Turnip Bowling

In our ongoing effort to manage carbs and our weights I have been using more turnips lately. At one time I considered turnips as one of my anti-guy foods. Then I found a Thomas Keller Roast Chicken with Root Vegetables recipe that uses them along with carrots, yellow onion, leeks, rutabagas, garlic, thyme and small red-skinned potatoes.

Turnips are low in carbs, potatoes are not. So I eliminated the potatoes and used more turnips. Rutabaga availability is hit and miss at my supermarket. (Extra foodie points are given for those who can tell the difference between turnips and rutabagas.) The roasted chicken juices, along with the garlic, thyme, onion cousins, olive oil, salt and pepper, layer on plenty of flavor to an otherwise pretty boring vegetable like turnips.

Another favorite, roasted vegetables with pesto, calls for fingerlings, which we love. Duh, it is still potatoes. So I now substitute turnips for the fingerlings with that recipe. Cheaper, too. The pesto peaks the flavor in this dish. This is not your traditional pesto recipe—no basil. No matter, I add some anyway but not the usual amount.

Last week, while vegetable gathering, I selected several turnips. First I had to wait for the sprinkler system to run. For you supermarket shoppers who know vegetables, they are always stacked neatly. I pay no mind to that and more often than not pick from the middle of the stack knowing what might ensue. Sure enough several turnips went tumbling. It was one of my better turnip bowling results. One rolled at least fifteen feet. Fortunately there were no small children in its path. These days they are safe and secure in the new SUV shopping carts—the ones so large that moms have to go outside just to turn around.

Pesto Me

In a November 2009 blog about turkey salad pesto sandwiches I gave you the basic recipe for fresh pesto. I once bought some pesto in jar at my supermarket—never again. Whatever preservatives they add alters the flavor too much. Besides, pesto is so easy to make.

Last night I prepared some lamb shoulder chops and served them with mint-basil pesto. Basically, instead of two cups of basil you use one cup each of basil and mint leaves, toasted walnuts instead of pine nuts, add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and reduce the parmesan portion to 3-4 tablespoons. This could be served with any cut of lamb.

Tonight I am preparing chicken breasts and topping them with spinach and pine nut pesto. Instead of basil I will use 2 cups of spinach leaves, pine nuts, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1-2 teaspoons of grated lemon peel, and a third cup of parmesan. I’ll leave out the garlic.

Another variation for lamb is walnut and mint pesto with one cup of mint leaves and one cup of parsley leaves, walnuts, lemon juice, and garlic.

I haven’t tried this next one yet but will soon—2 cups basil leaves, 1 cup parsley, 1 tablespoon each of fresh thyme, rosemary and tarragon, ¼ cup of walnuts, and garlic.

All of these pesto recipes use about 1 teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of pepper, and a third to ½ cup of olive oil.

You simply put all of the ingredients (except the oil) into a food processor, turn it on and slowly add the olive oil. Voila, fresh pesto. Pesto can be made ahead and stored in the refrigerator. To keep the pesto from turning a dark green, tear off a small piece of cling wrap and press it down directly over the pesto. It will keep its fresh green tint. I don’t like using cling wrap since it clings to everything before it submits to covering a container. Cling wrap is an emotional dwarf.

The basic pesto recipe is a great sandwich spread. Substitute for mayo—if you’re being good. I cheat and put pesto on one slice and mayo on the other.

Birthday Bashing

This weekend is my birthday weekend, though not my actual birthday. (DEG’s age will not be divulged.) As is our custom, when a birthday falls on a weekday we celebrate on the closest weekend.

Domestic Engineer Guys don’t get their birthday weekend off; unless you just won the lottery. If that were true you could hang up your apron and tool belt and hire a live-in chef and housekeeper.

Each year PJ gets to ask THE question: “What would you like to cook for yourself on your birthday?”

Since Friday is procurement day I just finished my menu planning.

Tonight is New York steaks with garlic, butter and thyme, roasted asparagus with dill hollandaise sauce, and fried onion rings. No dessert. The onion ring recipe is compliments of Emeril. You can find it on foodnetwork.com.

Saturday is pesto, diced romas and pancetta on toasted bread (quartered), herb-encrusted roast leg of lamb with garlic roasted fingerling potatoes, pan-roasted broccoli with sliced almonds and garlic, and strawberry shortcake. The pesto is made from scratch, natch.

Sunday is roast chicken with root vegetables. The vegetable lineup includes leeks, carrots, red-skinned potatoes, rutabagas and turnips. They are all roasted together with the whole chicken—a meal in a roasting pan. That vegetable combo is amazing. I also just like saying, rutabaga. It’s a Thomas Keller recipe.

One of my stops today will be at the Wine Exchange in Orange, the best value wine merchant in SoCal. It will be a syrah Saturday, any which way you spell it.

The toasted bread for the Saturday night appetizer is not a canapé. You have to remove the crust to earn that snooty label. Guys don’t do canapés, or the stilted conversation that goes with them.

PJ has volunteered to make the shortcake from scratch. We already have fresh strawberries here in SoCal. There is a roadside stand one mile from our house.

The one birthday benefit coming my way is a weekend without KP. There is also a one in four chance that our son will do KP one night. If so, I may take a picture for posterity.

Licking Privileges

This weekend is PJ’s birthday weekend. I won’t disclose her age, especially since it is so close to mine.

Her birthday is actually on the 13^th but as is our rule we celebrate on the weekend closest to the birthday when it falls on a weekday. Since our daughter is still with us from her extended holiday visit PJ naturally chose this weekend.

This morning she asked if she could also include next weekend, and even though she is the family ATM, I held my ground and said “no.” I’ll keep you posted on how that turns out.

The birthday girl gets her pick for tonight’s menu plus lots of weekend bennies. In her case that doesn’t add up to much because I routinely handle most of the to-do lists. Remember that ATM part.

PJ chose avocado, smoked salmon, sprouts, and pesto on toasted wheat bread for the appetizer, filet-of-beef with béarnaise sauce for the main course, roasted vegetables (fingerlings, haricot verts, carrots, red onion) with pesto (in this case without the basil, and butter in addition to olive oil), and for the closer, Jack Daniels & chocolate pecan pie*. The Jack Daniels is in the pie, not the beverage you serve with it. But for you Jack lovers, got for it.

One of PJ’s regular bennies is bowl licking after I have poured or spooned out the dessert concoction just prior to baking. This pie filling includes: butter, unsweetened chocolate, eggs, sugar, corn syrup, vanilla extract, and Jack Daniels. So her first birthday treat was the bowl. Even though I made the mixture with my largest bowl she still could not put her face into the bowl. Lord knows she tried. This is one of the times when a tongue extender would come in handy**. As it was, after scooping out as much as she could with a spoon, she fell in love with her right index finger. I almost didn’t have to wash the bowl.

*If interested in any of these recipes, contact me via my website, www.domesticengineerguy.com

**I know what you’re thinking.

Turkey Salad Pesto Sandwiches

This is variation of a turkey sandwich recipe I clipped from the LA Times Food Section a few years ago.

½ cup toasted and chopped pecans

3-4 cups diced leftover turkey (white and dark meat)

1 cup red grapes, halved if small, quartered if larger

1 cup diced celery

¼ finely sliced green onions (scallions)

2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon

1 cup of regular or low-fat mayonnaise

Salt and pepper

Freshly made pesto

Whole-grain bread

1. Toast the pecans.

2. In a large mixing bowl blend the turkey, grapes, celery, onions, tarragon, mayonnaise, salt, pepper and pecans.

3. Spread the pesto sauce on both bread slices, pile on the turkey salad, and presto, you have a great sandwich.

This will easily make six servings.

If you don’t have a basic pesto recipe:

2 cups basil leaves

¼ cup toasted pine nuts

½ cup freshly grated parmesan

1 garlic glove

1 teaspoon kosher salt

Freshly ground pepper

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil (virgin is fine)

1. Assemble all of the ingredients except the olive oil in a food processor.

2. Process the ingredients while slowly pouring in the olive oil.

The original recipe called for using cranberry sauce as the sandwich condiment. If you like cranberry sauce (which I don’t), have at it.

How was my Thanksgiving, you ask? Quoting from my book, “It was the best turkey I ever prepared.” Everything else was pretty spectacular as well.

Anniversary Menu

Several years ago PJ and I began a tradition of celebrating our anniversary on our patio, menu compliments of her domestic engineer guy.

This year another couple joined us. Here are the highlights.

Special Cocktail: Mai Tais. This recipe is the closest I have found to the Hawaiian ones we have enjoyed hundreds of times over 15+ Hawaiian trips, including the ones at the infamous Mai Tai Bar on the beach at the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu.

Appetizers: Toasted Baguette Toppers. There are hundreds of toppings for olive oil slathered toasted baguette slices. Last night I served three: prosciutto, fresh pesto with shaved parmesan, and fresh pesto with diced pancetta and roma tomatoes. The last one was the big hit.

Salad Course: Watermelon Salad with Feta and Toasted Pine Nuts on a bed of arugula. Feta and Watermelon? The feta is a bit neutralized by the watermelon. Great summer salad. Three herbs, dill, basil and mint, are tossed in as well, and finished off with my Basil Dressing.

Main Course: Beef Tenderloin with Morels and Tarragon-Marsala Sauce. As much as I love a traditional béarnaise with beef tenderloin, this is my favorite filet sauce. It’s the morels—though I had to take out a loan.

Side Dish: Roasted Vegetables: haricot verts, red peppers, shallots, and carrots, topped with toasted pecans, lemon zest and Italian parsley. Roasting is my favorite method of preparing vegetables.

Dessert: Blueberry Cream Pie. The crust is mostly crushed and rolled Pecan Sandies.

Wines: Rosenblum Petite Syrah, and a highly rated (Robert Parker) but very young Conn Valley Vineyards cabernet sauvignon. I decanted it and let it breathe for two hours. Very nice. The $15 petite syrah more than held its own. Rosenblum, known for their zinfandels, has brought out some fine syrahs lately.

Even though I paid good money for the Conn Valley cabernet, the filets and the morels, I still estimate that we spent $200 less than if we had celebrated at a fine dining establishment someplace in Newport Beach or Laguna Beach, as had been our tradition. The view from our hillside backyard was just as expansive; the weather was perfect; the candles romantic; the music to our liking, and we didn’t have to drive.

However, there are those dishes. I didn’t have the heart to ask our guests to do them. Besides, they bought anniversary gifts. We left the dishes until this morning. No wine glasses were broken.

Grillin' and Chillin'

This is inaugural weekend for grillin’ and chillin’ – igniting the grill monster, and chillin’ on the patio.

Our dog is especially fond of this annual launch – he knows more pats are in store – his tail in perpetual motion. He is less enthusiastic while I’m around the barbecue. Experience has taught him that something will go awry, so he cowers in his pen while I fume over the flames and flare-ups.

Yesterday I braised (in traditional kitchen fashion) some short ribs with parsnips, red onion, garlic, rosemary, beef stock and zinfandel. Yes, I tasted the zinfandel first; just to make sure it wasn’t spit-out vintage Thursday. Forgive me, for I have zinned.

The side I chose was grill-roasted vegetables with pine nut pesto. While I have an in-door grill, I heard the siren call of the season and decided to grill outside. The vegetables were cubed parsnips, carrots, brussels sprouts (try cubing those), butternut squash, and shallots, with a few thyme sprigs tossed in. Brussels sprouts is one of my anti-guy foods, but mixed in with other veggies is tolerable. I find parsnips pretty bland as well but pine nut pesto can salvage most anything.

Both recipes are from Food and Wine Magazine. I usually faithfully follow a first-timer recipe. Then I begin making changes. Next time - no parsnips in the short ribs recipe*. Maybe sweet potatoes instead – and in the roasted vegetable dish as well.

I like most root vegetables but parsnips, turnips and rutabagas have more subtle flavors – a bit too subtle for my taste. I’ll keep rutabagas in the mix because a veggie with such a great name must be consumed now and then.

The first dance with the grill monster went fairly well – it led, I followed.

Last season I made the mistake of buying some briquettes that were so chemically soaked that they ignited before I even reached for the match, soon spouting more flames than the Shrek dragon. They also threw off my timing. Thinking I needed about 30 minutes for the coals to be ready, I returned to the kitchen for other prep work. Wrong.

I haven’t decided how I will prepare the New York steaks tonight. I have fallen in love with simple technique using a cast iron skillet – searing them in canola oil on the stove, and finishing them (still skilleted) in the oven at 350 degrees for about two minutes per side, with some butter, garlic and thyme. Sea salt is preferred. Maybe tonight I’ll put the skillet on the grill monster. Live on the edge, I always say.

Sunday night I’m doing a whole chicken outside, not beer can, but something similar using white wine as the enema. Sorry – infusion.

PJ is mildly amused each barbecue season. She’s guessing that it will take another 10 years for me to earn my barbecue eagle badge. I have noted that she never ventures near the grill monster. She gets to chill, while I grill.

The good news is that I’m not so old that the singed arm and eyebrow hair won’t grow back.

*There is a reason that the Simon & Garfunkel hit was not entitled “Parsnips, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme”.

Basil Me

After returning from my recent trip to New Orleans, PJ expressed angst over envisioning my plane crashing, not because of losing me, but because she didn’t know how to make my basil dressing. It is always good to know where one stands in a relationship.

I confess to more than a fondness for basil. I would grow it in my herb garden except that I use so much that I would have to turn our entire hillside backyard into a basil plot. But then the dog wouldn’t have a place to dig.

I use basil lots of ways but two favorites are as a replacement for lettuce on sandwiches, and on beefsteak or heirloom tomatoes sprinkled with kosher or sea salt and pepper. Then there is pesto. I never buy pesto. My favorite lamb topping is a mint-basil pesto recipe.

I never buy salad dressings anymore. They are too easy to whip up fresh, whether a simple vinaigrette and all its variations, or my basil dressing, the easiest of them all. I read it somewhere and memorized it. If I can memorize a recipe upon one viewing then you know it’s easy. The basic ingredients are:

3 cups of lightly packed basil leaves (I discard the thickest stems)
2 cups olive oil

· Combine in a blender until finely chopped (do not puree)
· Pour mixture into a pan and heat over medium heat.
· Stir occasionally until the mixture bubbles around the pan sides.
· Remove from heat and let cool for about an hour.
· Line a strainer with two layers of cheesecloth and strain into a large enough storage container.
· Store the basil oil dressing in the refrigerator and use on any number of lettuce varieties found in grocery stores.

This quantity lasts us a week. You can vary these portions as necessary based on usage. It will solidify in the refrigerator, so take it out at least 30 minutes prior to use.

It is that simple. PJ takes half of the mixture to work along with other salad fixings. Sometimes I get the containers back.

After you try this you will understand her sense of loss if something happens to me.