Fried Squash and Onions 101

One of my favorite summertime side dishes is pan fried yellow squash and onions; the delicate flavor of the squash paired with sweet, caramelized onions. I know it seems like a pretty straight-forward recipe, but there are minutia that should be followed in order to achieve just the right results.

I found these small yellow squash at the store recently. I like to buy the smallest ones I can find, so when they're sliced, there's not a large amount of pulpy seeds to deal with. I also look for a nice, pale yellow flesh with the least amount of bruises or brown spots.

After peeling one small onion, I sliced it into thick slices. The thinner you slice the onion, the quicker it will brown. Be careful not to slice it too thin, else the onion will begin to burn before the squash is browned.

When slicing the squash, I like to slice mine on the diagonal. Slicing it on the diagonal not only looks nice, but it also increases the surface area of the squash that will brown.

Once the onion and squash are sliced, I melt two tablespoons of salted butter in a stainless pan. I like using a stainless pan for this dish, because I think it produces a nicer caramelization than a teflon-coated pan would. While the butter is melting, I also add about a tablespoon of olive oil to the pan. This way, you have the high cooking temperature of the oil, along with the wonderful flavor of the butter.

When the butter is completely melted, the squash and onions are added to the pan over a medium heat. A medium heat ensures that the vegetables won't begin burning before they're fully cooked on the inside. I stir them briefly right as they enter the pan to evenly coat all the vegetables with the butter and oil. Once they're coated, I leave the pan alone for the first four to five minutes, and only stir twice, maybe three times, while cooking. Leaving the pan alone is key to getting nice caramelization. Too frequent stirring doesn't allow for the vegetables to rest on the bottom of the pan long enough to begin to brown.

About half way through, you can see that the vegetables have begun to sweat and soften, and the onions begin to turn translucent. This is the time to add salt and pepper. Remember not to stir too often.

The best results are achieved after about 15 minutes. The vegetables have begun to caramelize, there are nice brown bits in the bottom of the pan and the texture of the vegetables is soft and tender. You could certainly cook them longer to brown them further, but the squash would begin to fall apart and become mushy.

Be sure to serve this dish immediately. If left in the pan too long, the vegetables will begin to get soggy and wilt. Yellow squash isn't the only vegetable that could be used; zucchini, eggplant or pattypan squash would also be delicious!

Laura's Secret Spice

This is proof of my culinary endeavors in the early years...



Can anyone tell me what, exactly, is a "clod" of ground ginger? And what other than, of course, a "dash" of Mrs. Dash? Brilliant.

Darling Desserts' Menu

MENU

CAKES

Lemon Olive Oil Cake with Fresh Raspberries
Dense poundcake made with Italian olive oil and lemon sugar, with fresh berries throughout

Apricot Cherry Upside Down Cake
Vanilla cake made with almond paste and topped with caramelized apricots and cherries

Italian Cream Cake with Candied Citrus
Layers of vanilla almond cake with walnuts and cream cheese icing, topped with candied citrus

Mexican Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes with Chocolate Pecan Glaze
Chocolate cupcakes flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg and a pinch of cayenne pepper, topped with a chocolate pecan glaze

Zuccotto
Chocolate mousse layered with white chocolate almond mousse, in a brandied poundcake dome

Honey Ricotta Cheesecake
Creamy cheesecake made with clover honey and whole ricotta cheese, available with a vanilla or chocolate cookie crust

Limoncello Raspberry Ricotta Cheesecake
Ricotta Cheesecake flavored with limoncello liqueur and fresh raspberries

Café Mocha Cream Tart with Chocolate Ganache
Chocolate café mocha cream in a vanilla biscotti crust, topped with dark chocolate ganache

Flourless Chocolate Espresso Cake
Rich, dense chocolate cake made with ground almonds, espresso and rum

PIES

Crunchy Caramel Apple Pie
Freshly sliced granny smith apples flavored with cinnamon and sugar, topped with a crunchy caramel crumb crust

Stone Fruit Pie
Apricots, peaches, cherries and plums, lightly sweetened and baked in a flaky pâte brisée crust

Bourbon Chocolate Pecan Pie
An untraditional version of the classic pecan pie, flavored with bourbon and chocolate, in a pecan pastry crust

Apricot Galette
A simple, rustic tart made with French apricot preserves and toasted almonds

White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Pie
White chocolate mousse with macadamia nuts, subtly flavored with orange zest and topped with a chocolate ganache

Darling’s Peach Pie
Peaches subtly flavored with fresh nutmeg and white wine, baked in a flaky pâte brisée crust

COOKIES

Almond Blueberry Cookies
Soft vanilla almond cookies with toasted almond slices and fresh blueberries

Vanilla Crescents
A European coffeehouse favorite: crisp vanilla crescent shaped cookies, made with almond flour and dusted with confectioners’ sugar

Chocolate Oatmeal Hermits
Rustic oatmeal drop cookies made with milk chocolate chips, Irish oats and pecans

Aunt Thea’s Lebkuchen
German gingerbread cookies, made with hazelnut flour, cinnamon, nutmeg and rum

Chocolate Dipped Coconut Macaroons
Chewy, decadent coconut macaroons dipped in milk chocolate

Pinenut Cookies
Vanilla almond cookies encrusted with toasted pine nuts and dusted with confectioners’ sugar

CONFECTIONS

Chocolate Truffles
Smooth, creamy, sinful chocolate truffles coated with dark, milk or white chocolate

Pumpkin Buttercream Bites
Gooey pumpkin buttercream bites with a soft vanilla crust

Chocolate Bundles with Ganache
Milk chocolate, nougat and caramel wrapped in puff pastry pouches and baked until golden brown, topped with chocolate ganache

Rumballs
Soft, chewy rumballs made with crushed vanilla cookies and ground walnuts, flavored with allspice and dark rum

BECAUSE ONLY THE FRESHEST INGREDIENTS ARE USED, ALL ITEMS ARE SUBJECT TO AVAILABILITY. SPECIALTY ORDERS ARE ALWAYS WELCOME. PRICING AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.

Zuccotto

Zuccotto is rich, chocolatey Tuscan trifle, said to have been inspired by the shape of the cupola of the Duomo of Florence. There are versions of this dessert made with an ice cream filling, versions with hazelnuts instead of almonds and versions with fruits folded into the cream. The version I make combines the flavors of semisweet chocolate and white chocolate with toasted almonds. I made it for the first time on a whim one evening last summer, and it's since become one of Eric's favorite desserts. Don't worry - the finished product only looks complicated. If you've got a few staple kitchen tools, a large bowl and about half an hour, this is a cinch to make.

The first step is to line a large bowl with wedges of poundcake. I use store bought poundcake to make my life a bit simpler. I like to make a pinwheel pattern in the bottom, as it makes the finished product look prettier. Be sure to save several wedges of poundcake for a later step. Also, notice that the bowl has been lined with plastic wrap. I spray my bowl with non-stick cooking spray and line it with plastic wrap to ensure that the dessert will come out easily in the end.



Once the bowl is lined with poundcake, use a pastry brush to baste the poundcake with brandy. Other liqueurs would also work well, like amaretto, rum or even whiskey.



Meanwhile, in another bowl, whip one cup of whipping cream and bit of vanilla extract. When whipping heavy cream, it's important to have the coldest cream and utensils possible. Otherwise, the whipped cream won't gain a good, thick, stiff texture - it will remain somewhat runny and will deflate easily. I always use a stainless steel bowl, which I put in the freezer with my beaters and chill for about 20 minutes before I whip the cream. Once the cream is whipped to stiff peaks, room temperature melted semisweet chocolate is folded into the cream. This is what the folding process looks like:



When folding ingredients together, it's important to remember that you're not vigorously stirring them together, but rather gently moving the spatula from the bottom of the ingredients against the bottom of the bowl, over and onto the top. The purpose of folding the ingredients is to gently combine them without losing any of the fluffiness from the whipped cream. This is what the end product should look like:



Once the cream and the chocolate are combined, spread the mixture evenly onto the brandied poundcake, creating a well in the bottom. Cover it and put it in the fridge while you move onto your next step.



For the next step, you'll be repeating the same steps with the melted semisweet chocolate and whipped cream, but this time you'll be using melted white chocolate and adding chopped toasted almonds. First, combine the whipped cream and room temparature melted white chocolate by gently folding them together.



Fold toasted, chopped almonds into the mixture.



Once combined, spread the white chocolate almond mixture on top of the semisweet chocolate mixture.



Take the reserved pieces of poundcake from earlier and brush them with brandy. Cover the top of the white chocolate mixture with the poundcake pieces, brandied side down. Make sure that there are no large holes, so the filling won't leak out when it's inverted. These don't have to be as prettily arranged, as they're going to be on the bottom of the trifle. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it chill in the fridge for at least three hours, up to one day.



When it comes time to invert the zuccotto, carefully invert the bowl by placing a plate top side down on top of the bowl and flip the two over together. The plastic wrap should come easily out of the bowl and off of the zuccotto. Keep in mind that this dessert should not sit long at room temparature, as it will slowly start to fall. Before slicing and serving, I like to dust the dessert with cocoa powder and confectioners' sugar.



Buon appetito!

Home Grown 'Maters

Eric's grandmother, Grandma Kerby, has the greenest thumb I know. At the end of last summer, she gave us several houseplants that were becoming more of a burden to her than a hobby. One of the plants was a nice potted begonia. Within the lush begonia, we noticed a tiny sprout of some other kind of plant, and we decided to leave it alone to see what we would get. Several months later, in the dead of winter, we had a nice, lanky tomato plant growing out of the begonia pot.

When the weather got warmer, we transplanted the tomato plant outside, hoping that it wouldn't go into shock and die. Within several weeks, the plant was yielding its first fruits and taking over the side of the house.



This is the plant today. We've already had a nice bowl of pico de gallo made solely from the tomatoes, used them on countless turkey sandwiches and just tonight, they starred in yet another delicious meal.





And twenty minutes later...



Bacon, brie and tomato tartines. Ah, the joys of summer. Thanks, Grandma Kerby. Hope you're feeling better.

It's Official!

Darling Desserts is officially open for business!



A ginormous THANK YOU to Todd for designing my logo and to Michelle for printing my beautiful business cards.

Expect delicious treats from Darling Desserts at the Pesto Cafe soon!

Sunday Dinner at Mom and Dad's

I like to credit my mother for instilling in me my passion for cooking. I have always marveled at her creations, paying intense attention to her techniques and trying to immitate the same at home. But, as many people also find, things always, no matter what, taste better when they're made by Mom.



This is my Mom when she was around my age. The resemblance is uncanny, I know. My Mom's interest in cooking started when she was in her late teens, early on in her college years. She has a very vivid memory of being about 18 or 19 and watching her Aunt Nadine cook spaghetti sauce, and asked for the recipe after the meal. This recipe eventually became one of Mom's staple recipes during the first few years of my parents' marriage. My dad's friend, Wolf, coined the term "Gray Spaghetti", due to the fact that the sauce contains a can of cream of mushroom soup, giving it somewhat of a grayish hue.

Over the course of the next several years, Mom slowly accumulated more recipes from various friends - a woman at work, who had learned to cook from the sharecroppers on her father's cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta, and the flamboyantly gay black man who frequented the flower shop where Mom and Dad worked, who gave her a delicious recipe for Italian Meatloaf, to name but a few. Here's a picture of Mom's first recipe, handwritten by Aunt Nadine herself.



Sunday night, Mom and Dad had Eric and me over for dinner. Since the temperature outside was breaking 100 degrees and my parents live in a historic home (read: no air conditioning), Mom thought it best that she grill something outside as opposed to even thinking of turning on the 1960's era, highly inefficient oven. When my parents bought their house in 1997, one of the things left behind by the previous occupants was a hibachi, a japanese barbeque grill. My parents have used this egg-shaped contraption quite often, and it always yields delicious results. This particular evening, Mom was grilling asian marinated chicken.



Meanwhile, I was inside helping prepare the salads. Mom had come across a recipe for an arugula and grapefruit salad with avacado, sliced grapes and toasted, seasoned pecans. The dressing was creamy and mild, a good accompaniment to the peppery arugula.



We sat down for dinner shortly after 7:00. The dinner table had been moved to the basement, the coolest area of the house. We listened to reggae on the radio and had at least five oscelating fans positioned around the room, cooling us as we ate our meal. Our chicken and salad were accompanied by some delicious roasted veggies (squash, red bell pepper and onion), and what meal would be complete without one of my Mom's now infamous deviled eggs? Shortly after this picture was taken, mom exclaimed, "Oh my GAWD, I forgot the capers!" Usually on Mom's deviled eggs, there are three capers placed vertically on the egg, making it look like a deviled egg wearing a button-up shirt.



The great food continued after dinner. Shortly after we cleared the table from dinner, we set it for dessert. Mom served up some homemade peach-strawberry ice cream and a "surprise dessert", which she wouldn't divulge to anyone until she took the foil off of the dish. The ice cream was a wonderful consistency, not bogged down with guar gum and other additives that make store bought ice cream its chewy, rubbery consistency; this was light, fluffy, creamy and highly meltable.



The surprise dessert turned out to be an eclaire cake, a delightful recipe from the one and only Paula Deen of The Lady and Sons restaurant in Savannah, Georgia (and also of Food Network fame). The cake was made of layers of graham crackers and coconut cream pudding, with a chocoate icing on top. Sinful. Decadent. And two pieces, please.



After it was all said and done, Eric and I went home stuffed full of the best food a body can be provided - food made by the loving hands of a mother. Thanks, Mom.

Limoncello Raspberry Ricotta Cheesecake

Last Friday evening was spent baking. There's a possibility that I'll be making desserts for a local restaurant, and I wanted to take some of my recipes for a test drive to make sure all the kinks were out before taking them to the restaurant. One of the things I baked was a Limoncello Raspberry Ricotta Cheesecake. Limoncello is an Italian liqueur that's made from fermented lemon peels, and the best Limoncello is made on the Island of Capri.

For the crust, and in trying to keep with the Italian theme of the restaurant, I thought using biscotti would be a nice touch and give the cake a subtle almond flavor. I crumbled the biscotti in the food processor and then added a stick of melted butter to form the crust. Once the mixture was the right consistency (wet, but still a bit crumbly), I pressed it into the bottom of a springform pan. I like my cheesecake with the crust on the bottom only, so I was careful not to go up the sides of the pan. Once the crust had been pressed firmly into the pan, I baked it for about 15 minutes until it was a nice golden color.

Meanwhile, I'd been draining whole milk ricotta in a piece of cheesecloth. Ricotta is a very watery cheese, and in order for my cake to have a nice, smooth, velvety consistency, I needed to get as much water out of the ricotta as possible.

Once the ricotta was drained, I combined it with cream cheese, sugar, eggs, limoncello, lemon zest and vanilla extract in the food processor and blended the mixture until there were no lumps and it had a consistent texture. Before pouring it into the pan, I added the raspberries to the bottom of the crust.

Since this was an experimental cheesecake, I wanted to see if the berries would have a different consistency if I coated them in flour. Because adding any sort of fruit to a cake ultimately means adding more liquid to a cake, I was hoping that the flour would aid in soaking up any of the berries' liquid as it cooked. So I decided to do half the cake with flour-coated raspberries, and half with uncoated raspberries.

Once I poured the batter over the berries, it was time to go into the oven. Cheesecakes are best when they're cooked slowly, at low temparature in a water bath. The water bath aids in providing the cake with an even temperature and prevents any "direct" heat from the oven. Because I was using a springform pan (a pan with a removable bottom), I wanted to prevent any water from seeping into my cheesecake, so I wrapped the pan in a double layer of heavy duty foil.

I cooked the cheesecake at a slightly higher temperature initially, then lowered the temperature by 25 degrees and cooked the cake for just under two hours. Another important step takes place after the cake is done baking. Turn the oven off and leave the door propped open just slightly, with the cheesecake still in the oven, to let the hot air escape and the cheesecake slowly cool. This slow cooling process prevents the cake from falling or cracking.

After chilling the cake in the fridge overnight (always uncovered, so no condensation forms and wets the top of the cake), I was pleasantly surprised with the results. The texture was creamy, yet not too dense, and the limoncello and raspberries added a really refreshing, summery taste.