Matters of Taste

Hooked on Colorado Cookies

Inspiration comes to cooks from strange places.

Last week I experienced one of the weirder examples of this.

Biking Biking with my husband and sons in Colorado’s San Juan mountains, we set out from Ridgway, a picturesque, two-block town straight out of a John Wayne movie, and headed for

the Ridgway State Park and reservoir. It was a glorious fall day -- bright blue sky, with a few wispy white clouds and a biker-friendly temperature of 60 degrees.

 

After rolling the length of the Dallas Creek Trail (a paved bikeway along the sloshing creek), we entered the state park and began an aggressive uphill climb on a single-track path that hugged the cliff bordering the reservoir.

 

Out of nowhere came a nasty black cloud…and by the time we reached the top of the trail, which ended in a campground and parking lot, it was starting to rain and the wind was working itself into a frenzy.

 

Luckily for us, the park’s Visitor Center was nearby. We rolled over and were met by three park rangers who gestured to us emphatically.  “Severe storm warning,” one shouted. “We just got word of a severe storm warning. Come on inside.”

 

For the next hour-plus, we watched Mother Nature put on one of her better shows…and  thanked our lucky stars that we weren’t still on a muddy trail hanging over a cliff as fierce lightning brushed by.

Our family is, by nature, a resourceful bunch. We can entertain ourselves quite well. But after reading the brochures on “how to deal with black bears” and the geological history of the Uncompahgre Plateau; scanning the visitors’ guest book; and trying on the goofy “animal” hats for sale, we were wishing someone had brought a deck of cards

That’s when I spotted the Colorado Cookie Collection. The cookbook, by a couple of Colorado women who compiled the recipes from friends and family, was one of  a handful of Colorado books for sale at the Visitor Center.

If it had been Colorado Casseroles, I would have been intrigued. But I am not a baker. Don’t have the precision or the patience. I might bake cookies or a pound cake once or twice a year. However, I do love cookies more than any other type of sweet and I do know a good recipe when I see one.

 

With nothing else to do, I flipped through the Cookie Collection and became an instant fan.  The book is divided into chapters on bar cookies, drop cookies, holiday cookies, no-bake cookies, etc.  Recipes are concise and well-written. Type face is user-friendly. And though there were no photos, my mouth was watering as I read.

 

With the stub of pencil I found in my bike bag and the back side of a park trail map, I jotted down, shorthand, the recipes for High-Altitude Marble Brownies and Oatmeal Drops.

 

When the rain let up and a park ranger declared that the emergency was over, we hustled out to our very wet bikes, inched down the slippery single track and found ourselves back in scattered sunshine within a half hour and back in Ridgway in a little more than that.

Before heading home, though, I hit the local supermarket for peanut butter chips, baking powder, unsweetened cocoa and cream cheese.

That night, I whipped up a batch of ooey-gooey marble brownies that were quintessential Americana, quintessential comfort food.  My kids were disappointed that we didn’t get to do the whole park-reservoir bike ride, but they know they hit the jackpot when I discovered the Colorado Cookie Collection.  By authors Duncan and Patrick, it’s available on-line at Barnes & Noble, Oh yeah, and at the Ridgway State Park Visitor Center.

 

A Dream Product from Peanut Butter & Co.

How do you make yummy “homemade” chocolate-peanut-butter-oatmeal cookies with less than three minutes of effort?

It all started when I read about Dark Chocolate Dreams on the Web site Bite of the Best.

Dark Chocolate Dream is a rich melding of natural peanut butter and cocoa…not a side-by-side flavor production like Reese’s PBCups but rather a smooth, subtle, grown-up blend.

 Bite of the Best is a cool interactive Web site devoted to finding, sampling and spreading the word about tasty new food products. Webmaster Bonnie Tandy Leblang, a longtime friend and fellow food writer, is an authority on nutrition. Together with her two twenty-something sons, she writes Bite of the Best as three different perspectives on each product. (The Web site also includes product coupons and  contests.)

Back to the cookies.  Desperate to schmear my new-found Dark Chocolate Dreams on something, I baked a batch of break-apart refrigerated oatmeal cookie dough; let them cool for 10 minutes, then spread each with a tablespoon of Dreams.  The easy-to-spread product has a pronounced peanut and cocoa flavor, with none of the sugar-overload found in many flavored peanut butters. It’s smooth, but retains that slight (and satisfying) grittiness of natural peanut butter. 

 It would also be delicious swirled into softened frozen yogurt, baked into banana bread and bread pudding, and plopped on (and in between) a stack of hot pancakes.

 Dark Chocolate Dreams is the brainchild of Peanut Butter & Co., a New York City company that started out as a tiny sandwich shop near New York University and Washington Square. The product line has grown to 10 varieties of peanut butter including Smooth Operator, Bee’s Knees (with honey), White Chocolate Wonderful, and The Heat is On, which is spiced with cayenne,  chili powder and crushed red pepper. (I’m trying that one in a Thai-style grilled chicken salad later this week.)

You can find the product ($6 a jar) in some upscale supermarkets (I bought it at Bristol Farms in La Jolla), at the original sandwich shop, and on-line at I Love Peanut Butter.com.

 

 

Say "American Cheeses" by Clark Wolf...and Smile

I had breakfast last week with Clark Wolf, the most quoted restaurant consultant in the U.S. Whip-smart and wise-cracking to boot, he’s every food writer’s go-to authority on restaurant decor and menu design, farmers markets and food trends, cuisine, culture and Camembert.

 It’s the Camembert we were talking about over breakfast at Loews Coronado Bay Resort. Camembert, that is, as one of the many glorious cheeses being made in America today.

 Wolf’s new book “American Cheeses: The Best Regional, Artisan, and Farmhouse Cheeses --  Who Makes Them And Where to Find Them” is a comprehensive look at a food niche that was dominated by Cheez Whiz and Velveeta for decades. Few people have Wolf’s passion or encyclopediac knowledge of  what’s been called “milk’s leap toward immortality.”  (He basically created  the cheese department at the legendary Oakville Grocery back in 1980.)  And he shares both passion anad knowledge with us in these pages.

The basics are there: How cheese “happens.” The various families of cheese, including fresh, soft,  semi-soft, blue, goat, sheep, rind vs. no rind, etc. How to buy cheese, store it, and eat it.

But my favorite part of the book is the road-trip across the U.S, with stops at dairies, cheese plants and small farmstead kitchens, and introductions to some of the personalities responsible for the growing sophistication of American cheese.

 Well, actually, that’s my second most favorite part of the book. My absolute favorite, and reason enough to purchase this tome, is the Macaroni and Three-Peppercorn Goat Cheese recipe from Zingerman’s Roadhouse, a deli-market in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  A bubbly masterpiece of fresh goat cheese, roasted red bell peppers, Dijon mustard, and ground white, black and green peppercorns, it’s topped with a crusty, bread-crumb-cloaked round of aged goat.

That's just one of the dozens of tantalizing recipes -- Lemon-Goat Cheese Tart or Berkshire Blue Cheese Bread Pudding, anyone? -- included in "American Cheeses." Available at Amazon.com.

 

Coming Up

“American Cheeses – The Best Regional, Artisan, and Farmhouse Cheeses.” A captivating new book that celebrates the art of cheese-making in America and includes killer recipes for mac ‘n cheese.

 

New Product review: A marriage made in heaven -- dark chocolate and peanut butter. Now in a jar.Get ready for the best bread pudding of your life.

 

Holy Cow. A side-by-side taste test of Choice and Prime rib-eyes.

Check out these posts early next week.

Times Flies....When You're Eating Well

What’s it like to ‘eat for a living’?

 

Today’s edition of The La Jolla Light features my story about becoming its first restaurant critic 30 years ago, and watching the dining scene evolve over the years from margaritas-and-nachos territory to a sophisticated, trend-setting celebration of terrific  food.

 

San Diego residents and visitors alike will laugh at the vintage photos (at left, in 1981, a super cool Bertrand Hug watches chef Andre Mena do his stuff) and cry over the tarte tatin and confit de canard that they’ll never get to taste again.

Check it out.

One-Upping Julia: Michel Richard's 'California Ratatouille'

RATATOUILLE, once just a tough word for Americans to pronounce, is now the hippest dish around.

It all started with the Disney movie of that name, in which a kitchen rodent nudges a human to new career highs. Before that, most Americans equated the traditional French dish with soggy eggplant and long hours of dicing and sautéing.

With the opening of the movie Julie & Julia, the veggie classic is once again in the limelight.

Personally, I’m thrilled. That means that now, when guests ask me what I’m making for dinner and I answer “ratatouille,” I no longer get the “say what?” response. By the way, the correct pronunciation is ra-ta-too-ee (unless you’re French, in which case it’s ra-ta-twee, the last syllable spit out with gusto).

I’ve been a huge fan of the dish since the early ‘70s when I learned to make it from Julia’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”  I would dutifully salt the zucchini and eggplant, slice the yellow onions and green bell peppers, and “peel, seed and juice” the tomatoes. After sauteeing each veggie by itself, I’d make three layers of the combo, separated by minced parsley, in a flame-orange Le Creuset dutch oven. The whole process took well over an hour and dirtied a lot of pans, and the cookbook, too.

Then there’s Wolfgang Puck’s ratatouille, served room temperature atop grilled swordfish, which I discovered one sunny afternoon at Ma Maison in Los Angeles.  It was the mid-seventies; Puck wasn’t even 30 years old.  It remains one of the most delicious things I ate in a career of ‘eating for a living.’

But it’s the ratatouille of another come-lately Californian that I cook at home all the time now. French-born Michel Richard, who opened trend-setting Citrus in Los Angeles in 1987 and now operates two award-winning restaurants in Washington, D.C., gives the dish a fresh, sparkling new look and taste. The vegetables – including corn kernels, red bell pepper, jalapeno and Anaheim chiles – are cooked quickly, with far less olive oil than the classic French version. Chili powder and chopped cilantro add an exciting new dimension. A splash of Champagne vinegar further punches up the flavors.

I make a large batch and use in on top of grilled swordfish and chicken breasts, tossed with pasta and buffalo mozzarella cheese, folded into leftover rice for an impromptu ‘risotto,’ and on top of Gruyere omelets.

Here’s the recipe (adapted) from “Michel Richard’s Home Cooking with a French Accent.” The book is available at Amazon.com.

CALIFORNIA RATATOUILLE

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium red onion, peeled and diced
1 large ear corn, kernels removed
1 large red bell pepper, cored, seeded and thinly sliced
1 large yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded and thinly sliced
1 poblano or anaheim chili, cored, seeded and minced
1 jalapeno chile, cored, seeded and minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons chili powder
2 tablespoons fresh minced cilantro
1 medium zucchini, ends trimmed, quartered lengthwise and cut crosswise into 3/8-inch pieces
1 medium yellow crookneck squash, ends trimmed, cut into matchsticks to match zucchini
4 medium green onions (white and light green parts only), quartered  lengthwise and cut into ½ inch-pieces
2 medium tomatoes, halved crosswise, seeded and diced
½ cup tomato juice
1 tablespoon Champagne or white wine vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy large nonstick skillet, over medium-low heat. Add the onion, cover and cook until translucent, for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the corn, red pepper, yellow pepper, poblano and jalapeno; increase heat to medium and cook uncovered 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the 2 tablespoons of olive oil, chili powder and cilantro. Stir in the zucchini, yellow squash, green onion and tomatoes. Pour in the tomato juice and vinegar, increase heat to medium-high and cook until the vegetables are crisp-tender, for about 7  minutes, stirring occasionally. Season with salt and pepper. Serve immediately or cool for 15 to 30 minutes to lukewarm.