Spicy Orange Margaritas

Hello, dear friends. It's been a very long time since I last blogged, I know--life was crazy with graduate school applications and general post-wedding madness. But now I'm back, and armed with creations whipped together during the DC Snowmageddon. I've got a yummy frittata and wild blueberry pancakes with homemade maple-blueberry jam to share--and later, 16-hour slow-cooked carnitas--but first, *alcohol*!


It being so cold and all, I began craving a winter cocktail that would help me imagine myself on a beach somewhere, toes buried in delicate white sand, and also be somehow seasonally appropriate. I think this spicy orange margarita is a perfect blend of seasonality and tropicality--the heat from the chilis makes it tough enough to combat the winter doldrums, while the orange and tequila put me squarely in the vacation mindset. It doesn't hurt that oranges and tangerines are in season in the dead of winter! The first time that I made these, I used slightly underripe tangerines from my parents' tree--the intense sourness was a nice counterpart to the chili heat. Since then, however, I've made them with regular OJ, with no complaints.

The best part of this drink is that it is so easy to make, and to make it bulk for a winter dinner party. All you need is regular tequila; tangerines, tangelos, oranges, or orange/tangerine juice; cointreau or triple sec; limes; and chilies to add heat. Oh, and at least a few hours to let the chilies steep in the tequila.

This recipe was inspired by the Spicy Margarita served at La Sandia restaurant in Tysons Corner, VA.

Ingredients
Tequila
Cointreau or Triple Sec
Citrus fruits (tangerines, oranges, tangelos--slightly underripe is okay) or tangerine/orange juice
Limes (I use regular, but I can imagine key limes being very tasty here as well)
Chilies (My favorites are serranos and habaneros, but jalapenos work in a pinch)

1. Steep 2-3 chilis, chopped crosswise, in 1-2 cups of tequila. There is no need to be precise here! Let the tequila steep for awhile, preferably for at least a few hours or overnight. The tequila keeps in the fridge for at least a few weeks--I'm still using tequila that was steeped 3 weeks ago.

2. Mix the chili tequila (without the chilies it was steeped with) with the Cointreau or Triple Sec and lime juice, in the approximate ratio: for one margarita, 1.5 oz tequila, .5 oz Cointreau or Triple Sec, and the juice of half a lime (perhaps a little less if the lime is very juicy. We don't get very juicy limes in DC). If I'm making just one or two servings, I mix right in the glass, since the tequila is already chilled anyway. For more servings, mix in a martini shaker or in a pitcher. If you like salt with your margaritas--I stay away from it because of the sodium content--wet the lip of your glass with water and use a saucer covered in salt to salt the rim.

3. Add ice to your liking, and garnish with a chili cross-section if desired.

Kicked-Up Paprikash

Let's be honest here--I cook not only to feed myself, but because I love hearing the compliments of my friends and family when I cook for them (humility be darned). My number-one customer, of course, is my husband--so when he demands that I post a recipe to the blog because he loves it so much, I listen.

Paprikash, while a visually striking dish, is not exactly the most photogenic. The color of the sauce--bright red-orange--is pretty one-note, and the yogurt in the sauce adds a sheen that doesn't show well on camera. The buttered caraway noodles look oddly plain, and the chunks of tender meat are hidden by that five-alarm sauce. But the flavor--kicked up by at LEAST a quarter-cup of Hungarian spicy paprika (I had to journey all the way to Budapest to buy big bags of it, but you can certainly find large portion-sizes at gourmet food stores), red bell pepper, and plain greek yogurt--is unique and soul-satisfying in the way only stews with noodles can be. If you're a ghoulash-lover, or a fan of rich beef stews chock-full of root veggies, this one's for you.


My doctor-ed up recipe includes much more paprika, and I swapped out chicken for pork in this version, since I was in a traditionalist mood. So traditionalist, even, that we had this with a bottle of that classic Hungarian wine, Egri Bikaver. Like most stews, Paprikash tastes even better on the days after which it's made, so save some for a ridiculously satisfying midday meal.

Serve the paprikash with buttered caraway noodles: simply toss al-dente cooked egg noodles with a couple tablespoons of salted butter and a generous sprinkling of caraway seeds. If you don't have salted butter, use unsalted and add salt to taste.

Pork Paprikash
Adapted--quite freely--from Cooking Light

1 tbsp oil
1-2 lbs pork (use a style good for stewing, like pork shoulder or boneless country-style ribs) or chicken tenders, cut into chunks
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup thinly sliced red bell pepper (about 1 medium)
minced garlic, to taste (I also threw in several cloves of smashed garlic--not very traditional, though)
1/4-1/2 cup whipping cream, 2% fat plain greek yogurt, or sour cream, depending on how you're feeling
4 tbsp (if you're a newbie) to 1/2 cup Hungarian spicy paprika
1 tbsp tomato paste (get the kind in a tube, next to the pasta at the grocery)
1 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes
1/4 tsp black pepper

Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add pork or chicken; cook 5 minutes or until browned, stirring occasionally. Remove from pan, and keep warm.

Add onion, bell pepper, and garlic to pan; sauté 4 minutes or until tender. Return meat to pan. Stir in your choice of dairy and remaining ingredients; cover and simmer minutes or until meat is done and sauce is slightly thick. If you are using pork, you may wish to simmer the sauce for 20-30 minutes more to get a more tender texture.

Chris's Favorite Pasta #9

Chris and I first had this pasta at our friend Peter's dinner party (along with an incredible beef tenderloin, German chocolate cake, and multiple other delicacies!), and it's quickly entered our regular weekly rotation. The recipe, Scallop Sauce with Olive Oil, Garlic, and Hot Pepper from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan, is a quick and remarkably delicious dish. Chris doesn't like scallops much, so we substituted frozen shrimp (try the Medium Contessa variety, uncooked, peeled, and deveined), with excellent results. Per usual, we quadrupled the amount of garlic in the dish and ramped up the spice factor. If you love parmesan, garlic, spice, and seafood, this is a pasta dish you definitely need to try!

I would recommend a chilled California or Australian chardonnay with this dish, unoaked if possible. Sauvignon Blanc would be another great option, as would my great Austrian favorite, Gruner Veltliner. Chris and I had this with Jacob's Creek Chardonnay a week ago, and it was a great match.

PS: if you use scallops, use the smallest ones you can find, and preferably ones that haven't been frozen. If you use bay scallops, cut them into pieces as small as the nail on your little finger.


1 pound fresh bay or deep sea scallops or shrimp
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp garlic chopped very fine (or more, if you're a garlic-lover)
2 tbsp chopped parsley
Chopped hot chili pepper, to taste (we love using 8-9 serranos, or a bunch of Thai birds-eye chilis)
Salt
1 to 1 1/2 pounds pasta (spaghettini, or thin spaghetti, is the best choice here)
1/2 cup dry, unflavored bread crumbs, lightly toasted in the oven or in a skillet

1. Wash the scallops in cold water, pat thoroughly with a cloth towel, and cut up into pieces about 3/8 inch thick (or follow the instructions on the package of frozen shrimp)

2. Put the olive oil and garlic in a saucepan, turn the heat to medium, and cook, stirring, until the garlic colors a light gold. Add the parsley and hot pepper. Stir once or twice, then add the scallops/shrimp and one or two large pinches of salt. Turn the heat up to high, and cook for 1 1/2 minutes, stirring frequently, until the scallops/shrimp lose their shine and turn a flat white/pink. Do not overcook the scallops/shrimp or they will become tough. Taste and correct for salt and hot pepper. If the scallops shed a lot of liquid, remove them from the pan with a slotted spoon, and boil down the watery liquid. Return the scallops/shrimp to the pan, turn them over quickly, then turn off the heat.

3. Toss thoroughly with cooked drained spaghettini, add the bread crumbs, toss again, and serve at once!

Lazy Girl's Indian

So, faithful reader, at this point you probably think that:

1. Kari is a lush.
2. Kari spends hours cooking EVERY NIGHT. Totally not my style.

As I sit here sipping my chocolate martini (martini purists, I don't wanna hear it!)...I can't deny #1. Alcohol + food = heaven.

However, with regard to #2, that isn't really true...I have lots of "short-cut" recipes that I use on weekdays, that require maybe 5-10 minutes of prep, and then maybe 5-10 minutes of puttering in the kitchen. Really easy, stress-free cooking.

The key to tasty, quick, luxurious meals? Knowing when prepared/frozen foods work, and when they don't. Frozen peas, baguettes, and blueberries work well; frozen strawberries and oily dishes, not so much. In the same vein, Rao's jarred pasta sauces are preservative-free, all-natural, and probably more delicious than anything I can prepare, but other brands--Progresso, Contadina, even Emeril's--just don't cut it. That's not to say that I don't use fresh blueberries in season, or that I don't make my own raw tomato sauce in the summer, but rather that there is a time and a place for frozen and prepared foods.

Indian cuisine, to me, is one of those places. Most people--except, perhaps, my good friend Ivan, who prepares vegetarian Indian cuisine like a native Punjabi--consider Indian food to be quite the undertaking, due to the number of exotic items and spices involved, as well as the time often taken to simmer sauces to an appropriate level of tastiness. Chris and I *love* Indian food, but we 1) can't afford to eat out all the time and 2) like to restrict our level of ghee consumption.

That's where Shere Khan and Geeta's prepared Indian jarred sauces come in. Chock-full of fresh-tasting onions, tomatoes, garlic, spices, and chilis, these sauces reduce hours of cooking to a simple pop-and-pour. They're also incredibly low in sodium and fat, because there's no ghee involved (at maximum, there's a bit of coconut that adds a little fat). Both brands are available at Cost Plus WorldMarket (sensing a trend, here?) and they're pretty economical (~5 bucks a jar).

There's no set recipe for this kind of cooking (although I've indicated some generalities below), but usually it involves browning some meat, adding the sauce to the pan, then adding the desired vegetables for some gentle steam-cooking. These sauces are excellent for vegetarians as well--just add more of the green stuff to your liking to replace the meat. Let the sauce, meat, and veggies simmer for a bit while the basmati rice finishes cooking, pop open a Kingfisher, and voila!--your healthy, spicy, impressively complex-tasting dinner is done in 25 minutes flat, rice cooking time included.

Beverage Note: We had this with Cline's Ancient Vines Zinfandel, perhaps my favorite red under $20.

Chicken breast, frozen peas, and canned chickpeas simmer away happily.

Try this concoction on simple coconut rice--you won't regret it.

Ingredients for 3-4 servings (alter at will)
About 3/4-1 pound of meat (chicken, lamb, etc), preferably organic, cut into bite-size chunks
2-3 cups of vegetables (canned chickpeas, frozen peas, cauliflower, eggplant, broccoli, potatoes, spinach, etc), made bite-size
1 can reduced-fat coconut milk
2 cups of rice, preferably long grain (basmati or jasmine)

Start the rice going--I love my cuckoo rice cooker, but it's perfectly acceptable and traditional to do it over a proper flame! Add the rice, coconut milk, and water to the pot (If using long-grain rice, use about 1.5 cups of liquid to every cup of rice; if using medium-grain, do a little more than 1 cup liquid to 1 cup rice. 1 can of coconut milk is a little less than 2 cups). If desired, add a little salt to the rice.

Brown the meat in a nonstick pan with a little oil over medium to medium-high heat (the Geeta's brand of sauces comes with a packet of spices to brown the meat in. So use those, if you're using Geeta's). If using eggplant, saute that at the same time as the meat. Lower the flame and add the jar of sauce. If using potatoes, add those now and let the sauce simmer for 5 minutes before adding more veggies. Add the remaining veggies, and let simmer til it is cooked to your liking.

Plate the rice, and spoon the Indian goodness over. That's it. Enjoy!

Bring On The Zins!

Okay: before I begin this post, a caveat--chili is really hard to photograph and make look pretty. So don't judge the food based on how it looks below--it is REALLY REALLY TASTY, I promise. Have I ever let you down before?!?!

So after that false start--HAPPY FALL!!! Welcome to my favorite season of the year! It is the time of Oktoberfest lagers, pumpkin (pies, ales, seeds toasted with rosemary, whatever), crunchy leaves that you go just a bit out of your way to step on, roasts, root vegetables, stews, and spiked apple cider (heavy on the apple brandy). Especially during this early part of the fall, we've still got all the gorgeous late-summer vegetables lingering even as a snappy cold character enters the air. It's the best of both worlds.

I'm a big fan of stew-and-bread combos during this season, and this post is no exception. To me, there is nothing better than a healthy, hearty chili, stew, or soup paired with a buttery, less-healthy bread (sorry, but bread without butter or cheese isn't worth the flour it's baked with. And don't give me that white-flour-is-bad-for-you nonsense, everything is good in moderation. I promise!). If you insist, you can nix the biscuits in this recipe, and I'll just pretend it didn't happen.

The great thing about this Chipotle Chili and Baking Powder Drop Biscuits recipe combo is how flexible both recipes are. The original recipe for the Chipotle Chili calls for ground turkey, for example, but you can easily sub in ground beef if it is all you have (it will be fattier, but so what? Maybe cut down on the butter in the biscuits if that's the case). You can also add more tomatoes or beans to your heart's content; I majorly upped the spice content by adding an entire can of chipotle chilis in adobe sauce. The Baking Powder Biscuits are quite similar--you can add grated cheese and/or cayenne pepper, like I did, or make them with other binding ingredients (yogurt, buttermilk, etc). Since I don't keep buttermilk or plain yogurt on hand, I added jalapeno cheddar to the mix, which went really well with the spicy chili (if you do want to use buttermilk or yogurt, bring it down to 7/8 cup and bring the baking powder down to 3 tsp).

The Chipotle Chili is originally by Rachael Ray (shaddup, she may be annoying but she's a damn good cook), and the Baking Powder Biscuits are from the trusty How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

Beverage Selections: The drinky-drink world is your oyster here. I love this chili with a spicy, rich Zinfandel, perhaps from California, or another hearty red like Shiraz--basically anything that goes with barbecue will go with this chili. If you're not a red-wine drinker, pick a white that will stand up to the spices in the dish--think of what you would drink with, say, Indian food (maybe an off-dry Riesling or Gewurtztraminer). Beer-wise, I would love to have this with Bell's Two-Hearted Ale, Magic Hat's Jinx, or even Blue Moon Harvest Moon (or similar pumpkin-scented ales). Enjoy!!

I may not be pretty, but my flavors are in the right place.

Buttery, cheesy, flaky warm biscuits are the perfect accompaniment for hot chili.

Chipotle Chili--serves four, generously

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
5 cloves garlic, chopped (I used more. Of course)
1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons chili powder (Used more of this as well. Mexican-style works well here)
1 teaspoon dried oregano (Skipped this. Subbed cumin)
1 tablespoon tomato paste (Skipped this--didn't have on hand. Subbed more adobe sauce)
1 chipotle chile en adobo, coarsely chopped, with 1 tablespoon sauce (No--used the whole can)
1 pound ground turkey (try healthy turkey breast, or low-fat ground beef, preferably organic)
1 (12-ounce) Mexican lager-style beer (I used Sam Adams Boston Lager)
1 (14 1/2-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, with their juice (I used diced--no need to chop!)
1 (15 1/2-ounce) can kidney beans, rinsed and drained (You can also sub black beans here)
Optional: Sliced scallions, cilantro sprigs, avocado, sour cream, grated Monterey jack cheese, and/or tortilla chips, for garnish (we didn't use any of these--the biscuits are accompaniment enough)

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, garlic, salt, chili powder, and oregano (and/or cumin) and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 3 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste and the chipotle chile and sauce; cook 1 minute more. Add the turkey, breaking it up with a wooden spoon, and cook until the meat loses its raw color, about 3 minutes. Add the beer and simmer until reduced by about half, about 8 minutes. Add the tomatoes--crushing them through your fingers into the skillet--along with their juices and the beans; bring to a boil. Cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until thick, about 10 minutes.

Ladle the chili into bowls and serve with the garnishes of your choice.

Bittman's Baking-Powder Drop Biscuits--recipe yields about 10-12 biscuits; I usually halve the recipe

2 cups (about 9 oz) all-purpose or cake flour, plus more as needed
1 scant tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2-5 tbsp cold butter
1 cup milk (if you're using nonfat or lowfat milk, compensate with more butter)
Optional: 1/2 cup grated cheese, like cheddar, gruyere, fontina, blue, or parmesan, along with 1/4 tsp cayenne

1. Preheat oven to 450

2. Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl or food processor (food processor is easiest here). Cut the butter into bits and either pulse it in the food processor or pick up a bit of the dry ingredients, rub them with the butter between your fingers, and drop them again (just buy the food processor). All the butter should be thoroughly blended before proceeding.

3. Use a large spoon to stir in the milk and cheese, if using, just until the mix forms a ball. Drop tablespoons (or about 1.5 tbsp, if you like bigger biscuits, like I do) onto a greased baking sheet (I like Pam for baking).

4. Bake 8-10 minutes, or until the biscuits are a beautiful golden brown--be careful not to overcook!! Serve within 15 minutes, preferably dunked into steaming bowls of chili.