butter tagged posts

Blueberry season around the corner and here in Florida the local farms have started the pick-your-own extravaganza. And as an adopted floridian I could help but jump in the train and do some picking on my own. Interesting fruit the blueberry. We call it blueberry where it is actually purple. It is one of the fine contributions to the new world to the americas.

Mashed potatoes has been a staple food around holidays table almost since its utilization. For the first people that cultivated potato boiling was the only way to go since open fire roasting was not as easy as is today. Mashing the potato is the second most common way to consume them after frying. And although it is easy and delicious we most rely on the boxy stuff. Flakes that come out of a box and are revived in microwaved water. No. Today we will reclaim the potato in its purest form. We will make the potatoes again the comfort food that is. 

Chocolate one way or the other, is the one thing I love – I LOVE – that has not yet made it in the blog. This is quite astonishing. I don ‘t even know why. But this is all history now. Last Valentine s after watching a million shows on the history of chocolate the temptation was too much not to give in and make something chocolaty. The only think available was the bitter chocolate that I used when I was making the mudslide cookies. Well then after all I had talked about chocolate… but it is never enough for chocolate.

And although usually you...

The coffeeshop right next to my work has a very tasty treat. It is called the mudslide cookie, and it is the fusion of chocolate with chocolate in a chocolate envelope. What I am saying is that that particular cookie, has so much chocolate that really gives you the idea of the mud. The bad thing is that it is a very popular treat, and it is gone probably by 10:00, the time I usually show up for coffee. So I was wondering how can I make them.

I have noticed that the recipes I add are usually post, or almost all of them are usually, related to a famous dish. I never present a dish that is on my own an inspiration of the moment. Well I have but it always has to relate to something. So with out further delays I am presenting a dish that is completely my creation of the moment. It is the fusion of different recipes and methodologies, I learned overt the years.Starting with the star of the dish, the salmon.

Staying tuned to the same frequency as the previous post, I will have a second summer dish, that I love. It is a simple humble summer dish that can be eaten warm, but I prefere it room temperature. It is a cauliflower casserole… Just that. Cauliflower and a simple sauce, one of the four mother sauces, baked in the oven. I got this idea from Ece a friend of mine that she made a similar version a few years back. The homeyness of that food will never be forgotten. But since we are having the first entry ever for the cauliflower as it is custom to this blog, we will start with a small history of the cauliflower, a distant cousin of the broccoli and cabbage.

Cau...

I left for last the sauce that is the one closest to my heart. The sauce of the sauces. Well at least for me it is. I love this sauce as nothing in the world. It is a sauce that has only one way of making it and can accommodate everything, from veggies to cardboard.

What do you think when I say rice? I know chinese food. Some more adventurous my think indian food. But in every case it will be thought as the companion to a very hearty, saucy meal. But Rice is way more than that. Rice can be yummy and delicious on its own. All it takes is some simple techniques, some basic know-how, and will to get creative... Yes with rice. But rice is a lot more than Chinese and Indian food. Don ‘t get me wrong, I love both of Chinese (and more generally speaking oriental) and Indian food.

One of the most recognizable greek deserts is baklava. It is a layered desert with lot's of nuts and a thick sweet delicious syrup. It a staple to almost every greek restaurant and pastry shop. The history of the desert is long and it is lost in past centuries, somewhere in the middle east. The first record of a desert like such was in ancient Syria where the Assyrians at around 8th century B.C. were the first people who put together a few layers of thin bread dough, with chopped nuts in between those layers, added some honey and baked it in their primitive wood burning ovens.

Yesterday I was invited to a desert party for Valentine’s day. It was desert so I assumed (wrongfully as it was proofed) that the main thing will be chocolate, since there is all this philosophy about chocolate and love and yada, yada. Instead of repeating the same pattern I decided to make something different. I made (as you can tell from the picture) cinnamon rolls. There are a couple of reasons for that: 1) I love cinnamon (I dedicated a whole blog entry on that) and 2) there is something about the aroma of yeast that makes homes really smell like homes, nice and cozy. Good cinnamon rolls, however, although simple to make, for sure require time and careful steps. They can go from puffed to flat in matter of minutes. None of the steps requires any super talent or any excellence or even any skill for that matter. All of them though, require religious attention to the execution.