I’ll get to our feast of the seven fishes soon, but I wanted to share with all of you a  New Year’s Eve tradition that is so delicious (and slightly nauseating but just trust me) you will be sad you’ve missed eating it all these years! The Palluzzis know how to cook a variety of things, from gourmet to comfort to baked goods, and this definitely falls under the comfort category.

I give you: Crabbies.

• 1 stick butter, softened
• 1 jar Old English cheese spread (pub cheese from TJ’s works)
• 1/2 tsp. garlic salt
• 1 1/2 tsp. mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp. seasoned salt
• 1 (7 oz.) can crab meat
• 6 English muffins

Here’s what you do. Take the everything but the muffins and mix it well. Spread over the English muffins.

Freeze for at least 20 minutes. Have someone figure out how to fit them in the freezer. In this case, it was my brother-in-law, Jon.

Cut each English muffin half into quarters. You must freeze them because you need to be able to cut them up nicely, and if you don’t freeze, this won’t happen. Also, you need to make sure the cheese doesn’t melt too fast, or else you have a gooey mess.

Put in broiler for about 10 minutes, until cheese is bubbly.

Serve to all your friends and you will be so happy you did, because now you’re everyone’s favorite person ever. Thanks to Kylah and Nikki for whipping this up for our NYE party!

Do you have a New Year’s tradition? Or some appetizer recipe your family always made? Please share you faves with us!

Happy New Year everyone! For 2012, we’ve been thinking about a new project for Garlic, My Soul. Now that we’re finally getting the hang of this bi-coastal thing, we realize that we have different ingredients available to us based on our locales, along with different taste testers along for the ride.

We want to make this year about reinventing our cooking; we’ve grown comfortable with a wheelhouse of ingredients, using them the same few ways, and we want to branch out. It’s time to learn some new uses for the foods we know and love and add some fresh skills and previously unexplored items to our kitchen cabinets. This year will be about pushing the boundaries of our collective skill sets but also about getting back to basics, and that means focusing on other people’s recipes. In our opinion, trying a new recipe is the absolute best way to get outside your comfort zone and actually learn something new.

In keeping with tradition, we’ve come up with a name to our project: [Ingredient], my Soul. Each month, we’d like to showcase an ingredient, talk about its origin, history, and common uses, then bring you recipe reviews using that ingredient.

In the first week of the month, we’ll try to educate ourselves about the ingredient and share with you some of our findings.  For the rest of that month, we’ll follow up with three recipes that will highlight that ingredient’s use. We’ll each choose one recipe to make on our own and report back, and at least once a month we’ll both make the same recipe on our separate coasts and give you a compare and contrast post. This will give us a chance to modify the recipe by locality, get two completely different perspectives on the same dish, and hopefully have a little fun playing around with our newly bi-coastal blog.

And by the way, we would LOVE your ideas and feedback. This year, please free to challenge us to something new and exciting. We love your input and your fresh perspective, so keep those emails, comments, suggestions, challenges, and recipe requests coming!

Hopefully this challenge excites you as much as it does us – stay tuned for January, when we’re planning to kick off the year by learning about a vastly undervalued vegetable: The mighty leek.

As you may know, Jennie’s family always does a traditional feast of the seven fishes for their Christmas Eve dinner. Well, this year, Mary, one of my other other halves, wanted to do our own version of this tradition.

Feast of the Seven Fishes is an Italian tradition with roots in the Roman Catholic practice of eating seafood on specific holy days like Christmas Eve because of abstaining from eating meat products. Now, neither Mary nor I are Catholic or Italian, but we thought this tradition sounded like something we needed to get in on. Since we were mostly interested in cooking lots of yummy fish for friends, we thought it would be okay to move the feast to New Year’s Eve and invite our friends to collaborate by making it a potluck.

As usual things got hectic in the kitchen right around meal time, so it was lucky that T.R. offered to help out and take a few photos while Mary and I were juggling hot pans.

Here are Mary and Zak looking very snazzy and transferring Zak’s salmon with mango chutney and pomegranate seeds to a pretty plate for mass consumption.

Meg who is looking cute and sparkly for New Year’s Eve is also being my sous chef for the linguine with clam sauce we threw together in about 15 minutes.

Another kitchen shot of ladies in pretty dresses. This is me and my friend Rose. You’re also getting a sneak peak at my new kitchen. I’ll provide a more thorough introduction at a later date.

And here is a partial view of the complete feast. You can see Zak’s salmon on the far left, my linguine with clam sauce is in the blue casserole dish, there’s a tuna casserole right up front, shrimp risotto in that cooking pot, and some crab dip barely visible at the very back.

From another angle, you can see Mary’s parmesan crusted tilapia in the front, as well as the shrimp cocktail. That other delicious casserole is some incredible mac and cheese. No seafood in that one, just pure deliciousness.

And so our complete feast of seven seafood dishes was

Linguine with Clam Sauce
Salmon with Mango Chutney
Parmesan Crusted Tilapia with Caper Lemon Butter Sauce
Crab Dip
Shrimp Cocktail
Shrimp Risotto
Tuna Casserole

Yes, we cheated a little by having two shrimp dishes, but we didn’t care. After all, that was a 2011 problem and it is now 2012. On to new adventures, right?

T.R. made it a truly perfect evening by providing delicious chocolate orange crème brule to everyone’s delight. We rang in the new year with very full bellies and smiles on our faces. I hope all of you had fun in the last hours of 2011!

Greetings chickadees! We’re heading into a new year this weekend, and although we definitely have to round out our Cucina Fresca for 2011, we’re already cooking up a new challenge for 2012.

As we all head into another holiday weekend, I’d like to share with you a few memories from the past year, including the Cucina Fresca project.

In January, we were obsessed with kale.

In February, we enjoyed delicious chili with five colors…

March was a quiet month, because we were preparing for April, and our photoshoot, and our cross-country road trip.

In May, we learned to be apart and ventured into video tutorials.

June brought us to guest posts from several friends, and also found us focusing on veggie heavy meals.

In July, Corelyn was in school and I was with a broken finger…and so we were mostly quiet, except for a few posts including a rose cake.

This summer we also talked about big changes at GMS, which lead to our website launch in the fall.

In August, we canned.

In September, we enjoyed delicious shrimp, embracing the fact that we have access to awesome seafood!

In October, we embraced the football season with some appetizers that would be man and lady friendly.

In November we made some killer Thanksgiving recipes, and were also reunited.

This is a photo Mary took from Thanksgiving!!

In November, we also launched our new website, which gave us a more professional look that we were yearning for. We also had a few more regular bloggers added, which gives us more time to work on photography, recipe development, and the site’s overall look!

In December, we baked, and cooked with friends, and had guest bloggers blog to their hearts’ content, and spent some time plotting for 2012.

2011 was a year of many changes to GMS, but overall they were changes for the better, we like to think. Although we’re bi-coastal now, we have embraced this new blogging style and can’t wait to invite you to meet some new people next year, as well as bring you a 2012 challenge. Happy New Year, everyone!

So today I tackle my first post that isn’t a review or an introduction.  I am very excited and as promised this post will be related to how you can use alcohol in food.  So I decided rather than starting with something like a beer can chicken recipe or a wine marinated steak (don’t worry we will get to those) I would start with something a bit simpler and sweeter.

The words Port or Tawny don’t come up to often in the vocabulary of recreational drinkers. These dessert wines are often overlooked for their friends, hard liquor, mixed drinks, and beer.  But they can hit the spot as a nightcap or can enhance the flavors of a side dish to compliment your dinner.  So today I am going to talk about a meal I made for my lovely lady Mary.  Who, by the way, also took all my photos.  (If you would like to see more of her work click here.)

MEAL:
Atlantic Salmon with sides of salted edamame and tawny soaked Bartlett pears. I served this with a 2009 Woodstock Collection Honey Pie.

INGREDIENTS: Serves 2 people
1 lb. of Atlantic salmon
2 pears
1 lemon
1 Bag of frozen edamame
1 tsp. of salt
1 cup of tawny
olive oil
1/2 cup of potlatch seasoning

When it comes to a dessert wine to choose for the pears I went with Penfolds Tawny.  I find it has just the right amount of sweetness and really enhances the flavors of the pears.

So where to start?  First thing I like to do is get the salmon out of its package and onto a flat surface, a plate or cutting board, this makes it easier to rub in the spices.

Once you have the salmon laid out and cut in half, I like to start with a layer of some salt. So take the salt you have put aside for yourself and rub it evenly into your salmon.

Then you want to grab your potlatch seasoning.  I love this stuff.  I was introduced to it several years ago by a wonderful girl named Katharine.  Since then I use it every time I make salmon.  Upon investigation by Mary, we found that you can purchase a can at Williams Sonoma for about 15 dollars.  Trust me – it is worth it.  Go ahead and rub the seasoning into the salmon.  Don’t be afraid to push it into the fish a bit.  It makes for flavorful surprises once cooked.

After you have the seasoning and salt on the salmon, give it a couple of minutes to settle. While you are waiting, go ahead and throw your edamame into a pot with some water.  Put it on the stove on high. And let the boiling process begin.

Next step grab the dessert wine and pour the cup of the liquid into a bowl.

Next cut up your pears into thin slices.  You don’t want them shredded thin because that will cause them to shrivel in the pan when you cook them.  Just thin enough to allow for the dessert wine to be able to soak into them.  After you cut the pears, put your slices into the bowl filled with your dessert wine and let them soak for 5 minutes.

At this point your edamame should be starting to heat up.  When the pot starts to boil, wait for a ring of foam to form at the top.  When it does, turn the burner off and allow the edamame to cool while you prepare the salmon and pears.

Grab two large frying pans and cover them with olive oil. One pan will be for your salmon, the other for your pears after they have soaked in the wine.

Dealing with the salmon first, bring your pan to medium heat.  When you can feel the heat coming off the center of the pan go ahead and drop the salmon into it.  Make sure you keep skin on the bottom of the fish so it can absorb the initial heat so the exposed fish doesn’t get burned.

After a minute, go ahead and flip the salmon, so the skin side is facing up.  Get a pair of tongs and gently pull the skin from the fish.  The initial heat should have charred it enough to allow for an easy removal.  It is important to do this gently so you don’t break up the fish.

After you remove the skin go ahead flip the salmon back over.  You’ll want to keep an eye on the salmon and alternate every few minutes until the center is a nice pinkish orange color.  While you are cooking the salmon throw a few slices of lemon onto the top of the fish while it is in the pan.  The juices leak through and it adds a nice citrus kick later on.

Now it is time to get to the pears while your salmon is on the pan next to you.  Bring up the secondary pan to medium heat and drop in a few slices of pear at a time.  Do not drop in all the liquid at once – you want to allow the liquid that has soaked into the pears to burn out a little.  But make sure you reserve the liquid for a few minutes.  Use a pair of tongs to make sure the pears don’t remain static in the pan.  You want them to be sweet.

After a minute or two, go ahead and pour the remaining liquid into the pan to give the pears one last soak.  Turn the burner down to low heat and let the pears sizzle for a few moments while you plate your now cooked salmon and edamame.  Make sure you strain and wash the edamame before you plate it.

Then go ahead and drain any remaining pear liquid into the sink and use your tongs to place them onto your plate.  You will notice they have shrunk a bit in the cooking process. Don’t be discouraged.  They are going to taste awesome.

The spice and saltiness of the fish will counterbalance so wonderfully with the sweetened pears.  If you are feeling adventurous, take a bite with both the salmon and the pears.  You will be happy you did.

Enjoy!

I look forward to our next culinary alcoholic adventure.  But until then check out my weekly booze review.

Good Spirits Folks!