A couple years ago, Christey and I ate at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon restaurant at the Venetian in Las Vegas. It was the first (and so far only) Keller restaurant we have visited. I had Keller’s gnocchi parisienne, which is a different way of making them from the more common potato or semolina versions. This recipe alone was the reason I bought his Bouchon cookbook, and I’ve since been inspired by several recipes.

Gnocchi parisienne are savory, but made from the more traditionally sweet pâte à choux dough. For the savory version, mustard, cheese, and herbs are added.

For June’s POM Pomegranate recipe, I decided to try to take the pâte à choux gnocchi back toward a sweet direction, and made a dessert gnocci with POM 100% pomegranate juice, served with a pomegranate juice and chocolate ganache.

Dessert inside!

Today, guest baker Krissy makes strawberry cupcakes. We met Krissy in our childbirth class before our daughter Meta, and Krissy’s and her husband’s daughter Julie, were born. I’m not much of a baker, so Krissy walks us through her outstanding strawberry cupcake recipe! — Peter

I remember the first time I saw a red velvet cake a few years back on an episode of Sara’s Secrets on Food Network. I figured since we lived in Florida now (from Pittsburgh, PA), I should learn how to make a proper Southern Red Velvet Cake. The recipe featured Cake Man Raven’s recipe, and it is one I see time and time again in searching for the perfect Red Velvet recipe. I have used the recipe several times over, but was a bit put off by the amount of oil and its residual effects let alone how much cocoa powder really should be in the recipe.

After some research, I found I could make a few substitutions that hopefully would result in a healthier tasting treat. I substituted unsweetened applesauce for half the oil in the recipe, and yogurt for buttermilk. I rarely have buttermilk on hand, but always have yogurt since it is one of my daughter’s favorite foods to eat.

The first time I tried all the substitutions I was surprised that they actually turned out okay, but I could not believe how great they tasted! It was definitely the ‘Wow!‘ factor I was looking for when my husband and I tasted them. I was really excited that after some failed baking experiments one actually turned out. By using the strawberry yogurt we get a wonderful tasting strawberry cupcake – or a muffin if you leave the icing off!

Let’s get baking!

Buitoni and Foodbuzz had a sauce contest for Buitoni’s new Riserva line of pastas. We created Champagne Chile Cream Sauce for their Wild Mushroom Agnolotti and submitted it to their contest.

Happily, we placed as a runner-up! The winner and other runners-up can be seen on Buitoni’s Foodbuzz post! Congratulations to Taste With the Eyes and all the other winners!

(Read through to the end for the first FotoCuisine giveaway!)

The lychee fruit is an Asian fruit, usually grown from China to India. They are commonly found canned in a syrup, and offered as desserts at a variety of Asian restaurants.

Bill Mee, from Lychees Online, runs a lychee orchard in South Florida, and he was kind enough to send us a batch of Mauritius lychees (I’ve since been informed that we were shipped Sweetheart Lychees — a South Florida variety with a large fruit and small seed that is rapidly becoming a major breed) fresh from the tree. You might expect fresh, ripe lychees to be better than the canned kind, and you would be right — there just is no comparison. The aroma, the flavor, the juiciness dripping out of every fruit, is something very unique to the Western diet.

Lychees taste like lychees, of course, but the closest flavors I can come up with are a bit of peach mixed with grape. The combination works pretty well. My 12-year old stepson doesn’t like peach, but really liked the fresh lychees.

There are a lot of sweet lychee recipes, as well as savory sauces with an Indian or Asian influence. I wanted to use lychees in a savory recipe, but I wanted to do something classic in technique, mixed with Western ingredients. Since fruit always goes well with grouper (or halibut if you prefer a similar texture of fish from northern waters), I made a pan-roasted grouper with a chicken stock velouté flavored with pureed lychee and New Mexico chiles.

More lychees

Between work and a bit of traveling, we haven’t posted in a while. We have a few posts lined up though, including a couple give-aways, so check in throughout the next few days!

We have a pretty beat-up gas grill on our porch. The grate in it had been looking pretty bad, and I couldn’t find a replacement locally. I did find a supplier on the Internet, and within two business days, I had a new grate for my grill…one size too large. It still fits, but it sorta projects out the front of the grill and slants a little bit. I probably can’t grill sausages on it, but I figured it would work for my first attempt to grill pizza.

For our honeymoon three years ago, Christey and I went to Paris, Rome, and Venice. We loved the thin, personal pizzas of Italy, the thin crust and variety of different ingredients. I made homemade pizza dough and whipped up a tomato sauce. Christey and I formed our own pizzas (hers: thinly sliced mushroom, pepperoni and feta, mine: mushroom and sardine) and I grilled them on our new, somewhat slanted grill.

pizza pizza

Our last post was an entry for The Royal Foodie Joust hosted by Jenn, the Leftover Queen.

We got beaten to the punch by a croquette entry, then just when I figured maybe our stuffed croquettes were maybe a bit more of an arancini, another entry featured that. So, great minds think alike, and I figured I’d regroup.

For Memorial Day weekend here in the States, there were wonderful sales on steak, so my reboot of this month’s entry is a filet stuffed with rice, roasted tomatoes, herbs, and bacon, with a similar tomato basil aurore sauce (since it was so good from the last post). Oh, and feta. Can’t forget the feta.

Memorial Day Jousting…

Last month, Núria, from Spanish Recipes won the Royal Foodie Joust, hosted by Jenn, the Leftover Queen! It was even more fun for us watching, because it was our ingredients selected for that Joust — Red, White, and Green. Núria won with a mouthwatering Piquillos Stuffed with Cod.

This month, the ingredients Núria selected were rice, tomatoes, and bacon. I have childhood memories of my mom making croquettes when I was little, maybe 5 or 6 years old. I remember I liked them a lot and would ask her to make them when she asked me to pick something for dinner. I haven’t thought of that in a while, though, but when I decided croquettes would be a great combination of the ingredients, I remembered them again. Strange what memories lurk in the brain, only to resurface 35 years later…

I made stuffed herbed rice croquettes with oven roasted tomatoes, bacon, and cheddar cheese. served them with a basil sauce aurore, which is a béchamel with tomato paste, with some fresh basil from the garden.

Bacon inside…

I found some nice lamb loin chops the other day, and I decided to try another bit of regional swapping. I love taking a technique or recipe from one part of the planet, and mixing it up with a completely different part of the planet. I think the foodie word “fusion” leans a little bit to the Asian/Western combination, but that’s sort of what I’m shooting for — combining what works in one culture’s food with what works in another culture’s.

Sometimes, this may be reinventing the wheel. Similar methods of meal creation pop up all over the globe, independently from any cultural link. For example, many cultures have discovered the basics of food fermentation separately, from kimchi in Asia to the preparation of chocolate beans in South America. Other cultures have relied on connections, sometimes roundabout connections, and have adapted ingredients to their own culture — Mexican cuisine uses the Middle-Eastern cumin, and Italy uses the South American tomato.

Therefore, I’m not entirely sure there’s not a Greek equivalent to the Argentinian technique of creating chimichurri sauce — which itself has been described as something of a Patagonian pesto. Heavy on the herbs, with some olive oil, vinegar, some vegetables…generally local stuff blended and chopped together into a chunky, pasty, loose sauce.

In any case, that’s what I thought of when I saw the lamb. A nice marinade for flavor, grilled nicely, then a chimichurri-like sauce with classically Aegean ingredients.

More lamb inside

To some, May means the Kentucky Derby. To others, the start of the summer growing season. To many backyard chefs, May is the start of barbecue.

Barbecue used to be a very regional thing. One area might mean pork while another means beef. Some barbecue chefs prefer to smoke, some to grill, and some to braise. There are passionate arguments about dry (a spice rub) vs. wet (cooking with the sauce), and even the ingredients in a sauce, whether the meat is cooked in it or not.

I like to barbecue, and I don’t like to get drawn in to one technique over another. No matter the method, barbecue is just good food. For this month’s POM blogger entry, I’ve made a tasty POM pomegranate juice barbecue sauce for pork baby back ribs. The sweet spice of the sauce is a nice balance to the salty, tender rib meat.

OMG BBQ inside

Last month, we won the Royal Foodie Joust, hosted by Jenn, The Leftover Queen. As part of the prize (along with the coveted Joust apron), we got to choose the three ingredients for this month’s Joust.

I was hoping for pure creative and fun cooking, and since FotoCuisine loves the way food looks as well as tastes, I chose “Red, White, and Green” as the ingredients. Each cook should interpret “Red, White, and Green” ingredients however they would like.

I can’t help but play along, even though we’re out of the voting this month. I made a spicy tuna roll (red tuna, white rice, green nori), with a spicy sriracha wasabi sauce (red sriracha, green wasabi, white(ish) garlic/ginger).

Roll on in…