The Good Plate Latest Recipes – Page 56 of 72

Crab Bisque

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Crab Bisque

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.

Thousand Island Dressing with Balsamic Toasts

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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!

Stuffed Ciabatta Garlic Bread – Great with Antipasto

Stuffed Ciabatta Garlic Bread makes a great appetizer or side for a big salad.

We are very lucky living in Glendale, where there is a wonderful bakery that makes the best bread, including a Ciabatta bread. When I picked Spane up this afternoon and needed some things at the store, I passed by the bread aisle and couldn’t help smelling the fresh bread.

This bread was pillow-soft with a crisp crust very reminiscent of the true Ciabatta bread found in the Lake Como region of Italy. It is nothing like the stuff that comes from mass bakeries.

Since the bread is small but rather flat and elongated, I knew it would be perfect for Stuffed Garlic Bread to go with our Antipasto Salad with Original Brown Derby Dressing.

Suggestions on Making Stuffed Ciabatta Garlic Bread

When making this, you could use a relatively soft Italian bread or even sourdough would work well. Choose the cheeses that you like. Some sun-dried tomato would be good with this. Some homemade pesto would be another option. If you want to have an alfresco dinner with the grill, then wrap the bread well with foil to void burning it. Enjoy!

I highly recommend using Penzey’s Tuscan Sunset instead of Italian seasoning. It’s the perfect blend and I find myself using it a lot. It’s salt-free and has a much fresher flavor.

Original Brown Derby Salad Dressing for Antipasto

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.

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Peaches Sautéed with Marsala and Cream

I really love peaches. I like peaches and cream ice cream, I like peach preserves, I like peaches out of hand, I just like peaches.

My neighbor brought me some peaches a few days ago, and I wanted to make something simple for breakfast for Spane. I suddenly remembered I had peaches in the refrigerator, and decided to cook them off, much like I did Rosy Peaches.

Peaches Sauteed with Marsala and Cream is a very simple recipe, and quite tasty. I served it over pound cake that I had lying around, but it would also be great on cereal, or on toast, or just in a bowl. You could have it for breakfast like we did, or as a dessert.

Plants in this Post

Has this happened to you? Have you had a vegetable start growing roots in your refrigerator? Green onions have done that to me numerous times, and I have always thrown the root part out. This time when that happened, I said “If you can live in my refrigerator, then you can live outside in dirt.”

We live in an apartment, and we don’t have a patio or yard, and yet I have always wanted to grow at least some of my own food. Well, Charlie, as my friend called him, started me on our apartment vegetable garden. I will be updating this post regularly as the vegetables grow.

We already had a basil plant that was doing fine living on top of the outside of the air conditioner. We even named her Lucille, but her name is pronounced the way that Little Richard did it in his song by the same name, Lucille. I have provided a video if you don’t remember it.

My good friend, who is the director of United States Soldiers Assistance Center and board member of Heal Children with Cancer Worldwide, suggested I use an unused dresser drawer for my garden. She was right, and the garden is doing fine.

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I love it when I suddenly have something I didn’t know I had. A few days ago, when Spane and I went to one of the wonderful Armenian stores, the check out lady gave us a loaf of Stone bread. I put it up on top of the refrigerator, and forgot it was up there. We don’t eat a lot of bread, so that’s not a surprise. I should have put it in the freezer, but… When I checked it two days later, it had really turned into its namesake, stone.

What to do with bread that has turned to stone that you know has really good flavor? Why turn it into stuffing mix! The stuffing mix that comes in the box has bread that I swear is dryer and harder.

I only had one problem. It was a big loaf of bread, not sliced, and too hard to cut with a knife. I tried whacking it with a skillet, but that didn’t work too well either. I thought to myself, what is the heaviest thing in the house? Me! So, I put my bread in several plastic bags (hey, finally, a good use for plastic bags), put some flat shoes on, and stepped all over the bread. Let me tell you, the sound was great, and the bread crumbled just the way I wanted it to.

I also had some ground turkey in the freezer, and cranberry sauce in the pantry. That sounded to me like a great head start on Thanksgiving!

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Ah, the first day back at school! This year, not only does Spane get a new teacher for 5th grade, the school also gets a new Principal. I think it’s important to make a good impression. Spane is a good student, but it never hurts to grease a few palms with an appreciative gift. I already made Trinket Boxes, and special Scrunchy Bows for the gift bag, but I wanted to put something else inside. I was wrestling with myself over this, and then I remembered I had a bag of butterscotch chips that I had gotten on sale at the local supermarket. Everyone likes cookies, and if they don’t they can give them to someone who does.

These Mocha Butterscotch Cashew Cookies will be rich, so I will also be giving a plate of cookies to the front office, some to my neighbor who gives me figs and apples, some to Spane’s Lemonade Stand co-worker, and still be able to have some for Spane and I.

Cookies for the Principal, the Front Office and the Teacher

I love going to the resale shops, finding bargains, and occasionally finding something old that comes back home with me for a new life. I have a friend who had this interesting jar with a top that you would push down on and she would use it for chopping onions. I always wanted one of those, and I was lucky enough to find one recently. I also found out that they were used for chopping nuts. Well, they do a great job at both!

Stove Top Cooked French Sweet Tart Dough

This has got to be the easiest way to make sweet tart dough. It makes a dough that is almost like a good cookie, just delicious! My food processor is in very poor health, like not working, might be able to be fixed. So, I needed to find a way to make tart dough without using the food processor. I found a recipe at David Lebovitz that looked promising – it required melting butter in the stove. Hey, it’s summertime in Glendale, California, and I didn’t want to make my house any hotter if I could help it.

I figured that I could melt the butter on the stove top, and use the Kitchen Aid mixer to actually make the dough. I was right, it worked out perfectly. This will be my go-to recipe for sweet tart dough from now on. Because of the caramelization of the butter and sugar, the crust had a slight caramel flavor and color that was perfect for my Blue Cheese Stuffed Fig Tart with Balsamic Honey Glaze.

Back to School Teacher Gifts in this Post

Spane starts back to school on August 12, 2013. I wanted to make a some nice Back to School Teacher Gifts, one for our new Principal and one for Spane’s fifth grade teacher. We don’t know yet who Spane’s teacher is going to be, so I did not want to make anything that was gender specific. I also didn’t have a lot of money to spend, so I headed out to my nearest craft store and purchased two silver toned boxes, some school themed stickers, blue and gold ribbon to reflect the school’s colors, yellow wine gift bags, and some horses from the toy department because the school mascot is a mustang.

Crab Bisque

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Thousand Island Dressing with Balsamic Toasts

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Stuffed Ciabatta Garlic Bread – Great with Antipasto

Suggestions on Making Stuffed Ciabatta Garlic Bread

Original Brown Derby Salad Dressing for Antipasto

Peaches Sautéed with Marsala and Cream

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Apartment Vegetable Garden

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Stuffing Turkey Meatloaf Ring

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Mocha Butterscotch Cashew Cookies Back to School Gift

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Stove Top Cooked French Sweet Tart Dough

Back to School Teacher Gifts

Back to School Teacher Gifts in this Post

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Suggestions on Making Stuffed Ciabatta Garlic Bread

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Plants in this Post

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Back to School Teacher Gifts in this Post

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