If there's one chef who has always really represented seasonal cooking to me, it's Suzanne Goin, chef-owner of LA's Lucques and A.O.C. The combo of persimmon and pomegranate shows up…
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Been awhile since we've had a slice, hasn't it? The good news is, I'm bringing pizza and beer. You can thank Andris and his beer crust experiments on the Baking Steel Facebook page last weekend. A day later, I had a batch of dough with Silver City Red Ale doing its thing in the fridge, just waiting to become a FridayNightSlice. The first beer dough pie was a simple pepperoni and mushroom. But for you, I'm fancying it up a little. This week's FridayNightSlice features that beer dough with pancetta, swiss chard and criminis.
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Popcorn is due for a comeback. An aluminum tub of slightly stale popcorn -- plain, cheddar and caramel -- was an ‘80s Christmas staple. Now, it just seems like a cheap office gift ordered from some terrible catalog. Long before kettle corn took over the popcorn scene, there were "gourmet" popcorn shops at the mall. After picking up some jeans at Miller's Outpost, you could pick up popcorn dusted in flavors like Barbecue, Sour Cream and Onion, and Ranch. Ah, the good ol' days.
With kettle corn overshadowing everything else in the popcorn universe, it’s been easy to forget about good ol’ caramel corn. The thing is you don’t have to go to the mall or wait for Christmas. Making caramel corn at home isn’t that hard and it’s just not that expensive. Let’s make some caramel corn with salty peanuts. It’s time.26
Something about a bellini feels infinitely more luxurious than your usual mimosa. You can get pretty decent freshly squeezed orange juice almost year round, which makes a mimosa standard. But the bellini is something special, something summer, something more than, especially with your own peach syrup.
After this, you’ll never want a can of peach nectar again.22
The door's open and I'm staring into the fridge. What've I got that might make a good, simple flatbread? No time for sauce, what can I throw on there for a quick snack? What did I get at the farmers market? Zucchini. Corn. Chiles. A basket of grape tomatoes. The dough was already stretched out on the board, so I needed to be fast. I took out the zucchini and remembered that julienne peeler I bought a couple of years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time, the whole zucchini noodle thing. The truth is, I made "zoodles" about three times before that peeler went in to the drawer, got shoved to the back, and didn't come out again.
Turns out, it's the perfect tool for shaving down a medium zucchini so it'll cook up quickly without making a watery mess of your pizza. In celebration of actually using that damn peeler again, this week's Friday Night Slice is the Zucchini Cherry Bomb. It's vegetarian, it's sauceless and it's delicious.
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I had a brief moment of panic. The sugar and water was quickly moving from golden brown to mahogany, so I took it off the heat. It continued to bubble and I thought, what, I’m just supposed to pour this cream and milk in here and hope it doesn’t splatter hot sugar syrup on contact? Apparently, yes. When the cold hit the hot, the sugar seized into a glob. Great. I put the pan back and on the heat and kept whisking. As Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Is Salted Caramel ice cream hell? Well, no. With this recipe, it just might be heaven.
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The main attraction for tacos is the filling.
And when it comes to fillings, it pays to be equal opportunity. Who doesn’t love a good carnitas taco with a little onion, cilantro and green salsa? Grilled chicken with a little pico or al pastor with grilled pineapple and green onion. I’m good with all of it. Gringo tacos with ground beef and Alton Brown’s Taco Potion #19? It’s in regular rotation. Even a vegetarian version with lentils and whizzed up cauliflower, yeah, why not? Where I draw the line, and this might surprise you, is at tofu.