Herb Crusted Cornish Game Hen Recipe

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A little hen with alot of flavor! Darn it was so tender the wings fell off!


2 Cornish Game Hens
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon each salt, pepper and paprika
1 stick melted butter
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon for each hen minced garlic in olive oil
ziplock bag
Roasting pan with rack
Water
2 celery stalks

Rinse the game hen under water. Melt butter in a pie plate. Roll each hen in butter.  In a extra large ziplock bag add the cup of flour with 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning, salt, pepper and paprika. Shake the hens in the flour one at a time. In the cavity add the minced garlic and 1 stalk of celery and any leftover melted butter.
Bake at 350 degree preheated oven on a roasting rack. Add on the bottom of the pan,  water 1/2 inch deep.  Tent loosely with aluminum foil.  Remove foil after 1/2 hour of cooking.
Cook until the skin is brown and crispy around 45 minutes more or until the juices run clear.

The Chubby Vegetarian Thanksgiving Cooking Class on Saturday, Nov. 3 in Memphis

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(UPDATE: WINNERS! Commenters Ssummers and James C. Williams, you have a spot at our class -- see you next Saturday at 6! Show up and just let us know via FB message this week if you have any questions. Glad to see you then.)

We are so excited to be hosting Thanksgiving early this year -- and you're invited! Come learn how to make Acorn Squash Stuffed with Dried Apricots and Chanterelles Topped with Miracle Mushroom Gravy; try your hand at our famous-within-the-family Brussels Sprout Salad with Candied Pecans and Smoked Goat Cheese; make your own Pomegranate Cranberry Sauce from scratch; and bake a Sweet Potato Pie with a Rosemary Cookie Crust with us to finish the meal. We'll teach you how to make the TCV family favorites that our families request this time of year.

In addition to walking you through a few simple steps to a perfect vegetarian Thanksgiving, we'll discuss the wine selection for your new menu. Of course, you'll also get a taste of everything that we create at the class.

Please don't make a sad frozen tofu turkey for your guests this year. Make a fresh, seasonal meal that everyone will be talking about until next Thanksgiving rolls around. Join us, won't you.

The Chubby Vegetarian Thanksgiving Cooking Class
In Memphis at the Downtown Cooking School

Saturday, Nov. 3, 6-8 p.m

Cost: $35 per person

Click HERE to register for the Thanksgiving Dinner class with Justin Fox Burks and Amy Lawrence or call 901.255.2562.

*CONTEST: We are giving away one place in our class to two separate commenters in Memphis or the surrounding areas. Winners will be chosen at random; to be in the running, just tell us about their best or worst vegetarian Thanksgiving meal. We know how it goes; oysters in the dressing, obviously non-veg marshmallows covering up the sweet potatoes, and that giant bird staring at you all day long while you virtually starve to death. Or maybe you have a few tricks up your sleeve when it comes to sidestepping these conundrums? Either way, leave us a comment and tell us all about it.

We will pick our winners on Friday. We can't wait to hear from you and see you in our class in less than 2 weeks!

5 Quick Questions with Chef Ben Vaughn of The Food Nework

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Justin: Ben and I became friends over food. He is one of the first chefs to invite me into his kitchen and teach me how to really construct a dish. It was in the kitchen at Grace that I nervously went from someone who had a passion for cooking to someone who could actually cook. I'll always be grateful for that. 


Amy: I was fortunate to be able to write the "Dining Out" column for Memphis Magazine before I started to focus more on home cooking, and Ben's food at his restaurant Grace knocked me over during my two little undercover visits. That article was a blast to write because I had the opportunity to share what I had found in my sweet hometown. I knew Ben's food first, but once I knew him as a person, I found him to be very inspiring, always open to collaborate with us and help us take our ideas further. Once, he improved upon and served our Cinnamon-Persimmon Sauce. That was awesome when I was just starting out and trying to be creative.
Justin: Ben has since moved to Atlanta, Georgia and taken a job as head chef at White Oak Kitchen & Cocktails. He also has his own show on the Food Network called Health Inspectors, which premieres tonight, Friday, October 26, at 10:30 pm/9:30 central. He told me all about it when we met up for breakfast the other day.

Photo courtesy of the Food Network

1. You've held every job in the kitchen from potato peeler to Chef/Owner. What experience has taught you the most?The experience I most learned from was how to motivate and inspire constantly. The restaurant business is tough with long days and nights. If I can't keep my spirits up and drive the team, teach, motivate, inspire, and build an ongoing culture, the air has left the balloon, folks. It's the small things that really keep your staff in tune, a handshake, a hug, or just a fist bump. I learned these lessons later on, and they would have been incredibly useful early on. 
2. Your food style is unique; it seems to be informed by your life experience. Tell me about the moment when your style clicked. My food style is my style: regionally respectful, clean, familiar, but without boundaries. I think it really clicked in Memphis right before I joined River Oaks. I knew no one in town, and I kind of wanted everyone to just say, "Where did this guy come from?" once they tasted my food.

3. You were discovered by the Food Network by answering an ad on Craigslist for a restaurant consultant while you were looking for new opportunities in Memphis. Is that right?It sort if goes like that. It's really not a great story, I was doing what I do, and they were busy being the Food Network. After running a few restaurants in Memphis, I felt a huge calling to share my lessons learned with other restaurant chefs and owners, and that's the relationship that ultimately led to the television pilot.
4. Could you ever have imagined yourself with your own show? What has the experience of stepping into that role been like?Honest answer – not so much, but in some ways, I'm a performer.  My stage has been the kitchen, and that's my first love; it will always call me back.

5. What dishes are you nostalgic about, and what dishes are you cooking now?I'm nostalgic about eggs and pancakes. It's a memory of my childhood. A celebration of family coming together. Since I spend evenings in the restaurants, I miss most family dinners, so I make sure to catch up with my amazing family as often as possible over breakfast. Now I'm working on a style of food that show cases a single ingredient prepared to complete an entire plate.  For example: Duck.  On tonight's menu at White Oak, sous vide breast of duck, duck glacé, confit of leg, terrine of sweet potatoes and duck bacon, and duck cracklings...and, well, it’s not vegetarian. 

Easy Monkey Bread

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Sometimes you have to ease up a bit and go with the classic way a recipe is made. It really needs to have a good payoff, though, to be worth the shameful cheats.

True story: we are back to dreams of developing our own strawberry cake recipe after following to a T a famous Southern lady's recipe for it last week. Even gave in to using a box of vegetarian strawberry jell-o (!) and a bag of frozen strawberries (!) and, yes, a box of white cake mix (!!!) in the hopes of nailing strawberry cake for the first time. Well, it tasted kind of all right, but it ended up with a strangely moist texture and eerie brown color. Why is strawberry cake so hard to make from scratch and just as disappointing made from boxes? Someone, please let us know.

This monkey bread is different. It will take you about 5 minutes to make for brunch this weekend if you can get over your weird Southern pride about your own finely honed biscuit recipe and just go ahead and get some buttermilk biscuits in a can -- we like Immaculate Baking Company's work in this area.

What a fun recipe to try since we have been meaning to make monkey bread forever, monkey bread like Mama Diane made a lot back in the day, the kind of monkey bread you pick at with abandon as soon as it's out of the oven. You should try your hand at it, too -- we cut way down on the amount of sugar and butter used in other recipes, it couldn't be easier to make, and it's a ton of fun to share.

Easy Monkey Bread

1 can buttermilk biscuits
1/3 cup cane sugar (like Whole Foods 365 brand)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/3 cup chopped walnuts
1/3 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup unsalted butter (melted; like Whole Foods 365 brand)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut each unbaked biscuit into 6 pieces. Loosely roll the pieces into balls. Set aside. Mix cinnamon, salt and sugar in a bowl. Toss into biscuit pieces a few at a time and toss to coat. Add in the walnuts and raisins. With a silicone brush, brush a bunt pan with a little bit of the butter to coat. Add in biscuit mixture and pour any of the mixture's sugar, raisins, and nuts that are left in the bowl on top. Pour remainder of butter over bread. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Invert bread onto a plate and serve. 

Huitlacoche and Sweet Potato Quesadillas With Chipotle Cream

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Huitlacoche, also known as the Mexican truffle (or by its less appealing common name, corn smut), is a mushroom-like fungus that grows on corn. It invades the plant through the stalk and feeds off of the kernels. When you peel back the corn silk of a plant that has been infected with the huitlacoche fungus, it looks like the corn has gone horribly wrong. It's kind of chunky and also looks like a smear of black ink. That aside, it's delicious. I'd describe the taste as earthy, bittersweet, with a faint herbal flavor of oregano. It's quite a delicacy in Mexico. It hasn't quite caught on here.

You can find huitlacoche in some Mexican supermarkets if you look, but if you are really interested in finding it, Amazon always has a few vendors that supply it. I've served it stuffed into poblano peppers, had it served to me stuffed inside of empanadas in Austin, Texas. I have had it at El Palmar on Summer Avenue in Memphis. 

These quesadillas are a great thing to do when you're ready to put corn smut to good use. The mild sweetness of the sweet potato plays nicely off of the bittersweetness of the huitlacoche, and the creamy/spicy blend of the chipotle sour cream is the perfect garnish.

Huitlacoche and Sweet Potato Quesadillas With Chipotle Cream

1 tablespoon canola oil (more for cooking the quesadillas; like Whole Foods 365 brand)
1 1/4 cups finely diced sweet potato (1 small)
sea salt and cracked black pepper (to taste)
7 ounces oaxaca or mozzarella (shredded)
7 small corn or flour tortillas
7 ounce can Huitlacoche
Chipotle Sour Cream (recipe follows)
chives (to garnish)

In a medium pan over medium heat, heat the oil until it shimmers. Add the sweet potato and cook, turning often, until sweet potato has softened. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside. Assemble the quesadillas by layering in equal amounts of cheese onto each tortilla and then continuing with equal amounts of huitlacoche and sweet potato. Close each tortilla. In a medium pan over medium heat, add a touch of oil and grill each quesadilla until lightly brown and the cheese has melted (about 2 minutes per side). Garnish with chipotle sour cream and chives.

Chipotle Sour Cream

7 ounces Mexican Crema or sour cream
2 chipotle pepper (from a can)
1 clove garlic

Place crema, chipotle, and garlic in a food processor and blend until smooth. Set aside in the fridge until ready to use.

I'm Angry... At a Candle

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Well, not really. I'm really mad at my camera. Or maybe my eye. I don't know. I'm just angry.

I challenge you to make today's project and then go outside to try to photograph it and just SEE if you can get your SLR to focus in the right place!

I couldn't do manual focus because I actually hold my projects to take photos of them. I don't have a little outdoor photobooth set up and I really do prefer natural light.

So 300 blurry photos later, I finally got ONE pic I could use. *Growls*

I was on YNN again last week, doing handmade fall projects. We painted a pumpkin like a candy corn, did fall tealights, a little bat that held a Hershey nugget and this candle.

Now if you haven't gotten the new Stampin' Up! two stage heat gun, this project is a great reason to do so. We've all made disastrous, lumpy decorated candles by over-melting them when we were attaching the tissue paper, but the new gun has a lower heat setting that makes this MUCH easier.

To make the leaf, I just folded up tissue paper so that I was making about 8 leaves at once, and I cut them with my Autumn Accents die. These are all the shapes it cuts


It matches this stamp set:



I didn't use the stamps this time - I used Direct to Paper with More Mustard and Pumpkin Pie ink pads randomly all over the leaves.

Then just hold it on your candle and gently heat until you see the wax melt through the tissue paper and you're all done! I move my heat gun around a lot so I don't melt it too much in any one spot.

I thought about adding more leaves, but I ended up liking how clean and bright this looked, so I think I'll leaf it alone. Heh.


Can you be-leaf how simple and quick that is? It took much longer just to type about it!

Are you ready for fall? Our first cool temperatures have snuck in while I wasn't looking and it's a nice break!

Makes me less angry when I run outside to curse at a candle!

Loveyameanitbye.

Earl Grey & Miracle Whip - a Genetic Mystery Story

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So I haven't even had any espresso since we got back from Santa Fe because I'm SO addicted to these London Fogs! In case you missed it, here's how you order it at Starbucks: Grande whole milk no water five pump Earl Grey tea latte. It's a lot of words, but it's worth it. It's the best drink in the world.

However, I've noticed something since raving about this drink.

There are people with a very serious genetic anomaly I wasn't aware of before now. It's frightening for the families of those affected, I'm sure.

These people suffer from Earl Grey Aversion Disorder Syndrome - or EGADS for short.

EGADS!! How can you not like Earl Grey?? Well, aside from a genetic disorder, that is...

I questioned my sister on the subject, as she suffers from EGADS, and she claims that it's the bergamot.

Pfft.

No one's ever heard of bergamot or would be able to identify it in a tastebud lineup. That is just a person in denial about EGADS.

I posed this question to my barista this morning -I said, "Barista, what is wrong with people who don't like Earl Grey?" And she made a very wise observation. She said "You know - it's like those MIRACLE WHIP people." And I think I saw an eyeroll.

She's right you know. Miracle Whip is only enjoyed by a small group of people with a similar genetic defect. Normal people eat mayonnaise, you know. And drink Earl Grey tea.

These are the things that divide our nation!

How will we achieve world peace with imaginary bergamot and Miracle Whip keeping us apart??

While I ponder that, I'm going to have a London Fog and keep calm and carry on.




Stamps: Carry OnInk: Midnight Muse, Poppy Parade, Tangerine Tango, Summer Sun, Lucky Limeade, Tempting Turquoise
Keep your chin up and try to have empathy for those with EGADS and Miracle Whip Affinity Disorder. 

I'm sure Bono will get all over these causes soon. 

Loveyameanitbye.