My column ran today in The Orange County Register print edition today. It’s not available online, so I’ve posted it here. Thanks for reading!
*****
Every year, we look forward to the annual holiday eating rituals: A golden, grand dame of a turkey, savory sides and a sweet finale with pumpkin pie front and center. (And if you’re household is like mine, the obligatory post-feast nap follows soon after.)

Though there’s nothing wrong with these traditions, why not mix it up a bit? This year, you may want to surprise your guests by serving pumpkin pie at the beginning of the meal instead of at dessert. How? By turning it into a soup. The transformation can be made even easier by using canned pumpkin instead of fresh, yielding fantastic results.

Canned food often gets a bad rap for being, well, canned. And rightly so; fresh ingredients are almost always better in recipes. But there are few exceptions to this rule, and canned pumpkin is one of them. For one, the canned variety is way easier to use. When you’ve got your hands full with roasting a bird and preparing sides to go with it, chopping, boiling and mashing fresh pumpkin isn’t making the best use of your time. Tip: When buying canned pumpkin, make sure you’re getting “pumpkin puree” instead of “pumpkin pie mix,” which is offered in similar-sized cans with almost identical labels.

This recipe yields a spicy soup that’s just reminiscent enough of a pumpkin pie to seem like a before-dinner treat, but packs enough savory ingredients to warrant it a place as a starter or first course. And with the welcome addition of bacon, cream and butter (necessary ingredients for happiness, in my opinion), everyone’s a winner.

The following long list of ingredients may look intimidating, but I promise the procedures are quite simple: You simply cook everything in one pot. If you have a formal party and want an elegant soup, you can puree it for a soft, velvety texture. But it’s just as good when left as a hearty, rustic soup.

When I make this soup, I like to serve it with pie crust “crackers” on the side. Take some ready-made pie dough (or homemade, if you have it), roll it out and use cookie cutters to cut rounds from the dough. Bake rounds on a baking sheet according to package directions.

Another fun way to serve this soup is in shot glasses. If there are appetizers before dinner, you can easily slide a tray of these onto any table, and guests can help themselves to pumpkin soup shooters. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

(more…)

Dear readers, I am in a funk. And not the good kind that allows you to wear a sequined gold dress and your sunglasses at night. The kind where everything you cook burns or tastes weird and everything you write reads cliché. It’s not a good place to be.

But onward we go, because cooking and writing is what we do here, however cringeworthy or awesome either turn out.

In the span of one week, four out of the five dishes prepared by my hands ended up as spectacular trainwrecks – ones that made microwaved frozen meals look like five-star food. The sole saving grace was this pasta with meat sauce, which is made annually at the first sign of winter’s chilly weather. It’s a hearty sauce thicker than blood, like an Italian chili almost, that goes well with garlic bread and even eaten alone in a bowl with a large spoon, should you be so bold.

In this case, it’s paired with a fresh pasta recipe adapted from Michael Ruhlman’s “Ratio,” using just the basics: flour and eggs. Nothing else.

I’ve been making this meat sauce for years, and thus it’s a recipe built on intuition. It’s a sauce that does its job and does it well, and with all of the flops I’ve been cranking out lately, it also helps to remind me that success, however little or large, is very, very sweet. And filling. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipes)

(more…)

Every now and then I wish I could poke little children with spoons. Why? Because there are few things in this world that we like to see inflated. A soufflé is one of them. A bratty little puffy-cheeked child is not.

Somewhere in time, children learned that the way to personal satisfaction was to fold one’s arms, inflate your cheeks and take as deep a breath as your little lungs will allow. You’d hold your breath until you got your way, no matter what kaleidoscope color action was happening on your face. Often, there would be a pleading parent in the immediate vicinity. This is called the Face-Off, and it ends horribly each time — with either a passed-out toddler or a bruised adult ego.

Ego-wounded adults, this is where spoons come in. We know that poking any soufflé with a spoon results with its collapse almost upon contact. My clever mother knew that the only way to deflate me during these patience-trying times was to poke me — lightly, but firm — with a spoon (or a pointer finger, if a spoon was not available). This resulted in giggles, which signaled that I had started breathing again. Mom, 1, me, 0. The experiment concluded with positive results every single time.

Children and souffles weren’t meant to remain inflated for long periods of time; they have to depuff at some point. With both subjects,  a little prodding allows the depuffication to happen sooner rather than later. I hope this information is helpful to the moms and dads who suffer through the public tantrums of their children (like the family I ran into at the supermarket a few months ago).

(Click “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe)

(more…)