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Happy Halloween!

Prosciutto-Wrapped Halibut with Sage Butter Sauce

This recipe is from Fine Cooking issue 75. It's super easy and looks great on plate. The herbed fillets are wrapped in a belt of prosciutto and baked. A sage butter sauce with a spike of lemon is prepared and dabbled over the cooked fillets at the end. I think this dish would be nice for a dinner party becauce once the halibut is prepped, it just goes in the oven and comes out looking spectacular with the colors of the pink prosciutto, the green sage and the snowy white halibut. I served mine with Spinach Catalania or spinach sauteed with raisins. The sweet raisins played off the salty prosciutto. And it was italian-y love.

Prosciutto-Wrapped Halibut with Sage Butter Sauce

From Fine Cooking issue 75
Serves 6

2 large lemons
6 1-inch thick halibut skinless fillets (about 6oz each)
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
A bunch of fresh sage leaves
6 thin slices imported prosciutto
6 TBS unsalted butter

Position a rach in the center of the oven and heat the oven to 400F.

Slicing crosswise, cut six ¼ inch rounds from the center of one of the lemons
Repeat with remaining lemon. Squeeze the juice from the ends into a small bowl (you’ll need 4 tsp,) and set aside. Arrange the lemon rounds in slightly overlapping pairs on a heavy-duty baking sheet covered with a piece of parchment.

Season the fish with salt and pepper. Set two sage leaves on top of each fillet and then wrap each fillet with a slice of prosciutto. The prosciutto should form a belt, enclosing the leaves but leaving the fish exposed at either end. Lay one wrapped fillet on top of each pair of lemon slices. Bake until the fish is cooked through (it should flake and be opaque in the thickest part), 15 to 20 minutes depending of the thickness of the fillets.

While the fish is cooking, melt the butter in a 10-inch skillet over med. heat. Add the remaining sage leaves and cook, turning once until the leaves are crisp and the butter begins to brown, about 7 minutes. Add the 4 tsp. lemon juice and season with ¼ tsp. salt or to taste.

Arrange each fillet on its lemon slices on each dinner plate. Pour any juices from the fish into the butter sauce in the skillet. Spoon some of the sauce and a few sage leaves over each fillet and serve.

Spinach Salad with Stir-Fried Pork & Warm Ginger Vinaigrette

This recipe comes from Fine Cooking issue 74. - the article: Warm Salads for Dinner.




The photo in the magazine looked great and I like all the components of the dish. But when we tasted this one, we really didn't like it because it was too oily. Oil to cook the pork, to stir-fry the veggies, the aromatics and finally to make the vinaigrette. The end result tasted like greasy chinese food tossed with spinach. Not good. I won't be making this one again.

I've made one other warm salad (scroll down) from this same article and it was great.

Smashing Pumpkins

I've had this pumpkin dish in the works for a week or so now. It took a while to gather all the ingredients. I needed 1lb pumpkins for stuffing. 1lb. is really tiny. If you start weighing all the little pumpkins in the produce dept., you'll soon understand what I mean. Anyway, it was Whole Foods that came through for me with organic, sugar pumpkins at 99 cents per pound. Then I needed sausage. I like the sausage (and all of the choice meats) from Happy Foods, so that required a special trip too. The rest of the ingredients are: sauteed pumpkin, onion, Israeli couscous, green apple, dried cranberries and herbs. The stuffing is prepared and the pumpkins, cleaned and stuffed, and the whole orb goes in the oven, covered with foil, for about an hour. It turned out great. Although my husband made fun of the whole thing throughout the process, he ended up liking it more than he thought he would.

I got the recipe from Country Living magazine, an issue from last year. It caught my attention because of my fondness for Israeli couscous. I just love the texture and the look of this pasta. Aesthetically, the pumpkins are stunning and look like you worked all day. Actually, all the labor is in cleaning out the tiny pumpkins.

You might be thinking that this would make a great vegetarian entree. But I think, without the savory sausage, the stuffing would be flat. You would need to add another savory component to balance everything. I'll give some thought as to what that might be, nothing comes to mind right away.

While hunting and gathering for this dish, I came across a similar preparation from Beyond Salmon. Here, delicata squash is stuffed with a similar concoction except using bread crumbs instead of couscous. I like the delicata idea because it gives you a smaller serving which would make an elegant side dish.

All in all, I proved to my husband that a stuffed pumpkin can make a smashing dinner.

Bean salad, yummy yummy

This is another simple salad from Deborah Madison. It is comprised of canned white beans, celery, green olives, tarragon and a vinaigrette. The tarragon is what makes it special. This herb has a buttery fullness about it. It elevates any dish to which it is added.

The Skinny

Last week, Jewel had a coupon for a free 5lb. bag of russet potatoes, so I brought home a big bag of potatoes. Now, we're not much of a potato-eating family, preferring our starch in the form of rice or bread. I predicted these potatoes would sit until little potato bonsai trees started to grow, and then I would throw them away.

Sure, I could make them into something, a gratin, maybe some hash browns or Giada's (truly evil) cheesy potato dish, but nobody except me would eat any of it. And even I don't eat much potatoes. Well, maybe mashed, but only if there is good gravy. Ever since reading the South Beach Diet, potatoes have become the equivalent of cheesecake in my brain. I can't fool myself into thinking they're the least bit healthy.

So the potatoes sat until this weekend, when a potato dish that we could all get excited about popped into my head: Potato Skins. This sort of potato treatment removes most the mealy potato (the part my family opposes) and replaces it with good things like crispiness, cheese, and bacon. I figure, if you're going to shake hands with the Devil, he may as well be dipped in sour cream. These skins were way too good. The only way I'll make them again any time soon is if the Bears are in the Super Bowl.



I still have half a bag of potatoes left. I'm thinking soup...

Maida Heatter's Brownies

This following recipe has gotten rave reviews on the Fine Cooking web site. These brownies fall into the rich fudgy brownie category. What makes them somewhat unusual is that the recipe includes sour cream which made me interested in trying them. They turned out really smooth and moist with a deep chocolate flavor. And they tasted even better the next day, but I don't think I'll be making them again. My family likes a drier, more toothsome brownie. My quest for the perfect brownie continues...

If you are a fan of Maida Heatter, check out "Mondays with Maida" on the link below. This cook bakes one recipe per week, mostly Maida's cookie recipes, and evaluates them in an interesting way. http://mylittlekitchen.blogspot.com/

For those who like fudgy, moist brownies (i.e. the majority of the population,) I would recommend Maida's brownies:




Maida Heatter's Brownies

1/4 cup (31 grams) sifted all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 ounces (225 grams) bittersweet chocolate
5 ounces (140 grams) (1 1/4 cups) walnuts
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons (8 grams) pure vanilla extract
1/3 cup (80 grams) sour cream
4 ounces (1 stick) (113 grams) unsalted butter
3/4 cup (150 grams) white sugar

Preheat oven to 300 degrees and put rack in center of oven. Prepare an 8 by 8 by 2 inch pan by lining the pan with a piece of aluminum foil, shiny side up. Coat pan with room temperature butter, then pour some fine dry bread crumbs into the pan, tilt pan to get crumbs all over, then turn the pan upside down to shake out excess.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside. Chop the chocolate in small pieces (can use a food processor or else place a cutting board inside a baking sheet with sides. Makes clean up easier); set aside. Cut walnuts into medium-sized pieces; set aside. In a In a small bowl beat the eggs, vanilla, and sour cream just to mix; set aside.

In a 1 quart saucepan, over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the sugar and stir for a minute until sugar is partially melted. Then add the chocolate and stir until melted.

Transfer to large mixing bowl. Stir in egg mixture, then the sifted dry ingredients. If the mixture is not perfectly smooth, beat it briefly with electric mixer. Stir in nuts.

Pour into the baking pan and smooth top. Bake for about 50 - 55 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out almost (but not completely) clean. Let stand at room temperature until cool. Remove from pan by inverting on a cutting board and then re-inverting it onto a plate. Chill brownies completely before cutting. I messed these up a bit by not letting them cool enough, so heed this warning. These freeze very well.

Makes 16 brownies

Source of recipe: Maida Heatter's Brand-New Book of Great Cookies

Small cheese

Having a dough ball in the freezer can save you when other dinner plans fall through.

Channeling Deborah Madison

Careful readers of this blog will know that I have sort of a thing for Deborah Madison, the renowned vegetarian cookbook author. As evidenced by the numerous rib posts lately, clearly I am not a vegetarian. I just like to make this woman's food. Deborah's cooking is different than my cooking. She keeps the elements of her dishes simple. She has a light hand with spices and doesn't use too many flavors in one recipe. When I cook her recipes and follow them as directed, the resulting dish is refined and somewhat elegant, even her rustic dishes. I feel as if someone else has cooked a very fine plate of food for me and I was just the instrument though which it arrived (profound, I know). It is kind of like french food. I can appreciate french food but the french way of flavoring doesn't come natural to me so I really only eat it in restaurants. Deborah Madison's food has a lovely delicate quality about it, but conversely, it fun to recreate at home.



This is Garbanzo, Spinach and Tomato stew, a very simple dish. I have made this stew many times before and we really like it. The vegetables are cooked with onion, garlic, paprika and red pepper flakes. I know the name of the dish does not sound all that appealing. But it comes off spicy good. All the flavors work well together and the beans make it very satisfying. I served it over couscous to absorb all the flavorful juices. Today, it is made with red swiss chard instead of spinach. The red chard's color really charged up the red in the stew to look like cherry pie filling. I just never knew I could be happy with a simple dinner of vegetable stew but Deborah showed me the way.