Gourmet Food on a Budget — Ever Forward, Ever Flavorful
Recipes and tips for smaller dishes that can be served as an appetizer, such as Hors d’oeuvres, canapés, starters, or even a small lunch.
One of the reasons artichokes are not that popular is they take a long time to cook on the stovetop. Well, there are easier ways. In this recipe, I offer two ways to have artichokes on the table quickly, either microwave artichokes or if you have one use the Instant Pot.
The sweetness from the Vidalia onion makes these Southern Spicy Vidalia Hot Wings pleasantly different from their tart Northern Buffalo cousins.
Watermelon Basil Salad
Watermelon Basil salad is great on a hot day, for a barbecue, or when you want something simple and flavorful. The flavor combination will surprise you.
Bacon Crusted Mini Quiches are so simple to make, look fantastic, and taste great. Make them plain with only eggs, or make them fancy with what you like in your scrambled eggs. These are not quiches in the true sense of the word because they don’t have a real crust.
Baked asparagus fries make an excellent appetizer or side dish. Did you know that you can eat asparagus with your fingers?
Bacon Spinach Stuffed Mushrooms are an appetizer that’s easy on your time and easy on your wallet.
Barbecued chili garlic shrimp makes an excellent appetizer or main dish with salad. Something different to put on the grill or even on the stovetop.
I am so happy that it is finally getting cooler in Southern California. As a matter of fact, there was thick cloud cover this morning, and I had to wear a sweater. It was a good day for soup.
After making Crab Salad with Thousand Island Dressing, I had a half a package of crab left over. I also had some cream left over from making something else. I knew I needed to use that crab, I needed to use the cream, and I wanted something warm. I have always liked crab bisque, so I decided to make that.
I had this brilliant idea when looking in my pantry and spying a can of Great Northern white beans. I didn’t have that much cream, and I really wanted the soup to be filling. To compensate for not using real crab, or real crab stock, I added a little anchovy paste for flavor. Both additions worked beautifully. Honestly, if you wanted to, you could omit the cream completely, as the beans do a fine job of thickening without all those calories.
Why would anyone want to write about Thousand Island Dressing? It’s yucky! It’s that reddish stuff that sits on the salad bar and congeals because no one wants it, and rightly so. It’s the “secret” sauce on the Big Mac and has become so common that you probably don’t even notice it on your sandwich anymore. That’s a pity because this is a grand dame of salad dressings with an interesting and honorable history.
Thousand Island Dressing is named for the archipelago of 1,864 islands that straddles the Canada-U.S. border in the Saint Lawrence River. Some of the islands are very small indeed. The one pictured above supports a single tree and two bushes. The dressing was popularized by May Irwin, a Canadian vaudeville star in the 1890s. She had a home in Grindstone Island, one of the Thousand Islands. She said that the dressing reminded her of the Thousand Islands, and enjoyed the dressing so much that she requested the recipe from Sophia LaLonde, a fishing guide’s wife who frequently made the dressing for her husband. Miss Irwin then gave the recipe to George Boldt, the proprietor of the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, who instructed his the hotel’s maître d’hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, to put the dressing on the menu. In 1950 the dressing became a standard and started its decline into the gloppy mess we have today.
One of the things we do at The Good Plate is to reconstruct packaged foods, so they taste better, and don’t have the preservatives common in packaged foods. I knew that venerable Thousand Island Dressing deserved a better place, and making it from scratch would make it one of my favorites, especially for seafood salads.
I made a crab salad for the dressing, and some Balsamic Toasts to go with them. This was amid Spane and his friend making Play Dough on the stove. There are little bits of homemade Play Dough all over the place. Time to clean!
Sometimes it’s a terrible thing to get old enough to remember wonderful restaurants that have closed down, notably The Brown Derby in Hollywood and Little Joe’s in Downtown Los Angeles. I’ll show you how to recreate some of the iconic recipes from these wonderful places.