Friday nights, we go out to dinner as a family.  When the girls were young, it was California Pizza Kitchen, El Torito, Baja Fresh.  Later, we went crazy and added The Counter.  Lately, we’ve branched out, dipping our toes in tapas, $u$hi, and southern BBQ.  But CPK, for so long, was our fall back – a solid restaurant where the food was exactly, and consistently, what you expected.  I ordered the vegetarian pizza (loved the Japanese eggplant), the husband – Chicken Tequila Fettuccine.  When they started posting calories on the menu we were both sad, looking for something that wasn’t two thousand calories a bite.

It’s been awhile since we’ve been back.  That burger I had at Stout last week may have been a heart attack on a bun but what do I know?  There were no calories listed on the menu and ignorance is bliss.  But oh, how I’ve missed digging my fork into the husband’s fettuccine, enjoying the tangy sauce, the tender chicken, the tasty peppers.  I was inspired Monday to create my own Chicken Tequila Fettuccine, calories schmalories.  And then I thought, why not see if someone knows the recipe so I can steal it and make it my own?  To the interwebs I went.

Three different sources all confirmed the secret ingredient – soy sauce – which feels wrong but makes this dish taste SO right.  The husband confirmed it was perfect and the daughters approved, so it’s staying in the repertoire.

My tweaks: I reduced the amount of heavy cream because I don’t like heavy cream sauces.  I used Trader Joe’s bag of frozen Fire Roasted Bell Peppers & Onions to reduce prep time, and I eliminated the jalapeno pepper because I’m a wimpy gringa.

And so:

CPK’s Chicken Tequila Fettuccine

(serves 5)

1 lb. spinach fettuccine

3 T. butter

½ cup chopped fresh cilantro (set aside 2 T. for garnish)

2 T. minced garlic

½ cup chicken broth

2 T. tequila

2 T. lime juice (fresh is best)

2 large chicken breasts, uncooked and diced

3 T. soy sauce

1 package frozen Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Bell Peppers & Onions

1 cup heavy cream

Boil heavily salted water for the pasta.

In a saucepan, melt 2 T. butter.  Add the cilantro (minus the 2 T.) and garlic and sauté for 4 minutes or so on medium heat.  Add the chicken broth, tequila, and lime juice and bring to a boil.  Cook until the mixture is reduced and resembles a ‘paste’, about four minutes.  Set aside.

Cook the fettuccine in the boiling water and drain.

Toss the diced chicken with the soy sauce and set aside for 5 minutes.

In a large skillet, melt the remaining T. of butter and heat the peppers/onions.  Add the chicken and soy sauce and stir, then add the cilantro ‘paste’, and heavy cream.  Toss well and heat until the chicken is cooked through, about 3-4 minutes.  Pour over the fettuccine and garnish with leftover chopped cilantro.

I served this with a Mexican Caesar salad.

Eat it, enjoy, and screw the calories.  Everything in moderation, right?

Two weeks ago, I made a perfect Sunday dinner.  I know this because those sitting around the table said so.  It was time for ribs and time for a new slow-cooked, easy recipe.  Instead of a crockpot version, however, this meal calls for the oven.  It didn’t make a lot of sense considering the blistering heat we’ve been experiencing here lately, but I was in the mood for ribs, dammit!  Long racks of ribs!

This recipe comes courtesy of some nice woman at Food.com.  I cut down on some of the hot spice so it wouldn’t overpower the taste.  It calls for baby back ribs, though when the husband went to the store for ingredients, he got pork ‘back’ ribs.  There was no baby mentioned.  They worked perfectly.  The second time I made this, just a few days ago, I could only find pork spareribs.  They were not as good, slightly fattier.

I served this with homemade corn bread and tangy cole slaw.  You should do the same.

Easy Ribs (serves 6)

3 racks of baby back ribs

2 t. garlic powder
1 T. kosher salt
1 T. black pepper
¼ t. cayenne
1 t. cumin (comino)
1 T. paprika
1 t. dry mustard
2 t. brown sugar
2 t. Worcestershire sauce
2 t. lime juice
1 t. Tabasco sauce
½ cup barbecue sauce (I usually make mine but who’s got the time?)

Preheat oven to 275°.

Combine everything from the garlic powder to the Tabasco sauce to make a paste.  Using your hands, spread the paste over the ribs, front and back.  Lay each rack on a long piece of foil and fold up like a birthday present.  Place on a cooking sheet with sides (you can stack the foil packages) and bake in the oven for 3 hours.  Remove from oven and increase the temperature to 475°.

Remove ribs from foil and place back on the cooking sheets.  Brush with barbecue sauce and place back in the hot oven.  Brown the sauce on top, about ten minutes.  The meat should fall off the bone.

I use the cornbread recipe right on the box of corn meal.  Here’s my cole slaw recipe, Carolina style.

Perfect, right?  I told you.

To Condi Rice: thank you for your thoughtful, well written speech.  While I don’t agree with everything you said, I appreciate you talking to us as if we were informed and mature.  You didn’t condescend nor whine.  Your emphasis on education, and our responsibility to fix it, cannot be overstated; conveying the sense that both parties share our country’s failures in this area was a welcome change.  Sorry about the lipstick on your teeth.

To Paul Ryan: you annoyingly boyish, lying hypocrite (too harsh?).  You spoke well to Mr. Romney’s largest fan base – the uneducated white male.  Good on you.  Now, grow up.

Alrighty then, I’d like to talk about several things that make me happy – namely rain, bacon, football, and San Francisco.

Los Angeles is one of the few cities in the country that generally doesn’t see rainfall from May until October.  It’s sad really.  It’s one endless day of sunshine after another – aside from gloomy mornings in June – and approaching Halloween, monotony sets in and we’re desperate for change.  This afternoon, lo and behold, clouds moved in.  We left our house for soccer practice and a quarter of a mile away, it started pouring.  The five girls in the car were giddy, and so was I.  Change, sometimes in whatever form it’s offered, is welcome.  When we arrived at practice, the smell of grilled burgers filled the air along with the sound of football as an announcer could be heard calling the high school game next door.  At home tonight, we tried a new recipe – Slow Cooker Bacon Jam – that had been simmering all afternoon.  Spread on toasted French bread, it tasted like love.  (I’ve used that line before; it works for me.)  Tomorrow morning, I’m headed to San Francisco – one of my favorite places – to hang with some high school friends.  The high temperature, socked in there with the fog, is expected to be 59 degrees.  I’ll be wearing long pants for the first time in four months and throwing on a sweater.

It’s been a good week – tasty, productive – despite my feelings about the GOP convention.  Sometimes, we must put politics aside and enjoy life and bacon.

This recipe is from Martha Stewart.

Slow Cooker Bacon Jam

1 ½ lbs. bacon

2 cups chopped onion

3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

½ c. dark brown sugar

¾ c. brewed coffee

½ c. cider vinegar

¼ c. maple syrup

Cook the bacon and set aside on paper towels to cool.  Leave one tablespoon of the bacon fat in the pan.  Cook the onion and garlic in the bacon fat, scraping the bottom of the pan, until translucent.  Add the sugar, coffee, vinegar, and syrup and cook for 2-3 minutes on medium.  Coarsely chop the bacon and add to the mixture.  Transfer to a slow cooker (crock pot) and cook on high, UNCOVERED, for 3 ½ – 4 hours.  Transfer to a food processor or blender and coarsely chop for a ‘relish’ consistency.  Spoon onto toasted French bread or bagel slices.

When I look at my phone periodically throughout the day, the screen is undoubtedly on Instagram.  Bun Bun and Miss T don’t have phones but want desperately to know the latest and greatest about their friends, so they use mine.  This morning, the message I saw was from a soccer friend telling her followers that she was off to camp for a month and would be out of touch.  Damn those Jews! I thought.  I am so envious of them – friends who themselves spent their summers at camp making lifelong friends and memorable experiences, and who now ship their kids off for a minimum of three weeks.  The Christians?  We spend those same three weeks feeling guilty for all the television our kids are watching, even if they’ve been at pottery-making classes all day.  You know why I check my phone for emails throughout the afternoon?  To see if anyone suddenly decided they wanted to take my kids for a few days.  Hasn’t happened yet.  And yet they’re nice kids.  Cute.  Not much trouble at all, especially if you let them watch “Dance Moms”.  How awkward would it be for me to send my little Gentiles to Camp Mountain Chai?  I wonder.

This is obliquely related to dinner.  Thing is, when kids are around they need to be fed and since mine are around all the time…well, you get the picture.  And yet this summer I don’t want to cook.  Don’t know why. I’m simply not interested in spending time in the kitchen doing much more than pouring a bowl of cereal.  I’ve completely misplaced my culinary mojo.  Dinner lately is one of four different things, maybe five, and two of them are from Trader Joe’s.  When in doubt, let TJ feed the family.

These chili-lime chicken burgers come in the frozen section and I’m telling you about them in case you don’t know.  I melt a slice of pepper jack on top and serve them with lettuce, tomato, and my famous guacamole.  Sure, you can buy the guacamole but I can’t.  I’m a guac snob.  Gotta make my own.

Anyhow, this is a meal in ten minutes, five if you buy the guac – and my family loves it.  Yours will, too.  So if you’re in the summer cooking doldrums like I am, or don’t cook to begin with, try these.  You’ll be glad you did.

Now, about my kids, do you want them?

While living in New York, I waited a table or two (thousand).  I was fortunate enough to work at restaurants with amazing chefs and learned how to cook, in large part, from them.  Louie Lanza made Chicken Scarpariello for the ‘specials’ board back in 1989, at Coastal Restaurant on Amsterdam, and I thought it was one of the best dishes I’d ever eaten.  In all the years since then, I’ve never once seen it on a menu again.

Don’t know why I thought of the dish this week but I did.  I scoured the internet for a recipe and none of the accompanying photos looked quite like the meal Lanza prepared.  Most of them included red bell peppers and pepperoncini, which is what I ended up using.  After the fact, I realized that Lanza had used pickled cherry peppers – tiny ones, he didn’t cut them – and you should, too.

To be honest, the girls thought this dish was too spicy even as they liked the tangy-ness.  I used mild pepperoncinis but my girls look like the Children of the Corn and weren’t born with a single ethnic taste bud in their mouths, so I forgive them.  They’ve been trying their whole young lives to adapt to my spicy cooking, but last night’s meal was too much.

That said, I’m going to make this again someday.  Mild pickled cherry peppers should fix the spicy problem.  Many versions of this recipe call for using the whole bird, a la chicken Cacciatore – country style.  I preferred using cutlets instead.  Serve over a bed of orzo tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper, and put sautéed spinach on the side.  Don’t forget chewy, crusty bread.

Chicken Scarpariello

3 T. olive oil

½ cup flour (for dredging)

2 lbs. chicken breasts, pounded and cut into cutlet-size pieces

salt and pepper

1 large red bell pepper, seeded and cut into bite-size pieces

2 large garlic cloves, minced

½ cup dry white wine

½ cup chicken broth

6-8 mild red cherry peppers

2 T. juice from the cherry pepper jar (the vinegar stuff)

2 t. lemon juice

2 T. Italian flat leaf parsley, chopped

salt and pepper to taste

In a large, heavy skillet, heat 2 T. of olive oil on medium high.  Pat the chicken cutlets dry, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge in flour.  Place in the pan and cook for about two minutes on each side (depending on thickness).  Don’t overcook.  Remove from pan.

Scrape the bottom of the pan and add the remaining T. of olive oil.  Add red bell pepper and cook for four minutes, stirring occasionally.  Add the garlic and sauté for one minute.  Add the white wine, chicken broth, cherry peppers, and cherry pepper juice, and cook until the sauce is reduced, about five minutes.  Transfer the chicken back to the pan, cook through, and add the parsley.

Remember to serve over orzo, and use the bread to soak up some of that sauce.

Note: The photo is what I made last night – yours should look slightly different with the cherry peppers and there will be more sauce.  I tweaked this recipe after the fact.  Let me know how it turns out.