Remember on my previous post how I couldn’t decide what to serve the Thai Ambassador to Malaysia for lunch: homemade peppermint stick ice cream or chocolate mousse? Well, I decided on the mousse. Light yet flavorful, with a hint of almond extract, it was perfection. Crispy almond tuiles sealed the deal. YUM!
No more rummaging through drawers looking for a spoon while trying to stir what’s on the stove. Keep your tasting spoons and forks on the counter within easy reach. I have 4 of these stainless steel containers from Ikea…one for utensils and measuring spoons, another for wooden spoons and chopsticks, a third for ladles, spatulas, etc, and the last one for misc stuff. It works for me…give it a try.
More about Kitchen Equipment, Kitchen Tips
When I mentioned I was playing around with ice cream, I wasn’t kidding. Peppermint stick is one of my favorite flavors…so I decided to whip up a batch. Now, I have to decide whether to serve this to the Thai Ambassador for dessert at Tuesday’s lunch…or to serve an equally rich and scrumptious chocolate mousse with almond tuiles. Such are the delicious questions that fill my mind every week.
To make this peppermint crunch ice cream, search my blog for my “Homemade Rocks! Vanilla Ice Cream” recipe or go directly to January 2011 and scroll down to my January 31 entry. Follow the directions, but omit the vanilla extract. Instead, to the churned ice cream, add 1 to 2 teaspoons peppermint or mint extract (to your taste…I love a minty flavor so I add 2), a tiny drop of pink food coloring (I used pink not red, but I suppose red will work, or go natural and skip it), and a 1/3 to 1/2 cup of peppermint crunch, which I purchased on-line from King Arthur Flour, but you can smash a couple of candy canes for the same effect. As you can see on the bottom left corner of the photo, before I take the finished ice cream out of the machine, I place my metal bowl on ice to prevent melting. This buys me time to mix in the extra ingredients. Enjoy!
Living in Malayasia I miss the seasons, especially spring in Washington, D.C….when daffodils, tulips, hyacinth, and forsythia suddenly burst on the scene, filling everything with color and positive energy. Here I share with you with a charming poem by William Wordsworth, about one of my favorite flowers: daffodils. When I ten years old, I memorized these lines from a book titled, A Child’s Book of Poems, which I still cart the world with me. Happy Spring to my family, friends, and fans!
Daffodils
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I, at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such jocund company:
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon my inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
By William Wordsworth
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While I was organizing my photos today I came across this picture of my birthday cake…well, it’s actually chocolate pavlova. I wanted to do something different this year and everyone agreed that a chocolate pavlova with whipped cream and strawberries sounded wonderful. For my birthday dinner (on March 21) we went out to an Indian restaurant…a tradition I’ve been keeping alive for a few years now to celebrate the fact that I was born in New Delhi, India. Sometimes, when the stars really line up, my mother-in-law, Evelyn Jones, who was also born in India (Bombay, now called Mumbai, her birthdate is April 7), happens to be visiting us wherever we are in the world…Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia are a few places she’s traveled to…and we celebrate our birthdays together in an Indian restaurant, with a special toast to India, where our lives began.
Oh…and here’s Pucci, my beloved blond, seven-year-old labradoodle, helping me open my gifts while ingesting bits of yellow tissue paper. He’s soooo cute with the gold bow around his neck. 
Today’s juices come in seemingly endless varieties, each offering a spectrum of benefits from which to choose. Some are fortified with calcium and antioxidants, others have low acid and extra pulp, while still others are juice combinations that offer a blast of vitamins and calories. To control your calorie intake, it is advisable to to limit juice consumption to 8 ounces per day. To give you an idea of the calories and benefits of an 8-ounce serving, following is a list of fruit juices with their primary vitamin content and calorie values based on the recommended daily allowances for a 2,000-calorie diet. (This information comes from Eating for Pregnancy: The Essential Nutrition Guide and Cookbook for Today’s Mother’s-to-Be.)
After you choose your juice, here’s my simple health tip: add water. I always water down my juice, usually a half-half ratio (I add more for high-calorie juices, and less for vegetable ones ), and whenever I serve juice to my kids I do the same for them. No complaints, and since they’ve gotten used to the watered-down version, they agree with me that undiluted fruit juice is way too sweet. In this photo I show two glasses: the light one is pink guava juice, loaded with vitamin C and A, and the other is mangosteen-pomegranate juice, super high in vitamin C. Having these delicious varieties so readily available is one of the many perks of living in Malaysia. Makes me thirsty just looking at them.
Orange: C = 207% 111 cals
Grapefruit: C = 156% 96 cals
Carrot: A = 539%, C = 35% 98 cals
Mango: C = 130% 130 cals
Tangerine: C = 128% 106 cals
Pineapple: C = 45% 140 cals
Cranberry: C = 149% 144 cals
Tomato: C = 74%, A = 27% 41 cals
V-8 Juice: C = 100%, A = 40% 50 cals
More about Breakfast, Health Tip, Vitamins
Few things in the sweets category top a still-warm-from-the-oven, perfectly crisp yet melting gooey chocolate chip cookie, and I think this recipe is the BEST on the planet. I’m sharing it under one condition: that you give me credit when people say, OMG where did you get this recipe, and then you send them to my blog, catherinejonescooks.com for more delicious recipes. I love these tasty morsels with a cup of robust coffee, my daughter prefers Earl Grey tea, while my son happily dunks his cookies in cold milk. My husband just stands by the cookie jar in easy reach of the next bite…you can’t eat only one, I’ve tried!
Catherine’s Chocolate Chip Cookies
The secret to this recipe is grinding the oats into a powder, which gives the cookies a wonderful crunch. No nuts are called for here, but add them if you wish. Also, you will notice that I call for baking the cookie sheets one at a time. Yes, this takes way more time, but in my many years of baking in conventional home-ovens (not restaurant ones with serious convection power) I have found that baking one sheet at a time leads to more consistent results. You can bake two sheets at once; see my Cooking Tip below.
Makes about 4 dozen 2-inch cookies
2-1/4 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1-1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose unbleached flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
16 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips
Cooking Tip: To bake two sheets at the same time, position one oven rack one rung down from the top, and the other rack one rung up from the bottom. Place both sheets in the oven at the same time and bake for 6 minutes, then switch the order of the sheets and bake for another 5 to 6 minutes.
Whenever my family asks for meat loaf, this moist and delicious rendition, from Eating for Pregnancy: The Essential Nutrition Guide and Cookbook for Today’s Mothers-to-Be, is what I serve. I load it with fresh herbs, and glaze it with a mixture of ketchup, molasses and seasoned rice vinegar. Mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, sweet potatoes and a green, such as broccoli or beans, are standard accompaniments, but get fancier if you wish (I love creamed spinach).
Leftovers are good cold with hit of Dijon mustard (or ketchup for son) in a sandwich made with robust whole grain bread, or alongside a mixed green salad. Potato salad is awesome, too. I will post a recipe for a sublime classic American version soon, but come to think of it, my Austrian potato salad made with fingerling potatoes and chicken stock would be delicious as well. Good news: this meat loaf can be assembled up to 6 hours before baking, keep refrigerated. The baking time may increase by 10 to 15 minutes. Enjoy!
Best-Ever American Meat Loaf
Serves 10
Canola oil cooking spray for greasing the pan
Glaze
1/4 cup ketchup
1 tablespoon molasses
1 teaspoon seasoned rice vinegar
Meat Loaf
2 pounds lean ground beef (preferably chuck) or a meat loaf mix of pork, veal, and beef
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
2/3 cup thinly sliced scallions
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 cup plain bread crumbs
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper or a couple drops of Tabsaco sauce
1/2 cup plain low-fat yogurt or whole milk
Cooking Tip: To check the seasoning before baking, spray a small skillet with canola oil cooking spray and cook about 1 tablespoon of the meat loaf mixture until well done. Taste the cooked meat and adjust the seasoning in the remaining meat mixture if necessary.
More about Main Courses, Protein
Easy and intensely satisfying (healthy, too!). The other day at a lunch in honor or the Australian Ambassador to Malaysia, I served this teriyaki salmon alongside delicate yet meaty green tea soba noodles and crisp-tender Chinese broccoli in oyster sauce. The salmon recipe is adapted from Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai by Ming Tsai and Arthur Boehm, a cookbook I’ve owned for many years and am now just beginning to peruse and cook from with delicious results.
Serves 4
1 cup soy sauce
Juice and zest of 2 oranges
3 tablespoons brown sugar
4 garlic cloves, peeled and left whole
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh ginger
1 tablespoon white sesame seeds
4 skinless salmon fillets (about 6 ounces each), preferably center cut for even thickness
More about Fish, Main Courses, Omega-3, Salmon
Reading nutrition labels on the sides of breakfast cereal boxes can make you wonder if you’ve gone astray and landed in the candy aisle by mistake. Sugar, sugar, and more sugar, plus a helping of fat, all with little or no nutritional benefits.
My family eats a ton of breakfast cereal every week, so I always try to make it as healthy as possible. My husband, who wins the prize for healthy breakfasts, consumes his cereal with a heaping portion of cut-up fresh fruit and homemade yogurt (see previous post for my yoghurt recipe). My son drowns his cereal in milk. My daughter adds cereal to her cup of raspberry or strawberry yogurt, the only flavors she likes. And, I eat mine with a minimal amount of milk due to lactose intolerance.
How do I cater to everyone without buying four different boxes of cereal? The answer is by making a delicious cocktail of healthy breakfast cereals which I combine with homemade granola. In a large, airtight plastic container, I mix about half the box of two different cereals (today, it was three: Nature’s Path Optimum Cranberry Ginger, Kashi GoLean, and the remainder of the All Bran cereal from the bran muffins I made). I add homemade granola, and it’s good to go (see previous post for granola…I sweetened my latest batch with maple syrup, walnuts, and dried mango bits…yummy!). Whether you mix and match, or you’re a one-cereal-box gal or guy, here are some essential tips for choosing a healthy breakfast cereal.
Tips for Choosing the Healthiest Cereal Brands on the Shelves
More about Breakfast, Fiber, Folic Acid, whole grains
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