Cooking Light Magazine ran a feature in their October 2013 issue highlighting their 25 Favorite Recipes. I'm sure that eventually I'll end up cooking them all, but I started with this super flavorful and EASY roast chicken. Of course, there are as many ways to roast a chicken as there are cooks. Some recipes call for little more than salt and pepper seasoning on the bird, others for elaborate stuffing, seasoning, and glazes. This roast falls somewhere in-between.
Bittersweet Chocolate Panna Cotta
Desserts don't get much easier or more rewarding than this one. With hardly any work at all and just a few ingredients you can have this restaurant quality treat on your table tonight. Hands-on time to craft this dynamite pudding is no more than 15-20 minutes, though you do need to plan for cooling-in-the-fridge time to set the panna cotta before serving. Two hours is probably enough.
Garlicky Chicken with Lemon-Anchovy Sauce
My old high school/college buddy, Dave, wrote to me the other day to ask if I had heard of this recipe. He had seen it published in the NY Times and had been cooking it pretty much non-stop ever since. Declaring it his favorite recipe of 2013, he went on to tell me that the dish was better than any "illicit drugs the 80s offered" (not that he or I had any direct experience with said drugs, it was more a figure of speech).
Chipotle Pepper Hummus
How to make a homemade Hummus is something I teach the students at each and every Cooking Matters class that I instruct.
Why?
Halibut with Crushed Chickpeas and Cumin Roasted Carrots
This is a slight adaptation of as recipe by Laura Calder, host of the Cooking Channel show, French Food at Home. I don't watch much food tv and so haven't actually seen her show, but I've watched a few of her videos on the Cooking Channel web site and must say I'm a bit smitten.
Crispy Tilapia with Classic Tartar Sauce
To be perfectly honest, I'm not really a big fan of Tilapia.
I love working with it as it's firm, meaty flesh cooks quickly and holds together nicely in the sautè pan. I love buying it, because let's face it, as seafood goes it's downright cheap to put on your plate. I even love inking it into our weekly meal plan because everyone in the family totally digs it.
Except me…..
Creamy Sweet Potato Soup
It didn't take me long to figure out which recipe I was going to try first from this month's holiday themed Cooking Light Magazine, because this one was right on the cover! I'm sure its not the first cover recipe I've cooked, but I must say I don't seem to do it very often for some reason. I guess I tend to be drawn to the little worker bee recipes buried deep in the mag, not the flamboyant queen on the cover.
Quick Chicken Cacciatore
This recipe is a twist on one I saw recently in Fine Cooking for a Veal Cacciatore. I'm not one who has a problem eating veal from a philosophical stand point, but in this particular dish chicken makes an easy and cheap substitute with hardly any impact on the flavor of the final meal.
While this is a one pan meal, it is cooked in stages so that each component can be done to perfection, then combined and reheated at the last minute. This dish is super easy, and just loaded with flavor, especially if you take the time to extract every little bit of moisture from the mushrooms, and caramelize them to a rich brown like you see in the photo above.
Amiable Bars
I've struggled for a while with what to call these little nuggets of goodness.
At first I called them…… Kind of "Kind" Bars
Then …..Sort of "Kind" Bars
Then I became concerned that the fine folks who make Kind Bars might take offense at my using their trademarked name in ANY way, so I thought of a synonym for "Kind" instead.
Et voila….Amiable Bars were born!
Corn Cookies
For the most part my wife and I generally agree on the quality of a restaurant experience we share. One may have enjoyed the meal slightly more or less than the other, but on a thumbs up – thumbs down basis, it is rare that we disagree. In fact, if memory serves there have only been two restaurants that we've visited where one of us (me) really loved the place, and the other (she) didn't.
