Artichoke Butter Recipe

This butter is delicious on a piece of toasted bread, but would go wonderfully with pasta, fish or grilled veggies. 

After making sweet potato tarte amandine and purple potato lavender white chocolate torte for my first cooking demonstration in front of a live audience recently, I had a lot of leftover high quality butter, so I decided to make a batch.

I prepared the flavored butter with artichoke hearts, a bit of sea salt, fresh basil leaves and lemon. It has a brightness to it that works well in almost any savory application. I'm planning on using the butter with a simple salt and pepper crusted steak. 

Lemon Butter Garlic Sauce Recipe

Lemon butter garlic sauce is a tasty accompaniment to artichokes.  Butter is used generously, in contrast to the low calorie and healthy artichoke.

If you want a healthier variant, check out my tofu vinaigrette I made a few weeks ago.

Ground Beef Stuffing Recipe

If you're Vietnamese, you've probably heard your mom say "tội chết" ("dreadfully sinful" in Vietnamese) in regards to wasting food. The lesson was definitely hammered into me, and now that I'm an adult, I intend to follow in my mom's footsteps and teach the same values to my daughter.

I love Acme brand green onion slab bread. It's very flavorful, moist and delicious. I went a little over-board buying 4 loaves at Costco. I made panini sandwiches the day before and had one left-over on the kitchen counter. Today, my goal was to come up with a creative way to use it all. I made stuffing using the onion bread with ground beef, artichoke hearts, tomato paste and mozzarella cheese. I moistened the bread with beef stock I had stored in the freezer. It makes a wonderful one-dish meal once the little casserole dish is heated and broiled in the oven. And if the slightly stale bread didn't have green onion in it, I could have made pain perdu (french toast) as well!

How to Make a Basic Vinaigrette

I’ve often heard from readers that the vinaigrette I’ve posted id either too difficult or requires ingredients that are too expensive to purchase for only one dish. Well, fear not; the ingredients in vinaigrettes can be easily swapped out for whatever may be available in your pantry. The real key to easily creating delicious vinaigrettes is to apply the basic rules. Almost all of my vinaigrettes requires a few basic ingredients: an acid (vinegar, concentrated sour-tasting fruit juice, lemon juice), mustard (coarse grained, honey, horseradish, flavored mustard), a sweetener (very sweet concentrated juice, syrup, honey, sorghum), an oil (olive, sesame, walnut, pistachio, etc.), seasoning (salt & pepper) and a mix of herbs and spices (oregano, basil, shallots, pickled garlic, etc) of your choosing. The acidic ingredient and sweetener help balance the salad dressing. The lecithin in the mustard acts as binder and helps emulsify the oil into the mixture.

I used this blueprint to create a dressing for garlic pan-seared artichokes (I pre-cooked them) accompanied by button mushrooms, tomatoes and capers that I drizzled with lemon juice and extra-virgin oil. If you want to recreate this particular vinaigrette but don’t have an ingredient or two on hand, have fun with it! Vinaigrettes are very forgiving, making them perfect candidates for kitchen experimentation. And if you come up with something fabulous, please let me know!

Baby Bella Mushroom Tart Recipe

Making savory tarts doesn't require a specific recipe. The basic dish consists of a puff pastry shell filled with your favorite mixture and topped with vegetables. I had Baby Bella mushrooms on hand, so I made a version using them along with an artichoke pesto.

The pesto is a combination of artichoke hearts, lemon, garlic, pine nuts and olive oil. To soften the pesto, I added mascarpone cheese. I topped the tart with the Baby Bella mushrooms and roasted red bell peppers. Cheddar cheese was the finishing touch so the filling formed one piece.