If you have been to San Francisco’s revered restaurant Gary Danko, then you know the ingredients are the epitome of seasonal foods at their peak. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of enjoying a dinner at Gary Danko with my mom and corn-loving brother. While my mom and I selected scallop and lobster appetizers, my brother ordered the corn soup. I have been trying to replicate this ethereal sweet corn experience ever since.
Cape Cod lobster is worthy of an opera. The sweetness of the tail meat, the tenderness of the knuckles, and smell of briny, salty Cape Cod water that lingers on your palate the next morning. This lobster bisque is my ode to Uncle Frank and my way of ensuring that I waste nothing. After we have enjoyed fresh steamed lobsters, I ensure all the meat is removed from the bodies and the legs have been rolled. The shells get combined with whatever vegetables I have readily available (carrot, leek, celery) and submerged in water to make a stock. The stock yields an extra depth of lobster flavor to the bisque.
This is not your traditional kitschy Italian restaurant chicken marsala. There will be no attached photos of perfectly browned chicken basking in a caramel-colored marsala cream sauce accented by a few small mushrooms. This is a mountain of rosemary scented roasted mushrooms sandwiched in between creamy mashed potatoes and buttermilk-sage fried chicken.
These are not the meatballs of my childhood. But these are the meatballs of my son’s childhood. And that is the whole point of this food blog…to preserve the flavors of my son’s childhood so that he can replicate them in the future so that these flavored memories are not lost.
On our honeymoon in Eleuthra, we ate at a restaurant owned by Italians where I was scolded for asking for cheese with my shrimp and squid. I was internally hand gesturing to them through my eyes – but I’m Sicilian – we love to combine cheese with seafood. Arguably, anytime you add a pesto to seafood you are marrying cheese and seafood with a delicious result. So why all the snobbery with combining seafood with cheese? I hope that this version of shrimp pasta helps you reconsider the antiquated rule of not topping seafood with cheese.
My absolute favorite part of eating chili (aside from all of the spices) is the smorgasbord of toppings. Serve the chili directly from the pot and set up a series of bowls containing the toppings. If you have picky eaters, it allows everyone to customize their chili to their liking. For my husband, that usually means adding more spice and for me it usually means adding more cheese.
Chicken and dumplings are a southern staple. I have heard fairy tales of my grandmother’s famed chicken and dumplings that were as light as air since I was a child. Of course, no one ever wrote the recipe down or taught the next generation to make the angelic dumplings. So, here I am almost seventy years later trying to recreate the flavors of my mother’s childhood.
