Blackberry viniagrette

The official salad dressing of the wedding.

4 teaspoons whole cloves
4 teaspoons whole allspice
2 3-inch cinnamon sticks
2 cups white vinegar
4 cups sugar
2 lbs blackberries

Tie spices in a cheesecloth bag, lower into pan with vinegar and sugar. Dissolve sugar over low heat, bring to a boil, simmer 5 minutes. Add blackberries, simmer 10 minutes. Cool and strain. Makes two pints.

Seafood gumbo

Again, I quadrupled this recipe for the wedding.

1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup flour
1 ½ cups chopped onions
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped bell peppers
1 lb alligator sausage and/or crawfish sausage
1 lb crawfish tail meat
1 lb medium shrimp
1/2 lb extra-large head and shell on shrimp
1 ½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cayenne (but I ended up using much, much more)
3 bay leaves
6 cups shrimp stock
1 lb chicken meat, cut into chunks
1 tablespoon file powder or 1 cup sliced okra
1 tablespoon each paprika, garlic powder, salt, oregano, thyme, pepper (but I ended up using much, much more)

Combine oil and flour in large cast-iron Dutch oven, over medium heat. STIR CONSTANTLY AND EVENLY for 20-25 minutes, until flour/oil mixture becomes the color of chocolate. This is a dark roux. If you stop stirring, the flour will burn and you will have to start all over again. Once the roux is the proper color, add onions, celery and bell peppers and continue stirring 4-5 minutes. Add sausage, bay leaves and spices. Continue to stir 4-5 minutes. Add shrimp stock, stir until well combined. Bring to boil, reduce to medium-low. Cook uncovered, stirring occasionally, 20 to 30 minutes. Add okra or file powder and cook five minutes. At the very last minute, add the crawfish and the shrimp. Cook one minute, turn the heat off, let sit for one additional minute, or until the seafood is just cooked through. Serve over rice, with fresh parsley and chopped green onions.

Chicken and andouille sausage gumbo

This makes one batch. I quadrupled this recipe for the wedding. Tomorrow's recipe: seafood gumbo.

1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup flour
1 ½ cups chopped onions
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped bell peppers
1 lb andouille sausage (kielbasa also works), sliced
1 ½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cayenne (but I ended up using much, much more)
3 bay leaves
6 cups water or chicken stock
1 lb chicken meat, cut into chunks
1 tablespoon file powder
1 tablespoon each paprika, garlic powder, salt, oregano, thyme, pepper (but I ended up using much, much more)

Combine oil and flour in large cast-iron Dutch oven, over medium heat. STIR CONSTANTLY AND EVENLY for 20-25 minutes, until flour/oil mixture becomes the color of chocolate. This is a dark roux. If you stop stirring, the flour will burn and you will have to start all over again. Once the roux is the proper color, add onions, celery and bell peppers and continue stirring 4-5 minutes. Add sausage, bay leaves and spices. Continue to stir 4-5 minutes. Add water or broth, stir until well combined. Bring to boil, reduce to medium-low. Cook uncovered, stirring occasionally, 1 hour. Add chicken, simmer for 2 hours. Remove, add file powder and fresh parsley. Serve over cooked white rice.

My barbecue sauce recipe

The wedding was spectacular. The food was amazing, the house was amazing, but most of all the people were amazing. It was so wonderful to be able to spend a solid week with family and friends, just hanging out and cooking and eating (and drinking). I was a slacker for not blogging more, but I was getting married. I have a good excuse.

So now that we're back home recuperating, I'll get back on my regular blogging schedule. The next few days will be a recap of the recipes from the wedding. The biggest hit was, of course, the barbecue. And my barbecue sauce. Which several people have asked me to market, so this recipe won't be exact. It'll just be a list of ingredients, which you can use to make your own version. I can't give out proportions anyway, since I don't know them--I always made this by adding a little of each one until it tasted right. I'm also not revealing my secret ingredients. "So what bloody use IS this recipe?", you ask. Hey, it's barbecue sauce--everyone likes it a little different. A little more vinegar, a little less spice--play with the amounts until you have something YOU like.

Base: between a half and two-thirds ketchup and the rest white vinegar, depending on how vinegary you like it.
To that, add a little Worchestershire and a fair amount of molasses.
To that, add roughly equal amounts:
paprika
chili powder
garlic powder
chili flakes
sea salt
cracked pepper
cumin
dry rub
cayenne pepper
Stir and taste. Add more seasonings as necessary.

The wedding champagne: Thibaut-Janisson

Thibaut-Janisson is a Virginia blanc de Chardonnay, and is also the sparkling wine Obama served at the event with the infamous gatecrashers. Not that that has anything to do with my wedding. But the bubbly was lovely--well-balanced, not too sweet, and appropriately complex. Just like a good marriage.

We interrupt this blog to bring you a wedding

For the next four days, I'll be staying with my parents, who have no internet access or cell phone reception. I'll return with many, many wedding-related recipes around Wednesday, May 19. Stay tuned!

Paris Manhattan

I'm gonna take a minute here and stump for one of my favorite liqueurs, St. Germain. It's an elderflower liqueur that is surprisingly versatile. I think it's great all by itself with some ice and club soda, but I've found it perks up any number of other drinks, giving them a lovely ethereal floral sweetness.

I've also turned John on to this stuff, and one of our favorites is the Paris Manhattan--a regular Manhattan with an additional shot of St. Germain. It's two parts good bourbon (I use Woodford Reserve), one part St. Germain, 1/2 part dry vermouth, and a splash of bitters. Mix and serve over ice.

Dark n' Stormy

A good Dark n' Stormy is one of my favorite drinks, and one that is shockingly hard to find outside my living room. Bars don't usually offer it, and at least 75% of the Dark n' Stormys I've paid for were decidedly sub-par. I no longer bother paying for one, unless I'm in an honest-to-God sailor bar somewhere on the East Coast, as this originated as a sailor's drink. (Sailors can be trusted not to screw up a Dark n' Stormy.)

Which is why I like making them for myself so much! All you need is Gosling's rum, a good-quality ginger beer (basically a higher-quality, spicier version of ginger ale) like Barritt's, and a lime. Traditionally you pour the ginger beer first and float the dark rum on top of that (creating the "dark and stormy" look), but I find it tastes better if you put the rum in first. Fill a glass with ice and fill it 1/3 - 1/2 full with rum. Add ginger beer, to the top. Take a fresh lime quarter, squeeze it in, and then drop in the lime carcass.

Ahhhhhhhhhh.

Mojitos

You guessed it, this week features some of the beverages I plan to serve at the wedding. My mom will be hip-deep in fresh mint, so I'm planning to make a big batch of mint syrup for mojitos.

OK, using a syrup is sort of cheating. Technically you're supposed to muddle the mint and sugar together in each glass. But for a party situation, that's way too time-consuming. This recipe is quick to mix up and can be adapted to serve lots of people.

My basic mojito recipe is 1/4 light rum, 1/4 mint syrup, 1/4 club soda, and 1/4 fresh lime juice, although obviously you can play around with that and adjust for taste. Serve over ice, with a sprig of fresh mint in each glass. The ratio is the same whether you're making one glass or a tub full. Each batch of mint syrup produces two cups, to wit:
1 big bunch of fresh mint
2 cups of sugar
2 cups of water
Combine everything in a saucepan and stir constantly over medium-high heat until all the sugar dissolves and you have a relatively viscous syrup. Set aside to cool. Discard mint and refrigerate the syrup until ready.

Fresh lemonade

I realized I had six or seven lemons left in the drawer this weekend, and decided to use them up by making--what else? A pitcher of fresh lemonade.

Fresh lemonade is highly underrated. Not enough people ever taste it from scratch, and it's a shame. Granted, it takes a few minutes to squeeze all the lemons dry, but that's great exercise!  The recipe is completely adaptable--you can adjust it based on how many lemons you have and how tart you like the final product to be. Just squeeze the lemons dry into a pitcher, add at least a cup of sugar, and some water. Keep adding sugar and/or water until you have a full pitcher of a lemonade that is sufficiently sweet or tart for you. I like mine more tart (big shocker there). Serve over ice. If you want to get really fancy, you can add fresh berries or mint (or even a little vodka) but nothing says summer like a big glass of plain homemade lemonade.

Cranberry-blood orange margaritas

This weekend I had a few people from work over for a pre-wedding cocktails thing, and I found myself contemplating the state of my liquor cabinet, which is now officially down to vermouth and grappa. How to have a cocktail party without buying a bunch of stuff?, I wondered. So, first I chilled all the champagne I had left (three bottles). Then I took the last half-bottle of tequila and resolved to make a batch of margaritas.

Here's the recipe, such as it is:
2 parts tequila
1 part triple sec
juice of one big lime
juice of one blood orange
1/2 part cranberry juice

Shake and serve over ice. For the first batch, I also added what was left of a mini-bottle of Chambord, so if you wanted, you could also add 1/2 part of that. It added a nice raspberry hint to the background. Of course the measurements are to taste, so feel free to play around with the final product.

Cookbook review: Fat

The name says it all. Fat ($21.45 at Amazon). Fat has been inappropriately vilified--yes, too much of it is bad for you, but it's crucial to the working of your body and brain. (In fact, with no fat intake at all, your brain literally stops working.) And let's not confuse bad fat--usually chemically produced, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, trans fat-type fats, the kind found in junk/fast/convenience foods--with plain old regular animal fat, which is good for you in appropriate amounts. Few ingredients can carry flavor like animal fat. And yes, okay, there are recipes like marrow sauce, but there are also recipes for pumpkin and bacon soup, caramel sauce, and brown butter ice cream.

Cookbook review: Real Cajun

By now, I'm sure you've all figured out that I have a soft spot for Cajun and Creole food. If New Orleans had any kind of infrastructure, I would move there in a heartbeat. (And then get enormously fat.) But as it stands, I enjoy things like regular garbage pickup and an uncorrupted police presence, so I remain in California. Fortunately my sister lives near there, so I can visit to my heart's content.

Real Cajun ($23.10 at Amazon) is IMHO one of the top two Cajun cookbooks on the market. (The other is Cooking Up a Storm, reviewed earlier.) This one is much more visually appealing, however. And the recipes have great stories to go along with them. Best of all, the recipes aren't filled with weird hard-to-find ingredients. Well, fresh seafood may be hard to find at times, but outside of that, I mean. In fact, I'm using a derivation of the seafood gumbo recipe in here for the seafood gumbo at my wedding.

Cookbook review: Made in Italy

Big gorgeous cookbooks featuring Italian food and cooking are a dime a dozen. Seems like every time I browse the cookbook secon at Barnes & Noble, half of them are about Italian food--many also featuring stories and/or journalism. But Made in Italy ($37.80 at Amazon) is the most useful of them. The recipes are authentic and most of them are simple enough for even beginner cooks. Plus it's gorgeous. My go-to fresh pasta recipe comes from here. And really, who can resist a recipe for prosecco risotto? Anything that involves bubbly is okay with me.

Cookbook review: The Bacon Cookbook

Now, you knew that was coming. The Bacon Cookbook ($23.10 at Amazon) is the cookbook I could have written. Well, not really, but naturally I couldn't NOT own this cookbook. Surprisingly, there were several recipes/combinations in here I hadn't yet thought of. And granted, this is not the healthiest cookbook in the world, but it doesn't matter. There's bacon in it.

Cookbook review: Cooking Up a Storm

Cooking Up a Storm ($16.47 at Amazon) features the favorite recipes published in New Orleans' Times-Picayune. Naturally it's a treasure trove of Cajun and Creole cooking, with recipes from both professional and amateur kitchens. It could use more pictures, but don't let the lack of visual appeal throw you. Everything I've made from here has been wonderful.

Homemade ranch dressing

I haven't willingly eaten ranch dressing since puberty, I'm much more of a good olive oil and good balsamic vinegar as a dressing type person, but I recently discovered my stepson-to-be loves ranch dressing. And garlic croutons. So I made a big batch of both this weekend, hoping to tempt him into eating salad. (It didn't work.) But the ranch dressing was good.

3/4 cup buttermilk (you can also substitute the same amount of regular milk, with a couple of tablespoons of white vinegar or apple cider vinegar thrown in)
a little mayo and/or a little sour cream, depending on how thick/runny you want the final product to be--you can leave it out entirely with no loss of taste, but it will be runny
chopped chives and parsley
one garlic clove
salt

Peel the garlic clove and mash it into a paste with the salt. Put this in a jar and add the rest of the ingredients. Shake well. Season with salt and pepper as desired.

Thomas Keller's roast chicken recipe

I've shared my own recipe for roast chicken, but this one by Thomas Keller is better. And quicker. I'm officially switching.

The beauty of this recipe is that it requires one ingredient, other than chicken: salt. And only one hour to cook. I was skeptical, but I tried it this weekend. I'm a convert. Trussing a chicken isn't difficult (I don't know why I didn't do it before) and bringing the chicken up to room temperature first made a big difference.

Plus, roast chicken in an hour!

Cookbook review: The Flavor Bible

The Flavor Bible ($22.14 at Amazon), from the same team that brought you What to Drink with What You Eat. It's the same principle--a reference manual that cross-references spices, herbs and flavorings with the foods that will go best with them (and vice-versa). A great way to figure out how to use unfamiliar spices, and also how to jazz up yet another chicken breast.

Cookbook review: What to Drink with What You Eat

What to Drink with What You Eat  ($22.14 at Amazon) is my second-most-frequently-used cookbook. Actually, it's less of a cookbook than it is the most awesomest reference manual of all time. It cross-references every kind of wine, and most kinds of booze, with almost every conceivable food item. Want to know what will pair best with asparagus? Look up asparagus. Want to know what kind of dessert wine to serve with aged cheddar? Got a fabulous bottle of cabernet and you want to make the best dinner possible to showcase it? Want to know what snackies to serve at your next margarita party? And so on. The book is a great way to indirectly learn about wine, too, since the best way to learn about wine is to drink a lot of it. Every dinner can be a new tasting adventure!