Tummy Warming Desserts for The New Year

From Denny: Celebrity chef Ed Brown is back again to help us keep on the pounds. Oh, what a man! :) Seriously, we adore bread pudding of any variety here in south Louisiana. It stars daily at in-store lunch or deli menus since French bread is still a big hit here, embedded into the traditional French culture stemming from New Orleans. And, just this last weekend I saw the grocer putting out fresh clementines, a delightful citrus for which Chef Brown has a recipe too.

Oh, and when I'm out of fruit for a bread pudding, I often substitute our other fav fruit: chocolate chips. I'm especially a huge fan of Ghiradelli brand double chocolate chips from San Francisco, California. The double chocolate means there is more chocolate in relation to sugar. My complaint about most chocolate chips is there is so much sugar you can barely taste the chocolate and Ghiradelli puts out the smoothest most awesome taste.

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Cranberry bread pudding

From: Chef Ed Brown

Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

• 3/4 vanilla bean, split and scrape insides, reserve pod for another time
• 3 cups milk
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 5 whole eggs
• 1 1/2 French baguettes (day-old best), cut into 2-inch-thick slices
• 1/2 cup golden raisins
• 1 cup cranberries (fresh or frozen fine)
• 2 teaspoons soft butter

DIRECTIONS

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

• In a large nonreactive bowl, combine vanilla, milk, cream, cinnamon, lemon, sugar, salt and eggs, whisk until well blended.

• Add the bread slices, raisins and cranberries, toss and soak for 40 minutes.

• Butter a 12-inch (ovenproof) ceramic deep pie dish with soft butter.

• Transfer bread and egg mixture to dish, be sure to have the fruit well distributed.

• Cover dish with aluminum foil, place in oven for 1 hour, removing the foil the last 15 minutes.



Clementines with Grand Marnier

From: Chef Ed Brown

Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

• 15 each clementines, peeled, segmented
• 2 cups simple syrup
• 1 cup Grand Marnier
• 6 each mint leaves
• 2 tablespoons Grenadine

DIRECTIONS

Combine all except Grenadine and refrigerate 2-4 hours before serving. Serve in a glass pedestal. Just before serving drizzle Grenadine on top.



*** ALSO: 5 Recipes: Lemon Chicken, Portobello Fries and Sides

*** THANKS for visiting, feel free to use any of these cute graphics as they are free to use on your site or blog - and stay warm this winter!

5 Recipes: Lemon Chicken, Portobello Fries and Sides

From Denny: Chef Ed Brown rustled up a more interesting menu to start off the New Year. OK, so he hooked me with the easy and simple lemon chicken as we love anything lemon at our house. And those Portobello fries look awesome! What can I say? I'm a big fan of brain food - my fav mushroom! :)

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Lemon chicken

From: Chef Ed Brown

Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

• 2 pounds boneless chicken breasts, cut into thin cutlets (approx. 1/2 inch thick)
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon fresh black pepper, ground
• 1/2 stick butter
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1/4 cup white wine
• 1/2 cup chicken broth, or vegetable broth or water
• 16 each paper-thin lemon slices with the skin
• 1/2 bunch flat-leaf parsley, picked, washed, dried, roughly chopped

DIRECTIONS

• Combine flour, salt and pepper and place in baking dish.

• In a large nonreactive skillet, melt 1/2 the butter over medium fire.

• Dust the chicken cutlets in the seasoned flour, shake off excess.

• Place chicken into the melted butter and reduce flame a little so it cooks slowly with NO color, turn after 2 minutes.

• Add lemon juice and wine, simmer 3 minutes.

• Remove chicken to serving platter, add stock to pan and increase heat to high, when boiling add remaining butter and simmer until reduced to half; cook 3-4 minutes.

• Place lemon slices and parsley over chicken.

• Pour sauce over the chicken.


Roasted carrots

From: Chef Ed Brown

Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

• 2 bunches medium, fresh carrots with tops, washed, trimmed not peeled
• 1/2 cup good olive oil
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Place carrots on baking sheet, coat with oil and season. Place in oven and roast until tender, approximately 25 minutes.


Smashed potatoes with olive oil and parsley

From: Chef Ed Brown

Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

• 8 each medium Yukon Gold or red bliss potatoes
• 3 quarts water
• 2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 2 bay leaves
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1/4 cup best quality extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 bunch flat-leaf parsley, picked, washed, dried, roughly chopped
• Fleur de sel or kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper

DIRECTIONS

• Bring potatoes, water, salt, bay leaves and garlic to a boil in a large pot.

• When fork-tender, approximately 18 minutes, drain water, discard garlic and bay leaves, return potatoes to pot.

• Add oil, salt and pepper, then use either a potato masher or a large fork and roughly smash mixture. Add parsley, check seasoning.


Portobello fries with soy dipping sauce

From: Chef Ed Brown

Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

Portobello fries

• 8 each portobello mushrooms
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups club soda
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 5 cups canola oil
• Sea salt

Soy dipping sauce

• 1/2 teaspoon soy sauce
• 1 1/2 tablespoons ketjap manis sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon Thai fish sauce
• 3 tablespoons mirin
• 1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
• 1 slice fresh ginger, smashed

DIRECTIONS

Method for portobello fries

Remove the stems and the gills from the bottom of the portobello mushrooms. Cut the mushrooms like steak fries. Lightly dust the mushrooms with 2 tablespoons of flour. Mix the flour, club soda, eggs and kosher salt to form a batter. Dip the portobello fries in the tempura batter. Blanch the fries in the canola oil at 325 degrees F. Drain on a dry towel and let cool.

Heat the oil to 375 degrees. Cook the blanched fries in the hot oil until they are golden brown and crispy. Drain on a dry towel. Season with the sea salt.

Method for soy dipping sauce

Mix the soy sauce, ketjap manis, Thai fish sauce, mirin and rice wine vinegar. Add the ginger. Marinate overnight. Strain through a fine chinois or other small mesh strainer.


Endive, watercress and pomegranate

From: Chef Ed Brown

Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

• 3 endive, split, cored, cut lengthwise in 1-inch segments
• 1 bunch fresh watercress, washed, dried, remove large stems
• 1 fresh pomegranate, remove seeds only, discard rest
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 teaspoons sherry vinegar
• Kosher salt and fresh black pepper to taste

DIRECTIONS

In a salad bowl, combine all ingredients, season, toss, serve.

*** ALSO: Tummy Warming Desserts for The New Year

*** THANKS for visiting and feel free to use these free graphics for your site or blog - and stay warm this winter!

How Funny! 10 Banned Overused Buzzwords of 2009

From Denny: That's the thing about buzzwords. First they are cool because they are a clever reference or manipulation of other words and then everyone starts using them. Our minds so crave something clever and unusual.

Then those same cool words get overused and suddenly people turn on them, like a rabid dog bites its once loved owner, declaring them now uncool. I can only imagine the confusion of someone trying to learn the English language. The occasional idioms are one thing but popular current language is a real mind-bender at times. I'm a native speaker and even I scratch my head sometimes, going, "Huh?" :)

Well, lucky you, these words and phrases are on their way "out" of our everyday language for 2010. Of course, who in the heck declares what's "in" or "out" anyway? Some fairy godmother waving her wand over the globe? Well, on to new magic in the New Year!



Photo by Betsie Van Der Meer/Corbis

1. Sexting = sex + texting - Parents are horrified, kids snicker, while someone gets slapped with pornography charges for dirty dialing on the phone. Not too funny when the law comes calling and empties your wallet for the deed.



Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid photo by Nicholas Kamm/Getty

2. Public option - Health care reform bill reference to a government run health care plan that is actually affordable. The popular idea is it would compete with private plans to force the insurance companies to keep their prices in line "or else" the public has a cheaper alternative with the government. Works for me. Seems to me the only ones that want to ban this phrase are the insurance companies because it means less billion dollar profits to the CEOs.



3. Autotune - Refers to a software program to correct imperfect musical pitch. After rapper T-pain made good use of it the late night comedians picked it up and applied it weirdly to news clips. T-pain released his own iPhone app that has been downloaded to the tune of 10,000 a day. Bet he doesn't care if he becomes a cliche with that kind of money rolling in daily at $3 an app. Whew!



Photo by Christy Bowe/Corbis

4. Wise Latina - Came from Sotomayor's first Latina nomination to the Supreme Court. This is the much maligned and repeated line from her 2001 speech the racists tried to use against her: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." What's funny is that her term of a wise Latina became a rallying cry in the Hispanic community where people proudly displayed it on T-shirts, coffee mugs, baby bibs and banners. Isn't it great fun when the mean-spirited people get backfired?! :)



Republican Senator Grassley photo by Alex Wong/Getty

5. Death Panel - Senator Grassley from Iowa declared for sure that Obama's health care plan would "pull the plug on Grandma." This is the same guy who was crafting the bill, had read it supposedly and yet still claimed this to be true. The 1,000 page bill had no mention of committees that were set up to execute the infirm or the old. Dementia or just plain stupidity here?

Alaska's weird Governor Palin shrieked from a Facebook message: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society, whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." Uh... Governor, can you read?



6. Birther - Speaking of shriekers, Orly Tait from California, peddled a huge fat lie that Obama was secretly smuggled into Hawaii just after his birth so he could qualify as an American citizen. What drugs was this guy on? This stuff is so incredulous you can't make it up: he did. Now what mother who just gave birth is going to get on a plane with a day old baby and fly all the way from Kenya to America? Are you nuts or just not female? Worse, who is actually brain dead enough to believe any of this warped nonsense?

Obama was born in Hawaii, complete with birth certificate and birth announcement in a local paper. Yet the Birther crowd still demands to see the original document. Yeah, like I'm going to show a bunch of crazed folks my social security number and other personal data as a sitting President. Yeah, right.



Photo by Juice Images/Corbis

7. Opposite Marriage - It's supposed to mean a marriage between a man and a woman but Miss California, Carrie Prejean, bungled her rambling answer to a question and it fumbled into this phrase. The question: Do you think gay marriage should be legalized in every state of the union? Answer: "Um, we live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there." As you can guess there were some angry folks and a shouting match.



Michael Jackson Photo by Paul Richards/Getty

8. Summer of Death - A number of high profile notable celebrities passed away this year: singer Michael Jackson, actor Ed McMahon, actress Farrah Fawcett, newsman Walter Cronkite, actor and dancer Patrick Swayze, John Hughes and even beloved Taco Bell spokes-puppy Gidget the Chihuahua. Most of the deaths occurred from May to August of 2009.

From the New York Times: "No more celebrities had died than in past summers ... this summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray."



Photo by Pete Souza/White House/Getty

9. Beer Summit - Prez Obama met with black Harvard professor Henry Gates, Jr. and white police officer Sergeant James Crowley to defuse a racial incident between them. The local police badly handled a call from one of Gates' neighbors who thought someone was breaking into Gates' house: it was Gates fumbling with his keys at the door.

The police got angry when Gates got angry and the whole thing blew up out of proportion, taking on racial overtones and a national controversy. Obama made public comments about the incident when he really should have remained above the fray.

Police profiling of minorities is a sticking point in America even after electing the first African-American President. Obama successfully sat down with the men over shared beers to lay to rest the overblown sensitive issue. Of course, the photographers had never seen an American President do such a thing and went wild in the Rose Garden snapping a piece of history.



Photo by Simon Marcus/Corbis

10. Green Shoots - What's the first thing you think of when you hear this phrase? Yep! Spring time and vibrant green plant shoots rocketing out of the ground at record pace. Turns out this phrase has been around about twenty years now. It really caught on this year when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, in a 60 Minutes interview, used it to describe his optimism for this year's economic growth.

Of course, since then depressed and disappointed analysts - and desperate journalists - jumped on the bandwagon and wore it out trying to use it as a soothing effect on their audiences. From Slate's Daniel Gross: "Economists are now walking around, eyes fixed on the ground like French rustics hunting for truffles, searching for verdant signs of growth."

I have to admit it was truly bizarre to hear modern day crusty personality business journalists using the phrase "verdant signs of growth" like they had just popped in from a 19th century luncheon with Sherlock Holmes at a poetry slam. I'll have to keep my eye on these guys in 2010 just to make sure they aren't suffering from buzzword dementia... :)

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Editorial Cartoons 2 Jan 2010

From Denny: Here's a sampling of editorial cartoonists' opinions, love 'em or hate 'em, as to the news and the year and decade that was and what the New Year might bring us:

See Cartoons by Cartoon by R.J. Matson - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

A short video of a few of the New Years fireworks worldwide:

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See Cartoons by Cartoon by Mike Keefe - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

It's the big ugly fact that if government does not spend the economy will crash down upon our ears. As it is, the banks are still not lending much for car loans and demanding 20% down for houses, creating a shaky economy:

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Larry Wright - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Gary McCoy - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Milt Priggee - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

See Cartoons by Cartoon by David Fitzsimmons - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Jeff Parker - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

*** For the full post, full of more grinners, over at The Social Poets, go here.

*** THANKS for visiting and have a great weekend!

Valentines Day: Impressive Four Chocolates Cake

From Denny: Looking through some old magazines today I found quite an impressive chocolate cake that was a category winner in the contest Your Best Recipe. What are the four chocolate tastes that converge all into this one gorgeous cake?

There is bittersweet and semisweet chocolate used in the cake batter. Then to "gild the lily" she dresses this cake with a mocha cream filling and the final adornment is a coffee liqueur ganache icing, topped with dark chocolate curls.

What makes this cake so special is the brown sugar in the cake batter that adds that mysterious hint of caramel flavor that goes so well with intense chocolate.

Awesome! I'm telling you this is THE cake to make for Valentine's Day! I hope I can wait that long...:) You will definitely get rave reviews for this beauty.

From: Category winner of Your Best Recipe, Florence Neavoll of Salem, Oregon - Southern Living, re-published January 2006

Prep: 30 min.
Bake: 30 min.
Cool: 10 min.

Yield: Makes 12 to 14 servings

Ingredients:

cooking spray
vegetable shortening
1/2 (4 ounce) semisweet chocolate baking bar, chopped
1/2 (4 ounce) bittersweet chocolate baking bar, chopped
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
3 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 cup boiling water
Coffee Liqueur Ganache Icing
Mocha-Chocolate Cream Filling
Garnish: chocolate curls

Directions:

Coat 3 (8-inch) round cakepans with cooking spray. Line bottoms of pans with wax paper; grease wax paper with shortening, and set aside.

Melt chocolate in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring until smooth; set aside.

Beat butter at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy. Gradually add sugar, beating until light and fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until yellow disappears after each addition. Stir in melted chocolate and vanilla.

Sift together flour and next 3 ingredients; add to butter mixture alternately with buttermilk, beating at low speed just until blended, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Stir in boiling water. Pour batter evenly into prepared pans.

Bake at 350° for 28 to 30 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks 10 minutes; remove from pans, and cool completely on wire racks.

Place 1 cake layer on a serving plate; spread top with 4 tablespoons Coffee Liqueur Ganache Icing. Spread half of Mocha-Chocolate Cream Filling evenly over ganache on cake layer. Top with second cake layer; spread top with 4 tablespoons Coffee Liqueur Ganache Icing and remaining Mocha-Chocolate Cream Filling. Top with remaining cake layer. Spread remaining Coffee Liqueur Ganache Icing on top and sides of cake. Garnish, if desired.


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