I’ve known Giuliano, Lael and the girls since their early days of the blog. The Hazan’s live in Sarasota, Florida, just a few minutes hop down the interstate from us. If you’re not familiar with Giuliano, I’m sure you’ve heard of his mother, Italian cooking doyenne, Marcella Hazan, whom I was lucky enough to spend time with a couple of years ago.

Giuliano, Lael and I have crossed paths many times, though usually it’s is a quick “hi!” at the IACP conferences or other blogging conferences. We’ve dined at their house and they at ours – I’m in love with their girls, Gabriella and Michela, who love their pastas almost as much as their papa.

Giuliano just came out with a new book, Hazan Family Favorites, featuring recipes from his childhood and new recipes that he loves to make at home with the girls. The dishes are unfussy and simple to prepare – most recipes have just a handful of ingredients and 3 steps. My favorite part of the book was reading the family stories and watching Giuliano grow up with Marcella and Victor through photos!

This morning’s eggs from our hens and a giant zucchini from the garden went into the Frittata with Zucchini. We added a super-ripe heirloom tomato, also from our garden and finished it off with goat cheese crumbles (sadly, not from our homestead, though one day….maybe…a goat or two)

Zucchini Frittata Recipe

The zucchini is best sliced on a mandolin – the one I *love* is the handheld mandolin by Oxo for $14.99. It’s lightweight, under $15 and requires no setting up.

Gorgeous heirloom tomato from my garden – I don’t remember the name of this tomato, but it ripens to a deep dark red/black color.

The onions are caramelized with just a pinch of sugar. The sugar helps speed up the caramelization by half the time.

Sliced zucchini is added to the pan and cooked until soft.

Those pretty eggs are from the hens – we used 5 of them. Whisk the eggs well.

In the pan, pour in the eggs, throw on the tomato slices and dot with crumbled goat cheese. Bake.

Great for breakfast, brunch, lunch or dinner.

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 21 comments

The Chinese equivalent to bacon is Chinese Sausage, or “lap cheong” in Cantonese. If there’s one ingredient that will make brussels sprouts your most favorite vegetable, it’s Chinese Sausage (yes, even more so than bacon).

Chinese Sausage is the secret ingredient to my fried rice - and hey, it’s sold on Amazon.com (actually, that’s a pretty good price $12.85 for a package of 3).

I should probably compare Chinese Sausage to pancetta, as it’s more like pancetta than bacon. But it’s much sweeter and not quite as salty.

Each sausage is dotted with fat…lot of it. Is that a good thing? Well, I believe that sausage without fat is just pork. The fat is where the flavor is, but I do understand the fine line between full-flavored and too fatty. I’ll show you exactly how to deal with this and let you decide how much of that fat to keep or discard. (photos of Chinese Sausage from Amazon.com)

Brussels Sprouts Chinese Sausage

One of my favorite ways to prepare brussels sprouts is to treat it like cabbage and shred it with a chef’s knife. It is a little time consuming, cutting every itty bitty mini “cabbage ball” by hand….feel free to use a food processor with a shredding disc OR just cut each brussels sprouts in half and leave ‘em half orbs.

Dice the Chinese Sausage and throw ‘em in a cold wok or saute pan. Yes. cold pan. Turn on the heat to medium-low and let the sausage heat up gradually.

As it heats up, you’ll begin to see ‘em sweat. That’s a good thing – the fat inside each sausage is melting.

If you use a wok, it makes it easier, push the Chinese sausage up the sides of the wok and let the fat drip down. Make sure you control your heat – don’t let the sausage burn. Now at this point, you can use a paper towel and mop up all this extra fat and discard (!!!) or be like me and just use that fat to fry the brussels sprouts. Just do an extra lap in the pool.

Remove all of the cooked sausage to a plate, being careful to not scoop up any of that fat. We’ll add the cooked sausage back in the pan later.

Crank up the heat and add in the brussels sprouts. Add in 1 tablespoon of water to get the b.s. cooking. If you’ve taken the easy way out and only cut the b.s. in half, you’ll add in a bit more water, cover the pan and let the b.s. steam. But since we’ve got shreds, they cook rather quickly – no need to cover the pan.

Fish sauce is my other secret weapon in this dish – feel free to sub with soy sauce.

Once the brussels sprouts have cooked through – just taste one of them, they should still be just slightly crunchy but with no raw taste – add the Chinese Sausage right back in.

Toss toss toss!

Done. You’ll never have brussels sprouts quite like this….feel free to do this with regular cabbage as well.

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 32 comments

Usually sometime during the holiday, we’ll bake an entire bone-in ham.

Split pea and ham soup is so surprisingly easy, especially in a pressure cooker. It takes about 3 minutes of chopping, 4 minutes of pressure cooking time and then 20 minutes to just let it sit. My friend, Wendy taught me her version, which actually comes from the back of the package of split peas!

No soaking necessary (which makes the recipe even simpler!)

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments

You know the beginning stages of falling in love? That exhilarating, “I’ll stop the world and melt with you….” feeling (that’s for my Modern English fans).

Well, back on 8/8/08, my birthday a few years ago, I fell in love all over again with my husband. The morning of my birthday, he told me, “pack your bags, we’re going on a surprise trip!”

I’m like, “YAY! How fun!” But of course super-neurotic control-freak me went a little crazy.

Where are we going? Who’s going to take care of the kids? What do I pack? Who’s going to water my garden? Get the mail? Take the kids to school? Who will feeeeeeeeed my babies? Tellmetellmetellmeeeeeeee!!!!

Scott had it all taken care of. Like clockwork, the nanny rang our doorbell, the kids were hugging me goodbye, boarding passes were printed out (but not shown to me) and the car was packed.

I just had to force myself….pry myself away….and just go with the flow. Well, it turned out that we were headed to Las Vegas with reservations at a restaurant that I’ve been dying to try, Japonais at the Mirage. One of the side dishes was a mashed potatoes – savory, nutty, creamy and buttery. The funny thing was that you couldn’t really tell straight away what flavored the mashed potatoes and I had to ask the server for the secret ingredient, which he happily gave.

Miso paste.

Absolutely divine. Umami to the max. And still to this day, it’s one of my favorite ways to have potatoes.

As I’m writing this post, I’m gettin’ those same goosebumpy feelings – for my husband (not the potaotes). Scott rocks my world.

Miso Mashed Potatoes

Crazy easy to make. Basically, make mashed potatoes the same way you’ve always been making them, but stir in miso paste.

I’ve made this recipe for my client, Miso & Easy, who makes a super-convenient prepared miso that comes in a squeeze bottle. The same company is also the maker of best-selling miso paste called Marukome. You can use either product in this recipe.

Ingredients:

Okay, time to have a little fun here. Use any type of potatoes – white, russet or reds work best. Any type of fresh herbs- chives, tarragon, parsley or green onion. Cream or milk.

The first step is to boil the potatoes and them mash them.

Add in the butter and miso.

Pour in the milk.

Throw in some fresh chives.

No gravy, salt or pepper needed. The miso paste provides all the flavor.

By the way, I’m serving the Miso Mashed Potatoes with Ham with Grilled Peaches Recipe.

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 19 comments

Rule #1 of food blog design: Never launch a new design or features the day before you go on vacation or travel.

I thought I had learned this lesson, oh…..5 WordPress themes ago, but apparently I underwent a momentary lapse of good judgement last Friday. Not only were we going on a family vacation at Disney World, but we were hosting Food Blog Forum in Orlando at Disney World for 100 attendees and their families. (More on those fun times in another post!)

Scott and I started getting emails from readers that, “Your site be broke!” as one so eloquently wrote. But our energy was dedicated to creating magical moments for FBF attendees and our boys, and not for freaking out on a broke site. So we stopped checking emails and just had fun.

It was harder than I’m making it sound. There’s no such thing as “stop checking emails” or “turning off phones” for geeks like us. But we did our best and you know what? Our weekend was one of the best eeeevvveerrrrr!!!

Broccoli Spanakopita…or Broccolikopita

Spanakopita is a Greek pastry, usually filled with spinach and feta cheese folded in layers of filo dough. Most of the time, I see them folded into triangles (kinda like how you fold an American flag), but I decided that rolls were easier to shape, easy enough for my boys to help me in the kitchen.

Instead of spinach, we used fresh broccoli, something we had plenty of in the garden. Crispy, flaky and savory.

The first step is to lightly saute the onions, garlic and broccoli in olive oil. Season with a pinch of ground nutmeg and salt and pepper.

The broccoli should still be a little crunchy and bright green. Let the pan cool a bit and then stir in the raw egg. If the pan is too hot, the egg will cook. Remember, this all goes in the oven later for 20 minutes, so everything will be perfectly cooked.

Lay out a sheet of filo, brush with melted butter, then add another sheet. Spoon a couple tablespoons of the broccoli filling in the middle, near the bottom.

Fold over both sides.

Roll up.

Once you’re done with all of the rolls, brush the tops with butter.

Bake for 20 minutes and serve hot!

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 45 comments

It’s Spring Break and my boys think it’s only right that I make them “weekend breakfasts” every morning, which means I need to channel my inner White on Rice Couple (when they were here last month, Todd & Diane made homemade waffles, bacon to order and pancakes – something different every single morning) and create hearty breakfasts. T&D – you’ve spoiled my boys.

A winner here is Broccoli, Potato and Bacon Hash – with a little fresh thyme thrown in. The diced potatoes are cooked in bacon fat. Yes, bacon fat.

Instead of using broccoli florets, I use the stems, they cube perfectly to be the same size as the potatoes and cook to a tender, happy green bite.

The broccoli stem sort of gets ignored anyways, I’ve often seen cooks cut off the florets and throw away the stem. What for!? Underneath that first tough layer is a tender crunchy stem. Just use a peeler to take away that fibrous skin.

Everything is cooked in one pan on the stove. What’s important is the order of the ingredients added to pan so that every single ingredient is cooked perfectly.

1. Cook bacon, render that fat! Remove bacon (so that it doesn’t burn)

2. Cook the potato in the bacon fat….yeah, soak up all that goodness!

3. Add in the onion

4. Add in the broccoli stems and the garlic (garlic is added at this late in the game so that it doesn’t burn)

5. Cover and finish cooking

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 17 comments

We recently went to Ruby Tuesdays for dinner and guess what? They have Cauliflower Mashed “Potatoes”!! It looks like mashed potatoes, its texture is similar to mashed potatoes and the taste is mashed potato-y enough to make those who are on the Paleo diet or low carb diet happy.

When I made it for the family, they loved it but all agreed that we shouldn’t call it Mashed “Potatoes” but just simply Mashed Cauliflower – it’s tasty on its own merit without having to degrade it to a quote-potato-end quote status.

I like the mashed cauliflower to be a little chunky (like I like my mashed potatoes) so instead of using an immersion blender, I just use a potato masher to mash and stir with the butter and sour cream.

Top with chives (or whatever you normally like on your mashed potatoes) and you’ve got one heck of a side dish.

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 22 comments

I’ve known Béa, author of La Tartine Gourmande blog, ever since I first started blogging. The first time I saw her blog, I was just blown away – every photo made me daydream that I was on some kind of gorgeous picnic in heaven! (they do have picnics in heaven right?!)

All these years of corresponding with Béa via email, blog, twitter and facebook, it was only last year that I finally got to meet her in person. We were both in London to speak at Food Blogger Connect - Béa brought her family along and I got to squeeze the baby toes of sleeping Lulu. Sweetness!

Béa just came out with her book, La Tartine Gourmande Cookbook and it’s every bit of picnic in heaven as her blog. There are so many fresh and healthy recipes that I want to try: Beet and Quinoa Tabouli, Potato Nests with Gingered Crab and Crustless mini Quiches, just to name a few. All the recipes are gluten-free.

The dish I chose to make first is crazy simple – French Carrot Salad is grated carrot tossed with lemon juice and olive oil. I’ve added fresh shaved fennel from my garden and plucked a few fennel fronds to add to the salad.

It’s absolutely refreshing. Picnic in heaven food.

French Carrot Fennel Salad

Fennel in my garden:

Have a taste of the fennel fronds (the green stuff) and it’s amazing – AH-MAZE-ING raw in salads. Don’t throw it away! In fact, I grown the fennel in the garden specifically for the fronds. Every time I make salad, I just pinch one little stem off and mince for the salad.

The bulb, shaved and added to a salad gives an nice crunch and light anise flavor.

Slice the bulbs very thinly – I used a mandoline, but feel free to just use a sharp chef’s knife.

Whisk together the dressing ingredients – lemon juice, salt, pepper, olive oil, fresh parsley and a few pinches of fennel fronds.

Toss with grated carrots and fennel bulb.

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 10 comments

This recipe was originally slated for my cookbook, but I seem to have too many recipes already slated for the Vegetable chapter, so I’m puttin’ it here and sharing with you on the blog.

Learning a good stir fry technique for home cooking is important – it will save you from throwing out the odds and ends of vegetables in the refrigerator, and give you countless recipe ideas to whip up at the last minute.

A stir fry usually only takes 10 minutes to cook and can be as flexible as you want. Here’s my technique for home cooks.

How to Stir Fry Green Bean and Shiitake Mushrooms

You can use either a saute pan (a fry pan with high straight sides + lid) or a wok. The first step is to cook the green beans because they will have a difficult time cooking in the stir fry without overcooking the rest of the ingredients. Other vegetables that require pre-cooking include: broccoli, cauliflower and any thick, hard vegetable.

I like to steam them instead of boiling/blanching them because it takes less time to bring a small amount of water to boil for steaming.

Fill the wok with about 1 cup of water and bring to a boil. Add in the green beans and cover.

Once the green beans are cooked to crisp-tender (just taste one, if it doesn’t taste raw anymore, it should be fine), remove the beans and drain. Wipe the wok clean with a towel and return to the stove.

You need to make sure that the wok has no water – not even a drop – as you’ll be adding in cooking oil. Hot wok + water + oil = splatter and burns.

When the wok is hot again, swirl in the cooking oil and add in the mushrooms and onions. Stir fry for a couple of minutes. Then add in the garlic, ginger and green beans.

Why do we not add in the ginger and garlic in an earlier step with onions? Because they’ll burn. Burnt ginger and garlic is bitter. So we add it AFTER the mushrooms and the onions have cooked.

The next step is to add in the oyster sauce and water and stir fry until the sauce is just beginning to bubble. That’s it!

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 29 comments

A reader asked me what miso paste tastes like, while she has enjoyed miso soup at Japanese restaurants, she couldn’t quite imagine what cooking with miso paste would be like.

So what flavor dimension does miso paste add to a dish? If I had to just choose one single word, I’d say “umami” which is just a fancy foodie term that writers and chefs use. This is a tough one…..but okay, if I couldn’t use that word, I’d say, “tasty.” Even just a teaspoon of miso paste added to a dish (whether it’s a sauce for the asparagus, salad dressing, mashed potatoes or casserole) makes the dish tastier.

Miso has a very deep, complex flavor – salty yet slightly sweet, a little nutty. Lately, instead of adding salt to a dish, I’ll stir in a small spoonful of miso paste.

I need a little help from you all – can you help me describe the taste of miso vs. salt? Maybe it’s easier to use an analogy:

Salt is to Miso…….as _____ is to _____.

And hey, the one who comes up with the best analogy gets a prize. How about a $25 gift certificate to the Steamy Kitchen Store?

***

*Why all these miso recipes? I’m developing recipes for Marukome, the makers of Miso & Easy and some of the very best miso paste. 

Miso Ginger Asparagus Recipe

This recipe couldn’t be simpler….

Basically, throw the asparagus on a baking sheet and roast. In the meantime, whisk together the remaining ingredients – pour on top when the asparagus is done!

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2012. | Permalink | 66 comments