Fare for the family table
This dish is nothing short of a revelation. Much like the first time I made my own pâte feuilletée at Le Cordon Bleu and became a forever spoiled puff pastry snob, having made this polenta from fresh corn, I am seriously questioning whether I can ever make one from dried cornmeal again.
Bold words, I know, but I defy any of you out there to make this and not have the same thought run through your head. Yeah, it's that good.
Peyton, who is once again on a pescatarian kick having given up eating all red meats while off at camp this summer, recently returned home after a six week absence, so a special meal was in order. As a huge fan of Asian food, sushi in particular, working up some appetizers and a main meal was pretty straight forward. We started with some fried crab spring rolls and "Wagamama" gyoza, then moved onto a fabulous rice salad with oranges and mangoes, and an awesome Thai dish called shrimp larb that we served up with a tasty cabbage and green bean salad.
Ever have a hankerin' for chicken wings?
Yeah, me too….all the time.
Normally I'm a buffalo wing kind of guy, having been schooled in the fine art of hot-wings while an undergrad student at Syracuse about 400 years ago. My time there coincided with the birth of the buffalo wing craze and there was a local joint called "Ventura's Wings and Things" that delivered killer wings that were always part of our weekend feasts.
Last year for my birthday, Boris bought me a gorgeous little cookbook by Lori Longbotham entitled Luscious Berry Desserts . I've flipped through it frequently, but until now had not pulled the trigger on a recipe. When sitting down to plan out Boris' welcome home dinner the other day (he'd been rocking a month long National Outdoor Leadership School "NOLS" course), I pulled his gift from the shelf and decided to make him the recipe that made the cover of the book, this delicious hazelnut berry cake. We liked it so much that we made it the following weekend for my father-in-law George's 80th birthday cake!
It's been an interesting summer around here dinner-wise, with just three of us at the table most nights we've gotten pretty fluid with our meal planning. For the first time, four of the kids have had rather long-term commitments that took them away for a chunk of the summer. Grid is in Manhattan working an internship for a cool tech start-up. Peyton is off to a six week camp in upstate New York, Arthas did the People to People student ambassador thing for three weeks, travelling to Greece and Italy, and Boris huffed his way through a month long NOLS course hiking and rafting in Idaho.
Cooking for the three of us remaining homebodies has meant that a late afternoon stop at the farm stand, or a serious pre-meal craving could easily inform what hit the table on any given night. Advanced meal planning has taken a back seat to spontaneity in a way that's just plain hard to manage when you're cooking for a family of seven.
Within minutes of polishing off the last of our stupendously good homemade coffee ice cream, my wife and I were back to pouring through Jeni Britton Bauer's Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home cookbook for another inspired recipe of hers to try. I fell hard for the "Salted Caramel", while my wife was drawn to the "Goat Cheese and Roasted Red Cherries".
Guess which one we made?
This recipe was inspired by one I saw last week near the cherries on display at my local Whole Foods. I read through the instructions briefly as I was shopping, and the salad sounded so good that I decided to spin my own version of it that night. I bought the cherries and the chicken while at the market, then married them up to some cukes, corn and basil from my weekly CSA haul, et voila!
Over the years we've posted three different banana bread recipes here on Oui, Chef. First was this, our favorite straight up version. Then came a cocoa variant from my friend Sally Sampson at Chop Chop Magazine, and finally a Nutella version I whipped up to put an end to a large tub of Nutella that Arthas and I bought while at Chelsea Market in NYC.
Most food bloggers would be content with sharing three different varieties of a dish, but no, not us. As we continue to do with brownies, we are constantly looking for exciting new twists on one of our favorite treats, banana bread. Bananas are something that we always have on hand in the kitchen, and when they get a bit long in the tooth we either craft a bread out of them, or peel, cut and freeze them for use in morning smoothies. Last week, when I needed to deal with 2 leftover bananas, I found our frozen banana remnant bag full to capacity, so bread it was.
