just a pinch.

Stracciatella with Escarole, Crispy Bacon and Balsamic Shallots

This recipe has been adapted from “The Mozza Cookbook.”

If you’ve never had Stracciatella (from stracciato meaning “torn apart”) then this recipe is a must try for you. If you live in the city you can definitely find this beautiful, creamy cheese at Eataly. Anywhere else in the world just go to your closest Italian market and I’m almost positive that they will have it there.

If you’ve read most of my recipes you know I ALWAYS use nitrate free bacon, normally a 40% lean peppered brand from whole foods. This recipe is no different, it adds a deep peppery spice that the peppermill just can’t accomplish.

This is a perfect dish for an easy appetizer. Don’t scimp on the bread, make sure it’s a freshly made delicious bread. My go to bread is Whole Foods’ Organic Seeduction Bread, perfectly soft and moist on the inside with a seedy crust.

Ingredients:

12 Slices of your favorite bread, 1/2” thick

olive oil

garlic clove, peeled

6 slices nitrate free bacon

12-16oz stracciatella, drained

salt and pepper

For Shallots:

6 shallots, thinly sliced

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

about 1/4 cup water

Escarole Dressing:

1/2 cup minced shallots

1/4 cup champagne vinegar, or to taste

1 clove garlic, minced

salt and pepper to taste

1/4 cup olive oil, or to taste

For balsamic shallots: In a large saute pan, add the shallots and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring when necessary until brown around the edges and soft. Add water when moisture is needed, let the water cook off before adding more. Add balsamic and stir until all has been evaporated.

In a large bowl, combine the minced shallots, vinegar, garlic, salt and olive oil. Add escarole, toss well and adjust seasonings to taste.

Heat oven to 350 F. Brush one side of the sliced bread with olive oil and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake the bread until golden brown about 10 minutes, depending on your oven of course. When bread is toasted rub with garlic clove.

Meanwhile, in a large saute pan over medium high heat cook the bacon, in batches if needed, until nice and crispy. Transfer to a paper towel lined plate and continue cooking until all slices are crispy. When slightly cooled break in half so there is one 1/2 slice of bacon per slice of bread.

Place bread oiled side up on work surface. Mound about 1/2 cup of the escarole on top of each slice, leaving the edges of the bread visible. Lay a piece of bacon atop the escarole. Scoop about a tablespoon, maybe a little more, of the stracciatella and place atop the bacon. Drizzle with olive oil, a crack of pepper and a pinch of salt. Top with a teaspoon of caramelized shallots. Serve immediately.

Cauliflower Veloute with Crispy Bacon and Chives

I feel like I’ve only recently turned into a soup lover. Maybe when I was little girl growing up I enjoyed a nice bowl of Campbell’s but over the recent years it’s nothing that I’ve ever really craved. Come to think of it, I’ve never really been too fond of cauliflower either, funny how your taste buds change. Anyway this is a very velvety soup, hence why I am calling it a veloute. Using whole milk instead of cream doesn’t only cut down on the calories but it is a major slash in fat. Feel free to use 2%…mayyyyybe even try 1% but I definitely wouldn’t use skim. You won’t get that beautiful creamy taste and I truly believe that whole milk is easier for our bodies to digest over skim milk. Seeing how a thick and creamy soup can sometimes be a bit boring in the texture department I decided to cook off bacon and crumble over top with fresh chives for added crunch and color.

Ingredients:

2 strips nitrate free bacon (I use 40% lean peppered bacon found at Whole Foods)

1 white onion, small dice

1 head cauliflower, cleaned and chopped into equal size pieces

1 tsp chopped, fresh thyme

1 bay leaf

2 cups low sodium vegetable stock

2 cups milk

1/3 cup sour cream

salt and pepper

olive oil

chopped chives for garnish

Render the bacon in a large dutch oven. Remove when crispy and place on a paper towel lined plate.

Add onions and a little sprinkle of salt and cook in rendered bacon fat until onions are soft and translucent. Add cauliflower, thyme and bay leaf and stir to coat well with the bacon fat.

Add vegetable broth and milk. Bring to a simmer and cook until cauliflower is very tender, about 20 minutes. Make sure the broth does not come to a full boil, you don’t want to curdle the milk.

When the cauliflower is tender, you can test with a knife, turn the heat off. If you have a hand mixer now is the time to use it or transfer the soup in batches into your blender until soup is velvety and smooth. Return back to the pot. Stir in sour cream and season with salt and freshly cracked pepper.

Ladle soup into bowls and top with crumbled bacon, chives and a drizzle of olive oil. As we all know, like most one pot meals, it is always even tastier the next day!

Bacon Jam

Though I’d absolutely love to, I cannot take credit for this recipe. I can tell you though that I used the finest ingredients…this include La Colombe coffee of course. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking when making the jam but I only made half a recipe, which I do not recommended, only of course because who wants only a little bacon jam? Go big or go home, right?!

So this recipe I got from one of my all time favorite blogs: TasteSpotting. My good friend Lan  recommended this blog to be quite some time ago and it has been an inspiration since! The original recipe is from the great Nigella. Though she tends to have quite a heavy hand compared to my light and local approach, she has some amazing food marriages and bacon jam on bruschetta with a bit of cream cheese is definitely one of her many. Feel free to play around a bit with the type of coffee, syrup and bacon you use…the following were my choices!

Recipe:

500g nitrate free 40% lean peppered bacon, 1”dice (applegate farms has a great no-nitrate bacon, do not use turkey bacon, MUCH different taste and not nearly as good)

4 loves garlic, minced

1 medium onion, small dice

1 cup strong brewed coffee (I used La Colombe’s Monico blend)

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup finest quality maple syrup

Couple dashes of your favorite hot sauce (remember it reduces and can get spicier, you can always add more spice in the end if you want to)

In a large, heavy bottomed pan, fry the bacon in batches. Remove the bacon from the pan and drain on a paper towel lined plate. Pour off all but 1 tbsp of the bacon

Turn the pan heat to med-high. Add the onion to the pan and fry until translucent. Add the minced garlic and fry until fragrant. Return the bacon to the pan, along with the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 2 hours. Stir occasionally, and add 1/4 up of water every 25 minutes or so (set a timer incase you forget)!

Once cooked down, puree the jam in a food processor until it reaches your desired consistency(mre or less chunky).

*Picture is before I pureed it. Forgot that step, I got a little too anxious to eat it :)

**original recipe calls for 2 tbsp brown sugar, with all the sugar from the maple syrup it sure doesn’t make much of a difference if you don’t add it, but feel free to experiment!

Roasted Peppers on Toast with Fresh Mozzarella

I’ve never really been a big fan of peppers be it roasted, raw, pickled, or whichever way you fancy. I like to tell myself that I really learned to dislike them when I was working on the garde manger station at my last restaurant because sometimes they just didn’t want to cooperate with you. They liked to spoil quickly, sometimes they didn’t want to peel and other times they contained an endless amount of little white seeds that, I swear would sometimes just appeared out of no where. Don’t get me wrong, I loved our dish, but the process was a tad tedious. In the recent months I’ve grown to love peppers again. Probably mostly now that my boyfriend is infatuated with them and likes to somehow incorporate them into each meal, or gnaw on them raw with a fairly large dip into some garlic lovers hummus.

This one was out of Jamie Oliver’s cookbook, Jamie at Home. As you know he is quite an inspiration to me, as say…Julia Child is to others, so his cookbooks are my go to when things aren’t quite turning right in my creative factory upstairs, if you get my drift. I’ve been flipping through this book constantly in the past week or so, so don’t be surprised if you see more of his recipes, though tweaked a bit on my end, they are still his with a little of my passion whisked in.

These are absolutely delicious, and I knew they’d be once I saw the recipe. Though he calls for a few portions of speck, I added my usual 40% lean no nitrate bacon (and I will repeat this, NO turkey bacon in my kitchen). You can also feel free to skip the added pork all-in-all and wah-lah, a whole-some vegetarian meal. Oh, if you don’t have basil, no worries, me being as forgetful as I am forgot it and it was still glorious, but I just knew how much better it could have been with the basil.

Recipe Pending…

Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes

I remember when I was a little girl, being a extremely picky eater with a normal diet of fresh bread and butter at any restaurant we went to. My mom worked at a German/American restaurant called the Spa Brauhaus which my grandfather would take us to every once in a while, well…who am I kidding? It was his, my nearly 100% Irish grandfathers’, favorite place to wine and dine so we were there for far more than just special occasions. So, back to my point. Besides my diet existing of bread and butter (which by the way, they had THE best dinner buns) I loved their twice baked potatoes. Crispy skin on the outside and fluffy whipped potatoes on the inside, delicious. We all know that the Germans are quite the heavy eaters so when I think back to that delicious twice baked potato I’m glad I didn’t know then what I know now about the loads of butter and cream they most likely used to whip those potatoes to perfection. With a returning craving I decided to see how a sweet potato worked.

Sweet potatoes are just that, sweet. They have such a unique flavoring and knowing that they taste just as good, or sometimes better, when I substitute them for an ordinary potato in something like french fries, I had to do a little taste testing. When choosing the best sweet potato go for the ones with a darker orange skin because they will have more beta carotene…and yes, you can eat the skin! Though “sweets” are something we are normally adding to our forbidden food lists, they may actually be a beneficial food for diabetics, as preliminary studies have revealed that it helps to stabilize blood sugar levels and to lower insulin resistance…who would have thought?!

Here I share with you the recipe for a delicious and nutritious twice baked sweet potato!

1 Large sweet potato, try to find one with that is straight

olive oil

2 tbsp low fat organic sour cream

2 tbsp thinly sliced scallions or chives, plus extra for garnishing

Cayenne pepper or your favorite hot sauce (optional if you want to kick up the spice)

pinch of salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Slice Sweet potatoes cross wise into thick pieces (see photo). Rub them with olive oil, be generous or they may get a bit too dark in the oven. Place on a oiled baking sheet and roast for about 35-40 minutes or until tender and “scoopable.”

When cool enough to handle scoop out the majority of the insides and place into a bowl leaving enough flesh attached so that when you refill them the “cup” is sturdy enough to hold the filling. Add your sour cream, scallions or chives, spice, salt and pepper to the sweet potato flesh. Always taste to see if you need to adjust the seasonings a bit to fit your taste buds.

Using a spoon refill your sweet potato cups enough so it makes a mound. Place back into your pre-heated oven for 20-25 minutes or until the potatoes are reheated through and slightly browned. Top with more chives or scallions and enjoy!

*Chef’s Note: After I tasting them I thought…mmmhmmm, should have added bacon! A great peppered bacon to purchase is one they sell at whole foods that is 40% lean with NO nitrates! When I go back this week I’ll get the brand name for everyone :)

Breakfast Bowl

I must say, I do fancy my eggs in the morning. Instead of my every day egg white omelet, scramble or frittata I’m going all out with an incredible, edible, cage-free (hmm?), good ol’ fresh off the farm egg. I’m sure you’ve all had the “soup bread bowl” at some time in your lives, but have you had the “egg bread bowl?” See above an endlessly grainy and seedy whole wheat roll, courtesy of Whole Foods, with the top cut off and a bit scooped out. I like to crack my egg in a ramekin first, just to be sure that some of the shell doesn’t try to ruin my tasty breakfast, then add to your bread bowl with a little salt and pepper. Bake in the oven at 400 degrees for approximately 15 minutes, depends of course on how runny you like your yolk. Top with some extra crispy, crumbled bacon and some freshly chopped parsley and Bon Appetit. 

Stuff Chicken with Celery Root Salad

When it comes to adding protein into my diet, I always look to chicken as my go-to source. There are a countless number of ways to prepare this bird that takes on just about any flavor beautifully. Stuffing chicken breast has been a new infatuation of mine lately. The one seen here, though you can’t see the filling, is stuffed with babaganoush, kalamata olives, capers and herb goat cheese.

Celery root is a delicious veggie that I adore and since it’s tasty raw it only takes minutes to prepare. After you carve off this ugly little guys’ flesh you’ll notice his chubby little self is a beautiful pearl white. I like to take it right to the box grater, mix it with a some thinly sliced celery hearts and light green leaves, crispy bacon and an easy red wine vinaigrette - low and behold a delightful celery root salad.

Bacon Wrapped Chicken Skewers with Almond Sauce

Looks like another bacon dish will be posted today. I mean, it is quite obvious that everything tastes better with bacon, right? Since I purchase the 40% leaner bacon I don’t feel so bad and it tastes 100 times better than turkey bacon. I’ve also noticed that turkey bacon can have a lot more sodium and sometimes even more ingredients - the less ingredients the better in my recipes.

Juicy chicken tenders wrapped in crispy bacon and grilled to perfection (again, you can definitely broil if you prefer) are accompanied with and submerged into peanut almond sauce. With almonds being the solo ingredient in almond butter I tend to stick with that over peanut butter. Happy dipping!

Stuffed Jalapenos with Crispy Bacon

On a recent trip to San Diego I was granted the opportunity to have a delicious homemade Mexican dinner. One of my favorite mouthfuls of the meal was a fiery, grilled, oozing jalapeno pepper. With a bit of a healthier twist I pack these spicy jalapenos with a mixture of lower fat cream cheese and shredded almond cheese, a bit of salt and pepper and stuff away. Top each with a 1/2 piece of bacon secure with a toothpick and toss on the grill until charred and scrumptious. Broiling them is also an option if, like i mentioned in a previous post, you live in NYC and a grill isn’t available in the dead of winter.

Stuffed Peppers with Broccoli Rabe

After a long day of work and a zen-like yoga session, I was headed home with one thing in mind…stuffed peppers. Nothing sounded more satisfying, though quite obviously a glass of red was the first thing on my mind, I was in deed in need of a dish to pair with it. Low and behold my ever so satisfying stuffed peppers with broccoli rabe accompanied with a bacon vinaigrette.