Category: Cooking

Recipes and chitchat

Happy Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day

Yes! This really is such a thing. If you follow me on Facebook, you know I am currently addicted to grilled cheese sandwiches.

Trivia aside: when I was a child, we called them toasted cheese sandwiches, and they were usually accompanied by tomato soup, which is now a comfort food icon.

A great grilled cheese sandwich begins with bread. Not the spongy, soul-less, nutrition-free stuff on which we grew up (even if it was baked to music), but grown up bread. Like this:

This bread comes from a regional bakery and is 100% preservative-free. It also makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches.

Right now I’m on a Swiss and Havarti cheeses kick.

Then I use butter. The real stuff. Spread on the bread, not melted in the skillet.

A co-worker suggested mayo instead of butter. Not a good suggestion. I am a card-carrying member of the I Hate Mayonnaise Club.

Add these three ingredients together in a perfectly sized cast iron frying pan, and voila! Bliss on a plate.

National Cook a Sweet Potato Day

Yes, this really is such a thing.

And since my sweet potato dish is requested at all non-summer family events, I thought I would share the recipe here. I originally published most of it in November of 2014.

But here you go.

MJ’s Sweet Potato Side Dish

6 long, skinny sweet potatoes, scrubbed, then sliced.

I like to use a rippled mandolin.

1 large sweet onion, chopped.

mix the onion and sweet potato together with Wegmans Basting Oil (or other seasoned cooking oil) in a large oven-proof pan (I like my lasagna pan for this).

Bake at 425F for about 40 minutes or until potatoes are fork tender.

One of the great things about this recipe is that it can be made ahead of time and reheated in the microwave, which makes it perfect for my family’s gathering.

 

 

Tantalizing Trivia: Bread & Butter

When I was growing up, my mother put bread and butter on the table every night for supper.  Butter she kept in a butter dish in the cupboard.

That’s right. Not the refrigerator. The cupboard.

The bread was usually the unhealthy white stuff the bread man delivered twice a week (when I was really young) or was purchased at the supermarket. But my mom baked her own bread, too, and it was fabulous.

But we ate bread and butter with every meal.

When you go to restaurants, you’re usually served bread/rolls and butter before your meal. There are a lot of theories as to why this is.

  • Breaking bread is a sign of hospitality
  • In the past, tavern owners served one meal at one time, so people ate bread and butter to tide them over until meal time
  • Eating bread and butter gives patrons something to do while waiting for their meal
  • Bread (a simple carb) actually makes one hungrier.

The phrase bread-and-butter is also an idiom meaning livelihood, the source of one’s food.

Bread is found in every culture because it’s a basic food that supports life. To butter someone up is to flatter them. So butter just makes bread better.

But I no longer eat bread and butter with every meal. I think it was a calorie/carb/fat decision.

 

 

 

Snarky Sunday: A Rant About Labeling Books

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I have a pet peeve.(That doesn’t surprise anyone who knows me.) And I might offend some people. But the label or classification some people apply to certain books offends me.

It all came to a head when I read this advice in a recent article:  “write a clean book”.

A “clean” book.

Well, my books are trayf–which is Yiddish for UNCLEAN.

Examples:

  • In my upcoming  Halloween novella–there’s a shrimp appetizer in the form of a human brain. Definitely trayf. 
  • Pulled pork sliders put in an appearance, too.(Now there’s a dish with some double entendre built right in.)
  • Andouille (Cajun pork sausage) is eaten in the Mardi Gras novella I’m currently writing.
  • I’m sure one of my characters in one of my books eats a cheeseburger washed down with a glass of milk.
  • And bacon! Pages are spattered with bacon.

Why are Jewish dietary laws even a consideration in romance writing?

I don’t have a problem with sweet romance. I like reading sweet romance. And if the story I’m writing doesn’t call for a sex scene, then I won’t write one.

Labeling sex-free books “clean” is a passive-aggressive way of judging books that do contain physical love scenes. And it is insulting to the authors of those books by implying sex-free books are somehow better than others. They are not.

Insults, no matter how subtle, are not what the romance writing community is about. We lift each other up. We support each other.

So let’s get rid of the label “clean” and find a category description that is less polarizing.

 

National Grab Some Nuts Day

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Yes, that really is one of today’s observances, and the latent Gutter Girl in me snickers and thinks: “SPLASH!”

But this is a PG-13 blog, so I’ll haul myself out of the gutter, dry myself off and be a responsible adult.

Nuts.

I am not a huge nut fan. Especially walnuts. Don’t know why people have to ruin perfectly good brownies or chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. All of my life I thought I didn’t like banana bread. A friend made some with almonds instead of walnuts, and I loved it!

Another friend substitutes pecans for walnuts when she knows I’m on the agenda. It’s an acceptable substitute, but the foods would still be better without them.

Nuts I do like:

Cashews don’t offend me—especially in Chinese food. And what about that divine mixture of hazelnut chocolate, Nutella? Addicting! Macadamia nuts with white chocolate in a chocolate cookie? I’m dying here!

I’ll eat peanuts (not technically a nut, but rather a legume), but almonds are my favorite. Too bad growing almonds requires so much water.  Something so healthy shouldn’t be an ecological disaster.

Because almonds are a healthy food choice.

Most nuts (in their pure state) are a good food choice. Unfortunately, chocolate (even though it’s made from cocoa beans, which are a fruit) is considered an adulteration. Nuts are a great at-the-desk snack—high-protein with omega-3 fatty acids, easy to eat, and very filling.

So go grab some nuts!