Every month, Jenn, the Leftover Queen hosts the friendliest cooking contest on the web: The Royal Foodie Joust! Three ingredients are chosen, and foodies and food bloggers from around the world compete for the coveted trophies of Best Picture, Most Unique, and Best Overall dish using those three ingredients.

If you haven’t Jousted, I seriously encourage you to try. It’s a fun, low-pressure way to stretch your culinary chops and see how three ingredients can spawn amazingly different recipes each month!

This month, the ingredients were yogurt, nuts, and mushrooms. I made a baked halibut, with a greek yogurt/sour cream sauce sprinkled with crushed macadamia nuts, sitting on a bed of thinly sliced criminis and shallots.
Recipe and more pics inside

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

Christey and I have done a guest-smackdown for Michelle over at Thursday Night Smackdown. We tackled Thomas Keller’s Coquilles St. Jacques, from his Bouchon cookbook.

Check out our post — and if you’ve never been to TNS before, it’s refreshingly PG-13 due to honest adult language.

The folks at FoodBuzz were kind enough to send us a sample of Buitoni’s new Riserva Pasta line. We got a sample of the Buitoni Wild Mushroom Agnolotti — a folded semolina ravioli-like pasta containing portabello, crimini and roasted garlic with padano and parmesan cheeses.

The semolina, mushroom, cheese mixture just jumped out with its earthiness, so I was mulling over choices for sauce. I came up with a champagne cream sauce, with some New Mexico red chiles, with fresh oregano and lemon juice. I was shooting for the idea of an alfredo, matched with just a very little bit of smoky chile zing, with some greenness and sharpness from the herbs and citrus. It turned out to be a pretty good mix of flavors.

Simmer Simmer

Lamb is one of those traditional ingredients of spring. These days, world-wide distribution and modern farming methods allow lamb to be available year round (for better or worse), but for many years, lamb was only available in the springtime.

Lamb is a great meat to use with pomegranate juice — it’s often paired with sweet condiments like mint jelly, and the complex pomegranate flavors go well with the earthiness of the meat. For this month’s POM blogger entry, I wanted to use a part of lamb that isn’t as familiar as chops. Lamb shank is economical, and is very tasty. Served pulled over linguine, with vegetables and fresh herbs, and this meal delivers a lot of flavor, but is very easy to cook.

spring on in

Christmas Eve dinner is a special event for me. Every year, I cook a four-course themed dinner for my family. One year the theme was “wrapped” foods, one year the theme was red and green, that sort of thing. Since I only go to this extreme once a year, I like to go all out and push what I’ve learned about cooking. Over the years, I’ve seen some good improvement in my cooking techniques, but also in my meal planning as these dinners have been for as many as eighteen guests.

This year was a first in a few ways. My brother, who is an excellent dessert guy, developed the dessert course in harmony with the earlier courses, and he also gave me a lot of help as my “sous” this year. Previously, I’ve done the entire meal on my own, which can be limiting. Also, this was the first year in which I asked my guests to pick a theme ingredient, Iron Chef style. In years past, I would surprise my guests with the theme — this year the surprise would be on me. I did ask for a week notice, but I also had to come up with the courses, shop, prep, pre-cook, and cook for fourteen adult guests.

After Thanksgiving, the guests emailed back and forth and compiled a possible list of ingredients on which to vote:
Agar gum, liquid nitrogen, miso, the whole goat, goat dairy, filo dough, bacon, rosemary, chili pepper, green chilis, orange, pomegranate, cocoa, rum, bourbon, avocado, sugar, cheese kids like, tomato, cilantro, hazelnuts, pistachio, nuts in general, coffee, beer, deep-fried everything, bread, rice

The semifinals simmered down to coffee and avocado, with a tie-breaking vote creating another tie. So, a coin was flipped, and coffee won the spot of honor.

I created an amuse bouche and three courses of dishes using coffee, and my brother came up with a final dessert (I don’t know what he would have done with avocado).

I asked Christey if she wouldn’t mind printing a tasting menu, just a 1/2 sheet with some different fonts. Of course, she came back with a two-piece vellum and card-stock menu, tied with a coffee-colored bow. It blew me away as well as our guests.
ho ho ho

This wasn’t exactly a normal dish for us. First of all, I took inspiration from Olive Garden’s Braised Beef & Tortelloni dinner. I don’t normally get inspired by chain restaurants, but this dish is actually pretty interesting. Secondly, unlike Olive Garden’s pre-prepared supply chain, I took pretty much an afternoon and early evening making this. I like doing this from time to time, though. Even though six hours of prep and cooking can be devoured in 15 minutes, it’s fun to build flavors and layer ingredients, basically practicing and expanding techniques. I usually have to do this on a weekend, though, and this was last Sunday’s dinner.

So, I made braised lamb shanks with root vegetables in veal stock and red wine, took a shank and minced it with Parmesan Reggiano, roasted garlic, and fresh oregano, stuffed it in tortelloni, and served it with sliced braised lamb shank meat and crimini mushrooms in a gravy made from the braising liquid.

You know this was good…

The first (and only) restaurant of Thomas Keller’s we have been to is Bouchon in the Venetian in Las Vegas. It was a highlight of our trip as much as anything else in Vegas.

My main course was Keller’s Gnocchi with Vegetables, a seasonal dish he makes that’s actually vegetarian (ovo-lacto, anyway, as ingredients include butter, cheese, and eggs).

There are basically three types of gnocchi in the culinary world — potato based, semolina wheat, and Parisienne, though there are branching relatives including spätzle, even to types of Chinese dumplings. There’s only so much you can do with flour, eggs, and boiling water.

Keller’s gnocchi (and my favorite) are the Parisienne — wheat flour, with cheese and herbs. They’re not the most delicately made gnocci of the bunch, they’re not hand folded or fork kissed or wrapped into a pretty crescent. They are awfully tasty, though, light and fluffy, and especially when gently sautéed and browned in a brown butter sauce with some simple vegetables and herbs.

butter, butter, and butter

This is my entry for this month’s Royal Foodie Joust from Jenn, the Leftover Queen.

Kittie won last month (congratulations Kittie) and her choices for this month’s joust were:
*Whole Grain
*Ginger
*Citrus

I made a crystallized ginger and lemon rind wheat bread with bulgar (whole wheat), and a hot and sour soup with ginger, lemon juice, garnished with popcorn (another whole grain). I formed the bread into a bowl and used it to hold the soup.

Soup soup soup!

This is probably more of a fall or winter recipe, rather than a sunny spring one. But, I was in the mood for duck breast, and duck goes well with fruit. A lot of fruits like orange and cherry are a bit overdone, so I went with apples instead, but cooked them in butter and orange juice for a least a nod to à l’orange. I wanted a rich, rich sauce to be able to hold up to the duck, so I used beef and mushroom stocks with a couple kicks. Wrapped in crepes with some exotic mushrooms and feta, and the richness was definitely on target, and it was tasty.

more recipe and tons of pictures