November 18 Newsletter

This is the time of year when I focus on family traditions. Thanksgiving Eve is the start of our holiday season and our twenty-five year traditional meal is French onion soup and Cobb salad. The season continues with holiday baking throughout the month of December and standing rib roast with Yorkshire pudding on Christmas Day. The celebration continues until New Year's Day when we end with a formal family dinner or party with friends.

This year I'm starting a new tradition which is to make sure I know all of the family recipes of favorite holiday foods. I want to hear the stories of why the recipes are made, the history. And I want to pass my special recipes on to those who enjoy them. Too often we miss out on learning or teaching family traditions until it is too late. These recipes along with their stories will be shared on iwannabeacook in the coming months.

If you are new to cooking I urge you to take the time to ask about the recipes, or if you are the experienced cook share your cooking knowledge with those new to cooking. Let Thanksgiving be the day of teaching and learning traditions. Share your kitchen and let others help. The perfect meal isn't what we're after; it's about sharing good food and company.

If you are cooking a Thanksgiving meal for the first time, keep the menu simple and ask for help in order learn not only about the food but about the people. Ask questions about their experience cooking their first Thanksgiving or past Thanksgiving meals. Make the day a social one by focusing on the experience not the meal itself.

Due to the holiday next week, iwannabeacook will not publish a newsletter. See you in December!

Happy cooking and eating! Email with thoughts and suggestions!

New recipes for the week

After all the cooking for Thanksgiving, the following recipes are quick, easy, and completely unrelated to turkey and dressing.

Pepperoni stromboli

Weeknight ground beef tacos

Taco seasoning

November 11 Newsletter

"How do you decide what to cook?" or "How do you decide which recipe to use?" are two questions I'm frequently asked. They are great questions, but difficult to answer in a straightforward way.

Let's start with "what" to cook. I'm the first to admit that weather plays a huge role in what I decide to cook. If the weather is sunny and warm, grilling is my go-to option. If it's cloudy and rainy, then obviously cooking inside is required. When I plan weekly menus, this flexibility is built in by the fact that I don't have specific recipes chosen. Of course I keep a list of recipes to try and some possibilities for the upcoming week, but I rely more on what the family is feeling that day.

Last week pork tenderloin was scheduled for dinner - grilled or cooked inside based on the weather. Turns out it was rainy and cold, so Goanese curry became dinner instead of grilled Cuban garlic marinated pork. The side dishes of rice and broccoli worked with either meal. If you have a well-stocked pantry, your menus can be flexible.

As for the question "which recipe," it depends on my mood. Some days a tried-and-true recipe is in order like JVE's chili, see picture above. I've been making this recipe for so many years. There are cold winter days that only this recipe will do. Or my favorite French onion soup recipe from Julia Child, which I always serve on Thanksgiving Eve.

If you've seen my cookbook collection you know it's large. Of course I don't know all my cookbooks, but some are more familiar to me than others. For Mexican food, my go-to cookbook is Mexican Everyday by Rick Bayless, for Latin American food Gran Cocina Latina, a general cookbook How to Cook Everything, and for French Julia's Volume I. These books provide recipes for days when I don't want to think much; I'm familiar with the style of these books so it requires little effort on my part.

On days I want to experiment, I start by looking in my other cookbooks and if nothing grabs my attention then search the web. At this point cooking becomes harder because I have to adapt the recipe to my family's taste. On days I want to try something completely new or learn a new technique I make the recipe with only changing the amount of salt, which I almost always lower. In my experience the way to learn a technique is to blindly follow a new recipe. Sometimes it works out, like the French/Mexican Spicy, smoky enchilada sauce;  sometimes it doesn't, like a complicated, time-consuming beef stew recipe that was bland.

Find a process that works for you. I'd love to hear how you find recipes or decide what to cook for dinner.

Happy cooking and eating! Email with thoughts and suggestions!

Other new recipes for the week

Brats

Cuban garlic marinade

November 4 Newsletter

What do you do when someone gives you four frozen pheasant breasts? Well you keep them in the freezer and think and research, think and research, and then research some more. Then you take the plunge and cook them. That's what happened to me over the past couple of weeks.

I had never cooked wild game so this was quite new to me. I learned lots of fascinating information about pheasants. Did you know that a pheasant needs a hanging time of five to seven days or more? This is one of the longest hanging times needed for birds. Interesting. I'm glad I received pheasant breasts because I'm not sure I was up for plucking the tail feathers one by one in order to preserve the skin. By the way, the skin of pheasant is what gives it a distinctive taste. Without it the meat will taste like skinned partridge or you guessed it chicken.

One word of caution when eating any wild game. Watch out for buckshot. My younger son was the lucky recipient of one piece of buckshot in his pheasant breast.

Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking was a tremendous help to me, but the one thing she did not say is to cook the meat in bacon fat. While I have only cooked this recipe once, hopefully more pheasant will be given to me, I think the bacon fat added a great deal. If you are lucky enough to get pheasant breasts, this is a quick and easy recipe. The website Field was also very helpful and provided the inspiration for this recipe.

We had one cooked breast leftover for the next day. I cut it up and used it as a filling for quesadillas. It was wonderful. You could also use any extra in omelets, fried rice, or in a salad.

Happy cooking and eating! Email with any thoughts or suggestions!

Shrimp and broccoli with pasta and Balsamic-glazed Brussels sprouts are also new recipes added this week.