White Chocolate Almond Biscotti

I like biscotti because they tend not to be too sweet. Even when you add a little white chocolate.

White Chocolate Almond Biscotti

2 ¼ c all-purpose white flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

3 large eggs

1 c sugar

½ tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp almond extract

1 cup sliced almonds

¾ cup white chocolate (chips)

one: Preheat oven to 325. Lightly grease your baking sheet(s) and set aside.

two: In a mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. In another (larger) mixing bowl, beat eggs, sugar, vanilla and almond extract until thick and pale. (About 3 min with an electric mixer on high.)

three: With a wooden spoon, stir the dry ingredients into the wet, followed by the almonds. (The dough will be soft and sticky.)

four: With two rubber spatulas, form the dough into two or three 10-in-long logs on the prepared baking sheet. (The do

ugh doesn’t expand much when baking, so consider how long you want your biscotti to be and that should dictate how many logs you want. That is - how wide you want the logs to be and thus how many you can make at about 10 in long.) They should be about an inch thick. Smooth the logs with a spatula or moistened hands.

five: Bake for 30 min or until the logs are lightly browned and spring back when pressed in the center. Lightly. Transfer logs to a cutting board and slice crosswise into ½-in-thick-slices. Stand the slices upright on the backing sheet about ½ inch apart and return to the oven for another 10 to 15 min. Or until they are lightly colored and crisp. Transfer to a rack to cool.

six: Melt white chocolate carefully – i.e. in a double boiler. I just put a smaller pot in a larger pot filled with a couple inches of

simmering water. Stirring constantly. You can also melt the chocolate in the microwave, if you have one of those, as long as you do it in short installments so you don’t burn it by accident. Stirring in between.

seven: Using a small spatula, spread white chocolate on bottom side of cooled biscotti. Place – top or chocolate side down – on wax paper to cool. Once the chocolate has hardened, remove from wax paper and enjoy!

Especially with coffee.

Winter Slaw: Cabbage & Grapefruit

It's easy to get bogged down with starch in the winter. The holidays are all about stuffing and potatoes - mashed, baked, candied, au gratin - and meat. Which isn't a starch but is often a similar color. Not to mention all of the cheese - cheese plates, on crackers, in balls, mixed into the stuffing and potatoes and meat...tis the season of beige food. It makes sense, of course. If we were actually eating with the seasons, it would be nothing but root vegetables and meats, and preserved things, like cheese. Very few fresh veggies and fruits - mostly fresh from a can or a jar. So it's nice to have some interesting salad options to brighten up our plates. Cabbage - which gets a bad rap, I know - is much hardier than lettuce and thus makes a good cold-weather raw option.

Fresh cabbage has a nice peppery bite that can stand up to the bright citrus of grapefruit, and hot peppers and toasted cumin seed add warmth to this refreshing mid-winter, xmas-colored slaw.

Cabbage-Grapefruit-Cumin Slaw

1 1/2 lb green cabbage (1 lg head), thinly sliced

1 - 2 grapefruit, peeled & "diced"*

5 - 10 red orchid peppers (or other red chili or even green chilis)**, halved the long way, seeds removed & thinly sliced

1/2 tsp toasted cumin seed***

1 tbsp Mirin (rice cooking wine)

1/2 tbsp brown sugar, packed

1/4 tsp salt

3 tbsp olive oil

one: Whisk cumin seed, Mirin, brown sugar, olive oil, salt and pepper to taste in the bottom of a large (serving) bowl.

two: Toss cabbage, grapefruit and peppers in dressing. Let sit for 1 hr.

three: Serve. (about 6)

*Once you've peeled the grapefruit, cut it in half top-to-bottom. Then slice each half into about 1/2 in. slices cross-ways. You can then pull apart the slices into neat, bite-sized segments.

**If you can't find the bonnet chilis - which I happen to get at my local farmer's market - you may of course use any chili that you can find. Just beware of how spicy the chili you've chosen is, and how spicy-tolerant anyone you might try to feed this to is. Adjust pepper amount and the size of your slice accordingly.

***Heat a frying pan over medium heat until hot. Shake tsp of cumin seed over the surface of the pan and toast until fragrant - shaking the pan gently once or twice. This shouldn't take much more than a minute.

Carrot Relish

Now that money's tighter, and I'm living more on my own again, that is not that I wasn't living alone before but I was sharing more meals, I'm on a kick to use everything up in the fridge before:

a) it goes bad and

b) I go shopping again.

I always have carrots around because they last forever and they make a good snack when I'm frantic running

out the door and don't want to eat another goddamn cracker, but aside from that I don't really put them in much. They go in tomato sauces sometimes or on sandwiches maybe, but I don't like them in salads unless they're grated and I'm too lazy to grate things on a serving to serving basis. I hate cleaning the grater; I always cut myself. But the more carrots get grated at once, the more meals the grating is spread out over, the greater the cost:benefit.

Carrot Relish

(serves 2-3)

2 carrots, grated

1 clove garlic, minced

1 jalapeno (or several random chilies) or to taste, minced*

Juice of 1/2 a lime

Salt to taste

one: Mix carrot, garlic and jalapeno in a bowl.

two: Add lime juice and salt. Taste and adjust.

three: Serve.

Particularly awesome on a burrito in place of salsa when you accidentally buy salsa that isn't spicy enough. Also good on humus sandwiches and def with any sort of peanut anything, including chicken or even red meat!

*note about the chilies: I like things uber spicy. It can be a problem for other people. In my case, I chopped up the chilies whole (I used about three small spicy red and yellows I got at our neighborhood farmer's market) seeds and all, but if you're not that into it, you could consider removing the seeds. Then you get some of the spice from the pepper's flesh, but it won't be as painful.

Receipts.1

3 limes

1 bunch cilantro

1 red onion

1 white onion

1 bag spinach

1 bottle white wine (Las Brisas - a white from the Rueda region of Spain. You see the $$)

1 bottle buttermilk

I often stand there in line at the grocery story wondering what my groceries say about me. Making snap judgements about the guy behind me with the three packages of ground beef, corn chips, chocolate milk, case of red Gatorade and bag of Gala apples.

Meatloaf, perhaps?

So I thought I would just put it out there. I think it's especially interesting now that I live in a neighborhood - um, maybe city - that doesn't really put much stock in full-on grocery stores, thus I have been doing a lot of shopping for a little of things.

In this case my friends just gave me the gift of seven homegrown California avocados. Guacamole? Cold soup? Etc. Etc.

Peach Cobbler: Look No Cans

This is my take on the easy peach cobbler recipe that's all over the internet. I know it's a little late in the season for peaches in many places, but I just visited the local farmer's market in my new neighborhood and came home with a mound of them. I wouldn't normally go here, but I have a friend who hates to bake and has adopted this recipe as her one and only. Now that we don't live in the same town, I find I miss it, so I'm making it my own. I suppose it's a great recipe whatever way you slice it, but most of the versions I've found call for self-rising flour and canned peaches, two things that never darken my pantry door.

Easy Peach Cobbler

1/2 c. unsalted butter

1 c. flour

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp (loose) freshly ground nutmeg

1 c. sugar

1 c. milk

16 oz. (about four) peaches, pealed and sliced

one: Melt butter in the bottom of an 8x10 baking pan.

two: Mix dry ingredients thoroughly with a fork. Add sugar and mix. Add milk and stir until smooth.

three: Make sure butter is evenly distributed over the bottom of the pan - i.e. it's on a flat surface - and poor batter over butter without mixing. Lay fruit slices over the top, again no need to mix.

four: Bake at 375 for 20-30 minutes or until the edges are a nice golden brown. Let cool for a cool 15 and enjoy.

I'll see if I can come up with a nice bourbon vanilla ice cream recipe to go with this one.

There's a Maggot in My Flour

That is, we live in the south.

That is, life must eat and goddamn but don't we have a lot of life down here.

That is, have you seen Suspiria?

That is, it's not poverty it's a Dario Argento movie.

That is, my friend stopped by the other day and brought my attention to something I never thought worth a second glance. It was so necessary and it seemed so intuitive.

Here's the story:

About two years ago I lived in this lovely little shack back in the BR with a very fabulous, if a little cook-lite, friend. Let me set the scene. When my friend rented the place for us - I was out of the country - our landlady mentioned that people 'keep telling me to put some work into these places, really renovate and up the rent, but I don't want to do that. I want to be able to provide cheap housing for students." Sweet isn't she? Very generous. Your average slum lord. Upon moving in, one of the first things I discovered was that when the oven was turned on, the scent of roasting shit permeated the entire house. Turns out.....well actually I don't think what I found under that oven need be described, but let me just say I baked nothing for the rest of that year. Not one thing.

So there I am, in our tiny, hobbled kitchen sauteing bok choi for my peanut noodles when something hits me on the head and bounces, landing on the stove about an inch to the left of my frying pan. Huh, I think and bend over to see.

To see a big, fat, white, writhing worm thing, Like a maggot. About half-an-inch long and thisthisthis close to having fallen in my food. What if I had stepped away for a moment and it had fallen in the pan? I wouldn't have even known.

And so I look up - really look - and there they are. All of these blanched streaks squirming around on the top of the walls. On the ceiling. And little brown, worm-shaped cocoons stuck to the white paint. I couldn't help it. I screamed.

And then I got mad. What the fuck, I thought. We're vegetarian for god's sake. It's not like there's a new shipment of meat stored up in our attic rotting away.

Is there?

No, of course there wasn't. It didn't take long to figure out where the wormies were coming from - much less time, in fact, than it took me to get up on a chair and wipe my ceiling down with bleach. They were, you guessed it, coming from the flour. All of our dried goods, which we had up until that point been keeping in our open-air open-face cabinets. No matter the container, no matter how air tight the seal, there were moths and well-fed larvae in all of our pasta, flour and bulk grain.

I threw out everything. And I started keeping my flour in the freezer.

So a week ago, my friend comes over - a fellow baker - and I reach into the freezer to get us some gin.

"You're a genius," she says.

"What?" I say.

"Your flour," she says. "We keep getting bugs in our flour. You've got it in the freezer."

"Oh, yeah," I say. "It helps."

"Pure genius," she says. "You should blog about that," she says.

Ta-da.

Snob Review: Raising Cane's, Baby

What better way to end days and days of eating off the highway (if I never eat Subway again...) but with Baton Rouge's best home-grown fastfood!

Raising Cane's began as a homework assignment for a business class at LSU. Todd Graves, Cane's founder, apparently got a terrible grade on his chicken finger business plan, but there's no dream quite as strong as the dream of fried chicken. After years of hard work out in the real world, he raised enough capital to get it going and finally opened the first store outside LSU's north gate in 1996. It was off to a bustling, finger-licking beginning, and the business has since expanded beyond our little sleepy BR berg into 13 other states of this our great nation.

One of the best thing about Cane's, I think, is the simplicity of their menu. They really have only 6 items from which to assemble your meal: chicken fingers, french fries, coleslaw, Texas toast, super-secret Cane's sauce and soda. You can order any of these a la carte, or you can go with one of their meals - various numbers of fingers, fries, toast, sauce and a drink or the Cane's sandwich: chicken fingers on a bun. That's it. That's all she wrote.

Brilliant.

Of course, what makes this simplicity pay off is the quality of the (fast)food. There's no denying the fastfood fried-ness of these meals. But everyone needs a little fastfood in their lives, and if you're gonna do it why not do it right. Do it local...or at least not BIG business. Do it yum.

First and foremost, these are some serious chicken fingers. I have to admit, I'm a sucker for chicken fingers. They were the very last meat I ate after I had become vegetarian - I ordered them delivery to my dorm in Boston and snarfed them in the common room, hoping no one would catch me and tell the vegetarian police. These chicken fingers are no McDonald's processed crap. They are clearly chicken - all white meat, flaky like chicken can be, tender and with the right meat:fried ratio. (I.e. more meat less fried. But still very very fried.) Definitely Cane's crowning glory. As they should be. The fries are fries - not particularly potato-y but salty like fastfood fries were meant to be - and while the sauce could use a little more kick in my opinion, it was creamy, saucy, good. Nothing here is pretending to be good for you, and so maintains its high taste level, but everything is quality. KFC should hang its head in shame.

Lastly, just a word about the ambiance. The original store, the one where I purchased these lovely fingers, is a real LSU staple. College kitsch on the walls and tiger print upholstery. Def worth the visit. And you see that guitar on the wall behind me? Enter to win.