Category — Recipes

The peaches are all picked, given away or eaten. Makes me somewhat sad but also relieved. I can write about something else now! Plus, peach season continues at farmers’ markets, so I can always get my fix if needed.

How about a little something for breakfast or brunch?

Avocado Baked Eggs

• 2 large ripe firm avocados
• 4 medium to large eggs
• Juice of 1 lime
• Mama Mai’s S&P
• Linda’s Southwest Seasoning
• 1 medium ripe tomato, diced
• 1 small yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded, and diced
• Chopped fresh cilantro
• Plain non-fat yogurt
• Hot sauce
• Additional lime for garnish

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It would be nearly impossible to have a “summer fresh fruit week” without a pie or two…or three.

I’m so into the refrigerated pie crust that Connor turned me onto, that I bought a half-dozen boxes when I found them on sale at Safeway.

They are in the freezer and I’m “pie-ready” for the summer!

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Kim gifted me with fresh Mission figs and sweet little plums. I know, it’s like a darn fruit stand over here!

I ate all the plums straight away and then worked the figs and all those peaches, ripening and being picked each and every day, into our meals.

What follows is one of the quickest and easiest of the bunch.

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The parade of peaches continues. Yesterday the peach salsa had the extra benefit of mango and strawberry.

Today’s salad gets an extra fruity punch from apricot.

Dave is the salad lover in our family. I love soup. But I will admit, I do love this salad.

Oh, and I used the sliced honey roasted almonds from Trader Joe’s but plain sliced or slivered almonds, or any nut of your choice for that matter, would work perfectly fine. I would just toast them in a dry skillet or in the oven first. Enjoy!

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I have a peach tree in my backyard and boy do I love it! So much so, that I’ll be using the ripe juicy peaches and other fresh summer fruits in every recipe for the rest of the week. I really have no choice. The season is fast and furious and it’s a “use it or lose it” situation.

The peach tree I have now is a sweet little dwarf tree.

But back when we bought the house in 1999, I planted a full-size peach tree, and was that ever a mistake!

By May 2003, the tree got so big and produced so much fruit that I could not keep up.

The previous three photos were taken at a “Peach Pickin’ Dinner” where I begged my friends to come over and help me pick and eat peaches. We picked enough peaches to cover the entire kitchen island, and those were just the ones that were ripe that night!

By 2005, the tree could not keep up either.

It produced so many peaches that the limbs broke under the weight of the fruit.

A couple of years later, we remodeled the entire backyard, so the damaged and the sad big peach tree was out and the dwarf peach was in.

The dwarf is in the same place and it must be the perfect local for such a tree because it produces like crazy too.

Thankfully, not a kitchen island full of peaches, but a cutting board full every few days of the short season. Much more manageable!

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Happy Memorial Day! I hope you and your loved ones are spending a relaxing and reflective weekend together.

Aw, finally! The day has arrived, I am posting the last recipe from my Friday the 13th Dinner Party. I’m just happy I was able to squeak it in before the first of June! The lucky element in this final recipe is the coconut.

The tradition/superstition is that eating any round fruit on New Year’s brings luck and good fortune. In the Philippines, 13 is considered a lucky number so the custom calls for eating 13 round fruits. Whereas, in Europe and the States, we eat 12, which represents the months in a year. In both cases, their coin-like shape and their sweetness are what bring luck.

This is similar to the earlier mentioned belief that when you eat 12 grapes at midnight of New Year, it will bring you wealth and more luck for the next 12 months of the coming year.

A few pointers before we get to the recipe:

To hull the strawberries, you can use a paring knife, a strawberry huller (similar to little tweezers), or a straw. I’m all about the straw method. It’s quick and fun.

I bought the mold for the ice pops HERE on Amazon.

The sticks tend to float up when the molds are filled. I fixed that by placing the empty box the mold came in on top while the pops were in the freezer. Problem solved.

To store the frozen pops; lay down or stand up in a tight-sealing container with pieces of parchment paper in-between each pop.

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I have one last recipe to share from the Friday the 13th Dinner Party, but it will have to wait until next week. I’ll post that and the party wrap-up on Monday along with the full menu and recipe links.

The reason it is put on hold is that I must share the recipe for the most beautiful pie in the world – in time for you to make it for the long Memorial Day Weekend.

Just in case you’re new here, you should know that I don’t enjoy baking. I’m not very good at baking. I have had and continue to have more than my fair share of baking disappointments and disasters. So much so in fact, that a while back I was contemplating changing the name of this blog to “Cooking Triumphs and Baking Failures.”  Not anymore, not after my spectacular and unexpected triumph in baking the most beautiful pie ever!

Are you ready to be blown away?  OK then, here we go…

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This was the main dessert for the Friday the 13th Dinner Party.

The frosting is what makes this cake special and bananas are the unlucky ingredient.

It’s crazy how many “explanations” there are for the superstition that bananas on boats bring bad luck, illness, and bad fishing. Here are but a few from Snopes.com:

• When top-heavy ships of earlier eras would sink, precious little other than the bananas they’d carried would be found floating on the surface, thereby leaving some to conclude conveyance of the fruit itself had led to these naval mishaps.
• Spiders, snakes, and other poisonous vermin living among bananas carried in the hold would, on long haul trips, expand their horizons by infesting other parts of the ship.
• Because the speediest sailing ships were used to get bananas to their destinations before they could spoil, those attempting to fish from them never caught anything while trolling.
• Fisherman became ill after eating the fruit.
• Other fruits would spoil more quickly when bananas were being shipped along with them, causing folks to deem bananas “bad luck.” (Technically, it wouldn’t have been ill fate that resulted in the spoilage of other foodstuffs, but instead, the ethylene gas emitted by bananas as they ripen.)
• Crew member injured by slipping on discarded banana peels.
• Banana oil rubs off onto the hands of a fisherman, thereby “spooking” the fish.

Makes me wonder if Banana Boat sunscreen was named as an ode to the superstition. Anyhow, this cake was lucky for me because it turned out perfectly. One thing though, I think it tastes better the day after it is baked.

*** Note: The cake was the first of the recipes I made for the party, so don’t mind me, I thought I was being cute and clever when I placed lucky and unlucky “charms” in the photos as I made the cake. 🙂

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Let’s say you are reading a menu at a high-end restaurant and you have the choice between ordering a Marinated Flap Steak or a Marinated Bavette Steak. Which would you order based on the name alone? My guess is that the majority of you would order the Bavette over the Flap.

Well, as you may have already guessed, based on the leading question, flap and Bavette are the same cut of beef.

The flap is an extension of the T-bone and Porterhouse steaks. Texture-wise, the flap is similar to a flank or skirt steak and as with those two cuts, it needs marinating first and then to be cooked over high, dry heat such as grilling. What makes it more distinct is the flavor and richness of the flap over the other two.

In our part of the country, the flap needs to be specially ordered. I was able to call the butcher at A.J.’s and special order the beef I needed for my Friday the 13^th Dinner Party.

I tripled the recipe so don’t be alarmed by the price of the meet in my photo.

This dish had nothing to do with the Lucky/Unlucky theme. I chose it solely based on the wish to treat my guests to something different and special.

One last party detail I wanted to share was the notion of a 14th dinner guest.

There are French socialites called Quatorziens (fourteeners), who are available to fill in as a 14th dinner guest to rescue the other 13 attendees from bad luck. Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed in this superstition and refused to have 13 guests at dinner parties.

My original intention was to have 13 but one invited guest, my dear friend Anne, wasn’t able to commit until the last minute due to illness earlier in the week. Knowing that she may be able to come, I was planning on Anne being our Quatorzien. She did and she was and Peggy made the cute name tag for her, even though the word wasn’t spelled quite right, everyone got the gist of it.

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Today is Connor’s 25th birthday. Dave, Connor, and I are celebrating at Universal Studio’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Los Angeles. We are having the best time! Our only wish is that our expert in all things Harry Potter could be here with us. We miss you, Marissa! The photos above are from Sunday.

Yesterday, Monday, we spent the afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard and at Warner Bros. Studio. The tour at the WB is pretty darn great. Not only do you tour the lot on a tram, but you get off and walk around all sorts of cool spots. My favorite stop was the props building and that is where we found the Oval Office set from The West Wing. Connor is very presidential!

And if your favorite sitcom of all time is Friends, then no trip to Warner Bros. is complete without a photo on the set of Central Perk.

Connor, I love you, adore you, and could not be more proud of you and the loving, kind, and generous man you are. xoxo

Getting back to the Friday the 13th Dinner Party – we are nearing the end. Tomorrow will be the main course and then only dessert remains.

The lucky ingredient in today’s dish is lentils. The legumes are considered lucky because of their coin-like appearance. Additionally, when cooked, lentils are plump, symbolizing growing wealth.

Lentil Salad with Wild Mushrooms and Caramelized Onions

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 large red onions, peeled and roughly chopped
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3 pounds fresh mushrooms; a mixture of white, crimini, oyster, shiitake, etc.
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/2 cup capers, drained and rinsed
• 1 cup dry black lentils
• 3 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• 1 bag baby arugula
• 1 cup fresh pomegranate arils (seeds)
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh dill

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