Okay guys, Brussel Sprout season is coming to an end, so I wanted to give them a little tribute since I love them so much. I know they have a pretty bad reputation out there. I also know I am talking to people who really appreciate food – so I am guessing you guys are a little more open minded about these cute little mini-cabbages and probably there are many of you reading this right now that also adore this vegetable! However, I am sure there are a few of you who are turning their nose up as we speak. So just hear me out, okay?

Lately I have seen lots of recipes out on the net targeting people who hate Brussel Sprouts – so here I am to give you a few more
recipes for your arsenal to welcome the members of the brassica (Brussel sprouts, cauliflower and cabbages) family onto your plate.

First, is my classic recipe where I just steam them and then throw them in a pan to sautee with onions, garlic and toss with a home made honey mustard vinaigrette. Sometimes I add a bit of bacon when I am sauteeing and it is a delicious side dish or main meal. I love this recipe so much, I got into the habit of making Brussel sprouts this way all the time – so I decided we needed to change it up a bit. So I did. I had a bunch of little bits of stuff in the fridge that needed to be used up, so I went with that as my inspiration.

This new way is even better than my old way and you will love it too!

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Recently we had my family over for an open house. We have been in our new place for a while now and not everyone had been here to see it. So we decided to do a luncheon. I had two ideas going into this party – I wanted to make something rustic and old-school hearkening back to the times that Italians stopped what they were doing to enjoy a nice lunch spread together out in the fields, on a big slab of wood turned into a table. Also along this theme, I really wanted to make something using ingredients that we already had at home.

Too many times when preparing for a party, I decide on a menu and then go and buy all the ingredients. This time, I wanted to challenge myself more and use what was around. We had been to the Farmer’s market the day before and had gotten our staples: potatoes, tomatoes, squashes, onions and beautiful bread. We also had a bag of frozen mussels in the freezer. So I decided to make a regional dish from Puglia, called Tiella di Cozze or Mussel Casserole – it is said to have descended from Spanish Paella. Since we were having a crowd, I also added some shrimp to the dish, which was topped off with a delicious bread crumb and parmesan topping! It was wonderful.

We served it with a nice green salad,Garlic-Rosemary Foccacia from Maria, the bread lady at the Farmer’s Market and finished with a

Yogurt Carrot Cake with Toasted Hazelnuts . Keep reading for the recipes.

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I love polenta – it is total comfort food and a great base for a variety of vegetables and great with tomato sauce and cheese. My favorite way to make polenta is with sundried tomatoes, olives, cheese and spinach – put it in the fridge until it gets hard, dust it with flour and pan fry in olive oil. Served with a hearty tomato sauce it is really one of the best things to eat. This time though, I didn’t feel like frying the polenta – I wanted something lighter but still comforting and flavorful, so I decided to use the polenta rectangles as a base for lasagna. It was really good and something I will certainly make again.

This is also my contribution to Marie of Proud Italian Cook and Maryann of Finding La Dolce Vita ’s Event: Festa Italiana. All Entries due March 22nd. Please click on either of their links for participation guidelines!

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Man, I am getting in a lot of blog posts this week! I guess there is just so much good stuff going on in the food blogoshpere that I want to support and be a part of. Sometimes, I get so backed up with other food related posts that I wait until the last minute to get my entry in for a Foodie Event. I wish I had time to do them all! I just love the creativity in this community! Food Bloggers ROCK!

Which leads me exactly to this post and this Foodie Event which is called Eat To The Beat and is the brainchild of my friend
Elly from Elly Says Opa! Elly says she was inspired to create this event because her love of music is about as big as her love for food! I completely concur. I have always believed that my life would be so much better if it had a soundtrack. So since I have started working from home, I can listen to music all day long and it just makes my life so complete. I can’t imagine cooking without music, dinner parties or meals without some kind of music playing the the background. So in a way, I have created a soundtrack for myself!

Press Play:

As you all who are regular readers of this blog know, I do bellydancing and I love it. Due to this fact, much of my music collection is what we call in this house “bellydancing music”. If the music hails from the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey or any of the places in between it is referred to as such.

And as all of you know who read this blog, I love all the foods from those regions as well…coincidence? Most likely not.

So this gets me to the meat of this post. We were having friends over for dinner last week, and I wanted to create a fun atmosphere – so we did small plates – meze, antipasti, tapas, whatever you want to call it. I was really getting into all the dolmas or stuffed grape leaves people were making in the weeks leading up to it too – So I decided to combine Peter’s from Kalofagas and Mag’s from Hommus w/ Tabbouli to make my own version. I also made the Labneh from Mag’s blog as well, which is a soft Lebanese yogurt cheese, plus I re-created the Middle Eastern Meatballs with Orzo I had made last year. However, this time I made my own meatballs with the leftover ground meat from the gyros the week before. I just added and egg and some bread crumbs and baked the meatballs in the oven at 400 F for about 25 minutes. The meal was a huge hit and we had a great evening.

I chose this song, Desert Rose, click here to see the original video, the partnership of Sting and Cheb Mami, who is one of my most favorite artists and who is a very big star in his native Algeria and much of the “bellydancing music” world. His voice is unique and beautifully haunting. I also love Sting and give him major props for introducing Cheb’s beautiful voice to the western world through this song.

For more by Cheb Mami, click here.
To hear more of his music, click below.

Now for the recipes:

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I have been getting very inspired by blogs recently. Maybe it is because I sit down to check my daily bloggings while sipping that first cup of coffee before I eat anything – so I am half starved. But in any case, bad habits aside, I have been going crazy copying recipes from blogs that I visit through my daily interactions with The Foodie Blogroll. There is just so much good food out there and being exposed to it on a daily basis is a dream for someone as food obsessed as me.

To me there is nothing better than a Gyro – spiced meat in a warm pita slathered with garlicky Tzatziki, put an order of fries on the side and I am in a state of bliss. So the other day when I came across this, on Bitsy’s blog, A Matter of Taste, I was intrigued. I mean normally I only get Gyros out – and you watch them slice the meat off a huge cylinder of meat on a spit. For me, foodie though I may be, it never really occurred to me to think how this giant cylinder of meat might come to be. I mean there are no cuts of meat this shape and size, so what’s the deal? So when I learned I could make it at home, no spit required I decided to take up the challenge.

So here we go…

Here is your music of the day:

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The winter is coming to an end here in the Sunshine State (I won’t rub it in that Roberto and I spent the weekend at the beach…), and before it gets too warm in the rest of the world, I thought I’d post about this wintery dish.

A few weekends ago we went to visit my mom. It was cold and gray and so she decided we were going to make stuffed cabbage rolls. This is an old family favorite. My Nana had two best friends as an adult – one was British and the other Liz, was what they called “Slavic” back in the old days. I am not sure if that means she is Polish, Czech, Ukrainian or something in between.

According to my mom, Liz always referred to these cabbage rolls as Halupky. Well, inevitably walking in my Nana’s footsteps, my best friend Jen also happens to be Polish and I knew quite a few people of Polish decent when I lived in Western Mass. Jen’s family and most of the polish people I know call cabbage rolls Golubki. So in honor of Jen, that is what I call it.

This is a simple dish to make and a rustic old school kind of thing, so I don’t really have exact measurements or anything. When I make Golubki, I tend to add some tomato paste to the broth because I really like that flavor and a thicker sauce. I also sautee onions and garlic and add that in the layers. When my mom makes it, she doesn’t use tomato paste, so the sauce, it is more of a broth.

If you are not big into meat, fear not, just fill the cabbage rolls with rice and tomatoes and skip the bacon. I used to make it this way when I was a vegetarian.

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If you have never had fried cauliflower, you are missing out. My Nana used to make it, just dusted in flower and pan fried. I used to eat it with ketchup when I was a kid! It was delicious. Years later, as an adult, I had fried cauliflower, known as Zahra Mekleyah, again, at a Lebanese friend’s house, then again at a Lebanese restaurant. They traditionally serve it with a delicious Tahini sauce and it is out of this world. Blows ketchup right out of the water!

I have always tried to take fried things I have enjoyed in a restaurant and see if I can make them healthier at home. I still enjoy all the fried stuff when I go out sometimes, but I hate the mess of all the oil splatters in MY kitchen. Yes, I am a neat freak,that is established. My favorite way to get a similar crunchy texture in the oven to frying is either to bake it at
450F, maybe 475F or broil it. These cauliflower, I did the former.

Instead of creating a Tahini dipping sauce, I decided to toss the cauliflower in it after broiling. It was phenomenal. Roberto and I kept saying, the few words that we spoke because we were too busy gobbling this down, through the whole meal that we need to eat this eat least once per week. Oh and did I mention that the cauliflower was from the Farmer’s Market?
Oh, yes, but of course!

Along with this wonderful cauliflower we made bruschetta with delicious farm fresh tomatoes, also from the market. The Bruschetta is Roberto’s recipe and made the Roman way – with crispy bread and warm tomatoes. It was really really good. I would not recommend making this unless you have really good tomatoes, as they are the star of the show.

Here is a little music with your dinner:

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Here is a Leftover Queen classic! Remember all those greens from the Farmer’s Market several week ago?

Well even with all my recipes that week, I still couldn’t use all the greens, so I washed some and stored them away in the freezer. I also had leftover tomatoes in juice from the Imam Bayildi and then there was the issue of random pieces of veggies in my vegetable bin. I also had purchased a small piece of lamb shoulder at the store, perfect for soup. I went into the pantry and found a can of cannellini beans and a package of rice pilaf. Put this all together and what do you have – an AWESOME stew. I am telling you guys, the flavors in here really really rock. It’s got a bit of the Middle East happening in here since I spiced it up with Sumac and Za’atar, a dash of coriander and a bay leaf and the world is a warm bowl of stew. We ate some for dinner, had it for lunch the next day and put the rest in the freezer for next week, so we can have leftovers of leftovers!

Here’s what I did.

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