Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

Just the mention of my favorite cake and I’m ready for a piece. Not a huge fan of icing or frosting, my traditional birthday cake is always a pound cake, plain and simple. Sour cream, cream cheese, chocolate, fruit flavored and even rum pound cakes abound in the culinary world.

As a fan of most all of these very simple, very elegant, and VERY delicious cakes, the plain ol’ pound cake or whipping cream pound cake just might be my favorite... sour cream and cream cheese respectively in the top three. Mama made this one as is her custom for my birthday...or any other time I pester her enough so she’ll cave in a make me one! The basis is the same. A simple cream (sour, whipping, or cream cheese) that combines with flour, butter, and sugar to make the perfect consistency of cake – augmented by a note of pure vanilla.

Even a scraping of vanilla bean adds the slightest of flavor and visual delight to the cake and whipped cream dollop. Though, for my first birthday, I managed to actually sit in a bakery cake piled and piped with sugary icing and eat my way out of the Sesame Street cake; yet, I developed a love for the goodness that is simply pound cake. Flavor, yes, a major factor, but also for versatility is why this cake is so dear to my heart.

Whether or not you’re trying to lose weight, here’s a hearty but superhealthy one pot dish that’s perfect on a cold night: Skinny San Francisco Cioppino.

An iconic seafood stew that evolved in the late 19th century when Italian and Portuguese fisherman ruled the bays of San Francisco and Monterrey, some say its name originated from “Ciuppin,” the Genoese word for fish stew.  Other folklore holds that it came from the heavily accented fishermen who called out to one another to “chip in” to the communal stew pot any leftover scraps from the day’s catch.

But wherever the name came from, the basic recipe is always the same: any combination of fresh fish and shellfish–like calamari, cod, halibut, sardines, crabs, clams, mussels and/or shrimp–cooked in a flavorful broth made of fish heads, herbs, onions, tomatoes, fennel and wine, sherry or vermouth.

In this version, all the flavorful veggies, herbs, spices and vermouth are there…but since no one (sadly) boils their own fish heads anymore, I’ve called for good quality seafood broth or chicken broth mixed with anchovy paste, instead. And by bumping up the ratio of vegetables to seafood, the result is lower in calories  but just as satisfying as the original…which means you can afford to have a slender slice of toasted sourdough bread with it as well.

So if you’re looking for a taste of the bay area without making a trip, pour a glass of red wine, put on a little Tony Bennett and try this!

Smoked salmon is one of those things nobody ever told me about until I was grown up. I mean, I guess I heard about it, but it was food beyond my reach. It never appeared in our kitchen; in small-town Illinois, it seemed exotic.

Other things I didn’t see much of included calves’ liver and oysters but when I tasted them for the first time, I knew it would be the last. I had quite a different reaction to silky, seductive smoked salmon.

I’ve never been able to convince my children of the virtues of smoked salmon: they have thus far refused to taste it. If you have a more open-minded group at your house, try this sandwich—it’s pretty great.

I think I can speak for everyone when I say French fries are probably Americans' favorite guilty pleasure. So much so that Americans dared to rename them Freedom fries when France objected to the war. Interestingly there is nothing French about them. As history goes, potatoes were first brought to Spain via the New World expeditions. Fried potatoes became popular during the 17th century in the Spanish Netherlands, present day Belgium.

When there were no fish to fry, the poorer citizens fried potatoes. Sometime during World War I, an American or British soldier eating fried potatoes erroneously named them French fries since French was the official language of Belgium. Another theory suggests that the culinary term for slicing into thin strips, "to French," was applied to fried potatoes and thus the name.

However the story goes, fried potatoes or pommes frites have achieved worldwide acclaim. American fast food chains accepted them as their own and their popularity soared. Once you bite into a golden crisp fry with a pure white fluffy interior, you just can't stop at one.