Old Bay Shrimp Cakes--PRE-HOLIDAY HIATUS RECIPE

Old Bay Shrimp Cakes

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Old Bay Shrimp Cakes

Simple, simple, simple. We love Old Bay seasoning.  It adds a bit of zip as well as a orangey hue to seafood evoking memories of steamed crabs strewn over newspapers in Baltimore…founding city to the Old Bay Company in 1939 (and where my husband grew to love this amazing spice). How can you avoid a seasoning that has been around that long? Give it a taste. Lick a pinch on your hand, close your eyes and you will find yourself seaside. Add it to your next Bloody Mary, boil frankfurters in an Old Bay-infused bath, sprinkle on potato salads, and popcorn! Sprinkle it everywhere. In this recipe, I use it to form shrimp cakes.  Again – simple, simple, simple.

Heading into the holidays, I would like to wish all of you a healthy happy New Year, chock full of great food, of course!

 

Old Bay....one of the world's great spices!

Lamb Loin Chops with Pan-roasted Grapes & Zinfandel

Lamb Loin Chops with Pan-roasted Grapes & Zinfandel

Sous Vide and Grill Methods

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Sous Vide Temp: 131- 134 degree F; Time: 2-4 hours

 

Lamb Loin Chops with Pan-roasted Grapes & Zinfandel

This is a simple recipe and a spectacular one. In the heart of the Paso Robles wine district, you will find wine and food paired in cooking as well as serving. This recipe includes actual grapes into the sauce adding an additional sweet note. One thing we know about California’s zinfandel: it is a far, far more food versatile wine than usually assumed.

But it wasn’t always like that. A couple of decades ago the country was still awash with pink colored “white zinfandel”; and focusing on the other two “fighting varietals,” chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon, many of the mainstream California wineries went so far as to drop red zinfandel from their lineups. This may have been good thing, because all it did was dramatize the inevitable resurgence all the more; towards the end of the nineties, when artisanal producers began pushing their big red Zins, recalling some of mammoth Zins that came and went with the seventies. Like micro-minis, fondue, VW bugs and martinis, there are many things never really go away – they just come back with a vengeance.