Food Lush

Top 5 Food Gifts I'd Like From My Valentine

Editor's note: For our last week at Food Lush, I've asked the writers to share both a favorite post by another writer, from over the last three years, and a favorite post of their own. You'll see these posts linked to at the top of their new post for the week. Enjoy a stroll down Lush memory lane!

by Jen L.

This is my final post for Food Lush and it has been a fantastic couple of years! I have loved sharing my foodie love with all of you, participating in this wonderful group of writers (we call ourselves the Lush Family) and reading all your comments. My favorite post from another writer is this Candy Corner post by Erik because 1. it involves Bit O' Honey, and 2.  it is HYSTERICAL.  Choosing my favorite post of my own was like being asked to choose a favorite child, but I narrowed it down, and read and read, then picked this one, a post I got to write in response to a reader's question about hosting a birthday party. The best part of Food Lush has always been the interaction with our readers, so thank you! 

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I love food gifts. Some people scoff at them. Some people automatically throw them out, as though they are tainted.  Other people, like me and people I'm related to, fight over them.  My husband and I get summer sausages in our Christmas stockings every year and my mom always gets me a big bottle of cranberry mustard to go with mine.  My grandpa used to give me my own wheel of Edam cheese every year.

I've never been one for flowers on Valentine's Day--I'd rather have a box of really nice chocolate or even have a nice dinner prepared for me. (My husband sometimes surprises me with cornish game hens!)  Here are five food gifts I'd be tickled to get on Valentine's Day.

1.  Harry and David's Pears.  Have you ever had a Harry and David pear? They are hands-down the greatest pears I have ever had IN MY LIFE. I don't know what it is, but they are always perfectly ripe, tender, sweet and delicious.  And look! They even have a Valentine Gift Box all ready to ship to the one you love, complete with heart-shaped stickers and pink foil wrapping.  Score.

2.  Wisconsin Cheese Mart Cheddar Deck Gift Box.  This trio of cheddar cheeses would be mine, all mine. I would use the mild for a cheddar cheese sauce (Served over pasta with bacon, of course!), the medium for grating over tacos and chili, and the sharp for eating with really good crackers.

3.  A Cookie Bouquet from Cookies by Design.  I had a cookie bouquet for one of my teenage birthdays and I remember it being delicious. I love iced sugar cookies, so that was right up my alley. (This was before I gave in to my all-consuming love for cake.)  This cute Conversation Hearts cookie bouquet would be a very sweet treat.

4.  A Crate O' Gummi Bears.  Haribo are the best gummies in the world--we all agree on this, yes?  How'd you like to get this crate of 72 packs of MINI gummi bears from Candy Warehouse? I thought so. 

5.  A beautiful box of Godiva chocolates.  Specifically, this dark chocolate collection.  Enough said.

What food gifts would you like to receive from your Valentine?  You can paste a link this post to in an email, you know...

 

Image credit  HarryandDavid.com

Butternut Squash and Sausage Casserole

by Tara

Now that the holidays are over we can focus on plain, old, winter cooking. I love winter squashes, and butternut squash, in particular, is one of my favorites. I set out to make a vegetarian meal one night using spinach, carmelized onions, and butternut squash and pasta, and it looked like a lot of work. So I made this up as I went along, instead, and it turned out great!

Butternut Squash and Sausage Casserole

Ingredients:
-1 large butternut squash
-3 large yellow onions
-1 tbsp butter
-2 cups whole wheat pasta (I used rotini)
-6 cloves (1 tbsp) minced garlic
-Italian sausage
-15 oz ricotta
-1 tsp crushed red pepper
-1/4 cup milk
-1/4 cup chopped parsley
-2 oz shredded parmesan
-1 cup shredded mozzarella
-spinch and/or arugula (I like the pre-packaged 50/50 mix)
-olive oil spray

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350. Slice the onions in half and then slice in thin, half-moon strips. Melt butter in large pan over medium heat. Add onions and cook over medium heat, slowly, until a pretty brown color, about 20-25 minutes.
2. Remove onions and cook sausage and garlic in the same pan until sausage is browned.
3. Meanwhile, cook pasta as package directs. When the pasta's finished, drain pasta over spinach/arugula (so that it wilts without an extra step!).
4. Add onions, ricotta, red pepper, milk, and parsley to skillet and cook until well-mixed and thickened. Add pasta and spinach/arugula.
5. Spray a casserole pan with the olive oil spray and pour the mixture from the skillet into the pan. Top with shredded cheeses and bake for ~30 minutes or until cheese is melty and browning.

(This makes a LOT of food. A lot. It made three pans and will easily serve 8-12 people as a main/only course. I froze two pans and while it was okay, the casserole wasn't nearly as delicious as when it was fresh. So you could fill up a 9x13 pan and feed a crowd.)

I'm calling this a success. I hope you enjoy it, too!

 

My Favorite Cookie Swap Contribution AND Reader Help: Roll-out Cookies

by Caitlin

Ahh, cookie season. It truly is the most wonderful time of the year. Especially if you're in the Larger Pants Selling Business, and if you are then maybe also call me because I'm predicting I'll need your help soon.

For much of my childhood my parents' friends had an annual cookie decorating party around the holidays. It's one of my most dear childhood Christmas memories, and in my adult years I've longed to recreate it.
It was such a wonderful treat to go over to their house and spend an evening sitting at a table covered in a rainbow of colored frostings, sprinkles and candies as bin after bin of sugar and gingerbread cookies in various shapes appeared non-stop.

Joyce, prolific hostess, spent weeks baking hundreds of cookies. She'd freeze batch after batch until the evening finally arrived. She made a simple sugar frosting which she'd color with food coloring and pour into muffin tins - a great strategy. We each had an area to work in, and after using little paint brushes and loading our cookies up with decorations galore we'd carefully place them on wire cooling racks to dry. Some were garish, loaded with as much extra sugar as possible, others we took our time on and were little works of delicious cookie art.

Angels, trees, stars, candles, gingerbread people small and large: We loved that the shapes were familiar year after year, but what excitement there was if she debuted a new shape! For several years she even made special gingerbread house pieces for my brother and I to construct. Those gingerbread houses are what first taught me about royal frosting and that there was such a thing as sugared violets. Some flowers were edible?! 12 year old Caitlin was in awe. 

A marvel our hostess was.

Over the past few years I've longed to recreate those wonderful memories. I've collected various sprinkles, jimmies, sanding sugars, and adornments. My baking cabinet is full, and my husband rolls his eyes at the mention of colored sugars. The truth is, aside from the issues of first not having the space, and lately not having the time, a major inhibiting factor is that...I'm afraid of cut out sugar cookies. I haven't had good luck with them in the past. I don't quite have the technique down, and I don't have any recipes I love.

I need your help, dear readers! How can I achieve a roll out sugar cookie that will keep it's shape, that carries the frosting and decorations well while still imparting a little taste, and which won't break your teeth to bite into? A sugar cookie that looks as good as it tastes: That's what Santa can bring me.

These two recipes look promising, but I've got a little Rollout Cookie PTSD. So much work, and what if it's not worth it?

Gingerbread Snowflakes

Holiday Sugar Cookies

(Photo from Epicurious)

Dear readers, can you help?

And! In return I offer you my favorite cookie swap contribution:These molasses crinkles. My grandmother always made molasses crinkles so I'll always have a soft spot for them, but they were specifically requested for a party last year and this recipe did not disappoint. Spicy, sweet, chewy, they are true holiday perfection.

I'm supposed to be attending some cookie parties soon, and (spoiler alert, friends!) I'll be bringing these to both. They were a huge hit last year, and why mess with a favorite? My secret trick, as with all cookies, is to underbake them slightly to retain that chewy softness. They'll still cook a bit when you take them out, so leave them a little shiny on the tops.

Also, find a fun, festive, cocktail napkin to unfold and display them on, and people will think you're more put together than you are.

(Photo: me)

Citrus Champagne Punch: The Perfect Holiday Cocktail

By Erica H.

Last night was my moms group's annual cookie exchange, which was delightful in a cookie-sense but dare I say revolutionary in the beverage-accompaniment-sense. (I definitely dare! What are you going to do, COMMENT AT ME? I'd like to see you try!)

Ahem, as I was saying. Cookies are great! Look at them!

Seasonal and buttery and delicious. But around halfway through a giant plate full of cookies, you start to cast about for something to cut through all the sugar-lumps. I can't say I wasn't wary approaching a bowl full of "champagne punch," as it conjured up visions of the very syrupy sweetness I was looking to counteract. But I was impressed...nay...overjoyed at what I encountered.

This Citrus Champagne Punch from Emeril Lagasse (brilliantly mixed by party hostess Lori) tastes like lemons and bubbles and sparkly dresses and twinkling lights. It is also, you should know, quite strong. HOLIDAY-LEVEL strong. I absolutely recommend it for Christmas, New Year's, and next Tuesday night.

If Loving Cinnamon Tea Is Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Right

By Julie

Earlier this year, I talked about Harney & Sons Hot Cinnamon Spice tea, and I still love it so much. But it’s a) somewhat pricey for tea, and b) hard to find. Yesterday, I went to the new Trader Joe’s in my area (finally!), and lo and behold, I found this:

 

Cinnamon Tempest tastes almost exactly like my beloved Hot Cinnamon Spice at – get this – half the price. If I had to split hairs, Trader Joe’s version is slightly less sweet straight up, but that’s something you can adjust on your own. It is simply perfect for this time of the year.

A word of warning: this seems to be a seasonal item, so it might disappear after the holidays, but you never know. In any case, if you can get to a Trader Joe’s, get this tea. And some Candy Cane Joe Joes while you’re at it.

(Photo: Trader Joe's)

The State Fair of Texas and All the Fried Food in the World

By Julie

There are many things for which the State Fair of Texas (yes, capitalized) is known, but perhaps none so much as the cuisine. Which, in this case, is a fancy word for fried everything. Literally. And it is awesome.

I haven’t been to the fair in many years, so when I had the chance to partake this week, I jumped at it. They have a contest every year to crown winners in new food categories, and the list of champions is long, distinguished, and deeply weird. There have been fried bacon, fired butter, and fried coke. Sensing a theme here?

So I did my own little taste test of decadent delights. My criteria for selection were as follows: it had to be unusual and it had to have enough tickets to buy it. Let Fried Fest begin!

Let me just state from the beginning that all of these foods, ones tasted and ones left for another day, look remarkably similar because they are all created on the principle of “let’s see what bizarre thing we can wrap in dough/dip in batter and fry to oblivion.” Nothing wrong with that.

I started off with the fried banana pudding because I saw it and remembered I’d seen a coupon in the guidebook for it. Savings at the fair? Yes, please. My judging panel consisted of myself, my 4 year old daughter, and my dad. Our conclusion was that this was pretty good, basically a banana cream fried pie. The whipped cream frosting was the best part, in my opinion. My dad said that it would really be better with some crushed up vanilla wafers inside to give it the full banana pudding experience, and I wholeheartedly agree.

A bit later, we were joined by my husband (who’d been off on his own fried food expedition, and more on that in a moment) to try the fried pineapple upside down cake and the fried “taste of autumn” pumpkin pie. The cake was just a canned ring of pineapple battered and friend, and was incredibly difficult to eat with only a flimsy plastic fork. The pineapple just slid out of the coating and refused to be severed by said fork. The pie was ball shaped and merely filled with pumpkin pie filling, so it wasn’t all that spectacular and I have no idea why it required a special “taste of autumn” descriptor. It was merely fine. I guess I just prefer my pumpkin pie chilled.

Now, my husband had wandered off in search of this year’s best taste winner, the fried jambalaya. He said it was tasty, but that it was predominantly a disc of fried rice and couldn’t really find any sausage or seafood in it, as one might expect in jambalaya. He also said it was fairly teeny in portion.

All that said, the winner of the day was a classic: the good ol’ corn dog, a fair staple since forever. Whether you’re a purist and go for a good slather of mustard, or a renegade and cover yours in ketchup (like my daughter, whom I don’t even know anymore, because ketchup?), you cannot go wrong with a corny dog. So good.

And there you have it, my 2012 State Fair of Texas food roundup. If you’d like to join my next year, please being prepping your arteries now.

{Photo Credits: blogs.observer.com, sidedish.dmagazine.com, and eatsblog.dallasnews.com. I actually took my own photos, but my computer and camera are currently conspiring against me.}

End of Summer Peach Salsa

by Jen L.

As much as I hate to kiss this summer goodbye, I'm actually starting to look forward to Fall, it's cooler temperatures, and it's pumpkin-heavy menus.  As a last hurrah and final salute to this grand summer, I give you my favorite recipe for peach salsa.  My batch didn't make it long enough to have its picture made (we devour this stuff in record time), so I borrowed this one from Faithful Provisions, which looks a lot like mine.

YUM.

PEACH SALSA

• 1 pound ripe fresh peaches (usually 3-4, depending on the size of your fruit)
• 1/2 red onion, diced
• 1/2 red bell pepper, diced
• 1 jalapeno pepper, diced and seeded (can do less if you like)
• 1 tablespoon cilantro leaves, torn or chopped
• Juice of 1 lime
• salt and pepper to taste

Start by washing your peaches and scoring the bottoms in an X shape with a paring knife.  In a large stockpot, bring several cups of water to a boil.  Place peaches into boiling water for one minute.  Remove from pot and immediately submerge in a bowl of ice water to "shock" them and stop the cooking process.  Remove from water and peel.  Chop peaches into bite-sized pieces.  Mix all ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour. Stir before serving.  Tastes great as a dip or atop grilled chicken breasts.

Uses for garden basil part 2: sweet basil ice cream

by Katie

Last week, I talked about very green pasta salad, the first in a series of posts about how I’m trying to find uses for the huge basil bush that is taking over my yard. Today we go a little further afield, away from “comfortable” and into “unusual:” basil ice cream.

I got the idea from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream at Home, my favorite ice cream cookbook ever and one that’s been featured here on FoodLush before. I followed her recipe to the letter (right down to the inclusion of praline pine nuts and oh my STARS those little nuggets are insanely tasty) but I think the technique would work with any base ice cream recipe you prefer. Basically, you make vanilla ice cream except don’t add the vanilla. Once you have cooked the custard, tear up a handful of basil leaves, toss them in, and let them steep while the custard cools. Before freezing, strain out the basil leaves and voila- beautifully basil-scented ice cream.

It sounds weird, you guys, but trust: it is delicious. The basil is herbal but light and subtle. It is not-too-sweet, but doesn’t come across as weirdly savory or anything– it just tastes green, if that makes any sense. If you have a bunch of basil and you’re looking to experiment, I highly encourage you to check it out: it’s a perfect unusual flavor for the end of a summer barbecue.

(Photo from me)

Necessities for a Camping/Tubing Trip

by Caitlin 

Around this time last year I was completing my Second Ever camping trip. It was car camping, and there was a lake and a party boat rental and it was just one night, but I still had to pee outside -- and unzip a door to do so -- so I maintain that it TOTALLY COUNTS. My husband grew up going on backpacking trips with his stepdad, and it's something that he's been meaning to resurrect in his adult life for a while now. He worked really hard to make that trip one I would enjoy. And enjoy it I did.

Here is my husband, pitching our tent while I drink a beer and photograph him and then later he agrees to let me put the picture on my blog. A man among men!

A month or so later we went Real Camping where we had to hike in to the site. We stayed in a cabin with about 15 other people, and we hiked the mile-plus trail in lugging a cast iron skillet, a cooler full of bacon and beer, and a lot of other things but again: Totally counts. After all, we were on the Appalachian Trail and there was bear mace and everything in the cabin. Also, this view:

Our THIRD camping adventure last summer involved the same dear friends (Randy and Lisa, Hi guys!) whom we'd first camped with. This time the trip involved car camping and a river tubing trip: you rent tubes from the campground and they drive you a few miles up-river and drop you off. You spend the afternoon drifting downstream through the hills and fields with a cold, floating cooler and some good friends. If you know of a better way to spend a summer afternoon I wish you'd tell me about it. It was such a blast that we decided to do it again this year, and we've learned some things along the way. Here are my recommendations for a summer tubing/rafting/float trip. 

 It is nice to cook dinner next to a river. 

1. Canned beer.

Photo from http://staffblogs.etruth.com.

Bottles on the river are not a good idea. Even if you're not a jerkwad who'd litter intentionally, it's easy for a piece of trash to slip out of your wet fingers or fall out of the bag, no matter how careful everyone is. (Oh, which reminds me! Make sure you bring a few bags to use for trash.) Bottles that end up in the river will break, broken glass is bad, etc. Cans used to have a reputation for representing crappy beer, but that's changing. There are some shockingly good ones out there nowadays (anything by Oskar Blues, for starters), but Yeungling and Copper Bell are delicious, drinkable, and good if you're having several. I've only ever seen Copper Bell at Whole Foods (I think I read it's their house brand?), but it is shockingly cheap at something like $5.99 for a 12 pack. 

2. Robaritas. 

This is apparently a concoction introduced by our friend Rob (Hi Rob!). It's basically a variation of this recipe: Tequila, beer, and frozen limeade concentrate. And it is DELICIOUS. The problem with Robaritas is that they go down far, FAR too easily. And it is hot on that river! And the Robarita in your hand, it's so refreshing! We were wise enough to bring some water, including some lime seltzer, and it turns out that Robaritas are still delicious and so refreshing when cut with lime seltzer. Drunk out of a re-purposed Deer Park water bottle, they are proud to be the trashy cousin of a wine spritzer!

This year Lisa also brought some of those new Bud Light Lime-a-ritas. Listen, I'm no fan of Bud Light, but these were DELICIOUS. They were also quite strong, and went down a little too easily. 

3. You're going to need something to soak up all that alcohol, even though you grilled some hot dogs right before you got on the river. So bring some sealable snacks.

Here's what I intended to bring when we were menu planning for the trip: dried fruit, cut-up vegetables and hummus, ziploc bags of pita chips, maybe ziploc bags with cheese and crackers.

HAHHAHAHHAAA. 

Here is what we brought: A few handfuls of pretzels, shoved quickly into a ziploc bag. They were delicious. Also delicious were Lisa's cheetos, which were also shoved unceremoniously into a Ziploc bag, then crammed by the slightly-damp fistful into our gaping maws. YAYYYY BEER! 

Listen. It's hot in that Virginia sun. There is little to no shade on the river. The drinks are cold, SO COLD, and you are thirsty. SO THIRSTY. The good news is that we go to this particular place because the campground is right on the river, and you can roll off your tube and stumble up the hill to your campsite when your ride has come to an end. No one has to drive. Everyone can rinse off in the showers, pass out in their tents for a few hours, and then get up around dinner time to start grilling. And crack a few more cold ones. 

HEALTHY!

Sunset over the campground. Not a bad end to the day. 

Do you have any camping or tubing traditions? Have you gone on a rafting/tubing/float trip? 

All photos are by me, except where otherwise noted. 

Fresh Strawberry Jams, Sweet and Savory

by Caitlin

A few years ago when I moved to Virginia, my friend Laura (Hi Laur!) got me back into a family tradition that had gotten lost somewhere on the way out of childhood: berry picking and jam making. 

Though we didn't know each other then, we each grew up in Massachusetts, spending June mornings picking berries and making jam with our moms and aunts. It's been a lot of fun carrying on the tradition in our own way, as adults, each with our childhood memories in hand. Strawberry season here comes a bit earlier, and this year with our particularly warm March meant jam making before Memorial Day. Unprecedented! 

Laur and I start the day niiiiiice and early, aiming to get to the farm (Butler's Orchard) before the crowds and before it gets too hot, then we head home to spend the afternoon jamming. Sometime in between there's lunch and a couple of beers. Beer drinking makes jam making even more fun. Fact. 

This year in a little over an hour the two of us picked four full flats; about 40 pounds. That's a lot of crouching and squatting and sore arches and berries crushed on the seat of your pants, but man is it ever worth it:

There's absolutely nothing that compares to a warm berry fresh off the plant and red all the way through. They make grocery store berries ashamed to be berries. 

I've lost count, but we made somewhere around 6 or 7 batches of jam with this. The rest of the berries were frozen or eaten out of hand. We made four different kinds of jam. 

Up first: A few batches of Classic Strawberry Jam. This is the recipe inside the powdered pectin box and it's a good one to master because once you do you can start playing around with different flavors (more on that in a minute). For my palate it tends to be too sweet (you'll note that there's more sugar than fruit in most jams) so to one batch I added about a 1/4 cup of lemon juice and, toward the end of cooking, the zest of a lemon. It balanced it nicely and kept it bright while still being plenty sweet. I'd like to play around with even more zest and juice to see what would happen.

Up next: A variation on the Classic Strawberry: Strawberry Orange Black Pepper. We used the original recipe as above and at the start of cooking added the juice of one orange, 1/4 cup lemon juice, the zest of 1.5 oranges, and 1 T black pepper.

Verdict: The flavor is really lovely.

Tweaks: I'd like it to be a bit bolder on the pepper and the orange zest. Next time I'd do zest and juice of both oranges, and add them closer to end. I'd increase the black pepper to 2.5 or 3 T, and probably grind it a bit finer too. An easy shortcut with this one though: Add more pepper when I open a new jar. 

Experimental batch number three was this recipe for Strawberry Jam with Balsamic and Thyme. I'd been wanting to make a strawberry balsamic jam for a few years and was excited to try this recipe. I used half lemon thyme and half regular thyme because I have both in my garden. I tasted it about halfway through cooking and it didn't have enough acid or balsamic taste for me so I added another 1/4 c of balsamic vinegar. 

Jam at the start of cooking. 

Verdict: Yum. Though it doesn't taste particularly balsamic-y or thyme-y, there's a nice balsamic note somewhere in the finish. Balsamic changes so much while you cook it (ie: what it looks like when you start a reduction vs. what you finish with) and I think adding it at different stages helped give it a nice round flavor profile. This jam has a beautiful rich, deep, dark color from the vinegar and I'd love for the taste to match that. 

Tweaks: I'd add another generous 1/4 cup of balsamic at the end of cooking. I'd also spend more time chopping my thyme very, very finely to try and get all the flavor out of it. I like the taste of thyme, but I loathe working with it's tiny little leaves. 

Finally, we made this Strawberry Jalapeño Jam.

I haven't tried it yet, but I have high hopes. Two years ago I made an Apricot Jalapeno Jam (aka ApriHot) that has been a big hit. Jalapeños just have such a wonderful flavor that goes so well with fruit!

Other Jam notes: 

- Laura and I have sworn off liquid pectin. Even when following the recipe for liquid pectin batches, we never seem to have any luck. Laura was able to succesfully rebatch one of her regular Strawberry jams that didn't set using this recipe for Liquid Cement. It uses liquid pectin, I know, but she said it worked and I'm planning on using it on a rebatch this weekend. 

- I enjoy savory jams on bagels, toast, English Muffins, and all the places you'd traditionally use jam. I also like it as an accompaniment on a cheese plate or served with baked brie. I know some people like spooing it over cream cheese and serving that as a spread for crackers. They're fun to play with in cooking as well, used in glazes for chicken or pork. 

Have you made jam before? Do you have a favorite jam recipe? A recommendation for using a savory-sweet jam?

All Photos by Me