All in the Salad

There's nothing better in the summertime than a fresh salad with great flavors and a good crunch. Every dinner with my mom's side of the family has had such a salad and rarely do we stray from its flavors and nostalgia. It's Italian tradition to have this salad no matter what the main course: burgers, lasagne, pulled pork; this salad goes with everything.

What makes this salad an even bigger deal is that it's my Grandpa's recipe - Grandpa Sam's Italian Salad, to be specific. My grandpa grew up with a litter of brothers and sisters with parents that emigrated from Sicily and spoke no English. Like many Italians, family is the most important thing in life behind their faith and it's no different for my grandpa.

Food has been one way that he shares his love with people. When my mom, aunts and uncles were growing up, I'm told he had a killer grilled chicken dish and of course his famous "sauce and noodles." And he's been making this salad for just as long. As a kid, my grandparents would host sleepovers with all of my cousins and there was always enough food to go around. It would be a sin if a grandchild went hungry. And while I will admit that I didn't always like his salad (I was a very picky eater once), I can't imagine a family meal without it now, and I always go back for seconds.

As a veteran of the Korean War, he's shared his recipes and cooked large dinners for his fellow veterans, feeding hundreds of people at a time. And this salad was of course on the menu. There is so much food at these dinners it's like cooking for an army. Okay, he is cooking for an army, but you get the point. No matter who or where you are, my grandpa will make sure you're fed.

So, what's in this salad? While I have to keep certain ingredients under wraps - it's a family recipe, after all - it includes all the basics to a great Italian salad: romaine lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and olives. Chopped green onions also add a little bit more flavor. It's when we start talking about the dressing that the locks and chains go up. The dressing is a blend of olive oil and red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, parsley, and garlic (exact measurements shall stay a secret). The salad is then tossed and coated with the dressing. Depending on your preference, you can go lighter or heavier on the dressing. 

This past weekend I had the chance to cook for a friend's birthday dinner. Beautifully paired with homemade spaghetti and meatballs, the salad was a hit. During dinner I thought of my Grandpa Sam and how he has shared his love with his family and friends through this and many other dishes over the years. I am so happy to share it now with my friends. I know I'll be sharing it with my own family for generations.

Blowing People Away

No one in my family has ever been in a movie, sang for millions of people, or played a sport professionally, but we are all entertainers. It's part of who we are. For as long as I can remember and far before that, my family has gathered around dining tables celebrating every holiday and event under the sun: Christmas, graduations, 90th birthdays, a Sunday afternoon, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Emphasis on the etcetera. And when we gather together it's not just a ho-hum event. Never. There is always enough food to feed an army, decorations that lift spirits (my cousins once had a 15-foot Christmas tree), and more than enough love to fill a sappy romantic comedy. It goes without saying that the Eggerdings (and our respective extended families) are in the business of loving and entertaining. In other words, blowing people away.

It should be no surprise, then, that upon moving out of my parents' home, I would be doing a little entertaining of my own. And that I did back in September 2011, throwing my close friend a fancy birthday dinner. As a perfectionist, every last detail was important: the meal, the table setting, even the music that would underscore our festivities. It was easy to get lost in the details, but the most important thing about entertaining is to simply be hospitable; ensure your guests enjoy their evening, their meal, their friends.

I have found that entertaining is easy when you include the guests in the planning. While potluck, or pitch-in, might be synonymous with cheap (so call me cheap!) it gives everyone the chance to show off their cooking skills and to play a role in the party. Plus, it's great conversation! For this first birthday bash, I supplied the main course, a fig-stuffed roast pork loin, and dessert - a light white cake with buttercream icing and homemade chocolate and salty caramel ice cream. You know me, my ice cream maker is my favorite appliance.

Another birthday party this spring offered its own challenges, specifically the outdoors. A rustic, outdoor dinner party. Once a party is moved outside you're automatically dealing with a whole new set of elements like Mother Nature and her close cousin the weather. Luckily, a little drizzle during dinner was this party's only hiccup, and achieving a rustic look was easier than you might think. While I am a details guy, these were simple details to master: throw a checkered table cloth on a table, butcher block paper down over that, and a dozen candles down the center. Voila! Rustic. Decor is easy. I've even cut up my old clean, patterned underwear and made streamers once. Nobody knew and it looked great!

The food was again a compilation of guests' favorite recipes while I prepared enough roast chicken that fed partygoers and myself for a week after. But it was juicy, flavorful chicken with very simple ingredients: rosemary, thyme, garlic, lemon and onions. And if I might let my obsession with ice cream show once more, I churned out some roasted strawberry ice cream with a yellow butter birthday cake. 

It is my innate desire to entertain that has, in part, drawn me to a career with a restaurant. I have made it a priority to blow people away when I open up my home and at Boca it is in our job description. Literally. All of those years of loving and celebrating family was training for my line of work. Think about it. How many professions are there where you can entertain, rather, love on people? I welcome any list you might have. Call me a sap, but entertaining is all about love and I am one of the lucky ones that gets to love the people I work with and love the people I serve.

My Big Boca Adventure

It's probably unclear what I've been doing the last seven months - the lack of blog posts should be an indication of that.  I promise I did in fact find the best pecan pie recipe out there, and I will have a long-awaited and much deserved update on that, but it's time to fill in the blanks of November to ...June. Wow, this is going to take a while.

Let's start at the very beginning. I changed careers. I am no longer working 9 to 5, as Dolly Parton might sing. I traded in my desktop computer and powerpoint-making skills for a pad of paper and an apron. Okay, I don't actually wear an apron, but it drives home the point that I am now a server at Boca restaurant - Cincinnati's finest restaurant (if I might toot my own horn). How did this life-changing circumstance come to be? Sometimes it's all about the people in your life and I was very blessed to have friends and mentors who willingly offered their help; set up coffee meetings; introduced me to the right people. It was serendipitous, if you believe in that kind of thing. For me, I believe it's what God wants for my life in this season.

Within two weeks - the last two weeks of my 9 to 5 job - I met Boca's human resources honcho and discussed the what and why of my interest in working in a restaurant. "I love food! I love people!" I said in one way or another. And before I knew it I was meeting Boca's General Manager - the most charismatic gentleman I have ever met. The more I talked with both of these fellows the more interested, excited and inspired I became. But the time for serving would come later. In fact, I didn't even have the job yet. We discussed and settled on a period of shadowing during which I would discover what I liked most about the restaurant biz - heck, if I liked it at all.

While I did shadow the General Manager and sommelier a few, very busy nights, for one day and night I played the role of chef. Emphasis on the word played. It is important to note that I am not a formally trained nor casually trained chef. So maybe I was more an extra pair of hands than anything else, but I did get to peel and chop parsnips that would later become a puree. In your world this might sound boring and mundane, but these were the most important parsnips I may ever meet. 

After the parsnip party I moved on to stuffing lemons full of mozzarella, roasted tomatoes, and basil. These lemons eventually spent some time in the wood oven allowing for all of the flavors to melt together. Served with bread, this was a perfect bruschetta to start any meal. I even served them at my Christmas party last year, although they weren't as delicious as the Boca version - my ingredients were a lower caliber (budget-friendly-cooking problems).

Back to that November night in the kitchen. While I stumbled through peeling parsnips and hollowing out lemons, the professional chefs buzzed about the kitchen chopping, pureeing, and sauteing. It was this day where I discovered how little I know about food and cooking. Not that I have ever claimed to be an expert in any way, shape, or form, but I liked to think up until then that I knew a little something about it - although it seems silly to even say that now. Consider my ego busted.

While my ego checked itself, it didn't take long for the restaurant to fill and the kitchen to pick up speed. It was exhilarating to be part of it, even with idle hands. In observing I was stunned by the chefs' ability to cook and prepare dishes at such a speed and with such detail. This is where I might say something about being a small fish in a giant pond.

And yet, that night I went home completely inspired and set with a challenge: to learn as much as possible. It has definitely taken some time, but over the course of the last few months I have realized that even the Boca chefs had to start somewhere. And then I came across a quote that changed my perspective: Julia Child once said, "No one is born a great cook. One learns by doing." So it was time to start doing.

The Best Pecan Pie Ever

I don't know if you are aware or not, but in just one week we will all be celebrating one of our country's finest holidays: Thanksgiving.  The one holiday where we come together as friends and family to give thanks for what we have and perhaps making it through another year. And then we fight over the only two turkey legs and the largest piece of pie.  At least we'll be thankful at the end of the day once we've eaten, right?

This year, I have been charged with bringing cranberry sauce and pecan pie.  No.  I do not buy the cranberry sauce in a can, and while some might argue that cranberry sauce is only good with the imprint of an aluminum can wrapped around a jellied cylinder, I disagree.  I actually make the cranberry sauce and, it has to be said, it's pretty darn good.  But this post isn't about cranberry sauce.  It's about pecan pie.

I am on a quest this year to make the best pecan pie ever.  I've done a little research the past few days this morning and I've found some of the most salivating recipes I could find.  The first is more of a twist on pumpkin pie, and although I probably won't embark on this recipe because we will already have a pumpkin pie gracing the dinner table, I think it was worth sharing.  From foodandwine.com, this recipe is for Bourbon Pumpkin Pie with Pecan Streusel.  The combination of pumpkin and pecans caught my eye.  Maybe I'll hold on to this one for Christmas, or just a regular Tuesday night.

The next is Pecan-Bourbon Pie from bonappetit.com.  I don't know what it is about bourbon, but it must make pecan pie tasty.  I guess there's only one way to find out.  Keeping with the bourbon flavor, the third pie is from Better Homes and Gardens and adds raisins to the mix in Bourbon-Raisin Pecan Pie.  Raisins are an acquired taste, I think.  Not everybody digs them, so I'll keep away from this recipe.

The next pie recipe, Old-Fashioned Pecan Pie, comes from theKitchn.com.  What's interesting about this recipe is its self-proclaimed old-fashioned taste without using corn syrup, but a natural substitute made from cane sugar.  This is worth the try and I'm curious if such an alternative syrup could be used in any recipe.

Toasting the pecans prior to putting them in the pie filling is the hallmark of this next recipe from bonappetit.com for, what else, Toasted-Pecan Pie.  Toasting any nut enhances the flavor and I'm excited to see what toasting the pecans can do for the pie's overall taste.  

At this current moment, I am leaning toward a recipe from the great state of Texas: Texas State Fair Pecan Pie.  The recipe is available on foodandwine.com, and I am a sucker for things that win State Fair competitions. We all know that everything is bigger (and better) in Texas, so why shouldn't this pecan pie be the biggest and baddest pie of them all?  The final decision still has to be made, and although I'm not from Texas and I've never been to Texas, there's a little bit of lone star in me itching to make this pie.

What dish do you look forward to at Thanksgiving?  Are you bringing a famous dish or making Thanksgiving with a twist?  How do you say pecan - peCAN or peCAHN?  Help a brother out.

Baked Apple Sorbet for a Thanksgiving Twist

It's hard to believe, but Thanksgiving 2011 is just 10 days away.  I live for this holiday all year.  It's the only holiday that completely revolves around a meal.  You can make your arguments for Halloween and the candy or Christmas and buche noel, but Thanksgiving is all about making a big meal and sharing it with friends and family.

This year I have been charged with bringing a pecan pie to Thanksgiving dinner and I will be sure to share every sweet and savory detail, but I was thinking recently that sometimes it's fun to take a classic, say apple pie, and give it a new twist for a holiday feast.  Maybe it was this stroke of creativity or my beloved Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream cookbook, but I found myself peeling six Granny Smith apples a week ago preparing to make Baked Apple Sorbet.

To start, you peel, core, and quarter six apples.  Add them to a glass baking dish and then pour in apple cider, sugar, and some cinnamon.  Jeni recommends baking the apples with a vanilla bean, but vanilla beans have proved difficult to pin down, so I added a splash of vanilla extract to the mixture.  Then the apples and cider mixture went into the oven for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, the apples were still a bit stiff and hard to push a fork through. It was clearly going to take a little longer for my apples to soften so I could puree the whole mixture.  (Just another episode of Andrew vs. the-oven-that-cooks-unevenly.)  It took about a whole hour for my apples to soften (including the original 20 minutes). Some of the apples were softer, okay, mushier than others, but it was all going to get pureed eventually.  As long as the apples weren't burnt, no harm done.

After a few minutes of cooling, I poured the apples and cider mixture into my stand mixer (you could use a food processor, but I'm asking St. Nick for that this year) and mixed the apples into submission - or at least until they were broken down into an apple-sauce consistency.  Once I had incorporated all of the apples and cider, it was time to pour the mixture into a plastic, Ziploc bag and into an ice bath for 30 minutes - similar to my first adventure in ice cream-making - followed by a spin in the ice cream machine.

No self-respecting cook (professional or otherwise) makes a dish without tasting, so of course I gave this sorbet a taste before tucking it inside my freezer for a cold rest.  No doubt about it, this sorbet tastes just like apple pie.  When I decided to serve it to some friends later in the week, I took the apple pie reference a bit further.  I had an extra pie crust in my refrigerator from an earlier pie adventure and I cut up a few pieces of crust to make a nice, warm garnish for the sorbet.  I even went the extra mile and made a lattice crust.

So, if you're looking for a dessert with a twist, but tastes like tradition, this baked apple sorbet will hit the spot.

Any great Thanksgiving remix recipes up your sleeve? Or perhaps you've got a great pecan pie recipe? What's on your Thanksgiving menu? Share it with me!