Lake Lure Cottage Kitchen

Grilling season is a great time of year.  It is sometimes a relief to turn the cooking over to my grill maestro.  It frees up my time to concentrate on side dishes. I love the flavor of this Bourbon marinade.  It is a little bit sweet and full flavored.  The recipe came from Paula on her blog Call me PMc.  It couldn’t be easier to mix together the bourbon, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, garlic and ginger.   The chicken skewers cook quickly.

I was looking for an interesting side dish to serve with the chicken and thought some kind of wild rice salad would be good.  I found a recipe from Ellie Krieger.  I wonder what happened to her show on the Food Network?  This orange and pistachio spiked rice salad is delicious.  It can be served cold or at room temperature.   It is even tasty warm.  It would be good with any barbecued chicken or pork.

I hope everyone has a wonderful 4th of July.  I will be taking a short break from blogging to spend time with the family.  We will be enjoying fireworks on the lake, swimming, hiking and most especially EATING.  Here is the gang that is coming.

See you back here soon.

BOURBON CHICKEN SKEWERS

For recipe see this link

ORANGE-PISTACHIO WILD RICE SALAD  (From Ellie Krieger )

2/3 cup brown rice
2/3 cup wild rice
3 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 orange, peel and pith removed, segmented and sliced (about 2/3 cup)
10 large basil leaves, sliced into ribbons (about 1/3 cup)
1/4 cup minced red onion
3 tablespoons chopped pistachios, lightly toasted
1 teaspoon finely grated orange zest
For the dressing:
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon orange juice
1 1/2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon honey
1/4 teaspoon salt

For the dressing:
Combine brown rice, wild rice and chicken broth in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat to a simmer and cook until all water is evaporated and rice is fully cooked, about 45 to 55 minutes. Remove from heat and cool completely.

When rice is cool, add orange slices, basil, red onion, pistachios and orange zest; mix to incorporate.

For the dressing:
Combine the red wine vinegar, olive oil, orange juice, mustard, honey and salt in a metal bowl and whisk to incorporate.

Pour over rice mixture and toss to incorporate.

Printable Recipe

This is familiar territory for me;  a cast iron skillet, warm lighting for the shoot (forget that natural light when it is late evening), decadent potatoes with a history from Julia Child and a heady scent in the air.  I made this as a side dish for the steak that David was cooking on the grill.  Each time that he returned to the house from the deck, he said “Man, it smells good in here”.  Sometimes tried and true recipes are all you need. And I was tired of baked potatoes with my steak.

Cooking the potatoes in an iron skillet seemed rustic and smart.  Cast iron holds the heat so well.  Julia Child’s Gratin Dauphinois, or scalloped potatoes to us, has stood the test of time and is still one of my favorite scalloped potatoes recipes.  I did make some changes to the recipe.  I used russet potatoes instead of boiling potatoes and I used Gruyere cheese instead of Swiss.  I also added fresh thyme to the casserole.  My thyme plant is thriving this year.

Steak, decadent potatoes and a cool crisp salad.  What a wonderful dinner.

JULIA CHILD’S SCALLOPED POTATOES (GRATIN DAUPHINOIS)

2 pounds russet potatoes

A fireproof baking dish about
10-inches in diameter and
2-inches deep

1/2 clove garlic
4 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
1 cup grated Gruyere cheese, grated
1 cup boiling milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

Peel the potatoes and slice them 1/8 inch thick.  Place in a basin of cold water.  Drain when ready to use.

Rub the baking dish with the cut garlic.  Smear the inside of the dish with 1 tablespoon of the butter.  Drain the potatoes and dry them in a towel.  Spread half of them  in the bottom of the dish.  Divide over them half the salt, pepper, thyme, cheese, and butter.  Arrange the remaining potatoes over the first layer, and season them with salt, pepper and thyme.  Spread on the rest of the cheese and divide the butter over it.  Pour on the boiling milk.  Set baking dish over heat and when simmering, set in upper third of preheated oven.  Bake for 20 to 30 minutes or until potatoes are tender, milk has been absorbed, and the top is nicely browned.

Printable Recipe

With the 4th of July approaching, I am experimenting with various salads to be served with grilled meat.  I love this recipe for it’s simplicity and fresh summer flavors.  We usually host the family for the Labor Day Weekend, but this year everyone is coming for the Independence Day Weekend.

There is nothing we enjoy more than watching the lakeside activities of the family.  A few of the younger children have yet to summon enough courage to jump from the top of the boathouse.  Perhaps this will be the year.  It is a rite of passage.

I love this black bean and corn salad because it easy to pull together.  It uses canned black beans and frozen corn kernels, although fresh corn would be perfect with it.  It has a lime and cilantro vinaigrette.  It can be made ahead of time, but I would suggest that you add the avocado at the last minute.  It will be perfect with grilled hamburgers and hot dogs.

BLACK BEAN AND CORN SALAD ( Food Network Magazine )

1/4 Cup Olive Oil
2 teaspoons honey
3 limes, juiced
2 15 oz. cans black beans, rinsed
1 cup corn kernels
1 diced red or orange bell pepper
1 bunch of scallions, chopped
1/2 cup cilantro
Salt and pepper to taste

1 diced avocado

Whisk together the oil, honey and lime juice.  Toss with the remaining ingredients except avocado.  When ready to serve, peel and dice the avocado and add to the salad.  Toss to combine.

Printable Recipe

There are so many reasons that blogging is a rewarding experience, but one of the major reasons is because you get to meet so many special people.  Let’s backtrack a few years.

When a started blogging in 2009 there were not many of us doing it.  I put my blog out there and hoped that someone would find my voice interesting.  I clicked on other blogs and found Penny’s blog.  Oh my, same name.  Oh my, born and raised in Michigan like me,   Oh my, lives in North Carolina just 25 miles away from where I live.  It was meant to be.  I had to meet her.  I wrote about our first meeting here.  We have since become great friends.

We had dinner at Penny and her husband’s home last Saturday.  It was a lovely evening and we enjoyed dining al fresco under their new pergola.  Penny is a great cook.  Everything was delicious.

Both Penny and I love Paris.  One of the delights of Paris food markets is the rotisserie chickens cooked over pans of vegetables.  The chicken drippings flavor the vegetables as they braise.  That was what she duplicated on their grill.

That is a beautiful plate of food.  It was a perfect meal for a summer evening.

Here are our wonderful hosts, Penny and her equally talented husband.  Because we have so much in common, it should have come as no surprise to me that what she served for dessert was the very same dessert that I had made the previous week for my next blog post.  So although I did not get a picture of Penny’s blueberry galette, I had it covered with the one that I made.  We are definitely on the same wave length.
I made this blueberry galette as part of a recipe testing exercise at the Food 52 website.  The editors of Food 52 pick worthy recipes that are submitted to their contests for other members to test and rate.  I chose to test this galette because of the uniqueness of the crust.  It incorporates rosemary and whole wheat flour into the pastry.  I LOVED it.  The pastry was easy to handle and the rosemary went so well with the blueberry filling.  The turbinado sugar just added to the rustic simplicity of this galette.  It will be repeated often in my kitchen.  Give it a try.  Thanks Penny and K for a great evening.

BLUEBERRY GALETTE (By Lisina at Food 52)

Printable Recipe

While shopping at one of my favorite Supermarkets, I found a package of Haricot Vert, the lovely French thin green beans.  By the way, that store is a mega Harris Teeter store that we have dubbed the Taj maTeeter.  Although I usually like to shop at small stores with quality ingredients, Farmer’s markets and butcher shops, sometimes a trip to a mega store yields interesting ingredients.  Haricot Vert are hard to find.  Translated haricot means beans, vert means green.  French green beans are thinner and longer than the beans that we grow here in the United States.

The beans are cooked quickly and then put in an ice and water bath to stop the cooking and set the color.  This can be done way ahead of time.  What makes the beans taste so special is the gremolata garnish that is added during the final cooking.  Gremolata is a mixture of garlic, parsley, lemon zest, Parmesan cheese and toasted pine nuts.  It is usually associated with Osso Bucco, the popular Milanese veal shank dish.  The slow cooked veal shanks are garnished with the gremolata mixture.  But used on the green beans, the mixture sings with flavor.

This is a wonderful side dish for a company meal.  Eat your heart out Dave S..  This was supposed to be for you.  We had a wonderful time at the blogger get together at Almost Heaven South.  There will be more about our gathering in future posts.  But in the meantime, enjoy this lovely and delicious side dish.

GREEN BEANS GREMOLATA (Ina Garten)

1 pound French green beans, trimmed
2 teaspoons minced garlic ( 2 cloves )
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest ( 2 lemons )
3 tablespoons minced fresh flat-leaf parsley
3 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons tasted pine nuts
2 1/2 tablespoons good olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Add the green beans and blanch them for 2 to 3 minutes, until tender but still crisp.  Drain the beans in a colander and immediately put them into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking and preserve their bright green color.

For the gremolata, toss the garlic, lemon zest, parsley, Parmesan, and pine nuts in a small bowl and set aside.

When ready to serve, heat the olive oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat.  Drain the beans and pat them dry.  Add the beans to the pan and saute, turning frequently, for 2 minutes, until coated with olive oil and heated through.  Off the heat, add the gremolata and toss well.  Sprinkle with 3/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper and serve hot.

Printable Recipe