced upon an absolutely amazing looking cake,
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Posted by mike on August 27th, 2008 in Cake, Dessert
Swordfish is more steaky than fishy (that dense, meaty, heartiness), so if you’re not sure what you’re craving, its a good way to go once in a while. Just like with red meat, you need strong flavors to stand up alongside it, and so for this dish, I grilled some citric marinated swordfish steaks and served them with a tomatillo corn relish.
The slowest step in preparing this dish is marinating the fish, and even that goes pretty quickly (no more than an hour!), so this is one of those dishes you could feasibly do during the middle of the week. The marinade imparts a subtle, spicy, citric flavor unto the fish, which compliments the more forward flavored relish. The relish largely resembles salsa verde and has similar citric, crisp, flavors with a balance of sweetness and crunch brought by the corn. All together, it was a really strong flavored, tasty meal.
- 2 swordfish steaks
- Marinade
- juice of 1 lemon
- orange juice (enough to cover)
- dash
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Posted by mike on August 23rd, 2008 in Main course, Mexican, Sauce, Seafood
Once again, Jeff over at Culinary Disaster organized an Iron Chef style challenge, and this go around, the theme was pizza. Since I always aim to make something a bit different, I wanted to make some sort of exotic pizza. After imagining many dead ends, a friend’s recounting of chicken tandoori pizza popped up in my head, and suddenly, a rush of Indian-themed ideas started swirling together. The result: Indian Pizza!
If you’ve never had something like this before, you’re probably skeptical about this one, and hey, I hear you–it does sound weird, but if you like Indian food, I promise you, this is a joy to eat. I didn’t want this to be some everyday pizza with just chunks of chicken tandoori on top (which sounds like it would be…crappy), so I revisited every element of the pizza.
First, the dough. Why not use everyone’s favorite Indian flatbread, naan? And tomato sauce? That certainly wouldn’t work, so instead, why not make a batch
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Posted by mike on August 20th, 2008 in Chicken, Indian, Main course, Sauce
BTW, I was tagged by Ning of Heart...
