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Hi guys! I know I was a bit MIA but I’m having a writer’s block (if we can call my blabbing here writing). Yes …it happens sometimes, I’m Googling my brain for some interesting subjects but all I can hear are crickets. LOL What to do? I haven’t done much…nothing glamorous at least, no fancy vacation, just work…and boring stuff. *Sigh* I think I need a cocktail with little umbrellas something to cheer me up a little. Any ideas? Anyways…I made this risotto today with this ever so cute baby artichoke, artichoke is a bit of a mystery to me, Most of the time I have to go online for some video of “how to” and believe me there are plenty. Isn’t Internet wonderful? Well… I don’t know if I can call this a true risotto because I have used pearl barley instead. It’s not the first time that I use barley for risottos you can see it here, I find that it work pretty well; the only difference is that it has a bit of a bite and an even nuttier flavor. The radishes were a bit of a stretch but it worked for me. It gave my risotto a crunchy fresh flavor. For some Blackberry Coconut Cake please check my dessert site.

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Barley Risotto with Baby Artichoke

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup minced onions
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1-tablespoon olive oil
• 4 cups vegetable stock or water
• 1 1/2 cups pearl barley
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 1 cup grated Parmeggiano cheese
• 8 to 10 baby artichokes
• ½ cup of peas
• ½ cup of shaved radishes

Directions:

Here is a video of how to clean and cut the baby artichokes. Then Add trimmed cut in half Baby Artichokes to enough boiling water with a drizzle of olive oil, salt, and lemon juice to flavor the Artichokes. Cover tightly and simmer just until tender, about 15 to 20 minutes (time will vary depending on how many Baby Artichokes you are cooking at a time). Drain well. Set a side.

Heat the olive oil in a saucepan. Add the garlic and onions and cook them for 2 minutes over medium high heat. Add the pearl barley and cook it for 5 minutes to slightly toast the grains. Add the white wine and cook for a minute then add 3 cups of the stock or water, and some salt. Bring the barley to a boil then cover and reduce the heat to medium. Cook the barley 25 minutes. Add the remaining stock and the peas Cook for 10 minutes. Stir in the cheese and correct the seasonings. Add the artichokes and radishes.

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Hi guys, I don’t know about you but the more I learn about cooking and techniques, the more I find it difficult to be happy eating outside or just buying food. This week I decided to make this stuffed pork loin and I headed to ‘whole foods’ to buy my pork. I asked the guy if he could open- flat the loin because I wanted to stuff it. He said, …“Sure I can”. So I trusted his word, after all it is his profession…so he should know how to cut meat. Right? He was very nice and polite, but when I got home I saw that he only cut it in half. Oh Boy! I was angry…if all I wanted was to just cut in half, I would have done it myself. So in the end it didn’t look the way I wanted. But it tasted delicious. Next time I will cut the meat myself. There are videos on Youtube teaching you how to. So if you trust your meat guy and you know he is good doing his job, go ahead and make it easy on yourself. Or you can be crafty and try it with youtube. I know I will. I also made my own apricot Jam, with apricot, sugar, lemon juice, and 2 Thai chilies (I would prefer 1 habanero but that was what I had at home).

Stuffed Pork Loin

Ingredients:

• 9 Dried apricots
• 1 boneless pork loin (2 1/2 pounds) open flat (ask your meat guy)
• Goat cheese or cream cheese
• 1/2 cup of chopped toasted walnuts
• 1 tablespoon of chopped chives
• 1/2 cup of apricot jam
• 1tablespoon of whole grained Dijon mustard (with the seeds)
• 1-tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Bring 1 cup water to a boil in a small saucepan. Coarsely chop the dried apricots add apricots to water; return to a boil. Remove from heat; let stand for 20 minutes. Remove apricots using a slotted spoon, and squeeze; reserve liquid. Meanwhile, butterfly pork loin: (or ask your meat guy to do it for you) Pound to an even thickness with a meat mallet if needed. Sprinkle salt and pepper over pork. Mix the chopped walnuts with the goat cheese and the chives, season with salt and pepper.

Spread drained apricots and the cheese mixture over the pork, leaving a 1-inch border on 1 short end. Roll up pork from short end to enclose filling. Tie together with kitchen twine to shape and hold in the filling. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place in a roasting pan, seam side down. Bring reserved soaking liquid, the jam, lemon juice and mustard to a boil in a small saucepan. Reduce heat; simmer for 1 minute.

Roast pork for 20 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees, and roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center reaches 138 degrees, about 25 minutes more. Brush with glaze, and roast for 5 minutes more. Transfer pork to a platter; reserve juices in roasting pan. Let rest for 10 minutes. Brush with glaze again.

For the Green beans and Radishes salad

Ingredients:

• 1 lbs. fresh green beans, trimmed.
• 1/2-cup oil
• 4 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1-teaspoon salt
• 1/2-teaspoon pepper
• Radishes
• 1 cup Yellow grape tomatoes

Directions:

Prepare a large stockpot by filling it with water and bring to a boil, covering with a lid. Do not add salt, as this will draw water out of the beans. Fill a large bowl with ice water about one half full. Drop the prepared beans into the rapidly boiling water and cover. After 3 minutes, remove them with a large straining spoon into a large bowl of ice water. Let them cool down and stop the cooking process for about 5 minutes, stirring a little. Cut the grape tomatoes and radishes in half. Mix the vinaigrette and pour over the salad.

Feeling like something Sweet? Check my new dessert site:

Fresh Peach Orange Blossom Cookies

They are back…the little eggplant; I can’t resist them at the FM, they look so adorable. I’ll tell you all about them in a few. First I want to tell you about the great things I get through my site. I get great free stuff to try and sometimes some adorable totally awesome gifts from my online BFFs. Yesterday was like Christmas here in this household. First I got a box full of Pomegranate juice from Pom. Delish… and then a bit later I got a package from Canada, from Jenn from Defunkt Gourmet, Now Chinese Baba how adorable is that? She sent me a “thank you” letter (on a plantable seeds paper) with some teas, and a summer mix CD. I loved it. It was the coolest thing. If you don’t know who is Jenn yet, I’m sorry to say you are missing big time. She makes me laugh so hard sometimes, that I’m considering using adult dippers when I read her comments. ( Jenn giiiiirl… thank you so much for your sweet gift, you totally rock). Now back to my eggplants, the guy that sells these eggplants at the market already knows me by name. Today, I got there a little late and they were gone, so I asked him if he had some more and he told me that he kept some for me because he new I would show up. Really??? How sweet is that? Of course my husband now thinks I am having an affair with the eggplant guy. LOL By the way…have you guys checked my new Dessert site yet?

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Eggplant Harissa Crumble Cake

For the harissa tomato sauce

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves minced
• 1 medium onion chopped very small
• 5 tomatoes
• 1 tsp of cumin
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp harissa
• 1/3-cup honey
• 2 tbsp tomato paste

Direction:

Take the skin of the tomatoes and cut the tomatoes into squares, in a saucepan heat the olive oil and sauté the onions and garlic. Add the chopped tomatoes, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, harissa, honey, tomato paste, salt and pepper. And let it simmer for at least 1 hour or until it turned into a thick paste. Let it cool down.

Pre-heat the oven to 350F. In a baking tray, roast 2 big eggplants or 10 baby ones with salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Remember they are going to be in the oven, so you don’t want them to melt and disappear. When it’s done set them aside to cool down.

Mix the roasted eggplant with the harissa tomato sauce and reserve.

For the eggplant cake:

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 6 tbsp (100 ml) milk
• 6 tbsp (100 ml) olive oil
• 1-½ cups of flour
• 1¼ cups grated mild cheddar cheese
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• Salt and pepper

For the crunchy crumble:

Ingredients:

• 4 tbsp butter
• 1cup of breadcrumbs
• 2 garlic cloves minced

Direction:

In a skillet melt the butter and sauté the minced garlic; add the breadcrumbs and sauté until the breadcrumbs begin to crisp.

Combine the eggs, milk, and olive oil in a large bowl and beat together. Add the flour and grated cheese. Season with salt and pepper stir to combine. Gently fold the baking powder. Add the eggplant mixture and fold. Transfer to the prepared baking dish top it with the crumbles and bake for 40 minutes (350F), leave to cool before removing from backing dish. Sprinkle some chopped parsley and serve.

You guys believe in the law of attraction? Well now I do…. it all started with a simple little issue in my template, and then it all fell apart. It was like a domino effect. All my electronic devices decided to gang up on me. Even my iphone broke down.  So Here’s what happened …while I was trying to fix a problem with my server, this so call “expert” technical adviser, ill advised me to reboot my site back to an older version of wordpress. I have to admit, I know very little about computer programming and when I hear the word “expert”, I really believe the person I’m talking to know’s what he or she is talking about (in most cases it’s a he rather then a she, why is that?) Anyway, to cut the story short, I lost all my posts from July including the comments. No need to say I had a total nervous break down right? So after I let him know how unhappy I was with his service, he somehow managed to restore some of my posts back. But my very last pasta salad post was forever gone with all the comments I had received for it. So I’m sorry if some of you didn’t get a reply or something. I remember somebody asked me about the red jars in my picture. They are from a store called “Cost Plus world Market“. Now everything is back to normal, and I truly hope that it will stay that way (please blue host and wordpress, have some mercy…). So as you can imagine, I didn’t cook much this week. Last night I had this simple fennel and orange salad that I love. It’s very refreshing, and very simple to make. Enjoy.

Fennel and Orange Salad

Ingredients:

• 1 big fennel bulb
• 3 oranges
• 1/4 cup good olive oil
• 2 lemons, juiced
• Kosher salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Kalamata olives

Directions:

Cut the fronds from the fennel bulb and reserve some of the feathery leaves for later Slice the fennel bulb very thinly with a mandolin. Peel the oranges, remove the pith with a knife, and cut segments.

For the dressing:

Whisk together the olive oil,  lemon juice, salt and the pepper in a small bowl. Place the fennel slices, oranges slices and in a large bowl. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss together. Add the olives and some fennel fronds for decoration

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Oh Dear! I forgot how difficult (for me at least) it is to tune and tweak a template to get it to look the way you want. This past week I pulled my hair, I cried , I destroyed all the work that was done already by accident, I called the poor soul that was helping me a zillion times. He is probably changing his number right now as we speak (type). (Sorry man! Thank you for all your patience, you are an angel). Then the dammed plugins…..ahhhhhh! I could totally chew some nasty plugins and spit it out. LOL. I made the design for ‘bakerwanabe’, but some little nasty details were depending on the skills of a programmer. Oh! I wish I new html, php, etc.etc. It’s so frustrating having something in your head and not to be able to make it work.

The template is okay now, almost working, I’m still having some issues with the Meta. I have to put my password again and again all the time I change pages, it’s a mystery… Sigh*….big sigh*…but there is good out of all this chagrin. The response couldn’t be better. I want to thank all of you that came and befriended me all over again at foodbuzz, my phone biped the whole day on Thursday with foodbuzz friend requests or comments. I really appreciate the support. I even made to top 9. Thank you guys so much. So last Saturday I planned a picnic at the beach, to relax and get rid of all the bad energy. It was a night picnic, I brought some lanterns, and had my little salad with under the moon light. I don’t know about you but I think night picnics at the beach are darn romantic, the ocean waves, the moon light, the mosquitoes… well not everything is perfect. But it was worth it.

Picnic Pasta Salad

Ingredients:

• 1/2 pound short pasta
• Kosher salt for the pasta water
• 1 pound grape or cherry tomatoes
• 3/4 cup good black, kalamata olives, pitted
• 1 pound good feta cheese, medium-diced
• 1 cucumber diced
• 4 radishes shaved in a mandolin
• 1 can of garbanzo bean washed and drained
• ¼ of purple cabbage sliced very thinly

For the dressing:

• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• 6 tablespoons good olive oil
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 cup fresh dill, chopped

Directions:

Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and place them in a large bowl. Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water (season the water is very important). Boil for 12 minutes, or according to the directions on the package. Drain well and allow to cool. Place the pasta in a bowl and add the tomatoes, olives, feta, cucumber, garbanzo beans, radishes, and cabbage. For the dressing, combine the olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, dill,  salt and pepper and whisk to combine. Pour the dressing over the pasta, and toss well.