Growing up, my sister and I enjoyed this simple puree my grandmother used to make. It was, and still is, part of our Cuban comfort food. This soup was never found on a Cuban restaurant menu, only at my grandmother’s home. She would make it when one of us were sick and she made it when my sister was pregnant for the first time and craving it. 

After my grandmother passed away, I thought the recipe was lost. My grandmother never wrote down recipes and often joked that the puree was her own secret recipe. I can only tell you that it’s been years and years now since I had it and I longed for it. Luckily enough, my aunt was able to hunt down the recipe and after a few years of hounding her, she gave it to me a few days ago while I was in Miami for my birthday. It was the best birthday present I could get. 

I came home and immediately started searching out the ingredients. I felt like this would be a difficult task because the ingredients are very “Cuban” and being so far from Miami and all things Cuban might lessen the chances of finding the ingredients.

The puree is time consuming…more than I could have ever imagined, but the outcome is simply amazing. If you have 3 hours to spare, make this.

I have added photos of the ingredients to make finding these root vegetables a little easier when you visit the produce aisle.

What you will need: 

• 8 cups of water
• 1 lb flank steak
• 1 “big” yellow onion
• 1/2 “big” green bell pepper
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 2 garlic cloves

Boil the stock for approximately 45 minutes and add the vegetables:

The Vegetables you will need are:

• 2 Green Plantains (cut them in half and keep the skin on, it will come off after boiling)
• 2 Yucas (the long waxy brown tubers in the photo)
• 2 Malangas (I found this in the produce aisle as Taro Root–They are pear shaped)
• 2 Ears of Corn (fresh is best…they are used for flavor)
• 1/4 pumpkin (I used a whole bag of frozen butternut squash)
• 1 Yam or in Spanish it is called Ñame

Boil until the vegetables are done (tender). This took me about 20 minutes on high. Take the onion, meat and corn cobs out and put aside. I usually save the corn to eat along with the soup as a side dish. For me, the onion fell apart so don’t worry if you’re unable to take all of the onion out. Puree the rest of the ingredients in a blender and add the stock little by little. 

The recipe originally said that it was for two, but I would think this is actually for four persons. 

Lastly, I just wanted to add that long are the days of spending all day cooking and this dish proves it. It was definitely time consuming, especially the prep of having to peel the yuca and malanga, but the end result was so worth it. When I was transferring the puree to the bowl, I risked my tongue from getting burnt by licking the puree from the spoon….That’s how good it was! 

I hope my grandmother would have approved of my version of her soup!

Having people over? Need to fix something for them to munch on? Have to make an appetizer for a dinner? Don’t know what to make? Need something easy?

Am I asking too many questions? Probably.

Caprese Salad is the ultimate in easy appetizers. What I like about the Caprese Salad is it’s simplicity. All you need is a tomato, mozzarella, olive oil, balsamic and basil. There you have it. The fundamentals of a Caprese Salad.

The Insalata Caprese originates from the Campania region in Italy and it really only calls for olive oil. There have been many variations that call for parsley, garlic and my favorite…Balsamic Vinegar!

The first time I had a caprese salad, was in Long Island. I was dating someone that came from the quintessential Italian Long Island family. His mother would cook the most wonderful things ever (she even introduced me to homemade Matzoh ball soup). I was not a fan of tomatoes, but when I tried it…I was a changed woman forever.

For my Insalata Caprese, I use beefsteak tomatoes and thinly slice them.

I top the tomato slices with finely chopped fresh basil and a slice of fresh mozzarella.

Lastly, I drizzle olive oil and I am very generous with my balsamic vinegar. I do this so the vinegar soaks into the tomato.

I add salt and pepper to taste.

After I finish assembling my salad, I refrigerate it for an hour or two.

The other night, I had a brief flash of genius. Rus had come home from work and we were pondering the common question: What’s for dinner?

Being Cuban and growing up in Miami, I ate a lot of Latin American dishes quite frequently. One of my favorites was a nice grilled flank steak topped with chimichurri sauce. When I brought this option up, Rus tried his best to ask what “chimichurri” was. I had to teach him how to pronounce it as “chi-mee-chew-ree” sauce. Needless to say, he still sounds pretty funny pronouncing it.

Chimichurri is an Argentinian concoction and a great one at that. Not only does it bring a great burst of flavor to an otherwise boring steak, it’s easy and fast to make too!

To make the sauce, all you need are a few simple ingredients:

A bunch of parsley

1/2 cup of olive oil

2 tablespoons of lime juice

1 clove of garlic (although I  like a lot of garlic so I added a few more cloves)

2 minced shallots

1 teaspoon fresh oregano

Salt and Pepper to taste
Add all of these ingredients in a food processor and pulse until the parsley, oregano, etc is finely chopped. Add the salt and pepper afterwards.

Top Drench your flank steak with this sauce and enjoy!

Okay, so in going over my honeymoon photos, I’ve come to miss my time in Scandinavia. I would give anything to go back again. We’re thinking of taking another cruise up that way eventually (in two years, hopefully), but for now…all I can do is make some Gravlax instead.

First off, I’m going to plug this cook book by Andreas Viestad. It’s called “Kitchen of Light: The New Scandinavian Cooking.” I used to watch his show on PBS all the time and I had a crush on the guy. I mean, c’mon…Who wouldn’t crush a Norwegian dude who digs a hole in the sands by the fjord and cooks a fish in it?

I decided to make Gravlax this weekend. I read up on it via the book and online sources and it seemed EXTREMELY TIME CONSUMING, which almost puts you off on the idea. If you’re patient and not too squeemish, this recipe is for you.

In reading up on Gravlax making, I noticed that the three main ingredients in curing the salmon are: Dill, Salt and Sugar. 

I learned that the ratio for Salt and Sugar is mainly 1 part salt to 2 parts sugar.

I cut this salmon filet in half which turned out to be way more than enough for 2 people. I ended up a surplus of salmon. Next time, I know to make half of this amount.

Next, I de-boned the salmon and rubbed it with sea salt and sugar.

I topped one half will fresh dill and then topped the other filet on top of the dill, making a sort of salmon dill sandwich.

Wrap the dill salmon sandwich up in saran wrap tightly. Now, here is where the traditional part sets in…In Norway, they would put the gravlax in a that sand hole by the fjorn to let rot for a few days. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t trust a dirt hole to rot my salmon in Downtown Long Beach. Therefore, I made a dish with some rocks (you can use canned goods too) to place atop the salmon. This way, the salt and sugar begin to brine the salmon and the pressure on the rocks helps to release the brine solution. The solution sits in the saran wrap and the salmon cures in it.

I left the salmon out for 6 hours at room temperature with this rock plate on top of it. After that time elapsed, I tucked it away in the fridge for 24 hours (you can leave it up to 36 hours if you want).

After waiting impatiently for a day, I unwrapped the salmon from the saran wrap. Boy, it was sticky and gross and not fun to do. Rinse the sticky brine  and the dill off of the salmon and cut into thin slices.

To prep the dish, I used a sea salt cracker from Whole Foods topped with their own lemon dill butter, the gravlax, capers and a slice of lemon.

Rus tested out the gravlax and loved it. He said (and I quote): “All of the flavors combine into one perfectly!”

Gravlax makes for a good party appetizer and I would definitely recommend making it with good planning and patience. 

I have been doing a pretty hard fish and tofu regime. It’s gotten so bad, that we’re both REALLY sick of fish. I’ve been trying out some non-fish entrees like tofu, portobello mushrooms, pasta, etc.

Saturday, though….I woke up with a huge hankerin’ for some juicy, bloody red meat. In fact, I wanted the finest filet mignons I could lay my hands on. I think this was partly due to having watched “No Reservations” the night before. I admit, I’m fond of really cheesy chick flicks, especially if there is food involved.

I went to Whole foods and noticed that they had some buffalo filet mignons on special. I asked for two and god, I was a little stupified by the price.

After the shock wore off, I drove back home and began to prepare the little lovelies. Sorry, I mean humongous pieces of buffalo carcass. These filets were huge and worth every cent!

I decided to season them with some sea salt and cracked pepper. Nothing too elaborate…Just simple enough for you to appreciate it.

I sauteed the filets in a pre-heated pan with olive oil and garlic paste. The guy at whole foods told us to cook them for 3 minutes on each side, but we did that and it was a little too raw for our taste, so I would have done 5 or 6 minutes on each side. Hmm…maybe next time I decide to blow $40 on meat.

As a side dish, I found a frozen (yes, frozen…sorry you picky foodies) potato gratin with tartinflette sauce which was super easy to make at Whole Foods.

Oh, and as I cooked the delicious super expensive meatz, we drank some of this nifty wine. I can’t help but be lured into buying a bottle of wine for it’s neat packaging. It was actually pretty good. Not too dry a pinot grigio.

Drumroll please?

Here is my lovely buffalo filet mignon. It was delicious and tender. Add some worcestershire sauce to it for some extra flavor.

I had to go at it alone the other day….It was Sunday and Rus went to his friend’s house to record a few songs for the 80s cover album he’s been working on. Since he was gone, that meant I had to make dinner on my own.

I remember back when I lived back in NYC not too long ago, how dreadful it was for me to have to cook for myself. Cooking for one is usually a task, most often times resulting in making too much food that you either put in a Tupperware and totally forget about or just throw away.

Luckily, since then…I’ve come to discover two things: Costco and vacuum air sucker food savers. Buying bulk obviously save money and I usually like to buy my meats and fish in bulk, take them home and vacuum seal them. I did this with some tilapia which came in an odd number….so there was one filet for a lonely night like this one. I decided to bread it with Italian seasonings and fry it up!

For the side dish I chose brussel sprouts. As you can see, instead of keeping them intact, I chose to finely chop them. *Note the Red Truck in the background, which I drank as I cooked along…I’m not a huge fan of red wines, but I have to give my seal of approval to Red Truck.

Back to the b-sprouts…I quickly sauteed them towards the end of the tilapia cooking time, adding some salt and pepper to taste and some pureed garlic (about 1tablespoon or less– depending on how much of a garlic freak you are).

The tilapia was cooked in vegetable oil until the bread crumbs were a nice golden brown.

Together, both tastes collided in my mouth like a bombastic explosion of flavors.
Rus missed out.

Since having gotten married, there has been one gadget I’ve been wanting to try out so very very badly: the Cuisinart Stand Mixer my parents bought us. It’s truly a thing of beauty. In fact, I’ve never had a stand mixer ever in my life. Whenever we used to bake cakes as a kid,  we had an avocado green hand blender with the two little popsicle like attachments that we used to take off after blending yellow cake and we’d like the left over batter off of them. I once got my fingers stuck in them…I have no idea why. You don’t know pain until you’ve foolishly stuck your fingers in between the attachments of a working hand blender.  Anyways, I’m not one to bake too often, but now that I have this new awesome contraption, I feel like I have to start baking.

I pondered high and lo…as to what it could be that would motivate me enough to bake. As it turns out, I was cleaning my desk at work the other day, and I found an old recipe I had printed out from a blog I visited almost a year ago detailing the deliciousness of cream cheese muffins. I even commented on these muffins!!!!

I brought home the wrinkled recipe and planned to make them at once! I was lucky enough to have most of the ingredients at home already so it wasn’t one of those baking ventures that gets too costly to make.

I followed the instructions almost to a tee, but I admit I deviated a bit on the topping and the cream cheese portion. I ended up dumping all of the cream cheese and sugar mixture into the batter because I didn’t read directions and didn’t let the cream cheese sit to room temp. For the topping, I used ground pecans and brown sugar only, topping the muffins before putting them in the oven.

Even though my attempted at baking these cream cheese muffins was a bit half-assed, they were pretty good I must say. The recipe yielded about 24, so I had tons left and brought them into work. Also, the new mixer? Worked like a charm. I was surprised at how quiet it was…and the best part, is that it has a plastic guard so I won’t tempt myself into sticking my hands in it while it’s running.

I don’t know why we don’t cook ribs as much as we do. I think we totally forget about ribs as an option and go with tri-tip or fish instead. This weekend we headed over to Costco to stock up on things when I saw a giant slab of pork spare ribs. These ribs were so large they sort of reminded me of that scene in the opening of the Flintstones… You know what I’m talking about right? When Fred and the bunch drive over to a drive-in and the waitress piles on some dinosaur ribs on their car and it tips over?

Well, they were THAT big (okay maybe not that big).

I ended up having to cut the slab in half and saved the other half for another weekend since it was just too much for the both of us and at $14 total, it was a really great deal (we even had leftovers).

When barbecuing ribs, there is an important question you need to ask yourself before starting to cook them:

DRY or WET?

In this case, we started off dry and it ended wet. You may be thinking to yourself, “What happened? Did your ribs fall in the pool while you were transferring them to your plate?”

The answer is, “NO.” In fact, I am unfortunate enough not to have a pool…although we have a little tiny pond in our backyard that is really a glorified in-ground bucket full of tepid water.

What we did do to our ribs, was that we started out with two dry rubs: A pork tenderloin seasoning which is pretty salty and a bbq seasoning I bought last year on a trip that is sweet.

Both rubs were rubbed onto the ribs, which had been patted dry beforehand.

The ribs were bbq’ed for approximately 35 minutes and were basted with bbq sauce periodically for extra flavor.

So…technically the ribs were wet, but they started off dry. Either way, they were delicious.

I have to say, I had a pretty eventful weekend. It started off on Friday, when I had to call out sick to work and ended up at the ER with a pretty awful upper respiratory infection and a middle ear infection. Luckily, it wasn’t that bad and I was let go to spend the whole day at rest and medicated.

Saturday, I attended a dog adoption fair and got my first foster dog. He’s the sweetest and most well-behaved dog you’ll ever meet.  All he does is sleep!

I was feeling a lot better on Sunday and we decided to put a new wedding registry gadget to good use: LUNCH. I decided to make a sorpressata and mozzarella pressed sandwich.

Don’t let it’s messy presentation fool you. It tasted a lot better than it looked! If you have a sandwich maker, make sure to drizzle some olive oil onto your bread before pressing it; it gives the bread a nicer taste and it’s not as dry. We basically likened these sandwiches to Hot Pockets, but with better quality ingredients.  You can make some serious damage with a sandwich press and the stuffing combinations are endless.

After lunch, I got to some gardening: started up a new green pepper plant and as well as some new basil. Unfortunately, most of my herbs died while we were away on vacation. I’m vowing to re-do my potted herb/veg garden and restore it to it’s former beauty!
Lastly, we made some BBQ’ed ribs for dinner, but I’ll post about that tomorrow.

Last night while I was waiting for a few slabs of salmon and snapper at the Seafood counter of my local grocery, I noticed these packets. Usually, there are tons of spices, rubs and marinades in front of the counter. The packet was only $1.99 and there were two choices: Lemon Pepper and Garlic Butter. I thought…”Steaming, eh?” I picked up both flavors and decided to give it a go. I mean, this brings a whole new level of laziness to the kitchen….Dumping some fish into a bag with some sauce and letting it cook, sounds appealing and not so messy either.

I immediately rushed home (I was hungry) and read the directions. They seemed easy enough: Pour the packet of seasoning into a bowl with 2/3 cup of water and whisk. Place the fish in the bag, dump the sauce into the bag and puncture a few whole to allow the steam to escape the bag.

Here was the thing I wasn’t too sure of…Microwaving it.

I was totally unsure about how microwaving salmon would be. Would it be really stiff, rubbery and disgusting or would it surprise me? Well, it surprised me tremendously. In fact, the fish was cooked perfectly. It takes a grand total of 6-7 minutes to microwave and you let it stand for an additional 5.

This was such an easy process that I can’t wait to do it again with the snapper/lemon pepper combo.