Scenes from the Third Annual Foster Farms Fresh Chicken Cooking Contest

Posted on by 5 comments

A chicken dish worth of $10,000.

If you were a chicken, the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena was a dangerous place to be last Friday.

But if you were a cook, gunning to show your prowess with the country’s most popular protein, you couldn’t have picked a better venue.

The occasion?

The third annual Foster Farms Fresh Chicken Cooking Contest, which pitted six finalists (two each from California, Washington state and Oregon) against one another for the grand prize of $10,000, plus a year’s supply of Foster Farms chicken.

It was my third time judging this contest, and each year the recipes seem to get better and better.

The judging panel (L to R): Chef Ken Frank, the Food Gal, Chef John Ash, Lynn Char Bennett, and Liam Mayclem.

My fellow judges were: Chef John Ash, host of KSRO-AM “The Good Food Hour”; Lynn Char Bennett, test kitchen director for the San Francisco Chronicle; Chef Ken Frank of La Toque in Napa; and Liam Mayclem, host of CBS’ “Eye on the Bay.”

Read more

Get Your Mojo On In A Delicious Way & A Food Gal Giveaway

Posted on by 8 comments

Clif Mojo's White Chocolate Macadamia bar.

Sweet, salty, crunchy and chewy — all in one bite.

Is it any wonder that Clif Mojo bars are among my favorite energy snacks?

OK, with chocolate chips in some of them and as much as 30 percent saturated fat, they might not be the epitome of health food. But at about 200 calories per bar (varies depending upon the variety), you could do a lot worse, especially when the ingredients in these bars are 70 percent organic.

They come in a variety of flavors, including: Chocolate Almond Coconut, Dipped Chocolate Peanut, Peanut Butter Pretzel, Mountain Mix and White Chocolate Macadamia.

I like the profusion of rice crisps and nuts in them because they make for a satisfying texture.

Stash one in your desk drawer, purse or carry-on luggage, and you’re good to go.

Win one of each of five varieties.

Contest: Five lucky Food Gal readers will win a sampler pack of Clif Mojo bars (one of each variety named above). Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight PST Oct. 6. Winners will be announced Oct. 8.

How to win?

Read more


Cookbook Author Diane Morgan’s Bay Area Events, MasterChef Casting Call & More

Posted on by 5 comments

Meet award-winning cookbook author Diane Morgan. (Photo courtesy of Diane Morgan)

Diane Morgan Visits the Bay Area

Veteran cookbook author Diane Morgan will host a series of events in the Bay Area to introduce her newest cookbook, “Roots” (Chronicle Books).

The book, which features more than 225 recipes, will show you creative ways to enjoy familiar root vegetables such as carrots and potatoes, as well as the more obscure ones such as galangal and crosnes.

Meet Morgan at 6 p.m. Oct. 10 at Omnivore Books in San Francisco, where she’ll be signing copies of her cookbook. The event is free.

Then, join her Oct. 11 at 6:30 p.m. at Draeger’s in San Mateo, when she’ll teach the class, “From Cocktails to Dessert: The Delicious Underground World of Root Vegetables.” Cost is $60 per person.

Do you have what it takes to be America's next MasterChef? (Photo courtesy of MasterChef)

Casting Calls For MasterChef Season 4

If you’re a fan of “MasterChef” (and yes, I count myself among them), you’ll want to make plans for when casting calls are held nationwide to find contestants for Season 4.

Read more

Secret Ingredient Brownies & A Food Gal Podcast

Posted on by 13 comments

Fudgy brownies with a sudsy ingredient.

Monday night, as the featured speaker at the Sunnyvale Public Library, I thought I’d have some fun with the audience members.

After all, if you’re going to talk about food writing, people are bound to get hungry, right?

So, I baked home-made fudge brownies for everyone, using a new recipe I recently came across. As folks nibbled away, I asked if anyone could guess the secret ingredient in these brownies.

Don’t even think it was some kind of controlled substance, though one guy did venture that guess. Other folks struck out with guesses of avocado, tofu, prunes, vinegar, black beans, red bean paste and even soy sauce.

In the end, after giving folks a hint that it was a “liquid” ingredient, one woman finally guessed the correct answer to win one of my very snazzy Food Gal aprons.

Of course, you guys reading this post have it easy. The photo above is a complete giveaway. The secret ingredient in these brownies? Guinness Stout.

“Guinness Brownies” is a recipe from the new cookbook, “Tate’s Bake Shop: Baking for Friends” (self-published), of which I recently received a review copy.  The cookbook, which features more than 120 recipes, is by Kathleen King, the owner of Tate’s Bake Shop in Southhampton, NY.

Read more

SPQR’s Smoked Linguini with Clams, Cherry Tomatoes and Basil Pesto

Posted on by 10 comments

Smoked linguini with clams, pesto and peeled cherry tomatoes -- all from scratch.

SPQR’s Executive Chef Matthew Accarrino made me peel tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes. A whole cup and a half of them.

He also made me smoke durum flour in a stove-top smoker to make my own linguine noodles.

At this rate, you’d think I was a sous chef at his San Francisco restaurant.

But nope, I was just making a recipe from his new cookbook with SPQR Proprietor Shelly Lindgren, “SPQR: Modern Italian Food and Wine” (Ten Speed Press), of which I recently received a review copy.

“Smoked Linguini with Clams, Cherry Tomatoes and Basil Pesto” was a triumph of a dish, even if it did take a couple of hours for my husband and I to make. Nothing is necessarily complicated; it’s just a dish where every component needs careful attention. If you have a few hours on a lazy Sunday evening like we did, it’s a project well worth doing, not only for the experience, but for the taste of it all at the end.

The cookbook is like an Italian travelogue that takes you through the artisanal wines and handcrafted dishes of central and northern Italy that make their way onto the tables at SPQR in San Francisco.

The recipes range from dried biscotti and nut biscotti with sweet wine granita, and bolognese with egg noodles to the more challenging bone marrow sformato with stuffed baby artichokes.

Read more

« Older Entries Recent Entries »