Cooking Club Archives

Donna Hay’s Beef, Guinness and Mushroom Pie

March 17, 2016 By Karen

Last St. Patrick’s Day, I shared a quick and healthy green smoothie, and wrote about my brother Brian, who would have been 46 today. This year, in honor of both Pi Day on Monday, and St. Patrick’s Day, I feel obligated to share Donna Hay’s Beef, Guinness and Mushroom Pie with you all. I have been sitting on this since November, and that’s just ridiculous, since there are so many reasons to make this savory pot pie as soon as you can. (Donna Hay, by the way, is Australia’s version of Martha Stewart, but younger, minus the crafts and the jail time, and I will be writing more about her, and our Donna Hay themed cooking club in my next post.) From one of my new favorite cookbooks, it uses a method for the pastry crust that I’ve never heard of before, but is so much simpler that the traditional cold butter version. It’s a hot water pastry that actually melts the butter with water before stirring it into the flour, which results in a kinder dough. It comes together quickly, is sturdy enough to hold up to a hearty filling, yet still flakes. If you’re intimidated by the idea of making a pie, then this is your crust!!! (Or skip it, buy a pre-made shell from the store, and everyone will still love you for making whatever you stick inside of it. I promise. But to be honest, this is totally worth the extra 10-15 minutes of your life.)

But here’s the thing, you’ll want to get started on cooking your brisket first, because this is not a 30 minute meal. Trimming your meat, cubing it, browning it, and finally braising it is time consuming. It’s the type of activity that you can do while listening to a good story though. (I’m currently enjoying this audio book if you’re looking for something entertaining, which is soon going to be a TV series.) And in its own way, it makes for a relaxing time in the kitchen….

Vegan Cornbread Stuffing with Chipotle, Swiss Chard and Sweet Potato

November 22, 2015 By Karen

I’ve promised several friends that I’d share this recipe in time for Thanksgiving prep, so I think I’ve made it in just under the wire! As I mentioned earlier this week in my Spiced Orange Cranberry Sauce post, stuffing is one of my favorite parts of the Thanksgiving meal. I love it so much that we always have two different kinds at our table, ensuring plenty of leftovers. While some get repeated, there are always so many recipes I want to try that I like changing it up every year. A few examples we’ve loved were sourdough stuffing with mushrooms, apples and sage, herb and bacon cornbread stuffing, and even wild rice, fruit and pecan stuffing, which was a bit of a departure for us one year. Last month, while I was searching for a dish to bring to my cooking club for our Vegan theme night, I went directly to one of my favorite food blogs, The First Mess. My friend Felice turned me onto it a year ago, and even though my diet doesn’t skew vegan generally, I want to make everything Laura writes about. The photographs are stunning, and her flavor combinations always excite me. Assigned to a starch dish that night, I new instantly that I wanted to try what she called her sweet potato, chipotle + chard cornbread stuffing. I figured I could use this as an opportunity to audition it for our Thanksgiving dinner, and I am so glad I did! I mostly followed the recipe, but made some slight adjustments in order to double it to fit a 9 x 13 baking dish. (You know me, if I’m going to spend time cooking, I’m going to make sure there’s a large yield to serve for other meals or to freeze!) I also had to find a vegan cornbread recipe to use, because my standard one uses buttermilk (and bacon fat when I’m going all in!) Food52 pulled through for me on that end, and with a few changes there too I had a winner. With this vegan cornbread stuffing you have the sweetness from both the bread and the sweet potatoes, the smoky spicy layer from the chipotles, and a savory earthiness from the leafy green swiss chard. It balances perfectly, stays moist on the inside, but gets slightly crispy on top. I made a large casserole dish to share with friends, but decided to bake two individual ramekins as well for my family to try. The good news? Because I waited for daylight to grab some of the shots, I didn’t actually let my guys eat their stuffing for 5 days after making it! And you know what? It was just as delicious!

And it turns out it complemented the rest of our vegan cooking club meal as well. We had a fantastic lentil and nut loaf as the main course, which you shoud definitely make, …

Alice Waters’ Ratatouille

November 11, 2015 By Karen

Before the warmth of summer is completely forgotten, I wanted to make sure to share this ratatouille recipe with you all. While the farm markets may be closing, I have no doubt you’ll still be able to find zucchini, eggplants, peppers and tomatoes around, because this dish uses all the best that season had to offer. In a perfect world I would have gotten this to you weeks ago, but please indulge my off-season post! Fresh and flavorful, this warm and hearty vegetable stew is comforting on its own, elegant when served as a side to Coq au Vin, and perfect as a topping to polenta or a bowl of your favorite pasta. Sweetness from the tomatoes gets balances by bright thyme and woodsy rosemary, and fresh basil completes it. It is one of those “genius recipes” that is guaranteed to work, and Alice Waters deserves all the credit for it.

I’d always wanted to make ratatouille, but never took the time to follow through on it. But when September’s cooking club theme was announced, I knew immediately what I would contribute. French night, and I was on for vegetables? Ratatouille!!! Obviously, this was the push that I needed. The first time I made this I doubled the recipe and had two pots going at once, and I am so glad that I did. The leftovers are freezer-friendly, and perfect to pull out on a fall night. It also meant I had enough extra to deliver to my friend Al, whose doorbell I rang, all frazzled, still in my apron, who let me take kitchen shears to his herb garden an hour before I had to get to my supper club when I realized that I was terribly short of basil. It was a night of fabulous food and even better company, and participating in this is always a highlight of my month. (The roasted endive and pear salad, the piped french potatoes, and the chocolate pots de creme were all hits, as was the coq au vin. Really, everything was delicious.)

The second time I felt inspired to make it though was all thanks to my neighbor Catherine. Creator of the amazing gardening and food blog The Winebox Gardener, she sent me an email asking if I would take all of her ichiban eggplant that she’d just harvested from her garden. Since she was in the middle of a kitchen remodel, and wouldn’t have a chance to cook it any time soon, she had plenty to share. Who’s going to turn down homegrown eggplant? Certainly not me! I would love to have seen what she would have done with it though, because her writing, adventures around NY and NJ, recipes and photography always inspire me. You really should go check out her blog! (Follow her on social media too, in all the usual places: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter!)

So if you’re looking for something that’s healthy, freezer-friendly, vegan, gluten-free, and all those good things, pick up some vegetables and herbs the next time you’re at the store and try Alice Water’s Ratatouille. It’s worth the effort. It’s satisfying and cozy all at the same time. And if you’re like me, and you find yourself falling into the pumpkin trap that surrounds us these days, there’s no reason you can’t throw some butternut squash or pumpkin into the mix, and with a little added sage, it will embody fall for you too. See, there, everybody wins. Now it’s seasonal! And please, let me know what you think in the comments, because I would love to hear if you make this or any other recipe on Tasty Oasis. All of your experiences and feedback helps me, and other readers, so please keep me posted!…

Peach, Ricotta and Basil Pizza

August 27, 2015 By Karen

Hello! I know you haven’t seen me here much these last few months, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been in my kitchen. I’ve said it before: it’s my happy place. My oasis. When there’s nonsense going on, I retreat to the place where nothing can go wrong, and where I can get a few minutes of solitude. Okay, maybe you are looking at that last sentence and thinking, “But everything can go wrong in the kitchen!” Sure, flour can be spilled, dough can be too sticky, crust can get burned, but really, is it the end of the world? No. Is it a disaster? Never. Unless you’re slicing a digit and bleeding all over the place, or burning yourself on a hot pan (all things I can proudly say I’ve done, more than once,) mistakes in the kitchen aren’t tragic. So just take a deep breath and embrace the fact that you can be creative, you can feed yourself and people you care about wholesome food, and it’s going to taste damn good in the end. Oh, and that solitude? Sometimes it happens, and pushing dough to the edges of a pan is meditative, and other times I’ve got whining kids cranking out saying they’re hungry, or that their brother was mean. But truthfully, just being in the kitchen calms me down, and my reactions are kinder there.

So what have I been cooking? I’ve made 9 pizzas in the last seven days. Yes, nine. Four had peach, basil and homemade ricotta, two were avocado, corn and basil, a pesto pepperoni and a standard pepperoni, and then one with garlic oil, figs, mozzarella, Maldon sea salt and a splash of balsamic. I just got on a kick, and I can’t seem to stop. Here’s the thing: pizza is really easy. It’s one of those tricks, that once you learn how to do it, you wonder why you never did it before. And you can throw anything you want on top, and most of the time it works. This week, they all worked. And they worked so well that I just kept repeating them.

I’ve been making my own dough for a few years now. I’ve tried tons of recipes, but my all time favorite is from the cookbook and blog, Dinner: A Love Story, by Jenny Rosenstrach. Her recipe is pretty much Jim Lahey’s no-knead dough recipe, and it’s a winner….

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sour and Hot Mushroom Tofu Soup

May 19, 2015 By Karen

It’s been a while since I updated you on the cooking club I participate in. I wrote a general “how-to” guide for cooking clubs, I told you about our inaugural Israeli night, I shared the Apple Cider Rum Punch from the Caribbean dinner, and I filled you in on Indonesia by way of an Avocado Shake with Kahlua and Godiva Liqueur. But there have been three others that I’ve kept you waiting on! While Mexico and Greece are on standby, I’d like to catch you up on our incredible Chinese meal and let you know about one of my new favorite cookbooks.

In order to expand my options in the kitchen lately, I keep ordering new cookbooks at the library and actually (shockingly!) cook out of them. But after years of collecting cookbooks for the sake of collecting, I have become much more selective. If I find one I really like, that I am willing to make a permanent space for on my bookshelf, I go ahead and buy it. This is one of those books. Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to study at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in central China, and while not a native Chinese cook, she has become a prominent cookbook author. Her latest book, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking is easy to follow, filled with healthy recipes and beautiful photographs that show food you’ll want to cook on a regular weeknight basis. Experimenting with Chinese cooking was on my to-do list, but this book pushed me to finally do it. It’s a perfect introductory book, and I can’t recommend it enough. (Full disclosure, the link is an affiliate link. It doesn’t mean you’ll be charged any extra, it’s just that I’ll get a few pennies to buy an extra mushroom or two if you purchase anything after clicking through.)

The one thing to know is that you will need to pick up a few specialty ingredients for your pantry, but once you have them you’ll be prepared to throw together quick and easy meals that will beat Chinese take-out ten times over. It will be healthier, more flavorful, cheaper, and can be made in less time than it takes to place an order and get it. That’s definitely true of her Spicy Buckwheat Noodles, her Sweet and Spicy Cold Noodles (which I’ve already made at least half a dozen times!,) and her Spicy Sesame Noodles, which all can be made in the same amount of time it takes to make boxed mac and cheese. Seriously. They’re incredible. But admittedly, for a girl who’s definition of soy sauce was the low sodium bottle from Trader Joe’s, I had some shopping to do to stock my pantry. I was lucky though to have a Taiwanese friend take me on a tour of our local new Asian grocery store, and after 90 minutes of wandering the aisles, I was ready to go. If you don’t have the same resources near you, remember you can always find ingredients online. Don’t let your location stop you!

Vinegar and Soy Sauces: Fuchsia Dunlop's Sour and Hot Mushroom Tofu Soup is a healthy, lighter version of a Chinese take-out favorite. With four types of mushrooms, it's hearty enough as its own meal, or the perfect compliment to a feast. It's comforting and impressive, and this large batch will leave you with plenty to freeze for future bowls. | www.tastyoasis.net

If you can’t find ingredients locally, Amazon carries them! Just click on the photo.

Which brings me back to the recipe that I chose for cooking club: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Hot and Sour Mushroom Tofu Soup….

Indonesian Avocado Shake (Jus Alpukat) with Kahlua and Godiva Liqueur

December 18, 2014 By Karen

I keep getting caught. Caught yawning. Shifting in my chair. Not by one person. Not by two, or even three or four. But by countless people.

Should I blame the weather? It’s been cold, wet and dark outside. Should I blame the alarm that routinely rings at 5:30am or even earlier? I set it after all, to go to perfectly decent days of work. What about my little guy who keeps tip-toeing in at 2am to ask to be tucked back into the covers that he kicks off? The poor kid’s cold, and he needs help. (But seriously, the kid has got to learn how to pull the damn covers up already.)

No, really, I take responsibility for my own glassy eyes and dark circles. Because night after night I stay up way too late, long after I should go to bed. Granted, I can be productive at times. One night a few weeks ago was turkey stock, started at the foolish time of 5 o’clock, so that it was midnight by the time it was cool enough to freeze in pre-portioned Ziploc bags. Another night was sorting and backing up all of the photos from the last couple of months. Especially important, since I just managed to completely lose three weeks of pictures this month. All my “before” kitchen shots would have been fun to share, but the bigger disappointment was erasing my husband’s birthday pictures. (Remember I told you my computer and technology skills were at least a decade behind when I started this project? Well, I’m learning, but I still managed to royally screw this one up. And no, they can’t be recovered. They’re gone. Yay me!) Then there was staying up at the kitchen table with my brother who lives 6000 miles away, or spending hours trying to figure out how to interpret jury instructions, also reading through a stack of new books I got at the library, and laundry. Endless laundry.

But there was one night a couple weeks ago that I got sucked into the internet, as I researched Indonesian drink recipes for our cooking club gathering that happened last week. I’ve had Malaysian food, Singaporean food, Thai, and Vietnamese, but I don’t think I’d ever had an Indonesian meal, so I certainly had no idea what a traditional drink would be. But as you all know, the internet can be a beautiful thing. And it can also suck your brain…. That night, it was a bit of both….

Cooking Club: Caribbean Night

November 10, 2014 By Karen

A few weeks ago, I shared my Apple Cider Rum Punch recipe that I created for last month’s Caribbean themed cooking club (or supper club.) As I have written about before, I’ve recently started getting together with a new group of women once a month so that we can all get a chance to play in our kitchens. Trying new foods, recipes, techniques, or ingredients, we all want to expand our cooking skills and have a night out with friends while enjoying a gourmet meal. It’s meant to be low stress, and so far the first two nights have been a ton of fun.

Our recent meal had a Caribbean theme, and our host based her selection off of a gorgeous cookbook called “Caribbean Potluck,” by Suzanne Rousseau and Michelle Rousseau. Most of us had very little experience cooking from this part of the world, but after just one night we all felt inspired to explore this area more. Paging through this book, I can’t even begin to tell you how many dishes called out to me. One member actually made the appetizers from one of the preview pages that she saw on Amazon while “browsing” the book online. Spicy Back Bean and Corn Wontons With a Papaya Dipping Sauce marked her first ever foray into the world of wontons, and they were outstanding. They paired well with the cocktail I made, and it was a great start to the night.…

Apple Cider Rum Punch

October 23, 2014 By Karen

June Cleaver? Betty Draper? Carol Brady? Any housewife from generations past that’s waiting at home at 6pm in full makeup and heels for her husband to come through the door, ready to mix his favorite cocktail?

I’m so not these women. I typically walk through my own door close to that time, trying to balance my work bag, my little guy’s lunch box, sweaters, my coffee mug from the morning, and the giant stack of mail, all while trying to get the key in the lock and the alarm off while reciting for the millionth time, “Please go right upstairs, use the bathroom and wash your hands. With soap. Now. Don’t make me start counting. One, two, three, four….” Tired and hungry, my makeup-less face attempts to hold it together. My shoes are kicked off and left in the pile of footwear covering our foyer floor, and I head straight to my room for pajamas. Pretty dress and heels to greet Brian as he returns home? More like an oversized grey t-shirt that says “Stanford Special Olympics ’95“ paired with pink and yellow striped drawstring pants. I’m so fancy, right? (Just writing that makes me think of one of the funniest songs I have ever heard: “Business Time.” I just re-watched the video, and I dare you not to laugh.)

So on Monday night, when I offered Brian a cocktail as he walked in the door, he looked at me confused. “A cocktail? Now???” I should probably mention that we’re not big drinkers, and I can’t think of a time that we have ever come home from work and just had a drink. Yes, I love having wine with dinner, or with girlfriends on a Friday night, but it’s not really Brian’s thing. And sadly, an open bottle of wine is going to sit around for weeks unless I throw it into something I’m cooking. And mixed drinks have always been for restaurants and vacation in my mind. (I know, such foolishness!)

But on Monday night I was trying to create a cocktail for our Caribbean themed cooking club that was happening the next evening, and I was taking my task very seriously. I was actually an “alternate” on the assigned rotation, so I was covering for the member on beverages. She had a business trip, and generously offered to supply the wine, so I only had to bring a fun drink. But if you ever look up Caribbean cocktail ideas, you’ll know the options are endless, which doesn’t help someone who has a hard time making decisions….