So I have kind of been clumsy in the kitchen...and well out of the kitchen...lately. And it is frustrating as my list of injuries continues to grow. I have had a few running injuries which make me grumpy to begin with, however last night when I smashed a knife into my finger, my grumpiness increased ten fold. How is it possible that I survived culinary school without losing a nail, a finger or a limb? Yet last night while enjoying a glass of wine (yes, just one), some good music and some kitchen time I butcher my own finger. Lovely!



In general, I am actually quite accident prone. I have been lucky, knock on wood, when it comes to the broken bone department, but my mishap list is quite long. Here are a few of my highlights:

• 18 months-first black eye. I refused to wait for my Mom while running on a beach path and head butted a rock...the rock won!
• 4 years old-first time getting ran over by a bike, yes I said first time. I was full on mowed over by another kid on a tricycle. He won!
• 21 years old-ran over by a second bike. I had just finished my last final for my last semester of college and while walking to my car I got ran over by a second bike. I can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt but this guy looked a lot like a young man I had met on the sidewalk 17 years prior....just sayin'
• 24 years old-first jelly fish sting...ok maybe several because I had marks all over my body. Nothing says sexy on a tropical vacation in Mexico like tentacle marks all over your arms and legs that burn
• 29 years old-while sleeping in a hotel room on the 2nd floor in a tropical country...startled awake by a large frog landing on my arm...it was a tree frog with sticky toes
• 29 years old-plane does emergency landing as it fills up with smoke...crash crews on the ground waiting for your plane...this is just never a good thing
• 32 years old-gets up in the middle of the night to use the restroom, while climbing back into bed somehow hits head on dresser, giving oneself a black eye...this is my second black eye

So truth be told I actually offered to do the appetizers for my friends 40th birthday, but as I was making them, I got to thinking (yes, scary, I know). And I realized that these appetizers were also potentially a trial run for Super Bowl. Did you know that Super Bowl is the 2nd largest food consumption day in the US? Thanksgiving is #1...no big surprise, right? Anyway we are a mere 2 weeks away from the big game and the even bigger eating fest. So here are two appetizers that are easy to make, really tasty and they were a huge hit at the party.




The first one-Olive Sun Dried Tomato Tapenade is by far the easiest appetizer on the face of the planet and it can be made ahead of time, which is always nice when you are entertaining. If you have a food processor or blender, this appetizer will make you happy! It also has great flavor, it is salty from the olives, smooth from the olive oil and has an earthy charred flavor from the sun dried tomatoes. Yum! The recipe is from Giada and it is to be served with endive and radicchio, however I did a combination of endive and baguettes to make it more user friendly.






So in a food processor, combine 24 oz of pitted kalamata olives, that are drained, 3/4 cup sun dried tomatoes that are packed in olive oil and 5T of olive oil.


Process until the mixture is blended but still slightly chunky! Yup that is it! It looks like you spent hours chopping olives, but truth be told, I just didn't.

So moving on to the Spinach Artichoke Dip. This recipe screams Super Bowl and seriously everyone loves gobs of cheese (yes, that is totally a technical kitchen term), artichokes and spinach, especially when it is baked together into a creamy mass of goodness and served with bread! Heaven! This recipe is awesome! It is cheesy, has a hint of spice and well there is green stuff in it, so it has to be good for you, right?

So first of all, cook the spinach and garlic in butter, until it is welted. I swear, every time I cook spinach, it feels like a magic trick, as you go from a large bag of fluffy green leaves, to a handful of green stuff. Wacky! Remove the spinach from the pan and cook the artichoke hearts, removing them after 2 minutes.

Make a roux, so melt 5T of butter and sprinkle in 3T of flour, whisking it continuously until it becomes a paste and then cooking for another minute. Add in the milk and continue to whisk until its smooth. As a side note, I never cook with whole milk, but since this recipe called for it, well I bought it. And I had a glass of leftover milk this morning with my pancakes, it was so good, what a treat!!



Next add the cream cheese, feta, Parmesan and half of the pepper jack cheese. Continue to stir until it is melted. Add salt, pepper and cayenne pepper.


Fold in the spinach and artichoke, if there is liquid in the veggies you can add that as well, actually helps to thin out the mixture a little bit.


Pour the mixture into a baking dish, sprinkle with remaining pepper jack cheese and bake for 15-20 minutes in a 375 degree oven. Voila!


Here is the actual recipe:

Ingredients
3 Tablespoons Butter
4 Tablespoons Garlic, Minced
1 bag Spinach
Salt And Pepper, to taste
2 cans Artichoke Hearts, Rinsed And Drained
3 Tablespoons Butter (additional)
3 Tablespoons Flour
1-1/2 cup Whole Milk (more If Needed)
1 package (8 Ounce) Softened Cream Cheese
1/2 cup Crumbled Feta
1/2 cup Grated Parmesan
3/4 cups Grated Pepper Jack Cheese
1/4 teaspoon Cayenne
Extra Grated Pepper Jack
Pita Wedges, Tortilla Chips, Crackers

Preparation Instructions
Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add the minced garlic and cook for a couple of minutes. Crank up the heat a bit and throw in the spinach. Stir around and cook for a couple of minutes until the spinach wilts. Remove the spinach from the skillet and put it in a small strainer. Squeeze the excess juice back into the skillet. Set the spinach aside.
Throw in the artichokes and cook over medium high heat for several minutes, until liquid is cooked off and artichokes start to get a little color. Remove the artichokes.
In the same skillet or a different pot, melt 3 additional tablespoons of butter and whisk in 3 tablespoons of flour until it makes a paste. Cook over medium-low heat for a minute or two, then pour in milk. Stir and cook until slightly thickened; splash in more milk if needed.
Add cream cheese, feta, Parmesan, pepper jack, and cayenne and stir until cheese are melted and sauce is smooth. Chop artichokes and spinach and add to the sauce. Stir to combine.
Pour into buttered baking dish. Top with extra grated pepper jack and bake at 375 for 15 minutes, or until cheese is melted and bubbly.
Serve with pita wedges, chips, or crackers!

And because today is MLK, thought you would all love to know that Martin Luther King had a few favorite foods, including but not limited to fried chicken, cornbread, collard greens and black eyed peas.  Hmmm, this sounds like a good excuse to cook...heading to the grocery store...cheers!!

I have always approached life as a celebration, regardless of the stage. I believe it is important to truly cherish the positive instead of getting entrenched in the negativity. And so I am single and I have been for quite some time. It is not that I am a man hater, haven't dated or wouldn't enjoy "Mr. Right," it is just that I am in the stage of my life where it is my time to kiss some frogs as I wait for the Prince. And so I want to take a moment to celebrate being single. Let me tell you a few things that are worth celebrating about being single:

1. I can be a starfish in the bed and no one complains that I am taking up the whole bed.
2. Along the same line as #1 I can hog all of the covers
3. I can have cereal, salami and cheese or a glass of wine for dinner
4. I don't have to fake headaches...hell I don't have to fake anything for that matter (yeah your mind can go in the gutter for a second)
5. I can keep a stack of magazines next to the bed without anyone getting angry about magazine clutter...and I can choose whether or not I want to read them
6. I can decide whether or not my jeans make my butt look big because I don't have to get a second opinion
7. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, without consulting another person
8. Every night can be a girls night out, if I so choose
9. I can buy shoes or clothes or handbags and not worry about how to sneak them into the house
10. I can cook because I am passionate about being in the kitchen, not because I have to


I love to make random things for dinner...because I can. It is common for me to make a side dish or an appetizer and call it dinner. So most recently, I decided to make Saffron Rice and call it dinner. Sure I also sauteed some spinach and steamed some asparagus, but really that was only to justify the fact that I wanted to really carb load off rice. In the past, I have always purchased Saffron Rice in a bag, ya know the kind that has all of the spices mixed into the rice for you. However, the other night I decided to make it on my own. And it was really good! I love the flavor of saffron and this rice recipe is much more subtle than the packaged kind. It also tastes more nutty and real, probably because it doesn't have all of the infusion of preservatives. This dish would be the perfect side dish for grilled chicken or fish!


To begin with take 10 1/2 ounces chicken broth and 1/8 tsp ground saffron and place in a saucepan. Simmer over medium heat to keep warm. Saffron is expensive and it is potent so you do not need a lot of it. And I just love that the saffron I purchased is packaged in a bindle that resembles narcotics sales...interesting.

Next cook 1 cup long grain rice and 2T olive oil in a separate pan. Cook until the rice is golden, this is the process that gives the rice a nutty earthy flavor. Add 1/2 cup minced onion and cook for 4-5 minutes.

Add the broth mixture to the rice. Also add 3/4 cup water and 1/3 cup dry white wine. Yes, a perfect excuse to open a bottle of wine, not because you want to drink it, just because you need it to cook...and oops sometimes it ends up in a wine glass and hence on your dining room table. That is what I call a win/win!!

Bring to a boil. Cover and reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes or until the liquid is absorbed and the rice is tender. The rice should also have a pretty yellowish hue.


Hope you all have an incredible weekend! Cheers!

I have very distinct childhood food memories from my youth and I completely remember going through stages of development based on my favorite foods of the time. And when I look back I recognize that my age group and the foods I enjoyed were reflective of my life events.




So here is my favorite food break downs based on my childhood:

Age 0-5 Understanding Food

• Pizza Crust-this is what I broke my first tooth on
• Bananas (mushed,frozen, whole)-my Mom fed me so many that I truly overdose on them and hate them more than life itself today
• Pancakes-ahhh the sugar rush of carbs and sugar, a lesson I learned at a young age

Breaking bread is obviously one of the oldest food traditions, if not THE oldest food tradition, and so I have always had visions of making homemade bread...in a woodfired oven, using cakes of yeast, waiting hours for it to rise and kneading the dough with my bare hands...like my ancestors. And this bread fantasy of mine was all well and good until I read the January/February issue of Cook's Illustrated. I learned that I can make homemade bread, without kneading, with rapid rise yeast and in a regular oven in under 2 hours, allowing me to move on and do something else and still have a house that smells like fresh baked bread goodness. Win/win!!



So today, while watching football, running, cleaning the house and watching the Golden Globes, after coming back from San Diego, I made bread! Let me just say my bread is good, but it is a little more dense than I think it was supposed to be. It has a great yeast bread flavor and it is brushed in butter so it also has a buttery crust which is nice, but I am just not so sure of the texture...and well I didn't get the top of my bread to look like a perfect dome, instead of an igloo style roof, my bread is more like a flat ranch style roof.

But let me share with you a few things I learned about bread from this article:

• The more yeast that is in the bread the faster the bread rises
• Adding more water to the bread enhances the gluten structure
• Gluten is a protein that forms when flour is combined with water. When you add yeast the gluten traps the gases that are released from the fermentation process, inflating the dough and causing it to rise (yup a little cooking science for you)
• The flavor in bread comes from the fermentation process