Phoenix Food Blog

​Ah, Monday. The day when you wake up to the beginning of a brand new work week and realize you didn't do the laundry or make it to the grocery store. We doubt that this has ever actually happened to Martha. But if it did she might opt to make Baked Tortilla Espanola for dinner.

It features ingredients that many of us are likely to already have on hand such as olive oil, baking potatoes, red onion, garlic, salt, pepper and eggs. And this means little shopping required.

​We've harbored a fantasy of opening our own food truck that only serves up pie and coffee. Phoenix Novembers would be perfect for this endeavor. And while we don't actually have a pie truck, we are always eager to try a new pie recipe. Which brings us to this week's Monday Night Martha, where we take on Rum-Vanilla Cream Pie.

Martha describes this as a, "traditional 1950s style cream pie". Mmm, sounds good. Plus the recipe calls for 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon golden rum. We're in.

First you have to make Martha's pate brisee (fancy French for pie crust) - her recipe makes two 9-inch crusts. Or take one out of the freezer if you are so inclined, and follow the directions for baking. Ours was perhaps, slightly under-cooked.

​Maybe it's because the first cold snap struck the Valley of the Sun this past week, or because the World Series is playing on TV, but our minds and stomachs suddenly want something warm and gooey and familiar. And really, nothing says Monday night like ... casserole. Ah, casserole the humble dish of a multitude of church recreation rooms. With its reliance on a can of mushroom soup, or canned tuna fish or elbow macaroni noodles -- you remember it? But we're talking Martha here. And this chicken, leek and mushroom casserole was delicious.

Setting this recipe apart is the fact that it calls for fresh ingredients -- no cans of condensed soup here. Plus, we're big fans of leeks, and this recipe calls for one leek coarsely chopped, plus celery, and 10 oz. cremini mushrooms.

​

Halloween is nigh and we are busy getting ready. For this week's Monday Night Martha we decided to spin a web of artery clogging goodness and make Martha Stewart's No-bake Spiderweb Cheesecake.

This recipe is not for the faint of heart as it calls for 32 oz. of cream cheese and 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream to make the filling. Not to mention the stick and a half of butter in the crust. If you are trying to bulk up to fill out your Chewbacca costume, eating several servings of this cake could be the ticket. Otherwise, you will want to invite a gang over to help you.

Creamy and rich are the keywords of the day. The recipe was easy to follow and we were pleased with the results. Our ganache spiderweb actually looked like the picture. Hooray! We went out on our own and made our decorative spider out of extra ganache. It took some scanning of the cookie aisle to find the chocolate wafers called for in the recipe, but we were able to locate them. They come in a long narrow yellow box.

​

 

Is it ever too early for pie? Yes, it's barely October but some Valley stores already have Christmas decorations up, which means like it or not, the holiday season is here. We happen to love the period between October and January and will take any excuse under the sun to make seasonal pie. That's why we dug up this wingding recipe from good ol' Paula Deen.

​

For dinner tonight, try this quick quiche recipe courtesy of my husband. He calls it his "3-2-1 Quiche" and he used to make it when he was a latch-key kid in the seventies. It's one of the few things he cooks, and it's excellent.

​

This week's Monday Night Martha recipe is an old stand-by in the Gutel household: shirred eggs. "Shirred" is a funny word that means "to bake in a shallow dish." That means you finally have a chance to bust out those ramekins that collect dust in the back of your kitchen cupboard. Ramekins are small oven-safe dishes perfect for baking popovers or crème brûlée.

​

Today's recipe, cumin-scented beef kebabs, is ripped from the pages of last month's Gourmet Magazine. The trick to these kebabs is the selection of steak, either sirloin flap steak or flatiron steak. We found flatiron steak at our local Fry's at a not outrageous price. Then it takes just five minutes whip up a marinade of olive oil and other spices and let the beef sit for a few hours.

Today's entry could also be called "How Not to Roast a Chicken."  The adventure started out in an innocuous attempt to cook a whole chicken with soy sauce, honey, ginger and scallions.

For most households, this would be a simple, everyday occurrence, barely worth a mention. You'd think we'd be old hands at it. After all, we regularly brave recipes like liquid popcorn,  and make strawberry basil martinis without blinking but for some reason, roasting a chicken is like climbing Mount Everest for us, and as a result, we don't do it very often. Who knows why. Maybe it's the defrosting, or maybe it's having to stick your entire hand up the bird to pull out the gizzards, neck and heart. Consequently, we don't have a decent roasting pan. We didn't want to use our giant pan for turkeys so at the last minute we opted to use a glass casserole dish.

​

​Asparagus is no longer in season but that doesn't stop the Gutel household from gobbling it by the pound. Simply put, we adore asparagus and the best way to cook it is to roast it in the oven and then wrap each stalk in a thin slice of prosciutto.

There's something about the combination of the crunchy asparagus and the salty pork that makes this appetizer as addictive as crack cocaine. It's so good you'll want it as a side dish with every meal. Having pan-fried steak for dinner? Let's have asparagus with prosciutto! Making burritos? Let's have asparagus with prosciutto! Feeling too lazy to cook and you're warming up a sad little can of SpaghettiOs? Let's have asparagus with prosciutto!

​This week's recipe comes from a friend who has a knack for going into the kitchen and whipping up quick little dishes that she seems to pull out of thin air. This is the same pal who was kind enough to share her recipe for cranberry sorbet.

Spicy cucumber salad is a great side to bring to a late summer potlock. It tastes fresh and cold. The cucumbers, although marinated in rice vinegar and sesame oil, stay crisp and take on just a hint of spice.

Ingredients

2 medium cucumbers
2/3 cup rice vinegar
1 tsp of sesame oil
dash of salt
3-4 sliced, dried red chili peppers

Strictly speaking, this is not a "Monday Night" dish but a "Sunday Morning" one. We made it for breakfast over the weekend but it was so good, we say you could easily talk yourself into having it as part of an easy-breezy weeknight dinner. This dish is adapted from a Mark Bittman recipe. Over at the New York Times, they call it "Baked Eggs with Onion and Cheese". We prefer to call it "Happy Husband Eggs".

​

What is there to say about zucchini pancakes? They're simple, savory and a good complement to grilled fish. It's also a way to trick your family into eating green vegetables. This is a vegetarian recipe, but not vegan because of the egg. It takes about half an hour from start to finish.

​

​Not sure how you feel about Food Network stars but we're big fans of Giada De Laurentiis. We received two cookbooks when we got married, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and Giada's Everyday Italian: 125 Simple and Delicious Recipes.

The Bittman bible is dog-eared and beet-stained and we dip into at least once a week. On the other hand, we cooked our way through Giada's cookbook pretty quickly. If you can get over the amount of cleavage she displays while showing off heaping plates of pasta and antipasta, it's actually a pretty good cookbook. We don't use it all the time, but it's fun to return to occasionally and try some of our old favorites, one of which is salmon baked in foil.

​We're experimenting here at Monday Night Martha by cooking from recipes downloaded to the Amazon Kindle. We received a free copy of The Cook's Illustrated How-To Cook Library as part of a short promotion offered this spring. It's slightly odd trying to cook from an electronic reading device because when your hands get messy in the kitchen, you have to be careful handling your "cookbook" so you don't break it.

We chose a recipe from the pasta chapter called "sun-dried tomato and olive pesto." By strange coincidence, a nearly identical copy of the recipe is online at the Arizona Republic's site.

Anchovies: Salty & Delicious or Slimy and Gross?

Bagna what? We found this recipe nosing around Epicurious. It's an anchovy fondue-style dip from the Piedmont region of Italy.

According to Wikipedia, bagna cauda means "hot sauce" and is typically eaten in the fall or winter. We're one of those odd ducks that adores anchovies -- all canned fish, really -- so the recipe was irresistible, despite the heat.

Harira is a traditional soup in Morocco, served to break the fast during Ramadan. Soupsong, where we got this particular recipe, says it's one of the best soups in the world and we won't pick a fight with them over it. Their recipe isn't perfect, but it's close enough to remind us of eating this soup in Rabat, many moons ago.

Harira is a bit like chili in that it's thick and chunky and you can throw just about anything in it. Ingredients vary somewhat depending on the region and who you are talking to.

The good news is that nothing needed to make harira is too expensive or difficult to find. This particular recipe serves eight people.

We dipped into the archives of Grandma Hernandez's collection of recipes again for this week's entry -- a quick and dirty cookie recipe made from store bought cake mix.

You have to wonder who first took a box of prefab cake mix and got the bright idea to try to make cookies out of it. Nonetheless, we're glad they did because these funny-looking globs are chewy and a snap to make.

This is a slightly bizarre but delicious summer soup made of pureed watermelon and tomato. The soup is served cold and requires no cooking, so it'd make vegetarians, vegans and even the raw food crowd happy.

The recipe comes from Epicurious by way of Self Magazine. Self says the soup serves up generous portions of the "skin-saving antioxidant lycopene." That sounds dandy enough but we decided to try it out because we were craving watermelon one hot day and randomly Googled "watermelon soup". 

This June has been Arizona's coldest since 1913. But even the coldest of Arizona summers are warm by the rest of the country's standards, with highs in the 90s at least.

Still, most of us are aware that we're living on stolen time, and we know that any day now, the real summer will kick in -- the summer of searing hot steering wheels and sidewalks that scald barefeet. When that eventuality happens, try making yourself one of these lime coolers.

We're serving up a unique Monday Night Martha today. This recipe comes from Julia Child, by way of our friend Sean Collins. In the late 1980s, Collins was working as a producer on NPR's Morning Edition when he was assigned to help with a project at WGBH in Boston.

"It basically involved sitting in Julia Child's kitchen at her home in Cambridge with her," Collins says. "I got to sit and chat with her. For two days."

Tonight's meal could also be called "the dinner so nice, we made it twice." The recipe is clipped from this month's Gourmet magazine. You can also find it at Epicurious.

The "pearls" in the title refer to a spherical semolina-based pasta known as Israeli couscous. Unlike its Moroccan counterpart, Israeli couscous is much larger and tastes more like orzo or risotto. This meal is ultra simple to make and takes no more than half an hour, including the time it takes for the water to start boiling.

We must be craving sweets these days because we just realized we've cooked two chocolate dishes back to back. Ah well. What can you do.

It's fun to cook with soda pop because you feel like you're breaking some unspoken rule of the kitchen. There are actually dozens of recipes that use Dr Pepper, including Dr Pepper ribs, Dr Pepper baked beans, Dr Pepper gelatin and even Dr Pepper spaghetti.

At the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas (yes, that Waco), you can purchase Dr Pepper marinades and sauces. And the soda jerks at the vintage fountain there serve Dr Pepper floats. On cold days you can try a mug of steaming Dr Pepper served with a lemon wedge.

First off, the name "Mexican Chocolate Tofu Pudding" has too many adjectives to sound as though it would taste any good. It's like it was invented during a bad game of culinary Mad Libs.

Second, who the heck puts tofu in pudding? Nonetheless, we spotted this recipe in last week's New York Times and haven't been able to shake the thought of it.

This isn't Bill Cosby's JELL-O pudding. Silken tofu makes the pudding creamy but also adds protein to the dessert, which is really odd when you think about it. Then there's this special zinginess thanks to the cinnamon and chili powder. This recipe is vegetarian but could even be made vegan if you purchased the right chocolate.

What's up with those recipes that seem too intimidating to try on your own, and then you go visit a friend and they cook them from scratch without even blinking? This week's dish is one of those. It comes from our pal Margret; she makes a mean cranberry sorbet.

Now sorbet is really just iced fruit and sugary water and it's shockingly easy to make. This recipe is made from frozen cranberries but you can substitute or add other types of berries if you'd like.

We're cross-pollinating Martha Stewart with Rachael Ray tonight. The dish is called "Stuffed Potatoes with Ham, Thyme and Gruyere" AKA "I bought a flippin' huge bag of potatoes and now I don't know what to do with them."

We uncovered the recipe in Ray's book 30 Minute Meals, a classic for any lazy cook. In typical Ray style, this couldn't be easier to make, and you don't really have to stick to the recipe that closely. Stuff the potatoes with blue cheese, mushrooms, bacon or anything that strikes your fancy.

Artichokes rock. If you don't believe us, check out these photos from the annual Artichoke Festival in Castroville, California. It's held every May and celebrates all things 'choke - fried artichokes, pickled artichokes and even creamed artichokes.

Apparently spring is over. Brace yourself because the temperature is supposed to rise to 100 degrees Tuesday. To keep cool,we're making strawberry limeade. It's a makeshift recipe we pretty much created on the spot.

We're pulling back the curtain today on Dutch Baby Pancakes. You may have had them before if you've ever gone to the Original Pancake House in Scottsdale. Dutch babies are towering, eggy creations served with lemons and powdered sugar.


Truth be told, they're easy to make and require few ingredients. The recipe we followed can be found online here.

We're bringing you Depression Era Dining Part Deux tonight with teeny faux cheesecakes. The recipe comes from Grandma Hernandez who was born during the Great Crash of 1929. The mini cakes are cheap to make and are beyond cute.