Happy Cinco De Mayo

Hope you have a happy (and safe) Cinco De Mayo. Here is a sweet and fun margarita for your celebration.

1 cup sugar
1 cup water
3 1/2 cups seeded, cubed watermelon
3/4 cup tequila
1/2 cup fresh lime juice
Crushed ice

Make a simple syrup by bringing sugar and water to a boil, stirring until sugar dissolves; boil for a minute, turn off heat and coo.

Put watermelon in blender and puree until smooth. In a cocktail shaker combine all ingredients and shake well. Serve over ice in sugar rimmed glasses.

The First Tomato

Here it is, the moment we have been waiting for...the first tomato. Many more to follow but I was so excited to see the first one get all red. I may have 'premature picked' in my excitement but it sort of fell off of the vine when I was checking it. We'll eat it tonight.

Mine are better than Ikea's!

Okay, y'all know m obsession with Ikea Swedish Meatballs. But I'm running out of my frozen stash and so I had to some up with a substitute, or drive four hundred miles to pick more up. So I looked up recipes on the Internet and found one from Ikea's cookbook. But the only problem was that the directions were European, in things like grams, deciliters, etc. I failed metric system and I'm an American, dammit, we won't change. So I had to adapt the recipe a bit. And then we ate them side by side with one of the few Ikea meatballs we had left. And guess what? My mom liked mine better! And I tasted them and I liked mine better too! I still need to work on the cream sauce but at least I have half of the equation down!

Better Than Ikea Swedish Meatballs

1 lb. ground beef
1/2 lb. ground pork
1 egg
1/4 c. half and half
1/4 c. flour
3 Tbsp. minced onion
2 small potatoes, cooked and cooled (you can boil but I just microwaved them)
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. allspice
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
5 Tbsp. butter

Saute onions in a bit of butter until tender and lightly browned. Cool. Peel and mash potatoes until smooth. Mix all of the ingredients together until it reaches a smooth consistency. Shape into small balls and fry slowly in remaining butter (I cooked the over medium low heat for about 45 minutes total.) Serve with cream sauce (I'll let you know how to make that once I perfect it!) I love them with big egg noodles, yum.

Newest Obsession

My mom made soba noodles with dipping sauce last night. They were great. My newest obsession. I am now invstigating the many ways of soba.

My mom thinks I should write a cookbook. She says she and my grandma are willing to be guinea pigs for my 'research' to write to book. I guess anything is possible!

Food Time Machine

There are a lot of days I wish I had a food time machine so I could have some of my favorite foods again. One of the reasons I learned to cook was so I could re-create some of my favorite dishes. If I hadn't learned to cook, I would have lost forever my Grandma's potato salad, her gravy, spicy hot tamales, my Mom's Swiss steak (which she still makes but not as often as I would like!), my Dad's shrimp wymus (which I still don't have exact but that's because he made it up and there is no actual recipe), my Grandma Kathleen's bourbon balls. There are some recipes I'm still working on, like my Grandfather's potato soup and my Grandma's bread pudding. Some of these recipes I haven't actually tasted the real thing since I was little girl. And if I finally recreate them, it will be good. But if I had a food time machine it would be wonderful. I could taste the recipes the way they were and ask some questions. But mostly I would be able to see and eat with the people I have loved and lost.

Food brings us together and binds us in an invisible but tangible way. Recipes are handed down from generation to generation to insure a little bit of immortality to the person who made them for us. I was only seven when my paternal grandfather died but I can remember that he made his potato soup all the time and it was so delicious and it made me feel safe and warm and loved. My brother and I still laugh at the way my Grandma Wilhite made biscuits and gravy. She was an awesome cook but a terrible baker. Her biscuits bordered on the awful. They were hard, flat little things (which seems really strange to me since they were Bisquick biscuits so I have no idea how she managed to get them not to rise) and they were almost always burned on the bottom. But as my brother says, it didn't matter because once you put her gravy on them they were heavenly. They were just an edible spoon really because you would have looked weird spooning gravy directly into your mouth but trust me, you wanted to.

There are also restaurants, now long gone, that I wish my time machine could take me. Las Vegas doesn't really appreciate history and so no one mourns the old restaurants. But most of the places I miss were family run restaurants that knew our names and welcomed us in to eat. Like the Miller Family Steakhouse, which was in an old Sizzler location and Mr. Miller always made sure to say hi when we came in for Sunday dinner, which was about once a month for most of the eighties. We knew when his kids got married, when the Millers had a new grandchild. I miss the Silver Star, a takeout only Chinese place where you couldn't see the kitchen but you could hear the woks a clangin' and they made the best fried rice I have ever eaten in my life (it was almost black and so wonderful). You could order enough food for a family of five for under fifteen bucks and have enough leftovers for a week. I miss the chicken chimichangas at Garcia's. They also made a killer chocolate mousse with Kahlua in it. There was the crab rangoon and strawberry chicken at Kwelin. The pizza at Pizza Inn. Enchilada's at Hilda's. The turkey sandwich at Country Inn on those yeast rolls and their killer honey mustard dressing. The soup and cottage cheese dip at the Alpine Village. I miss the atmosphere at Poppa Gar's. That Italian place we used to eat at on Boulder Highway. The food was so good at those restaurants but even better is the warm memories I have of eating there with my friends and family.

If you had a food time machine, where would you go? Who would you eat with? What food memory makes you happy?

My brother got a cast iron skillet for Christmas and he asked me if I would show him how to make my grandmother's gravy. I'd be honored. I hope I can do it justice. So that when he makes his own gravy he can savor the flavor of sitting at her table, crammed together in that tiny dining room, the table groaning under the weight of all that food. So his taste buds can remember separating the burned biscuit and heaping gravy over it. So that he can taste her love.

Home Grown Tomatoes

There is nothing like the taste and sell of a home grown tomato. My tomatoes are setting like crazy and now I'm just waiting for the first ones to get ripe. it's not easy gardening in the desert but I'm trying!

Learning Something New

I love it when I learn something that will help me out in the kitchen. Yesterday I learned how to make sticky rice (also called sweet rice and glutinous rice). Sticky rice is found in a lot of Thai restaurants. It's delicious. But I've always found it hard to make. We tried the rice cooker but couldn't get it right. The directions for the traditional method call for long soaking, then wrapping the rice in cheesecloth and steaming the whole bundle, which seems like a whole lot of work for a little bit of rice. So we kept looking at the large bag of rice we bought at the Asian market wondering what the heck we were going to do with it. Then yesterday I was cruising the Internet for recipes for 'pearl rice balls' (an appetizer with a won ton like filling that you roll in the sticky rice and steam) when I found a website with microwave instructions for making sticky rice. Yes, microwave. And it doesn't require six hours of soaking or cheesecloth. So I made it last night with some fish in a curry sauce and sauteed spinach in peanut sauce. It was perfect!

Here is how to make microwave sticky rice.

Soak once cup of stick rice in one cup (plus a tablespoon or two) of warm water for ten minutes in a microwave safe container. Microwave on high for three minutes. Stir. Microwave for another three minutes. Stir again. You are looking for all of the grains to be translucent. Continue microwaving and stirring at three minute intervals until all the rice is translucent. In my microwave this took about twelve minutes total but mine is pretty low wattage. Enjoy!