Oh Snap!

We had a cold snap last night. And when the temps drop, I go for two things: a fire and soup. OK and maybe a hot toddy.

I decided the perfect Rx would be the bourbon butternut squash bisque I served at my bourbon tasting party a few months ago. While I often think of butternut squash soup as over-rated, this version is definitely off the hook. Seriously, when I served it at the party, I felt like a drug pusher, forcing a cup of this soup on anyone with—or without—a spare hand.

What makes it so different? It isn't overly sweet. It actually isn't really sweet at all. Well, I gave some to my friend's 4-year old daughter who inhaled it but said it tasted "just like watermelon." Well, she is only four so has a somewhat limited palette, but she also just consumed a hearty helping of vegetables so what mom would complain? Well, there was a healthy dose of bourbon in it so maybe that explains the strange proclamation?

Anyway, the roasted butternut squash for the base does get all lovely and caramelized, but it surely doesn't taste like dessert (or fruit). It's perfectly rounded out by a generous addition of leeks, onions, garlic and cumin. The nutmeg adds a little somethin' somethin' that no one can ever put their finger on. It's almost always the secret ingredient in a recipe but this time I beg to differ. This recipe called for soy sauce which added a nice note of saltiness to the sweetness of the vegetables, creating more depth to the soup than I think it would have had otherwise.

Then there was some "flair" added in because really who wants to eat boring soup?! I'm talking about a little maple syrup, some dry sherry and, of course, bourbon. It's been well documented that I like the eat my bourbon as much as I like to drink it, but it's for good reason. When done well, it gives a slight hint of vanilla, caramel and even smoke to a dish, transforming simple ingredients into a three-diminsional tasting experience. In short, it takes a dish from ordinary to memorable, which is just what occurs here.

This really does come together in a snap There's no breaking down of fatty proteins or tenderizing beans for hours. Once the squash is roasted, you're basically just adding a few finishing touches and heating it up to bring all the flavors together. The pureeing is not even necessary but the silkiness of a pureed soup just feels so indulgent. The finished color is gorgeous and the taste positively swoon-worthy.

So cook this up and stay toasty, my friends!

Butternut Squash and Bourbon Bisque

from FoodNetwork.com

Ingredients

8 cups cubed butternut squash

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 cup diced onions

1 cup diced leeks

1/2 tsp ground cumin

2 Tbsp chopped fresh garlic

1 Tbsp chopped fresh ginger

2 Tbsp pure maple syrup

2 Tbsp soy sauce

1/4 cup bourbon

1/2 cup dry sherry

1/4 tsp grated whole nutmeg

5 cups chicken stock

3/4 cup evaporated skim milk

Salt and pepper to taste

2 Tbsp cornstarch mixed with 2 Tbsp water

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place cubed squash in a roasting pan and bake for approximately 45 minutes or until tender when stuck with a fork.

2. In a large Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over medium to medium-high heat and add the onions. Cook until lightly golden brown (approximately 8 - 10 minutes) and add the leeks and cumin. Cook for 2 minutes and add garlic and ginger. When the garlic is fragrant, add the maple syrup, soy sauce, bourbon, sherry and nutmeg. Add the squash and stock and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and cook gently for about 15 minutes.

3. Using an immersion blender (or a regular blender), puree soup until very smooth. Add the evaporated milk, salt, and pepper. Cook for two minutes; do not bring to a boil. Add the cornstarch mixture and stir until thickened, about 5 minutes.

Note: Serves 6 but easily doubles.

Tik Tok

So how's everyone doing with their New Year's resolutions? I know many people, me included, try to clean up our acts in the wake of all the holiday parties and indulging. There is something utterly refreshing about the start of a new year, a new page, a new chance. We make our declarations about eating healthier, exercising more, and imbibing less. So given that, I figured I might as well enjoy one last gluttonous hurrah before all the clean living commenced.

Luckily I had two girlfriends who were insistent that I not go this path alone. We decided to have an "around the clock" dinner party on New Year's Eve. We wrote each hour of the 24-hour day on a separate slip of paper and each drew two "hours" out of a hat. Thankfully, we drew a pretty decent range of times. The challenge was to make a dish and a drink that represents that time of day. The game plan was to start at 7 pm and enjoy a course an hour, thus timing our final course with the arrival of 2012. We figured that would allow us to enjoy a small plate every hour and wash it down with a fine beverage without feeling completely stuffed. Well, let me just say we were stuffed, even with a 3 am departure time.

Things got kicked off with Meredith's "7 am service" of scrambled egg sliders served on top of a homemade bacon-and-Cheddar corn muffin. It was the perfect dish for people who love breakfast for dinner. The bacon studded muffins added a lovely salty note to the sweet corn. But the star might have been her habanero-infused vodka "screwdriver" made with mango and pineapple puree. I could have sipped away on those all night, which probably would've been deadly.

Second up was an early "11 am lunch" of grilled paninis accompanied by an Italian Sangiovese at 8 pm. I served two kinds: one with salami, mozzarella and fig jam and a second with rosemary ham, Emmental cheese and a drizzle of honey. Both turned out to be wonderful flavor combinations that I'd make again.

The next hour, Karen took us slightly Asian for a "1 pm" luncheon salad, which was simple but bursting with flavor. She took an iceberg lettuce salad and dressed it up with mint and a roasted sichuan pepper vinaigrette. But perhaps what stole the show was the sparkling wine she presented with a wild hibiscus flower in the bottom of the glass. It colored the wine slightly pink and added a hint of sweetness. But the real beauty of it was watching the petals unfurl as the sparkling bubbles danced around it. It sounds totally weird but try it sometime to add a bit of whimsy to your next cocktail party. She found a jar at BevMo but look online for other options.

At 10 pm we sat down to enjoy our "6 pm dinner." Meredith went retro with a beef fondue set up with several delicious dipping sauces to boot. We pretty much polished it off in minutes, along with the California Cabernet she'd selected.

Around 11 pm, Karen stuck with the fondue theme but satisfied our sweet tooth with her "10 pm dessert": homemade caramel sauce and beautiful apples to dip into it. It was our one attempt at being pseudo-healthy for the evening. To accompany this dessert, she selected a playful hard apple cider, which was really refreshing.

When midnight struck, we had to take a break to watch the ball drop, blow our horns and toast each other with champagne. While we all claimed to be stuffed, we soldiered on and embraced our final course of the night, which happened to be "midnight!" That was a lucky draw on my part. When I think of eating after midnight, it usually involves a greasy cheeseburger or a slice (or two) of greasy pizza. And since pizza is my favorite food, that's what I went with (sans the grease). I served this Catalonian-style pizza you may recall around 12:30 am.

When all was said and done, it was a wonderfully (full)filling and fun way to usher in 2012. And shockingly no one had a hangover the next morning! I think the late night pizza was the trick.

Bacon-and-Cheddar Corn Muffins

from Southern Living

Ingredients

6 bacon slices

2 cups self-rising white cornmeal mix

1 Tbsp sugar

1 1/2 cups buttermilk

1 large egg

4 Tbsp melted butter

1 cup (4 oz) shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

Vegetable cooking spray

Directions.

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Cook bacon in a large skillet over medium-high heat 12-14 minutes or until crisp; remove bacon, and drain on paper towels. Crumble bacon.

2. Heat a 12-cup muffin pan in the oven for 5 minutes.

3. Combine cornmeal mix and sugar in medium bowl; make a well in center of mixture.

4. Stir together buttermilk and egg; add to cornmeal mixture, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened. Stir in melted butter, cheese and bacon. Remove pan from oven and coat with cooking spray. Spoon batter into hot muffin pan, filling almost completely full.

5. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 - 20 minutes or until golden. Remove form pan to a wire rack and let cool 10 minutes.

Note: We made this muffin into a scramble egg slider, which was heavenly.

Hello, Sunshine!

Well, we're officially on day two of 2012. Like I said, I have a good feeling about this year! The sun has greeted me each morning thus far, which always brightens my mood. If I was an animal, I'd certainly be a cat. You'd find me chasing the sun and napping in it whenever possible. I find total contentment just sitting on a window sill with the rays of light warming my skin. In fact, that's often where you'll find me when I'm on a conference call, eating lunch or even just paging through a magazine. I even move from room to room within the house, trying to keep up with the changing angles of the sun.

But I also ate hoppin' john last night to lock in my good fortune and prosperity. And my friend was kind enough to give me an enormous bag of citrus fruit from her yard.

Oh how I love Winter's abundance of varying shades of yellow and orange fruits that pull the branches of trees almost to the ground, just waiting to be plucked.

It's hard to beat a sweet tangerine. It's like a burst of sunshine in each segment. It's hard not to smile when eating one.

So clearly 2012 is off to a good start. I hope you feel the same!

So Long

So long, 2011! It's been swell but I'm pretty much counting down the minutes until 2012. I'm really looking forward to the New Year. I have a feeling 2012 is going to rock.

I hope everyone has a fabulous time watching the ball drop or whatever your pleasure may be. I am excitedly awaiting the start of a cook fest with two of my best girl friends. We're having an "around the clock" party, where we each cook two dishes from different times of the day and serve it with an appropriate beverage. I got an early lunch (11 am) so am making paninis with a Sangiovese to sip, and then got midnight so am going with my favorite late night food—pizza!!!—and champagne of course. You can't ring in the New Year without some bubbly!

Wishing y'all a safe and special night, and thanks for reading!

A Few of My Favorite Things

I'm back in Santa Barbara after spending Christmas with my family in the Low Country. I haven't heard a Christmas carol in a few days since my return. It's kind of sad. My mom always start playing them the day after Thanksgiving and has amassed quite a collection of holiday ditties over the years. She's got all the classics like Bing Crosby, some new ones (i.e. the little girl who placed second on America's Got Talent), and my personal favorite, 1992's The Muppet Christmas Carol soundtrack. I love listening to them all. The one exception is Julie Andrew's My Favorite Things. Not to sound like a scrooge but I don't know how that slipped into the category of Christmas carols. Have you listened to the lyrics? There is not one iota of Christmas in it. It's got bees stinging and dogs biting for goodness sakes. There's a reference to Winter but even that's a stretch. But I do like the song because I love The Sound of Music. In fact, I had big plans to perform in the musical when I was young. Too bad I can't sing. I even wanted to change my name to Gretel for awhile. So as the year comes to a close, I wanted to share with you a few of my favorite things from the holidays.

Favorite meal: We've started a tradition of gorging ourselves on Apalachicola oysters, which my brother generously hauls to us each year.

Favorite gift: the glasses my nephew received that double as a straw.

Favorite beverage: Real Coke made with real sugar served out of a real bottle. Perfection.

Favorite laugh: The wine my brother picked up for me — at the gas station! I asked him to get a bottle to go with the short ribs I was serving for dinner. This is a plastic "goblet" of (questionable) Merlot packaged with an aluminum seal and a plastic lid, which was stolen from a Pringle's can, I'm sure. Talk about red neck!

Favorite serendipitous moment: Sunrise on the creek.

Happy New Year's Eve Eve, y'all.

CCCs

I know the final days of shopping are upon us. Christmas is literally just around the corner. Yikes. Each year there's someone in my life I'm frantically running around town for, desperately trying to find the *perfect gift* and coming up empty handed store after store. On the other hand, there's always my dad who, when asked what he'd like for Christmas, simply replies year after year, "CCCs!!!" In fact, he usually starts campaigning for CCCs around his birthday in October. "Where are my CCCs?" . . . . "You're making CCCs for me for Christmas, right?" . . . . "You know what would taste good right about now? A CCC . . . "

What on Earth might you ask is that?! It's a Chocolate Chip Cookie. Well, specifically my homemade chocolate chip cookies. While some people claim to have the greatest CCC recipe with all sorts of fancy twists and unique spins, sometimes just a plain ole chocolate chip is hard to beat. I always go with the Tollhouse recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag. And therein lies the humor around "my special CCCs." They're not special at all. They're the most ordinary chocolate chip cookie in the world and yet my father claims mine are the best! How that's possible remains a mystery to me. In fact, my sister-in-law and I crack up every Christmas when my dad opens his box of CCCs and exclaims, "These are the best in the world!" Because truly anyone can make these cookies. In fact, they do. In fact my sister-in-law did make these for my dad once in an act of kindness. And he had the nerve (and short-sightedness) to tell her that mine were better! I mean really. It's the same damn cookie! It's certainly not better.

But this morning I woke up to the sunrise on the creek at my parent's house to make my grandmother's famous buttermilk biscuits for everyone for breakfast. My grandmother, whom we call Monk, makes the best biscuits in the world. And I have legions of people who have tasted them and would agree vehemently. She gave me her recipe a few years ago. Well, she's 92 so doesn't actually use recipes. She cooks and bakes from memory and years and years of practice. Anyway, she taught me how to make her biscuits and even watches me execute them. She says I do it the same way she does, using the same recipe and technique, and yet I refuse to agree that they taste the same. Her's are the best. Mine are not. But people still gobble them up and tell me how good they are. But to me, they're still not Monk's.

And I realized that's why when someone else serves my dad a Tollhouse CCC, he will say they're not as good as mine. It's because sometimes the gift is the person who gave it to you, not the gift.

Happy {Early} Christmas to all.

Red and Green

Fight as I may, I might as well just accept the fact that the holidays are upon us. It just seems like yesterday it was Easter though. And while I might still stomp my feet and pitch a small fit in protest of yet another year hurtling by, Christmas is here. And because my defiance was no match for Father Time, I made this soup instead . . . as a partial concession and because I like soup.

The last part of that statement may seem the equivalent to someone saying, "Puppies are cute." Duh. Everyone knows that. Everyone loves soup, especially when the weather starts to dip and you're looking for something to warm you up. I hear my friends wax poetic about "I loved when it rained and my mom would make me a grilled cheese and tomato soup. . . ." I'm with them on the grilled cheese. But tomato soup? Yuck. To this day, you won't see me put a spoonful of that to my mouth, but I finally did smarten up when it came to soup. For whatever reason, I was a late bloomer. I guess I was too busy eating butter sandwiches. I'm embarrassed to admit that actually involved Squeeze Parkay, which is perhaps one of the more questionable butter substitutes on the market. But soup is something I've just kind of discovered and embraced in the last 5 or so years. Now I probably eat it several times a week (even if it's just take-out from the local grocery store). It's an easy and healthful option for lunch when I am tempted to eat pizza (which is nearly a daily battle). And it's so nice to make a big vat of it on a weekend and freeze in individual containers to access when I come home from another business trip to an empty refrigerator.

I have some standby soup recipes, but I stumbled upon this recipe a few months ago and thought I'd try it out. It was called Christmas soup, which I thought was random. I wasn't aware of a traditional Christmas soup. I kept reading through the online comments for some tale of tradition but ended up none the wiser. Then I made it and realized how blonde I really am. Seriously, there are stereotypes for a reason, people! Anyway, the ingredients for the soup are all red and green, the ubiquitous colors of the holidays, hence the name Christmas soup. It makes for a very festive soup this time of year. It also makes for a very delicious one, which is more important. Red and green can only take you so far if it tastes like crap.

The soup includes red and green bell peppers, red bliss potatoes, red kidney beans, I added some sausage with peppers in it to keep the red and green theme going, and of course green kale because seriously wasn't it some sort of law that you had to eat kale this year? You couldn't escape kale if you tried. I really do love it but I think its 15 minutes of fame are up. Let another vegetable have the spotlight, you know?

This would make for the perfect dish to whip up over the holidays when time is short and stomachs are growling. It's also a one-pot wonder, which is great because you can spend more time enjoying another glass of eggnog, er. . . I mean enjoying the magic of the season with your family instead of scrubbing dishes in the kitchen.

Christmas Soup

Adapted from Alton Brown

Ingredients

1 lb pre-cooked sausage, sliced 1/4-inch thick on the bias (the original recipe called for keilbasa but I used a roasted pepper turkey sausage)

Vegetable oil, as needed

8 cloves or garlic, minced

2 15 oz cans kidney beans, rinsed

1 15 oz can garbanzo beans, rinsed

1 15 oz can diced tomatoes

2 cups onion, diced

1 red bell pepper, diced

1 green bell pepper, diced

2 1/2 qt chicken broth

1 lb red bliss potatoes, cubed

6 oz fresh kale (approximately 4 large handfuls)

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper

Directions

Place the sausage into a Dutch over and set over medium-low heat. Cook meat until it's has browned well, approximately 15 minutes. Add a little vegetable oil if needed. Remove meat from the pan and set aside.

Add 2 tsp of oil unless there is already that left in the pan after browning the meat and cook onions, bell peppers and garlic and cook for approximately 7-10 minutes, stirring often over medium heat. Add the beans, diced tomatoes and chicken broth. Cover and cook for 45 minutes. Add the potatoes, cover and cook an additional 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Wash, rinse and trim the stem from the kale and tear into bite size pieces. Add the kale to the pot, cover and cook for another 10 minutes until just tender but not mushy.

Add the red wine vinegar, black pepper and sausage to the pot. Stir to combine and serve.