Rosemary Lemon-Ginger Vodka Spritzers

A beachside refresher

Our vacation got off to a tremulous start - what with the 5.2 earthquake and all - but we managed to get everyone safely in the car and on the road to Rosemary Beach, our almost impossibly lovely destination on the Florida Panhandle.

This place is one of those scarily-proportioned planned "towns" that seem to spring up out of the swamp land as if by magic. What I mean by scary is just the absolute perfectness about it all; it's so self-contained and pristinely designed that it just doesn't seem real.

And, in keeping with the Mediterranean theme of the architecture, there are rosemary bushes springing up everywhere. I don't think that rosemary would grow here as a native plant, but it does seem to thrive in this climate, because the plants seem to grow into large hedgerows.

Rosemary might just be my favorite herb and every spring I put out numerous small plants in my garden. I always hope that one or two of them will make it through the winter, but so far that hasn't happened.

Seeing them casually growing here to the size of happy Great Danes kind of overwhelms me. I'm starting to feel like cooking something. Or maybe I'm just thirsty.

We came up with this refreshing cocktail recipe while lounging on the beach yesterday. It's pretty good. Might be just about time for another!

Rosemary Lemon-Ginger Vodka Spritzers

1 cup sugar
1 cup water
¼ cup peeled, chopped fresh ginger
2 large springs rosemary, plus more to garnish
Pinch of fine sea salt (seems weird, but it really makes the syrup pop with flavor)
Fresh lemons, halved
Ice cold vodka
Chilled sparkling water

Combine the sugar and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Stir in the ginger, rosemary and salt; remove from the heat and let steep for about 10 minutes. Strain the syrup and chill.

To make a drink, squeeze fresh lemon juice to taste into a glass filled with ice. Pour in 2 ounces vodka and about 1 tablespoon syrup. Top off with the sparkling water. Take a sip, and add more syrup if you like. Add a rosemary spring for garnish. Cheers!

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Crunchy Shrimp with Ginger Orange Sauce

photo from myrecipes.com

I know, I have been MIA for a while.

Briefly, I give the following as explanation:

1. My camera got lost.
2. I’ve been up to my eyeballs with work stuff, everyday stuff, and other stuff. Sometimes I feel that being a “good” blogger can be soooo very challenging.
3. My camera got lost.
4. We’re piling everyone into the car for a road trip to Florida tomorrow.
5. Woo-hoo!

I know it’s lame, and I apologize, but without a juicy photo to share (have you seen my camera, by the way?) I’m posting one of my contest winners from a few years ago and borrowing a picture from myrecipes.com. I won the $10,000 grand prize in Cooking Light’s Ultimate Reader Recipe Contest for creating this recipe and it continues to be a favorite with friends and family.
Enjoy, and I’ll check in again soon.

Crunchy Shrimp with Toasted Couscous
and Ginger Orange Sauce

For Ginger Orange Sauce:
1 cup orange juice
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons reduced fat mayonnaise
1 1/2 tablespoons chicken broth
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
1 teaspoon fresh lime juice
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, or to taste
For Couscous:
1 cup uncooked couscous
1 1/2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/3 cup sliced scallions
2 tablespoons sliced almonds, toasted
For Shrimp:
20 jumbo shrimp (about 1 pound), peeled and deveined
2 egg whites, lightly beaten
1 cup panko (Japanese breadcrumbs)
1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
2 teaspoons chopped fresh cilantro
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 - 2 tablespoons canola oil
2 cups trimmed watercress

1. To prepare sauce, place orange juice in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Cook until reduced to 1/4 cup, 10-12 minutes. Transfer to a medium heatproof bowl to cool. Add remaining sauce ingredients to the cooled orange juice and whisk until smooth.

2. Place couscous in a 10-inch non-stick skillet over medium heat and cook 3 minutes or until toasted, stirring constantly. Add the broth, orange juice and salt to pan and bring to a boil. Cover and remove from heat. Let stand 5 minutes; fluff with a fork. Stir in butter, scallions and almonds. Cover to keep warm.

3. Place shrimp in a large bowl; add egg whites and toss to coat. Combine panko, ginger, cilantro, salt and pepper in a large zip-top plastic bag. Add shrimp; seal bag and shake to coat evenly with panko mixture. Heat the oil in a 12-inch non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Add coated shrimp in one layer. Cook until golden brown, 2-3 minutes; turn shrimp and cook until second side is golden brown.

4. To serve, spoon couscous onto a large platter. Arrange watercress over and around couscous; top with shrimp. Drizzle sauce over shrimp.
Serves 4. (serving size: 1 cup couscous, 5 shrimp and 1 1/2 tablespoons sauce)

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Buttercream and Party Cakes

You can lick the spoon

Among the world of bloggers are an amazing group, consisting of over 600 to date, who once a month conspire about one recipe challenge, chosen by a different member each time. The monthly challenge remains a secret until the last day of the month, when everyone blogs about their results; a kind of gang-blog. These are not your run-of-the-mill bakers, friends. They are the Daring Bakers, and for some reason I thought it would be fun to join up. What was I thinking? I should have been thinking that I was out of my league.



I am not a fancy-pancy cake decorator. I think I’d rather pick nits off a monkey’s back than to obsess over making intricate flowers made out of sugar or enrobing a cake in fondant. It’s just not my thing. After looking at some of my blogging friend’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous creations, I became comfortable with the realization that I am a peasant cook at heart. When I bake, I always gravitate toward the simple and rustic, like free-form tarts and cakes baked in loaf pans.



This month, the recipe was chosen by Morven of Food Art and Random Thoughts; Perfect Party Cake from Dorie Greenspan’s fantastic book, Baking, From My Home to Yours. I enjoy Dorie’s recipes because they aren’t too fussy and she obviously writes them after lots of testing. In fact one of my all-time favorites is Dorie's Lemon Yogurt Cake (baked in a loaf pan!).

The party cake is a fairly simple recipe, and I can see why it should become a stand-by recipe. Plus, I have a weakness for any cake made with buttermilk and lemon. I love the tangy moist texture of this cake, and would make this again just smeared with some jam, lemon curd and powdered sugar.

However, the highlight in my house was the luscious meringue buttercream. I can’t remember the last time I smeared a cake – or anything, for that matter - with a substance containing three whole sticks of butter, multiple cups of sugar and fluffy marshmallow-like beaten egg whites. This stuff should be classified as a dangerous substance by the DEA. My kids were content to lick the beaters and spatula (and I was too, just in case you were wondering), to the point that there was barely enough left to frost the darn cake.

Now that I think about it, that seems like a perfect arrangement. Piece of cake, scoop of buttercream on the side.

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Classic Italian Meatballs

Classic meatballs, Italian-American style

Meatballs are personal.

Let me rephrase that: Show me your meatball, and I’ll show you mine.

Oh, wait. No. Not that personal. That’s the sort of thing that goes on in other blogs, the after bedtime, Not Safe for Work kind.

What I meant was, meatballs for me are like Proust’s madeleine. Like any childhood comfort food, meatballs represent a time, place and taste that exists only in my memory. But when prepared in just the right way - today, right now- one bite into a really good meatball could transport me back to my parents' Sunday afternoon dinner table.

My mother would set out a large platter of meat that had spent the better part of the day braising in thick, rich tomato sauce – the gravy. On it, there would usually be a beef chuck roast, a braciole (a rolled beef flank steak stuffed with cheese, breadcrumbs and fresh parsley), sweet and spicy pork sausages handmade by my grandfather, and meatballs. I always went straight for the meatballs.

Meatballs are so personal that even among family there can be great disappointment. My bias unfailingly (some might say stubbornly) swerved toward my mother’s meatballs. Even as much as I loved my grandmother’s Sunday gravy, I was ambivalent about her meatballs. And because each person’s meatball is as unique in form as their own fingerprint, it was always immediately apparent to me when someone other than my own mother or grandmother had shaped meatballs and surreptitiously slid them into the family gravy pot.

There was that one Sunday gravy which has traumatized me for life. I can’t remember the distant relative who’d prepared them, all I know is this: one hopeful bite of her meatball revealed something dark, chewy and slimy-sweet, an alien nugget that could only be... a raisin. A raisin.

Who would go and put a raisin in an innocent-looking meatball? Why?

Later, my mother explained to me in a stage whisper that it was because great aunt Carmella was Sicilian. Oh.

Needless to say, my family was spoiled by my mother's stellar meatballs and as a result grew very particular. It was standard for us to rate the quality of the meatballs whenever we ate at a restaurant. We could spot inferior execution every time. Like meatballs made with stale, dried, seasoned breadcrumbs or those that were so firm and rubbery you could set one on a billiard table and smack it into the corner pocket.

Because I believe my mother made the very best meatballs, hers are the standard by which all others are judged. They were generously portioned - almost the size of a baseball; crusty on the outside, tender and almost fluffy within. They were strewn with flecks of fresh parsley, garlic and soft bits of milk-soaked Italian bread. They were sharp with the salty tang of Pecorino Romano cheese. They were big juicy spheres I couldn’t wait to stick my fork into.

My mother is no longer with us, and sadly, she took her meatball recipe with her. She’d told me her meatball secrets, probably more than once, but that was a while ago and the details are sketchy. Did she say to remove the crusts from the bread before soaking in milk? To squeeze out the milk thoroughly or to keep the bread dripping with liquid? To flatten the meatballs slightly while frying? Can’t remember. I didn’t write it down.

Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have inherited the gene for meatball mastery from my mother, and I’ve yet to work out her perfect ratio of meat-to-seasoning-to-filler. I hang my head in frustration, but I’m working on it.

I’ve turned to cookbooks lately, and recently found a recipe in Two Meatballs in an Italian Kitchen that seemed eerily familiar. I played with the recipe a bit and came up with this one. They are very close to my mother’s in method and taste, but just not as light as I’d like them to be. Back to the mixing bowl.



As always, I’ll keep you updated with breaking meatball-recipe news as it occurs.
Until then, what are your cherished food memories? Visit the comment section at the end of this post and share them with me.

You might also like Rigatoni with 20-Minute Sunday Gravy.

Classic Italian Meatballs

3 thick slices Italian-style bread, crust trimmed
1 ½ cups whole milk
1 pound ground beef chuck
½ pound ground pork
2 egg yolks
½ cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
1 tablespoon kosher salt or 1 ½ teaspoons table salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
½ cup fresh Italian (flat-leaf) parsley
¼ cup olive oil

1. Tear the bread into small pieces and place in a medium bowl. Cover with the milk and soak 5 minutes. Squeeze the milk out of the bread until just moist.

2. In a large bowl, use your hands to combine bread, beef, pork, egg, cheese, salt, pepper, garlic and parsley until evenly mixed. Break off ¼-cup sized pieces of mixture and roll into balls. They don’t have to be perfect – craggy meatballs have character and hold the sauce better.

3. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add as many meatballs as will fit in the pan without crowding. They should sizzle as soon as they hit they pan or the pan isn’t hot enough.

4. Cook meatballs until browned on all sides and cooked through, 6 -8 minutes total.

5. Serve hot with your favorite tomato sauce.
Makes about 15 meatballs

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