We were having two of our granddaughters over for dinner on Ash Wednesday, so I was looking for a good kid-friendly Lenten dish. I decided to try a tuna casserole recipe from an old Midwestern cookbook, Mary Mead’s Country Cooking. This is different from the typical tuna casserole since it is essentially a custard. It Read More …
This combination of dried salt cod, potatoes, and onions is a Portuguese classic. I have seen it presented many different ways. In the Pestana Hotel in Curitiba, Brazil, it was in a ramekin and the potatoes were mashed. This version is from Jean Anderson’s The Food of Portugal. I cooked it a bit differently from Read More …
This is an adaptation of a dish served at a Galician restaurant Casa Simeon as documented in Penelope Casas’s book Delicioso: The Regional Cooking of Spain. The idea is to have good quality dry-pack scallops and then to complement, but not to overwhelm, their flavor. This is how we made it for 2 persons, using Read More …
Our tradition for many years has been to have a cold seafood salad with good bread and champagne for Christmas Eve dinner. When our children were young, we would go to the children’s Mass on Christmas eve and would eat dinner after Mass. A cold salad which could be prepared in advance and taken Read More …
This is a classic Greek appetizer, shown here on a slice of baguette. This recipe is an adaptation from what I think is the best community cookbook of all time, The Complete Book of Greek Cooking from the Recipe Club of Saint Paul’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral. It makes about 2 cups. Since olive oil Read More …
These are crab cakes with just enough binder to hold them together, and just enough flavorings to enhance the crab meat, which is the star of the disch. There is no attempt here to reinvent, modernize, or freshen up a classic, nor is there any attempt to make the dish less expensive by stretching Read More …
Treating shrimp with baking soda and salt before grilling them helps keep them juicy and helps them brown better. Just be careful about how much shrimp you have and adjust the salt quantity accordingly to avoid having it be too salty. Quantities below are for 1 lb. of shrimp and can be scaled up Read More …
This is basically a seafood version of shepherd’s pie, with 3 types of seafood in a leek cream sauce. The three types used below – hot smoked salmon, cod, and shrimp – were chosen to provide a variety of flavors and textures. The same basic idea could be done with whatever seafood was available. I Read More …
This is one of my favorite Thai dishes. In the past we have tried to make it at home with rather disappointing results, but we decided to try again, and this batch turned out well. The trick is to get the right consistency in the patties. The final product should be rubbery, in Read More …
This is paella’s soupier Portuguese cousin. One reason it really appeals to me is that with paella it can be hard to get all of the rice to be fully cooked: the rice grains on the top are sometimes crunchy, rather than fully hydrated. By cooking the rice in a greater volume of liquid, this problem Read More …