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Escargot Stuffed Mushrooms

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Our 34th anniversary was last week, and we celebrated in style with 2 of our favorite couples. My husband requested his favorite Beef Wellington and while it is a bit of a chore to put together, I was happy to oblige. It is after all “The Anniversary”. This is one of the few times a year I break out the good china, silver and crystal; set the table with linens and serve the meal in real courses. We started with Escargot Stuff Mushrooms, followed by Mixed Greens Salad with Pears & Roquefort, then the Beef Wellington with Scalloped Potatoes.

The recipe for my Beef Wellington can be found in my cookbook, Recipes from the Red Stove.

Click here to Order

 

Today however, we’re talking about Escargot Stuffed Mushrooms. They are the perfect elegant appetizer that you can make head and just pop in the oven when your guests arrive. Not only that but they are really easy to do.

Escargot Stuffed Mushrooms

Marie Cook
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Prep Time 20 minutes
Cook Time 40 minutes
Course Appetizer
Cuisine French
Servings 6 people

Ingredients
  

  • 1 Can Escargot These typically have 24 snails in them
  • 24 Button Mushrooms
  • 1 large Shallot About 1/4 cup diced
  • 8 tbsp Butter Divided
  • 2 cloves Garlic
  • 1 tsp Salt
  • 1 tbsp Pernod If you don't have Pernod you can use Brandy or Sherry
  • 1/2 cup Panko Bread Crumbs

Instructions
 

  • Clean and remove the stems from your mushrooms, Scrape out a bit of the middle of the mushroom so you will have enough room to fill it. Line them up on a baking sheet.
    Dice your shallot and mince your garlic. Melt 6 Tbsp's butter in a small skillet and add the shallot and cook until it starts to soften, add the garlic and and let it cook for a minute or so. Add the Pernod, salt and the drained escargot to the skillet and let it simmer for 10 minutes or so to let the alcohol cook out. Remove from the heat and stuff each mushroom with an escargot, you should have a nice mixture of shallot, garlic and butter in the skillet and you want to spoon a generous portion of this over each stuffed mushroom.
    Melt the remaining 2 tbsp butter in a small bowl, and add the breadcrumbs and combine to coat, then spoon a generous portion of the breadcrumbs over the stuffed mushroom.
    Place in a 350 degree oven and bake for 30-40 minutes until golden brown.
    I make these ahead and cover with plastic wrap and keep them in the fridge until 15 minutes before I want to cook them. Then all I have to do is pop them in the oven.

 

 

Recipes from the Red Stove

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After three long years, a bunch of rewrites, lots of cooking for friends so I could photograph, and a major editing project, I am happy to say that my cookbook Recipes from the Red Stove is finally complete and available for purchase. Printed as a coil bound paperback for ease of use while in the kitchen.

Click Here To Order

I have always loved to cook for friends and family and love to come up with new and different recipes. One evening as we were sitting down with friends for dinner my friend said to me “Oh My! I have to have this recipe.” I grimaced and she looked at me and said, “Don’t tell me, you don’t have a recipe, you just made it, right?” I shrugged and said, “Sorry, I can tell you how I did it if you want.”

After becoming semi-retired several years ago I found myself with extra time on my hands and I was looking for a way to fill it. I decided that a cookbook would be fun. You see I inherited this wonderful Chambers Model C Stove that had been in my family for ages, and I decided to tell the story of that Red Stove. From it’s humble beginnings in one of the most rural parts of the Ozarks to my kitchen in St Louis there are wonderful stories of family, friends and traditions.  Over the years there have been many people in my family who have cooked on this stove and I have included favorite recipes from all of them and then added some of my own.

I hope you enjoy recipes from the Red Stove, I had a lot of fun putting it together and reminiscing about days gone by.

…

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Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing

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What do you do when Tony Tomato calls and says he has 20lb’s of fresh spinach, you send out a blast email to the Cook Book Club and tell them you’ll divide it up and put it on the front porch for them to pick up. Just because we’re practicing social distancing doesn’t mean we can’t share the wealth and eat well.

 

After all 20lb’s of spinach is a lot of spinach. I got 7 grocery sacks full of this beautiful stuff and my first recipe is an old favorite, Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing.

Everyone knows bacon and spinach just go together and when you put that warm dressing on the salad the spinach leaves start to wilt and get soft and luscious.

I’ve made this warm dressing for years and tried several different versions. Sometimes I would use celery seed and dried basil and marjoram, to give it a bit of a kick but this version is my favorite. When you add the shallots to the vinegar they do a sort of quick pickle. You get the flavor without the harshness of the raw onion. Very simple and oh, so good.

If you don’t have a shallot use a little bit of onion, preferably red it will be close enough. I do recommend that you use sherry or tarragon vinegar for this recipe if at all possible, they seem to work best.

This salad makes a great side dish or a main course, just top it with a bit of chicken breast or shrimp and you got a full meal.

Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing

Marie Cook
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Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 15 minutes
Course Salad
Cuisine American
Servings 4 people

Ingredients
  

For The Salad

  • 1/2 lb Fresh Spinach about 8 cups
  • 2 Hard Boiled Eggs sliced
  • 12 Cherry Tomatoes halved
  • 1/2 English Cucumber quartered and sliced
  • 3 Slices Thick Cut Bacon sliced and browned

For The Dressing

  • Rendered fat from your bacon
  • 3 tbsp Brown Sugar
  • 4 tbsp Sherry Vinegar
  • 1 Shallot Thinly sliced
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
 

  • In a small skillet cook your bacon until nicely browned, remove from the pan and set aside. Assemble your salad ingredents. To your bacon drippings add the brown sugar, viegar and salt and pepper. Then add the sliced shallot and let it simmer in the dressing for several minutes until it gets soft. Pour the hot dressing over the salad, toss and serve.

Zesty Italian Roasted Chic Peas

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  Being stuck at home, just like everyone else, I’m looking for fun and interesting things to do and for me that’s cooking.  I’m trying to limit my trips to the store so I’m using up a lot of my pantry staples, and I just happen to have several cans of chic peas on the shelf.

Roasted Chic Peas are a tasty and versatile treat. Once you get the roasting part of it down they can be seasoned with anything you happen to have on hand. Over the years I have made these with Chili Seasoning, Cinnamon and Sugar, Pappy’s BBQ seasoning and today I decided to try  Good Seasons Zesty Italian salad dressing. You know, the kind that comes in the package that you add oil and vinegar to. I also had some of it on the shelf and decided why not?

After visiting several websites and trying several different techniques I finally came up with one that I think works the best if you want your chic peas to be crunchy, which I do. There is nothing worse,  in my opinion than soggy roasted anything much less chic peas. The secret is to roast them for about 20-25 minutes with no seasoning or oil at all and let them get good and dry in the oven, then when you toss them with your seasoning you pop them back in the oven for another 20 minutes or so and they come out wonderfully crunchy.

Most of the time I’m pretty good at estimating the amount of oil/seasoning I need for something. I can pretty much tell how much a teaspoon is with out measuring, but when it come to the amount of oil  I use in this recipe I get out my measuring spoon. Too much and they’re soggy and oily, not the effect we are after, so measure carefully on the oil and have fund with the other spices.

Zesty Italian Roasted Chic Peas make a great snack or a wonderful topper to soup or a salad for extra crunch and protein.

Zesty Italian Roasted Chic Peas

Marie Cook
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Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 1 hour 20 minutes
Course Appetizer
Cuisine American
Servings 4 People

Ingredients
  

  • 1 14.5oz can Chic Peas
  • 1 tbsp Olive Oil
  • 1 1/2 tsp Good Seasons Zesty Italian Salad Dressing Mix

Instructions
 

  • Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Drain the can of chic peas and pat dry on a papper towel. Don't worry if they are still a bit wet they will dry out in the oven. Place a piece of parchment paper on the baking sheet, this will help you to get them off when it's time to season them. Put the chic peas on the baking sheet, spread them out well and roast in the oven for 20-25 minutes , shaking them around every 10 minutes or so. While the chic peas are roasting put the Italian seasoning and oil in a small bowl and mix well. After 20-25 minutes take the chic peas out of the oven, grab the parchment paper on either side and make a funnel to transfer the chic peas to the bowl of oil and seasoning. Mix well to coat and return to the baking sheet and the oven for another 20-25 minutes until the chick peas are golden brown and crunchy.

Mediterranean Pasta Salad

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It’s circus week at our house. My husband is a Shriner and every year the biggest fund raiser they have for the hospitals is the Circus. It costs $28,260 per minute to fund the children’s hospitals in the Shriner’s Network. That comes out to almost a Billion Dollars a year, so as you can see this is a big deal for us. However, being a Shriner means that along with the work comes a good amount of fun. Over the next 3 nights there will be Pot Luck Suppers, Barbecue, Wine Tastings and all kinds of fun with the gang in between working the circus.

My husband came home last week and told me that he had signed me up to bring Pasta Salad for the Pot Luck Supper on Thursday. Now I have never been a big fan of Pasta Salad. I don’t know, it just seems to be carb heavy and kind of tasteless, if you know what I mean and I certainly didn’t want that. So what was I going to do? I looked at recipes and didn’t really find anything that sounded good and finally decided that I would go with a Mediterranean theme and just wing it. I decided that once again instead of making a dressing I would use what I had in the pantry. I mean really, why reinvent the wheel when you have the perfect thing in the cabinet. If you can’t find Vivienne’s dressing in your location any good Italian dressing will work.

I set off to “The Hill” for provisions. This is the Italian area of St Louis where they have all these great Mom & Pop shops mixed in amongst a plethora of fabulous Italian restaurants. These little stores have some of the best deals in town on everything Italian. Olives, Artichoke Hearts, Sun Dried Tomatoes, you name they have it and at about half the price you would pay for it in the grocery store. I make a “Hill Run” about once a month to pick up my staples. I was looking for some kind of interesting pasta when I came upon a bag of Zoo Animal Pasta and thought, Well, isn’t that’s just the ticket. Animal shaped pasta for the circus, Perfect!

Time to get cooking………

Mediterranean Pasta Salad is light and tasty with loads of good stuff in it. For the perfect summer supper add some chicken and you have a complete dinner in a bowl.

Mediterranean Pasta Salad

Marie Cook
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Prep Time 30 minutes
Cook Time 10 minutes
Total Time 40 minutes
Course Salad
Cuisine Italian
Servings 14 People

Ingredients
  

  • 1 Medium Red Onion
  • 1 7oz Jar Sliced Kalamata Olives
  • 1 16 oz Jar Roasted Red Peppers
  • 2 14 oz cans Quartered Artichoke Hearts Not marinated
  • 1 1/2 cups Julienned Sun Dried Tomatoes In a pouch not packed in oil
  • 2 6 oz packages Tomato & Basil Feta Cheese Crumbles
  • 1 bunch Flat Leaf Parsley
  • 2 14 oz packages Pasta
  • 1 12 oz bottle Vivienne Romano Cheese Salad Dressing

Instructions
 

  • Chop the red onion into fairly large pieces, about 1/2″ X 1/2″ place in a small bowl and cover with any kind of inexpensive vinegar (White or Cider) and 1 tbsp salt. Let this sit for about 30 minutes while you prepare everything else. This will take the sharpness out of the onion.
    Get the water heating up on the stove with 3 Tbsp salt. When it comes to a boil add your pasta and cook for 10 minutes.
    In the mean time drain the olives and add to a large bowl. Drain and slice the red peppers into 1/2″ pieces. Drain the Artichokes and 1/4 the 1/4’s. Drain and rinse the onions to remove any excess vinegar. Chop the parsley and add to the bowl with the onion, red peppers, artichokes, sun dried tomatoes, and feta cheese. Once the pasta is drained and cooled add to the bowl with the Vivien Salad Dressing and toss to combine.
    Cover and refrigerate for several hours to let the flavors blend.

Watermelon Salad with Feta and Fresh Mint

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Woo Hoo, it’s watermelon season again! I swear we must go through at least one a week through the summer, my husband loves it, but I must admit that as much as we love it after a while it does start to get a bit boring. I’m always trying to come up with a new twist to make it a bit more interesting and this is an easy one. Watermelon Salad with Feta and Fresh Mint is a great combination. The saltiness of the feta adds a touch of savory to the sweetness of the melon and the mint gives it such a bright freshness. They are a perfect compliment to the melon.

This recipe calls for Balsamic Syrup and being the cooking show obsessed person that I am I have watched many a TV cook pour a whole bottle of balsamic vinegar into a sauce pan and spend 30-45 minutes waiting for it to reduce into a thick syrup. Now, I don’t know about you but that is just way too much effort for me to go through when you can buy the stuff at the grocery store. I know it seems expensive, but a little bit of this syrup goes a long way. You can use it for all kinds of things and it will last for up to a year in the cabinet.  I use it on my Caprese Salad. I put it on grilled corn on the cob with some fresh herbs. I have even used it as a glaze on grilled chicken. So, if you don’t have any I recommend that you pick some up the next time your at the store.

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Watermelon Salad with Feta and Fresh Mint

Prep

Total

Yield 8 Servings

Ingredients

1/2 medium watermelon (about 10 cups)

1/2 cup chopped fresh mint

1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese

2T balsamic syrup

Instructions

Cut the watermelon into 1" square pieces, or as close to it as you can get. Add feta, mint and drizzle on the balsamic syrup and stir to mix well and coat the watermelon with the syrup. Serve.

Notes

I had my watermelon all cut and in the fridge, then just before serving I added the feta, mint and syrup. It's easy to do it this way when you are entertaining.

Courses Salad