Olive Oil Biscuits

Easy, fast, tasty, cheap, versatile and no butter or shortening. You can make these savory by adding bits of ham and scallions, or chunks of smoked salmon and chives, or sweet by adding nuts and chocolate and a bit of sugar.

Corn, orange and sweet pepper olive oil biscuits

The last batch I made had little chocolate chunks and hazelnuts that had been sauteed in walnut oil and I replaced one tbsp. of olive oil with walnut oil.

1 3/4 cups of all purpose flour
1 tablespoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
5 tablespoons of olive oil, plus a tablespoon for the pan and brushing the tops
1 cup of milk

Preheat the oven to 450° because this is going to go fast.

Put the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add any dry ingredients not in the recipe and stir. Make a little well in the center.

Put the wet ingredients in the well and with a spatula or large spoon fold the dry ingredients into the wet ones. Don't stir, just keep turning the dry ingredients until it is just barely mixed, like making waffle batter. It's ok if there some flecks of dry flour. Better to undermix than overmix.

Put a tablespoon of oil in a baking pan and smear it all over the bottom. You want a nice layer of oil, not a thin layer. This makes the bottom of the biscuits brown and crunchy.

Using a large spoon drop about a half cup of batter for each biscuit onto the pan. Don't worry if they are uneven, it's part of their charm. Brush the tops with a little oil and sprinkle with salt or sugar or cinnamon or whatever matches what you've put in the batter. For my chocolate hazelnut biscuits I used salt and brown sugar.

Bake until the tops are browned, about 8 minutes.

If you make smaller biscuits they will come out crunchier.

You should eat these soon after baking or put them back in a hot oven for a couple of minutes to reheat and crisp them up.

One other thing: if you leave out the milk this recipe makes great cracker dough.

Alright, one more thing: previously this recipe erroneously said there was on cholesterol but obviously there is milk in it. It should have read as it does now that there is no butter or shortening.

Going to the Game!

Got to go to see Lincecum pitch against the Dodgers at ATT Park. Here's what I brought to eat.

Now I am a foodie, and I love to grow my own food. I use very few ingredients in most of my cooking and hardly ever anything from a box or a can. My heroes are the great natural food philosphers and chefs.

That said I love ballpark food. All of it. Junk or not. There is something about being at a game that makes me hunger for It's Its, dogs with kraut, all that stuff. And being a cheapskate I could spend a week's income and eat a year's worth of calories and salt in a single inning.

Getting it ready for the ball park!

So to counter that I have to bring food that I just will love sitting and eating. I try to load up on healthy things, even eating too much, if it keeps me from cashing in my retirement to buy a burrito.

I try to bring things that take a while to eat, have strong flavors and have lots of crunch.

Here I have lamb leg steaks (my butcher calls them sirloins but they are cut from the leg), some Kalamata olives, a sliced carrot, some raw cabbage and an apple. I also brought a couple of pieces of Thunder Chicken and some crackers and dried apricots. The only thing I bought was some ice cream - and at $9 it cost more than all the other food I brought combined. If only I could bring my own parking...

And no - I didn't eat all that lamb! So far is has served 3 meals and there are leftovers.

Kitchen Sink Pasta

Thank god for leftovers.

This is one of the house favorites, Kitchen Sink Pasta. We also make Kitchen Sink Soup, Kitchen Sink Salad, etc.

Leftover pasta with Stuff

To make this particular dish I dry-fried some onions cauliflower and carrots. When they were slightly burned I added the asparagus, diced smoked pork and a bit of olive oil and orange zest. I let it cook for a few minutes then turned the heat off and threw in the leftover campanelle and some toasted almonds.


On top is some shaved fennel and dried apricots.I squeezed the juice of half the orange over the whole thing.


You can make this kind of dish in just a few minutes. I try to include different textures and colors and cooling foods like the fennel and rich savory tastes like the almonds. This dish improves if you let it sit a while.

You can easily make it vegetarian by leaving out the pork. You could add shredded tofu or smoked tofu. You could substitute fish for the pork or bbq chicken or whatever you have. If it's dull add some flavors and colors and crunch or juice or something!

Pack a Great Lunch

A crunchy, flavorful, satisfying meal

Some people are embarrassed to take lunch with them to work. If you don't want to be embarrassed don't bring embarrassing food! Your food should be your bling! Bring a steak! Bring these salads!


This is a lunch you can take anywhere and it will pack a lot of flavor and crunch. I will admit that when I sat down to eat this I really wanted something hot and filling but I changed my mind after a couple of bites. This is an outrageous meal.

The idea behind this lunch was to have a good number of different flavors and textures and colors. I went to a new market in the neighborhood that I had been meaning to check out and I approve!

Here are the flavors and textures: romaine lettuce, carrots, kalamata olives, boiled potato, 2 different cheeses I picked up at the market, toasted almonds, fresh flat leaf parsley, smoked herring, satsuma tangerines and a vinaigrette made with olive oil and fig balsamic vinegar.

I know what many of you are thinking - smoked herring? Isn't that really strong and fishy? Yes, but with the combination of the bland potato, crunchy lettuce and the sweet and sour dressing it tastes fairly mild, sort of like a smoked salmon but admittedly stronger. I love it and talk about cheap! Cheap!

The cheese I bought was an aged white cheddar and a cheese that was simply marked 'Italian table cheese' but it was made here in Silicon Valley so I had to try it. Funnily it tastes just like the cheddar!

I made the dressing with fig balsamic vinegar which, while sort of stuck in the 1980s, can be a very tasty food.  It is rather sweet so I cut it in the dressing with the juice of an unripe orange from my tree.

This looks pretty good but it tasted way better than that

I was lucky to have this leftover pasta, too. It's mini bow ties that I dressed with onions, walnut pieces and corn sauteed in walnut oil the night before. Perfect for a picnic it doesn't contain any ingredients that will go bad quickly.

The combination of the pasta and vegetables with the crunchy nutty almonds and the salty olives was very tasty.

To make this meal vegetarian you could substitute smoked tofu for the fish. If you did that and left out the cheese it would be vegan.

This is a relatively low fat, low sodium meal and there is a lot of nutrition here. Total cost: about $2.50. What you would pay in a restaurant for this? Ten, fifteen, twenty bucks?

A Fast but Great Lunch

Just a few minutes and loads of crunch and taste

Today was one of those 'I have nothing to do but I am really busy' days. I didn't have anything on my schedule until evening rehearsal but managed to keep busy playing with the dog, planting cucumbers and tomatoes and making a simple lunch on the first hot day of the year.

Despite the ridiculous price of produce right now I found these nice red leaf lettuces for a buck and a half each. Here I am serving myself one half of one. Notice the core of the lettuce is trimmed but still attached. It's my favorite part.

The sandwich is really thin ciabatta bread waved over a burner and seasoned up with dabs of strawberry preserves from a student of mine and a bit if Dijon mustard. I sliced some left over turkey and some cucumbers as a filling.

The salad got dressed with this Morrocan olive oil I found in the clearance basket at the market. I am not sure it is good enough to go back and buy more. I also used lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Another Classic - Pork Chops with Apples

What's a chop? What's a steak?

A bone in beef rib-eye is a steak. A pork loin cut is a chop.  A beef T-bone is a steak, a lamb T-bone is a chop. Huh?

The pork in this recipe is a sirloin chop. Or steak. Who knows. It depends on what the butcher thinks he can get more money for.

Another great, fast, inexpensive meal

Here we have a great lunch, spicy pork chops with apple and yellow beet salad.

The pork is seasoned simply with olive oil, chipotle powder, garlic powder and salt and pepper then grilled in a cast iron pan.

The salad is dressed with walnut oil and this great French cider vinegar. Each of these is expensive but the amounts used  on this plate costs pennies.

The bread is a ciabatta toasted over a gas burner. It stays soft in the middle but the outside gets crusty and smokey.

The beets are raw yellow beets that I sliced so thin you can see through them.

The pork is easy to make if you have a heavy bottomed frying pan. You can use a non-stick pan too if the bottom is not too thin.

You want to take the pork chops out of the fridge at least ten minutes before you cook them. If you take them right from the fridge they won't be as tender.  Cook them over medium heat so they brown and take them out just as they firm up. Let them rest for a couple of minutes before you eat them.

A hunk of meat, crusty bread and a flavor salad in about 15 minutes. Total cost for the meal: about two bucks!

Family Favorite - Orange Chicken

We have this huge Valencia orange tree in our backyard, which means lots of free food to a cheapskate like me.

We juice them. we eat them, we use the zest. I throw them into sautes and the things I brown on the stove then finish in the oven.

This is not a difficult dish to make although it might take some practice to get the timing down.

Orange chicken, brown rice risotto and dry fried asparagus

I put some of my spice rub in a big mixing bowl and added a couple of tablespoons of the old extra virgin. I had bone in, skin on chicken breasts. You can use boneless and skinless if you want.

The chicken pieces were large so I cut them in half with a big knife. Then I used one of them to mix up the spice rub and olive oil. I got my big cast iron pan hot on the stove and turned the oven on to 350°.



I rubbed all the chicken in the spice mix then laid the pieces skin side down in the pan.

After they had browned a few minutes I tossed a couple of oranges in the spice oil and threw them in the pan.

While the chicken was cooking I made dry fried asparagus. Dry frying is using a hot cast iron pan with no oil, butter or fats to cook vegetables. They cook in a few minutes, steaming in their own juice.

As soon as they are just done they are seasoned with salt, pepper and (optional) a tiny bit of butter.

Dry frying works great with many vegetables like green beans, squash, carrots, etc. It imparts a slightly smoky flavor.

Along with the chicken and asparagus I had leftover brown rice risotto and one of the cooked oranges, which I squoze over the chicken and rice.

Low in fat (especially if you remove the chicken skin) high in nutrition and cost about $2.50 for the whole shebang.