My own mom is part of a dying breed of cooks. Growing up, she lived with her grandmother every summer. Nana was an exceptional gourmet herself and taught my mom everything she knew. She taught my mom how to skim cream off the milk and turn it into ice cream, how to can fruit and turn the canned fruit into great winter time salads, how to make angel food cake from scratch with a wire whip, and how to improve anything at all with a great sauce.
Great Skill
Every time I get the wild idea to make something "different," I consult my mom and she always seems to have answers. When I got married, for instance, we had just been on a research trip in Europe and I suggested that I wanted a wedding cake "like the cakes in European coffee houses." You can find those cakes in bakeries now (though they still may not use all butter for their butter cream), but at the time, they were no where to be found.
In this video she describes how she makes a base for any salad -- how to prepare the greens and how to flavor them so that they are ready for any topping.
In the video, she demonstrates how she has bagged lettuce to save for later in the week. This technique works best for romaine. For leaf lettuces, store the whole leaf and tear it up when you are preparing the salad. Leaf lettuce tends to wilt pretty quickly and not store well.
Included here are tips and tricks from my mom, Jeanie Rose, on handling and mincing garlic. I thought I knew all of her garlic tricks until I watched the video and learned even more.
Click on the play button in the image below to watch the video or visit the video directly at YouTube (Minced Garlic)
This is a favorite salad around this house. It is a single entree meal with a large base of fresh raw vegetables, topped with an official depression buster food -- beef. This particular beef comes from a steer featured on this site back in February in "I Met My Meat."
I apologize for the over-exposed video, but I guarantee that the salad itself was anything but washed out. Here's what mom has to say about enchilada salads:
Do you have a favorite liver recipe? Post it here or post it on your blog and include a trackback to this site so we can all read it.
We are experimenting all the time with liver. Mom's latest creation is captured on video. This is one of our longer videos because she cooks the liver entirely on camera and makes gravy. In under ten minutes, she puts together the liver and gravy.
She learned this flash frying technique from a raw foodist who will be surprised by her quote on the video "no one really likes liver raw." Some people do, but mom is not one of them.
This is a staple food around here all year round -- the composed salad. It always looks different depending on what we have around. Some use less lettuce and more of whatever other vegetable we have around. Each usually contains some sort of protein food. In this case, mom uses an egg salad to top the greens. In the video, she refers to previous videos on this website on handling greens and minced garlic.
To view the video, click the "play" button in the image below or go directly to YouTube to view composed salads.
When we are short on time and long on vegetables, this is a pretty darned good way to do it.
This is a pretty long video but comes in three parts:
(1) Mom describes how she marinades vegetables in olive oil and crushed garlic for a few hours or so, turning a couple of times in the soaking process to move the oil around. The vegetables will absorb the flavor from the oil and garlic as they soak.
(2) Mom grills the vegetables on the stove top but she also suggests baking in the oven. After grilling, mom adds some Romano cheese to the top and shows how it looks as a composed dinner plate.
(3) Mom uses the vegetables in a composed salad.
To watch the video, click on the "play button" in the image below or visit YouTube directly here: grilled vegetables.
A summer staple, mom describes in the video what she adds and why, down to why she cuts basil into ribbons. Enjoy the detail of the video or go straight to the recipe below.
I grew up in Delano, California, home of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez but also of one of the largest original Philippine immigrant populations in the country. In the 1920s, men traveled from the Philippines to work in agriculture and many settled in the Delano area. They could not bring women in those early days so many of these men waited decades to marry, once the rules changed. I went to high school with the daughter of one of these men -- her father was eighty years old when I was in high school. He just recently passed away at over the century mark.
One of the perks of growing up in Delano is that I got to sample real food regularly. The fresh-Mex and Asian restaurants across the country are no substitute for the real thing. One of my favorite restaurant memories in Delano was of a little Philippine restaurant that operated for few years in the old A & W Rootbeer building. They made a great balamiki chicken -- a kind of sweet chicken shishkabob. When the place closed down my mom was determined to recreate the dish at home. This is her recipe for all of the flavors of the Bamboo Hut's balamiki chicken without cutting the chicken into strips. She uses the whole breast.
Oregano plants do very well in our landscape. They are drought resistant once they are established, they reseed fairly well, they are fragrant, and they put on nice flowers. The fragrances, flowers, and flavors vary with the plant variety.
We recently harvested a lot of oregano from our yard to dry for use in cooking and in dry flower arrangements. We were so inspired by their beauty that my mom made a video about oregano.
Oregano will add great flavor to your dishes (most notably Italian sauces) and, as a member of the mint family, this herb is also an antioxidant. As it cooks with meat, it will help reduce the carcinogens in that dish. You can't ask for more than flavor and a health benefit.
Roasted Sweet Italian Peppers: Using the Summer's Bounty
We've had a pepper bonanza of late and this is one of our favorite ways to cook them. It's easy to do and there are rarely any leftovers.
Read on for the recipe, view the video by clicking on the "play button" in the image below, or go directly to YouTube to watch Roasted Peppers.
Mom writes:
For years I've grown sweet Italians for the rich flavor they add to sauces and salsas. Only in the last few years have we been roasting them. I had never heard of them! In reading an autobiography I came across the concept and came up with this preparation. (The autobiography was not a cookbook, unfortunately.) Roasted peppers now stand as a hallmark of great summer eating in this house.
Using and Preserving Overgrown Zucchini (Plus Zucchini Cornbread)
In honor of the Eat Local Challenge this month and its focus on food preparation, here is a video by mom on what to do with the giant squash that got away from you in your garden. She has recipe ideas but also describes how to process it and freeze it. Below you'll find a zucchini cornbread recipe, a long-time family favorite.
To view the video, click on the "play button" in the image below or go directly to YouTube to watch Zucchini.
Deviled Eggs: Always a Winner and Nutritious to Boot (Boiling Tips Included)
This time of year is our peak egg consumption. Much of our egg eating is in the form of egg salad or deviled eggs, probably largely because those are both cold egg dishes and are appetizing on hot afternoons. As the weather begins to change, we will likely replace those dishes with quiche and frittata. But as the season changes, the egg production of our hens will slow to a trickle and we will consume fewer eggs.
As we continue in our egg bounty, mom has been going to town on egg dishes. Here she decribes her deviled egg secrets. Watch the video and read the recipe below. Below the recipe you'll find her tips on boiling and peeling eggs. To view the video, click on the "play" button in the image below or go directly to YouTube: Deviled Eggs.
Eggs are a great source of Omega 3 fatty acids. The egg from a hen freely eating weeds and bugs is most certainly a depression buster food because of the Omega 3 content. Boil them up, peel them, mash them, add some dressing and you'll have the beginning of a great meal. The previous entry on deviled eggs discusses how to peel eggs.
In this video, mom talks about using egg salad to stuff a wonderful end-of-summer pepper. To view the video, click on the play button in the image below or go directly to YouTube to watch (Bell Pepper Stuffed with Egg Salad).
Freezing: An Easy Process to Preserve Food and Nutrients
Summer gardens are slowing down but many of us are still bombarded with summer peppers, squash, and tomatoes. The only reasonable thing to do with the bounty is to preserve them in some way.
For the sake of nostalgia or simply to be able to say you've done it, you may be tempted to can your bounty. Tomatoes lend themselves to canning because of their acid content. But as I watched my mother can a few jars of tomatoes a few weeks ago, I thought "That is the perfect example of nutrient loss in our own kitchen."
She could not get the cans to seal and cooked those jars for hours before they were done. Cooking is a known adversary to nutrients. Cooking a jar of tomatoes for hours may make a tasty winter sauce, but it is not your nutrient solution.
At long last, the second generation of “mom cooking videos” are here. We got great encouragement after the string of videos last summer and fall that we bought a decent camera and then proceeded to act like we knew what we were doing with it (much like we pretended with the first). Of course, mom is great in all of them, but apparently not everyone can hear her in the first generation of videos. The second generation may have some sound problems as well, but with a mondo kitchen and sound bouncing all over the place, the sound issue is a work-in-progress that our friend Keith is helping us tackle. Keith is editing the videos as well.
In the video below, mom shares tips on staying organized on kitchen tasks in busy times. You can click the "play button" below or watch Cooking Tips for Busy People at YouTube.
