Silence speaks louder than words

Eating at the Chef's Table

Those of you who frequent this blog know that my "day job" is at Jefferson Lab, a nuclear physics research lab in Newport News, VA. It is a very interesting place to work, not only because of the world-leading science that is done there, but the international nature of the workforce. Needless to say, it leads to some very interesting culinary adventures, many of which I will be sharing over the next weeks and months. I have gotten recipes for salmon from Jim (already posted!), corn pudding and poppy seed cake from Sheila, broccoli salad from Sharon, curry and pilaf recipes from Swapan... well, you get my drift.

We are very fortunate to have a cafeteria at JLab that tries to meet the many dietary needs and preferences of our diverse population. Run under contract by the Compass Group, one of the largest food service companies in the world, our Quark Cafe (named via a contest among Jlab employees and users) has a staff that knows us by name, and our own CIA-trained chef, Chris (okay, we know we are lucky!) We have a salad and deli bar every day, two soup choices, and entrees that include cafeteria standards such as meat loaf or chicken divan as well as falafel and stuffed eggplant.

Every Thursday, besides our regular menu choices, staff and users are invited to the Chef's Table, a speical entree made to order by Chef Chris at a special cooking station set up where he can be observed working his culinary magic. Chef's Table entrees always atract a crowd- Chris has featured mussels and clams in wine sauce, salad with beef tenderloin and blue cheese, a seafood plate that included crab cake, salmon fillet and shrimp in a light cream sauce, and my personal favorite , made-to-order sushi rolls. For $7.99 on Thursdays, we can get a restaurant quality meal, watch a chef in action and enjoy Chris' easy banter without even leaving the site. I have posted pictures here of one of his Chef's Table entrees and you will notice right away the (great) quality of this picture- that's because they were taken by our JLab fotog, Greg Adams.

The Quark Cafe is so much a part of life at Jefferson Lab, it is hard to imagine what it would be like not to have such a great place to get a good breakfast or lunch right on site. What do you do for lunch? Brown bag it? Go out? Eat at your desk? Or do you have your own cafeteria that you frequent. I invited you to lunch at JLab, now's your turn to take us along for your lunch break!

A Moment to Reflect- Becoming Part of a Hokie Nation

I haven't posted in nearly a week,and what week it was. A long-time friend and colleague of mine from Jefferson Lab is moving on to a new life in the Washington DC area and we had been planning a party for her ( and about 60 of her closest friends) that had me spending 3 solid days as a "white tornado" getting my house in shape. The day of the party... Monday April 16, 2007. As I was finishing last preparations, I kept the television on watching, trying to absorb what was happening only hours away in Blacksburg. I have to tell you that I have terrible timing for taking a day off. I was working a half day after Molly's birth and preparing to go in for my half-day when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. I had taken the day off on 9/11. Those infamous days I was, like everyone else, glued to the TV, not wanting to watch, but unable to turn away.

But this day was different... Blacksburg is so close... I have children the ages of many of the shooter's victims... Like most Virginians, I have friends, and my kids have friends who attended or are attending Virginia Tech. How do I deal with it, and help my children deal with yet another bout of random violence. How do I carry on with a party, when so many families are dealing with the unspeakable horror of losing a child, or brother, or father, or sister?

We did have our party... we would not have another opportunity to honor our friend and colleague. We did the only thing that can be done in the face of this type of tragedy...we lived. We talked, we laughed, we ate, we remembered a person we cared about and who would be leaving us and our organization. It was a nice party in the midst of a world and day that did not make sense.

Friday, some VT alumni at Jefferson Lab organized our participation in Hokie Hope day, bringing their entire stock of Hokie wear to share with others who wanted to show love and support, making Maroon and orange ribbons, and taping Va Tech banners to their office and cubicle doors. We gathered together and took a few moments out of our work day,watched a slide show of remembrances for the students and faculty that took place at universities all over the world, and finally, as it approached noon we saw the faces of the victims, projected on the screen... their smiles, their enthusiasm, their lives... In our silence we prayed and reflected upon this act of needless violence and lifted these special people up in our thought and prayers.It was a special moment that bonded us together in a way that only tragedy can. And we left with the words of Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni stating... "We will prevail". It is true that we will prevail... hope will prevail... love will prevail... indeed it must, here, in the Hokie nation.

Breakfast Pizza

I took the pictures (okay, I know my pictures are legendary... and not in a good way!) for this post a month or so ago, because my kids ask me at least once a week if I have posted this yet. I was reminded this morning when I asked what everyone wanted for breakfast and heard a resounding "Breakfast pizza!" from the girls. Like most of my recipes, this one, of course comes with a story... so here they are (the story and the recipe).


Like many families who are on a food budget with many mouths to feed, I was always looking for ways to save money while providing good quality food for my family. Many of those cost-cutting strategies, I still use today (I can't help it, I am always looking for a bargain!). I know which day the Harris Teeter marks down their meat specials so that I can stock up on things that I always use or to get something special like lamb chops or scallopini veal that might not ordinarily fit in my food budget. Most supermarkets mark down their meat right after their specials change in order to get rid of meat near its buy-by date. As long as it is properly packaged, if you buy by the date on the package, the meat is perfectly good for use in the next day or two or, as I usually do, to freeze. However, I digress.



We have been very lucky to have an Entenmann's bread thrift store that carries Arnold breads and Entenmann's cakes and baked goods. One day when we were doing our bread shopping there, they had Boboli pizza crusts. The lady behind the counter told us that lots of her elderly customers used the crusts to make a breakfast pizza, using egg, sausage and cheese. Well, once we tried this, I was destined to use my Boboli stash almost exclusively for breakfast pizza. With teens and tweens in the house, they are always running late getting to school at the last minute, and this is something that they can grab running out the door. My daughter Katie loves it since she can eat it on the run and leftovers are good for lunch or dinner, too. I love it because, depending on what you have, it can be different every time. You just need eggs , some meat and some cheese, and whatever else suits your your fancy(I sometimes add chopped onions and peppers). Its a great recipe for playing with food!





Thrift Store Breakfast Pizza



1 large Boboli pizza crust (we like the thin, but use whatever your family likes)

2 beaten or 2/3 cup Eggbeaters

1 cup of meat (I have used chopped deli ham, sliced brown and serve sausages, cooked loose sausage, crumbled bacon, even deli turkey chopped up)

1 - 1 1/2 cups grated cheese (cheddar, monterey jack, pepper jack, mozzarella,whatever you like is good)


Place crust on baking sheet and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pour egg or Eggbeaters on crust and spread over the top of crust evenly. Spread grated cheese over top and bake in 350 degree oven for 15- 20 minutes or until eggs are set and cheese is melted and bubbly. And if you are like my family, grab a slice and go!

Weekend Herb Blogging - Salt Roasted Rosemary Potatoes

I have been seeing posts since I started blogging for Weekend
Herb Blogging, the brainchild of Kalyn over at Kalyn's Kitchen, but until this weekend, I have not participated. However, I was visiting Anh at Food Lover's Journey who is hosting this edition of WHB and I thought of a recipe that would qualify and that would be appropriate for Easter as well, so here I am. Like a lot of my recipes, I can't remember where this idea originally came from, but I have been making it for quite awhile and it is one of my favorite ways to make (and eat) potatoes. While you may be put off by the amount of salt used... don't be. The finished product is delicious and when you break the potatoes out of the salt crust, only enough salt is left to flavor the potatoes and the rosemary is infused into the potatoes. The bonus? The aroma while they bake is incredible.

First, let's start with the star for this event, the rosemary. When we bought this house, it had a huge yard and I had a fantasy that we could have a kitchen garden by my door, but the sun wasn't really right, so we had to compromise. To satisfy my desire to have fresh herbs right outside my door, I have two large clay pots one witha large bay tree (that is actually outgrowing the pot ) and the other has a large rosemary bush and oregano, (seen to the right, you can see that I haven't started spring cleaning outside yet!) I use this rosemary all the time for cooking and even cut sprigs to tie onto a gift bottle of wine when we go to a friend's for dinner. No matter the weather, wind, Hurricane Isabel, snow on April 7 (yesterday!), this rosemary bush doesn't seem to suffer, and it finds its way to our dinner table at least once a week.

And this recipe is one of my favorites (Surprise! the Irish woman likes potatoes!)

Salt Roasted Rosemary Potatoes

5-8 small potatoes (red or Yukon Gold are great), enough to fit snugly in a 9 inch cake pan

3 cups coarse Kosher salt

1/2 cup white flour

The leaves stripped off of 2 4-inch long stalks of rosemary

1/2 cup water

Optional (not really, once you've tasted this you won't want these any other way) :

Sour cream

Caviar or fresh chives chopped

Wash the potatoes and place them in a pan that accomodates the potatoes just touching and touching the sides of the pan. Mix the salt and flour together, until well mixed, then slowly add water until it forms a crumbly "dough". sprinkle in the leaves of rosemary and mix well. Spoon the salt into the spaces between the potatoes and the pan and cover tops with salt mixture. Pat down until firm. Place in the oven at 350 degrees and bake for 45 minutes. Remove from oven and invert pan onto plate. Break the potatoes out of the salt crust and serve warm with sour cream and either chives or caviar.

This is a great dish to have for company, it is so dramatic to bring to the table. It looks almost like you are breaking the potatoes out of a bed of ice crystals. Try it... you and your guests will be impressed!

Tea smoking for Dr. Fisher

When people find out I have a food blog, very often they ask me to post with something in particular. By this time you all know that my daughter Katie is on a clinical assignment out of town and one of the physicians she is working with saw this blog and told her to ask me post a recipe that is good for a smoker. Tough assignment. But I am an experienced cook and after racking my brain I decided what I would share with him and all of you. Besides, the man was nice to my daughter, so I want to include something that he can use to impress his guests.

Like many of you (or your husbands), we had, for awhile, one of those black "bullet" smokers. We cooked Boston butt, smoked salmon, chickens, and even smoked cheddar cheese (tough to do without melting the cheese, but totally delicious). When my husband and I renewed our vows on our tenth wedding anniversary, we smoked a turkey to serve at our "reception". It turned out great, but two tips - 1) Don't eat the skin! (too smoky!) 2) The meat will have a pinkish tinge when smoked( I was surprised by this when we sliced into it and was afraid it wasn't done!)

Also like most of you, we have used hickory chunks or chips, or mesquite to impart smoky flavor to whatever meat we were smoking. We have also saved and dried chunks of apple wood or pecan wood when we trimmed trees or lost limbs in our yard to use for a different, more delicate flavor. However, a technique that is lesser known and very versatile is tea smoking. While you can use a bullet smoker with this technique, you can also do it on any grill with a cover, and it adapts well to large cuts of meat like pork or whole chickens, pork tenderloins to chicken parts (boneless thighs are my favorite) and even salmon! The only meat I haven't tried is beef, and I think the flavor of tea smoke might be too understated for a meat like beef or lamb.

Tea smoking is done over indirect heat so that the flavor pervades whatever you are smoking. The flavor relies on a combination of salt, sugar, Chinese black tea , and star anise. While you could be very selective in what tea you use, I usually get black tea bags like the ones you see here and open them and use the tea. I am sure you could use green or white teas to get a different taste, but I have not tried this. The star anise is critical to the taste of the smoke. While you can get this spice at gourmet grocers, I usually buy mine at an oriental market near me since they have it at a much better price !

When tea smoking, you cook the meat, poultry or fish the same time that you would if you were just grilling, the smoke is a way to flavor the meat, not cook it, making this a technique you can use any time you are grilling.

Tea Smoke Spice Mix

Mix together 1/2 cup sugar (white or brown is fine), 1/2 cup salt, 1/2 cup of black tea leaves.

You can keep this in an airtight container until you are ready to smoke (your meat, of course)

To smoke, make a double thickness packet of heavy duty aluminum foil and add 3-4 tablespoons of the salt-sugar-tea mixture. Add 4-5 star anise to the packet. Leave the top of the foil packet open, and place on grill or smoker rack over indirect heat and keep top of grill tightly closed. Check periodically, and when all tea and sugar is blakened and no more smoke is emitted, remove the packet, and replace with a new one. Here are some of my favorites and some specific instructions.

For pork tenderloin or chicken thighs- Brush meat with a mixture of 1/4 cup of soy sauce and sherry with a little (2-3 Tbsp) honey stirred in. Place on grill, add smoke packet and close grill or smoker top. 1-2 packets during cooking will give a great taste!

Salmon fillet - Brush lightly with a mixture of 2 tbsp raspberry preserves and 1/4-1/2 tsp of adobo sauce (from a can of chipotle peppers) and 1 tsp canola or peanut oil. Place on grill pan or doubled sheet of foil sprayed with cooking spray to avoid sticking. One tea packet should be enough to flavor this!

Boston Butt- For this I usually precook on top of the stove so that the resulting roast will be tender (and I don't have the worry about whether the roast is really done!). For a 5 lb pork roast, I braise it in 2-3 cups water with a little vinegar and 1/2 cup soy sauce (I use the vinegar from hot peppers) for about 1 - 1 1/2 hours, then slow roast on the grill for about another hour over indirect heat (This means you put the coals on one side and then put the meat on the rack on the other side to slow the cooking). For a roast, 3-4 packets will be enough to give you a roast that everyone will rave about.

One more hint- if your tea mixture burns too fast, move the packet further from the fire, and don't replace the packet until it stops producing smoke.

So I hope all of you will join Dr. Fisher in giving this a try... the results will really surprise you, and let me know if you develop your own techniques or try other spices or herbs (I have always wondered how cloves, or cinnamon stick, or rosemary stalks might work!). A great bonus of tea smoking...you get to play with fire and food!

A Special Day and Oysters

First of all, I know this is not a "mommy blog", and I don't want to drive away readers, but my blog does feature important family events and what event could be more important than the birth of a child? I'll tell you what - when you have two children who are born on the same day, fifteen years apart! Katie comes with a special food story about her birth that I have already posted. Because of her we have the famous pimento cheese... and so much more. Katie was born after two miscarriages and her birth was so anticipated. Just like I had made a whole wardrobe of clothes for my older daughter Colleen when she was a toddler (by hand, I might add, I didn't have a sewing machine at that time!), I made a layette of clothes for Katie and even made a christening gown from a Vogue pattern. When she came she was a 9 lb 11 oz bundle, the biggest baby in the nursery (at that time you had to have a chest x-ray, and while I was waiting I heard two nurses talking about a little redhead who had this really big baby in the nursery, and it was Katie!)

Fifteen years later, despite my best efforts to not have her on Katie's birthday, Molly was also born on April 3. Molly was a little surprise baby, born when I was thirty-nine, but it only took a day before Kate forgave me for ruining her birthday. When we brought her baby sister home and Katie held her, there was a bond formed that surprised us all. It also started a tradition of the double Dowd birthday. Over the years these parties have alternated from small family gatherings to large and loud dance parties(including some where I remember Kate and her friends dancing on chairs singing Man I Feel Like A Woman!), but always the girls had celebrated together. Until this year. For the first time in 27 years the Dowd sisters will not be together for their birthday. As I have said in this blog before, Kate is becoming a nurse anesthetist, and she is on an out-of-town clinical rotation. We had a birthday dinner for Kate this past weekend, and this year we will celebrate Molly's first by-herself birthday.

I will get to hug Molly, make her a special cake, and we will blow out candles and open presents, but Kate will be in a strange city with no family with her. She has had a tough year- she has had an emergency appendectomy, been rear-ended in her car....twice...all while working through one of the toughest health sciences graduate programs there is. Twelve -hour clinical days, preparing for a comp exam, and writing a paper, while living in a strange city doesn't make for a very happy birthday... especially when your birthday is usually a huge family event with your favorite foods (not to mention people!).

So where does the oyster come in? Well it is a food (though not the ones I will talk about), and I think all of us have been it a situation like that of the lowly oyster and I hope that Katie (and maybe some of you) will read this and see the parallels. The oyster lives its life on the bottom of a body of water. It is not flashy like a starfish or a rainbow trout. Day after day it filters water through its body. One day a bit of sand makes its way into its shell, day after day, stressing the little oyster, trying to keep it from living its life,doing what it is meant to do, irritating it. How does the oyster deal with this? Day by day it builds up a protective layer around that stressor, doing its thing, surviving, doing what it has to do. Until one day, when the oyster is opened, a perfect white pearl has formed from what once was an irritating grain of sand.

So keep plugging along, and Happy Birthday Katie and Molly!

April Fooling in June

After being totally taken in by the trio at Peanut Butter Etouffee with their April Fool's post, it made me start thinking about a post that was seriously playing with food. I already told about my husband who gave one of his co-workers a recipe for a low-fat substitute for sour cream, telling him to combine yogurt and lemon juice instead of cottage cheese and lemon juice. Thank heaven the guy was not his boss, but that was a food mistake not a food joke (and I am sure his co-worker wasn't laughing).

Then there was the time when Molly swore, after seeing a TV show (damn MTV!) where people drank raw eggs to build muscle, that she could do that. She kept insisting and so we bought pasteurized eggs to make sure she wouldn't get sick - she tried one whole, one beaten, and one beaten with orange juice, but she still only managed a swallow. However, Bridget, not to be outdone, swallowed a whole beaten egg with orange juice down the hatch. But while it was a bit funny to watch (except for the resultant gagging!), it wasn't really a joke.

It was Katie who decided to play with food... at the expense of others, when we were at our annual Dowd Beach Week. She decided to make some lemon angel food cupcakes that she had seen in a magazine. She gathered all the ingredients, and we scoured the rental house for cupcake pans, and she set about mixing and baking, giving us a taste of batter, and of the frosting as she assembled the cupcakes. Katie had an evil plan. She set aside one cupcake and instead of putting lemon frosting on the top, she frosted it with mayonnaise! There were assorted cousins and two of Bridget's friends with us and one by one Katie tried but failed to fool her siblings and her cousins, but she found a hapless victim in Bridget's friend Carly (she didn't know us well enough yet to be suspicious!) Carly, as we all watched trying not to give up the joke, took a big bite. She never made a face, saying that she thought the cupcake was great (though not with much enthusiasm!)

We all burst out laughing and told her what Katie had done. To this day, Carly will tell you the mayo-frosted cupcake wasn't really that bad. The moral of the story- Make sure you're not getting played when your friends decide to play with food.