A simple, light meal for a simple, light Friday

So I've been exhausted all week. I guess that's what I get for having too much fun lately.

Since part of that exhaustion likely stemmed from the fact I had an abbreviated weekend last week (I spent my Saturday at a writers training) I managed to score a comp day. You might have guessed as much from the blogging madness this morning.

Anyway, I was all set for takeout to top off my easy, breezy Friday, when at some point I started fascinating about this salad that I get when I visit Buffalo. My friend Sarah and I have taken a liking to the Creekview restaurant, where we get this salad with roasted red peppers and mushrooms, and goat cheese over greens with balsamic vinegar. We kick it up a notch and add some salmon, always one of Sarah's favorites.

I figured the salad would be simple enough to make at home on my little day off, and refreshing with all of those yummy veggies. One of the things that makes this salad so delicious is how the warm veggies and salmon melt the goat cheese, allowing it to coat the salad with their juices and sending the salmon swimming in a sea of deliciousness. For the most part, you can just throw everything in as you like it.

What you need:

1 red bell pepper

1 package portabella mushroom caps

Asparagus

Capers
Pine nuts

Goat cheese

Salmon

Spring greens

Quality olive oil

Balsamic vinegar

Salt and pepper

What to do:

Heat the oven to about 400 degrees. Coat the whole red pepper and asparagus in olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast for about 20 minutes, turning occasionally. Take the pepper and put in either a bowl covered with plastic wrap or a ziplock plastic bag and let sit for about 15 minutes so the skin loosens.

While the pepper sits, season the salmon with olive oil, salt and pepper and then put in the oven for about 12 minutes (until cooked through). Slice the mushrooms and coat with olive oil, salt and pepper and let roast about five minutes, until slightly tender, but still firm.

Toss the spring greens with some pine nuts, a little more fresh ground pepper, olive oil and some balsamic. Add the roasted veggies when they are done. Put on a plate, place a piece of the salmon on top. Warm chunks of goat cheese in the microwave for about 15 seconds and place on top.

Sarasota Forks and Corks

OK ... I can already hear Emily laughing from her little hut in Senegal.

Yes, I'm all dorkily excited about another food festival.

This time it's the Forks and Corks food and wine festival right here in Sarasota. A group of local restaurateurs started doing it two years ago at the gorgeous Ringling Art Museum.

I can think of few better ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than sipping wine, eating food from some the area's best restaurants and strolling around the grounds of the museum.

And I expect this to be the best festival yet. The first year they had the festival in June, a terribly humid and miserable time of year for eating and drinking in Florida. Last year they moved it up to May, but it didn't make much of a difference.

Finally, they got the picture and we're on for January.

Some of the girls and I got special wine humor t-shirts (think sayings like "Drinks Well with Others"). We've got our tickets.

Now, less than two weeks and counting ... I'll have a drink for you Emily, you smart ass : )

Sunday Mimosa Brunch

Every so often my friends and I come up with a bright idea for a themed party. Most of them revolve around food and wine. There have been so many of these bright ideas that I now have a list in the back of my planner. Perhaps it's a bucket list of sorts before I turn 30.

This weekend we crossed one of the items off the list, the Sunday Mimosa Brunch. The idea came out of a wine tasting about a month ago as we tasted some delicious sparkling wines and heralded the virtues of a good bubbly.

If there's one thing better than a good mimosa and some hearty egg dish on a Sunday morning, it's sharing it with good company.

The best thing about a brunch party is that most of the dishes you can make the night before. I whipped up the Paula Deen hashbrown casserole and the Tyler Florence blueberry scones (both things I mastered before). So Sunday morning I merely rolled out of bed, made a few last minute preparations and then hit the mimosas. My friends brought an assortment of quiche, pound cake and little toasts with salmon and cucumbers. It was all delicious.

And what better entertainment for a ladies Sunday brunch then dreaming up the next party. We probably added a half dozen items to the pre-30 bucket list of food and wine fun during the party alone. Next up, a paella party at the beach. Stay tuned ...

Today, I just wanted a snickerdoodle ...

... It was Monday. A good day for a good baked product.

A few hours into the afternoon, when I started to get a little bored and thinking I needed some more coffee, I thought about heading out to Main Street to find a good one at some random bakery.

But I've been disappointed by baked goods too many times. Take for example the red velvet cupcake at Starbucks last week. It looked so perfect in the case, the rich red color carefully topped with a nice swirl of frosting...

It sucked. It was stale, like so many once-frozen products. And the frosting wasn't even cream cheese.

I wanted a snickerdoodle so bad and I didn't want to be disappointed. So I decided to make my own.

A quick search of the Food Network web site produced this recipe from Emeril, obviously a winner.

And thanks to the beauty of a well-stocked fridge and cupboard with plenty of basics ... and then some, all I needed to stop and pick up was some Crisco.

For $2.69 - probably the price I would have paid for one crappy cookie at some shi shi bakery - I had dozens of them within an hour of making it home from work.

Now that's what I call a good way to end Monday : )

Scones, revisited

So a few years ago I picked up this little scone habit.

I don't remember quite how it started. A friend of mine in high school seemed to eat them a lot. Then I started buying them at Starbucks with my Americano nearly every morning.

But after a while those dollars add up, and one tires of the hard, frozen and over processed taste of the Starbucks pastries.

I figured I might as well just start making them.

Thus opened the door to my scone obsession.

I started with a blueberry scone with lemon glaze, courtesy of Tyler Florence. I then moved on to create my own cinnamon scone recipe, determined to get a one up on Starbucks. I tried raspberry, peach, peppermint chocolate. Some Sundays I just set up my own little scone test kitchen and baked all morning.

As with many obsessions, this one turned out to be somewhat passing. At some point, I tired of making scones every Sunday and their creation in my kitchen became more and more infrequent.

But apparently the memory of the scones still lingers, particularly in the mind of the locally famous weatherman who works at the TV station in our building. A few weeks ago he reminded me how much he loved the blueberry scones, so I promised to make some for him.

So that's what I did Sunday. I dug out the original Tyler Florence blueberry scone recipe that started it all.

One thing about these scones: they're more like biscuits. Or the really, really fresh scones you get at some independent bakeries. They're moist, not hard. My British friend actually said he liked them better than the traditional scone you find at stores (now that's an endorsement).

And a note on the recipe: You might want to try your own luck coming up with the lemon glaze topping. I find that if you follow Tyler's instructions, the glaze is really runny and watery. I like mine thicker, so tend to just melt the butter, use less lemon juice and then add in the confectioners sugar until I reach the desired consistency.

I forgot all of this however, and went with Tyler's method. I ended up adding a ton of confectioners sugar to thicken it up, and then had a serious glaze surplus.

So I went with the obvious solution. I made an Ina Garten pound cake to soak up the rest of it. This worked out well since I had all of the ingredients in my kitchen except for the buttermilk, but found recipes on line for a substitute that involved about 3 tablespoons of lemon juice to three quarters a cup of milk.

And that was the culmination of my Sunday morning baking. Who knows, maybe this will jump start another scone revolution and I'll end up sharing my recipe for the cinnamon ones ...

47 days and counting ...

With my ticket in hand and hotel reservation made, needless to say I was thrilled when I checked the South Beach Food and Wine Festival web site and saw they have posted the schedule for the Grand Tasting.

The day my friend and I picked to go (Saturday) is sold out (not surprising...but you can still get tickets for Sunday). The schedule is packed with celebrity cooking demos by some of my current and former favorite Food Network stars - Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray, Emeril, The Neelys ...

Of course I'm expecting long lines and waits for the demos, so we will have to be selective with our choices. I'm thinking Rachael Ray and Emeril will be priorities...

The rest of the time we can spend wining and dining our way through the food tent. I can't wait! This trip has been years in the making ...

Rachael Ray's Drunken Tuscan Pasta

OK... Next time it comes down to drinking a bottle of wine or boiling pasta in it I'm going to go with my gut instinct.

Just drink it.

Rachael Ray's recipe for Drunken Tuscan Pasta has always kind of intrigued me. The pasta recipe was in her Express Lane Meals cookbook

Surely, pasta boiled in a bottle of red wine must be packed with plenty of flavor. She actually made a risotto version of this dish on her Iron Chef appearance (she and Mario Batali went up against Bobby Flay and Giada De Laurentiis... Mario and Rachael won).

But is it really worth a bottle of vino?

I caved on this belief over the weekend, and only because I had a nearly full bottle of wine I opened before my Christmas vacation and never finished. After it sat about a week, what else was I going to do with it?

Maybe using wine that's been open that long detracts from the flavor. But aside from turning the pasta a magnificent fuchsia color, the flavor I got wasn't worth a full bottle.

Don't get me wrong. The pasta is tasty, with the peppery flavors of escarole and pancetta. But I don't think it was any better than other pastas I've made with this ingredient combo.

Can't blame me for trying.

Game Highlights

After discussing the big Iron Chef battle with some of my friends today, I realized my post last night was rather cursory. Perhaps it was the shock of my team's loss. Perhaps it was the vino.

Either way, I wanted to come back and share some of my favorite highlights from the event, most of which involve Mario Batali getting snarky with Bobby Flay. The other one involves sweet potatoes.

To be fair, I do like Bobby. I did drive three hours to spend an entire day waiting for an hour-long cooking demo and a signature in my cookbook. But Emeril trumps Bobby Flay any day. If Bobby was on Emeril's team, I would have been cheering for him.

Besides, I'm a sucker for sass.

Without further ado ...

Memorable moment No. 1: Mario Batali practically running into the White House garden proclaiming he was going to take all of the chiles and tomatillos, staples of the Bobby Flay menu.

MM No. 2: Emeril telling Mario Batali about two nice looking cauliflower in the White House garden, and asking whether they should take one of them. Mario's response: Grab them both. Bobby Flay later was caught yelling back "Did you guys take all of the cauliflower?"

MM No. 3: Mario proclaiming his plans to make tacos and burritos while heading back with his garden bounty.

MM No. 4: Sweet potatoes. Apparently an Obama favorite (we learned as Bobby tried to kiss up to the first lady before the battle). Both teams used the sweet potatoes to make what I think were the best looking dishes of the night - a ravioli from Emeril and Mario and a sweet potato tart with marshmallow topping from Bobby and Cristeta Comerford.

So there you have it. It sure does seem like Mario has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the Food Network. This article from the New York times says a lot.

"They don't need me," Batali is quoted as saying. "They have decided they are a mass market and they are going after the Wal-Mart crowd. So they don't need someone who uses polysyllabic words from other languages."

Which raises an interesting question ... Were Emeril and Mario in on the fix? Did they realize the odds were against them? Why bother?

My guess is the publicity from the hugely marketed event was probably enough to entice the two chefs to return to the Food Network. After all, we are in a recession, and both could probably use some advertising for their franchises.

I did make me kind of want to eat at one of Mario Batali's restaurants...

Well ...

... I think it was a fix.

I figured it from the beginning. There was no way Food Network would let the White House chef lose an epic Iron Chef battle. Especially when paired with poster child Bobby Flay, and up against two Food Network castoffs - Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse.

But I had hope when the chefs walked across the White House lawn. I thought maybe, just maybe, this would be a fair fight of some of popular culture's biggest culinary giants.

Hope that was shattered.

To be fair, it's hard to say who should have been the champ when you can't taste the food. And I have to say, I'd probably be hard pressed to top any of the dishes put before the judges.

I'll give Bobby and Comerford that their dessert looked the best, a sweet potato tart with marshmallow on top. And any time I hear Bobby Flay talk about chipotle or chiles I feel a little tingle. I love those flavors.

But Mario and Emeril's American birds two ways also looked good. So did their scallops and radishes.

Either way, I'm a little disappointed.

I guess there's no way to know for sure whether Emeril got a fair fight.

And at the end of the day, it was a good show. Maybe one that will inspire America to get cooking.

An epic culinary battle ...

Brace yourselves. Now, consider the following:

Iron chef ... White House ... EMERIL LAGASSE!!!

That's right, many of you who talk to me on a fairly regular basis or watch the Food Network have probably caught wind of what's being billed as the greatest night in culinary history. An Iron Chef battle at the White House featuring Bobby Flay and White House Chef Cristeta Comerford versus Emeril and Mario Batali. They will be cooking their dishes with ingredients from the White House garden.

It takes my breath away a little just thinking about it.

Anyway, it may not be the greatest night in culinary history, but will sure be a good one. Show starts at 8 p.m. Jan. 3 on the Food Network.

I'll give you one guess who my money is on : )