A Milk & Honey Giveaway!

It's an exciting day--our first giveaway. I have mentioned Milk & Honey Ice Cream before, a small batch ice cream company that utilizes seasonal, local ingredients. Their ice cream is made only from all the good stuff: organic cream, eggs and evaporated cane juice -- that's it, no stabilizers or other strange ingredients.

Their Rum Ginger Caramel Ice Cream was amazing! My Pear & Butternut Squash Pie was delicious, but that ice cream took it over the top into the completely, utterly fabulous realm. Well, today, you get a chance to win two pints of Milk & Honey Ice Cream! Cool, right? (Seriously, no pun intended.)

Brittaney is the talent behind these wonderful ice creams. She's a local Sonoma mom, and all around great gal, and has graciously offered to host a giveaway here. You can enter to win a pint of each of this month's flavors, and they sound fabulous:

Eggnog: Straus organic cream and milk, Hooker House bourbon and cognac with a touch of winter spices.

Chocolate Chip Candied Orange: Straus organic cream and milk, homemade candied organic orange and chocolate chips with swirls of silky chocolate sauce.

I am also going to include a jar of my homemade Salted Caramel Sauce, just in case you want to "gild the lily." With just 4 ingredients, organic cream, butter, cane sugar, and sea salt, it is completely delicious drizzled over ice cream, cakes, or folded into marshmallows. More to come on that . . .

So, how to enter? You need not be local to win -- I will pack it up appropriately and FedEx it anywhere in the United States. Sorry, Australian readers, no international shipping yet.

Step (1) Like Olive Oil Salt & Pepper on Facebook.

Step (2) Like Milk & Honey on Facebook.

(If you are already a fan, yay! Just go to Step (3).)

Step (3) Then leave a comment on the Olive Oil Salt & Pepper Page on Facebook letting us know the ice cream flavor you'd most like to try!

For an extra entry, just share this Facebook post and we will add your name to the drawing again.

The winner will be selected on Wednesday, December 18th. 

Persimmon Posibilities

I have been in a bit of a cooking slump. I think it was a the Thanksgiving preparations, Christmas preparations, and having a nasty cold. Frankly, I was starting to worry a bit that I wasn't going to feel that burning desire to create something in the kitchen.

Fortunately, I AM BACK! Due in no small part to this inspiring post at Abi's Farmhouse Kitchen. In the last 24 hours, I made yeast raised waffles--wow! Salted caramel marshmallows--amazing! And, this awesome persimmon pork dish.

It seems this year has yielded a bumper crop of persimmons in Northern California. Some dear friends gave us a huge box full of Fuyu persimmons from the tree in their yard and told us they don't really care for them. Even my brother, who is a chef, says they are not high on his list. However, I think persimmons, Fuyu persimmons, are underrated, (and clearly my daughter agrees as she just ate 5 of them). And, I am willing to bet I get can my brother and our friends to love persimmons.

I dreamed up an entire persimmon menu, think of an Iron Chef episode with persimmon as the secret ingredient.

Persimmon Lavender Shrub Cocktails

Persimmon Carpaccio with Burrata and Shaved Fennel

Bresola wrapped Persimmons and Arugula

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Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Caramelized Persimmons and Kalamata Olives

Salad of Shaved Brussel Sprouts and Kale with Warm Pancetta Persimmon Vinaigrette

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Eggnog Ice Cream with Persimmon Salted Caramel Sauce

Friends, (you know who you are), you will be called upon give some or all of these ideas a taste!

Thanksgiving Tour -- Bringing It All Together

I am having a hard time believing that tomorrow is Thanksgiving. It seems like a week ago that the kids were just going back to school. I am also having a hard time believing that I still have two recipes to post!

For the Thanksgiving salad, Fuyu persimmons and Bosc pears are tossed with a blood orange vinaigrette and topped with toasted almonds and pomegranate seeds. It's simple and lovely. No blood orange olive oil on hand? No problem, just use another excellent extra virgin olive oil.

You could substitute Fuji or Gala apples for the pears, but please make sure to get the Fuyu and not Hachiya persimmons. The Fuyu are firm, shaped somewhat like a doughnut, and much tastier to eat straight out of hand.


And last, but certainly not least, the stuffing (or dressing). On day one of this adventure I posted about the Wild Rice and Roasted Squash Salad. I also promised that I would transform those same ingredients into the stuffing.

When I made the stuffing I used the leftovers from the Wild Rice Salad, added toasted baguette cubes, cranberries, walnuts and some fresh chicken stock. It was delicious. I have written the recipe up for you here from scratch since I am figuring you may want to make this and don't have the Wild Rice Salad in your fridge.

On a final note, thank you for reading, sincerely thank you! This is my 18th post in 35 days. That's a lot of blogging. And now, I think I am going on a hiatus, for a few days anyway. . .

Pear & Butternut Squash Pie

Recently, a local mom launched her Milk & Honey ice cream business. When she announced one of this month's flavors, Rum Ginger Caramel, a couple of weeks ago I started imagining pies to go with it. And that is how the Pear & Butternut Squash Pie was born. The pie was totally sublime with the ice cream.

Now I realize not everyone has Rum Ginger Caramel ice cream in their freezer. So we tested the pie with good quality vanilla ice cream as well. (You know, purely for science, we had to make sure it was still good!) You could also make a rum caramel sauce to swirl with some regular vanilla ice cream from the store.

Sliced squash.

This pie uses winter squash differently than you are probably used to. The squash is not pureed, but left in pieces. A concept I first ran across in Dorie Greenspan's book, "Baking From My Home to Yours." I quartered the squash and then thinly sliced it.

Now about the crust, I used leaf shaped cookie cutters to create the top crust, but you can also cut them out with a pairing knife, or make a lattice pie crust. I made the crust with white whole wheat flour, but all purpose flour works fine to of course. If this is your first foray into pie crust making, it is not difficult, but I do have a few helpful tips. There are some nice tips, with pictures, here as well.

•  Don't over process the dough, you want to mix only until the dough just begins to form a ball.
• Let the dough rest for 30-60 minutes after you've mixed it.
• The dough is easiest to roll out and handle when it is cooler than room temperature, not cold though.
• Don't be afraid of using plenty of flour when you are rolling out the dough. You can always brush off any excess.
• You can make the balls of dough ahead and refrigerate, or freeze, until you are ready to use, allow the dough to warm before rolling out.
• When the dough is rolled out and in the pie plate keep it cool. I return it to the fridge whenever I am not working with it.

Happy baking, and, stay tuned for a Milk & Honey giveaway here next month!

Butterscotch Pie, Version 2.0

Image of pie available at: http://tinyurl.com/m2rmx29

You may recall not long ago I blogged about the Butterscotch Pie with Curry Crust from Bon Appetit. You also may recall, that I did not exactly love the recipe. However, I kept thinking about that pie. I thought there was a good idea there, and I thought the recipe could be improved upon. Yes, the Gourmets, Bon Appetits, and Saveurs of the world do not always have perfect recipes. Sometimes they are fabulous, and sometimes they need a little work.

So I decided to go to work on that recipe, and, let me tell you, I have changed my opinion -- this one will make it to our Thanksgiving spread. I started with modifying the texture. The first pie was too much like Jell-o for my taste. I upped the cornstarch, and decreased the gelatin, and voilà, much nicer mouthfeel. Secondly, I got rid of the molasses -- the caramelized sugar and brown sugar were plenty flavorful, and, I added whiskey, because heck, why not?

Now, about the crust. The crust is a big deal, it is what takes a kind of straight up custard pie and makes it interesting. And, while the curry in the crust was a great idea, I didn't want to hit diners over the head with it. I was hoping for more of a subtle, mysterious flavor that would make you go "Hmmm, what is that deliciousness?" I decreased the curry and the butter in the crust (there was way, way too much butter as the recipe was originally written). I also left out the sugar in the crust entirely. You use vanilla wafer cookies to make the crumbs -- given that these are already sweetened, I thought it unlikely the crust needed more sugar.

Disclaimer: this is not an easy recipe. It involves caramelizing sugar, and making a cooked egg custard on the stove -- arguably two of the more difficult techniques in cooking. But please, don't let this dissuade you from giving it a try. Whether it turns out perfectly, or gets messed up, you will learn a lot (which is fun!), and you might just end up with something of a showstopper on your Thanksgiving dessert table.

Thanksgiving Tour Continues

We continue today with a vegetable side dish, my favorite part of the menu, except for perhaps the pie.

I love this recipe because it is simple, fresh, and if you've never had sautéed snap peas, well then you are in for a treat. For the olive oil in this dish I used a basil infused oil, but any very good quality oil will do.

As far as timing goes, this is the one dish you should really do à la minute.  Begin this dish 15 minutes before you are ready to sit down. Then all that's left to do is carve the turkey and serve.

I love getting things done ahead, so below is a sample schedule I have sketched out of the cooking preparation.

Sample Preparation Schedule

2 days before -- Make stock.

1 day before -- Make cranberry sauce, make pie crusts, cube bread for stuffing, rub the turkey.

Morning of -- Make pies, assemble gratin (cover and refrigerate), assemble stuffing (cover and refrigerate), set out ingredients for vegetables.

3.5 hours before -- Start roasting turkey (2.5 hours for 14 lb, if your bird is larger, back up the start time accordingly).

2 hours before -- Make gravy base, make salad dressing.

1 hour - 45 minutes before -- Take turkey out of the oven to rest, bake gratin and stuffing, finish gravy.

15 min before -- Assemble and dress salad, make Peas and Carrots, carve turkey.

ENJOY!

Thanksgiving Tour -- Turkey

With one week until Thanksgiving this seems like the perfect time to "talk turkey." There are probably as many ways to cook turkey as there are . . . well I don't know what, but there are lots of ways to cook your turkey: grill, fry, smoke, brine, stuff, even, God forbid, microwave.

The thing is that a lot of these techniques are, frankly, a pain in the ass. I mean, to wet brine your turkey, you've got to get a big cooler, sanitize it, fill it, and go through a lot of hassle. You can purchase special turkey roasters. Heck, you can even buy an indoor turkey fryer for the low, low price of $209.99.

As I have mentioned before, simplicity and minimalism are important to me. Less is more, and all that. I was going to go ahead and cook a turkey specially for this post, to try to develop one of those other techniques mentioned above. But Thanksgiving is about tradition and gratitude. So I am grateful for my simple regular kitchen oven, and classic roast turkey.

Image available at: http://tinyurl.com/k5dea9t

A couple of years ago I followed this recipe from The Way the Cookie Crumbles (Which also happens to be the food blog that introduced me to food blogging). It came out PERFECTLY. I mean, perfectly perfect. The meat was moist and flavorful, and the skin was nice and brown. It left nothing to be desired -- so I present to you my favorite Turkey recipe.

May your Thanksgiving be peaceful, simple, thankful and tasty!