Comfort Meal "Cole-Style": Pesto with Green Beans and Grilled Lamb Chops

Growing up, my mom had a lot of "go to" comfort meals:  Chicken with Mushrooms and Olives, Veal or Chicken Picatta, Chicken Cacciatore with "mushy" Polenta, Spaghetti and Meatballs and Italian Sausage, Tuna Noodle Casserole...  I could go on.  I loved them all and when I make them at home with Marshall, I'm transported to my mom's kitchen, sitting at the heavy kitchen table feeling warm and happy.  One of my absolute favorites was homemade Pesto with Pasta and Grilled or Broiled Lamb Chops.  This was a popular dish during the spring, when lamb is freshest, using pesto my mom made and froze the previous fall.  While we didn't eat this all the time (lamb can be expensive), it was wholeheartedly welcomed.  When I got older, my mom started adding green beans to the pesto.  This is something my mom's grandma used to do when preparing pesto for the family.  The sweet crisp green beans, boiled for just a couple of minutes with the pasta, blends beautifully with the garlicky pesto and the creamy Romano cheese.  Of course, during the summer, when the pesto is made from freshly picked basil this is a fantastic meal to eat outside.  When I think of summer, I get aromas of the charcoal BBQ, lamb and basil.  

When I moved into my first apartment my sophomore year of college, I inherited my grandmother's electric skillet.  It's this huge round fry pan that plugs into the wall.  The reservoir just under the cook surface is filled with something and an electric coil.  The great thing about this electric skillet is that the heat is always constant and even.  My grandma used this for making Chicken with Mushrooms and Olives, and...pan-fried lamb chops.  Whenever I would visit my mom during breaks or weekends, I sometimes would be sent back to school with frozen plastic containers of homemade pesto.  I remember specifically one night feeling extravagant and bought myself a few lamb chops from the Italian market in downtown and cooked myself pesto with pan-fried lamb chops.  I sat in front of the TV and devoured everything I made, sucking loudly on the lamb chop bones, which thoroughly bothered my vegetarian roommate, and slurping up my pasta.  I was at home again.

My sister even used to make this same dish when she and her, then, boyfriend (now husbands) were living together in college.

Luckily, I introduced lamb early to Marshall and he loved it.  I can always make lamb without much issue in our house and pairing with pesto has become a favorite in our home, too.  I took advantage of some pesto I had whipped up with some extra basil I had from another meal.  I bought green beans and lamb chops.   The green beans get trimmed and thrown in the pasta pot when there are only a few minutes left cooking time.  The lamb chops are prepared just as simply; seasoned with just some salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil and thrown on a hot grill, cooked medium-rare.  This is a meal known for not having any leftovers.  The pesto is devoured and the lamb chops are stripped clean to the bone.

This is true comfort food.  This is a meal which reminds me who I am and where I come from; it's family.

Bubba Blue Be Proud: Southern Shrimp Burgers

I'm not sure if I said it any time before this, but I'll say it again and again and again:  I love shrimp.  I will eat it cooked in any fashion, too:  boiled, broiled, grilled, sautéed, baked, stuffed - as long as it's is cooked, I'll eat it (not sure if raw shrimp, even for sushi, is OK).  One of  my favorite cooking magazines, Cooks Illustrated, came out with a Summer Grilling issue last year and I've found more than a handful of successful and delicious recipes in it, some of which made it onto my blog already.  One of those recipes was for Southern Shrimp Burgers.  Funny enough, I had never eaten a shrimp burger.  I've had tuna burgers, salmon burgers and crab cakes (which are kind of like burgers, right?), but never a burger made of shrimp.  The headline in the magazine stated "In most versions of this coastal classic, the shrimp flavor is all but buried beneath excessive amounts of binding and spices.  We wanted shrimp burgers that tasted like shrimp."  They certainly succeeded.

Making the shrimp burgers was similar to making any other kind of burger, although there is a little bit of binding, since shrimp tends to be wetter than most other proteins.  What's great is that the only binding is a slice of sandwich bread (I think we used sourdough, since that's what our home considers "sandwich bread").  The rest of the mixture includes fresh herbs, mild spices, mayo and shrimp:  the perfect combination of flavors to enhance and showcase the sweetness of the shrimp meat.  They held surprisingly well on the grill, which is where we cooked them.  You can easily cook these in a pan on the stove, if you're interested in having a summery light meal in the dead of winter.  The burgers were tender and juicy, sweet and delicious.  I would definitely make these again.

I served the shrimp burgers without buns.  I would think buns, or any kind of bread-like product, would totally ruin the freshness of the burger and weight the meal down.  They were perfect fork-and-knife burgers, although you didn't need a knife at all to cut through the burger.  I made a home-made tartar sauce for dipping.  A simple mixture of mayo, capers, and fresh chopped dill.  You can certainly buy tartar sauce from the store, but when it's this easy to make, why would you?  The picture in the magazine showed the burger alongside some fresh greens.  I remember making a Tuna Steak au Poivre a long time ago that had a bitter greens salad on the side, which was great.  I figured that kind of super light salad would be perfect and it was.

I hope you give these burgers a shot.  I highly recommend using fresh, unfrozen, shrimp if at all possible.  They really aren't expensive, comparatively speaking, and you get a MUCH better flavor.  Also, again if possible, buy as local as possible.  Unfortunately, for Californians, local shrimp comes from the Gulf of Mexico, which is definitely more local than Thailand or Vietnam.  Like with all fish, wild-caught is infinitely better, both in taste and nutritional value, than farmed (shrimp aren't supposed to eat corn).  I know that when I first started preparing raw fresh shrimp myself, the deveining was the most worrisome.  It is so easy, I can't even tell you:  take scissors (kitchen shears and desk scissors work equally well) and snip the shell along the back of the shrimp (not the side with the legs) stopping right before the tail (if you want a handle) or all the way through the tail (if you just want the meat).  The snipping allows you to peel the shell easily from the shrimp meat and will cut just enough of the flesh to expose the vein.  Under running cold water, clean out the groove you made with the scissors and you're done!  Your shrimp are now ready to cook and enjoy!

Just Warming Up: Cuban Black Bean Soup

And...I'm back, readers!  I'm hoping to do better by you and stick with my cooking blog writing.  It's been quite a while since I've last provided you all with a cooking experience and a recipe, but believe me - I've got plenty coming.  I've got a stack of papers and magazines sitting on the floor next to my desk, just waiting to be introduced!  But back to the topic of this evening...

Winter calls for soup.  A coworker commented on my leftover lentil soup in the kitchen today about how it's all we seem to eat in the winter is soup.  It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone to learn that our bodies crave warm carbs during the winter months.  With the lack of sunlight giving us the endorphins and Vitamin D we need to keep our spirits up and our bodies warm, we turn to food to fill the void.  Potatoes, pasta, beans, creamy dishes which we would never touch when it's hot outside call us forth to their steaming bowls.  We go to bed at night with a comforting feeling in our warm-soup-bellies. 

To be fair, I made this Cuban Black Bean Soup when it was closing on Fall, but it would definitely feel right at home in the months between December and March.  The first time I made this soup was actually a few years ago.  I have made other black bean soups after that, but there's something about this particular recipe which is just terrific.  I think it's the simplicity of the soup itself.  All the fixings you add to it, are added on top of a bowl of stewed black beans - there's nothing else.  For recipes like this one, you'll definitely need the day.  It's perfect for a weekend evening, particularly Sunday, when you can drag out the copious leftovers.  I think Marshall and I even used the soup base leftovers for an attempt at enfrijoladas (tortillas smothered in a pureé of black or pinto beans) one morning a while back and it worked perfectly.  The various toppings make this a great dish when serving kids.  They can have fun plopping chunks of ham, shreds of cheese, and dollops of sour cream into their bowls to make their soup their own.


This soup warms the soul with a little kick of spice.  It also has an underlying sweetness which keeps you coming back for more.  I know that when I make this soup, I cannot have just one bowl - I must have seconds!