Apple Crumb Pie

While Steve likes to watch football on Sundays, I prefer to spend my afternoon hours making pie. As you can see by many of the posts here, I make a lot of pie. I have some farm girl genes in me and this is my way of expressing them. This Sunday, I found myself with some frozen, homemade, leftover pie dough and a whole bunch of apples. The dough amounted to only enough for a bottom crust. Hmmmm, what to do? Apple Crumb Pie was the answer. I didn't follow an exact recipe, but I did use the crumb topping recipe from Fine Cooking #67, except I omitted the ginger. I was going for a very traditional tasting apple pie. My boys don't like surprise flavors in things.

Beef Short Ribs ARE my favorite or Life without Spinach

Beef short ribs really are my favorite, if we're talking ribs. Except, they're not really like traditional pork ribs in any way except that they have a bone. (Well, I've been corrected. short ribs are the spare ribs of beef) Beef short ribs are braised, cooked in liquid very slowly until meltingly tender. They are more akin to pot roast but richer. I like to braise them in a seasoned tomato sauce, remove them and shred the meat. Then I add the meat back to the sauce for a rich Short Rib Ragu. This dish is heavenly, even Baby Jack even loves it. I got the recipe from last winter's Fine Cooking #77, the article: Three ways to Braise Short Ribs by Molly Stevens. I loved this pasta so much that I never got around to making the other two suggestions from the article, until yesterday.



Yesterday I tried my hand at Asian-Glazed Braised Short Ribs and Oh My(!) Sure, every dish in the kitchen needed washing by the time I was finished, but it was worth it. These ribs sang with flavor. They're rubbed with a blend that includes Five Spice Powder (a spice mix that I am currently loving.) and left to sit overnight. They're browned and then braised in ginger-garlic-beer-broth mixture for hours until very tender. THEN, they're coated with a honey-orange juice glaze and put under the broiler until sizzling and sticky. This is why I love asian food, aromatic, spicy, sweet and savory.

My normal plan of action would be to serve them with sauteed spinach. But alas, as present life no longer includes spinach, I decided to use baby bok choy instead, stir-frying the sliced bok choy as I would the wayward spinach. The baby bok choy is a cruciferous veg, very healthy, but I miss my spinach.

Spare Ribs aren't my favorite

A large rack of pork spare ribs sat in the freezer. I saw them frequently as I rummaged around in there and they had become somewhat of a mental burden, knowing that they needed to be cooked soon. I'm not crazy about spare ribs. I'd much rather have back ribs if I'm going to eat pork ribs at all.

But finally this week, I made them in the oven on a rainy day. They were rubbed with spices and cooked low and slow for more than two hours until they were tender. They were sauced with Sweet Baby Rays BBQ sauce and served with Alton Brown's sweet corn pudding and green beans sauteed with carmelized shallots. Spare ribs aren't my favorite but they can be pretty good. And paired with corn pudding, they are better. Really, I only made the ribs because I thought they would accompany the pudding nicely and I needed an excuse to make the puddin'.

Seared and Steamed

This is Halibut, done Kung Pao-style. It is from The Big Bowl Cookbook, one of my favorite sources for Chinese recipes. The technique with the fish is to sear one side for a nice brown crust, flip it and add the sauce mixture and some water. Cover and let the fish finish cooking gently. Then remove the fish from the pan, keep warm, and reduce the sauce. The sauce is spectacular, sweet and hot. It is comprised of soy sauce, sake, hoisin, and chile sauce. There are slivers of chile, ginger and bamboo shoots. I didn't get a perfect brown crust this time because I wasn't paying attention as well as I could have been. But it was all good anyway. This is served with jasmine rice and sauteed swiss chard - not the deadly spinach.

Leftover Madness

After a weekend of cooking and dining out, I had amassed the perfect assortment of this and that to come up with a creative satifying dish. These are Corn cakes, topped with shredded chicken that has been tossed with a spicy salsa. The cakes were garnished with roasted poblano peppers, goat cheese and cilantro. A lot of labor went into each segment of the dish, so that if I had made it all on one day, it would have been quite an ordeal. But the corn cakes, chicken and roasted peppers were leftover from Saturday's dinner. And the salsa and cilantro were "borrowed" from Baja Fresh's salsa bar. It all came together as mexican flavored goodness in 20 minutes (just the time to reheat the corncakes and shred the chicken.) The results were very pleasing to the eye and palate. The corncakes took the place of a corn tortilla or sope', and it really tasted "Frontera-esque."

Stone Crabs

These are beautiful stone crab legs - a crab unique to Florida. The meat is sweet and not very salty like some other crabs. They are served cold with a delicious mustard sauce. The shells are very hard, like porcelain, but underneath you get big chunks of crabmeat that separate easily from the shell. We got these as carry-out from Joe's Stone Crab and Prime Steaks. They are our ultimate decadent treat!

Pork Char Sui

This pork tenderloin was marinated overnight in a great tasting mix of soy sauce, honey, dry sherry and Chinese5-spice powder. We grilled the pork over indirect heat and then sliced it thin and served over stir-fried baby bok choy. The marinade flavor really does come through (as I find is not the case with some marinades.) The meat is a little salty, but has a sweet component because of the equal amounts of soy and honey.
I will make this one again. It is from Fine Cooking issue 74.