Veggie Pinto Beans-

I tried to use the new electric pressure cooker to make some pinto beans. It would only allow me to cook one cup at a time... so on menu items such as this, it makes more sense to make them the old fashion way.  Note that soaking the beans overnight in a brine solution is the key to soft skinned finished beans. As a menu item, some corn bread might go rather nicely with this recipe.

Electric Pressure Cooker Tables

My eyes just don't work as well as they used to. So that is my excuse to add the next entry into this food blog.

The new Wolfgang Puck electric pressure cooker comes with a nice recipe booklet. Its got some nice recipes but as the book mentions, your own recipes can be adapted to this new tool too. How do you adapt your recipes without a conversion table. These tables are used to give the cook an idea about the time and setting needed for these devices so that they have enough liquid in them to make it to the end of cooking without blowing up and provide a idea about the ideal length of time required to cook various foods.  What it does not note the length of time required to get the device up to the pressure needed. This must be added to the overall length of time required to cook.

The charts that came with the device are written in very small print.  I fancied them up with some color and size and some doodles.

Fruit Salad March 2012

I have been trying to get our diet off the white sugars into some of the fruit sugars. This fruit salad works as a wonderful substitute to a very sweet type of desert. The blackberries are a real luxury and we only put a half a dozen on any serving. Last week it was red raspberries instead. Its amazing that it only takes a couple of small fruit to change the entire outlook of a fruit salad. My neighbor brought us over  a big bag of mandarins since he said that the season was finally over in Madera. That is why they are used in this fruit salad! 

Biscotti Where; the idea began

In my small moleskin I had drawn a storyboard for making this biscotti from a new cookbook that I had bought. That drawing was the inspiration to this blog.  I replicated it on my large moleskin for today's entry. Enjoy!  In the mean time the song that keeps rolling in my head is Mambo Italiano! LOL!

Illustrated Dinner! Welcome!

Recently I have become a fan of Urban sketchers. This blog will be devoted to an illustrated cookbook in that same style.

The first recipe is one that I made the other night. When we were living in Northern Colorado for student teaching way back in the 70's this combination of cabbage and hamburger was a major fund raiser just as enchiladas. and tri trip dinners are now.  The only difference is that they used a bread dough to wrap these and called them beer rocks.