butter

Posted by Greg Henry
Chocolate Beet Pound Cake

So you wanna eat more veggies? You keep saying you do. But I am starting to doubt your strength of commitment in this area.

Take my personal favorite veggie. The beet. Both beetroot and beet greens are very powerful cleansers and builders of the blood. Beets are loaded with vitamins A, B1, B2, B6 and C. The greens have a higher content of iron compared to spinach. They are also an excellent source of calcium, magnesium, copper, phosphorus, sodium and iron. So they are very very good for you. Yet you resist eating them.

I am not your mother however, and this is not a nutrition blog. It’s an “I am crazy in love with food and you should be too blog” But who says love can’t be good for you?

And because I have a healthy love/love relationship with beets I come here and push them on you whenever I can.

I have used them in a salad, an interesting, spicy salad that even included the beet greens. You looked the other way.

I tried to cajole you with the prettiest pasta you’ve ever seen. I even steeped beets in rum hoping to get you to enjoy them at cocktail hour. But still you beat back my beets!

Harrumph… is all I have to say.

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Posted by Greg Henry
Chocolate-Beet Pound Cake with Hazelnuts & Crème Anglaise

This cake is dense and rich and mildly sweet. It's a true pound cake, with lots of butter and eggs so don't expect a true chocolate cake. The chocolate takes a back seat in this version. And though the beets may seems odd, they make this cake very moist.

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Posted by Greg Henry
salmon troisgros

Let’s have a history lesson.

I was always a good student. I was one of those kids that did well in almost every subject (notice I said almost…numbers still elude me).

But numbers aside, history was/is particularly delicious to me.

Cooking has an interesting history of course. You don’t have to go all the way back to medieval times to find a fascinating tale.

In fact I have a fun story for you. In the 1960s & 70s, in this country at least, the foodie-world was abuzz with the suddenly “discovered” truth behind “classical French cuisine”. It was brought to our attention by the commendable talents of Julia Child. Her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking changed the way American home cooks like my mother began to look at gourmet food.

As I have said before. I was raised on this kind of fare. I was a nine year old who liked chicken liver pâté. I knew crêpe was not pronounced crape, and sauces always started with bones.

But things can never stay just as they are, now can they? In fact changes were afoot in the culinary world. Because just as Ms. Child was introducing Americans to classical French cooking; classical French cooking was being challenged or perhaps re-interpretted in of all places– France!

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Posted by Greg Henry
Salmon & Sorrel Troisgros

This is my version of the nouvelle cuisine masterpiece that changed the way the world looked at classical French cooking. I adapted a recipe from Daniel Boulud, who probably adapted the original Troisgros recipe, and so it goes in cooking.

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Posted by Greg Henry
spicy nuts with garlic, shallots and rosemary

It's Sunday. This is  my usual day to walk down the hill to the Hollywood Farmers Market to do a Market Matters post. I love the market and rarely miss it.

But today is an exception because we are having a fundraiser for the people of Haiti at my house this afternoon. It's part of StirIt28 a nationwide, multi-city effort by members of the food bloggering community to help bring some relief to Haiti. One hundred percent of the money we raise today will go to Yéle & Share Our Strength.

 Well when I get to thinking about food and community, I get a little misty. I can't help it. That's because food sustains life. The people of Haiti desperately need this sustenence. The stories of what is going on there will tear you apart. Getting food, water, medicine and shelter are the first needs that need to be met. The charities we are benefiting today are ready and able to provide these needs. They just need financial resources. That is where the help you and I can provide is essential. That is the reason I opened my home to this event.

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Posted by Greg Henry
Spicy Nuts with Fried Garlic, Shallots & Rosemary

Slightly spicy, with the bold flavors of fried garlic and shallots these are nuts are addicting.

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Posted by Greg Henry
Sausage and Potato Flat Bread with Mustard Greens

Meat & Potatoes. I promised a week of Meat & Potatoes. 6 recipes in 6 days. That's a week in my book. So this is the last of these recipes.

My meat is sausage. Spicy Italian sausage. My potatoes are potatoes. Is that clear enough?

If not I should also say this is a recipe for flatbread. Meat & Potato Flat Bread with Mustard Greens. I added the mustard greens because spring has begun to sprung here in So. Cal and the hills are alive! Every spring the first things to come alive in the hills near my house are wild mustard plants. That means urban foraging to me.

I live in the Hollywood Hills. My street backs up to some L.A. County conservancy property, which bleeds into Lake Hollywood and the land owned by Department of Water and Power, and culminates in 4200 acres of Griffith Park. That is a lot of wild land in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world.

As I said, winter rain makes spring come early in California. Julie Andrews has nothin’ on these hills, because they really are “alive” right now. That means the tasty young leaves of wild mustard are everywhere. So I was out bright and early today gathering a big bag of mustard greens. Naturally I just had to use them within hours of picking them. So they make an appearance here in the last of my Meat & Potato posts. Meat & Potato Flat Bread with Mustard Greens serves 8 CLICK here for a printable recipe.

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Posted by Greg Henry
Sausage & Potato Flat Bread with Mustard Greens

This is a deliciously simple meat and potatoes flat bread. The meat comes in the form of spicy Italian sausage. The potatoes are well, potatoes!

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Posted by Greg Henry
making d'agneau champvallon

Meat & Potatoes Day 2 goes continental! Lamb Champvallon.


According to the Larousse Gastronomique, this classic French dish dates from the reign of Louis XIV. It was supposedly invented by one of his mistresses. But which one? There are 14 (quatorze) officially recognized mistresses. That’s a lot of ladies to give credit for this dish to.


The French seem to have a lot of these stories attached to their most traditional foods. It’s hard to say how much truth there is in any one of them.


Take this recipe known to the French as Cotes D’agneau Champvallon. If it was indeed a lamb dish brought to the King’s attention by a mistress, it seems to make sense that her name may have been Champvallon. But most mistresses get short shrift in the history books. I can find no references to any of Louis’ lovers with that name.


So I decided it was time for me to take hold of this lore and redefine the history behind this dish to suit my own needs and my own cooking style. While I am rewriting history I think I’ll do a bit of tweeking to the recipe too. Something more suited to the modern palate.


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Posted by Greg Henry
pot roast with roasted root vegetables

It’s February and half the country is snowed in. I heard there was snow in Florida last week! Well I live in Southern California and we are feeling the effects of some cold weather too. Not snow, of course, but chilly none-the-less.


Cold weather puts me in the mood for substantial dinners. Soup is good food and can be just the thing for a winter’s chill. But snow and ice require real sustenance, the kind that sticks to the ribs, and gets our butts into endurance mode. I am talking survival of the fittest, manly meals.


Manly meals require animal sacrifice. I am sorry, that is just the way it is. We are the masters of the King Of The Hill mentality, and that mindset requires us to eat other creatures in order to show our dominance. I am not kidding. It requires that.


So I have a whole week of eating other creatures planned for you here. But not wimpy little creatures that my baby sister might eat. Little girly creatures like chicken, squab or fillet of sole. Nope that’s not the kind of meat that I am talking about. In fact you won’t see anything with feathers or gills here at all this week.


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Posted by Greg Henry
pot roast serving

I prefer to roast the vegetables separately from the meat adding them to the same pot at the end of the cooking. This makes for a pot roast with wonderfully varied textures and intense flavors.

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Posted by Greg Henry
lamb champvallon
lamb champvallon from the oven

According to the Larousse Gastronomique, this classic dish dates from the reign of Louis XIV, and is typically made with lamb shoulder chops. I used boneless lamb chunks as an updated alternative.

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Posted by Greg Henry
Panko crusted mustard chicken

Do you ever have great ideas? Are you ever sure you are going to just WOW them?

Do you ever lay awake thinking: "this one is THE one; now my life feels right?" Well, this recipe started out something like that. But then it went someplace else entirely. As you'll soon see.

I'll let you in on a secret though. Everyone has thoughts like these. They have them in consideration of their jobs. They have them in consideration of sports (GO SAINTS). They especially have them in consideration of love.

Sometimes I even have these thoughts in consideration of SippitySup!

But really... SippitySup is a website. A blog. SippitySup is something I do that is outside my real life. Something that I do to express myself. Because in my real life I do not always get to express myself.

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Posted by Greg Henry
Panko Crusted Mustard Chicken Breasts

Crunchy, savory and delicious. A perfect mid-week chicken recipe.

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Posted by Greg Henry
ingredients for chicken liver pasta

Quick boil some water!

No I’m not having a baby… it’s Default Pasta Night!

At my house Default Pasta makes regular appearances. In fact I’d even go so far as to call these appearances star turns. That’s because learning how to bring forth quick, flavorful weeknight meals can be a lifesaver, and a toe-tapper as you will see.

There are a lot of good reasons to master the concept of Default Pasta. Maybe you have not been to the grocery store for weeks and the fridge and pantry are pretty bare. But never fear, because if you follow my rules for Default Pasta you can make any meal special.

Of course in my world (well, most of our worlds really) Default Pasta Night happens at the end of a long day, you are tired, hungry and just want to turn the TV on and sing and dance along with Glee. Singing and dancing with hot soup is hell on the carpet, and you are sure to burn your vocal chords. That’s where the Default Pasta rules come in and that’s what the pot of boiling water I used as my opening hook is for; cooking dried pasta, the greatest friend a weeknight cook has ever had.

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