One of the bartenders at my local tavern is a good cook, and for Saint Patrick's Day she brought corned beef, cooked carrots, mashed potato with cabbage and bacon, and red potato. Someone else brought a Mexican style chicken dish with whole jalapeño peppers, and I contributed my homemade Irish Cream cheesecake that was flavored with Irish cream liqueur and had Irish butter in the crust. The top photo shows my savory lunch plate after I helped myself, and the bottom photo shows my cheesecake before some pieces got eaten and the rest mysteriously disappeared. This was a good and memorable Saint Patrick's Day meal.
Location: Escapade Tavern, 12347 Palm Drive, Desert Hot Springs, California. Date: March 17, 2024.
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This is the second time I've made this chicken recipe from Senegal, this time for two friends visiting from Spain. It's relatively simple but very delicious. You marinate bone in chicken thighs in lemon juice and mustard seasoned with some salt. You brown them in some oil, take them out, and add the weight of the chicken in thinly sliced onion. You turn down the heat and slowly caramelize the onion. You return the chicken to the pot, add chicken broth, lots of garlic cloves, and a habanero pepper, and you simmer until the sauce thickens and the chicken falls off the bone. Serve chicken with onion sauce on top of rice and garnish with chopped parsley. The tender chicken is a little sour from the lemon juice, a little sweet from the copious amount of caramelized onion, and a touch spicy from the habanero. Try it!
Location: My home in Desert Hot Springs, California Date: January 16, 2024. About once a week, Felix shows up at my local pub to sell his wife's homemade tamales. The jalapeño and cheese are so good that I haven't even tried the others yet. I love that she uses the spicy jalapeño instead of the milder poblano chiles because the spice kicks the tamale to a new level, plus the masa (corn dough) is so well seasoned. The cheese was a somewhat chewy yellow version, but it worked great with the chiles. The bartender said that these were the best tamales in Desert Hot Springs, and I would say that the chile and cheese ones were the best I've ever had.
Location: Escapade Bar, 12347 Palm Drive, Desert Hot Springs, California. Date: January 12, 2024. Huey came across a lot of carrots, and he made carrot soup at his home. I frequent his restaurant, Smokin' Burgers, and he brought samples of his soup for select patrons to taste. I told him that if he brought me a whole bowl of it, I would blog it. He did, and I asked for a green garnish for the photograph, and as you can see, it was three slices of jalapeño, two of which I ate with the soup for that extra spice. The soup consisted of yellow onion, garlic, virgin olive oil, fresh ginger, apple cider vinegar, pepper, chicken stock, carrots (of course), organic maple syrup, and cream. It was savory, creamy, just a touch sweet, and very delicious. Huey suggested it could be made vegetarian with vegetable stock or vegan with the vegetable stock and coconut cream instead of the dairy cream.
Location: Smokin' Burgers, 1775 E Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs, California. Date: January 5, 2024. I think this cake is going to be my holiday tradition from now on. It takes almost three months to make, but the result is magical. I used raisins, prunes, and dried cherries and brought them to a boil in spiced rum and sour cherry brandy with cinnamon stick and star anise. After an hour of soaking, I removed the spices and made a paste out of the fruit in a food processor. I then added this to the cake mixture, sweetened only with brown sugar, and after baking one bastes the cake with the rum and brandy along with some sherry wine. You wrap it up and store it for ten weeks or so, basting it once a week. It's dense but moist, and it's not too sweet. I took the tin you see in the pic to Escapade Tavern for their Christmas potluck today, and even people who claimed they didn't like fruit cake seemed to like this boozy version.
Location: At Home in Desert Hot Springs, California. Date: December 23, 2023. I love it when food comes with a story. Lee, a retired sheriff's officer, learned how to make salsa from his mother in El Paso, Texas, and they obviously know how to make salsa in El Paso. He uses soy sauce instead of salt, peeled tomatoes, tomato paste, and three different chiles: jalapeños, anaheims, and yellow wax. He made a jar for someone named Bill, but that guy didn't show up at the bar so Lee gave the jar to the bartender and she gave it to me because she's not into heat. I tasted the salsa in front of Lee, and it was spicy but loaded with flavor.
Location: Escapade Tavern, 12347 Palm Drive, Desert Hot Springs, California. Date: December 1, 2023. My friend Joe made cassoulet for Christmas and froze the leftovers. He thawed them out when I visited, and what a wonderful and savory dish! His cassoulet contained merguez sausage (a lamb sausage from Morocco), duck sausage, chicken thighs, and pork shoulder, along with the beans, of course (great northern). He cooked all the meat in duck fat, and he credits that for the authentic taste. He also added onion, garlic, carrot, and chopped tomato. He seasoned the dish with salt and pepper, fresh thyme and basil, and bay leaves, and he slow simmered it all night. Joe woke up to the wonderful aroma filling the whole house. When he warmed it up for me, in a clay pot in the oven, he grated comte cheese on top (it's French gruyere). The grated cheese got a little crispy, and the meats and the beans were melt in your mouth.
Location: Private Home, Redlands, California. Date: April 28, 2022. I've used Shan brand butter chicken spice before, but not with chicken sausage. What I did was to saute onion and garlic in butter, and then I added the Pakistani spice mix and the sliced sausage with peas, peeled tomato, and yogurt. I cooked fingerling potatoes separately and added them to the curry to make a complete one pot meal. It was creamy, spicy, a touch sweet and sour, and very savory.
Location: Private Home, Desert Hot Springs, California. Date: January 18, 2021. The owner of Smoke Tree BBQ in Palm Springs decided to make Chef Steven's chili recipe, but it called for dried chiles that needed to be soaked and pureed, so the owner decided to use a shortcut and add canned chipotle chiles. The result was so spicy that he tried to cut it with diced canned tomatoes and even sour cream, and he also added smoked brisket to the ground beef. It didn't work, but what it did do was to create the tastiest chili I've ever had. It was bright with sweetness, sourness, and that intense heat. There was also some smokiness, and I definitely tasted cumin. This is one of those rare dishes that I'll never taste again because, by his own admission, the owner of Smoke Tree BBQ will be unable to replicate it. At my friends' house, I decided to add some drained and rinsed canned corn to it, and I served it with egg noodles that I tossed in a brown butter and caper sauce seasoned with garlic salt and parmesan cheese. The heat still came through with force, but it was a very delicious dish.
Location: Private Home, Whitewater, California. Date: November 21, 2021. My favorite way to eat salmon is raw, as in sushi, but some friends, who I'm house sitting for, left me some frozen salmon, and since I assumed that it wasn't sushi grade, I decided to cook it. I sauteed onion slices in butter with a little olive oil to prevent the butter from burning, and I seasoned with freshly ground sea salt. I removed the onion from the pan when it was soft, and I seared the salmon skin side down in the same pan until the skin was crispy. I'd seasoned the cut side of the salmon generously with Chef Paul Prudhomme's Seafood Magic seasoning blend. I removed the salmon from the pan and added back the onion as well as some capers with some of their brine. I then placed the fish on top, seasoned side down, turned off the heat, and let the salmon coast to cooked perfection. I served it skin side up, to retain the crispness, and put the onions and the butter caper sauce around. The salmon was cooked through but still moist. The dish was a balance of salty, tart, and spicy, but in an understated way; it was really all about the moist salmon and the crispy skin.
Location: Private Home, Whitewater, California. Date: November 19, 2021. |
AuthorChef Roland has been a legal resident of seven countries and has travelled in over thirty, documenting food along the way. He currently resides in the desert in Southern California. Categories
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