Blanching vegetables

By Sandy Hu
A new video for Video Friday

As the weather warms up and farmers’ markets and supermarket produce counters are filled to overflowing, it’s time to celebrate the bounty with crudité platters and delicious dips.

Some vegetables, such as radishes and sugar snap peas, taste great just served raw. But hardier vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower florets, green beans, asparagus and even carrots taste better when they’re blanched. A quick dip in boiling water takes the raw edge off and makes these vegetables taste sweeter.

Blanched vegetables can also be used for cooking. I like to blanch green beans , then sauté them in olive oil. By blanching first, the beans cook more evenly, since they have had a head start through the blanching process, and cooking goes faster.

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Burgers? Make Mine Teriyaki

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

We eat a fair amount of burgers in our house. With a gas grill just outside our kitchen door, grilling burgers is a convenient answer to a quick weeknight dinner.

Sometimes we make them plain, seasoned with salt and pepper, but other times we go for teriyaki. If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you know how addictive teri burgers can be. Ground meat is seasoned with teriyaki sauce before grilling. The flavor of sweet-salty teriyaki sauce makes burgers succulent and the aromas as the burgers cook are simply scrumptious. With lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise for the dressing, it’s a winning combination.

While I think of a plain burger with ketchup for lunch, the teriyaki flavor seems more like dinner. In fact, you can serve these burgers with rice and a veggie if you’re not into sandwiches for dinner.

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Roasted Grapes – Appetizer or Dessert

By Sandy Hu
A new video for Video Friday

It’s always a good idea to have a repertoire of simple, tried-and-true recipes that you can whip up in a hurry when company’s coming. Here’s a super-easy one to add: Roasted Grapes, a recipe by Lori Powell, our “One or Two Bites” blogger.

Lori, who blogs on Special Fork about cooking for one or two people, devised this recipe as a way to use up an abundance of grapes. But it’s also a versatile choice for company meals when you’re too busy to cook.

While she serves two or three with this recipe, it will stretch for four. Or you can simply multiply the recipe, as needed.

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Old-Fashioned Peanut Butter Cookies

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

If there’s one thing that reminds me of my childhood – and I’ve been thinking more about my childhood since my mother passed away recently – it’s peanut butter cookies. The ultimate comfort food, this cookie is simple, sweet and captures the essence of every kid’s favorite spread – the next best thing to scooping peanut butter out of a jar and eating it outright. (And don’t tell me you never did that!)

As far as I’m concerned, a cookie can only be called a peanut butter cookie if it has the crosshatch pattern on top, made by flattening the ball of cookie dough with the tines of a fork. Whoever came up with that idea met two practical needs at once: providing a way to shape the cookies easily and giving them a distinctive identity.

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In Memorium

Congratulations to Angela Y from San Diego, CA, the winner of our Sandy in France Sweepstakes.

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Some people become good cooks because their moms were bad cooks. My case was the opposite.

My mom was a really good cook, and since I took good food for granted, I wasn’t motivated to try to cook it myself.

It was only when I stumbled into a food career that I began to take cooking seriously. So I can’t say I learned from my mom, while attached to her apron strings.

But one thing my mom taught me – if only by the food she made – was what good food should taste like. And that palate – the ability to taste and to correct seasonings – was learned at the dinner table, eating her food.

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