My neighbors invited me and several other neighbors over for dinner on Saturday night. After spending Friday and most of Saturday sanding and stripping the built-in, it was so incredibly nice to hit the shower, wash all the dust and grit off, and head across the street to a fantastic meal.

I made my usual salad and brought a long a carafe of Julie’s Dressing. Shawn made Chicken Piccata

and Risotto with Red Pepper (Cam helped with the labor-intensive stirring).

It sounds extremely corny and cliché, but honestly, nothing makes food taste better than eating it in the company of good friends--especially when you don't have to make it yourself!

Are you getting hungry for turkey and can't wait until Thanksgiving for a taste? Here is a recipe from the Ferrari-Carano Vineyards and Winery for Turkey Cacciatore that uses turkey breast and thighs in a delicious tomato and red wine sauce. I found this recipe while checking out web sites for wineries that we are visiting this week in Napa Valley. I tried out this recipe on our wine group and they “gobbled it up” (I couldn’t resist) every bite. 

I served it over a coluple of thick slices of polenta (from the produce section of my supermarket). Simply slice the polenta into ¾-inch slices and brown it in melted butter in a skillet.

I’m on vacation today, but working on something food related. My goal is to strip, restore, prime and paint this:

and this:

So that I can eventually fill this:

with this:

How is this food related? It’s all taking place in my dining room. (Okay, so it’s a stretch, but hey, I eat in the dining room.)

Today I’m in Napa Valley, visiting wineries with members of our wine group.

A couple of weeks before we left on our trip, the eight of us in this group decided to have a dinner using recipes from some of the wineries we were planning to visit.

Marge brought the appetizer course using a recipe from the Chalk Hill Winery for Crab Cakes (see recipe below).

These crab cakes are held together by a mixture of fresh scallops and a little cream, making them easy to turn over when they are fried because they don’t fall apart. They are served with a wonderfully rich wine sauce that is flavored with Chardonnay wine, mushrooms, green onions and lots of cream. In fact, I’d better warn you to make only a half recipe of the sauce because we had way too much of it for the number of crab cakes this recipe makes.

Marge added some salad greens and added a stuffed mushroom to each appetizer plate.

Crab Cakes
Developed by Pacific Connections Catering, Santa Rosa, CA

1 lb. Dungeness crab meat
4 ounces scallops (sea or bay)
2 Tbsp. heavy cream
¼ cup finely diced celery
¼ cup finely diced green onions
¼ cup lemon juice
2 egg whites
Hot pepper sauce to taste
Semolina flour or all-purpose flour
Olive oil for frying

Squeeze out liquid form crab.
Place scallops in food processor; puree. Add cream; process until well blended.
In medium bowl, combine crab and scallop mixture.
Stir in celery, green onions, hot pepper sauce, lemon juice and eggs.
Form into patties and place in 13x9-inch baking pan. Sprinkle with flour. Roll over and coat other side of each crab cake with flour.
Heat olive oil in medium skillet over medium heat. Sauté crab cakes in olive oil until cooked.
16 crab cakes

Sauce
1 cup Chardonnay wine
5 fresh mushrooms
1 bunch green onions, finely chopped
3 cups heavy cream
¼ cup lemon juice
¼ cup apple juice

In medium saucepan over medium-high heat, cook wine, mushrooms, onions until half the volume remains. Add the cream, lemon juice and apple juice. Continue cooking over medium  heat about 20 minutes or until sauce has thickened.

Strain through a fine strainer into a medium bowl. Pour mixture into blender container and blend at high speed for about 30 seconds or until smooth. Spoon sauce over crab cakes.

I don’t know how you spent Election Day (hopefully you voted!). This is probably the first election I’ve ever really taken an interest in. I mean, really, regardless of whom you were rooting for, it was a pretty amazing event.

I planned to spend most of the night with a friend glued to the TV so to add an air of festivity to the evening, I made Spinach Balls. I hadn’t made them since I blogged about them back in March and they were just as tasty as I remembered. This time, I halved the recipe (well, I halved everything but the butter—oops!) and remembered to take a photo.

I remarked to my friend, who had never tasted the Spinach Balls, that they weren’t much too look at. “No matter,” she said after one bite, “I don’t plan to look at them long.” And then she reached for another.

Spinach Balls
2 (10 oz) packages frozen spinach, cooked and drained (this is easy to do in the microwave)
6 slightly beaten eggs
½ cup butter, melted
1 cup parmesan cheese
2 cups seasoned croutons (the small ones work best)
5 clove of garlic, crushed

Mix all the ingredients into bite-size balls and bake at 350º on wax paper for 15 to 20 minutes. Baking time may be shorter—watch carefully. Best served warm.

Makes 4 to 5 dozen, depending on how large you make them

We started working on the new Betty Crocker Christmas Cookies magazine (available in stores now) last March. My office is directly above our test kitchens and I’m able to look down on them through a glass wall to see what is going on. In May, I took this photo of Kristen and the counter filled with cookies, just waiting for our taste panel evaluation to begin.

 After tasting all of these cookies and many more over several weeks, we settled on 42 of the very best ones. Then we took a photo of every recipe and put them together in this new magazine.

The recipes shown on the cover are: Pecan-Shortbread Trees, Raspberry Poinsettia Blossoms, Gingerbread Cookies with Royal Icing, Chocolate-Peppermint Creams and Sparkling Lemon Snowflakes. All of these are really yummy, especially the Chocolate-Peppermint Creams which are fudge-like confections that I couldn’t stop eating after our taste panel was over. At times when chocolate is involved, it can be difficult for me to maintain my professionalism.

One of my favorite recipes in this issue is the Heart Sandwich Cookies because—well to be honest—I love heart-shaped things.

Heart Sandwich Cookies 
 
Prep Time: 1 Hour 30 Minutes
Start to Finish: 2 Hours 30 Minutes
 
  Cookies 
    1/2 cup butter, softened
    1/2 cup granulated sugar
    1 egg
    1 tablespoon milk
    1 teaspoon vanilla
    1 1/2 cups Gold Medal® all-purpose flour
    1/2 teaspoon baking powder
    1 teaspoon red edible glitter
  Cinnamon Filling 
    1/4 cup red cinnamon candies
    1/3 cup water
    3 tablespoons butter, softened
    3 cups powdered sugar
 
1. In medium bowl, beat 1/2 cup butter, granulated sugar and egg with electric mixer on medium speed until creamy. Beat in milk and vanilla, scraping bowl frequently, until well mixed. On low speed, beat in flour and baking powder until well mixed, scraping bowl frequently.
2. Shape dough into 2 equal halves; wrap in plastic wrap. Flatten each to 1/2-inch thickness. Refrigerate until firm, about 1 hour.
3. Heat oven to 400°F. On generously floured surface, roll out 1 half of dough 1/8 inch thick. Cut with small (2-inch) heart-shaped cookie cutter. On ungreased cookie sheets, place cookies 1 inch apart. Sprinkle glitter on cookies. Bake 5 to 8 minutes or until edges are lightly browned. Repeat with remaining half of dough, except do not sprinkle with glitter. Remove from cookie sheets to cooling rack. Cool completely, about 10 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, in 2-quart saucepan, heat candies and water to boiling over medium-high heat, stirring constantly. Reduce heat to medium-low; simmer uncovered about 3 minutes, stirring frequently, until candies are melted. Remove from heat. Using wire whisk, stir in butter and powdered sugar, 1/3 cup at a time, until smooth.
5. Spread or pipe heaping teaspoon filling in center of flat side of each undecorated cookie. Press decorated cookie over filling; press firmly to secure.
 
3 dozen sandwich cookies
 
High Altitude (3500-6500 ft): No change.

The colder it gets outside, the hungrier I get. Pasta and bread are the top of my Things-I-Want-to-Eat list. My theory is that it has to do with some sort of primal urge to hibernate, but I don’t have any scientific data on that.

Last Thursday my dad took me and some friends out to Buca de Beppo for my birthday. We ordered Chicken Saltimbocca which the menu described as “Juicy sautéed chicken breasts, layered with fresh sage and prosciutto, and topped with artichoke hearts, capers and out delicate lemon-butter sauce,” and a Penne Arrabbiata: “Hearty pasta featuring spicy Italian fennel sausage in a fiery tomato sauce, garnished with Romano cheese.”

(The photo of the Chicken didn’t turn out and the photo of the Penne isn’t the best. I’m sure that had nothing to do with the bottles of wine we happened to be enjoying at the time.) I actually preferred the chicken; the penne was too spicy for me.

Then on Saturday I ate brunch with my mom at Pizza Luce. I ordered Pesto Eggs Benedict which is pretty much what you think it is: Poached eggs on top of two English muffins topped with a rich, creamy pesto sauce. Instead of Canadian bacon, the restaurant uses sausage but I order it without the meat. It comes with hash browns.

I’m not a huge fan of Eggs Benedict but this is one of my favorite things to order at Luce. For a pizza place, they have a surprisingly good brunch menu. (Sorry about the shot. I forgot to take a photo until I was almost done eating.)

On Saturday night, my neighbors invited me over for dinner last Sunday. Shawn made Pasta Carbonara with Chicken and incredibly delicious garlic bread. He used penne instead of fettucine which was sort of fun. I can’t be the only one craving carbs: Everyone practically inhaled the bread the moment it hit the table.

(This shot took on a weird orange haze. Not sure why.)

And last, but certainly not least, my sister made me (out-of-focus) Pasta with Artichoke Pesto on Sunday night.

I realize, after writing this,  two other themes emerge: 1.) People feed me a lot and 2.) I'm pretty lousy at taking photos of food.

So, how about you? Do you get especially hungry before winter? What do you crave?

It’s not unusual for Heidi and I to blog about the same topic (see her previous blog about making cheese) but we usually do it in a very different way. Here's mine on cheese.

Cheese trays are really one of the quickest appetizers you can make and they cost much less if you make them yourself. Last week, my coworker, Jann and I made a couple of large cheese trays for a retirement paraty. We put six different cheeses on two  slate trays from Crate and Barrel and then added some grapes, dried apricots, two kinds of almonds, rust colored roses and some lemon leaves.

To make each tray look more interesting, we left a couple of the cheeses whole or in big pieces (the blue and triple cream Brie) and then cut some into cubes, sticks and slices. Also think about color: from white to yellow and orange. Aren't the slices of the wine Cheddar beautiful?!

The cheeses we used were: St. Pete’s Select Blue, Carr Valley Cheddar, Cahill Port Elderberry Wine Cheddar, Jarlsberg, Manchego and a triple cream Brie. Next to the platters we filled baskets with crackers sliced breads.

Are you sitting down? I want to make sure you’re ready for this.

I made cheese on Monday night. Or, rather, AC and I made cheese on Monday night.

The recipe is called 30-Minute Mozzarella. One of AC's many cookbooks is Home Cheese Making and that’s where she found the recipe. You can find it here.

First, a few warnings: Making cheese, IMHO is kind of gross. There is a certain ingredient involved that, once you know its origin, may make you wary. Also, as my photos will attest, the process isn&