Cat Food

Best French Fries Ever!

Dinner

A quiet dinner. Rosemary crostini, Soppresatta & Camembert.

Octopus Salad @ Tia Pol

Stopped for a snack on my way home the other night. Tia Pol has the best tapas and they didn't disappoint. Octopus medallions, fingerling potatoes and shaved baby beets in a light onion vinaigrette. Yum.

Culinary Scotland

I get the Travel section of the New York Times delivered to my inbox every week. It comes on Fridays. Since money's tight these days I tend to treat reading this section as my weekly vacation (there probably won't be one this year). This week Frank Bruni has a piece on his culinary tour of Scotland in the early Spring during lambing season.

The first time I visited Scotland it was early Spring during that same season because I had a crush on an accordion player that I had met through friends here in New Jersey. I was young and silly and when he mentioned that I should come for a visit I took him up on it. Hell, I had a passport with very few stamps - that needed to change! Needless to say I fell in love ... not with the accordion player but with Scotland. I traveled around the Trosachs (lower highlands) with him and his band staying on ranches and wandering the little towns, mountains and pastures. I bartered my limited culinary talents for room and board and was even given lamb feeding duty on one ranch. Now I haven't traveled around the world but I have been to quite a few places on the planet and hands down, Scotland is my favorite. It's natural beauty and diversity, the hospitality of it's people, it's food ... if you've never been - you must go.

Read the New York Times piece HERE.

There's A New Bakery In Town!

After spending the past 9 months searching for local space (and not being successful I'm sorry to say), former pastry chef and current local cooking instructor Cat Morris (yep - it's me!) is on the verge of opening her first "virtually" local bakery - Basic Kneads.

The bakery will focus on local ingredients baked up like gran'ma used to do it. Everything from low fat muffins like apricot ginger and cranberry orange to all sorts of cookies, double fudge chunk brownies, cakes, pies, tarts and much more. All using wholesome and locally available ingredients. There'll also be freshly baked crackers, breads and even granola packaged to go! And let's not forget about those birthday - wedding and any ole' custom cakes you can think of!

Check Basic Kneads over the next couple of weeks as we roll out our new menu and local delivery schedule.

Baking on Sundays

Spending that week in Tuscany last month really made an impression on me in so many ways. We were there mainly to experience the way these folks approach food and the thing that I really took away is that it seems they eat much less "processed food" and much more variety including lots of vegetables. I decided to try and cut all processed food out of my diet and have been making my weekly bread and pasta on Sundays. At first it took a bunch of hours to do this but now after having it down to a bit of a science it only really takes an hour, maybe an hour and a half on sunday mornings.

This past Sunday I made an olive bread. I haven't made this bread since I lived and worked as a pastry chef on Nantucket 10 years ago. Wow! I can't even believe it was that long ago - feels like yesterday. Anyway I thought I'd share the recipe here because it's a really easy bread and it packs so much flavor.

Ingredients:
yeast 1 pack (dry)
water 1 ¼ cups
flour 4 cups **
salt ¾ tsp.
olive oil 2 Tbs.
olives 1 cup

Yield: 1 loaf
**amount of flour depends on moisture
in olives

Method:
preheat oven to 400 degrees**

1. Pit & chop olives till medium chunky. Or buy pitted olives and coursely chop.
2. Combine all ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer.
3. Mix for @ 10 min. with the dough hook until satiny texture and no longer sticky. You may have to scrape
down the bowl once or twice.
4. Place in oiled bowl and cover with a cloth and let double in size at room temp. Approximately 30 minutes
5. Shape dough into a boule or baguette shape and let rise on baking sheet till almost doubled.
6. At this point you can brush the loaf with a little egg wash (egg mixed with a bit of water) or just brush
lightly with water. Make a couple of slashes across the top of the loaf and place in oven.
7. Pour a couple cups of water in the preheated pan on the bottom of the oven and shut the door. Don’t
open the door until the bread has good color. The steam created by the water will help create a nice
crispy crust.
6. Bake till golden brown and has a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom – about 30 minutes depending
on your oven.

**place shallow pan on bottom of oven. When putting bread in oven add water to pan to create steam for baking.

Print Recipe

Our First "Poster" Girl!

I'm so excited! Folks from the MSU trip to Tuscany are starting to send me more photos of beautiful Toscana.
Just give a click on Myra's Tuscany photo page to check them out.

Ciao-
Cat

Cheese Making in Tuscany

I got a little sidetracked over the weekend while I was color correcting and editing down all my photos from Tuscany. I decided to try and teach myself the iMovie software and it slowed me down a bit. Today I put together this "snapshot" of one of our excursions to a cheese making factory in San Gimignano. Cacio Pecorino S. Gimignano is known for their plain, black pepper and red chile flecked Pecorino as well as their amazingly fresh Ricotta cheeses. The factory was beautifully clean with a little shop on the side where you could purchase all these fantastic cheeses plus additional locally made products. It wasn't in the most picturesque of areas, a small industrial park to be exact - but it certainly was the real thing!

Buon Appetito!

Tuscany Here We Come!

I'm almost through tweaking my photos from the recent Montclair State University trip to Tuscany, Italy.

Check back over the weekend to check 'em out!

Cullen Skink Revisited!

Well, it's been a few days of nasty cold damp weather and I thought I'd make a big pot of soup! Oh yeah ... I still don't really have a proper working stove. DAMN!

For those of you out there who are thinking it's soup weather too why don't you try a nice hearty recipe for a Scottish favorite and let me know how it turns out. I have to cook vicariously through you till the new stove comes in!

Cullen Skink ... or Haddock Chowder