Cooking with Mumu: [Update] There are 4 new posts in "Simply Recipes"

Simply Recipes

Here is the Simply Recipes update for cookingwithmumu@gmail.com

Roast Quail with Balsamic Reduction
Rice Pilaf with Mushrooms and Pine Nuts
Moroccan Orange Dessert
Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce

There are 4 new posts in "Simply Recipes"

Roast Quail with Balsamic Reduction

This was supposed to be a Valentine's Day meal. Dainty roast quail, so small that a serving is two birds each. Precious. Adorable. Perfect for Valentines.

Perfect, yes, as long as your notion of a romantic meal includes eating with your hands and gnawing on bones as if you were in King Henry VIII's court. Unless you are as skillful with dinner knife as a surgeon is with a scalpel, the easiest way to eat a small bird such as a quail is with your fingers. It is a messy affair, unless you can get your quail already "tunnel boned" in which the main body bones have already been removed. A bird prepared like this you can easily stuff and then just use a fork and knife to cut and eat. Alas, although I was able to find quail (frozen) at each of the three stores we checked, they were all still fully bone-in. Which means fingers, and little bones, and messy, and primal. Hmm, primal. Wait, maybe that's not so bad after all for a romantic meal?

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Rice Pilaf with Mushrooms and Pine Nuts

Have you ever noticed that some people are potato people and some people are rice people? My dad for example, is a potato person. He's happiest with a side of simple boiled potatoes as his starch, for practically any meal. He can eat a plate full of them, while I will have just a quarter of one small Yukon gold. I am a rice person. Perhaps it's the residual of scraping by on steamed broccoli and brown rice for so many years before discovering the twin joys of bacon and butter. Or perhaps it comes from living in Japan where rice is so important the word for it (gohan) is the same as the word for food. In any case, I love rice every which way. This is a nutty, earthy rice pilaf, a riff off of my mother's basic pilaf, but with mushrooms, toasted pine nuts, some butter, and a green. We were originally considering this as a stuffing for a poultry dish, but decided to serve it as a side instead (great with chicken). Do you have a favorite rice pilaf or pilaf-ish rice stuffing that could double as a side? I would love to hear about it. Thanks in advance. Yours truly, the Rice-Obsessed-One.

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Moroccan Orange Dessert

Yum, Hank put together this gorgeous dessert with some blood oranges we swiped from my parents' tree. ~Elise

This was the first dessert I ever made to impress a girl, years ago when I was attending graduate school in Wisconsin. We were both athletes, and eating for us had mostly been about fuel, not fun. But it was Valentine's Day and I was making her dinner, so I wanted something exotic and, well, sexy, to end the meal. When I read about this Moroccan classic in one of my cookbooks, I knew I had my dessert.

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Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce

White beans are so versatile. We usually have several cans ready to go and at least a pound or two of dried beans in the pantry. This is a simple baked bean dish, with the beans first cooked in simmering water and then baked in a tomato sauce, flavored with bacon and sage, sweetened with honey, and spiced up with some chile flakes. You could also use pancetta in place of the bacon, or rosemary instead of sage. If you swap out molasses for the honey you'll have something a lot closer to Boston baked beans.

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