Simply delicious

My latest lunch craving is so simple, yet sooo delicious, probably because half of the recipe comes straight out of my garden. There’s something to be said about these seasonal delicacies. Behold — Cucumber sandwich with Mint/Garlic Mayo.

1. Chop up mint and garlic and mix with mayo. If you want to be fancy, use a mini-food processor or a blender.

2. Toast bread.

3. Wash and slice cucumber, preferably fresh out of the garden, warmed by the sun.

4. Mix 1-3, with salt to taste and mayo at the consistency of your choice and enjoy!

Any suggestions for improving upon this are encouraged. And please share your favorite cucumber recipes because my garden is overflowing with them.

Food for thought

Welcome to my blog. Why write about food you may ask? Well, here's just a few of the reasons.

I have vivid memories of being a child and walking through my Italian grandparents’ gardens and feeling so at home among the rows of tomatoes and wine grapes. To this day, I can’t stand to eat a fig, but just the mention of the preserve makes me tear up thinking about my grandfather burying his fig tree under layers of leaves and plastic to help it survive the winters.

It was always a treat to skip school and stay home to help preserve and can peaches, tomatoes and strawberry jam with my grandmother. And the cookies…oh the cookies. Maybe that’s why I became a journalist, from years of helping make and frost hundreds of Italian cookies in preparation for the holiday season, all lain out on the local newspaper, The Palladium-Times. Food was a very important part of my upbringing, and the centerpiece to all family gatherings.

One of my first jobs was in a kitchen, ‘slinging haddock’ at Cahill’s Fish Market, located on the Oswego River. From there, you can connect the restaurants like dots in my job history, from Italian food, to Mediterranean, to sushi and even burgers and pizza. For years, I was a salad chick and proud of it.

Food is a huge part of my life. I think about it constantly, and wring my hands over not doing enough to eat naturally, organically, or in a way that leaves the smallest footprint on our precious Mother Earth. There’s nothing more comforting than spending hours slaving in the kitchen to create a meal with friends and family. It’s the only kind of science I’ve ever been able to dig my teeth into!

I liken writing a story to making a cake. You have many ingredients, that when combined and baked together, make a delicious treat. When you bite into the cake, it can be easy to forget about the individual ingredients and labor of love that went into creating it. Just like when you read a story…if it’s well written, you become so absorbed reading it that you forget about all the creativity, research and interviews that went into making the story.

In short, Diaries of a Foodie is just that…many ingredients combined and baked together to create stories about food. I want to create a place where we can all talk about food, whether that is great recipes and restaurants, interesting articles about food topics and trends, or experiences we've had over food. I hope this blog will inspire you to respond and share your own food for thought. Happy reading!

Fine cuisine for a decent price

My good friend Salva Dut, founder of Water for Sudan, a non-profit dedicated to providing clean water wells to the people of Southern Sudan, is in town this week. He's back from Africa for just two weeks and then he'll head back to get started building a new Water for Sudan compound and digging the next round of 30 wells.

Salva's visits are always reason to go out to a new restaurant. He basically survives on beans and rice when he's in Southern Africa, so when he's home, he tries to get his fair share of good meals. During this visit, we decided to visit Joey's Pasta House in Penfield, since neither of us had eaten there before. We had attempted to dine there on a previous visit, but we went on a Saturday night, and the place was packed with an over hour long wait. This time we went on a Tuesday, and while it was just as packed, we were lucky enough to score a two-top upstairs.

Over the years, I've watched restaurants come and go at this location at 1789 Penfield Road. Let's hope Joey's Pasta House is there to stay, because the price and quality of the food is something that will keep me coming back for more.

As I weighed my options, I gnashed some crusty baguette, soaked in a garlicky olive oil mixture with some hint of herbs in it. Choosing what to order was really tough. A sucker for a good salad, I was weighing the Arugula Salad with roasted beets, candied walnuts, goat cheese and roasted shallot vinaigrette; the Wedge with crispy pancetta, crumbly bleu, creamy bleu and red onion, or the Grilled Caesar with hearts of romaine, garlic toast and smoked Caesar dressing.

Entrees come with a house salad and a choice of pasta or potato, but the server informed me I could get any type of salad for a slight up-charge, so I hemmed and hawed and chose the argula salad, even though I hate goat cheese. In combination with the other ingredients though, it was incredible. I think my taste buds for goat cheese may be changing.

For dinner I was debating between the House-Made Potato Gnocchi with roasted plum tomato sauce, fresh basil and shaved Parmesan; the Risotto of the Day, which was a combination of seafoods ($29 and a bit out of my budget), or the Chicken French, described simply as sherry, lemon and butter. I chose the chicken french, with a side of homemade linguini, and Salva chose the Chicken Milanese, which was breaded in panko and served over arugula tossed with shaved Parmesan and lemon vinaigrette.

Our meals were both spectacular. The salads were to die for, tossed with just the right amount of dressing and not skimping on the beets and walnuts. Our chicken dishes were both superbly cooked and very juicy. The flour bath on my chicken created a perfectly consistent batter, and the french sauce was just right, with the sherry and lemon disguising the fact that the butter makes this a sinfully fattening dish. We didn't share our food, but Salva was equally as ecstatic about his dish, particularly the arugula, since he said you can't get salad greens in Africa.

Surprisingly, the bill was very reasonable at $44, without the tip.

Joey's has gotten some mixed reviews on both RocWiki and Urban Spoon. One of the comments I noted was the service. In my opinion, the service was just right, with time to converse (although it was a bit loud, but hey, people were having a great time), enjoy each course, and not feel rushed. It reminded me a lot of my experiences dining in Rome...the kind of meal that you dress up for and plan to spend hours enjoying.

For more information, visit Joey's Pasta House on Facebook.

An exquisite evening with the girls

I can’t take responsibility for all this deliciousness you see on the plate. On Saturday, a few of my girlfriends and I decided to pull together a communal meal. I brought the coleslaw and corn bread. The coleslaw was your basic pre-cut slaw mix from Wegmans. I just added some mayonnaise, vinegar, celery salt, white onions, and fennel seeds, which is something new I decided to add to the mix. It was a hit! The corn bread was something my friend Jen taught me how to make. You just add a box of Jiffy corn bread mix with a can of cream of corn and bake it at 350 or 400 degrees until it is cooked all the way through.

Melissa made the delicious spare ribs by cooking them for a little over an hour in a pan of water, mango puree and onions, covered in foil. For the sauce, she cooked up regular store-bought barbecue sauce and mango chunks and then she pureed the mango into the sauce. After coating the ribs, she put them on a small grill for a little while to give them grill marks.

Kate brought potatoes, which we cut in half, tossed in oil, herbs and garlic, and cooked in the oven until they were done. Katie brought macaroni and cheese. And voila, there you have it, an exquisite meal!

Lasagna, a labor of love

Last weekend I decided to make veggie lasagna. It turned out to be much more than pasta, veggies and cheese.

It was a Saturday afternoon, the night before Halloween and I had the house to myself for the weekend, so I figured it was a perfect time to do some entertaining. Since I wasn't in any rush, I decided to walk to the grocery store to shop for the ingredients. Following through on my "green-lasagna" project, I even remember to bring my reusable Envirosax grocery bags (which by the way are adorable and very convenient).

Walking down Winton Road on the way market (Wegman's) and feeling very European, I observed a few other people walking by me going the opposite direction. Both were middle-aged women. One had her groceries in bags; the other in one of those carts with wheels you often see at the market. It made me reflect on a time when women spent their entire day collecting the ingredients for and preparing a meal. I am sure my grandmother spent many a day in her lifetime making lasagna noodles from scratch. Despite the fact that my grandmother and I grew up decades apart, the labor of lovethat goes into making big homemade meals and the joy of sharing them remains unchanged.

I will try to explain how I made this lasagna, but I never follow a recipe when I cook it. I check out a few recipes online and rely on my past experiences. This time I included carrots, yellow squash, red and green peppers, mushrooms, onions, spinach, broccoli and some stewed tomatoes I had leftover. I cut all the veggies up to about the same size, using the food processor to chop the zucchini and carrots. Then I cooked the ingredients all together, starting with the vegetables that take the longest to cook and gradually adding the others based on their required cooking time. The key is to get all the liquid out of the veggie mixture.

My wet cheese mixture included ricotta, California-style cottage cheese, Bertolli® Vineyard Premium Collections Marinara with Burgandy Wine Sauce, a little four-cheese alfredo sauce, and fresh oregano, parsley, basil and thyme. My dry cheese was just a combination of a bunch of different Italian cheeses.

Some may call me lazy (and wouldn't my grandma be appalled), but I use the no-boil lasagna noodles. I actually like the way they bake up, with a little more crisp and firmness to them than the kind you have to boil first.

Once I have the veggies and cheese mixtures ready to go, it's time to layer them. I decided against using my own baking pan because lasagna can really make a mess of it. I suppose this goes against my concept of a "green lasagna," but then again, I saved water with one less dish to wash! Back to the layering. You start with some of the veggie mix, then a layer of noodles, then veggies again, followed by a layer of the wet cheese, the dry cheese, and then noodles. Keep going until you run out. You typically want the top layer to be just wet and dry cheese.

I would recommend putting foil over the lasagna to keep the moisture in as it bakes. I forgot to do this and my top layer kind of dried out. I pretty much cooked it at 350 degrees until it looked done. I admit, this was not one of the best lasagnas I have ever eaten, but then again, they say lasagna is best left-over. I've heard reports that it was great the second and third time around. I hate leftovers, so I'll take those people's word for it.

Knowing the amount of leftovers I usually have when I make lasagna, I invited a half-dozen people to help me eat it all. What a wonderful surprise it was when Frank and Nancy Sinatra dropped in, along with a few other friends. In the end, it wasn't the hours of work I put into making the lasagna or the few missteps I took while making it that stands out in my head. It was the great company and conversation which flowed like the wine which I will remember.

I wanna Wok with you

One of the best parts about cooking is doing it with a friend. Especially if that friend owns a Wok. Of course, I don't need an excuse to hang out with my best gal and cookie partner Nicole, but last Friday when she invited me over for dinner, I immediately said sure, as long as we can use your Wok. She got the Wok a while ago and we've only used it less than a handful of times, but there's just something about the way it cooks the food that makes it better than any take-out Chinese food around.

According to eHow.com...A wok is shaped like a large bowl and usually made out of carbon steel, with some alternatives being aluminum and cast iron. The stove top wok's rounded bottom nestles into the grates of a gas range. This projects the flames' heat into a hot spot on the wok's bottom. A wok's main advantage is that you can create healthy meals in a relatively short amount of time. Little oil is used in preparing vegetables, meats or seafood. Due to the concentrated heat, food cooks quickly and vegetables retain a crisp, crunchy texture, while the meats and seafood do not absorb large amounts of oil.

We've cooked several different meals in the Wok. This time we did a tangerine/orange beef. We didn't really follow a recipe, instead using several recipes Nicole had researched to come up with the basis for our sauce. In addition to orange peels, we added broccoli, water chestnuts and scallions. We served it over brown rice.

The finished dish was so delicious we forgot to take a picture.

Kitty Litter Surprise

On Friday, everyone at work brought in their spookiest, scariest, goriest treats to share. Wanting to impress, I racked my brain before remember this fun recipe my friend Stacy once brought to my Halloween party. I called it Kitty Litter Surprise.

It is just no-bake chocolate, peanut butter, oatmeal cookies served in a kitty litter box (a new one of course). The recipe is super easy. The only trick is making sure you boil the mixture at just the right temperature and for just the right amount of time, stirring constantly. The recipe says to bring it to a rolling boil for a minute-and-a-half. If you don't boil the mixture for just the right amount of time the cookies will turn out dry, or they won't harden at all. I thought I had done that, but my cookies still threatened not to solidify, so I retaliated by putting them in the fridge overnight.

Kitty Litter Surprise was a hit. I guess I should have eaten the left over Grape Nuts, but I just threw them out. And I forgot, when Stacy brought this dish to the party, she included a litter scooper for easier serving.

Happy Halloween everyone!