I’m not a cake person.  Especially that pedestrian cake that they sell at your local grocery store, that shit is awful. I’d rather have a nice golden brown fruit pie. Preferably apple or strawberry.

My beautiful and amazing wife however, is a cake person. Specifically chocolate cake. So this year for her second consecutive 29th birthday, I surprised her with quite possible the most luxurious chocolate cake ever made.

This cake was comprised of two unbelievably moist chocolate cakes, between which was an extra thick layer of creamy chocolate mousse. If that wasn’t rich enough, the entire thing was covered in chocolate ganache. Lots of chocolate ganache. Easily 1/4 inch in some places. On the top was some decorative chocolate swirls and sugar flowers, which for some reason my wife really thinks are delicious (She drinks).

 
I can not even begin to describe how wonderful this cake tasted. Chocolate times 1000! It’s almost overwhelming. After enjoying the delicate inside you get to basically eat an entire candy bar that has been wrapped around the outside. You really feel like you’ve accomplished something after eating a slice. And damnit, that’s the way dessert should be!

You might be wondering where I obtained such a wonderful cake, a fancy boutique bakery perhaps? Absolutely not. I was introduced to a woman who makes these cakes out of her house. As you can see she’s amazingly talented and she’s working up to doing this full time. She lives on the near East-side of Cleveland and she’s available to make a cake for you too. In the interest of keeping her personal contact information off of the Internet, if you’d like to order a cake from her leave a comment down below and I’ll send you her email address.

Update: No email address for you! The aforementioned cake lady is leaving the state. No more secret cake lady.

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The place is pretty tiny inside.  I think I counted 10 tables.  But, size never says anything about the service and quality of the place.  The thing I first noticed was there was a TV showing you everything the chef was working on.  Basically you can see your sushi being made, without having to stand over the chef and watch that way.  I thought that was pretty neat. 

We got our drinks right away when we sat down along with our menus.  The menu is 4 pages, with part of the menu being a ‘lunch combo’ section, which is served from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm.  Your choice of sushi is served along with soup and your choice of seaweed salad or pot stickers.  Being dinner time we missed out on that special… but, there’s always tomorrow.

There were so many choices; seafood salad, seaweed salad, edamame, potstickers, rolls, sashimi, tempuras and so much more. I decided to try their sushi rolls and choose the potstickers as an appetizer. I of course had some of my friends edamame,  The appetizer came with 6 pot stickers on the plate.  It was definitely a nice size appetizer to share between two people.  As soon as we were done with our appetizers, our sushi came out just a few minutes later.  My choice of rolls were the California Roll, Spicy Salmon, and my favorite of the evening, the Crunch Roll. 

The California Roll was the same as pretty much anywhere else I’ve had it.  The spicy Salmon was the regular Salmon Roll, drizzled with hot sauce over every roll.  I love spicy food, but this sauce was spicer than I had expected, and it made my sinuses clear out right away.  The crunch roll, my favorite roll now, was made with shrimp tempura, cucumber and avocado.  On top of this roll they added tempura batter all crumbled up with a drizzle of what seemed to be a teriyaki sauce.  The crumbles on top reminded me of a bread crumb topping.  But, I need to say it again… my favorite roll ever!!!

We had great service throughout the whole time we were there.  Our drinks were always full, and the server asked as quite a few times if there was anything else she could get for us as we dinned.

You have no idea how sad I am that I didn’t take a picture of this meal for you all to see… but, now you have an excuse to go and take a picture of your own meals when you head to Young’s Sushi in downtown Willoughby.

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When I was a little girl my dad used to take the family to this wonderful restaurant almost every Sunday.  It was called, El Parador.  Literally translated  “The Stopper”.  Basically this was “the place to stop and eat”… so yummy.  Our lunch was always the same.  Rotisserie chicken right off the spit, avocado salad, and boiled & fried Yuca.    Yuca is a root, from the same family as a potato.  It is very starchy and extremely hard when it’s raw.  This is one of those things you cannot eat raw… take it from me, I tried it once.  YUCK! If you like potatoes, I know you would love Yuca. 

There are two ways I make Yuca; boiled & fried.

To begin preparing the yuca you have to peel the outer brown bark-like skin it has on it.   Cut the Yuca into chunks, add to a pot of water.  To give the Yuca flavor, I add minced garlic and a palm-ful of dried parsley flakes.  It will need to boil for a while.  You will know it’s done when it is fork tender (just like a potato). When the Yuca is done, I drizzle a garlic/butter sauce over the top of the yuca to give it extra flavor.  Remember it is very starchy so it won’t have a lot of flavor unless you add something to it.

The second way you can make the yuca is frying it like a very thick French fry.  Instead of cutting it into chunks, you are going to cut it into slices like you would for extra thick French fries.  Add these to a pot and boil until they are a little bit less cooked then for the boiled yuca.  This way it won’t fall apart when you go to fry it.  Once the yuca is done, take it out of the pot, and dap it dry with a paper towel.  In a skillet, heat the oil of your choice.  Add enough oil so that the yuca fries are half covered in the skillet.  Once the oil is hot, add the yuca fries and fry until they are golden brown. Serve the yuca fries with ranch dressing or a spicy garlic sauce of your choice.

Like I always tell people, try everything once.  If you don’t like it, then at least you can say you tried it once…

None Found

The inherent problem with most cookbooks though is this: The recipes are in control.  So what happens if you don’t have that recipe anymore? Or what happens if your recipe calls for white wine and you’ve only got red?  Then what?

Well, in my wife’s case, she usually throws up her hands and says she can’t do it. She has to have that recipe because it’s safe for her.  What she really needs though is confidence that she is the one in control, not the recipe.

In Mark Bittman’s book How to Cook Everything, he puts the person in control of the meal, the recipe is simply one of the many tools at their disposal.

I’ve been a fan of Mark Bittman with his Minimalist column in the New York Times and I’ve enjoyed his shows on PBS.  His straightforward, no B.S. style really appeals to my tastes and I like the fact he can have a good laugh in the kitchen.  There are way too many people who take cooking too damn seriously. 

How to Cook Everything celebrated its 10th anniversary last October with its 15th reprint and the addition of some new material.  It’s almost unbelievable how big this book is with over 1000 pages!  The book covers subjects from meats to sweets, and everything in between.

While the book does have over 2000 recipes in it, it is far from a recipe book.  Each chapter is filled tons of useful information so even a kitchen novice can cook like a pro. For instance the chapter on chicken shows how to safely and easily remove the bones from a chicken leg and thigh and the bread chapter explains how yeasts work to make bread rise. It’s all there amongst the great recipes.

Bittman’s true genius is evident in the way he addresses recipes.  Instead of a long complicated list of ingredients followed by detailed tasks, his recipes are relatively short and simple creatures aimed at providing a culinary base in the cook’s mind.

Take for example risotto.  A normal recipe book might have a 2-page “Mushroom Risotto with Seared Scallops” recipe that would contain 50 ingredients and almost as many steps.  Bittman grinds his recipes down to the most basic incarnation, in the case of risotto it’s a short and sweet recipe for a plain risotto, taking up less than half a page.

The benefit of this is that might actually remember how to make it without having the book in front of you.  A real bonus as I see it. 

Bittman also encourages creativity by offering suggestions on how to make variations of the dish after each recipe.  After risotto he offers tips on how you can make risotto with lemon, risotto with herbs, risotto with 3 cheeses and risotto with seafood. It doesn’t take much imagination to move beyond those variations and make something truly unique, because you’ve now got a solid foundation.

And guess what, that means you’re cooking!

Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is truly a cook book, because his simple techniques and foundational recipes will allow you to be in control when you cook. He provides a straightforward way to gain a great deal of confidence in the kitchen, something anyone from a novice to a pro can always use.

This is truly a great book, I have it in my library and you should have it in yours.

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My favorite thing to do with garlic is make garlic bread.  But I’m not a fan of all types of garlic bread.  I like to taste the garlic & the toasted bread equally.  I decided that I wanted to come up with a good way to make it that I would truly enjoy.  So here it is:

Stacy’s Garlic Bread

French bread
2 large garlic cloves
freshly grated parmesan cheese
butter or margarine

Preheat your oven at 350.  Take the loaf of French bread and cut into thick slices. Butter one side of the slice of bread.  Put the slices of bread on a baking sheet and pop in the oven for 2 minutes.  This will help the bread get a little but toasted before you take add the garlic.   Take out the bread slices and set them aside for a few moments.  Take the garlic cloves and cut them in half.  Take a clove and rub it generously on the bread slice.  Add a generous amount of parmesan cheese on top.  Once you’ve done that with each slice, pop them back in the oven for another 3 –4 minutes.  You can reduce or add minutes depending on how ‘crunchy’ you like your garlic bread.

For those of you who share my love for Garlic there is an annual Garlic Festival coming up this summer in July.  For more details click here:

http://gilroygarlicfestival.com/

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The corn they used to make Corn Nuts originally was grown in Cusco, Peru.  The corn kernels were much larger than our corn kernels here.  They were approximately one-inch kernels.  In 1964, Albert was able to research and introduce Corn Nuts made with a hybrid variety of corn they found that was similar to the corn he found from Peru.  They found that this hybrid was able to grow in California.

Corn Nuts were sold for a long time by the Holloway family business, which was then sold to Nabisco in 1998, and as of 2007 it is now a part of Planters, which is a subsidiary of Kraft Foods.  

Corn Nuts are not sold in all stores in this area.  I have been successful in finding them a Walgreens Stores in the area.  I’ve tried all of the flavors they sell, including: Original, Barbecue, Nacho Cheese, Chile Picante con Limon, Caliente Mix, and Ranch.  I have to admit that my all time favorite is the Original. 

If you are a lover of Corn Nuts, click here for a recipe on how to make them on your own. http://www.kurtsaxon.com/foods009.htm

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French Toast Sandwiches

This is definitely the way to go to mix breakfast with lunch.  Here’s how you would go about making this wonderful & delicious creation.

Ingredients:

sandwich bread
1 egg for every 2 slices of sandwich bread
deli meat of your choice (recommend ham, turkey, roastbeef, pastrami)
sliced cheese of your choice (recommend provolone, munster, yellow american)
mayo

To make the French toast:

Step 1

1. Take the eggs and crack them and beat them in a bowl as if you were making scrambled eggs.

2. Heat a skillet on the stove and add a very small amount of butter or oil to the skillet so the toast won’t get stuck to your skillet. 

3. Once the skillet is hot, take your bread and coat it in the egg.  Put it into the skillet and let each side brown.  It normally takes about 1 –2 minutes for each side to cook.

4. Once you’ve cooked each piece, set aside to cool down a little bit,

To make the French toast sandwich:

1. Take two pieces of the already made French Toast and put mayonnaise on one side, add as much cheese & deli meat as you’d like. Top with the second piece of toast. (Remember you can always add or delete an ingredient if you would rather use something else.  You may like to add lettuce or tomato or onion to the sandwich as well.  All three add excellent flavor and texture!)
2. Serve with either French Fries or your favorite chips.

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The problem is that risotto is labor intensive and time consuming with some recipes calling for an hour or more of cooking time. Not to mention the fact that you have to be present for all of it, stirring constantly.  With a newborn in the house that ain’t gonna roll. Hell, I’m lucky if I get to shave my bikini line anymore.

One night I was making white rice in my rice cooker, when I said, “It’s just rice.”  Why couldn’t I cook risotto like you cook every other kind of rice by putting all of the liquid in at once and skip the stirring bit?  A hundred years of Italian culinary tradition be damned.

So I decided to compare the two.  I made one batch of risotto in the traditional method and the other in my new fangled lazy ass approach.  But the no-stir risotto couldn’t taste anywhere near as good, could it?

Risotto – Stir v. No-stir

My batch of traditional risotto turned out great.  Even before I added the Parmesan cheese it was thick and creamy with a good deal of starch suspended in the liquid as you can see in this photo:

The stirred risotto clings to the spatula and its sauce has some real body.  You’ll also notice too that the rice grains are pretty much intact.

For the no-stir risotto I followed the basic steps of the traditional risotto up until the point of adding the liquid bit by bit and stirring.  At that point, I just dumped all of the liquid in and let it boil.  Then I walked away.  I don’t remember what I did during that time, but I can guarantee you it was a hell of a lot more fun than stirring. 

When I came back to check on my risotto, I was quite pissed.  The risotto was more like rice soup with absolutely no body and hundreds of exploded rice grains:
 
You can see in the picture that the sauce is very watery and little or no starch suspended in it like the risotto I stirred. The texture in the mouth was horrible as well, flavorless mush.  I think I ended up throwing the pictured spatula across the room.

My traditional risotto got even better after I added the Parmesan cheese, down right luxurious if I do say so myself. 

Risotto perfection.

Although I was really ticked off about how poorly the no-stir risotto had turned out, I decided that I might as well go for the gusto and waste the Parmesan cheese as well.  I figured it could only make it better, it sure as hell couldn’t make it worse.

As I added the Parmesan something magical happened.  The grated cheese melted eventually it combined with the liquid and began binding the rice together.  Rather quickly, the no-stir risotto went from looking like the dog’s dinner to mine.
 
While it looked more like traditional risotto, I was skeptical to taste it.  It wasn’t exactly on the money, but it wasn’t that far off either.  I think that the burst rice grains softened the texture a bit too much for it to be perfect.  On the other hand, I had an hour of freedom I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Conclusion

You don’t have to spend an hour stirring to make some pretty damn good risotto, you can boil it like you do any other kind of rice.  It won’t be perfect, but it will be very close and if you’re anywhere as busy as I am, you can deal with that.

Bonus: I love left-over risotto almost as much as fresh and the day after, I couldn’t tell the difference between the stir and no-stir.

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Okay, so now you ask me, “Why are you addicted to your George Forman Grill?”, keep reading folks…I’ll give you two reasons why:

1. It grills chicken breasts perfectly, in a matter of minutes.  It allows all the extra fat to drip into the drip tray, as well as cooking the meat perfectly; juicy & tender.  To cook chicken, you want to take the amount of chicken breasts you need to make for the meal.  You want to butterfly the breast so it is not so thick.  Season with a very little bit of salt and pepper if you like.  Once the Forman Grill is hot, place the chicken on the it.  Let each side cook between 2 – 3 minutes.  If you do have a temperature dial, turn it to the medium setting so it doesn’t burn.  If you do not have a dial, just make sure you watch it so it doesn’t burn as there is no way to control the temperature.  It never takes more than 6 minutes to cook the chicken. 

2.  One thinks of a grill and immediately you think of meat…. but that should never be the cause.  Use your grill for all sorts of things. So now my second reason is that it makes the most delicious grilled sandwich. My husband and I love to make all types of grilled sandwiches. Cheese, Ham & Cheese, any lunch meat really.  We also like to add a slice of onion and tomato and a little bit a mayo. No need to butter outer side of the bread and no need to flip the sandwich so it doesn’t burn on one side. With the George Forman both sides of the sandwich are grilled evenly. 

Do you have a specific reason why you love your George Forman Grill?  Is it because it’s easy to use & store?  Do you have a favorite recipe you like to do when using the George Forman? 

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