Chicken Pot Pie

Making a pie crust is easy in concept, but hard to execute. You're working with very limited ingredients (flour, water, salt and shortening - maybe sometimes butter or sugar, depending on what you're doing), but those few ingredients are very demanding.

I had a taste for chicken pot pie this afternoon, and I felt like working in the kitchen after being behind a computer all day. A perfect storm. Read the rest.

Delicious lamb chop marinade

The barometer of good food for me lately is: Would I serve this to Anthony Bourdain?

I make so many frou frou cakes and baked nonsense, that oftentimes the answer is no.

But tonight, the answer is yes.

I have always had a soft spot for lamb chops; and indeed, they led to my downfall as a vegetarian. A bite of lamb broke my nearly two year fast from meat, and I haven't really looked back since.

Tom and I bought some chops at Whole Foods last night, and today he found a great marinade recipe. In a nutshell: 1/4 cup white vinegar, 2 tbsp olive oil, a healthy amount of smashed and chopped up garlic, 2 tsp of sea salt, 1/2 tsp of pepper, and some thinly sliced onion.

It seemed like it would be too much salt, and too much pepper. But it was delicious.

It took two passes on the grill to get it from raw to nicely pink.  It was perfect.  I will make this for you when you come to dinner, Anthony Bourdain.

Strawberry Dutch Pancake

I had never made one of these before, and I saw a recipe in the free press that I only loosely followed. I think their oven temps were way off - it said to start at 450 for fifteen minutes and then drop the temperature to 350, but my oven holds the heat like crazy. I would have been better off just cooking it at 350.

They had you make the batter, put 2 tbsp of butter in a pie pan to melt in the oven, swirl the butter around and then pour the batter in.

It rose gloriously in the oven during the first fifteen minutes, and I watched with anticipation. I dropped the temp and kept watching. After ten minutes, the edges were about to burn, so I took it out. Then fell like a brick.

The middle looked like it could have cooked longer.

Still, it tasted ok.  I topped it with diced strawberries, powdered sugar and a drizzle of agave syrup.

Here is the batter recipe.

1/2 cup flour
3/4 cup milk
2 eggs
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla