Kitchen Scoop Blog

It was a wet couple of days, but walnuts are still happening. These were taken in mid-October during the California Walnut Harvest. Hope you enjoy the photo tour.

Ever used one of those nifty apple-peelers? I bought one a few years ago at a Pampered Chef party because I just love cooking and baking with apples. Am I glad I did? Pretty much! Here’s my pros and cons review:

First, the good:

• The apple peeler takes care of three cumbersome tasks all at once – the peeling, coring and slicing.

Traditional Steak Diane is prepared table-side in a flourish – butter, tenderloin, cream, brandy and a burst of flames. Quick by nature, it is easy to adapt to the desperation dinner table even during midweek madness.

We’ve lightened our rendition by using half and half. (If the extra calories aren’t a problem, the cream is delicious!) Since we don’t usually stock shallots, we’ve substituted scallions. (If you have shallots, feel free to use them.)

Even though brandy is also optional, (just use an additional 1/4 cup of broth), we hate to leave that out. The brandy really makes this dish exciting, not just because of the showy fireworks but also for the distinct flavor it imparts to the smooth and savory sauce. Serving our Desperate Diane over egg noodles helps make sure you don’t miss a single drop.

I’m done with Halloween. In fact I’m trying to figure out how to avoid it altogether.

Do I put a bowl of candy out on the porch and a note to say Happy Halloween?

Or do I just go upstairs and turn all the lights off?

I sound like a witch for sure, but I’m just past being interested. Are you into Halloween?

The scariest thing about Halloween is whether or not you'll be able to put dinner on the table before the doorbell rings. Those of us who love Halloween don't want to miss a single costume.

On nights like this, it's tempting not to even bother with dinner since the kids are too excited to eat. But motherly guilt won't let us send the brood in search of sugar on an empty stomach.

So here’s a convenient, kid-friendly, one-dish dinner that goes together in 20 minutes, start-to-finish. That means we'll still have time to dig out the witch hat.

What I'm pondering now:

The number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, reports the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in The New York Times, and that’s despite a 12-year effort to cut that number.

In a recent report the United Nations said starvation was acute even before the global financial crisis. And while the technical expertise and resources exist to increase the world’s food production by 50 percent in the next 20 years, the food probably can’t be grown in the developing world where the hungry can actually get it.

Such a conundrum pretty much nullifies the parental admonition to
“finish your dinner because children are starving in Africa.” Even if your kids clean their plates every night of the week, it won’t help the world’s starving one iota.

It’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing – or the inevitable result. Spending a month studying Spanish in Buenos Aires came with a bonus: An extensive food and restaurant culture – one full of buttery steaks, freshly made pasta, cheese, and gelato and dulce de leche at every meal. And since the Argentine peso stayed depressed at about 25 cents U.S., you could have a generous serving of Kobe beef for $10. A three-course business lunch (with wine and tip) routinely ran $8. What sort of budget cookbook writer would I be to let such bargains breeze by?

When the first button popped off my brand new traveling pants, perhaps I should have taken heed. And when the second (and final one) blew off? Maybe I should have prayed. That’s about the only thing that could have helped. Here I was, sinking into a food-induced purgatory.

Gluttony? They don’t call it a deadly sin for nothing.

Do you ever take a complicated recipe and whittle it down to fit your busy lifestyle? We’ve “desperized” hundreds of complicated recipes over the course of writing Desperation Dinners, and one lesson we’ve learned never seems to change:

It’s vastly easier to shorten a really good recipe than it is to try and make an already quick (and usually bad) recipe taste good. The chef who first taught us this lesson (from afar) was Paul Prudhomme.

Here’s an update on The Great Pumpkin Shortage of 2009: Even though wet spring and summer growing seasons knocked out much of the early pumpkin crop, a spokeswoman for Nestle SA, the parent company for Libby's canned pumpkin, has told The Washington Times that supplies will improve by Thanksgiving.

"If you looked [during] the last few months, canned pumpkin was not on the store shelves," Roz O'Hearn said. "There were a lot of weather issues with last year's harvest which left us without a surplus."

(Libby's has a farm with 5,000 acres of pumpkins in Morton, Ill.)

"Harvest 2009 is still going on, and it was wet at the start, but we are seeing a turnaround," Ms. O'Hearn said. "I think America will be OK for Thanksgiving."

But just in case, I’m holding on to the three cans of pumpkin I found today in the back of my pantry. Even though the “optimal use” dates have passed, the canned pumpkin will still be safely edible. (I usually stock up on canned pumpkin when it goes on sale at the holidays, and my tendency to hoard usually means I overdo the stockpile.)

If you haven’t used your Crock-Pot in so long you’re afraid of it, now is the time to dust the dear sweet thing off and get cooking. Or at least figure out if the darn thing is worth keeping.

So is it dear or darn? Let’s see…..